Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  “You like my lady?” he asked. Ordered to, we looked again at the wall’s image, both nodding back down at him. “My name’s Jamal. I kept real real still, didn’t I? My mother gets off soon. She helps sick people. I am going to be in here from now on, but play like you don’t know, okay? Okay.”

  And then his brown face retreated into blackness.

  We two glanced at each other, shaken but grinning. “Sick people,” he had said as we stood looking at our only form of proof and health.

  “Hartley, what are we going to do?” She straightened her bent arm, studying the cotton’s sample of her own blood. Head tilting, eyes going in and out of focus, the painter gauged, “Not half bad, this color, hunh? Dried like this especially. Take a little Mars Red. Use Permanent Green to cut the sharpness, really take it down toward flat, almost to khaki-ish. If,” Alabama said, “if … if he … or you … if I …—Hart, maybe you’re contagious, ever thought of that? Maybe I caught your Wannabe Happy bug. Maybe all along, I’ve been closet-case Happy? I mean, hey, I’ve finally got a Fifty-seventh Street gallery that puts my name onto its second-floor window in letters as tall as … that fort with no boy in it. I’m just beginning to like it here … My twenties were Jaws, my thirties chewed every mouthful of me a hundred times. Who knows how custardy and nice my forties might feel?—Honey, if it gets us, what are we going to do?”

  We stood here, looking at her art for lack of any vista finer. “Best we can. At least, there are several of us. It’ll just have to play itself out.”

  “If only we could’ve fallen for a nice dull clean little four-inch CPA …”

  “Ysch, I’d rather be …” Then I changed the last word … “I’d rather be us.”

  Robert, home, glad for that, vowed to never pack another bag. His second night back, he nearly stood us up for a dinner at Rocco’s. He was rarely late. She and I were splitting our zabaglione, table still littered with mussel shells, when he wandered past and chanced to see us. Robert came rushing in, turned his chair around, settled there, his head at rest on his crossed arms. Staring at us, silent. He did not appear talkative.

  “Uh … dearie?” she started. “Welcome home to you, too. You hate my always being late, so what good are you? You had an appointment with us.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did friggin’ so.”

  “Sorry—did? Forgot.”

  “Forgot! So,” she gave him a chance, “what did you learn on tour?”

  “‘Earn’?” he asked.

  “‘Learn.’ You taught us that.”

  “I caught a cold. Walked to Mrs. Park’s for milk yesterday? Had to sit on two stoops. Nina let me rest on her cot she keeps for beauty naps behind the steam presses in back. Can’t seem to shake this chest thing. Feel so out of it. Last night, shivered my nuts off. Sweated like it was the Tropics and I was Joan Crawford chewing scenery in … (don’t even tell me, Hart. Because I know you’re going to try to act it out) … Rain. Shook to where my bed squeaked. That bed, even with a crowd, never squeaked before.”

  I advanced a theory. “Maybe it’s been loosened up by all the recent floor activity.” And we all laughed, but out of Robert’s mouth a goodly sample of his chest cold, one corner piece of gray-green phlegm—shot, hit, then slipped down the side of one glass Parmesan dispenser. Our waiter, seeing, looked prissy, then solemn. Robert alone laughed at the projectile, laughed quite loud, pointing. Two candlelit couples at far tables turned, romance offset by his sudden braying, peeved.

  “Honey,” she said. “Honey?” And I saw her hand scoop forward. At her touch, he set his head down on the checkered cloth before us, good jaw amid rattled mussel shells. Bama’s palm pulled back as from a lit stove.

  “Hartley, feel him.”

  My hand now met his heat. At this temperature, it felt unlike a human surface.

  “What?” Robert awarded us a dazzling out-of-sequence smile. “Because is it something I said?”

  “I’ll pay.” I signaled for our waiter. “Robert, sweetie, you have a temperature, a brain-cooker temperature. Robert? We’re going to get you fast over to St. Vincent’s.”

  “A saint lives in the Village? I don’t feel my absolute best. But, where is there one? Can we walk to see the Saint?”

  “Yes.” She held his right arm. I took his excellent left one.

  It was among us.

  AFTER

  That Ship Left Already

  How’re the Folks?

  A Highly Unlikely Love Poem to My Parents

  y father has lost our car. He’s way out there, wandering the mall’s vast lot. He disappears behind a hundred palm trees lit with Christmas stars somehow sickening at noon. Mom and I strain to see him. There, white-haired between vehicles, his golf togs overbright as educational playthings, a thin man keeps waving something side to side.

  A compass? Some pocket dowsing rod? No, she explains, it’s that thing, his latest toy (four hundred bucks)—“a no-key remote-entry device” meant to unlock the trunk, flash headlights, activate the alarm of a much-missed Buick Park Avenue. Among the thousands of cars beaded colorful to the horizon, my old man is trying to flush out his. He hopes to force his own to dance.

  I am, of course, in Florida. I’ve left Angie and the others in charge of Robert’s latest hospital stay. Beside me, on this backless bench set just within mall glass, my gaunt chic mother, 80, clucks, shuddering. Feeling responsible, she acts as ashamed for herself as for poor Pop out there.

  “I told him where it was.” Her voice has grown deeper, sexier and as she’s aged, I guess, past sex. “You heard me, honey. I said, ‘Dick, it’s in B-2.’ Because I remembered that by—‘To Be or Not to Be.’”

  “Isn’t a liberal education a wonderful leg-up?” (Hartley here is really working to be pleasant.) I flew South to relax. I have lived in Manhattan so long I’m good for nothing but. There, if you have cash, and if you don’t look like a Harlem fare, you can just lift your hand and make a cab appear any hour, day or night. Here you get assigned a single car. And you can lose the thing, apparently.

  As a favor to my parents, I usually arrive wearing a jacket and tie, to set myself apart from the airport’s rude Hawaiian shirts. Not today. By now, this far into rounds as a friend-nurse, my new motto runs: Why not look as tired as you feel?

  It comforts your patients, if not your parents. Isn’t it dishonest, appearing too natty, in control? These dark rings under my eyes are now countable as those within some redwood’s trunk—and like the tree, I’m not unproud of them.

  My folks failed to meet me at the gate, first time ever. They forgot to tell me in advance. I fretted till, outside Baggage Claim, I spied their gleaming silver car. It rested in a Handicapped Zone. Had they fudged? Embracing Mom, I spotted, on their interior mirror, the Blue Permit hanging, a little white stick figure in its little white stick wheelchair.

  They smiled so. Even Dad. He tried imbuing one firm handshake with a hug’s velocity. I, overbold from swashbuckling hospital emotions, moved to embrace him. He waddled backward, nearly fell against the car. In his cool blue eyes, I saw a man who’d just escaped a sexual assault.

  Muzak now offers us carols; I’ve lost sight of him. Dad drove us direct to this mall. Dad said I had to see the new Bloomingdale’s that, he swore, “is way better than your one up in New York.”

  “Aha,” said the backseat diplomat.

  Soon it’ll be Christmas. I do hope we find the Buick first.

  I’d planned this trip as an escape from disability. —Working with a disease so wicked gives you a false sense that everything not It is easy.

  They are shrinking, my parents. Odd but my own love for them seems to roar suddenly open—the mouth of the MGM lion—just as they go whittling kittenish into air. The more I see Robert turn ancient so damn fast, the more I long to keep these veterans here in health.

  They still look luxuriously pink and silver.

  Poor Dad—way out there—hoists his remote device. To reassure us?

 
; These days, Mom risks more. Only to save face for him, of course. But how competent, dry, and witty this woman has suddenly finally become—she who agreed, at age nineteen, to use the leading lady’s energy in a supporting role.

  “Mom? I’m gonna chance sounding tactless here. We, uh, both do know where the Buick is, right? I mean, we’ve been sitting here going on what? Three hours? Maybe I’ve grown pushy from my years in overdrive in New York, and maybe I’m not respecting the terms of your agreement, yours and his … whatever. But how about I barge out there and lead him to it? Tactless, right? The car is on the other side of this place. True, he’s getting ‘warmer,’ but that asphalt’s heat might kill him first. Our car is due east, Mom. Dad’s due west.” I sing along with one carol, “‘We Three Kings DisOrient Are.’”

  “On that, you’ll hear no argument from me. But, honey, you know how he gets. And, during your first visit in a whole year, how would that be for his self-esteem? You come and then you leave. I have to live with him. He’ll find it eventually, trial and error. Patience. That’s become my full-time job. Why, just last week …” And she wraps arms around herself, leans forward, shifting from the sight of him.

  She’s about to offer something she feels is disloyal. I urge her on. “He won’t know. He’s quite a distance. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, watching all this happen so fast. We’re going through it with Robert, but at least I have Angie and the others, though the others’re none too well. The worst is having nobody who’ll listen …”

  Mom lowers her eyes; the toes of her good shoes draw even against the mall’s blue-gray terrazzo. “Last Thursday, the fourteenth”—(I sense a boastful mnemonic virtuosity in this flourish—forgivable, even adorable) “at three-ten p.m., he did this, too. Lost it. The car, I mean. And as usual, he took his new car-door-opener thingie, and was aiming it at anything even vaguely … Buick-like …”

  (I grin, and know I am my mother’s son.)

  “Finally, I carried take-out lemonade over where he’d got himself to. No judgment on my face, you know, no impatience, just happening to wander up with a cold drink. Then I see, see he’s …”

  I sidle one inch closer. This familiar conspiracy between us started at least nine months before my birth.

  “See, honey? Dick was using the remote, from our television set … Richard Hartley Mims the first, my hero, out in the heat trying to find our car by changing channels. Back at home!” She covers her mouth, takes a great fish gasp then makes a smile of it … “But, tell me about your friends, about our friend, our Robert.”

  I wish I could rush her with good news. Of Robert, I mention only his loss of weight and widening of delusions. I do not tell her he now believes that a high school musical is about to go on, that its whole cast is still waiting to learn the show-stopping song he has yet to compose. The cast stands anxious around him. Cars are pulling into the school parking lot-parents, arriving, especially his. Robert seems to sit at the piano before reams of blank paper, the actors gather, sweating through their makeup and cowgirl costumes, eager to see if they can’t learn a whole song real darn quick. Nothing comes.

  This fact and others, I withhold.

  But I fear I’m letting her down, even by informing my sheltered Mom that a boy thirty-four might be in worse health than poor Dad out there. “Mom? Look, now he’s pushing a shopping cart. What’s the cart for?”

  “The cart, darling, is to hold Dick up.”

  “Oh. Oooh, boy.”

  “That it should be Robert seems particularly unfair,” she goes on. “I don’t know how to ask these things—Yours, it’s a world whose forms I … But, were you and Robert ever … ? Did you two think of yourselves … as more than … ?”

  “Just friends. If that’s not a contradiction in terms these days. No, he never found me interesting, in that way.”

  “Lucky you,” she whispers, and this shocks me, but I see her point.

  She, dreamy, adds, “Someone as beautiful as he, there’s no telling how many …”

  “Mom? Did you know that Robert and Angie were ‘a number,’ as the kids are saying now?”

  “But … Oh, it’s beyond me, Hartley! First, growing up, I thought there was only one way, ours. And then you’ve taught me over the years to … accept, or try, another. And now he and she! … It’s past me. Or I it.” We sit here, silent. At this moment, I feel as close to Mother as I did to Angie when—free of any topic but art, poverty, sex—we once sat shoulder to shoulder for hours somewhere, with a view of the entrance, waiting for him.

  “Your Robert always had lovely manners, and such a striking boy.”

  I consider telling her he now weighs ninety pounds. I don’t.

  “How is your own health, darling?” This is where our newfound intimacy has been leading yet again. Poor thing has asked me my status three dozen times in that many roundabout ways.

  “I’m still assuming I’m negative. One way of saying something positive, Mom. If anything changes, I’ll call you first, okay? Assume the best. You’ve got enough on you. I’m fine but I’m learning. I keep a postcard of Walt Whitman in one corner of my shaving mirror. He was a caretaker during his whole war. I thought he must be ancient till I turned the card over last week. Year younger than me. I’m not that jollied or spiritual. But I’m all right. Sleepwalking, trying to get everything done. Sure am glad to see you—Mer’ Christmas.”

  “Yes, you too, dear. —But look how white my own baby’s hair is getting. I don’t dye mine but I certainly wish a person’s children would!”

  She redirects a curl around my ear. I pull away. “Tickles. I’m not a baby and it’s not white. Just silver, and only at the temples. ‘Distinguished.’ That’s Nice for ‘exhausted.’”

  “Please don’t mind my continually asking. Things change so fast, healthwise.”

  And we both stare out toward Dad. Who waves. We—polite, conditioned-signal back. We smile our set and wasted smiles however invisible from that far. “The time your father and I visited you in New York City that December five years ago? Robert had something waiting on our bedside table at the Stanhope. Your Robert gave me my first box of Godiva chocolates.”

  I never knew he’d sent Mom candy. At the time, Robert, writing his Titanic, earned most of his cash by cleaning people’s apartments. As I sit here, I reconsider my pal. I imagine how my mother sees him, his undying sense of luxury. Robert, even when most broke, a gift.

  “Those days, I still thought that Whitman’s chocolates were tops. I soon started seeing Godivas everywhere and I did let myself say to Mimi Albertson, ‘Yes, Godiva. Little gold box? Yes, I was given a box of those in New York City. Aren’t they delicious? Rich but not too sweet, is what I like.’”

  Everything today makes me cry.

  (Angie insisted that I needed this trip, a break, some sun. “By now,” she said, “You’re yellow as sweet Robbie here.”

  “Thanks bunches.”

  “Besides, if you have Florida at Christmas, I’ll get to go to my opening in Berlin come New Year’s. Fair’s fair? Okay.”)

  Mom sounds tired, “Honey, maybe run fetch us some lunch from their food court. I’ll stay here and wave. You never know how long it’s going to take. —Oh, and I’d so hoped your visit might be fun for you, and now look what he’s … what we’ve gone and …”

  “Chinese? What’s least hideous here?”

  Just then Dad, from a flashing mall security car, gives us the V for Victory sign. “Found it,” he mouths, grinning like a man inviting us to come and view the huge gold nugget he has just lifted from some California stream, changing forever the course of American history.

  “Eureka,” I say in comic monotone. Laughing, she covers her laugh with one hand. Rising, she says, “Now now.” Her new tone warns me: Once we’re physically with Dad, all true and intelligent intimacy between us must stop, change, hide. One benefit of the lost Buick? We’ve had three and a half clear honest hours right at the start before she must mostly withdraw.

&
nbsp; “Oh, son, so glad you’re here. Even if that’s selfish of me. —Can’t imagine.”

  “I’m beginning to … Great!” I mime through massive glass. I hoist Mom’s elbow as she mutters, “Was it in 2-B, or was it not 2-B?” but only just under her breath. And all while waving, flirting her best bent geisha thanks toward my old man. My suddenly old, old man.

  Orientation

  aving found our car, he actually drives it. Should he?

  Bound home, breathing hard, he smiles so. “These days, swear holy God, never know, quite where the.” He does drive oddly well. That he can do it at all seems as logically illogical as certain combined improbable tasks in dreams—say, walking a tightrope over Niagara while setting a huge brass alarm clock.

  I soon see: He is competent only if everything stays predictable. Suddenly one rusted station wagon full of migrant workers swerves across three lanes toward an exit, no signals. Dad panics, honks; our tires graze median as he lets loose such a blistering list of racist epithets. Ones new to me. I mean: New to me out of him.

  I see my mother’s neck muscles lock. I receive her coded plea that I, the liberal, not call him on it today, at least not till this vehicle is stopped. —No problem. Hey, whatever, it can wait.