“No, you were right,” Maggie admitted. “How many times have I slipped a fish into a hot pan without thinking that somebody had to take its life? One ought to be more … responsible! Oh, I’m really so glad I came, you dear man.”
The dear man made Harold blink.
“I savor each day here,” he said, “knowing how few there are left.”
She lifted a forkful of fish without eating, ingesting his remark instead.
“Why summer’s barely begun,” she said. “I don’t think it even officially starts until the twenty-first of the month.”
“The man in the bright nightgown doesn’t go by the calendar.”
“Who?”
“The Grim Reaper,” Harold said. “Death.”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, putting down her fork. “This is a bit abstruse for me. Did you say death?”
“I did.”
“Don’t be morbid, dear.”
“Isn’t it death that gives life its savor?”
“I suppose.”
“Those mayflies we saw on the river live but a single night in their adult form. That brief one-night life they spend seeking a mate. They don’t even eat—”
“Now, that is dreary,” Maggie interjected, her mouth full of slaw.
“In fact they’re no longer equipped with the organs of digestion. They’re just little flying sex machines. At dawn, having achieved their reproductive destiny, they drop exhausted onto the film of the water, their little wings outstretched like miniature angels. And there the trout gobble away all trace of their existence.”
“You make it sound so … operatic.”
“Imagine your whole life crammed into a single night! The intensity of it!”
“I prefer dragging it out. There’s the change of seasons, for instance.”
“Still, Maggie, you must consider that we’re not going to live forever.”
“I refuse to dwell on it. There’s too much to be done in the here and now. A lovely dinner to eat, for instance.” She wielded her fork again and stabbed a piece of fried tomato.
“Sometimes one has no choice.”
“Certainly you have a choice. A person’s attention really is limited and life is a matter of what we pay attention to.”
“A diagnosis changes all that,” Harold said, quaffing his wine and refilling his glass.
“You’re being awfully enigmatic,” she said, finishing her wine, too, as if bracing herself for some blow. “A diagnosis of what.”
Harold refilled her glass before he uttered the word: “Cancer.”
“Cancer?” Maggie said. “Who? You?”
Harold, rather than answering verbally, merely cocked his head in reply, as though he had received an award and extreme modesty were in order.
“Wait a minute,” Maggie said. “You’re saying you’ve got cancer?”
Harold nodded.
“What kind?”
His eyes went glassy as if some rogue memory had momentarily distracted him. Then they refocused on her. “Pancreas,” he said.
“Oh, God,” Maggie said, pushing her plate forward.” You don’t look … ill.”
“It’s a subversive little bastard,” Harold said gloomily.
“How long have you … had it?”
“Something came up on the blood test in a routine checkup last month. I was sent to an oncologist—horrible-sounding word, isn’t it? Oncologist. It reeks of angst and misery. Yeccchhh. Anyway, he gave it to me pretty straight. Frankly, I don’t know how a fellow can do that, what, ten, twenty times a day, without becoming an alcoholic.”
“Do what?” Maggie said weakly.
“Tell people it’s checkout time.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to say. Let’s drink to life.”
He raised his glass as though to make a toast.
Maggie gazed into her lap as tears pooled in her eyes.
“Don’t start,” Harold said.
She began to blubber uncontrollably.
“Cut that out, right now, Maggie Darling.”
But there was no ordering the emotions around. The human heart is not an underling in an office. Maggie cried exuberantly for several minutes while Harold finished his trout, his slaw, his tomatoes, and slathered another piece of cornbread with butter.
“How can you just sit there, eating?” Maggie finally said, blowing her nose in the paper napkin.
“What do you think I should do? Run around and holler? Volunteer for clinical experiments? Fly off to Lourdes?”
“It’s so unfair.”
“I wouldn’t even say that. I’ve had sixty-one good years. That’s more than Babe Ruth and Mozart. Never had to go to war. Enjoyed life in a great city. Ran a fine company. Knew a lot of interesting people. It would be indecent to whine.”
“Can’t anything be done?”
“Not a goddamned thing. This thing I’ve got is one of the deadliest there is.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to follow my normal routines until I get too sick to carry on. Then it’s off to a friendly little hospice run by monks over in Montpelier. I’ve scoped it all out. Helluva smooth way to go.”
“You talk about this as though you were planning a vacation.”
“Well, what is it but a long trip to a strange land? Say, what’s for dessert?”
“Do you expect others to act normal around you? As if this ghastly thing weren’t happening?”
Harold sighed. “No, I suppose I have to let you get over the shock. But if you’re really interested in my well-being, I’d encourage you to normalize as soon as possible. For instance, tell me, what’s for dessert?”
“Some lovely St. Andre and ripe pears.”
“Nothing for the old sweet tooth?”
“There’s chocolate bars.”
“Oh, goody. I’ll fetch the cognac.”
7
Glory Days
Maggie proceeded to get rather drunk. Harold began reminiscing about the old times and old friends, about what it was like to come to New York as a young man in 1961, the year when Mantle and Maris were at Yankee Stadium, and Jack Kennedy was in the White House, and real writers hung out at P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue, and Norman Mailer turned up at all the parties along with Ken Tynan and Gay Talese, and occasionally someone as legendary as Auden would blow into a Greenwich Village apartment, and “La Vie en Rose” always played at their favorite little French place with the stuffed pheasants in the window off Sheridan Square—what was its name?—and the Met was free in those days, and a bottle of good Scotch was six bucks and a rib-eye steak $4.95, and you could get a splendid apartment with a working fireplace on East Sixty-third Street for two hundred simoleons, and people still got married and had their wedding parties at the University Club, and the fabulous Ernie Kovacs did that utterly insane half-hour TV show on Thursday nights, and there were no sniveling guitar pluckers cluttering up Easthampton, and remember Checker cabs … !
This was the renowned Harold Hamish charm they wrote about in Vanity Fair and PW. He glowed like a hearth. The night was warm and soft. The cognac, a Kelt Amiral, was outstanding, the chocolate kept Maggie reasonably alert, and she quite enjoyed hearing about that bygone world of America at its supreme imperial moment before everything went to hell. But, of course, the ghastly backdrop of Harold’s illness remained with them, like a terrible beast of prey waiting beyond the glow of a campfire. It was exhausting simply to be reminded of it. So, when he paused at the conclusion of some anecdote about the extraordinary drinking exploits of one Malachy McCourt, a Manhattan bar owner, Maggie begged Harold to excuse her for bed.
“You’ve been sweet to listen to such a prating old windbag,” he said.
“I love the old stories,” she said and came around the table to give him a good-night hug. There was a wonderful smell in his clothes, a masculine scent of juniper and exertion. He kissed her more than once in the tender spot beside her ear and held
her tightly in his arms just a moment longer than she felt was wise. Then, with a twinge of regret or guilt, she wasn’t sure which, she left him on the deck and went up to bed.
8
The Sonata
She read Bartram’s Travels for a while. It was lovely reading by the light of the oil lamp. The room smelled reassuringly like camp when she was a girl: pine straw, old blankets, unpainted wood. Harold remained out on the deck for while, drinking, she supposed. Then he clomped around downstairs putting things away. Finally, she heard his footfalls on the creaking stairs. For an electric moment, she held her breath wondering if he might come into her room and what on earth she would do if he did. But then she heard his door open and shut and his bedsprings creak as he shifted this way and that and then silence. Maggie didn’t know whether to feel grateful or cheated.
She awoke sometime later in the darkness to feel him in her bed pressing up against her back spoon-wise, a large hand cupping her shoulder. Oddly, her first thought was, This is not Kenneth. She feigned sleep a few moments longer, trying to think tactically. In fact, the sensation of the large warm presence behind her, and her own mammalian response to it, quite hampered her thinking. Moreover, her head felt uncomfortably hollow from all the drinking, like a cored winter squash. Harold buried his nose behind her ear and kissed her as he had earlier. A tremendous chemical rush quickened the nerve endings throughout her body and urged her to surrender to sheer sensation. Harold moved his hand strategically to her hip, pausing to caress it before moving on to the complicated topography of her right breast, exploring the nipple at its eminence and emitting a little groan of longing to which Maggie could not help but reply in kind. Moments later, she had swiveled around so they were face-to-face, lips-to-lips, and hips-to-hips until she opened to him like a great night-blooming flower. She made love with him without a word being spoken.
He was powerful and deliberate. In his lovemaking he had the quality of a master musician playing a sonata on a rare and valuable instrument, sure yet careful, and he displayed that paradoxical stamina of the older man who can soldier stolidly through a long and elaborate piece of music, never flagging, without reaching the highest pitch of emotional intensity too soon. In their heavings and pantings she lost track of time and gave herself to him repeatedly, each time thinking, strangely, that the very galvanic power of her pleasure might infuse him with enough vitality to battle and perhaps even vanquish the molecular monster that threatened his existence. Finally, she felt him release himself with a plangent sob, and they both sank wordlessly spent into a cool, pine-scented oblivion.
9
The Proposal
The same odd thought visited her upon awakening: this is not Kenneth … She quickly amended it, telling herself, But it is dear, dear Harold, and rolled over to find him yet engrossed in slumber. A trapezoid of morning sunlight glowed on the wall opposite the window. Quarreling blue jays made shadows in it like Balinese puppets. So, Maggie reflected, they had crossed the frontier of friendship and professional fellowship into the uncharted territory of conjugality. In light of his illness, was it a tragic error or a kind of mutual gift that transcended ego if not time? What would they do now? Pretend to have a future together? Or was this perhaps nature’s way of telling her not to try to plan everything, to let go, to give up the perpetual struggle to control persons and events? For what could one do in the face of such a fatal diagnosis? Perhaps Harold was right to submit to the inevitable as gracefully as possible. He stirred and opened his eyes.
“Why it’s you, Maggie Darling, my dream girl.”
“You’re very sweet.”
“I’ve hungered for you like a mad dog for years—”
“You concealed it nicely.”
“—waiting for you to ditch that reprobate husband of yours.”
She looked away, their nearly futureless fate glaring at her like the trapezoid of sunlight on the wall. It was something of a relief to her that he drew her close to him again and commenced to perform a feat of stimulation that made her forget the train of doubts and regrets that rushed so obstreperously down the main track of her mind. Then he was upon her like the night before, a magnificently subtle engine generating heat and sparks. He made love, she thought, the way a prisoner on death row might take his very last meal, in desperate delectation. When the act reached its gratifying denouement, she could only wonder what perverse power of manners or psychology had kept her out of Harold’s arms all these years until now, when it was nearly too late. The idea reamed her with sadness, yet she dared not express it.
“Say, I’m so hungry I could eat this book,” Harold declared, hoisting the Bartram. “How about some breakfast.”
Yes, breakfast, Maggie thought. Her sadness dissolved as she began to imagine the many ways to feed Harold magnificently and defeat the beast of illness that lurked inside him.
She ended up making pancakes because Harold asked for them— though he called them, winningly, “flapcakes.” There was plenty of real maple syrup on hand. This was Vermont, after all, where they sold the stuff in gas stations. While rashers of thick-cut cob-smoked bacon sputtered in a cast-iron pan, and the espresso pot heated on a back burner, and Maggie attended the delicate assembly of the cornmeal and buckwheat batter, Harold sat at the end of the great table tying caddis flies for the day’s fishing. Mozart filled the house with brilliance. The day could not have been more perfect. Soon, she presented his stack of buckwheat and corn flapcakes with a garnish of cranesbill geranium. There was something in Harold’s grateful smile that made her want to give herself to him carnally right there, and on a wild impulse she ducked under the table and serviced him in the continental style before he tucked into his all-American breakfast.
“My God, but you are a great artist, Maggie,” he said when she resurfaced.
“I want so desperately to make you happy.”
“Then marry me.”
She felt a sensation in her brain equivalent to tripping on a dark woodland path.
“Harold, dear, there’s the divorce. It could take months.”
“What’s a few months?”
Maggie blinked more than once, unable to reply.
“Oh, I see what you’re thinking,” he said, slashing his pancakes this way and that so as to reduce the whole stack to bite-size shreds. “Well, I’ve got a bit of good news.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not really ill.”
“You’re not ill?”
“I’m as healthy as a Brahman bull.”
“Is this what they mean by the denial stage?”
“Denial? Pish posh.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying you’re okay?”
“Yes. Aren’t we lucky?”
“What about the … the oncologist?”
“A literary embroidery.”
“Oh?”
“Maggie, the plain truth is, I don’t have cancer. I just said that to, uh, break the ice.”
“Why you perfect pig,” she said, seizing his plate and flinging the contents all over his face and chest.
She was packed and out the door in under one minute. What a lovely day to walk down a country road, she kept telling herself, lest she go to pieces. A minute or so later she heard Harold putter up beside her in the Morgan.
“Aren’t we overreacting a little here?” he ventured.
“You don’t exist, except as a ghost of a pig.”
“Oh, Maggie …”
She marched straight ahead, lips sealed.
“You’re blowing this all out of proportion,” he said, wearing his desperation rather visibly now.
No reply.
“Am I to think that you were only interested in me because you thought I was dying?”
The stone wall.
“Get in the car, Maggie.”
She quickened her step.
“You don’t even know where you’re walking. It’s miles to anywhere.”
<
br /> She advanced undeterred.
“You goddamned willful bitch!”
He swerved ahead into her path, cutting her off. She stopped marching. He leaped out of the car, slamming the door, and hurried around it to confront her bodily. She thought he looked rather ridiculous out on the road in his silk Japanese bathrobe.
“Get in the car, Maggie,” he growled.
Though something about his costume may have inspired her subconsciously, Maggie was quite untutored in the martial arts; perhaps his bobbing Adam’s apple just presented an irresistible target. She didn’t even feel as though she struck it very hard, but the blow produced immediate and impressive results. Harold crumpled beside the right front fender and began making a peculiar and unpleasant noise as of steam escaping an old clogged pipe. Pitiful as he was, it took a moment for Maggie to decide not to attend to him. Instead, she went around to the driver’s side, tossed her bag into the passenger seat, and threw the tight little gear shift into first while acquainting herself with the brake and clutch positions.
“Aaaarrggghhh …” Harold said. She peeled out, raising a plume of gravel and dust that obscured him until she rounded a bend and his croaking was subsumed by the rich country verdure.
Part Nine
Penultimate Disasters
1
The State of the Nation
“… so I ditched the car in Windsor and found a kid at the gas station who was willing to drive me home for a hundred dollars and expenses,” Maggie said, digging into her smoked duck salad with a chilpotle lime dressing. Christy Chauvin gazed across the table with a sly smile that seemed to signify approval. Maggie had unloaded in minute detail not only the sordid saga of her night in the country with Harold Hamish but also the unfortunate amorous incidents with Swann and Reggie that had preceded this latest debacle. The lunchtime crowd at Tontine, on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-first Street, could not help stealing glances at their table, even though Christy wore nothing more provocative than a V-necked J. Crew T-shirt and jeans and Maggie was virtually hiding inside an Hermes scarf. “He was a nice boy,” Maggie added of the young Vermonter, “but when we passed Hartford he asked me if it was New York City.”
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