Today’s post is a fiction story or the beginning of a novella. Will it advance? “Ask again later. Cannot predict now.”
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Answer Hazy
I don’t look like a private investigator. I look like a college professor in my fifties who’s grown weary of teaching literary theory and is considering an affair with a student. There’s a furrowed, wincing look to my eyes. I could use a chemical peel and some Botox, but I won’t get around to them. I’m becoming invisible, and it helps in my line of work. It helps, too, that I used to be an actor. Maybe you saw me in one of those downtown shows I was in during the eighties, a performance where you were likely to get smeared with something? Or maybe in that Lysol commercial where I’m wearing the yellow gloves?
The night before Mom got sick, I hooked up with Frankie, one of Heddy’s friends, at a sushi bar in Philadelphia, where Heddy had been last seen. The wait staff wore minidresses and ankle boots. Frankie was wearing a Russian fur hat pulled low over lank, dark hair that curtained her thin face. Her lipstick and nail polish were the color of dried blood. She drank tequila neat, sucking a lime wedge and licking salt mounded between her forefinger and thumb. She thought that if Heddy wasn’t doing theater, she was probably working somewhere as a dom. She said, “Marx didn’t have an imagination for late capitalism—services instead of goods. There’s no limit to the market for passivity.” She brushed hair off her cheek and took my hand, leaving a trail of salt on the table. “Find her, please.”
I’d met Heddy some years ago in the Berkshires. She was a playwright, and I thought she was talented. I saw a one-act of hers that summer. At the time, she was tangled up with some people and wanted to go to New York. According to her mother, she’d packed up her stuff and moved to Philly for a while. Now, no one had heard from her in a few weeks.
I was about to start searching for Heddy, when my sister called. She said Mom had had chest pains, and they’d gone to the hospital. It wasn’t a heart attack, but Mom was staying overnight. The next morning, I called the doctor on Mom’s case, who said, “She’s sitting on a volcano.” In fact, Mom had had a mild heart attack, but, more critical, her arteries were almost entirely clogged. She needed a bypass right away, but she had refused the operation.
Driving back to New York, I felt sad about Heddy. She was out there somewhere, although I didn’t picture her under anybody’s heel. Still, she was missing, and a hunch was as solid as believing you were never going to die. I parked near the hospital and walked around the block a few times. How long had it been since I’d seen Mom? A year? Maybe two? I felt excited and scared.
When I got to her room, she was on her bed, a hawk on an iceberg. She said, “Do you have a boyfriend?” I said, “No. Do you?” She hitched up her chin and said, “Get me out of here.” She raised her hand to yank out the tube feeding oxygen into her nose. Her diamond ring sparkled in the light. It was a deco design, with a fiery, round diamond in the middle of a wide platinum band, flanked above and below by rows of four smaller diamonds. Who had given it to her?
I grabbed her hand. It was delicate and bony. I said, “I can’t.” She said, “You mean you won’t.” I said, “You’ll die without oxygen.” I didn’t believe this and neither did she.
Her voice was strong. Why should she think she was dying? People only said they were dying when they were safe. When they were actually dying, they acted like they were waiting for valet parking to come around with their car.
Mom said, “Raise my head.” I pressed a button on the side of her bed, and the top of her floated toward me. She said, “Lower my feet.” I pressed another button, and her legs glided out on a dolly shot. Her feet looked helpless, several toes bent in different directions, as if they couldn’t decide which way to go. A corn on one toe was hard and rough, as if it had logged all the miles she’d walked in her life. From Earth to the moon?
The walls of her room were the beige of support hose. The room was breathing along with Mom. The sink and cabinet were exhausted from all the death they’d seen. One of Mom’s nostrils was larger than the other, something I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was new? She had once been very beautiful, the kind of woman men are drawn to because they are easily frightened and ambivalent about sex, the kind who flirt but hold themselves at a distance, distractedly playing with candle wax and drifting off during a seduction. She was still beautiful.
For a woman not that tall, her legs went on forever. She was slim-hipped, and when she was young people had said she looked like Rita Hayworth, with her red hair and high cheekbones. From photos, you can see the resemblance. In one snapshot, she wears a halter top and stands beside a mountain lake, her legs taut and shapely in shorts, her thick tumble of hair tied back with a scarf. Something more intelligent and shrewd rose off Mom than Rita, and even at her most ravishing, she looked wary—a guardedness in her eyes, a band of tension between her brows—as if she knew something she’d rather not have learned.
She said, “I’m glad you came.” I said, “Of course.” She cocked an eyebrow and said, “You hate me.” I said, “The normal amount.” She reached out a hand and said, “Come, kiss me.” I bent down. She looked like a bird I’d cleaned during an oil spill, its feathers matted. I’d felt its tiny heart beating in my hands, its confusion at being in a sink.
On the street, someone shouted, “Hola, mami,” and a silvery laugh rose up. A car door slammed, and a dog yelped. What happened between Mom and me didn’t matter, and if it did, not in the big picture, whatever that was. I would glimpse it sometimes on a case, or, better yet, forget about my place in things altogether when I was working. I dealt in personal injury, product liability, medical malpractice, marital splits, wrongful deaths, and missing persons. Mostly I tracked people who had left their lives on purpose, and I had a decent record of finding them alive. I’ve come upon some corpses, but usually by then police are on the case. What happens after I find someone isn’t officially my concern, but I like knowing. A part of me wants to let people stay gone if they want to be gone. Another part of me wants to find them so they can leave in a different way.
“I have to pee,” Mom said. I went to find her nurse. The nurse said Mom wasn’t allowed to get up and had to pee in a bedpan. Mom said, “Tawny, help me. Put the bedpan on the floor, and I’ll pee standing over it.” I was on her side. Official policies seldom benefitted ordinary people. I had tracked a man named Mack, who made it out alive from a tower at the World Trade Center. If he’d remained at his desk, as people were instructed to after the first plane hit, Mack would have been buried under rubble. After he got out, he had decided to go missing. I didn’t know where I’d go if I left my life.
Mom lowered the bars of her bed and threw her legs over the side. She stood for a moment, then wobbled. I held her. She said, “Get the bedpan under the sink.” She took a step forward and started to pee where she stood, a long trickle. She looked embarrassed. I said it was nothing. I didn’t know many facts about her life. Maybe she didn’t know them herself, anymore. When I’d ask her questions, she’d come back as a Magic 8 Ball, saying, “Ask again later” or “Better not tell you now.”
I helped her back to bed and cleaned the floor. I rinsed out several pairs of her underpants and hung them around the room on knobs to dry. The scene was beginning to look like an art installation: “Sick Room With Panties.” Mom had smoked for sixty-five years as she stared out windows. She said that nothing mattered, but she didn’t want to be cut open.
I’d met Heddy at a hotel, where I’d taken myself for a few days between cases. A young woman passed me, as I was sitting outside the hotel on a wooden porch. The way she sat, with her feet up on a railing, I could see up her skirt to smooth, long thighs. We got to talking, and she asked if I’d see a play she’d written. I said yes. She said, as a teenager, she’d cleaned the houses of rich people in the area. A mosquito buzzed my ear. I swatted it, and it left a drop of blood on my palm. I said, “Did you snoop around?” She said, “I looked at their magazines and watched their videos. I read their letters and diaries.” I said, “Do you think they knew?” I had a theory that everyone knew everything. In a way we were born with our cupboards full of information and spent our lives emptying them. Sometimes, to solve a case, I needed to retrieve a memory.
Fault wasn’t something I dealt in much. Gray and grainy was more my line. When Mack went missing from his life—he’d been at a brokerage firm—he hitchhiked to Mexico and joined up with activists helping workers in the border factories. Who does not at some time long to go missing from their life—especially if you are already missing from the life you’re in? Mack’s girlfriend had had a feeling he was faking his death and hired me to see if he was really still alive. If you spend a lot of time around evasive people, you know they are capable of anything. It wasn’t that hard to track him. There are cameras everywhere and you can’t go out these days without tripping over information brokers. When I found Mack, he said what he was doing was easier than breaking up with Jill. He couldn’t get it done. He’d think he’d called it quits with a woman, only to have her phone him the next day and say, “So where are we having dinner?”
My sister was at the café when I arrived. A piece of chocolate cake and a cappuccino were before her. I looked at the green flecks in her eyes. They were Dad’s flecks. She said, “If Mom doesn’t have a bypass, she’ll die . . . in weeks . . . . maybe less.” Becca’s upper lip trembled, and tears welled up. The way she loved Mom never failed to take me aback.
Had a day gone by when my mother and sister hadn’t spoken? Becca might say, “I booked a dinner for the Congress of Cantors. Brisket and latkes for four hundred at Temple Beth Tikvah.” Mom might say, “What will we do if our butcher ever dies?” What if? What if?
Becca patted away her tears and said, “She hates Thistle.” I said, “Surgeons are sharks. Thistle’s a shark.” Becca ate some cake and said, “There are notes of coffee and a spice . . . cinnamon and a little cayenne. Interesting.” She swallowed without pleasure. She didn’t want to feel good while Mom was sick. She said, “She doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with her.” She set down her fork. “What will I do without her?”
I wanted to say, You can depend on me, but I didn’t say that. I said, “She doesn’t have to die . . . well, she does, some time, but not now. She could have the operation.” Becca nodded and said, “She’s afraid of everything.”
Mom was sleeping when we got back to her room, a strand of hair caught in her mouth. It was dyed a color close to her natural flame, and it was full and swept off her forehead. She looked transparent, as if her secrets were trying to get out.
Becca hugged her, and Mom opened her eyes. Becca kissed her cheeks and held her face, burrowing into her neck. Becca said, “Susan Cotter demanded pretty waiters today. They’re supposed to look like models, and she wants the liquor bottles counted to make sure nobody steals any of them. Can you believe it?”
Mom said, “I can believe it.” “Ma,” Becca said, her shoulders slumping, “You have to have the bypass.” Mom said, “You don’t understand my body. I’ll die. They’re lying to you, and you’re too naïve to know.” Becca said, “You might die if you have the operation, but you will definitely die if you don’t.” Mom said, “So I’ll die.” She didn’t look like she wanted to, though. She looked like she wanted to go to Susan Cotter’s party.
“Ma,” Becca said, “you have to do this.” Mom said, “Stop crying.” Becca turned to me. I was at the foot of the bed. The scene seemed close and far away, like a family living on the other side of a wall you can hear breathing but don’t know very well. She said, “Tawny, speak to her.”
What could I say? Have your chest cut open and your heart exposed? We were urging life on someone who claimed to have little appetite for it. Then again, Mom said she wasn’t hungry before biting into a sandwich as big as her head. “Ma,” I said, “I don’t want you to die.” She said, “Since when?”
It was a reasonable question. As Meursault says in The Stranger, “All normal people, at various times, have desired the death of those they loved.” Then again, I was comparing myself to a character who not only shoots his assailant in revenge but loads three more bullets into him after he’s down. I said, “Since now.” She said, “No dice,” and she couldn’t be budged.
Loved this! Particularly "Her voice was strong. Why should she think she was dying? People only said they were dying when they were safe. When they were actually dying, they acted like they were waiting for valet parking to come around with their car."
I type with tears in my eyes. This Sunday will be the one-year anniversary of my mother's death. She, too, was a vital and gorgeous woman, laid low by a series of strokes.
I was a dutiful son: I moved in and cared for her during her final year -- well, as much as I could. The decay became much more than any one person could handle.
My sister and I were able to get her into a new and decent long-term care facility for the last two weeks of her life (quite a feat - navigating Medicare was no small undertaking, and vultures from shady skilled nursing facilities hustle and exploit mercilessly at such times).
I worked from her bedroom for the final days, which made her happy. I know this because it is the last thing she told me. The final stroke came a few hours after those words -- the previous two took away her mobility and, briefly, her empathy and her speech. She fought hard to regain these abilities, semi-successfully.
The final stroke happened late at night on a Saturday, and contorted her body into a frozen question mark. Her face was a silent stone, fixed in an permanent Edvard Munch scream The private-equity funded hospice service, whose marketing promised 24-7 care, did not send anyone to evaluate her until Monday, when she finally received the palliative meds she so clearly needed.
She couldn't speak, but I assumed she could hear, so I sat alongside her and kibbitzed during Jeopardy and British detective shows on PBS, just like we did in healthier times. She died a few hours later.
I have known a lot of death as a Gen X gay man from NYC. But nothing prepared me for the challenges of watching the literal avatar of feminine strength, beauty, and wisdom fade away.
The only detail that felt unfamiliar was the one about feet: My mother's were spectacularly perfect until the day she died. Her toenails were always perfectly painted, and she favored open-toed shoes to show them off. Those shoes remain in the over-the-door rack in her bedroom to this day - it's hard to give away things that touched and defined her.
I eagerly await the next installation of your novel/novella/whatever this becomes. Thank you, Laurie!