"Do you work here?" he asked. "At this hotel?"
"No, Mr. Nelson. I"m Paul"s wife. Andrea. We"ve met before."
"I"m sorry, I don"t remember. But I wonder if you could do me a favor. I"m expecting a visitor, an Indian sort of chap- he wears traditional clothing, and sometimes people who work in this sort of hotel are ill educated and can be quite rude. Would you make a point that Mr. Patel is a very great friend of mine and should be shown right up."
"Of course, Mr. Nelson," she said. His face had the same courtly intelligence it had had yesterday, or half an hour before when she"d given him the chocolate. Did it matter so much that he was confused about where he was? That he didn"t remember her?
She had bought a deck of cards; she and Paul played poker but she wasn"t a good player and she knew her lack of interest and skill was a disappointment to him. He took the cards out of her hands and began to play solitaire. She took out her book, Homage to Catalonia, which she had bought because of Mr. Nelson. She hoped that he would see it and that he would be himself again and that they could talk about history and politics together.
When she got to the Siciliana, it was crowded, and her friend the waiter was too busy to pay much attention to her. He asked only if her husband was better. When she said yes, he said, "Bene," and went on to another table.
Mr. Nelson put his hand on her forearm when he pa.s.sed her in the hall. "I"m terribly embarra.s.sed about this morning. Not recognizing you.
Taking you for a stranger. Taking this for a hotel. Your husband told me what I"d done. It"s very distressing. My mind goes in and out. You could say very properly that I keep losing my mind."
She was angry at Paul for telling him. What possible good could come ofthat?
"Please don"t worry, Mr. Nelson. It doesn"t matter a bit."
"You"re very kind," he said. "You must take me for an old fool."
She wanted to say, "No, Mr. Nelson, I think you"re wonderful," but he was not American, and she knew that to say it would be wrong.
The next day was Sunday, and each of the three old men had a visitor. She had bought chocolates for Mr. Nelson, three Seckel pears for Mr. Cas-tanopoulos and, as an afterthought, a bag of hard candies for Mr. c.o.x-Ralston, and another one for Paul. But when she saw that they all had guests, she was embarra.s.sed to present her gifts, as if she were suggesting some pride of place for herself, earned by her being there with them, buying presents, when their current guests had not.
She was relieved to see that Mr. Nelson"s guest was, in fact, as he had said, "an Indian sort of chap." He was wearing traditional dress, which looked rather like ivory cotton pajamas. He wasn"t a young man, but it was hard to place his age exactly; certainly he was younger than Mr. Nelson, but his toes, visible in his sandals, showed that he was no longer young.
Mr. Castanopoulos beckoned Andrea with his finger. "This my daughter," he said. Andrea saw that she had bought her father Seckel pears. But they were more beautiful than the ones Andrea had bought, with a rosy blush at their base that absorbed itself into a sunny yellow as it moved toward the narrow tip. Andrea"s were small and dun-colored; their tawny skin was speckled with light dots, like a sprinkling of cinnamon or pepper; they looked unsavory in comparison with the fleshy beauties that the daughter had brought, sitting demurely in their cups of purple tissue beside the pineapple.
"Thank you for being kind to my father," the woman said. "I live rather far away, in Hendon, so I can"t make it here as often as I"d like." Andrea noted that her speech was unaccented, and that she was rather heavily made-up, in the way of European professional women, skirting garishness through a firm confidence in their appeal as women, unafraid that anything of importance could be lost to them by display.
"He has rather a thing about fruit," the woman said, under her breath, and she and Andrea laughed uneasily.
"He"s a charming man," Andrea said, knowing she exaggerated. Mr. Castanopoulos was not a charming man, not like Mr. Nelson, but his story had interested her, and she was grateful for the gift of interest, of distraction, so she wasn"t spending all her time thinking about Paul, worrying about their future.
She sat beside Paul, took out the candy she had bought for him, spread it on his table, and kissed his newly shaved face. He c.o.c.ked his head in the direction of Mr. c.o.x-Ralston and his guest.
"Monty Python"s come to call," he said.
She understood what he meant. Mr. c.o.x-Ralston"s visitor had an appearance so outlandishly comic that it was hard to believe at first that it wasn"t a costume, a mask, put on for a deliberate comic effect. His hair, entirely without gray, although he appeared to be in his seventies, stood up perpendicular to his scalp in a thick alarmed brush. His cheeks seemed permanently flushed, stained a berry color, and his teeth protruded so that his face was capable of one expression only: an abashed grin that despaired of modulation. Andrea"s and Paul"s eyes met and they stifled giggles, pretending to embrace so they could hide their faces in each other"s shoulders. Andrea savored the moment; it was the first time she"d felt really close to Paul since he"d collapsed.
Mr. c.o.x-Ralston proceeded upon an uninterrupted monologue: about the callousness of his daughter, who had not come to visit him, the badness of the food, the neglect of the nurses, the doctor who had had to try three times to find a vein for his IV.
"Ah, James, my little brother, how I envy you the ease of your retirement. When you left the bank, you lost merely a job; when I left the world of cinema, I lost a world."
Andrea wanted James to say something in his own defense, but not a sound came from him; he nodded as if his brother had a perfect right to a.s.sert the superiority of his life, his loss.
"The nurse said there"s a garden in the back of the hospital," Paul said. "Shall we try to find it? So that we don"t need to say our garden tour of England was a compete bust."
"That"s a wonderful idea," Andrea said, feeling there was no place for them in the ward since the other men had visitors.
She pushed Paul in a wheelchair. The wheels needed oiling and their progress was slow. Mr. Nelson"s guest caught up with them.
"I am Mr. Khan," he said. "I am Mr. Nelson"s friend. I wanted to thank you for being so kind to Bill," he said to Andrea.
"It"s my pleasure," Andrea said. "He"s a very interesting man."
"Life has, I am afraid, not been kind to him. He was a code breaker during the War, the Second War, I mean, so he stayed here in England. He was worried that his children would not be safe here in London during the bombing so he and his wife moved them out to a little cottage they had near the Epping Forest in the outskirts of London. He and his wife stayed in Hampstead. As it turns out, the cottage was bombed and the children and the nurse were killed. The children were eight and five. Whereas Bill and his wife were perfectly safe. She died in 1960. He was, I guess, about fifty then and he just sold everything up, chucked the lot, house, job, and traveled around the world. I met him then, in India; we"d had mutual friends from my days at Cambridge. I"d trained as a chemist; most of my professional life I worked in Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden. But when I retired I found Stockholm, as a city, rather boring. Not enough cultural enrichments and it seemed to me in age what is left is the pleasures of mind and the imagination. We"d corresponded very regularly, Bill and I, and met from time to time. We came up with the plan of renting a small flat and living together. We rub along rather well, or we did until recently, and then Bill began losing track of things somewhat, and now this sepsis has set in because of an operation on his knee that went bad, but I like to think we will rub along rather well for a while longer."
"I"m glad you have each other," Andrea said, and worried then if that was too American a thing to say.
Mr. Khan bowed slightly and said, "I, too, am very glad. And glad for the two of you, that you have each other." He bowed to Paul. "And I very much hope that you"ll soon be feeling quite tip-top."
"Thanks a lot," said Paul, but in a way that indicated to the Indian man that he didn"t want his company.
"I"ll be running along then," Mr. Khan said. "Don"t go," Andrea wanted to say, but she knew that Paul didn"t want him.
She wheeled Paul into the garden. Up the brick wall climbed late cream-colored roses; marigolds, which had before this struck her as fussy and schoolmarmish, pleased her with their geometric pleasures now. She wanted to talk to Paul about Mr. Nelson and his eventful tragic life but she didn"t know how to elicit the response she wanted from him, and she feared that the wrong response would disappoint her disproportionately. She wanted to say, "I think they"re better than us, these men. I wonder if we"ll be interesting to the young when we are old."
"The doctor says they might let me out tomorrow," Paul said. "A few days in the real world after that and then he hopes I"ll be ready to fly."
"That"s wonderful, darling," Andrea said, but to her surprise, her heart felt heavy.
"My husband may be going home from the hospital tomorrow or the day after," she said to her friend the waiter at the Siciliana, whose name she still didn"t know. She didn"t want to say "in hospital," as the British said it, and she considered that it might be more restrained to wait till the following day to tell him, when it would really be her last time there, a more appropriate time for the announcement. But she wanted to tell someone, someone who might express the regret she knew she had no right to feel. He didn"t disappoint her. "Oh, but that is terrible, that I will not be seeing you again."
"I"ll send you a postcard from New York, "she said. "You must tell me your name."
"Paolo," he said.
"Paolo," she repeated. "My husband"s name was Paul."
He bowed, as if the connection were important.
"It"ll be splendid to have hubby with us once again," said Mrs. Romilly "I don"t think we"ve had such a good-looking young man with us all year. I must say, he"s rather a dish, your Paul. Quite good for the morale."
She wanted to say, "I never thought of him as particularly good-looking," and she wondered what it was that had made her love him. She supposed it was his way of seeing the world, a slightly hard vision with a touch of acid that made her feel safe from ambush. But that wasn"t all; it was that he took pleasure in ordinary things, in dailiness, and she had understood that most of life was ordinary, so his pleasure in it gave her hope. He was mistrustful of heroics. He had said, "I think I will have succeeded in life if when I die people say of me that I did some good and little harm."
But now she would have liked to say to him, "I"m not sure that"s enough." But he was her husband, he would be the father of her child.
She had loved him, but she had never thought him beautiful. Not like Mr. Nelson with his fine skull and his generous, courageous mouth. But what would it have been like to live with Mr. Nelson?
She was thinking of that when she fell asleep. She dreamed of a place she knew was Scotland. She had never been to Scotland but in her dream the air was clear and rich, delightful to the lungs, the mountains were high and when snow fell on them it cast a rosy shadow.
When she got to the hospital, Paul was dressed and sitting up in his chair. The bag she had brought his things in was packed and sitting on the bed like a cadet ready for his first posting.
"I"m sprung," he said, "We"re out of here." He stood up, twirled her around, and kissed her on the lips.
"Don"t tire yourself," she said, embarra.s.sed that Mr. Nelson could see them.
"We"ve just got to wait for Morton, the head quack they call him, to sign off on me. They think it will be half an hour."
"Let me just run down the street and get some goodbye presents."
"Sweetie, you"ve done enough. And I want to be ready to fly out of here the first second we can."
She knew she couldn"t go against his wishes. His impatience was a sign of health and his health must be the thing that she most prized.
"I"ll just say goodbye to everyone," she said.
"The farewell concert... leaving the fans crying for more," he said.
She began with Mr. Castanopoulos. He had wrapped two apples in paper towels and presented them to her, with a bow of the head.
"Gif my reG.o.ds to Brodway," he said.
"We shall miss you terribly, terribly, my dear," said Mr. c.o.x-Ralston.
"I"ll write," she said, trying to control what sounded like wildness in her voice.
"I"m afraid I"m not much up to writing," Mr. Nelson said. "I"d be glad to hear from you, but you mustn"t be disappointed if I don"t respond. It"s not that I wouldn"t be thinking of you. But the old eyes aren"t what they were and my arthritis has made my handwriting impossible."
"Perhaps Mr. Khan could keep me up-to-date," she said, knowing they both understood that what she meant was "perhaps he"ll let me know when you die."
"Ah, Mr. Khan, a very fine chap. He"s my very close friend. A great man. It would be wonderful if you could meet him sometime. He"s a chemist, lives in Stockholm. I haven"t seen him in many, many years."
"I did meet him," Andrea said, and then regretted having embarra.s.sed him.
"Oh, yes, of course, I"ve forgotten. I forget a terrible number of things, you know."
"Mr. c.o.x-Ralston, you must tell me some of the movies you were in so I can look for them," she said.
"Oh, my dear, I"m afraid you misunderstood. I wasn"t in movies. I worked as a film projectionist. But, you see, that was heavenly, that was magical in its own way. You flipped a switch and there was light in darkness, you brought magic into people"s lives and they couldn"t even see where you were."
She saw Paul pretending to blow his nose to hide his laughter. He"d always thought c.o.x-Ralston was an old fool, and he was right, of course he was right, he was an old fool and an old fraud, but Andrea didn"t want Paul laughing at him.
The nurse was going over the details of Paul"s medications. She made herself pay attention. It was terribly important that they got this right. The doctor arrived, listened to Paul"s chest with a stethoscope, and p.r.o.nounced him right as rain.
"Goodbye, everyone," she said. She turned her back on them. What she wanted to do was walk down the hall backward, waving at them, blowing kisses, saying very loudly, so that everyone could hear, "I"ll miss you, I"ll miss you. You don"t know how happy you"ve made me. I think I will never be happier. Yes, I know it: I will never be this happy again."
"G.o.d, what a relief to get out of that loony bin," Paul said when they were waiting for the taxi. "One compulsive liar, one fruit fetishist, one who"s only on our planet two-thirds of the time. lesus, what a nightmare."
Yes, Paul, she wanted to say, you might be right, what you say is quite probably right. Only there is another way of thinking of it, of thinking of all of them. Not as nightmare, but as triumph. They had triumphed, all of them, in their ways. Simply by living, simply by getting to their age. Mr. Nelson had triumphed over tragedy, and Mr. Castanopoulos had triumphed over disgrace, and Mr. c.o.x-Ralston had triumphed over mediocrity. And that was something, wasn"t it? You couldn"t say that it was nothing. Or that it was bad. And certainly not a nightmare. She knew that nightmare was the wrong word for what the two of them had seen. You are wrong, Paul, she wanted to say. I know that you are wrong. But she said nothing. She took his arm. He was her husband; he was young and well.
"I can"t wait to get home," he said.
"It will be wonderful," she said to him.
She knew their life was just beginning.
Conversations in Prosperity.
It is the last day in September, cool and dry. My friend and I are sitting in the park, a few feet from the gardens, admiring the cosmos and the columbines, which we know we are incapable of growing for ourselves. We are quite different, physically: she"s tall and thin and blonde, and I am short and dark and fleshy. She"s wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless blue shirt, and a denim jacket. I"m wearing purple leggings and a red cotton sweater. I have my dog with me, a seven-year-old black Labrador.
An older woman, alone, a very nice woman in a gauzy flowered skirt, a silk jacket that zips in front, tan Rockport sneakers, stops to pet the dog. She talks about her own dog, long dead. A c.o.c.ker spaniel. How she used to come to the park with her dog and her son in a stroller. How one time a man gave her dog the rest of his ice-cream cone. But grudgingly. "Take it if you want it so much," the man said to the dog.
"I wanted to say to the man, "Well, at least be gracious about it," but of course I didn"t," the woman says to us. She wants to talk. I focus upon the hem of her skirt, hoping it will move, indicating she"s ready to leave us. We don"t want to talk to her, we want to talk to each other. We love each other and have too little time to sit and talk. So much, too much, in our lives. We position our bodies so the woman will understand that we don"t want to talk, but in a way that, we hope, will indicate that it has to do with our affection for each other, not our rejection of her. She does go away. We feel a little bad, but not for long.
Then a young woman, with well-cut hair that falls like a black slash across her cheek, flowered Lycra running shorts, a bottle of water, steps up to pet the dog. She says, "You have the perfect dog. You"re so lucky to have the perfect dog." If she looked different, if her hair were less well cut, if her shoes were dirty, we might interpret these words as madness, but we know they aren"t mad. Only, perhaps, a sign of melancholy. It"s easier not to talk to her than the older woman, since it seems more likely that the future for her will be bright.
She moves away from us, not happier for having seen us.
Although we are quite different physically, my friend and I share a concern for virtue. My friend, who is a midwestern Protestant, carries in her heart a sentence a philosophy professor said to her once: "What have you done today to justify your existence?" And I, raised by Catholics who mixed a love of pleasure with a sense of endless duty, carry in my heart the words of Jesus: "Greater love than this no man hath, than that he lay down his life for his friends." We have talked about this to each other, and we understand that both these sentences take for granted that just living is not enough. Something great, something continually great must be done because this thing "life" is not to be taken for granted, consumed, like a marvelous meal or a day at the ocean. My friend has in fact devoted her life to serving the poor. She"s a social worker; now she"s working with children in Washington Heights. I have not put my lot with the poor, and my friend"s saying that I am heroically committed to an ideal of language isn"t, I know, enough for me. I have not laid down my life. But my friend, too, feels she hasn"t done enough. Some days we are so sickened by the events of the world that we can"t read the newspaper. Then we force ourselves to read it, on the phone, together. We hate our political opponents with a vengeance that there is no place for in the ideals of the liberal minded. It is always on our minds: we haven"t done enough.
And so we can"t quite brush away the two women who wanted to talk to us, to whom we refused to talk. We wish we could be other than we are. Or we wish we could be seen clearly for what we are really. Not, as everyone imagines, people who are endlessly sympathetic, endlessly dependable, but people who deeply resent invasions on our pleasure and our privacy. No one understands our hunger for solitude, or that we could quite easily and totally give ourselves over and became voluptuaries. When my friend had a short s.p.a.ce between jobs she spent a day naked, eating the box of chocolates her co-workers had given her by way of farewell. She finished the whole box sitting on her couch watching the Simpson trial. She said no one would believe her if she told them. As no one understands when I describe the days spent with the phone off the hook eating Milano cookies and reading People magazine. They say my friend and I only do these things occasionally, that we need to do them because normally we are so productive and responsible. What they don"t understand is that we would like to be doing those other things quite often. Maybe all the time. That we would if only we could believe that we could get away with it. If these were things of which it would be impossible for us to stand accused.
I may be speaking only about myself. I think that, much sooner than I, my friend would give up luxury and put her shoulder, as she always does, to the wheel.
I might not.
Both of us have things to do the next day that we don"t want to do. A visit to the country. A friend who has lived in a foreign city for years and is back in town. Both of us say yes too much, because we do like people, we really do, but usually not as much as we first thought we would. Or when they"re not around, we don"t like them as much as when we were with them, and certainly, we don"t look forward to seeing them again. And there are always too many people with whom it would be moderately pleasant to spend time. We are not the kind of people who have to speak to women in the park who seem approachable because of the kind eyes of their dog.
My friend says that when she saw the movie II Postino, she knew she would do exactly what Pablo Neruda did. Have an intense, deeply felt friendship with the postman. Then, leaving the island, fail to write. Then come back for a visit to the island, but too late, after the postman was already dead.
We talk about the sickening sense that you have betrayed someone simpler, finer than yourself.
The truth that for a certain time, it was right to say you loved them.
Realizing too that while you never thought of them, your face was always in their heart, behind their eyes.
My friend says, "I"ve never been left."
I say, "I haven"t been left since I was twenty."
As we say this, we are not proud. We understand that what is missing in us is the impulse to surrender. We speak of another friend of ours who has been left, again and again. Dramatically. Midnight scenes involving things thrown out of windows. Furniture removed when she"s gone to work. She has been left, and left greatly. I think of her when she dances with a man. She puts her head back, exposing her throat, as if she were ready for the knife. When I see her do it, I envy her the beauty of the gesture. And I envy the man who is her partner. If I were a man I would fall at her knees. Or put a knife to her throat. Perhaps both. Perhaps both, simultaneously.
My friend and I agree that we are both too old now to be left dramatically. Or at all. We"ve chosen good men, accomplished men with a secret streak of pa.s.sivity which we may be the only ones to see. These men make a still center around which we move, purposefully, anxiously, believing we are doing good.
I ask my friend if she thinks it"s a good thing for a man to love someone like us.
Or for a son to have us as a mother.
She tells me her son once said, "The thing about you, Ma, is that emotionally, you"re very low maintenance."