Another Broken Wizard (24 page)

“For now,” she said and smiled.

“What time is it?”

“Ten,” she said, which by her inflection was late, but by my reckoning too early. I burped up a little whiskey and grimaced.

“So what do you have planned for today?”

“I promised my advisor I’d read all these books over break and I am way behind. So I have devoted my day to Alexander Hamilton’s early plans for industrializing America. You want some breakfast?”

“I don’t know. Yes?”

“I have eggs and oatmeal.”

“Maybe some oatmeal. My stomach is a little jumpy.”

She started making the oatmeal at the stove. I blinked, at home for the first time since I had come to Massachusetts. I opened the book on Hamilton for a look, saw the word
tariff
three times in a paragraph and closed it. The wood grain of the old kitchen table was more my speed.

“So I was thinking about what you told me about Joe. Did you really talk to that cop, Ira, last night?” she said, stirring the pot and then turning around.

“Yeah, I even filled out some forms, so he could get a warrant. I did all of that.”

“I think it’s a good thing you did.”

“If it works out. Otherwise, it might be the worst thing I could have done.”

“Regardless, you did something. You’re looking out for the guy.”

Pulling up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, she poured the oatmeal into a bowl, then retrieved a box of brown sugar from a cupboard she could barely reach and sprinkled it over the oatmeal. The dust in the sunlight swirled when she walked over with the bowl.

“This is a situation where good intentions may not matter. I just hope I’m not being misled here.”

“Obviously. But still, it’s a good thing. I think it had to be done, and done by one of his friends.”

“Well, the only thing I can do now is warn Joe. But I can’t even do that. Fuck.”

“Back when I was at Smith, a group of my friends hung out with this kid from town. His real name was Jaime, but he called himself Brando. He was a few years older than us and always knew where to find drugs and parties. We met him when we were freshmen and he was a funny, self-deprecating guy. He might have been gay, but he wasn’t out. He’d get us coke and X and we’d have a lot fun. But by the end of my sophomore year, he started getting bitter, even violent sometimes, and we just stopped returning his calls. Sometime in my senior year, he hung himself. I only heard about it a few weeks later. But I always wonder what I, or anyone, could have done, if someone, anyone, had been looking out for him. I mean, where were the people who cared, who could have stopped him from getting to that point, from doing what he did?”

“It’s the million-dollar question: How do you get between someone and their self-destruction?” I asked, eating again.

“It’s one of those things. I don’t think you can. But I think you have to try. Do you ever go to church anymore?”

“Hardly at all, maybe once every few years. Catholic school cured me of it. Why, do you think I should get the diocese involved?”

“No, it’s just the idea of trying to help people, to change people. It reminds me of church, of all that steadfast effort for impossible things, like turning the other cheek, or just having faith. I started going to Sunday Mass again last year, almost every week. I don’t think it gives me much peace, but it gives me a proper place to be honestly uneasy about all the impossible things, all the things that are out of my control.”

I finished my oatmeal. We looked at each other and both knew it was time for me to go. Outside, the sky was a clear merciless shade of pale blue over the dirty snow and sandy streets. Back on Route 9, I considered going to a Mass, then thought of the pale wood and bad art of the modern churches. It made the whiskey churn in my belly. Passing a shuttered mini-golf course, I smelled myself and decided not to stop into the Fountainhead for a change of clothes. Coffee and gas later, I was in Dad’s room. There seemed to be fewer tubes and wires going into his gown. He was napping in front of the repeating stream of cable news. He woke suddenly when I went for the TV remote cradled in his forearm. It took him a minute to get his bearings. We talked in sputters and spurts.

“I like that shirt,” Dad said.

It was a polo shirt with brown and blue stripes.

“Thanks.”

“Did you have that on yesterday?”

“Yeah. I guess I did. I had a late night.”

“You’ve been having a lot of them lately. That’s a good thing. You should have some fun. I didn’t mean to sound like I was giving you a hard time the other day. This place probably makes you want to blow off some steam. So who’s this girl?”

“Who?”

“The one you’ve been going out with?”

“Oh, I don’t know what’s going on there. I just met her a week or so ago. It’s funny. I met her here.”

“In the hospital?”

“Yeah, you can store that one away for when you start dating again. The food sucks, but the ICU is full of vulnerable chicks.”

“When I was your age, I could go out any night of the week and take a girl home. They weren’t always gorgeous. But any night of the week.”

“When was that, 1970? Everyone tells me that was a good year.”

The little hospital TV filled up with a computer-animated mushroom cloud full of bullet-pointed factoids over the Manhattan skyline.

“You really need to get a job,” Dad said when the commercial came.

“Really? I had no clue. I was just sitting around, twiddling my thumbs and waiting on the salary fairy. Thanks, really. Thanks for the fucking tip.”

“Hey, hey. Take it easy.”

“Me? I am taking it easy. But why don’t you tell me to eat? Why don’t you tell me to breathe? That’s not exactly advice.”

“Fine. Forget it,” Dad said, lowering the corners of his mouth so his eyes widened, the implication being that I overreacted.

In my experience, overreacting is sometimes the correct thing to do. I looked across the room and noticed that Dad’s roommate was gone. The curtain was pushed round to the wall, and the bed awaited a new customer.

“What happened to the old guy in the next bed?” I asked.

“His cancer spread. They moved him to a hospice.”

“That’s one of those places they put you to die?”

“Pretty much. I’m stuck here until Tuesday, the doctor said. I don’t want another depressing roommate.”

“He wasn’t so bad, except for the dying. He didn’t talk anyway.”

“Yeah, he was fine. But his wife, Jim, you didn’t hear it—she would start saying the rosary when you left. I mean, not even whispering. And I’m here, trying to sleep, so I clear my throat, but she keeps at it. So I ask her to stop it. She ignores me again. So finally, after twenty minutes, I buzz the nurse and I tell her. The nurse tells her to pray more quietly.”

“I guess she was distraught.”

“Oh, that’s not the half of it. When the nurse leaves, the woman starts praying out loud again, so I yell at her to shut up and buzz for the nurse. So the wife comes over and pulls the curtain away and points at her eye and her neck and then at me and makes a hissing noise. It was the strangest damn thing. Here I am and I can’t even wipe my own ass, and now I have this crazy woman putting a goddamn gypsy curse on me.”

“I thought she was a Catholic.”

“Catholicism is different for women, it’s all about hexes and candles and bribing the saints.”

“Fucking witchery,” I said. We both started laughing at the perverse tableau of Dad harassing the soon-to-be widow, and me accusing her of witchcraft.

“I’m just saying, why can’t I catch a break? I know it’s a hospital, but can’t I get a less-depressing roommate? Why can’t I get some nineteen-year-old sorority girl after her boob job?”

“I don’t think they give those to guys who just had open-heart surgery. Insurance and whatnot.”

“I’m just saying.”

“How’s the pain?”

“It’s okay. It’s just in one section in my chest, well, the upper half of my torso, well, most of my torso, shoulders and arms, and neck. The point is that if I just don’t think about it, it’s pretty manageable. But it wears me out. I think I sleep about fifteen hours a day.”

Dad shook his head. He looked old, but somehow identical to how I remembered him from when I was a kid. His hair wasn’t gray and he had a mustache then. His cheeks were less baggy back then, and not so full of red capillaries. His eyes weren’t as crowded by folds of skin and his eyebrows weren’t as wild and overgrown. But I had to work to recognize the differences. Something was so much the same that it mooted everything else.

“Hey, if you’re going to the cafeteria, I could go for a Diet Coke,” Dad said, smiling at his failed attempt at subtlety.

I said okay and got up. The hyperbolic voices of the news anchors exploded into life before I was two steps away. I ran into Dad’s friend Robert in the hallway, waved and said I’d be back in a few minutes. The cafeteria was crowded, so I wandered like a kid in a new high school looking for a place to eat lunch, with my tray of chicken nuggets, soft pretzel and Diet Cokes. I spotted Olive at a table by the cash register.

“Oh, hey,” Olive said, looking at me flatly.

She was wearing jeans along with a black top that had too many straps to make sense at first glance.

“Nice to see you too, sunshine.”

“I guess that was supposed to be you being charming.”

“I’m sorry, did I shoot Morrissey while I was sleeping?”

“Hardy har,” she said, and smiled despite herself. But she flattened her mouth and deadened her eyes almost immediately.

“Hey, really, what’s going on?”

“You should have called.”

“I thought I did.”

“No, you should have called before that. I was going to call to tell you. But I figured you’d probably take a few days to call me back if I did.”

“Okay. Well, I didn’t say I was going to call and you didn’t ask me to,” I said, sensing where this was headed and hating myself for adding to the momentum.

“Never mind. I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“Well, I’ve had a lot on my mind. Believe me. I am trying to keep so many balls in the air right now that I can hardly think. I have a best friend who is going to get himself killed in a blood feud, a resume that’s not getting read, a mom I keep meaning visit, a girlfriend who’s forgetting my name day by day, a bank account that’s eroding with every fucking pretzel and hospital parking ticket. Basically everything is swirling down a big toilet bowl. It’s all spinning away and so if you want, fine, I am fucking sorry if I didn’t fucking call.”

In the midst of my outburst, I had shoved my soft pretzel across the table and onto the floor. Olive leaned over and picked it up. She put it back on my tray and made a gesture as if to dust it off. She looked at me. She bit her lip, and her eyes looked like they were getting dewy.

“So what is it? Is it your dad? Did he get worse?” I asked, softly.

She shook her head. Emboldened by my rage and her vulnerability, I did what I had learned many times before not to do.

“Is it your period?” I asked.

She nodded and laughed a little, a tear shooting across the mascara barricade and down her face.

“I was going to tell you to go fuck yourself,” she said, laughing a little through the tears.

“I’ll bet you were.”

We got up and embraced. It was a hospital, and emotion wasn’t out of place—just Catharsis Day in Cafeteria B. She watched me eat my chicken nuggets and the dusted-off soft pretzel. We made plans for her to come over later and then left. We kissed good-bye before parting for our respective dads’ wards.

Robert and Dad were talking when I got there. Dad was wearing his brave face. I remembered it from an office Christmas party when I was nineteen, a big event held at a hall in the Boston Ballet. As we entered the already-f party, Dad turned to me and said “Watch me work the room.” He had that face on. It was happy and ready for everything, except maybe honesty. I pulled up one of the chairs and gave Dad his Diet Coke.

Dad and Robert talked on about old co-workers—who was where, who lost a spouse and who gained one, who went back to school and who went back overseas. By the time Robert left, I was as tired as Dad. I could tell by how he squeezed the handle in his hand that Dad was doing his late day run on the pain medication, calling down the curtain on the day.

43.

I drove back down Route 9 like an idle child scribbling the same line over and over again in hopes of tearing the paper or destroying his crayon.

At the Fountainhead, I showered, shaved and dozed in front of the TV. The buzzer gave me enough time to rinse my sleepy mouth out with Diet Coke before Olive came up. She was dressed sexier than she’d been at the hospital. We gave an honorable amount of lip service to the notion of going out for dinner and drinks before we made love on Dad’s bed. We ordered Chinese food and did it quickly on the floor of the living room before the delivery guy showed. Each screw shut out the day before and the day to come a little more.

We ate spareribs and made fun of the unfortunate coeds being slaughtered on the pay-per-view horror movie.

“You’d think a boob job that retarded would at least protect her from a lawn dart,” Olive commented on the film.