Eleanor Rigby (19 page)

He glowered at the room as if he’d been kept at school for detention, then looked at me. “How bad is it?”

“They don’t know if it’s a cold or flu, but it led to pneumonia, and now you’re here.”

Again he looked around the room, then up at the ceiling. “The mattress here is too firm, and it could use a four-inch foam underlay. And I don’t know what they spray it with to keep it sanitary from patient to patient.”

I said, “At least it folds upward.”

“I forgot about that. Where’s the button?” It was by his side and I gave it to him. Like William with his old Hot Wheels set, Jeremy started messing with his bed. “Now
this
is a mattress.”

I said, “Actually, Jeremy, it’s a total sleep system.”

“When I get out of here, I’m going to sell to institutions. That’s where the big money is.”

“Really, now?”

“Yes. My small and manageable dream has just become slightly larger.”

*    *    *

An hour later, Jeremy fell unconscious, and he stayed that way for a few days, wandering in and out of a fevered blur. He looked at me, but I’m still not sure if he recognized me, which was horrible.

By the next weekend he was able to come home, but his motor skills had largely deteriorated. He shook, he froze, and even using a spoon could quickly become hard work. I had to locate the balance between mothering him and babying him, as well as learn how to treat him both as my son and as a man.

A few days after this, Jeremy relapsed—one evil rancid sponge-mop in a whorehouse of an armpit of a gorilla of an every-loathsome-metaphor-in-the-book flu. I spent my days in the condo, drying Jeremy’s forehead from his sweats, doing all those things I was told, as a child, good nurses do. It required almost no training; the instinct must be built into us the way birds know how to build nests.

Caring for people is so odd—it’s boring but it’s not boring at all. It’s like being in a house and you hear a funny noise and you freeze, ears cocked, wondering if you’ll hear the funny noise again—except with a sick person you’re always in that frozen state of mind, attuned to the tiniest change in your patient’s condition.

At one point Jeremy attempted a lacklustre stroke or two of paint on the red kitchen wall, but I commanded him back to bed.

During clear patches, he tried to rest my mind by asking silly questions.

“Mom, why does water have no taste?”

“Because we’re made of water, that’s why.”

“Mom, why does having money feel so good?”

“Because …” I was stumped. Why
does
it make us feel so good?

Jeremy said, “Mom, you don’t strike me as the type to get a thrill from spending money.”

“Me? No. But I’m not dumb—it gives me security. An unmarried woman of my age has to have that, no matter what her place is in the world.”

“But haven’t you ever just taken a wad of dough and splurged on something completely useless but great?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Chinchilla underwear. An exotic dancer who makes you flaming crepes and then undresses you with his tongue.”

“No.”

“You should do something. If I wasn’t such a waste case, I’d happily be spending your money for you.”

“Don’t be so negative. You’re not a waste case, and I’d be happy to help you spend my money.”

Actually, I downplayed things earlier. I
do
have lots of money tucked away. My salary is large, I don’t spend it and I play the market, where I tend to follow my hunches and almost always win. It’s just common sense, most of it. In the early
1990
s I bought twenty stocks because their names contained the word
micro.
Since I sold them at the right time, that decision alone secured my retirement. At the same time, you also have to buy stocks in companies that make soup and toothpaste, because no matter what happens to the economy, people will always need them.

To be more precise, I’m
rich
, and it actually
is
odd that I don’t splurge on myself, ever. But when you’re alone, you know that money is the one thing that can keep you safe. Safe from what? Safe from being hauled away in the middle of the night and baked into protein wafer cookies to feed people who are in relationships. Safe from worrying about being eighty and entering a rest-home bidding war with some other rich person over who’s going to change my diaper that afternoon. A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money. I said, “Actually, I do use my money—to keep my family in check.”

“How?”

“To be blunt, who’s in my will and who isn’t. It’s cheesy and low-class, but it’s power, and I do like it. If I was whacked by a bus tomorrow, there’d be a minimum of fuss followed by a gleeful reading of my will.”

“You’re being too harsh on yourself.”

“The one exception would be Mother. She has no financial interest in me, but she’d be itching to see who snagged what.”

There was a silence.

I said, “Needless to say, my son, your arrival has altered things.”

“Ralph Lauren makes iron lungs?”

*    *    *

Back to a week ago. Back to me walking into my living room, deep in the night, checking my e-mail and seeing Herr Bayer’s message with an icon telling me of an attachment. Back to me breathing in and out a few times before clicking the download button.

I knew what I was going to see, and after twenty endless seconds what I saw was the Viennese person of interest, Klaus Kertesz, the obvious father of Jeremy—older, hairier and more European-looking in that way you can’t ever really articulate—but it was him. I must have been very drunk indeed that night at the Roman nightclub to forget that face. On seeing it, I felt like I’d fallen and bumped my head on the butcher block. My ears stung.

I’m not even sure if it was good news or bad news to see the face of Klaus Kertesz before me. He’s Jeremy’s father, and yet he’s—well, a rapist or molester or who knows what. The only thing that made sense to me was to go fetch my lucky meteorite, my message from above; and I’ve been holding it ever since.

Indeed, a week has now passed, and I haven’t yet phoned Herr Bayer, nor have I e-mailed him a proper reply. I’ve skipped work, and I’ve been sitting by my computer, writing these words while toying with the face of Klaus Kertesz, making him thinner, younger, more like Jeremy. I keep looking at framed photos of my son—it’s so hard to see my own face in there somewhere. I feel like that one Scrabble tile that has no letter on it. I’m a Styrofoam puff used in packaging. I’m a napkin at McDonald’s. I’m invisible tape. Lucky Prince William, to be able to see his mother so clearly in his own face.

*    *    *

I’ve not mentioned my family’s involvement in Jeremy’s care—or Donna’s. I thought they’d be at the condo often, but once the novelty wore off, the pace of their visits slowed. There was one funny moment with William, on the phone, when he said, “I have to do due diligence here, Lizzie: any chance Junior is a gold digger?”

“He’s going to stick my head in a plastic Wonder Bread bag for my cheesy condo?
Please.
”

“You can never tell.”

“William, a new BMW isn’t going to happen. Maybe a shiny bauble or a trinket. I don’t know. I’ve never had someone to spend money on before. It’s new territory for me.”

An hour later, the phone rang. It was Leslie. “What’s this I hear about you buying expensive jewellery for Jeremy?”

Mother was a terrible caregiver. “Whenever you kids were sick, I’d lock you outside for a few hours and you’d be good as new. Just stick him in some cold fresh air.” She meant well, but she had no tolerance for the ever-worsening, intractable manifestations of the disease. She
did
want desperately to introduce Jeremy to her friends, but was slow in doing so as it meant revealing my shameful teen pregnancy. She toyed with the idea of “the long-lost nephew,” but William, Leslie and I scotched the notion.

In the end she brought along her easily bullied friend Sheila. During her visit, the woman asked no questions about Jeremy’s past; I can only imagine the sugar-coated version of the truth Mother fed her. Jeremy, of course, was charming, and for the first time I felt that Mother might be proud of me. The sensation was so new and jarring that I had to go into my bedroom, close the door, and sit there to both analyze and savour the novelty. When I returned to the living room, Jeremy was opening some of the boxloads of gifts Mother had brought him—pricey designer stuff. Mother’s not a cheap woman, but nor is she extravagant. I suspect she was trying to buy her way out of guilt, but I kept that to myself, and Jeremy was no dummy—he would have figured that out in a blink.

Later, he asked, “Growing up, was your mother cheap with you?”

“No. Not really.” Actually, Mother may have taken some sort of pride in my perceived virginity, but she was also always trying to tart me up in overpriced designer gear and makeup—anything to boost my sex appeal.
Make the boys interested in taking you down off the shelf for a look.
If I’d shown even a sneeze worth of interest, a leather dominatrix outfit and a set of handcuffs could have been mine—anything for a show of interest in sex. And if you forced her to choose between Liz as virgin and Liz as tramp, my hunch is that she’d have chosen the latter. Fortunately, Leslie was a far more enthusiastic participant in Mother’s campaign of sex.

*    *    *

Jeremy was right about Donna: in a brief time she was all over the condo like a teenager lining up for concert tickets. Not to disparage her intentions, but she converted one afternoon of bowling into a life partnership with the man. I’d taken a leave of absence from work and so extra help wasn’t needed. Some conversation might have been nice, but when Donna visited, her focus on Jeremy was so intense it reminded me of stalker movies.

“He’s suffering.”

“He’s just sleeping.”

“Imagine the
pain.”

“It’s actually the opposite. He goes numb.”

In her eyes I was branded a witch.

After a week of this, Jeremy said, “This is going to get sexual really soon, trust me. She’s a control freak, and I’m a control freak’s dream date—to be more precise, I’m her prisoner. She has to go. What can we do about it?”

“Best we simply tell her to stop.”

“You be the one to do it. She’ll go ballistic.”

And she
did.
It was ugly and boring, and I was accused of being unappreciative, and Jeremy was accused of faking his illness for attention, and … Even thinking about her gets my blood to boiling. Once you see a person go psycho, you can never look at him or her the same way again. You hear that so-and-so’s crazy and it’s cute and funny, but once you’ve seen it for real, it’s over.

The day after the outburst, Liam visited around dinnertime. “Donna was very upset.”

Jeremy said, “She’s psycho.” It was a good health day for Jeremy, and to look in from the outside you’d never know he was falling apart.

Liam knew enough to leave the Donna issue alone. “I’ve got three of my choir friends in the car downstairs. Can I invite them up to hear Jeremy sing?”

This was such a shameless and unexpected request, we were happy to have them up, two women and a man. They were polite and quiet, and for once I had things to serve guests besides pudding cups and ouzo. One of the women had brought a tape recorder with her, and she was timid about using it, but she had no need to be. She asked Jeremy, “Can you sing classically?”

“I can, but I don’t know any of the theory behind it—just the sounds.”

“That’s okay.”

“What would you like me to sing backwards? Remember, I max out at around thirty seconds.”

“Actually, we’ve made a list …” Indeed they had. We spent two hours recording music. For a few of the pieces, Liam asked us to speak during Jeremy’s singing, only to prove to listeners that this wasn’t a stunt.

The four of them left, and that was that.

*    *    *

Some scraps of paper I just found …

A new order, cold- white lights that burn and die.

A tornado with a halo