Evenings at Five (3 page)

“As soon as
pos
-sible” took a playful leap up the scale, ornamenting the concept of what was possible with typical Rudy-ish melisma.

Christina slugged back her drink, some of it spilling down her chin.

“Damn it, Rudy, you could probably materialize in that chair if you wanted to. So could you, God. I don’t know why I bother with either of you. Damn you both, my heart is broken.”

Christina’s bedroom phone, with clock, cat’s short glass, and her tall glass

Chapter Four

At some point she lurched up to bed, Bud weaving in front of her as they climbed the stairs.

“Don’t cross
over
like that,” Christina slurred irritably. “That’s the way cat owners break legs.”

The night was a horror. Dry mouth. Racing heart. Nausea. Dizziness. Ugly faces leered on the insides of her eyelids. Coming attractions of her future, perhaps near future, played themselves out. Who was that old novelist who fell in the toilet when she got drunk, and her faithless young protégé spared no details in his popular memoir after her death? Christina thrashed around in what was left of the king-size space, Rudy’s former half being littered with books and papers, until Bud got disgusted with rearranging himself and went downstairs in a huff. Each time she dozed off she was awakened by ringing in her ears or stabbing in her eyeballs or after-images of flashing lights, as if someone had been taking nonstop pictures of her while she slept. For the tenth or twelfth time that night she checked the digital green numbers on the bedside clock.

Only this time there were no numbers, just a watery green blob. She sat up and turned on the lamp. Everything in the room, even the precise English landscape paintings on the wall three feet away, swam behind a thick gluey scrim. Faint with fright, she made her way to the bathroom, holding on to things. The face in the mirror was so indistinct it didn’t have eyes or a mouth. She sat on the toilet, head in hands, and planned the rest of her life. Learning Braille. Having to depend on others for rides, having to pretend to be a good sport. (“The worst thing, for Christina. Why couldn’t it have been her hearing? But we can’t choose those things, can we? And she’s taking it so well.”)

She could not bring herself to call 911, though she had done it five times for Rudy. The rescue squad certainly knew their way to the house, and she knew the drill: oxygen first, then the EKG, the questions, the radioing in to the ER, Rudy’s deep voice behind the mask barking orders for Christina to pack his medicines from the kitchen shelf in the Ziploc bag that would accompany him to the hospital, calling them out with his magnificently rolled
r
’s: “Toprol, Procardia, Zestril . . . “ She knew most of the squad members by name and where they worked in town.

On Rudy’s final trip, six of them transported him out the door sitting bolt upright on the stretcher. “You look like Pharaoh being carried forth on his litter,” Christina said, making him smile behind his mask as they bore his noble bulk to the waiting ambulance, its red lights already flashing. He told them he was feeling a little better already from the oxygen.

Christina’s bed

But now, crouched on the toilet, Christina knew she would not be rousing the jeweler and the IBM couple and the retired stockbroker from their beds or be summoning the young policemen from their night patrols. If the best of her life was over, she preferred to postpone facing it for a few more hours. She did go so far as to drag herself over to the sink and swallow an aspirin, remembering the TV commercial of the man collapsing on the tennis court and his son whipping out a Bayer. Then she felt her way back to bed and lay down and closed her eyes and breathed in and out, using the
ujj¯ay¯ž
breath her yoga instructor had taught her.

By morning her sight was normal, and she went to church. Though the Cope had palled since Rudy’s death, she continued to go because church was something she had grown up knowing how to do. And she looked forward to Father Paul’s extemporaneous sermons. Startling things sometimes came out of his mouth as he stood in the aisle in his alb and chasuble with no notes: “we just have to accept our inseparability from God” had been a recent one. Also the parishioners at St. Aidan’s comprised the bulk of her social life. Important human dramas were in progress there: the retired sea captain who was losing his memory, the little boy fighting cancer, the lovely young teacher who had been proposed to by two men on the same day. Also, Christina liked to dress up, and today was her Sunday to read the epistle.

After church, the Mallows, the couple who had given Christina and Rudy their plots at the artists’ cemetery, invited her to brunch and were so solicitous of her that she burst into tears and confided she might be going blind. They insisted on driving her to the emergency room. Gilbert told her about the time last summer he had been reading the paper and all of a sudden there were little colored explosions on the page. He drove himself to a specialist, who steadied his head in an apparatus and while telling him the plot of a novel flashed something at Gilbert’s eye. “There, all fixed,” the specialist said, having lasered together a retinal fissure. If necessary, the Mallows would be glad to drive Christina to the same specialist, even make the appointment for her. They remained with her in the ER all afternoon while she underwent tests. A CT scan ruled out a brain tumor. The doctor on duty guessed she had suffered a migraine and wrote her a prescription in case she felt another coming on. By then it was time for dinner and the Mallows took her to a fish restaurant by the river. Christina thanked them profusely all the way home.

“Oh, it was fun hanging out with you,” Eve Mallow said.

Gilbert added, “When Rudy was alive, you two barricaded yourselves, which was understandable, with all his health problems. You were both formidable, though you seemed the more accessible of the two.”

The idea of sharing Rudy’s formidability did not displease Christina at all.

Rudy’s medicine shelf

Chapter Five

Christina’s primary-care physician, Dr. Gray, sent her immediately to an eye doctor, young and thorough, who ruled out detached retinas and glaucoma but booked her for another kind of CT scan, because her left eye protruded and he wanted to check out whether anything was behind it. Meanwhile, Dr. Gray said, her blood pressure was way too high; this wasn’t an easy time for her, he knew. What had she been doing in the evenings, how had she been coping? He had a way of looking at her as though he already knew, but he was a gent and let her confess in her own style. Because Christina liked her assignments in writing, he gave her a prescription slip on which he had printed in large block letters
STOP ALL ALCOHOL
, and told her to report back in three weeks.

“And I wouldn’t worry too much about the protruding eye. A lot of people have one eye that sticks out more than the other, but he’s got to check it out. However, if you can’t get your pressure down, we’ll have to do something.”

Back home, Christina took down the
New Yorker
cartoon that had enjoyed pride of place on their kitchen bulletin board long enough to have gone brown and curly at the edges. A couple sitting side by side on the sofa, drinks in hand. The man’s free arm encircles the woman, who has kicked off her shoes and leans into his embrace. “I love these quiet evenings at home battling alcoholism,” the woman is saying.

Christina tacked up Dr. Gray’s block-lettered injunction in the vacant spot. She made herself a cranberry cider with crushed ice and seltzer and a carefully sliced circle of lime. Needing a ritual to signify her intention, she lugged the heavy blue gin bottle from its freezer home and poured its contents down the drain.

“Farewell, Your Majesty. It’s time you completed your Scotland mourning and returned to your duties in London.

“
Arrivederci,
John Paul.”

But she would not throw away the cartoon.

Now to get through the rest of the evening. She cleared out Rudy’s medicines from the kitchen shelf to the left of the sink: the Lasix, the Toprol, the Procardia, the Zestril, the pain killers, the Nitrostat, chronicling in her memory what had led to what in the fifteen-year-long saga of Rudy’s organs betraying one another and breaking down. The costly Procrit, still lying flat in the refrigerator, for when his kidneys, protesting the multiple myeloma, started to fail. She retraced the insidious transition, beginning in his sixties, when he went from being the one who dashed ahead up mountain trails and paused indulgently when she needed to stop and catch her breath until that sad afternoon when they were doing their back-and-forth walk across the flat causeway over the reservoir and he urged her to go on and finish alone: “I’ll wait right here for your return.” Off she went, while he sat on the causeway railing behind, keeping her in his sight. She walked quickly so she could reach the end faster and turn around and have him in her sight to walk back to again.

Dr. Gray had used the expression “blotto,” which left less room to wriggle out of than the euphemisms she had grown up with. The lady who had spent the night under the piano at the country club in a pool of vomit had been tipsy. Dear Judge So-and-So, bless his heart, had been three sheets in the wind again.

The other word lately ascribed to her was more flattering to ponder: Gilbert Mallow’s calling her and Rudy “formidable.”

Christina recalled the occasion last winter when the Mallows met Rudy. The local caterer, whom Rudy and Christina liked, was giving a small dinner party for his favorite customers. By then, Rudy was inking
nyet
all over his At-a-Glance diary, often as late as on the day of the appointment. Wasting time had become anathema to him. The prospect of being trapped in a boring gathering now triggered anxieties hitherto saved for being iced in on their hill or out of reach of 911. There was no bad weather forecast on the day of the party, but that morning Christina took the caterer’s explicit directions and made a dry run to his house so Rudy would not be worrying all day that they might get lost after dark.

Rudy’s desk and watch

As always, they showed up punctually (
“Ponctualité est . . .”
), which meant they were the first to arrive. Rudy made his bows to the host, accepted a glass of champagne, and staked out a firm chair with an upright back. Christina sat next to him. The other guests trickled in, among them the Mallows. Impressive hors d’oeuvres were passed in timely succession, champagne glasses almost too promptly refilled. A woman cornered Eve Mallow, recognizing her from the food co-op, and the two got into a conversation about the unusually large Brussels sprouts that year. Rudy smiled sourly at Christina and rolled his eyes. A few moments later he shot her a malevolent look, as if it were all her fault they were here, and rested his head against the chair back as if preparing to snooze.

“Please, please behave,” Christina murmured, “I beg you.” Gilbert Mallow, the only person sipping water in a champagne glass, was watching them with fascination.

“And their cabbages are also outstanding,” Eve Mallow had to say just then.

Rudy sat bolt upright, and Christina felt herself lose control of his tight leash.

“An outstanding cabbage,” said Rudy, pretending to address Christina alone, though he knew perfectly well that his basso profundo voice could silence a room, “would be a welcome addition to this gathering.”

She had hated him fervently at that moment, so why was she now hooting with laughter until tears ran down her cheeks? The full force of his presence was often too much for her, especially when he was unleashing himself on his surroundings with that careless arrogance. But now the absence of that force she could never quite modify or control had left an excavation in her life that cried out to be filled with his most awful moments.

“It would be better to take a pill,” Dr. Gray had said, “than to get blotto every evening. Better for your sleep patterns.” He had given her a prescription for Ambien. “Start with half a pill and if that doesn’t work, take the other half.”

Christina abstained brilliantly for the three weeks until her next appointment. She had always responded well to a definite assignment. She took one or two of the Ambiens, then found herself falling asleep without them. When she went back to Dr. Gray, her blood pressure was normal and the CT scan results had come back negative and she had even lost four pounds.

But Dr. Gray looked sad and she told him so.

“I’m sad for you,” he said. “I know some of what you must be feeling. My mother died ten years ago and I still miss her terribly. My father has never gotten over losing her. Tell me something: do you believe in an afterlife, that Rudy is up in heaven?”

“I did once, but I don’t now,” Christina admitted. “How about you?”

“I believe my mother’s molecules are still part of the earth, and I know she lives on in me; she’s with me every time I think of her,” said Dr. Gray.

“I think of Rudy a lot,” Christina said. “It sounds awful, but I pay more consistent attention to him now than I did when I had him right in front of me. I can hear exactly what he would say about so many things, the exact words and phrases and intonations. I must have absorbed a great deal of him in our years together.”

Dr. Gray was watching her closely. “Look, Christina. Do you think you’re going to make it through this?”

Christina considered a moment and replied honestly, “Yes, I think I am.”

“We may never know what that blurred-vision episode was,” Dr. Gray told her. “It could have been extreme hypertension. Or you may have passed a clot. Do you miss the alcohol?”

“Not desperately. I love the clarity, and I sleep better. But I’ll probably have a glass of wine with friends over the holidays.”

“Enjoy a glass with friends, but if I were you, I’d be very careful when you’re at home alone” was Dr. Gray’s parting advice.