The Gargoyle (28 page)

“If you don’t accept her invitation, you’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever met,” Gregor said. “In addition to being a lousy liar.”

When you lie in a hospital bed long enough, you start a mental catalogue of all human contact. I touched Gregor on the back of his hand, the first time we’d ever touched, and said, “Thank you for bringing Sayuri’s present.”

A TOUCHING MOMENT . . .

I buzzed the nurse to ask for more morphine.

. . . BETWEEN LOSERS.

On Christmas morning, Marianne Engel appeared in my room with a sack of presents and a silver briefcase that she immediately slid under my bed. We passed a few hours, speaking as we often did about everything/nothing, while she fed me mandarin oranges and marzipan. As usual, she made her regular trips outside to smoke cigarettes, but I noticed that sometimes when she came back, she didn’t have the telltale smell of fresh smoke upon her. When I asked her if she had something else going on, she shook her head no. Her smile, however, betrayed her.

In the early afternoon, Sayuri and Gregor arrived, followed by Connie, who’d just finished her rounds. Dr. Edwards never worked on Christmas Day, and Maddy and Beth had both booked the day off to spend with their families. With no one left to arrive, Marianne Engel dragged her sack out of the corner and we began to exchange gifts.

The nurses had pitched in to buy me some books on subjects that had recently taken my interest, such as the inner workings of medieval German monasteries and the writings of Heinrich Seuse and Meister Eckhart.

“You aren’t easy to buy for, that’s for sure. I had to go to three different bookshops,” Connie said. As soon as she realized this might sound like a complaint, she hastily added, “Not that I minded, of course!”

Gregor gave me a stationery set, as I’d confided to him that I’d been working on some writing in recent weeks, and Sayuri gave me some lavender ice cream that I happily shared with everyone. Marianne Engel seemed to enjoy it the most, and was tickled by the fact that it turned her tongue purple.

To the nurses I gave compact discs by their favorite artists. While this was not particularly personal, I didn’t know much about their nonhospital lives. To Sayuri, I gave the gift that I’d asked Gregor to pick up on my behalf: two tickets for an upcoming Akira Kurosawa film festival.

“I got the idea when Dr. Hnatiuk was telling me about it. He loves Kurosawa, you know.”

Marianne Engel looked at me, raising an accusatory eyebrow, because subtle I’m not.

Next came my gift to Gregor, as picked up by Sayuri: coupons for a dinner for two at a Russian restaurant with the highly unoriginal name of Rasputin’s. I asked Sayuri whether she’d ever eaten authentic Russian food, and she answered that she had not. It was now I who raised an eyebrow in the direction of Gregor. When they thanked me for their gifts, I grumbled that “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any fucking presents.” No one seemed to understand what I was talking about, which only proves that more people should read Louisa May Alcott.

Next, Marianne Engel gave her gifts. The nurses got day passes to a spa, which Connie tucked away with the CDs. Sayuri received an intricate blown-glass Buddhist temple, while Gregor received a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. They were impressed with the handmade quality of the items, and Marianne Engel boasted that the gifts were the work of two of her friends.

As for Marianne Engel and I, we had already decided to exchange our gifts later, in private. And maybe I was the only one who’d noticed, but apparently Sayuri and Gregor had also come to the same understanding.

After a while, Gregor said, “Are we ready to move along?” Everyone looked at Marianne Engel, who nodded. Christmas truly was a time for miracles, if the medical staff was looking to the schizophrenic to provide guidance. Sayuri put me into a wheelchair and Gregor pushed me down the hall, and when I asked where we were going, no one would answer directly. Soon I figured out that we were heading to the cafeteria. Perhaps there was some sort of Christmas function, a hired Santa or volunteer carolers, although the fact that I’d heard nothing about it struck me as odd. After so many months in the hospital, very little escaped my attention.

When the doors of the cafeteria slid open, I was battered by the smell of every food in the world. Against the far wall, a small task force of caterers was tending to a series of heavily laden tables. Thirty or forty people were milling around the room, under red crepe streamers that hung from the roof, and a few of them gestured in our direction. At first, I thought they were all pointing at my appearance but when the caterers waved to Marianne Engel, I realized that she was the center of attention, not I. The patients started ambling towards us: an old man with a cough, a curly-haired woman with bandages on her arms, a handsome boy with a limp. Bringing up the rear was a preteen girl with no hair, a fistful of balloons, and a cheering section of relatives.

Everyone thanked Marianne Engel for what she’d done; at this point, I still didn’t know what that was. After Gregor pushed me to the catering tables and helped me out of the wheelchair, he explained that she had arranged and funded the entire party. This, in accordance with her general lack of restraint, was no small undertaking. Even having seen the outsized dinners that she brought to my room, I could scarcely comprehend what was available.

Turkey, ham, roast goose, chicken, meat dumplings, curried goat, boar, venison, meatloaf, carp (carp? who eats carp?), cod, haddock, lutefish, shellfish, cold cuts, a dozen types of sausage, roasted eggs, oxtail soup, meat broths, onion soup, more cheeses than you could shake a cow’s udder at, brown beans, gungo peas, onions, pickles, rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweeter potatoes, sweetest potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, squash, pumpkin, basmati, white rice, brown rice, wild rice, tame rice, antipasto, stuffing, assorted breads, bagels, buns, cheese scones, green salad, Caesar salad, bean salad, pasta salad, jellied salad, whipped-cream-and-apple salad, spaghetti, fettuccini, macaroni, rigatoni, cannelloni, tortellini, guglielmo marconi (just checking to see if you’re still reading), bananas, apples, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, mixed nuts, mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas bread, coconut shortbread, pecan pie, chocolates, chocolate logs, chocolate frogs, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, fudge, sugar, spice, everything nice, epiphany cake, fruitcake, gingerbread men, Torte Vigilia di Natale, snips, snails, puppydog tails, cranberry punch, eggnog, milk, grape juice, apple juice, orange juice, soft drinks, coffee, tea, you say to-may-to juice, I say to-mah-to juice, and bottled water.

Everyone in the hospital must have filled up their plates once, twice, thrice, and Marianne Engel charmed each guest with her grace and eccentricity. It didn’t hurt that she had slipped into an elf costume and looked astoundingly cute. Music played and people talked merrily to each other, everyone partaking in the spirit of the event. Patients who otherwise would never have met were speaking at length, probably comparing illnesses. Coughs were drowned out by laughs, and there were squeals of delight from the children, who each received a gift from under the plastic Christmas tree. Apparently Marianne Engel couldn’t obtain permission for a genuine pine, but an artificial one was more than good enough. If flowers might kill a man, just imagine what a conifer could do.

For this one afternoon, I was a hospital celebrity, as the word spread that it was my friend who’d done all this. An old man came to talk with me with such a large grin on his face that it was a shock when he mentioned that his wife of sixty years had recently died. When I told him I was sorry to hear it, he shook his head and clasped his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I’ll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don’t ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.”

During the party, a feeling of strange relief had come over me. From our first meeting, Marianne Engel had shown such irrational affection towards me that I expected it to disappear as abruptly as it had started. Relationships fall apart, that’s their nature. We’ve all seen it a thousand times, even between couples who we were certain were “going to make it.”

I once knew a woman who liked to imagine Love in the guise of a sturdy dog, one that would always chase down the stick after it was thrown and return with his ears flopping around happily. Completely loyal, completely unconditional. And I laughed at her, because even I knew that love is not like that. Love is a delicate thing that needs to be cosseted and protected. Love is not robust and love is not unyielding. Love can crumble under a few harsh words, or be tossed away with a handful of careless actions. Love isn’t a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur.

Yes, that’s
exactly
what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear. For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat. Imagine the cutest animal that you can, after it has been squeezed so hard that all its stuffing has been pushed up into an oversized head and its eyes are now popping out in overflow. The lemur looks so vulnerable that one cannot help but worry that a predator might swoop in at any instant to snatch it away.

Marianne Engel’s love for me seemed built on so flimsy a premise that I assumed it would come apart the moment we stepped through the hospital doors. How could a love based on a fictional past survive into an actual future? It was impossible. That kind of love was a thing to be snatched up and crushed in the jaws of real life.

That was my fear, but this Christmas Day had shown me that Marianne Engel’s love was not feeble. It was strapping, it was muscular, it was massive. I thought that it could fill only my room in the burn ward, but it filled the entire hospital. More important, her love was not reserved only for me; it was shared generously with strangers—people she didn’t think were friends from the fourteenth century.

All my life I had heard foolish stories about love: that the more you give away, the more you have. This had always struck me as nothing more than a violation of basic mathematical principles. But watching Marianne Engel share her love so widely awakened in me the weirdest of romantic feelings: the opposite of jealousy.

It comforted me that love was her soul’s natural condition and not an aberration built on fantasies. Her love was not a lemur, an animal so named because Portuguese explorers in Madagascar noted large shining eyes peering out of the forest when they sat around their campfires. Convinced that these eyes belonged to the spirits of their departed companions, they christened the animals with the Latin word meaning “spirits of the dead.”

When the last turkey leg had been eaten, Marianne Engel thanked each caterer and passed out envelopes that contained “just a little something extra for working on the holidays.” While she was wheeling me back to my room, she claimed that this was the best Christmas she’d ever had. I pointed out that that was quite a claim, given that she’d had seven hundred.

After she helped me into bed, Marianne Engel sat with a satisfied thud. I observed that the party must have cost her a fortune; she dismissed this with a wave of her hand and pulled the silver briefcase from under my bed. “Open it.”

The briefcase was fat with sleeves of bills, fifties and hundreds. In my days of pornography and drugs, I’d seen the occasional satchel of cash, but nothing like this. I spun the numbers around my skull, trying to come up with a rough estimate. It was difficult to do the math—I was still too stunned by the
fact
of the money—so Marianne Engel saved me the trouble. “Two hundred thousand.”

Two hundred thousand dollars. Which she’d left sitting under the bed all day. Which anyone could have walked away with. I called her stupid; she laughed and replied that against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain. And really, she asked, who would look under a hospital bed on Christmas Day for a briefcase of money?