Everyman (13 page)

"Well, don't forget to include how you'd walk into my office and say, 'Okay, here's your panic deadline—first thing tomorrow I need that storyboard in my hand.'"

"It worked, didn't it?"

"You were diligent, Ez. I asked you one time why that fucking detergent
was
so gentle to a lady's delicate hands. You gave me twenty pages on aloes. I got the art director's award for that campaign, and it was because of those pages. It should have been yours. When you get better we'll have lunch and I'll bring you the statue."

"That's a deal," Ez said.

"And how's the pain? Is there pain?"

"Yes, there is, I have it. But I've learned how to handle it. I've got special medicines and I've got five doctors. Five. An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist to help me overcome the nausea."

"The nausea from what, from therapy?"

"Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally."

"Is that the worst of it?"

"Sometimes my prostate feels like I'm trying to excrete it."

"Can't they take it out?"

"It wouldn't do any good. It's too late for that. And it's a big operation. My weight is down. My blood is down. It would make me so weak and I'd have to give up the treatment, too. It's a big lie that it moves slowly," Ezra said. "It moves like lightning. I didn't have anything in my prostate in the middle of June, but by the middle of August it had spread too far to cut it out. It really moves. So look to your prostate, my boy."

"I'm sorry to hear all this. But I'm glad to hear that you sound as you do. You're yourself, only more so."

"All I want is to write this memoir," Ez said. "I've talked about it long enough, now I have to write it. All that happened to me in that business. If I can write this memoir, I will have told people who I am. If I can write that, I'll die with a grin on my face. How about you, are you working happily? Are you painting? You always said you would. Are you?"

"Yes, I do it. I do it every day. It's fine," he lied.

"Well, I could never write this book, you know. Once I retired I immediately had blocks. But as soon as I got cancer most of my blocks fell away. I can do whatever I want now."

"That's a brutal therapy for writer's block."

"Yeah," Ez said, "I think it is. I don't advise it. You know, I may make it. Then we'll have that lunch and you'll give me the statue. If I make it, the doctors say I can have a normal life."

If he already had a hospice nurse, it seemed unlikely that the doctors would have said such a thing. Though maybe they had to lift his spirits, or maybe he'd imagined they had, or maybe it was just arrogance speaking, that wonderful, ineradicable arrogance of his. "Well, I'm rooting for you, Ez," he said. "If you should want to speak to me, here's my number." He gave it to him.

"Good," Ezra said.

"I'm here all the time. If you feel in the mood, do it, call me. Anytime. Will you?"

"Great. I will."

"All right. Very good. Bye."

"Bye. Bye for now," Ezra said. "Polish up the statue."

For hours after the three consecutive calls—and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink—what he wanted to do was not only to phone and speak to his daughter, whom he found in the hospital with Phoebe, but to revive his own esprit by phoning and talking to his mother and father. Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

When he next went to the hospital for the annual checkup on his carotids, the sonogram revealed that the second carotid was now seriously obstructed and required surgery. This would make the seventh year in a row that he would have been hospitalized. The news gave him a jolt—particularly as he'd heard by phone that morning of Ezra Pollock's death—but at least he would have the same vascular surgeon and the operation in the same hospital, and this time he would know enough not to put up with a local anesthetic and instead to ask to be unconscious throughout. He tried so hard to convince himself from the experience of the first carotid surgery that there was nothing to worry about, he did not bother to tell Nancy about the pending operation, especially while she still had her mother to tend to. He did, however, make a determined effort to locate Maureen Mrazek, though within only hours he had exhausted any clues he might have had to her whereabouts.

That left Howie, whom by then he hadn't phoned in some time. It was as though once their parents were long dead all sorts of impulses previously proscribed or just nonexistent had been loosed in him, and his giving vent to them, in a sick man's rage—in the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness's deadliest trap, the contortion of one's character—had destroyed the last link to the dearest people he'd known. His first love affair had been with his brother. The one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for this very good man. He'd made a mess of all his marriages, but throughout their adult lives he and his brother had been truly constant. Howie never had to be asked for anything. And now he'd lost him, and in the same way he'd lost Phoebe—by doing it to himself. As if there weren't already fewer and fewer people present who meant anything to him, he had completed the decomposition of the original family. But decomposing families was his specialty. Hadn't he robbed three children of a coherent childhood and the continuous loving protection of a father such as he himself had cherished, who had belonged exclusively to him and Howie, a father they and no one else had owned?

At the realization of all he'd wiped out, on his own and for seemingly no good reason, and what was still worse, against his every intention,
against his will
—of his harshness toward a brother who had never once been harsh to him, who'd never failed to soothe him and come to his aid, of the effect his leaving their households had had on his children—at the humiliating realization that not only physically had he now diminished into someone he did not want to be, he began striking his chest with his fist, striking in cadence with his self-admonition, and missing by mere inches his defibrillator. At that moment, he knew far better than Randy or Lonny ever could where he was insufficient. This ordinarily even-tempered man struck furiously at his heart like some fanatic at prayer, and, assailed by remorse not just for this mistake but for all his mistakes, all the ineradicable, stupid, inescapable mistakes—swept away by the misery of his limitations yet acting as if life's every incomprehensible contingency were of his making—he said aloud, "Without even Howie! To wind up like this, without even him!"

At Howie's ranch in Santa Barbara there was a comfortable guest cottage nearly as large as his condo. Years back he, Phoebe, and Nancy had stayed there for two weeks one summer while Howie and his family were vacationing in Europe. The pool was just outside the door, and Howie's horses were off in the hills, and the staff had made their meals and looked after them. Last he knew, one of Howie's kids—Steve, the oceanographer—was temporarily living there with a girlfriend. Did he dare to ask? Could he come right out and tell his brother that he'd like to stay at the guest house for a couple of months until he could figure out where and how to live next? If he could fly out to California after the surgery and enjoy his brother's company while beginning to recover...

He picked up the phone and dialed Howie. He got an answering machine and left his name and number. About an hour later he was called by Howie's youngest son, Rob. "My folks," Rob said, "are in Tibet." "Tibet? What are they doing in Tibet?" He believed they were in Santa Barbara and Howie just didn't want to take his call. "Dad went on business to Hong Kong, I believe to a board meeting, and my mother went with him. Then they went off to see Tibet." "Are Westerners allowed in Tibet?" he asked his nephew. "Oh, sure," Rob said. "They'll be gone another three weeks. Is there a message? I can e-mail them. That's what I've been doing when people call." "No, no need," he said. "How are all your brothers, Rob?" "Everybody's doing okay. How about you?" "I'm coming along," he said, and hung up.

Well , he was thrice divorced, a one-time serial husband distinguished no less by his devotion than by his misdeeds and mistakes, and he would have to continue to manage alone. From here on out he would have to manage everything alone. Even in his twenties, when he'd thought of himself as square, and on into his fifties, he'd had all the attention from women he could have wanted; from the time he'd entered art school it never stopped. It seemed as though he were destined for nothing else. But then something unforeseen happened, unforeseen and unpredictable: he had lived close to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active way of life was gone. He neither possessed the productive man's male allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he'd left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was—the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know.

The man who swam the bay with Nancy's mother had arrived at where he'd never dreamed of being. It was time to worry about oblivion. It was the remote future.

One Saturday morning less than a week before the scheduled surgery—after a night of horrible dreaming when he'd awakened struggling to breathe at three
A.M
. and had to turn on all the lights in the apartment to calm his fears and was only able to fall back to sleep with the lights still burning—he decided it would do him good to go to New York to see Nancy and the twins and to visit Phoebe again, who was now at home with a nurse. Normally his deliberate independence constituted his bedrock strength; it was why he could take up a new life in a new place unconcerned over leaving friends and family behind. But ever since he'd abandoned any hope of living with Nancy or staying with Howie, he felt himself turning into a childlike creature who was weakening by the day. Was it the imminence of the seventh annual hospitalization that was crushing his confidence? Was it the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else? Or was it the realization that with each hospital stay, going back to childhood and proceeding on up to his imminent surgery, the number of presences at his bedside diminished and the army he'd begun with had dwindled to none? Or was it simply the foreboding of helplessness to come?

What he had dreamed was that he was lying naked beside Millicent Kramer, from his art class. He was holding her cold dead body in bed the way he'd held Phoebe the time the migraine had got so bad that the doctor came to give her a morphine shot, which suppressed the pain but produced terrifying hallucinations. When he'd awakened in the night and turned on all the lights, he drank some water and threw open a window and paced the apartment to restore his stability, but despite himself he was thinking about only one thing: how it had been for her to kill herself. Did she do it in a rush, gobbling down the pills before she changed her mind? And after she'd finally taken them, did she scream that she didn't want to die, that she just couldn't face any more crippling pain, that all she wanted was for the pain to stop—scream and cry that all she wanted was for Gerald to be there to help her and to tell her to hang on and to assure her that she could bear it and that they were in it together? Did she die in tears, mumbling his name? Or did she do it all calmly, convinced at long last that she was not making a mistake? Did she take her time, contemplatively holding the pill bottle in her two hands before emptying the contents into her palm and slowly swallowing them with her last glass of water, with the last taste of water ever? Was she resigned and thoughtful, he wondered, courageous about everything she was leaving behind, perhaps smiling while she wept and remembered all the delights, all that had ever excited her and pleased her, her mind filled with hundreds of ordinary moments that meant little at the time but now seemed to have been especially intended to flood her days with commonplace bliss? Or had she lost interest in what she was leaving behind? Did she show no fear, thinking only, At last the pain is over, the pain is finally gone, and now I have merely to fall asleep to depart this amazing thing?

But how does one voluntarily choose to leave our fullness for that endless nothing? How would he do it? Could he lie there calmly saying goodbye? Had he Millicent Kramer's strength to eradicate everything? She was his age. Why not? In a bind like hers, what's a few years more or less? Who would dare to challenge her with leaving life precipitously? I must, I must, he thought, my six stents tell me I must one day soon fearlessly say goodbye. But leaving Nancy—I can't do it! The things that could happen to her on the way to school! His daughter left behind with no more of him for protection than their biological bond! And he bereft for eternity of her morning phone calls! He saw himself racing in every direction at once through downtown Elizabeth's main intersection—the unsuccessful father, the envious brother, the duplicitous husband, the helpless son—and only blocks from his family's jewelry store crying out for the cast of kin on whom he could not gain no matter how hard he pursued them. "Momma, Poppa, Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, Randy, Lonny—if only I'd known how to do it! Can't you hear me? I'm leaving! It's over and I'm leaving you all behind!" And those vanishing as fast from him as he from them turned just their heads to cry out in turn, and all too meaningfully, "Too late!"