Everyman (8 page)

"You can continue to lie here if you like," he said to Millicent Kramer after she had drunk some of the water.

"I can't be lying down all the time!" she cried. "I just cannot do it anymore! I was so agile, I was so active—if you were Gerald's wife, you had to be. We went everywhere. I felt so free. We went to China, we went all over Africa. Now I can't even take the bus to New York unless I'm laced to the gills with painkillers. And I'm not good with the painkillers—they make me completely crazy. And by the time I get there I'm in pain anyway. Oh, I'm sorry about this. I'm terribly sorry. Everybody here has their ordeal. There's nothing special about my story and I'm sorry to burden you with it. You probably have a story of your own."

"Would a heating pad help?" he asked.

"You know what would help?" she said. "The sound of that voice that's disappeared. The sound of the exceptional man I loved. I think I could take all this if he were here. But I can't without him. I never saw him weaken once in his life—then came the cancer and it crushed him. I'm not Gerald. He would just marshal all his forces and do it—marshal all his everything and do whatever it was that had to be done. But I can't. I can't take the pain anymore. It overrides everything. I think sometimes that I can't go on another hour. I tell myself to ignore it. I tell myself it doesn't matter. I tell myself, 'Don't engage it. It's a specter. It's an annoyance, it's nothing more than that. Don't accord it power. Don't cooperate with it. Don't take the bait. Don't respond. Muscle through. Barrel through. Either you're in charge or it's in charge—the choice is yours!' I repeat this to myself a million times a day, as though I'm Gerald speaking, and then suddenly it's so awful I have to lie down on the floor in the middle of the supermarket and all the words are meaningless. Oh, I'm sorry, truly. I abhor tears."

"We all do," he told her, "but we cry anyway."

"This class has meant so much to me," she said. "I spend the whole week waiting for it. I'm like a schoolkid about this class," she confessed, and he found her looking at him with a childish trust, as though she were indeed a little one being put to sleep—and he, like Gerald, could right anything.

"Do you have any of your medication with you?" he asked.

"I already took one this morning."

"Take another," he told her.

"I have to be so careful with those pills."

"I understand. But do yourself a favor and take another now. One more can't do much harm, and it'll get you over the hump. It'll get you back to the easel."

"It takes an hour for it to work. The class will be over."

"You're welcome to stay and keep painting after the others go. Where is the medication?"

"In my purse. In the studio. By my easel. The old brown bag with the worn shoulder strap."

He brought it to her, and with what was left of the water in the glass, she took the pill, an opiate that killed pain for three or four hours, a large, white lozenge-shaped pill that caused her to relax with the anticipation of relief the instant she swallowed it. For the first time since she'd begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an aging spine took charge of her life.

"Lie here until it starts to work," he said. "Then come join the class."

"I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. "It's so shameful."

"There's nothing shameful about it."

"There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted..."

"In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."

"You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread—it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful."

She's embarrassed by what she's become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn't? They were all embarrassed by what they'd become. Wasn't he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility. By the errors that had contorted him and the blows—both those self-inflicted and those from without—that deformed him. What lent a horrible grandeur to the process of reduction suffered by Millicent Kramer—and miniaturized by comparison the bleakness of his own—was, of course, the intractable pain. Even those pictures of the grandchildren, he thought, those photographs that grandparents have all over the house, she probably doesn't even look at anymore. Nothing anymore but the pain.

"Shhh," he said, "shhh, quiet down," and he returned to the bed to momentarily take her hand again before heading back to the class. "You wait for the painkiller to work and come back in when you're ready to paint."

Ten days later she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

At the end of the twelve-week session virtually everyone wanted to sign up for a second one, but he announced that a change of plans would make it impossible for him to resume giving the courses until the following fall.

***

When he'd fled New York, he'd chosen the shore as his new home because he'd always loved swimming in the surf and battling the waves, and because of the happy childhood associations he had with this stretch of Jersey beach, and because, even if Nancy wouldn't join him, he'd be just over an hour away from her, and because living in a relaxing, comfortable environment was bound to be beneficial to his health. There was no woman in his life other than his daughter. She never failed to call before leaving for work each morning, but otherwise his phone seldom rang. The affection of the sons of his first marriage he no longer pursued; he had never done the right thing by their mother or by them, and to resist the repetitiveness of these accusations and his sons' version of family history would require a measure of combativeness that had vanished from his arsenal. The combativeness had been replaced by a huge sadness. If he yielded in the solitude of his long evenings to the temptation to call one or the other of them, he always felt saddened afterward, saddened and beaten.

Randy and Lonny were the source of his deepest guilt, but he could not continue to explain his behavior to them. He had tried often enough when they were young men—but then they were too young and angry to understand, now they were too old and angry to understand. And what was there to understand? It was inexplicable to him—the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation. He had done what he did the way that he did it as they did what they did the way they did it. Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect? He was one of the millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family. But did he beat their mother? Did he beat them? Did he fail to support their mother or fail to support them? Did any one of them ever have to beg money from him? Was he ever once severe? Had he not made every overture toward them that he could? What could have been avoided? What could he have done differently that would have made him more acceptable to them other than what he could not do, which was to remain married and live with their mother? Either they understood that or they didn't—and sadly for him (and for them), they didn't. Nor could they ever understand that he had lost the same family they did. And no doubt there were things he still failed to understand. If so, that was no less sad. No one could say there wasn't enough sadness to go around or enough remorse to prompt the fugue of questions with which he attempted to defend the story of his life.

He told them nothing about his string of hospitalizations for fear that it might inspire too much vindictive satisfaction. He was sure that when he died they would rejoice, and all because of those earliest recollections they'd never outgrown of his leaving his first family to start a second. That he had eventually betrayed his second family for a beauty twenty-six years his junior who, according to Randy and Lonny, anyone other than their father could have spotted as a "nutcase" a mile away—a model, no less, "a brainless model" he'd met when she was hired by his agency for a job that carried the entire crew, including the two of them, to the Caribbean for a few days' work—had only reinforced their view of him as an underhanded, irresponsible, frivolously immature sexual adventurer. As a father, he was an impostor. As a husband, even to the incomparable Phoebe, for whom he jettisoned their mother, he was an impostor. As anything but a cunthound, he was a fake through and through. And as for his becoming an "artist" in his old age, that, to his sons, was the biggest joke of all. Once he took up painting in earnest every day, the derisive nickname coined by Randy for their father was "the happy cobbler."

In response he did not claim either moral rectitude or perfect judgment. His third marriage had been founded on boundless desire for a woman he had no business with but a desire that never lost its power to blind him and lead him, at fifty, to play a young man's game. He had not slept with Phoebe for the previous six years, yet he could not offer this intimate fact of their life as an explanation to his sons for his second divorce. He didn't think that his record as Phoebe's husband for fifteen years, as Nancy's live-in father for thirteen years, as Howie's brother and his parents' son since birth, required him to make such an explanation. He did not think that his record as an advertising man for over twenty years required him to make such an explanation. He did not think that his record as father to
Lonny
and
Randy
required such an explanation!

Yet their description of how he'd conducted himself over a lifetime was not even a caricature but, in his estimation, a portrayal of what he was not, a description with which they persisted in minimizing everything worthwhile that he believed was apparent to most everyone else. Minimized his decency, then magnified his defects, for a reason that surely could not continue to carry such great force at this late date. Into their forties they remained with their father the children that they'd been back when he'd first left their mother, children who by their nature could not understand that there might be more than one explanation to human behavior—children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to sustain a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power. Suffering his wrongdoing was all he could ever do to please them, to pay his bill, to indulge like the best of dads their maddening opposition.

You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits! Would everything be different, he asked himself, if I'd been different and done things differently? Would it all be less lonely than it is now? Of course it would! But this is what I did! I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made. This is what I did to get here, and there's nothing more to be said!

Over the years, luckily, he heard regularly from Howie. In his late fifties Howie, like almost all the partners who reached that age except for the top three or four, had retired from Goldman Sachs; by then he was worth easily fifty million dollars. He was soon sitting on numerous corporate boards, eventually being named chairman of Procter & Gamble, for whom he'd done arbitrage in his early days. In his seventies, still vigorous and eager to be working, he'd become a consultant to a Boston buyout firm specializing in financial institutions and traveled to look for potential acquisitions. Yet despite the continuing responsibilities and the demands on Howie's time, the two brothers exchanged phone calls a couple of times a month, calls that could sometimes go on for as long as half an hour, with one of them laughingly entertaining the other with recollections of their years growing up and of comical moments from their days at school and in the jewelry store.

Now, though, when they spoke, an unwarranted coldness came over him, and to his brother's joviality his response was silence. The reason was ridiculous. He hated Howie because of his robust good health. He hated Howie because he'd never in his life been a patient in a hospital, because disease was unknown to him, because nowhere was his body scarred from the surgical knife, nor were there six metal stents lodged in his arteries along with a cardiac alarm system tucked into the wall of his chest that was called a defibrillator, a word that when he first heard it pronounced by his cardiologist was unknown to him and sounded, innocuously enough, as if it had something to do with the gear system of a bicycle. He hated him because, though they were offspring of the same two parents and looked so very much alike, Howie had inherited the physical impregnability and he the coronary and vascular weaknesses. It was ridiculous to hate him, because there was nothing Howie could do about his good health other than to enjoy it. It was ridiculous to hate Howie for nothing other than having been born himself and not someone else. He'd never envied him for his athletic or academic prowess, for his financial wizardry and his wealth, never envied him even when he thought of his own sons and wives and then of Howie's—four grown boys who continued to love him and the devoted wife of fifty years who clearly was as important to him as he to her. He was proud of the muscular, athletic brother who rarely got less than an A in school, and had admired him since earliest childhood. Himself a youngster with an artistic talent whose single noteworthy physical skill was swimming, he'd loved Howie unabashedly and followed him everywhere. But now he hated him and he envied him and he was poisonously jealous of him and, in his thoughts, all but rose up in rage against him because the force that Howie brought to bear on life had in no way been impeded. Though on the phone he suppressed as best he could everything irrational and indefensible that he felt, as the months passed their calls took up less time and became less frequent, and soon they were hardly speaking at all.

He did not retain for long the spiteful desire for his brother to lose his health—that far he could not go as an envier, since his brother's losing his health would not result in his regaining his own. Nothing could restore his health, his youth, or invigorate his talent. He could, nonetheless, in a frenzied mood, almost reach a point where he could believe that Howie's good health was responsible for his own compromised health, even though he knew better, even though he was not without a civilized person's tolerant understanding of the puzzle of inequality and misfortune. Back when the psychoanalyst had glibly diagnosed the symptoms of severe appendicitis as a case of envy, he was still very much his parents' son and barely acquainted with the feelings that come with believing that the possessions of another might better belong to you. But now he knew; in his old age he had discovered the emotional state that robs the envier of his serenity and, worse, his realism—he hated Howie for that biological endowment that should have been his as well.