Nude Men (29 page)

“Do you mean she was murdered?” I ask, because of movies. “No. She died of her brain tumor, as was expected,” says the doctor in my dream.

“So what was the car accident? Was that her brain tumor?” asks Henrietta sarcastically.

“Exactly,” says the doctor. “It was a new symptom: a cancer.”

“Cancer of what?”

“Cancer of her space.”

“What?”

“Cancer of the space, or place, her body fills in the universe. It is also called cancer of her air, but generally it is called cancer of
one’s
space, place, or air, not
her
or
his
space, place, or air. In this case, however, since we are talking about a very specific person whom we knew, we may say
her.”

“Was it some sort of psychological problem, this ‘cancer’?” one of us asks.

“Far from it. Cancer of one’s place means that the place one’s body occupies in the universe has become cancerous.”

“We really don’t understand what you’re talking about,” we say.

“When your place is cancerous, it means it’s always at the wrong time. Accidents happen to you.”

“Do you mean like being at the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“No. Your place cannot be wrong, but when it is sick or cancerous it becomes at the wrong time, just as a watch can become at the wrong time, except that with your place it’s far worse than merely the
wrong
time; it’s the
bad
time, the
tragic
time; accidents keep occurring in your place. With Sara, the first accident was the last.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I knew it the first day you brought her to me, when I saw the nature of her brain tumor. You may want to sue me; you may hate me for having known and not told you about this symptom: for having known and not told you that it was the last symptom she was going to have and the one that would kill her. I decided to withhold this information from you for your own good.”

“Then why are you telling us now, for God’s sake? Why not just let us believe she died of a real, down-to-earth accident?”

“I’m not sure why. I suppose it’s because I love watching people’s surprise. Anyway, honesty is the best policy. Is that a famous quote, or did I just invent it? Even if it comes late. Better late than never. Better safe than sorry.”

“So you invented all those lies about her lying down on the sidewalk and closing her eyes?”

“Well, I
did
tell you she would die suddenly, didn’t I? And she
was
lying in the street, though I suppose her eyes weren’t closed if she was hit by a car. Anyway, I wasn’t so far off.” Anger is rising very quickly, to a dangerous, boiling level within me. “I would have prevented the accident!” I cry.

“No,” says the doctor. “Only delayed it, which is why I didn’t tell you about it. The knowledge would have made your lives hell.”

“You murdered her by not telling us!” we scream, with all the rage of our lives.

“You would have kept Sara locked in a little white disinfected room with no furniture, only a floor made of mattress and walls made of mattress. And even then the fatal accident would have occurred eventually.”

Brimming with disdain, I spit: “As far as I can remember, there are only four types of deaths in life: disease, accident, murder, and suicide. So far, the only one Sara did
not
die of is the last, but I’m sure that with your help we can squeeze it in somewhere. After all, you’ve already been so kind as to provide us with murder.”

Lady Henrietta and I are able to contain ourselves no longer. We attack the doctor, throwing ourselves at him. We beat him and make him bleed. I knock on his head like a woodpecker. Henrietta punches his chest. “Death and dying,” I feel, for some reason, I should say. And then I wake up.

What an asshole of a doctor. I am still full of anger, even though I am relieved that it was just a dream. Sara did, truly, die of an accident, not a “cancer of her place” or “space” or “air.” Her accident was not preventable, not foreseeable, not to be expected, and some stupid little doctor in his stupid little office did not know it would happen.

I
continue taking the parrot’s excrement to that street and dropping it there.

I
visit my friend Tommy. I tell him about the accident, I cry, and he tries to be supportive.

He says, “Manhattan is such an unhealthy and repulsive city, not a place for people to live, especially children. There are barely any trees, no animals except pet dogs and pigeons that shit you on the head. Though actually that’s not quite true. A few days ago, I was at my girlfriend’s apartment, doing my male courtship dance, which she always demands of me before we have sex. The music was blasting, and I was stark naked, when lo and behold, I see a blue bird outside the window. So maybe there is hope left for this mean, repulsive city.”

“Was it a parrot?”

“A parrot?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t close enough for me to tell.”

“I could have you arrested for indecent exposure.”

He looks at me a moment, to see if I’m laughing, to see if I’m joking.

Finally, he says, “Hey, lighten up.”

“No. It was you that woman was looking at when she ran over Sara. Why the fuck did you have to stand in the window naked? Don’t you know that’s illegal, and for good reason?”

“What are you talking about? How would you know what she was looking at?”

“Because she
told
me. What address were you at?” I ask, to make sure he was the naked man the woman had seen.

He tells me, and I nod.

He sits down, perfectly white and silent. After a while, he softly says, “Pardon the banality at a time like this, but... it’s a small world.”

“A small circus.”

P
eople start to clap at her life.

chapter
ten

S
ara’s funeral is attended by dozens of male models.

L
ady Henrietta has stopped painting.

“I want to leave,” she tells me. “Take me somewhere, Jeremy.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere. Just away.”

“The only place I can think of is my mother’s house. Unless you want to spend money on a real trip.”

“I don’t care at all. I can’t think. Your mother went to Disney World with Sara. I would like to meet her. I want to be with people who have been with Sara when I was not there.”

“How long do you want to stay?”

“Don’t ask me petty questions at a time like this. I couldn’t care less. I have no idea. Maybe one hour, maybe one month, maybe forever, okay? You decide.”

L
aura understands perfectly and approves of my going to the country with Lady Henrietta to comfort her.

H
enrietta and I go to my mother’s house. We both sleep in my old room, which has twin beds. The only other bedroom in the house, my mother’s, has one big bed, so we have no choice. Henrietta stays in our room most of the time, on her bed, her legs under the blanket, like someone sick. In darkness. She cries incessantly. She gets cold sores under her nose and on her upper lip, from blowing her nose all the time. She lies under a mountain of Kleenex. She vomits once, from crying so much. Her hair is stuck to her face, so I brush it for her and tie it in a ponytail. I wipe her face with cold water. I feed her. She eats absent-mindedly. After crying a lot, she gets very cold, and I find her sitting in bed, wearing her winter coat.

Henrietta keeps Sara’s braids on her night table, in the long box. Even the little note is still there, on which Sara wrote to me: “Here is a lock, a token of my affection.” Henrietta often pets the braids.

My mother is angelic, as I suspected she’d be. She is discreet, sensitive, always there behind the door if she is needed. She wears black. She always whispers. Her face gets bloated, like Henrietta’s, maybe out of sympathy. Perhaps she cries secretly in her room. When she’s not behind the door, she sits on the couch in the living room and does nothing. Sometimes she walks around and looks out the window.

It’s summer outside. The weather is gorgeous. Not too hot. Very sunny and bright and colorful. The birds chirp. So do the insects. It feels very inappropriate,- this chirping. Henrietta keeps the blinds down, but there’s a high window in our room, which has no blind. Through it she can see the sky, blue like someone’s eyes, and the trees rustling in the breeze.

Henrietta’s mourning is a normal mourning. It’s very intense, probably as intense as mourning gets, short of suicide, but it is normal—for Henrietta, that is, which means there are still a few pitiful eccentricities here and there, but nothing I couldn’t have thought of myself. Actually, that’s wrong. I could not have predicted that she would take a liking to spilling water around the house and that she would feel the need to unplug the electrical appliances in whatever room she’s in. I cannot figure out the secret meaning of those things.

I take a walk in the woods, the parrot on my shoulder. I give in to some fantasy of life after death. I will utter Sara’s name aloud to see if I’ll get some sort of response from her. No one is listening, so why not try. It can’t hurt.

“Sara,” I say, in a normal voice.

The parrot cocks his head and looks me in the eyes. “Sara?” he says.

I walk some more in silence, and then I say again, “Sara.”

I get no response from Sara, unless she is communicating to me through the parrot, who repeats, “Sara?”

“Sara,” I say.

“Sara,” he repeats, not looking at me anymore but staring ahead in a melancholic way, like a little person. He understands that we’re looking for her.

“Sara,” I say.

“Sara,” he says, his voice becoming deep and mournful.

I look at the trees. I wait for the slightest response to our calling, but there is no variation in the activities of nature. The breeze does not become stronger after we utter Sara’s name, not a single branch cracks, no squirrel darts by at that moment, the sky does not become overcast, nor does the sun get brighter.

I start thinking about the afternoon of Sara’s death, its bizarre sequence of events. Destiny. I have always craved to control destiny, either through down-to-earth effort or through supernatural means. But she is frighteningly whimsical, Destiny, inexorably so. She will not be controlled by little white elephants. She’ll fight them to the death. She does not like to feel pressured, does not like commitment. Only accepts freedom. She’s impatient, bored, restless, fidgety, like a little kid who can’t sit still at table, with one cheek of her backside off her chair, her legs trembling, waiting, positioned to race away the moment her parents tell her she’s dismissed. Except that Destiny does not wait to be dismissed. She races away anytime, all the time. She’s capricious, flirtatious, unfaithful, selfish, a clumsy artist, not a true friend but a charming one nevertheless. She’s always mischievous, incessantly saying “Oops,” then melting into giggles. Always innocent in her evd deeds, never to blame, crowned by a complete and utter lack of sensitivity.

“Sara,” I say.

“Sara.” The parrot is crying, except that there are no tears.

A plane passes overhead.

* * *

H
enrietta is losing weight every day. Her face is ravaged. Her eyes are sunken, very red and irritated from the constant crying, and surrounded by dark circles. There are red blotches on her face, and her upper lip is all puffed up, thicker than I’ve ever seen it. It looks like a boxer’s beat-up lip. All this isn’t doing much good for my spirits, and I feel she is pulling me down with her.

I try to think of things to make her feel better. I decide to buy her marzipan. I find some in a little bakery in town. I also stop at the supermarket to buy her bottled water, because it’s all she drinks. I walk through the aisles. Everything reminds me of Sara, and I realize how deeply her personality has been incorporated into every aspect of my life. My clothes remind me of her, because she used to draw men’s clothes. I used to look at pretty women on the street or in the supermarket for the sake of looking at pretty women. Now when I see a pretty woman (especially one with big breasts) I cannot help but think: There goes one of Sara’s Barbie dolls. Or is she a Jane doll?

The eggs in the dairy section remind me of Sara’s Humpty Dumpties. My facial features float on their surfaces.

My thoughts are suddenly interrupted by the sight of a woman who looks extremely familiar. I slow my gait, trying to remember who she is. I get the feeling she is someone I don’t like, though I can’t remember why. And then I remember. She is one of my mother’s agents. She is the lemon woman, the one who asked me to hand her down the tall kitchen garbage bags.