The Executor (11 page)

How she missed Vienna, though. The culture, the learning, the
life
. Everywhere you looked, there was music and art. It was all impossibly Romantic. She had once gone to a party at the home of a man who owned a dozen Klimts, one of which he kept in his kitchen, on the door to his icebox. During ball season the parties never stopped, orgies of booze and waltz that ran till five in the morning, when the dancehalls burst open, spilling everyone out, men staggering into lampposts and women running barefoot in their gowns. Those with sufficient strength and foresight would pick themselves up and go for
Katerftühstück,
the morning-after breakfast, consisting of pickled herring and strong black coffee, guaranteed to stop a hangover dead.

All that was gone now. She hadn’t been back since the eighties, finding it too depressing. Her Vienna—the real Vienna—existed only in her memories, and I understood that my job was to provide her a canvas on which to re-create them. I did my best. I listened with enthusiasm; I tried to ask intelligent questions. When she mentioned the impossibility of finding a decent
Sachertorte
in Boston, I went to the Science Center and downloaded several recipes, baking up one a day, every day for two weeks, until at last I managed to produce something she winkingly deemed “an impressive fraud.” From then on I made it fresh every Monday.

Following lunch, we watched the soaps. Even in this she revealed herself as discriminating. Aside from
One Life to Live,
she enjoyed
As the World Turns
and
Guiding Light. General Hospital
she abhorred as “inelegant”;
The Young and the Restless
and
The Bold and the Beautiful
were both “implausible.” When she said that, I couldn’t hold back a laugh. She started laughing, too. “One must never abandon one’s critical faculties,” she said.

If there was nothing on, I ran errands or read some more. At three o’clock she joined me in the library for our official conversation, and before dinner—which she ordered from the market, prepared in tins, and which we ate in the kitchen, never at the formal dining table—I went out for a long walk, my mind digesting everything it had taken in that day.

It was a wonderful way to live, at once relaxing and invigorating. If I had anything at all to complain about, it was the maid, a stout

Romanian with loaf-like breasts and a three-dimensional birthmark on her upper lip. Once a week she pulled up at dawn in a blue Subaru station wagon, its headlights held on with duct tape. Letting herself in through the service porch, she undertook to wake me with her racket, galumphing around the house, humming to herself in a minor key as she dusted and swept, pausing only to shoot me spiteful glances as I stumbled out to brush my teeth. Her dislike for me was understandable (although no more pleasant for that). I added to her workload, and as I later learned, Alma paid her a flat fee, rather than by the hour. Before I showed up, she must have been making a killing. Now she had to contend with extra laundry—extra male laundry—and three extra rooms. She therefore went out of her way to disturb me, following me around the house, treading heavily, breathing heavily, and always
humming.
Everything she sang sounded like a funeral march. The Eastern Bloc must have been a sad place to grow up.

I don’t think she knew my name, referring to me in the third person or, less often, as “sir,” pronounced seer and dripping with sarcasm. I wonder who she thought I was. A young lover? A grandson? I decided to kill her with kindness. I thanked her for small favors. I complimented her voice. She started to make eye contact with me, and I thought I’d begun to bridge the gap, until the following week, when she barged into my bedroom at six A.M., vacuum roaring. I groggily ordered her to leave.

“Sorry, seer,” she said, slamming the door as she went.

Giving up, I began spending those mornings out of the house, using them to catch up on e-mail. That I could go a week at a stretch without withdrawal proved that I needed the outside world a lot less than I’d thought. It’s amazing how much of what passes for communication is garbage. No phone, no Internet—and no worse off. Other than Alma, there were few people I wanted to talk to, and doubtless Yasmina had been spreading propaganda, telling our friends her side of the story. I ignored Evites; I grew addicted to the DELETE button. My world was shrinking, and that suited me fine.

 

 

WE EACH LIVE to a rhythm, one that dictates the way we speak, move, and interact with our environment. Some people like to leave their mark. Enter a room after they’ve been in it and find the furniture displaced, the lampshades askew. Others, like me, live in the background. Throughout my adult life I’d had roommates, and in every case my rhythm clashed with that of those around me, Yasmina being the one exception. I had come to miss that kind of easy syncopation, and it was a joy to feel it once again. With Alma I felt both unalone and uncrowded. She gave off such quiet, steady vitality that I could sense her across the house. We kept in constant communication, trading witticisms from adjacent rooms, reassuring each other with our footsteps.

Comforting as it was to be near her, it was proportionally upsetting when she took ill. In my first five weeks of residence, she had four attacks. I’d know something was up the instant I exited the library to find a certain stillness hanging in the air, our rhythms decoupled. These episodes were unbearably random. One lasted an hour; another, all afternoon; and though she continued to insist that she was in no real danger—recovering by the next day—I had serious difficulty sitting on my hands. It was to my great relief that she told me her doctor was due for a visit. I came home from my walk on the designated afternoon and saw a green BMW parked in the driveway, a gaunt woman half into the driver’s seat.

“You must be Joseph. Paulette Cargill.”

We shook hands. “I didn’t realize doctors still made housecalls.”

“I don’t. Alma is exceptional.”

“That she is. I hope everything’s okay?”

The doctor made a slightly helpless gesture. “It’s the same,” she said. She then gave me a mini-lecture on trigeminal neuralgia and the difficulties of case management. “Surgery helped for a little while, that was back in oh-two, but the pain started to come back about eighteen months ago. We’ve discussed trying again, although in my opinion—and she agrees—it’s the wrong choice. At her age, every additional year brings greater risk of complications. We could do more harm than good. The goal at this point is to get the pain to a more bearable level, not to cure it. I’m afraid that’s simply not realistic.”

“She keeps saying she isn’t in danger.”

“She’s not. Actually, she made a point of telling me to reassure you. She says you’re worrying yourself to death.”

“Yes, well, it’s worrying.”

“In your position I’d feel the same way. Aside from the discomfort, though, she’s in perfect health. With her bloodwork, she could live to be a hundred.”

A silence, as we both considered the implications of that statement.

“Will it get worse?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But it won’t get better.”

Another silence.

“We’re all doing the best we can,” she said.

I said nothing.

“That goes for you, too,” she said.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said.

“But you have. Her mood is excellent.”

“I guess so.”

“Trust me. I’ve been caring for her for fifteen years. This is as good as it gets.”

I tried not to think about how bad it could get.

“Just keep doing exactly what you’re doing. I’ve been bugging her for years to find someone to talk to. What she needs is to make the most of moments when she’s pain-free.”

I nodded.

“Like I said, I don’t make housecalls. Alma is ...” The doctor touched her heart. “Call me anytime.”

Inside, Alma was at the kitchen table, two plates and two forks and the remainder of that week’s
Sachertorte
set out before her. She looked up when I entered, smiling her enigmatic smile. I saw it now as an expression of impenetrability, a hard veneer of sadness. Pain has long been a source of interest to philosophers as an experience that is both universal and incommunicable. There’s a sense in which it’s harder to watch someone else in pain than it is to endure that same pain yourself: we have no more potent reminder of our alone-ness. It is pain that sets limits on empathy, drawing a bright line around what we can ever hope to know about another. At that moment I wanted badly to stand in Alma’s place, and knowing that I could not made me ache twice over.

She picked up the cake knife, made to cut herself a largish piece. “A little extra for me today. I believe I deserve it.”

We ate in silence. Or rather, I did; she in fact ate nothing at all, eroding the cake with her fork, prodding the little sachet of whipped cream until it deflated. I got up to rinse the plates and behind me heard her chair scrape the floor.

“I am very tired and should like to lie down. If I am not up for dinner, I assume you can fend for yourself.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I said.

Her face then passed through many phases, all of them obscure to me. “I only hope that you shan’t pity me.”

“Never,” I said. “Never in a million years.”

She nodded, turned, disappeared.

I reminded myself what the doctor had told me; I tried to accept that this nothing, this shackled passivity, was as much as I could do. A bitter pill, for it was at that very moment, when she was too weak to talk, that I began to appreciate the depth of my debt to Alma. Whatever comfort I afforded her, she had already advanced me tenfold. For that I will forever be grateful, looking back on those early days as the happiest of my life, all the more so for how fleetingly they passed.

W
hat it sounds like,” Drew said, “is
Harold and Maude.”

It was late March. I’d ventured out of the house in a feeble attempt to maintain the fiction that I still had a social life. To thank him for repeatedly putting me up, I bought us lunch at Darwin’s: deli sandwiches and macaroons the size of trumpet mutes. We took our food to Harvard Yard, where we sat on the steps of University Hall and watched Japanese tourists snap photos of frazzled undergraduates.

Drew’s real name was Zhongxue. A computer scientist by training, he came from Shanghai by way of Milwaukee. We’d met in the artificial-intelligence seminar and become fast friends. Like me, he was All but Dissertation; unlike me, he had stopped of his own volition, dropping out to play poker full-time. He now made his living shaking down bachelor parties at Foxwoods. His parents wept whenever he called.

“Please,” I said.

“All I’m saying, it’s a strange way to talk about a lady old enough to be your grandmother.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t think of how to describe my feelings for Alma. One deeply uncomfortable dream aside, I didn’t find her attractive, not per se. Obviously not. If we’d met fifty years ago... But this was now, and given the circumstances, I could not reasonably look on her as an erotic subject.

But it wasn’t quite friendship, either. These days, friendship is cheap and fungible; go on the Internet and you can collect two thousand “friends.” That kind of friendship is meaningless, and I considered it blasphemous to apply the term to Alma.

The closest fit I could come up with was Platonic love, not in the colloquial sense but according to its original definition: a spiritual love, one that transcends physicality, that goes beyond sex, beyond death. True Platonic love is the fusion of two minds.

“She’s the most interesting person I know,” I said.

“I’ll bet.” He growled, clawed the air.

“Idiot.”

“Seriously, I’m happy for you. I don’t understand you, but I’m happy for you.”

“Stop it.”

“What.”

“Stop saying you’re happy for me.”

“But I am.”

“I’m not
dating
her.”

“Uh-huh. Your old roommates sounded more my style. Introduce me?”

“You’re about a hundred pounds underweight.”

“On it,” he said and stuffed half a macaroon in his mouth.

A tourist ran up to us and began photographing him.

“He thinks we’re students,” I said.

Drew nodded, his mouth full of coconut.

“Just so you know, we’re not students,” I said. “I’ve been expelled, and he’s a professional gambler.”

“Havad!” yelled the tourist.

“Okay,” Drew said, coughing out crumbs. “Show’s over.” He shooed the tourist away. Undeterred, the man positioned himself behind a tree, fitting on a zoom lens.

“These people,” said Drew. “What’s so appealing about pictures of complete strangers. Who cares?”

“Evidently, they do.”

“I should tell him to shoot my left side. That’s the photogenic one. Hey, happy almost birthday.”

One of Drew’s talents is a remarkable memory for dates and numbers. It’s especially peculiar because he has a terrible time remembering anything else: to flush the toilet, for example.

“Thanks.”

“Are we going to party?”

“We?”

“I forgot,” he said. “You don’t like parties.”

“I don’t mind parties, but I don’t see why one’s called for here.”

“Uh, because it’s fun.”

“It’s not a milestone.”

“It’s your birthday. Think about it, at least.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Say the word. Crap, I almost forgot. Your mom called for you a few days ago.”

I was perplexed. “How’d she get your number?”

“I guess she called Yasmina first. Anyway, call her back.”

“Did she say what it was she wanted?”

Drew shrugged. “Probably calling to wish you a happy birthday.”

These days I heard from my parents only when they had bad news: the divorce of a cousin, the death of our family dog. If my mother had gone to the trouble of calling both Yasmina and Drew, then the news in question had to be of a far greater magnitude. I thought of my father. He wasn’t yet sixty, but he had overworked his machinery, and his own father had died of a heart attack. Suddenly I had a vision of him, crouched beneath someone’s kitchen sink, straining to loosen a U-bend—then an angry grunt, a mighty crash, a spilled can of Comet.