The Executor (17 page)

“What do you think I think, I think it’s awful.”

“Nnn. That’s not what I mean. What I mean, in your opinion, is she happy?”

I wanted to blurt out yes, of course she was happy, of course. She had me, after all. But could I honestly make that claim? I felt ashamed to realize that in all the time I’d known Alma, I’d never thought to ask myself that question. How does one measure happiness ? Can one assign it a quantity? The utilitarian attempt to do just that is now considered risible. Enumerate the soft signs, then: she still smiled when we talked (although, these days, how often did we talk?): still ate her chocolate (although how often did she feel hungry?). Did these behaviors mean anything? Were they artifacts? Where did the real proof lie? I thought back to our very first conversation, which had begun with the question of whether it is better to be happy or intelligent. At the time, setting those two concepts up in opposition had seemed eminently reasonable. Now, as I sat listening to the quiet fury on the stereo and the waitress telling the bartender to kiss her sweet ass and the men snorting into their beers, I wondered if the happiness I thought I’d given Alma was merely a wan projection of that which she gave me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“If you don’t know,” he said, “the answer’s no.”

I said nothing.

“And, I mean, what if she gets worse. You must have thought about that.”

“I hope not.”

“Course not. I mean, sure, I wish I could stop it. That’s make-believe, though. So, I dunno. If it’s never going to get better, and if it’s getting
worse,
like it looks like it is, then what do you do with that? I mean, what the hell does a person
do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. I just don’t fucking know. Nobody does. You know? Maybe there is no answer.”

“Maybe not.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He studied his fingernails. “I can’t say how you feel about this, but since you care about her, like I do, I bet that you think it, too. Sometimes I wonder if it’d be better if, I mean, better for her to just—
whhhp.
You know?”

I caught myself nodding and stopped. What, exactly, did he think I knew?

“For her sake,” he said.

What I read in his eyes froze my heart.

“You boys all set?” said the waitress.

Eric smiled at her. “All set.”

“You want a beer, shout.”

“Will do.”

She left. When he spoke again, I heard him through static.

“Look,” he said. “Whatever happens to her—and something’s gotta happen at some point, and for her sake, you have to hope that it’s sooner rather than later. She’s in pain. Sooner rather than later, something’s going to happen. It might be difficult to think about. It might make us uncomfortable. But it’s a fact. Life is life.

“You see what I mean?

“I can tell what you’re thinking. ‘Look at her. She’s already—what. Seventy-eight? Seventy-nine? Even if we sit back and wait, how much longer can it go on?’ And you’d be right to think that way, you would. So let me tell you something else, something you might not know, which is the family history. You’re gonna have to trust me on this when I say that she could hang in there a long, long time. It runs in the family. Longer than anyone wants—her most of all. I mean, you’re smart. Use your imagination for a second. What would it be like for her if this went on for another, I don’t know, twenty years? All of a sudden it’s not so simple anymore.

“Is it.

“So, day to day, for us, what does that mean? I think, and this is just my opinion, but I do think that it’s one based on fact—I think that we, meaning you and I and her, we have to focus on the present. What is happening now. What that leaves us with here, I think, is a balance of power. If you ask me, this is not a bad thing. It’s the way it should be. You’re there. You’re with her. You’re the one she sees every day. Something goes wrong, you’re the one who can say what occurred. How the situation plays out has a lot to do with what you decide.

“That being the case, whatever happens next is really up to you.

“And I’ll tell you something else. My grandma’s gone, my mom and dad are gone. So for her, that’s it, you know? Just me. What do I need a house for? I don’t. I mean, something does happen, it goes down a certain way, fine, it’s my house. Okay. But depending on what plays out, you could have it, if you wanted.

“But you know what, though. I can tell that it’s not something you feel a hundred percent about. I can see that. That’s okay. Of course not; this is something you probably never thought about much, and if you did, you thought about it only from one angle. So let me give you some other angles to consider. It’s not a question of you or me. Look at it as a question of what’s best for her. It’s a question of dignity. You said it yourself: she’s not getting any better. She is in pain. That’s why I’m saying we have to look at this from her perspective. Is she happy? I mean—you said it yourself. No. She isn’t. It’s not natural. Is it? Tell me. Is it natural for someone to have to wake up every day and face that kind of pain? Of course not. I mean, it would be unnatural for anyone, but she’s the kind of person, it’s going to be hard on her, much harder than on your average person. I know that.
You
know it. You’re not an average kind of person, either, so put yourself in her shoes for a second and ask yourself, ‘Is this really what I want?’ And you tell me what the answer is going to be.” He sat back. “You tell me.”

I said, “Would you excuse me.”

He gestured
go ahead.

I locked myself inside a bathroom stall and stood a long while massaging my chest. Had that really happened? Had he offered me the house? Conspired with me over cheeseburgers? Impossible. I knew what he had said. He’d said it and yet he hadn’t.

What did he expect?

Did he expect me to do an accounting?

Did he expect that to come out in his favor?

The world was unreal, the floor tiles swimming, the toilet a grinning menace.

I slapped myself across the face.

The waitress had taken my seat in the booth. As I approached, she slid a piece of paper across the table to Eric and stood up, straightening her skirt.

“You take care,” she said.

“Will do,” he said. To me: “All set?”

I started for the door.

“One sec,” he said.

He was holding up the bill.

Reflexively, I reached for my wallet and removed a twenty.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, snatching it from me and tossing it on the table. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Feeling numb, I pushed out into the blinding summer sun. I hadn’t intended to pay for him, but somehow I had.

 

 

“YOU DON’T NEED TO FIND ME,” Eric said as we stood on the corner of Mass Ave and Prospect. “I got some stuff to do but I’ll be around. Meantime, you think it over, and the next time you see her hurting like that, you think about what I told you.” He smiled, clapped me on the shoulder, and walked toward the T Through a shimmering cloud of exhaust, I watched him sink underground.

I
would never have wished an attack on Alma, of course, but I will admit that right then I was relieved not to have to see her. To sit and chat as though everything was the same—to look her in the eyes—I didn’t think I could do it. For several hours I paced around the library, trying to make sense of what had just taken place.

Tell the police. That’s the automatic first response. Tell them what, though? Eric hadn’t asked me to do anything, not really. He’d described a set of circumstances—a sick old woman, a dangling fortune—and left me to reach my own conclusions. Though his intent was unambiguous, when I tried to pin him to anything explicit, I came up empty-handed. So much of what he’d said had been wordless, built into facial expressions, and pauses, and prosody; by talking around his point he made it far more forcefully than he ever could have by stating it outright. He was, I realized, a true Continental, his pitch a masterpiece of dramatic subtext.

Was it a crime to talk about such things? Did failing to report the conversation make me a party to whatever he did next? Was I legally responsible? Morally? I pictured someone like me walking into the station (in my mind, it looked like a public library, except with guns and thugs), approaching the front desk, and offering, unprompted, a confession. What would that look like to them? Very simply this: I had agreed to help Eric, then backed out. I didn’t know why he had chosen me, but surely the police would think he had reason to do so; by offering myself up for scrutiny, I would become a suspect in a crime that hadn’t been committed, that might never be committed, the idea of which might never be known to anyone except the two of us. He could easily claim that I had approached him, or that nothing had happened at all. I’d be crying wolf—about myself. No, the police were out. But whom did that leave? Alma? At best she would think me incoherent; more likely, delusional. One or both of the same two problems applied to telling the doctor or any of my friends. Perhaps that was Eric’s insurance policy: the knowledge that if I sought help, I would either bring suspicion upon myself or else sound deranged. What came next, then? More cajoling. If that didn’t work, threats. Physical intimidation. Or else he’d find another accomplice, and when he did, I would become the man who knew too much.

What was it about me that suggested I would be willing to entertain such a notion? Did he think he could convince me? Did he think I didn’t need convincing? I thought about all the times I’d sat beside him, watching him flirt with her. Had I given him the go-ahead ? The wrong kind of look? Had he smiled and nodded at me, and had I smiled and nodded back? What could I have done to bring this on? How long had he been planning this? Since we met? Since our night in Arlington? Had he planned that, too? Were the girls in on it? Was the scene the next morning calculated to achieve some end? But now I really did sound delusional.

Worst of all was the way he had framed the idea, as an act of mercy. An arrow aimed at my soft spots, or did he truly see it that way? Had he had to work on himself, or had it been easy for him? Did the idea drip like cave water, dissolving the bedrock of his conscience? Or had there never been a conscience in the first place?

What about me?

Did he know what he was doing when he put the idea in my head?

We all have thoughts we’d rather not have. While I could not conceive of ever seeing things Eric’s way, I did think about what he’d said. How could I not? I couldn’t delete the concept. It was, perversely, to the contrary. The more tightly I muzzled it, the more insistently it barked. I thought about it, all right: I thought about it that night, when I heard her hobbling around, and I wanted to go to her, and restrained myself for fear of offending her. I thought about it throughout the following week, when the temperature soared and she got worse and I had to call the doctor once again, and was once again told that there was nothing we could do. So of course I thought about it; like an earworm, it had eaten its way into my consciousness, and I thought about it again when the doorbell rang and he stood on the porch, winking; thought about it as I handed him the envelope with his check; thought about it as I slammed the door and ran to the library to hide myself in a book.

I began to think about it all the time.

Because you couldn’t claim that the idea had no upside whatsoever. There was something to be said for alleviating suffering, wasn’t there? That was what doctors did, after all: they made people “more comfortable.” They adminstered drugs that divorced the mind from reality, painkillers that gradually shut down the body. A slower kind of death, but was it all that different? Not that I was a doctor. Not that I had a mandate to act one way or the other. But when someone was in extremis—as Alma clearly was—did the distinction between what morphine did and what Eric wanted me to do mean anything at all? Was it a question of scale? Of semantics? Say that she had asked me to help her commit suicide. Illegal, perhaps. But immoral? Whom did it help, keeping her alive if she no longer wanted to be alive? Nietzsche tells us that one should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly, and Alma was nothing if not proud. She had told me never to pity her, but given the present state of affairs, that was all I could manage to do. So if—let me say that again: if—if she had asked me to help her end her own life, I would not have hesitated. In fact, I would have felt morally obliged to help her. Now, obviously, that situation would be different from one in which I acted preemptively. By asking, she became the actor instead of the acted-upon, the agent instead of the victim. And, crucially, she had not asked. The whole thing was theoretical, the very thought absurd. But as Bertrand Russell wrote, “Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened of absurdities.”

So when, a few weeks later, she stopped watching her soaps, complaining that the whine of the television nauseated her, I thought about it.

When I heard her vomiting up my
Sachertorte,
I thought about it some more.

I thought and thought and thought.

It was possible (scarcely so, but that will suffice) that that was what she
did
want, if only she weren’t too proud to ask for help. Everything I knew about her (and I knew her well, didn’t I, knew her better than anyone else) told me that she would not readily confess to weakness. She never called the doctor; I did. She never asked for me to bring food up to her room; I did that on my own, knowing she was too tired to do it herself. She never asked for these things—she never would have; they were beneath her—but she was grateful when I did them for her. This is love: anticipating another’s needs, providing what they cannot or will not ask for.

Another thought experiment: eventually she would die of one cause or another, and if I was still around when that happened, in one or five or twenty years, I would be out on the street. (Twenty years? Did I really intend to stick around that long? But this was all theoretical.) At that point, Eric would have no motivation to give me the house, not when he could sell it for profit and I had done nothing for him. On the other hand, if she left the house to him, and he gave the house to me ... it was repellent, of course, but the thought was there. I had a flexible mind, and though I would
never—never
—put these theories into practice, it was in my nature to ask questions, probe the abstract, conceive of possible worlds. One could make an argument—an anemic argument but an argument nonetheless—that by acting now, I was simply securing my future, allowing myself to one day return to my writing in peace and quiet—something Alma herself had encouraged me to do. She believed in me. She told me all the time. In a certain sense, I would be carrying out her wishes. I could live in the house until I completed my dissertation—or beyond—or I could sell it and find a place of my own.... I’d never owned property. I didn’t know anything about titles and deeds. How did it work? Could Eric simply gift me a house? Wouldn’t that look suspicious? Of course it would; we’d have to let some time pass before I took possession, in the meantime I could rent it out, it’d be easy enough to find tenants, they could pay in cash.