Waveland (8 page)

At noon he gave her the list, gave her the keys to the car, and gave her his Visa card along with a signature card that she needed to show at the grocery store so that she could sign the Visa receipt.

At the door she turned and said, “Chips? You want chips?”

He shook his head. “No, we have chips.” He waved at her from across the room. She went out and he listened to the door lock.

When she was gone, he returned to the bathroom and with an elaborate effort managed to get himself out of the wheelchair and onto the toilet. This was such a relief for him, to be sitting on the toilet. He sighed and closed his eyes, grateful to be alone in the house and to be in the bathroom with his stick, the one he used in the kitchen and elsewhere when there were things out of reach that needed to be touched or moved. Now he used the stick, reaching out toward the door and shoving it almost closed. Now he waited.

Minutes passed, a quarter hour. He wanted to go to the toilet now, because if he could, then the woman would, if necessary, clean him up when she returned. If he didn't go to the toilet now and he had to go after she left for the evening, there would be no one to clean him up. He could do it himself with the toilet paper, but the results were not always satisfactory. He could do it with the washcloth, but that required cleaning the washcloth, and sometimes the sink and vanity, and the results were often not completely satisfactory. He preferred when the girl did it, though while he was there on
the toilet in the small bathroom, he noted with comfort that there were dozens of washcloths folded and stacked alongside the lavatory.

On this occasion he managed to shit and on inspection saw that the shit was well-formed, well-colored, and cleanly off him. Buoyed by his success, he wiped his bottom several times with the toilet paper, flushing the toilet after each pass, and then, without getting off the toilet, wet a washcloth and passed the wet cloth between his legs. It burned his skin but after a couple of attempts the cloth emerged unsoiled, and he returned it to the sink, under the running water. He pulled up his pajama pants, and eventually got back into the wheelchair, rinsed the washcloth, then got out of the bathroom, and back into the living room where he sat in the wheelchair facing the couch where he slept every night, realizing that the sheets were not freshly folded on the arm of the couch where they usually were with most of the other Catholic Services women who saw to him.

Later in the afternoon he watched CNN as the woman prepared his lunch—a small, bony steak. In the news that day: a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, more casualties in a recent airliner crash, a rise in the snake population of Alaska. When he switched to the local weather channel, he saw that rain was expected by the end of the week. His testicles itched.

As the afternoon dragged on he took a nap, and the woman retreated to the kitchen where she turned up the volume on her TV, a nine-inch model he had bought especially for the Catholic Services women, and which was connected to the cable service that provided two dozen Spanish-language channels. At five-thirty she put his dinner on the TV tray and
then she was out the door, smiling. He gave her a thumbs-up and a nod, and when the door closed he lifted the plastic top she had put over his plate, surveyed the food, and then replaced the top. “Too early to eat,” he said, to no one.

In the early evening Vaughn's father telephoned Vaughn's wife, Gail. This was before the divorce, although there was already talk of it, and Vaughn's father was party to that talk. He found her at home and talked to her for some time about how much he missed her and about how much he missed the old times when she and Vaughn would come to visit. He told her he had a particular fondness for her and that she was always his favorite of his sons' wives. He wished she would come visit him sometime. He needed someone to take care of him, someone with whom he could talk, with whom he might share a meal, an evening. She was welcome to stay at the apartment. In fact, he would like it if she would stay at the apartment. It would remind him of old times. She said that might be a little iffy.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Not at all. In fact, if you get tired of my son, you can come and live with me. And by the way, how is your job going?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Maybe you could divorce my son, quit your job, and come and live with me,” he said. “I could provide for you.”

“We aren't divorced yet,” she said to Vaughn's father. “No matter what you think.”

Vaughn's father, who was eighty-six, fell silent. Gail, who had presented herself to him as, perhaps truthfully, as sweet a woman as ever walked this earth, said, “Maybe later I could.
Maybe I could come live there with you and take care of you. I could cook and do that sort of thing.”

“It might not be too bad,” Vaughn's father said. “You don't really have a husband, do you?”

“Well, sort of,” she said, and they laughed together.

They went on talking about this as if it were a real possibility. Later she would report to Vaughn that on many occasions his father offered to do his best to satisfy her in every possible way.

That night Vaughn's father watched a football game on television. He moved from the wheelchair to one of the deep, soft easy chairs that he and Vaughn's mother used to sit in every night when they watched television. He still sat in his chair while his wife's chair, a little tattered, remained empty. He watched the football game for a while with the sound on, barely following the action. The sound was loud as it ricocheted around the room, and he found that comforting. Later he turned off the sound and stared at the game and past the game to the brightly colored jerseys, the screaming green field, the bright lights, the fans, the players and their sparkling helmets. He stared and wondered what would become of him, how he would go on living alone in the apartment. Eventually he was just staring at the wall off to one side of the television, barely aware of the movement on the screen, a shadow-play in his peripheral vision. By eleven he was asleep in the chair. The food was untouched on the TV tray; the television was running. All the lights downstairs were on. Outside, footsteps of the other apartment dwellers passed back and forth in front of his door. In the distance trucks could be heard gearing up
and gearing down on the freeway heading out of town. Air-conditioning compressors clicked on and off. Crickets sang. The night rolled on.

He awakened at three-thirty in the morning, disoriented, and he stayed in his chair for a minute trying to get his bearings. The television was showing some kind of sports news program with two young anchorpeople. The TV tray was just out of reach in front of him and to the left, on the other side of his chair. The covered plate was still on the tray, along with a glass of water with condensation on the sides. There was silverware there. After a few moments in the easy chair, he sat up and pulled the wheelchair to him and began to transfer himself into the wheelchair so that he could go to the bathroom. He managed to get into the chair and to the bathroom, where he missed the bowl.

Coming out, he decided to try the walker. It was chilly in the apartment and he wanted to look at some papers on the table, and to close the curtains. He did these things successfully, using the walker. He wondered why no one ever called him—why Vaughn did not call him, why Newton did not call him. He wondered why he had to live there alone, tended by a woman who didn't speak English, and who changed day by day. He wondered where his friends were, where his family was. He wondered what he had done to earn himself this precarious and uncomfortable circumstance. He remembered when he was a powerful man, successful, well-regarded, a leader of other men and the prince of his family.

He remembered his wife and the fight they had the night she fell in the den and hit her head on the coffee table and how that started her sudden speedy decline. He wished they had not had the argument; it was about something silly. They
had been together for so long and had had so many arguments that every new one seemed to be about life and death. He wondered whether, if she had not fallen, she would be alive and there with him still. He regretted treating his wife badly in the final years of their marriage, regretted that he was unable to cope with her problems and his own problems and the loss of authority, the loss of purchase in the world, the sense that both of them were lost in time and space and that she was no longer any good to him in the way she had been previously, and that it didn't matter anyway since he was worthless himself. The children, the two sons, had loved her immensely and in her decline had been with her constantly. They traveled to town and stayed with her at the hospital, stayed with her at the rest home even when she could not speak, and when she was comatose they had stayed by her side. Days and days and weeks, on into months, when finally at his insistence the feeding tube was removed from her stomach, and his wife and their mother passed on within days. He wondered if that was why they had forsaken him, or was it more? Was it everything that he did and did not do—the whole of his performance, every slight, every strong word, every missed expression of affection, attention not showered? Was it everything? He did not have an answer.

He sat in his apartment in his wheelchair. The television was blinking in the other room, and he sat in the middle of the living room and he did not know. He was tired and dizzy, sick to his stomach. Suddenly his head jerked and it felt as though someone had hit him with a bat, but no one had hit him. Everything swam in front of him, and he thought he should lie down. He got out of the wheelchair and reached for the walker, but missed and stumbled onto the couch, his
legs splayed under the coffee table, his powerful hands still locked on the aluminum handles of the wheelchair. He began to cry. There was nothing left to do. There was nothing he could do. He tried to get up and get under the sheet on the couch, but he was on top of the sheet and couldn't seem to lift himself off the sheet in order to get it out from under him and spread it over himself for sleeping. His legs were stiff and heavy, hard to move, like weights attached to his body. He couldn't move very well and he was dizzy and he closed his eyes and let his head fall forward onto the couch; he stayed that way for a few minutes, and then he was asleep again.

When the Catholic Services woman, a new woman that next day, arrived in the morning, she found him like that, one leg twisted under the coffee table, his head on the couch, his hands covering his head. She helped him up and onto the couch, where he rested, breathing heavily for a few minutes. She was worried and called the Catholic Services office to report, then checked him again and found that he was breathing smoothly and sleeping on his back on a rumpled sheet on the couch. She went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. When she returned a few minutes later with eggs and toast and jam, he smiled at her and asked for help getting into the wheelchair. He said, “I have some things I want to get done later.”

“Qué?”
she said.

Gail was released from the hospital late the next day and she called Greta's house to thank them for their help and to report that she had gotten a cab back to the house and that she was fine. She wanted to talk to Greta, but Greta was out so Vaughn talked to her. She asked how he'd been and he said he was okay. He didn't want to talk to her because talking to her made him nervous; he didn't feel comfortable talking about anything.

“I want to file charges,” he said. “I want you to.”

“I don't know,” Gail said.

“Come on, Gail. This is fucked.”

“It is, but, you know, you're you and I'm me. It's a onetime thing.”

“No way to know that,” he said. “Even if it is, it's way beyond letting it go. I think we've got to do it.”

“Let me think about it,” she said. “Just get back a little. So … what are you doing these days, anyway?”

He was quiet a minute, then said, “Emergency housing. Tiny places you can build for not much and take to a site on the back of a truck. Assemble in a week.”

“No kidding,” she said. “Like those things they tried to sell at Lowe's after Katrina? Little carpenter gothic cottages?”

“Not really, no. More like in cool trailers, I guess. Except for the trailer part.”

“I don't like trailers much,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

They talked like that for a few minutes, with lots of dead air growing between their lines of dialogue. Finally, Gail said, “I just wanted to check in, say thanks for everything. I'm doing better and I think things will get better from here.”

“We live in hope,” he said.

“I'll let you go. I'll call Greta later, catch up with her.”

“Okay,” he said. “We need to talk more.”

“I know,” she said.

Hanging up, he was thinking he had originally liked Gail because she was always disappointed in herself. You could hear it in her voice, a kind of deadness. It was like some people got it, and knew they'd failed, and others didn't get it at all. What was best was to know you were screwed and to be okay with that. The people he didn't like insisted on imagining themselves excellent and in good order.

Gail had been a basket case early in their marriage, always going up walls, making shit up, doing drugs, disappearing in the middle of the night and staying gone days at a time, calling him from a distant Wal-Mart at six in the morning
to whisper that she was being followed, or busting out of the house on foot in the rain after an argument and calling from a pay phone in the bus station three hours later with two “friends” she couldn't seem to get rid of. That had been the pattern for a time. He got her to see a therapist who straightened her out, though after a year she started treating problems with platitudes, categorical ideas that clearly weren't hers. He tried, in their marriage, to make her feel loved, and sometimes he did love her intensely, he ached for her—
ached with tenderness
was the joke they made about it. She was the queen and he was the worker bee, scuttling around doing stuff for her. When she was lonely, he called people. When she was scattered, he put things in order. When she forgot, he reminded her. When she didn't understand, he explained. It got a little tiring. She went into rehab. And then to the therapist. After that she turned into somebody he didn't quite recognize, which he thought was heartbreaking.