Wide Blue Yonder (12 page)

The squad car pulled up behind her and sat there, calling in
her license plate, she guessed, her virgin car that had never even had a traffic ticket before. She put both her hands on the wheel where they could see them. The liked for people to do that, she remembered.

And when someone got out and tapped on the window and she opened it, the hot night poured back in. There was a flashlight shining on her and not until it was lowered and her eyes had adjusted could she see anything. Then, considering all the things that had already happened, not only that evening but in her mind for weeks and weeks, it was perhaps not so strange for her to say what she did, as if all their previous conversations had been real ones: “Oh, you grew a mustache.”

The lawyer, a younger, sleeker version of Ed Pauley, was explaining things with the practiced ease of a man who got paid for talking. His words shaped themselves as if he bit them off a bar of silver. His office had the same prosperous high gloss to it, everything substantial and well ordered. The carpeting yielded softly to the foot. The double-paned windows gleamed, holding back the blasting heat. The silent air-conditioning chilled the air so deliriously that Elaine could have drunk it.

This was Frank’s lawyer, or one of them. Not the divorce guy but someone else. It almost felt as if they were getting divorced again, both of them sitting in upscale office chairs and wearing their game faces. Frank was looking especially unlovely these days, she couldn’t help uncharitably noticing. Puffy and soft, like a very well-dressed stuffed animal. His jowls were piling up above his shirt collar. He listened to the lawyer with that expression of bland seriousness that men used for such occasions. Women always felt they had to keep making animated, interested faces. She had learned not to do that, thank God.

“Power of attorney,” the lawyer was saying, “is the instrument people use to safeguard their interests in the event they become incapacitated. Of course, that assumes the individual is capable of making a rational decision to delegate that power.”

“Rational,” said Elaine. “I suppose there’s room for interpretation there.”

“Yes, fortunately, or we’d have to lock up all the Cubs fans.” The lawyer showed his expensive teeth. Lawyer humor. Elaine and Frank bent their mouths politely. Elaine tried to catch Frank’s eye:
Is this guy any good?
Frank wouldn’t look at her. “Now you have two options here. The preferable one is to have your uncle agree to sign over to you a durable power of attorney. Durable means he can’t change it. The alternative is a great deal more expensive and time-consuming, and that’s having a court appoint you as his guardian of person and/or guardian of estate.”

Elaine shifted uncomfortably in her comfortable chair and waited for Frank to say something. She had a urinary-tract infection, something she thought you only got from sex. She couldn’t get over the unfairness of it. Honeymoonitis, they used to call it. An unwelcome thought with Frank in the same room, or anywhere in the same county, for that matter. She was hoping the meeting would be over before she had to humiliate herself by running to the ladies room.

The lawyer was Frank’s idea. It was the way he liked to resolve things, it was that marble-in-the-maze process again. The law was the maze, and you dropped people in the top and they came out the right slot at the bottom. She was filled with foreboding as to what this might mean for Harvey, but she had to keep reminding herself that she was only here by Frank’s negligible courtesy. She had no standing in this. That was the legal word,
standing.

Frank said, “Assuming he’s too out of it to sign over power of attorney, how does guardianship work?”

“You would file a petition to have a court hearing. There would be a report on your uncle’s condition by a physician who has examined him.”

“Except the whole problem is he doesn’t want to see a doctor.”

The lawyer said that this could probably be arranged through court order. “Well that seems like the way to go,” announced Frank. “Resolve the situation right then and there.”

Elaine couldn’t keep out of it any longer. “Unless you ever want him to see a doctor again.”

“I’m sure the professionals know how to handle these guys.”

“What, the sheriff shows up and holds him down while somebody injects him with elephant tranquilizers?”

“Who said anything about elephant tranquilizers?”

“You know what I mean.” She addressed the lawyer. “There has to be some better way than coercing and traumatizing him.”

“The court might view his refusal to seek medical care for a serious condition as prima facie evidence of incompetence.”

“Unless he has a genuine phobia about doctors.”

The lawyer tented his hands, beginning to get interested in the legal subtleties. “There’s a great deal of interest these days in the legal rights of the mentally ill. Americans with Disabilities Act, you know.”

Frank said to Elaine, “You want him to go blind, is that it?”

“Right, Frank. That’s my secret agenda here.”

“All of a sudden you’re what, the Social Work Queen?”

Now they’d gone and done it. Dogfighting in public again. The lawyer gazed serenely out the window, blind and deaf to any unseemliness. Elaine decided to just let it go, resist the temptation to answer back. She tried once more to shift the pressure off her bladder. You couldn’t hope to keep up your end of an argument when you had to pee so badly.

She had called in to her gynecologists’s office for antibiotics. She couldn’t remember having to do that before, she was always the picture of rude good health, she sailed through her visits to plague-ridden India without so much as a sniffle. The nurse had been almost too sympathetic. Ah well, you’re at the age where you can expect that sort of thing to start happening.

Not what she wanted to hear at all. She wanted someone to tell her it was the fault of the hot weather and its attendant risks of dehydration,
a simple climatological phenomenon. Instead she was at the age where you could expect all sorts of increasingly unpleasant things to start happening: wrinkles, softening teeth, the surgical removal of body parts. She tried to have a sense of humor about this whole getting old thing but she didn’t, not really. She tried to arm herself with wisdom and serenity and common sense but none of it worked. She couldn’t even take proper satisfaction in Frank’s looking so lousy because it reminded her too clearly of a time when he (and she) had not, and was this what life would be from now on, a series of mean little triumphs based on vanity and fear?

By the time she returned her attention to the conversation, it had moved beyond her. “It’s called a guardian ad litem,” the lawyer was saying. “An attorney appointed by the court to represent your uncle during the proceeding. It’s pro bono work; we usually get the younger people do to it.” He turned his hands palms up, to indicate the negligible weight of young attorneys. “And that guardian ad litem is required by law to sit down and talk with the client and determine what they want and to represent their interests. So it’s not your automatic slam-dunk type of situation.”

Frank was busily taking notes, just to show her how firmly committed he was to following through on whatever awful legal procedure they had been talking about. If she kept objecting, it would only make him more determined. The lawyer said, “I should ask if there are any substantial financial assets involved here.”

“Hardly. Unless he has bags of dimes hidden under his bed.”

Elaine stood up. “I’m afraid my parking meter’s just run out.” She shook hands with the lawyer, who barely had time to rise out of his chair, and nodded to Frank. Baby steps to the door, then she practically galloped down the hallway. She didn’t care what either of them thought of her.

When she came out of the restroom and headed for the exit, she was surprised to see Frank standing just inside the glass doors waiting for her. “So what do you think we ought to do about him?”

Was he actually asking her advice? “I don’t know,” she said warily. “There’s probably no ideal solution.”

“Maybe we could find a nursing home that would let him watch the Weather Channel.”

“Could we not talk about nursing homes just yet?”

Frank gave her an unfriendly glance but subsided. He rubbed the back of his neck and squinted through the glass. The sun reflected off every surface: automobiles, street signs, glinting particles in the sidewalk, so that the light seemed to be in constant, hectic motion. “You believe this weather?”

“Yeah. It’s like the planet’s moving closer to the sun.”

“I can’t wait to get to Aspen. You know what they have there? Actual snow.”

Elaine sighed. “I don’t suppose you want to hear about your daughter.”

“Go ahead. Make my day.”

“She’s not sure she wants to go with you. Actually she’s sure she doesn’t.”

“Since when does she know what she wants about anything? The kid’s got some kind of disorder. She doesn’t talk, have you noticed that?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“Everything’s ‘Yeah,’ ‘Unh-unh,’ or ‘I dunno.’ What kind of future is she going to have if all she can do is make these retarded noises? Is she doing drugs?”

“She says she isn’t. I don’t know.” Elaine felt the strangest sensation then. As if she was watching a movie she thought she already knew and suddenly the film wobbled or jumped and she and Frank were still married. None of the last five years or more had happened and they were having this conversation over
breakfast coffee and she was going to have to remember to send his shirts out. They spoke of their daughter in voices that were exasperated but fond. They had aged so gradually, day by day, that they hardly took notice of it. In this other movie, other life, she would not have remarked upon what seemed to be a hair crisis on Frank’s part, but then, it was probably Teeny’s idea to have him get this peculiar stiff brush cut so you wouldn’t notice all the encroaching pink scalp. She caught a whiff of something pungent and aromatic, some product probably designed to stimulate hair follicles, and took a hasty step back from him.

“Anyway,” she said, “you’ll have to talk to her. Maybe she’s getting too old for family trips.” Something about her words made her pause. The notion of Frank and Teeny as family? “So. Harvey.”

“Believe it or not, Elaine, I want what’s best for the guy.”

“Then call off the attack lawyers.”

“Tell me how else he’s going to get medical help.”

“I don’t know, but you weren’t there when I tried to talk to him about it. He howled. Curled up on the floor and howled and blubbered. It took me almost an hour to get him calmed down.” It had frightened her to see him that way, his face stretched into an unrecognizable mask of dripping misery. “It was so pitiful,” she said inadequately.

“Well for Christ’s sake, Elaine, of course he’s not going to like the idea. You can’t just give in to him.”

That was it, of course. He thought she was soft, when the situation called for stern, manly measures. She said, “Remember that woman downstate a couple years ago who refused to go in for a court-ordered psychiatric exam and the state police surrounded her house for three weeks and cut off her water and power and blared rock music over loudspeakers? And she shot a dog, I think, before they finally took her in.”

“And your point is?”

“Just wondering if you really want to go that route.”

“Nobody’s calling the state police, why do you keep saying things like that? So what do you want me to do instead? You can feel as sorry for him as you want, you can be the ministering angel of mercy, but then what?”

“Just give it a little more time.” The sunlight was nearly liquid in its brightness, it hurt her eyes even looking out at it. She poked around in her bag for her sunglasses. She felt sad, irritated, hopeless. Frank was right. Feeling sorry for Harvey didn’t do him any good. Nothing would do him much good for very long. “Look, I have to go.”

Frank reached for the door handle, paused. “So why are you so into this? He’s not your responsibility. Are you just trying to prove to everybody what a big jerk I am?”

No, it’s because there are times I feel like him, she stopped herself from saying. Alone and crazy and afraid of everything. She said instead, “His house needs some work. New roof, that sort of thing. Easy enough to do.”

“Let’s wait and see if he’s really going to be living there first.” Frank’s face had shut down and there was an end to talking. She walked past him into the staggering heat. The sun seemed not to have moved, but to have been hung up on a nail in the middle of the no-color sky. She willed herself to endure getting into her car and starting it, trying not to breathe until the air conditioner had purged the worst of the murderous air.

Across the street at the edge of a gas station lot someone had set up a vending enterprise, a van bedecked with giant muddy canvases, the paint laid on in slabs, of animals in heroic poses: wolf howling at the moon, eagle in flight, lion rampant. Behind the van a number of American and Confederate flags were set out on tall poles. Along the sidewalk was a line of half a dozen tiny tricycles, customized with plastic handlebars and seats and
streamers and plastic rosettes fastened to the spokes, all in combinations of the most painful plastic colors: flamingo, lime, orange, cerise, grape. There was something crazed and preternaturally ugly about the whole assemblage, as if it were a colonial outpost in the empire of the mad. It was so impossible to imagine people who would look on such things with admiration and consider placing them in their homes, or people who thought it reasonable to fabricate the things and expect a profit from them, who likely did earn a profit from them, that Elaine felt as if the world she had lived in up to now had cracked open in the heat and this twisted version had risen up in its place.

She blotted her face with a Kleenex and tried to bring herself around. She waited for some of her old energy to course back into her. But the heat was against her, or perhaps it was the weakness of the body, or the image of Harvey in his perfect loneliness reaching out to pass his hands over the glowing television screen. A wave of grief washed over her, filling her eyes with salt. The dashboard warning light was on, as it had been for days, a winking yellow. Yellow, the color of danger, fear, urine, heat. She knew what the light meant now: that everyone died.