Acceptable Losses (36 page)

“Did he hear anything?” Damon said impatiently.

“Nothing,” Elaine said.

“Okay,” Damon lay back and closed his eyes. “I’m awfully tired, Elaine. It was sweet of you to visit me, but I think I’d like to try to take a nap now.”

“Roger …” Elaine hesitated. She was not ordinarily a hesitant woman. “There’s one favor …”

“What is it?” He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to look at the orange coat anymore.

“Remember that photograph I gave you on your birthday, the first year we were married … ?”

“The
only
year we were married.” He still didn’t open his eyes.

“The one of us together on the beach, that I had blown up and put in that silver frame? You remember?”

“I remember.”

“You were so young and handsome then. It has so many associations. I long to have it. Do you think you can find it?”

“I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

Elaine sobbed and he opened his eyes to see if she was faking or not. Tears were rolling down the pale cheeks. She wasn’t faking. “That isn’t what I meant,” she said reproachfully, between sobs.

“You’ll get it, dear,” he said and reached out gently and patted her hand.

“Please get well, Roger,” she said, her voice tremulous. “Even if you never want to see me again, I want to know that you’re around and happy.”

“I’ll try,” Damon said softly. Then he lay back and closed his eyes. When he opened them a few moments later, Elaine was gone.

When the nurse came in the next day to announce that there was a Mrs. Dolger who was at the reception desk, he told the nurse to bring her in, but added he wanted the nurse to stay in the room all the time that Mrs. Dolger was there.

When the authoress who had made his old age, if he was going to have one, secure came in, he had to suppress a gasp of surprise. The dumpy little suburban housewife had vanished and in her place was a svelte, beautifully dressed lady in carefully coiffed tinted hair. She was wearing a handsome green tweed suit that looked as though it came from Paris and carrying a green alligator handbag to match, and she must have lost twenty pounds since he had seen her last. He wondered what torments she was putting her husband and children through.

Her voice, however, had remained the same, modest and pleading and grateful. “Oh, Roger,” she said, “I kept calling every day and they kept saying you were on the critical list.”

“I’m off it now. You look beautiful, Genevieve.”

“I took hold of myself,” she said firmly. “I dieted and I went to gym classes and I started reading
Vogue
, and I wouldn’t allow myself to go to bed at night until I had written at least ten pages. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am to you and Oliver. He’s been a tower of strength on
Cadenza …
Although,” she added hastily, “there’ll never be anyone like you.”

“I’ll go over the proofs when you get them,” Damon said, hoping that they would come in late and the editors would resist any changes because they were weeks behind for their publishing date.

“First,” she said, “you have to get well. That’s the important thing. I brought you a little gift.” Dashing tweed suit and alligator handbag and weighing twenty pounds less than when he’d last seen her, she still spoke shyly. She had put a square baker’s box down on a table when she came in, and now she took it up and opened it. “I know how awful hospital food is,” she said, “so I baked a pie for you myself. It’s apple. Do you like apple?” she asked anxiously.

“I love apple.” He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t been able to get any solid food down in almost two months.

“Do you think we could get a plate and a knife and fork?” Mrs. Dolger asked the nurse. “I’d like to see him eat a piece with my own eyes.”

The nurse looked over at Damon for a sign and Damon nodded. I’ll get it down, he thought, if it kills me.

“We’re buying a new house out in Amagansett,” Mrs. Dolger said. “Our old house is right on the street and it’s terribly noisy, and there’s no place I can really call my own where I can work. And I know I’ll write better with a view of the ocean. When I get it fixed up, you must come out and visit us, a nice long visit. With your wife, of course.”

“Isn’t Amagansett a long way out? For your husband, I mean. With his office in New York.”

“He’s retiring at the end of the month. He won’t have to commute anymore. He says there’s no sense in having a rich wife if you don’t know how to use her money.” She giggled girlishly. “Who would ever have thought I’d be supporting a man in this lifetime?”

The nurse came back with a plate and a knife and fork and Mrs. Dolger cut a vee out of the pie. “I hope it came out all right,” she said worriedly. “You never can tell with pies. They have a mind of their own.”

The nurse cranked up the back of the bed, and Damon sat up and accepted the plate from Mrs. Dolger. “It looks delicious,” he said, postponing the moment when he would have to put the first morsel in his mouth.

“Anybody can make a pie
look
good,” Mrs. Dolger said. “But with pies it’s beauty is as beauty tastes.” She giggled again, appreciating her own cleverness in changing the hackneyed phrase.

Damon took a deep breath and cut the smallest piece possible from the end of the vee. He put it into his mouth gingerly, as though it were steaming hot. He began to chew methodically. He swallowed. It stayed down. And it
was
delicious. Until now the only taste that he could endure had been that of pineapple juice. He cut himself a much larger piece of the pie and ate it with relish. The look on Mrs. Dolger’s face as she watched him reminded him of the childlike and blissful expressions on the faces of some of his clients when he had caught them reading a rave review of a book of theirs that had just come out.

He finished the slab of pie.

“Bravo,” said the nurse, who had been trying to stuff all kinds of food down his throat for weeks, without success.

In a sudden rush of affection for Genevieve Dolger he said, “Now I’ll have another piece.” He knew it was the wildest bravado and that he was running the risk of throwing everything up after Mrs. Dolger left the room, but he felt that he had to prove his gratitude to this dear and devoted woman and that mere words would not suffice.

Mrs. Dolger beamed and blushed at the same time at this tribute to her and cut a larger slab of pie and put it on his plate. He ate it with relish and did not throw up.

“Tomorrow, Miss Medford,” he said to the nurse, “when you weigh me in the morning, I’ll bet you I’ll be at least two pounds heavier.”

Miss Medford looked skeptical. When she had weighed him that morning, it was still a skeletal one hundred and thirty-eight pounds.

Mrs. Dolger left in a flurry of little uncertain movements that did not go with her new hair-do or the smart green tweed suit and alligator bag. “If there’s anything I can do,” she said at the door, “anything, my darling Roger, just ask me.”

He could tell that she was not just indicating that she would bake him another pie if he requested it and hoped Miss Medford, who was as sharp-eyed as a forward artillery observer, didn’t interpret Mrs. Dolger’s remark as anything more than a generous offer of her services as a baker.

He was also relieved that Sheila had had to go to Burlington that day, as her mother had recovered sufficiently from her stroke to be taken home and had asked Sheila to help her. Sheila felt that her mother’s return to health was a sign that the storm of ill fortune that she, her mother and Damon had suffered in the last months was finally abating. If Sheila thought this, Damon was happy for her. As for him, the fact that an old lady who had always disapproved of him was able to speak and get out of bed in distant Vermont was hardly an event that presaged any quick deliverance for himself.

Being able to eat two pieces of apple pie, one after the other, was far more encouraging to him, even though when Miss Medford weighed him the next morning, he still weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

“D
OCTOR,” SHEILA WAS
sitting in Zinfandel’s office. Across the desk from her Zinfandel was fiddling nervously with a pencil. “Doctor,” she said, “there’s no way we can get him to eat while he’s in this hospital. He ate two pieces of apple pie that a friend brought him a week ago and that’s it, except for that miserable powder we mix with water or milk that you ordered.”

“It is life-sustaining,” Zinfandel said. “It has all the vitamins, proteins, minerals …”

“It isn’t sustaining
his
life,” Sheila said. “He doesn’t
want
to sustain his life. We’re lucky if we can coax him into taking half a glass of the stuff a day. He wants to go home.
That
will sustain his life.”

“I can’t take the responsibility …”

“I’ll take the responsibility,” Sheila said. Her anger, which she kept in check, but which was evident nonetheless, was working for her. “If necessary,” she said, using the threat that had worked in getting Damon out of the Intensive Care Unit, “I shall go to his lawyer tomorrow and get a writ ordering you to release him in my care.”

“You’re running the risk of killing your husband,” Zinfandel said, but Sheila knew he was beaten.

“I accept that risk,” she said.

“We will have to make a whole series of tests.”

“I’ll give you three days to make them in,” Sheila said, discarding all niceties of civilized speech. All pretense was now gone; they were antagonists and what was victory for one of them was abject defeat for the other.

Damon endured the X-rays, the CAT scan and the taking of blood without complaint or any signs of interest. Sheila had not told him of her conversation with Dr. Zinfandel, and he was resigned to the fact that he would never get out of the hospital alive. He still could make no sense of the
New York Times
and the only nourishment that did not make him gag was still iced pineapple juice. His mind wandered and when Sheila said that she had heard from Manfred Weinstein from California, he wept and said, incoherently, “He made one wrong move in his life,” as though the long throw from shortstop had been his, Damon’s, fault. He remembered that a woman in a green suit had come into his room and given him a piece of apple pie, but he couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Miss Medford forced him to get out of bed from time to time to walk with a cane in the corridor, but once he had looked out of the window at the end of the corridor, the walks no longer interested him, and Miss Medford’s assurance that he was walking more and more strongly each day seemed the most trivial of information.

He brightened a little when, after two days of X-rays, tests and examinations, Sheila told him that the doctors had given him a provisional clean bill of health.

Out of superstition, Sheila didn’t tell him why he had to undergo the series of examinations. To avoid disappointing him, she wanted to wait until the very last moment possible before his liberation to break the news. So it was Miss Medford who was the bearer of the glad tidings. “You’re in the paper this morning, Mr. Damon,” Miss Medford said, when she came in to relieve the night nurse. She waved a copy of the
Daily News.
“In a column. It’s all about a lady who’s written a book and your agency has made a deal for her for billions of dollars or something like that.”

“Don’t believe anything you read before eight o’clock in the morning,” Damon said. He was still wondering about Dr. Zinfandel’s frigid behavior at six
A.M
., when he had made his daily visit.

“It says you’re getting out of the hospital today after your terrible ordeal, the shootout on Fifth Avenue, they call it. They think you were wounded. They don’t mention Dr. Rogarth.” Miss Medford laughed sourly. She was not an admirer of the doctor. In the few instances that he had come in to see Damon while she was on duty, she had behaved as though she had only that moment been taken out of the deep-freeze compartment of a refrigerator. “Do you want to read it?”

“No, thank you,” Damon said. “I’m not partial to fairy tales. How does nonsense like that get into the papers?”

“In every hospital I’ve ever worked in,” Miss Medford said, “there’s always somebody, a nurse, a doctor, an orderly, a clerk, who knows somebody on the papers—a cousin, a boy friend, somebody who gets them tickets for an opening night in exchange for information … Don’t think this place is an exception.”

“Has anybody told
you
that I’m leaving today?”

“No,” Miss Medford admitted. “Not a word.”

“Let me go back to sleep,” Damon said. “I was having a nice dream about going to a football game with my father.”

It was only when Sheila arrived in the room with some fresh shirts and underwear and got him out of bed and began to dress him that he realized what was happening to him and broke down and wept.

“Oliver’s waiting downstairs,” Sheila said, “with a car he’s rented. We’re going out to the house at Old Lyme. We can’t have you climbing three flights of stairs up to our apartment and neither Oliver nor I can carry you.”

The nurse insisted on putting him in a wheelchair and pushing him to the emergency entrance of the hospital, although Damon protested, because he wanted to walk out of the place on his own two feet and was sure he was strong enough to do so.

It was a mild, sunny spring day and Damon took a deep breath of air as he was wheeled through the door, then slowly and with effort, stood up. He saw Oliver standing next to the rented car, smiling. Damon waved jauntily with the cane that the hospital had given him. Everything was in sharp focus—Oliver, the buds on the trees bordering the courtyard, the shape of his own hand holding the cane.

He felt neither ill nor well, merely vibrantly observant, the bright colors of the outside world making his eyes squint. He heard Miss Medford’s low voice behind him giving last-minute instructions to Sheila about the care of the bedsore that was still a gaping hole on his buttock. He took a step by himself, toward where Oliver was standing. Then he saw a man in a blue windjacket step out from behind a car parked next to Oliver’s. Damon knew who it was, although why he knew was beyond him. The man took two steps toward him. Damon could see his face. It was flabby and round and the color of wet dough, with eyes that looked as though they had been bored into the man’s head by a pneumatic drill. The man took something out of his pocket. It was a pistol and he was pointing it at Damon.