Dear Digby (20 page)

Page hooted. “Did you get out the .38 again?”

I looked at her. “No. No, I didn’t. You know, I
was
ready to kill him, but when I saw his face, I felt terrible for him. He was
devastated.
He felt he’d failed me miserably—”

“Well, Christ, Digby, he
had.”

“He sat down on the couch and started to cry.”

“Jesus, Digby! I told you—never trust a guy who cries—they’re
sadists
to a man.”

“Yeah, I know. But I felt different about everything at that point. I mean, you have to remember I’d just had my whole life story rewritten that night. Page, I couldn’t help thinking—how much did I care if he wasn’t perfect? He told me that he refused to have a drink with Kuchera, but invited him to talk on the cab ride down to my apartment. When they couldn’t find a cab in the after-theater crush, they hopped on the subway. And it got stuck between stations. Terence said Kuchera couldn’t
believe
him. Terence was beating on the subway walls and pacing. Kuchera paced along with him—he kept repeating,
“Ob-sessed.
You are ob-
sessed!”

“And you believed this story?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, it was a bizarre night. Where was it written anyway that he had to
save
me? In what fairy tale? And Jesus—all my
life,
I realized, I’d been waiting for some man to
save
me! I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. Well, I saved myself—or rather, Iris saved me—from Danny, who was
also
trying to save me. Wasn’t he? Terence just didn’t get there in time to save me from the
other
savers. My God, I felt so good—I could
forgive
Terence, I could show him a little mercy. He
was
a hero, in his own weird way. Like everybody else that night. Do you know how strange I felt, standing there in my living room, watching Terence sob and Iris try to do her best to comfort him?”

“Yeah?”

“She asked him for a recent photograph, she brought him a handkerchief, she cut out a piece of his hair—a big piece—to put in her ‘fan’ scrapbook. Then the three of us sat there, Terence crying, me dozing, Iris mumbling to herself—holding hands for a while. It was very peaceful.”

Page hiccuped again.

“After a while the Brookheart staff people arrived and picked up Iris, and then Terence and I sat there on the couch till dawn, holding hands and staring, like the last two people left on earth.”

Page stopped running suddenly and crossed zigzaggedly over the highway line and sat down on the curb. The cars whizzed by below us, shaking the rickety foundation. “My heart is fluttering weirdly,” she said.

I sat down next to her. I put two fingers on her wrist. “I can’t get a pulse.”

“It’s okay. I don’t think I have one. I’ve never been able to find it.”

“Put your head between your legs,” I said. She sat with her head between her herringbone leg warmers, her lovely red-brown hair falling onto her running shoes. “I’m okay,” she said in a muffled voice. “I just don’t want to die alone.”

“What?”

There was a stifled sigh. “I’m
fine.
I’ve been thinking about the future. I don’t have kids and I won’t have kids—I doubt if I’ll ever marry and all that’s the way I want it. I just don’t want to die all by myself.”

She pulled her head up and looked at me. Her eyes were bright brown. “Would you promise, Digby, to sit by my bedside when I’m dying?”

I took her hand in mine. “Page. What are you talking about? Why do I think that this has got something to do with Dresden Bostec?”

Dresden Bostec was a very young eighty-two. She visited the SIS office regularly with terrible-tasting home-baked pies and peckish moral support. Her older sister had been a suffragette, and she loved to talk about the Cause. She wore a coolie hat and smoked Camels. (“Hi, kids, I’m here to take the
suffer
out of
suffragette!”
)

Once when she was in her seventies, Dresden Bostec had been hospitalized and told that she was dying. “And I thought I
was,
honey,” she’d holler at anybody who was listening. She was lying in a bed alone in a hospital room, watching her life go by on the ceiling, and she pulled herself up and buzzed for a nurse. When the nurse came, she asked to hold her hand while she died, because, as she said, “there appears to be nobody else right now.” The nurse took her hand and sat for a while. Dresden felt life draining from her and held tight. Then the nurse looked at her watch, told Dresden she had coffee break at six thirty. Dresden pulled her hand away and hoisted herself up. She peered at the nurse’s watch; it said ten minutes after six. “I’ve decided not to die yet,” she told the nurse. “I was too pissed off,” she would confide later to her listeners. “Honey, I absolutely refused to croak just in time for her Sanka!”

Dresden lived on, but the deathbed scene did tend to stay with one. To have to grope hopelessly for a comforting hand at the end of the escalator was too cruel.

Page shrugged at me. “I’d ask Dresden, but she might be busy baking something that day.” She sighed. “Or
worse,
she might
bring
me one of her pies in the hospital! I’m okay now,” she said a little sheepishly. “This body is made of tensile steel.”

I took her hand.

“I will write you a letter,” I said. “A formal commitment signed, sealed, delivered. Saying that I will be by your side to take your hand on that sorry day.”

She made a face at me, but she didn’t take her hand away. “Thanks, Digby.”

“Unless, dear pal,” I said, “I’ve gone on
ahead.”

DEAR IRIS,

I know what you mean. I suppose it was inevitable, though, that Danny was sent to Brookheart for psychiatric observation. I think it’s kind of encouraging that you’re taking Classical Ballroom Dancing and Low Impact Aerobics together. And I’m positive that he is not the one who’s smearing the Balm on the sanitary napkins. That sounds more like Dr. Bush.

As for me—well, ever since That Night, I’ve fallen asleep early in the evening and slept dreamlessly for ten, eleven, sometimes twelve hours. It’s as if I’d satisfied my nightmare quota for the next thirty years. I get to sleep easy—no debts, no terrors. No more dreams of guns or babies. I still talk to Lily, but that’s different. It’s like you talking to God—she guides me.

Yes, Terence is still around and I’ve conveyed to him your desire for another photograph. And yes, I did notice that he looked at you with “stars in his eyes.” Who wouldn’t? He is being very solicitous to me too—he is still thankful that I am alive (as opposed to being, say, Republican), and therefore we are getting along well. He is feeling better himself. Have you ever noticed that physical threats to the loved one always quicken ardor? I think it’s because there is a stand-in for one’s own desire to maim or kill the loved one, thereby clearing the stage for protestations of devotion. I refer to the state that Terence and I are presently in as NYD, Not Yet Divorced. I prefer that description to, say, “desperately in love” or “inseparable” or “terminally gaga.” If we can stay NYD for maybe two or three more years, I’ll register my china pattern at Bloomingdale’s. We are, in fact, living together and even discussing the act of procreation together, since that
is
what the Holy Father says sex is for. Oh, well, I can’t fool you. Maybe we will stay together. Maybe we will have a kid one day. “Climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly!”

And there’s more news on the SIS front. Minnie W-W-G has changed her name to Solange. Just
one
name. No more hyphens, no more abbreviates. Just plain old Solange. The reason she changed her name is because she just broke off her engagement with a recalcitrant hyphenate.

Other SIS news: Bob Hargill so far has
not
sued me—in light of my now-somewhat-justified reasons for carrying a .38—but he has held a press conference, in which he accused me and W.I.T.C.H. of “urban terrorism.” He has correctly identified W.I.T.C.H.’s intent as “invasion of privacy” and asked the city to “deal harshly” with any further such invasions. He has asked me for a public apology, which I intend to give him in a press conference of my own. W.I.T.C.H. has kindly engaged the services of a “hair reconstructionist,” who will appear with me at the press conference and offer timely information to Bob (with visual aids) on his personal cosmetic (read Dome Shag) problem.

Needless to say, I have been inundated with letters, running about sixty-forty pro and con my new column. Holly has given me the okay to continue, at least for now. I finally met Dino Pedrelli, who showed up to shake my hand the other day—and to offer his services as a bodyguard. Since he’s about four eleven with bifocals, I didn’t leap at the opportunity—though he did point out to me that he owns a huge silver whistle that he uses to rout muggers, as well as to attract the attention of headwaiters, cabdrivers, and as he puts it, “people who are ignoring” him.

Yes, I was subpoenaed to testify in the Brookheart hearings, as expected. We’ll probably be on the stand together. What they keep asking me is what made me answer your letter in the first place. Why wouldn’t I? Everyone who writes to me expects to have an answer. Are we not supposed to answer people who say outrageous, outspoken things? No, we’re not, we’re supposed to all sound alike, all write alike, all make love alike. I promise not to preach—but what do you think about wearing matching plaid bloomers and gilt wedgies to court?
Women’s Wear Daily
might be there, you never know.

As I said in response to a rather harshly worded inquiry of Page’s yesterday: Yes, I probably will always talk like an asshole, thereby pissing people off, and that’s just what makes this country great, isn’t it?

One
certainty: no more guns in my life, ever. In fact, I intend to do all I can to defeat that legalized vigilante lobby, the National Rifle Association. Those jerks should be lined up and shot!

No, I will never leave SIS; I love it. And I may never leave Terence, since one great consolation in being involved with an actor is that the odds of his being in Madagascar on Monday are so much greater than in the average relationship.

I will be up to see you on Friday. I’ll bring some more textbook Delusions and you can keep springing them on Bush. So far he’s missed Sock Fetish, trichotillomania, and cyclothymia.

Terence and I (on the nights I’m not catching up on my sleep) have had a few forays into the glittering potholes of Manhattan night life. So far, though, I cannot (unlike the swallows) go back to Capistrano.

Write again soon,

WJD

P.S. Dear Iris,

The above is
not
the letter I meant to write. I wanted to write you a letter that explained my feelings for you—how I love you and how grateful I am to you.

It was a foggy day in New York City yesterday and I took a long walk. I love it when the edges of this sharp, clear city blur a little, when fog washes over the buildings like a white wave, when people emerge from the subways like phantoms. I walked along the East River—you couldn’t see across it, which was nice. I felt safe, in a cocoon, carefully bandaged. I was afraid to take a deep breath, the way people with broken ribs are afraid to. Two people who are dead, gravely wounded by me, forgave me. They reached across time, touched me through time. At last I can bury my father, I can bless him as he has blessed me, and let him go, his daughter. I can bury Matthew Kallam, who all these years I thought I’d killed, whose ghost was as much a part of me as the blood in my veins. There’s no particular comfort in knowing it wasn’t
my
bullet that stopped his heart, because at that time I hated him and wanted him to die,
more
than Danny, but there’s solace in seeing now how all our feelings in that tent that night were an accident, and how guns are designed to make the gunner feel nothing. Now I can feel something for that dead boy and for that little girl in hunting clothes, who sat beside his body, rocking back and forth in total silence as the fathers rushed in and the doctor … who said nothing about that night for twenty some years.
Mercy,
for us, and for Danny, mercy. Mercy for the little ghost who slipped from my womb, Lily, whom I still talk to—perhaps wrongly. Because that being was not Lily, it was a dreamer, a wanderer, not meant to quicken and be born. Mercy took her back into her great implausible ocean, where we all began, untouched. Well, another great thing about fog is that it’s easier to walk around and cry in it. In fact, you can wail in it and who knows the difference.

My mother called and told me that she’s going back to Carmel, where she’s merely known as a bad painter and not the mother of a freak. Okay, okay. She
didn’t
say that. What she said was, “I love you, honey, but you’re just a little too weird for me.” Which is fine because I know how she feels. I think I always knew I was a little too weird for her. I have been too weird for myself at times, but you’ve helped me shake hands with my strangeness.

I hope that this doesn’t offend you but it does cheer me to know that you and Danny are in the same place. I think of you (forgive me) as a kind of late-life marriage, both injured (as
you
said) beyond repair, but kind,
kind
to each other.

I think of you as one of Van Gogh’s “Irises,” painted at the end, in a so-called laughing academy—painted among madmen, the gnarled, royal faces of the flowers, and one white, one pure white. Dear one. I will visit soon.

Love,

Fog

SPECIAL TO THE
New York Mirror
—The State District Attorney’s office suffered a setback in its upcoming patient abuse case against employees of the Brookheart State Hospital when a key prosecution witness, Ms. Iris Moss, thirty-five, a Brookheart resident for nineteen years, died earlier, today.

Ms. Moss was a victim of congestive heart failure, believed to have been caused by a pulmonary embolism, and succumbed at 6:00
A.M.
EST in the intensive care unit of St. Philomena’s Hospital, Badger Falls, New York.

Ms. Moss, who sustained second and third-degree burns over 80 percent of her body as a childhood survivor of a fire that killed her mother, lived with dramatic physical and mental impairment as a result of burn trauma.

Throughout her life, she underwent regular extensive skin grafts (including painful scalp grafts, which never entirely healed). Her right hand and forearm were amputated, and she developed secondary pathologic conditions that included speech, neurologic and vision disorders, seizures, renal dysfunction, and chronic respiratory disease. She was also plagued by phlebitis (caused by periods of inactivity), and there is speculation, prior to the coroner’s report, that a phlebitis attack precipitated the fatal embolism.

Despite her physical disorders, Ms. Moss was an active, outspoken member of the Brookheart community, President of the Patient’s Rights Committee, member of the hospital’s patient-staff liaison committee, President of the Brookheart David Letterman Fan Club, and chapter member of the Let’s Stop Mr. Rogers Now Society.

She was an avid letter writer and it was her correspondence with a SISTERHOOD magazine editor that provided grounds for initial inquiry into staff conduct at Brookheart.

Ms. Moss, who was hospitalized in her early teens at Brookheart for minor personality disorders related to her various neurologic complaints, managed to overcome physical and mental adversities with an aggressively positive self-image. Attorneys in the D.A.’s office described her as “articulate, stubborn, opinionated, profoundly energetic.”

The Brookheart hearings, scheduled for next week, will gain notoriety from prosecution plans to put several members of the Brookheart patient population on the witness stand. Ms. Moss’s was to have been the central testimony in the hearings.

Funeral arrangements for Ms. Moss have not yet been set. There are no survivors.