Ending (13 page)

We laughed and then Jerry told a funny story made even better by its intimate references to famous people. Martin’s father laughed and sputtered and choked and his wife had to slap his back. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “He loves you on the TV too.”

We could hear the visitors’ bell chiming in the hall. “Five minutes,” called the nurse. “Five minutes.”

Jerry stood up first. His hand came out and grasped Jay’s. “Okay, Boy. You have to get well now. They’re shooting my bad nostril. You hear?” He was perspiring and his face was pale. His wife arranged her fur around her shoulders and he looked at her with an urgent expression.

“Good night, all,” she piped through her nose.

Jay thanked them for coming. Jerry kissed me and his flesh was damp and chilled. “Do you need a ride?” I shook my head and he said, “Take care,” and grasping his wife’s elbow, he steered her toward the door, as Martin’s father rushed to reopen it. Good-bye Good-bye. They waved to him and called after him as if he were leaving on a long voyage and would not be seen again on the same channel at the same time on the very next night.

I had become terribly aware of the car now as something large and hulking and patient waiting for me in the parking lot of the hospital. The vehicle that took me to Jay, that took me home again. I could hear the sound of its engine in traffic with the talent of a new mother who hears her own baby in the chorus of squalls from the nursery. It was a particular car, ours, with scars and odors and idiosyncrasies that humanized it.

Old friend, I thought, as I closed the door, encapsulated against the night. But then, riding home, I stopped for a traffic light on a street as empty and still as a Sunday street in a Hopper painting, and the engine moaned and coughed and was silent. A small red warning light on the dashboard glowed and went out. The radio stopped, and the heater. I waited, half expecting that the car would begin again of its own accord. Then I shifted to neutral and pressed the gas pedal tentatively. Silence. This time I pressed more urgently, pumping my foot, thinking vague thoughts about flooding the engine, remembering words like carburetor and points and spark plugs, words heard from the passenger seat as Jay and a mechanic stood and talked in sunlight, patting the hood from time to time as if it were the flank of a beloved horse. I was not even sure if I could lift the hood (was there some intricate catch?) and would I know simply by looking if something had disconnected or burned or worn away? I stepped out into the starry winter night and looked at the car, hunched and quiet, containing its mysteries. I kicked at a tire and rapped my knuckles on the roof.

There were a few stores on the street, serving the immediate neighborhood, and they were closed and dark. There were several houses, but only three had lights visible behind the drawn shades. I would have to knock on one of the doors and explain what had happened. I would ask to use the telephone to call for service on the car, and a taxi to take me home. Yet I didn’t, stopped somehow by the idea of disturbing the privacy of those homes, where families were involved in the simple and yet complex business of their lives. Taking baths or reading the newspaper, eating leftovers with their fingers from plastic containers in the refrigerator. I imagined children doing homework in kitchen light and someone laying out the cards for a game of solitaire.

In the distance I could hear the motors of other cars. Perhaps someone would drive down that particular street and see me, and offer to help. “Help,” I said softly, and the word dissolved in the air with the vapor of my breath.

What if someone dangerous came along? Boys, for instance, who would seem very nice at first, even deferential. Boys with pretty faces and cold leather jackets. “Can we help you, Ma’am?” Then slowly, in some tribal dance, they would surround me, chanting something in the new language of the streets. I wouldn’t know that I was threatened, even laughing at first—“Say, what’s going on?” Then knowing that it was hopeless, hearing the end of things in the soft thud of blows to the head, in the sounds of flesh tearing in the name of sex. “Help, help,” only whispered now, and the terrible clots of blood, tasting strangely like tears in the throat, and darkness and darkness and a new silence.

But it might be Francis, in his blue station wagon with empty cookie boxes on the seat, and a child’s shoe beneath it. Francis, shutting the motor off and opening the door like an invitation. “Well come on. Get in. Isn’t it lucky I just happened to be riding down this street? I’ve been thinking about you and your destiny and your loneliness and your husband and the soft pink nipples under that brown sweater. Now just get in and I’ll take you home or somewhere without lamplight and I’ll give you what you
really
need, never mind that metaphysical crap of spiritual love and loss. What you need, baby …”

Click, click, I would start to run along the street. His engine starting again with an explosive snort and the car alongside me with the door still swinging open.

“Get in.”

Me running in the slow-motion leaps and bounds of a dreamer.

“You whore. You teasing bitch.” The car, pacing me, a manager cruising alongside his panting fighter. “Are you getting in?”

But I would be exhilarated from running, from the transfusion of air, and I would begin to laugh, puffing and laughing at once, and the door of the car would bang shut and I would be left there, laughing and gasping in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

But I sober up fast, walk sedately now, because there is a vintage car, rounded and high, coming down the street. My father toots the horn at me, a playful honk (the way he honks at all the girls—no
harm
in it). My mother is sitting beside him and they are slimmer and very young with no ideas in their heads of ever growing older. My father toots a tune on the car’s horn: shave and a haircut—two bits! That’s appropriate. My mother slaps his arm and leans out the window. “Come home now, tootsie. It’s time for dinner and I’ll make something good with steam rising from it and the smell of butter and you can have your old room again and be our pride and joy.”

I stop and look inside that car, at the plaid seat covers and the dark polished gleam of my father’s hair. I don’t know if I want to go inside again, to go back and back and back. In a way it seems more terrifying than going ahead.

Then I don’t have to decide because another car is coming and the driver is Jay, and I think, thank God that everything is all right now, that all the horrors are only the dream and all the pleasures are the reality. Because Jay is ruddy and almost round-faced, and his hand is on the steering wheel and he’s laughing. He’s waiting for me, full of new seed and beauty, and tears come to my eyes because I’m so happy.

“Guess what, I had the most terrible dream. I can’t shake it and the essence lingers, but I can see that you’re all right and even immortal and we can go home together with your hand resting between my legs and I’ll keep touching you and looking at you because I can’t shake off this dream. It seemed so real, but I can’t tell you the details, they’re too painful. Well, all right, Jay. You were sick, oh, I won’t even use that word, you know what everybody fears, and it was such a long dream, made up of all the years of my life, it seemed. It was so real, with blood and bad smells and death rubbing its hands together like something in a monster movie. Jay, I’m so happy, I’m so happy.”

I began to weep, looking into the window of a shoe repair shop at a pair of nylon lifts for ladies’ shoes. I tried to read all the signs: While U Wait, Professional Work, We Fill Orthopedic Prescriptions. But then my head filled with Jay, and I cried and cried, the only sound on that quiet street.

Then a car came along, scanning the road with its headlights. It slowed as it drew alongside me and the window was rolled down. A woman said, “What’s the matter, are you broken down?”

I blew my nose and wiped my eyes before I walked closer. “Yes. I didn’t know what to do. I was just getting up the nerve to ask someone if I could use a telephone.”

There were several people in the car. The driver, a fat man with a tuxedo on under his overcoat, came out and lifted the hood of my car. “Battery?” he asked. I shrugged and he said, “Did she go on you suddenlike, or flicker out slow?”

“Suddenly.” Thinking, mercilessly, without friendship or loyalty.

“Got service?”

I nodded again.

He clucked, felt around under the hood, muttered. “Might be the hose here.” Then he closed the hood with a decisive slam. “Okay, we’ll leave a flare out here and take you someplace to make a call. Then we can drive you home.”

I told him that I didn’t live too far away, that I would call from home and just leave the key under the floor mat.

The car was so crowded that I hesitated, but a chorus of voices urged me in. “Come on. There’s always room for one more.” “Ooooh, you must be freezing!” “Move over, Roseanne. Vincent, sit on Auntie Grace.” There was a great shifting and rearranging and suddenly a space opened for me in the back seat. There was a powerful odor of flowers in the car.

“Do you smell the flowers?” asked the woman in the front seat. She held up an overflowing basket. “We’re just now coming from my niece’s wedding reception. What a time we had. Wasn’t it terrific, Vinnie?” she asked the driver, who had come back into the car again.

“Some party,” he agreed.

“This is my husband,” the woman said. “These two are my kids. That’s my sister-in-law back there with you, and her husband. This is my aunt.”

“How do you do?” I said, and the children looked at me shyly and giggled.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” the sister-in-law said. “I ate myself sick. Such food. You should have seen the Viennese table. It’s almost a sin.” She sighed happily.

“We’ll all see it on your waistline,” her husband said, and she jabbed absently at the side of his head. “Look who’s talking.”

It was warm inside the car. All that body heat, all that easy conversation. Life seemed so reasonable again, so sane.

“What a bride,” the old aunt said, in a deep voice. “She was like a movie star. The groom was very good-looking. Tall, long hair like the kids wear.”

“A sexy kid,” said the woman in the front seat “They really were a sexy couple.”

The old aunt laughed. “Today everything is sex.”

I laughed too, shutting my eyes.

“The bridesmaids wore pink, old-fashioned with big hats, you know, and roses. The color scheme was pink and white. Pink tablecloths, pink and white striped candles.”

“The way they do things today,” the aunt said.

Their voices droned on and on all the way home and I became a part of it, the lighthearted banter, the leftover joy. Then we came to my apartment house. I thanked them all. They shifted in their seats to shake hands and to wave good-bye. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. Then I opened the door and was expelled into the world again.

I looked up at the window of our apartment and I thought that I saw a shadow move slowly behind the curtains. Caspar on his night watch. But when I went upstairs and opened the door, I found him sitting at the kitchen table, contemplating his hands. “Hello,” I called out. “I’m home.”

That smile again. He rose from the chair quickly with an old-world gesture, almost a bow.

At the same time, I raised my hand. “No, don’t get up, please. We’ll have some coffee.”

But he moved to the stove where a pot of coffee was already waiting.

“How nice of you!” I reached into the cupboard for the mugs and brought them to the table. “I’m sorry that I’m so late. Car trouble. I had to leave it somewhere between here and the hospital. I’d better call the garage.”

The look on his face changed to one of concern. “But how …?”

“Easy,” I said, gesturing with my thumb. “I rode home in style with a wedding party.”

He was satisfied then. I telephoned the automobile service and told them the location of the car. Then we sat down and faced one another, hiding our eyes in the steam of the coffee. “Milk? Sugar?”

Silence. All these new dead moments in my life. Throat-clearing, ahem, ahem. Smile. Sip. Silence. “Jerry Mann showed up at the hospital tonight.”

“You mean the star? From the big show?”

“The same. He was the hit of the century. The blind could see again. The lame threw away their crutches.”

He didn’t know what to make of me. His head tilted to one side, the way a dog’s does when he expects a command.

“Listen, he’s really very nice. It was nice of him to come. Wow, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

“Of course. The trouble.”

“Yes.”

“You’re very brave.”

Not me, I thought.
I’m
going to live. And live. I sighed, nervous under his paternal gaze. His goodness seemed insufferable.

“So,” I said. “It’s very cold out.”

“I know. I could hear that wind. I had to cover the little one twice.”

“Yeah. He fights the blankets off as if they were enemies.”

“He talks in his sleep. Sounds only. I couldn’t understand the words.”

“He finishes the day’s work. Settles battles and restores himself as the hero.”

“Like everyone does in his dreams,” he said.

“I don’t dream anymore. I can only sleep a little while at a time. Like a sentry on duty.”

“You should take something.”

I nodded.

“Me too,” he said. “I stay up too. Sometimes the whole night. I hear the children next door wake up and I realize that I haven’t slept.”

I wondered what time Estrella came home. Did he have a pot of coffee waiting for her as well? Now, whenever I was awake in the middle of the night, I would imagine Mr. Caspar awake at the same time, looking out at the empty courtyard, listening for the hum of the elevator.

“Listen,” I said. “You were very good to stay with the boys. I appreciate it and they really love you.” Like a grandfather, I almost said, but stopped myself.

He waved away my thanks. “I should thank
you
,” he said. “Because you know sometimes I’m very lonely.”

I waited.

“My wife is a sick woman.”

“Yes.”

“I know that she’s the joke of the neighborhood. But she doesn’t even know it. She turns everything into admiration.”