Florence Gordon (18 page)

Of course she was leaving him. Of course she was running off with the grit investigator. She was leaving him because he’d never really become himself. The grit enthusiast—that’s who it was, of course: it had to be Lev—as pudgy and unimpressive as he’d seemed at a glance, was at least
himself,
thoroughly and unapologetically himself, and though Daniel could undoubtedly knock his teeth out if he wanted to, the plump psychologist’s comfort in his own skin made him the better man.

He wanted to feel good old-fashioned fury. He wanted to be the kind of guy who might be tempted to kill the ice-cream-eating sage, and kill Janine in the bargain, maybe. But that wasn’t, it turned out, who he was.

He was crossing into Riverside Park. He saw each stranger with a kind of double vision. He wanted to stop them all and cry on their shoulders, but at the same time he was scanning them all for suspicious behavior. Apparently he
was
a cop.

If you cultivate a set of habits long enough, they become second nature, and then they remake you. Maybe he was no more a fraud than anyone else.

Life was confusing.

His cell phone vibrated. It was Janine, calling to say that she’d almost made a terrible mistake, but had suddenly come to her senses, and wanted him to know that what the two of them had together was the most important thing in her life.

No. It wasn’t Janine. It was his mother. He let it go to voice mail.

Thank God Emily was away for the weekend. He could just go back to the apartment and collapse.

What was Janine
doing
? Why was she doing this?

He realized that he hadn’t yet wondered what was on her mind. This gave him another reason to feel bad: the thought of how selfish he was. He’d been thinking only about himself and the question of whether he was a fraud and the question of whether he was unlovable. But what was it like for
her
? What was she going through? What did she need that he hadn’t given her?

It shouldn’t have been that surprising that his wife was having an affair. She’d been restless. She’d been dissatisfied. Wasn’t that what all the Internet crap was about? All the Facebook bullshit, all the time spent friending people and bookmarking people’s tweets, or whatever the hell she was doing online all the time. If you’re in love with your life, you’re not spending time worrying about how many “friends” you have on Facebook.

He was feeling sick to his stomach. He wanted to vomit. The only thing that kept him from vomiting was the fact that he’d always hated it in movies when people vomited in reaction to upsetting news. It always seemed so phony. So he was damned if he was going to vomit now.

But he was feeling worse and worse. A pain that went from his stomach all the way up to his jaw.

He started to wonder if he was having a heart attack.

You’re not having a heart attack. You’re just freaking out.

But how could he be sure he wasn’t having a heart attack?

He’d had a friend who’d just dropped dead one day, with no warning, at the age of forty-five. Maybe that was happening to him, here, now. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

No, he thought. I’m not ready. I don’t want to miss everything. I’m not ready to go.

You’re not having a heart attack. Don’t be fucking silly. You’re not having a heart attack.

With a clownish fastidiousness, with a degree of considerateness that even he found absurd, he felt as if he were exhibiting bad manners: having a heart attack and upstaging Janine, on what might—who knows?—have been the happiest day of her life.

He had no reason to think that it was the happiest day of her life, happier than any of the days she’d spent with him, but jealousy tends toward self-debasement.

He tried to focus. If I
am
having a heart attack, what should I do?

It was a warm, calm day. The park was filled with gorgeous people—beautiful long-legged girls, hunky boys with their shirts off—and none of them would ever die, and none of them would help him.

I should call someone, he thought, but who? He couldn’t call Janine. He didn’t want to call Emily. He knew that if he needed her, she’d rush back to help him, but he didn’t want to lay that kind of burden on her. His son—ach. Forget it. Even if Mark had been nearby, the thought of Mark’s being any use was laughable.

He didn’t want to call his mother, because he knew she was working hard on her memoir, and he didn’t want to ask her to take time off from her work.

His father? If he called Saul for help and Saul met him in the hospital, the first thing Saul would do would be to ask for reimbursement for the subway ride.

He had a few old friends left in the city, but no one he would want to trouble with this.

He was burning from his stomach to his chin. He kept thinking that this faux heart attack would pass, but with every minute it seemed a little less faux.

He should go to a hospital. He had no idea which.

I finally found a decent reason to have a fucking iPhone, he thought. If I had a fucking iPhone, I could just search for “best emergency rooms NYC.”

He thought of finding a cop and asking him where to go, because there was a fraternity among cops, a brotherhood of the blue, but on the other hand, there wasn’t a cop anywhere in New York who would regard a cop from Seattle as a real cop. There was no brotherhood of the blue.

He left the park and took a cab to Roosevelt Hospital. During the ride he tried to reach Janine with a psychic message. Call me. Stop whatever you’re doing and call me. Don’t go away this weekend. Stay.

As the cab was crossing over to Tenth Avenue his phone went off again, and again it was Florence, and again he let it go to voice mail.

In the emergency room, after he told them he was having chest pains, they went to work fast. A male nurse took him to a little makeshift room, where he was separated by dull gray curtains from a coughing old man on one side and a retching kid on the other. He couldn’t see either of them but it was as if he could. It struck him as strange that you could tell how old people were without seeing them, and then he wondered whether the fact that this struck him as strange meant that his mind wasn’t right. Would this seem strange to me on a normal day? He didn’t know.

Everybody was speaking Spanish. Daniel couldn’t understand much. He was given an EKG, and then he was hooked up to a blood-pressure monitor and a blood-oxygen monitor, and then they ran an IV tube into his arm.

He was trying to stay calm, by means of paying an almost detached attention to the details of his treatment. He noted with approval that the team that was treating him was adhering in a methodical way to a checklist. It was good to know that he was in the hands of competent professionals.

Then he was alone. His emotions were repeating in a tight little loop. For a minute he was nothing but embarrassed. This wasn’t a heart attack; it was fear confusion grief panic bewilderment rage. His mind was going crazy so his body was going crazy too. In the next minute he admitted to himself that this pain was like nothing he had felt before.

He had a pen in his jacket, which was draped over a chair near the bed. He asked an aide if she could find some paper, and she came back with two bright-blue sheets. He began a letter to his wife.

My darling. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I have a spooky feeling. I don’t want to go without telling you what I hope you already know: you’re the love of my life, and you’ve always been the love of my life. I’ve always loved you and I’ve always been in love with you. Loving you has been my life’s great adventure.

Do you remember that night when we were kids and we went up to the top of the Empire State Building and all the lights of the city were around us, and you said that no matter how big and fantastic it all was, what we had with each other was even bigger and more fantastic? I felt that, and I feel that, and I feel that, and I feel that, and I always, my darling, will.

On the second sheet he wrote,
To my dear children,
and then realized that he didn’t want to write to them both at once, but before he could write anything more, the curtains parted and a doctor, frizzy-haired, fortyish, walked in. She looked schlumpy, in a friendly, human way.

“I’m Dr. Sam,” she said. “What’s the trouble with this one?”

She was looking at her clipboard, talking to herself.

“Seattle Police. Far from home.” She looked at him for the first time. She put the clipboard down and put her stethoscope against his chest. “What are you doing in the Big Apple, fella? Chasing down a fugitive?”

“Right,” Daniel said. “Tracking down a fugitive. Visiting my mother too.”

“It’s always good to visit your mother,” the doctor said. “On the other hand, not if it sends you to the emergency room. Maybe you should have stayed in Seattle.”

“Maybe so. But this is probably indigestion. Don’t you think?”

He was feeling suddenly better. He was feeling rather mellow, in fact.

They must have given him something when they’d hooked him up to the IV—Valium, maybe?—because he was feeling much more mellow than he had any right to feel, under the circumstances.

“Well, could be,” said the doctor, scribbling something on the paper on the clipboard. “Could be a lot of things. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

She was still writing. It went on for a while.

“What the hell are you writing?” he said.

“I’m writing my memoirs. Don’t worry. Nothing about you.”

On a TV somewhere nearby, Bill O’Reilly was doing his blowhard thing, shouting at one of his guests.

“Can somebody turn that bullshit off?” Daniel said.

“What?”

“Fox News. Right-wing bastards.”

“A white male officer of the law who doesn’t like Fox News. This gets stranger and stranger. Well, I agree with you about their politics, but we’ve got to give the people what they want. When we tried putting it on CNN—hello!”

Evidently she’d noticed something on one of his monitors, and then he felt a spike in his chest that was stronger and sharper than anything he’d felt so far. It was like a feeling that
wanted
something, if that made sense.

The doctor and some nurses were in action around him; he didn’t know where the nurses had come from, but one of them was pretty, so that was something, that was something he could use to take his mind off whatever it was that was killing him. Was something killing him? Was he dying? Am I dying? He wanted to ask somebody—the frizzy doctor, the pretty nurse—to tell Janine that he loved her, Janine and Emily and Mark, but talking would be too much of a strain. Maybe they’d given him too much pacifier—pacifier? Was that the word?—and maybe he was dying; all he knew was that he was shutting down. He knew he was going under, and he didn’t know whether he’d come back up again. He put his wife and daughter and son at the center of his mind, and as the wave of something sweet and soft came up, he tried to hold fast to the thought of them. He wanted his last thought to be love.

Janine was in her bathroom in the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, shaving her legs.

The situation was too complicated to be borne. She was going to the conference center next door to attend a panel discussion about the psychology of impulse control in adolescents, and then she was going to sleep with a man she shouldn’t sleep with.

I should write a paper, she thought. The role of the impulsive self versus the rational self in the planning of extramarital affairs.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shaved her legs for Daniel. Yet here she was, shaving her legs for Santa.

Damn it, Emily, get out of my head!

She wasn’t thinking about Daniel that much, but she couldn’t stop thinking about her children. What would Emily think? What would Mark think?

What would it
matter
what they’d think? They were her
children.
There was nothing relevant about what they’d think about her having illicit sex with Santa. The thought of her having lawful wedded sex with
Daniel
would gross them out.

If she’d been trying to have an affair ten years ago, it would have been impossible, because, while slipping illicitly into bed, she would have been worrying about whether there was enough peanut butter left to make lunch for the kids the next day. You can’t have an affair in that condition. You have to wait till the kids are grown.

But one of the reasons it had always been so glorious to make love with Daniel was that everyday concerns didn’t deflate the experience, because the experience of making love with him included everything. From her highest erotic and spiritual longings to the question of whether she’d remembered to buy peanut butter, everything in the world was in that bed.

Why had it ended? Why hadn’t it remained?

She went to the window. Her room looked out on Greater Pittsburgh, if there was such a thing.

Pittsburgh, however wimpy it was, however terribly it had been laid to waste by an uncaring capitalism, was a city, and she could never fail to be thrilled by the lights of a city in the evening.

It would have been nice to share this with Daniel.

If only Daniel would
talk
! If only he would dance! If only he would willingly
do
things with her—go to museums or shows or karaoke bars, go hiking or bicycling or swimming or ice-skating. He would do these things, but never willingly. He didn’t do anything willingly except read and have sex and go to the movies. Anything else and it was a smiling “Believe me, darling, I won’t do that.” It was funny, but sometimes it made her want to brain him.

She didn’t know what she wanted. Here she was, in the heart of Pittsburgh, that hotbed of sexual transgression, and she didn’t know what she wanted. The thought made her so disconsolate that she forgot to finish shaving her legs.

In the morning he discovered that he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t remember being transferred, but he was in a regular room now. He was still hooked up to an IV pole; he still had a blood-pressure cuff on his arm and a blood-oxygen clip on his index finger.