Nude Men (28 page)

“Why?”

“Because when the doctor says sorry oops, I will cry. Sara should not see anyone cry about her death. You will not cry.”

“I might.”

“I don’t know if you’re saying that because you think it’s nice or if you truly believe it. But I know you will not cry. You don’t care enough about her.”

There are many things I want to answer to that, but as each one enters my mind, I don’t utter it. We sit in silence, so the parrot whispers, “Is it time yet?” (He knows how to whisper.) “Time for what?” asks Henrietta, feigning ignorance.

“Is it time for the death and dying of the yet yet?”

The parrot sometimes startles us with complex sentences. “It’s not funny,” says Henrietta to the parrot.

“The yet yet?” says the parrot.

“No, death.”

“Death! Death!” shrieks the parrot, flapping his wings, excited at hearing someone other than himself mention his word.

Henrietta squeezes his head with her thumb and forefinger, which always makes him stop. “I want to love him,” she says, “but he makes it very difficult.”

The parrot calms down and goes back to purring loudly.

“I do care about her,” I finally say. “But a lot of things have happened.”

“Therefore you will not cry.”

“I might not,” I concede, but I don’t bother trying to convince her that it’s not because I don’t care about Sara but because I feel as though I have cried out all the tears in my body.

P
eople start to clap when she’s walking down the street.

I
take Sara to the specialist. She smells rotten. The fruit in her, which previously produced the sweet smell, has rotted. She is past due. The key was to die before the fruit rotted. Poor Sara. I can smell it. It comes out in her breath when she talks.

The doctor tests Sara and then tells us the test was successful, and that therefore there is a possible cure, with a fifty percent chance of success. I look at Sara. She looks at me, her eyes wide. We simultaneously get up from our chairs and hug each other.

“Will my beard go away?” Sara asks the doctor, while we’re still hugging.

“Yes,” he answers.

“The stubble and everything?”

“Yes. You will be exactly as before.”

We talk to the doctor some more. I am frisky, fidgeting, and wagging my tad. Once everything has been said, the cure is given to us in a little bottle, and Sara and I decide to go eat some ice cream in the coffee shop across the street. Walking out of the doctor’s office, we talk excitedly to each other, about Sara’s possible future, about things she’d like to do if she lives, except that she doesn’t say “if,” she says
when
she lives.

In the hallway, she flips her coin in the air and catches it over and over again, absentmindedly, just for fun. “Now I can
really
flip the coin to see if I’ll live or die,” she says. “It really
is
a fifty percent chance now.” But she doesn’t look at the coin when it lands.

While we wait for the elevator, she says, “I suddenly have a very strong craving for pear ice cream. Why don’t they make pear ice cream?”

Outside, she says, “When I live” (notice the “when”) “do you think there’s a chance you could ever love me, in a few years?”

“I don’t know. We shouldn’t think of that now.”

“Tell me, Jeremeee,” she says, yanking my arm. “Like when I’m seventeen and you’re thirty-five, or, if that’s still too young, when I’m eighteen and you’re thirty-six?”

I don’t answer, hoping she’ll change the subject.

“So, do you think? Why not, huh?”

I am trying to think of a reply. I must call Lady Henrietta to tell her about the incredible fifty percent news, which will make her ecstatic. I will call her as soon as we get to the coffee shop, which is right across the street we are now crossing.

“Tell
me!
” She yanks my arm on “me.”

I laugh, a bit exhausted. We are now crossing it, that street across which the ice cream is and, more important, the phone is also.

“Jeremy, I’m
se
rious. Don’t you think you could ever be in love with me? I love you.” Sara is holding my hand but lagging behind me, making me pull her a bit as she dreams about her fifty percent chance of a future, which is now, suddenly, yanked away from her by the same car that yanks her hand out of mine.

Sara gets hit by a car and dies. That’s in other words. Run over by it. Instantly. Without suffering. Her body twitches.

I am screaming. Everybody is screaming and crying. Sara is silent. There is blood everywhere, except on the little white elephant that is gleaming up at me, spotless, from Sara’s neck. So familiar. So disconcerting.

The doctor—the specialist—is now in the street, and he pronounces Sara dead.

As I bend down over her, a voice inside me repeats: “Oh really? Oh really, Fate, oh, really?” I am bending down over her, confused. Something went wrong. I don’t get it. It’s like reading a novel, and something happens, and you weren’t paying attention for a moment, and suddenly you don’t understand what’s going on anymore. I go back over the events I have just lived, to figure out if there’s a logical link, you know, cause and effect, or anything similar. The visit to the doctor, the news that she may get well, the happiness and plans for the future, the decision to get ice cream, exiting the budding, Sara’s question, the crossing of the street, Sara’s question again, the yellow car driving right into her. I get it: There’s nothing to get.

Sara’s fist is clenched. I unclench it. In her palm lies the coin. I take it and dig my fingernail into it, hoping to hurt it, before putting it in my pocket.

Sara’s dead eyes are open, aimed at the sky. Although they are not aimed at me, she is looking at me out of the corner of her eye, I know. “I’m serious, Jeremy. So, do you think?” she does not say, but her eyes are still demanding the answer from me. She still wants to know, even now.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, holding her hand. “When you’re eighteen and I’m thirty-six. It’s a possibility.”

Now the voice in my head is repeating something else: “You didn’t even brake. You didn’t even brake,” over and over again. I go up to the woman of the yellow car, who is crying.

The interrogation:

“You didn’t even brake,” I tell her. She just stares at me startled, so I say, “Why did you hit her?”

“It was my fault,” she says. “I wasn’t looking.”

“What were you looking at?” I ask, sensing that this question is tremendously important and that its answer will help me understand everything. “What were you looking at?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter?”

“It matters a lot. I
must
know what you were looking at.” She remains silent. Maybe she does not recall, because of the shock of the accident.

“Perhaps if you look back at the street,” I suggest, “you might remember what caught your eye.”

Finally, she says, “I didn’t forget.”

“So you know.”

But she does not say more.

I try to reassure her: “Don’t feel bad about telling me. I know that whatever you were looking at, it was probably a stupid thing to look at. Anything would be stupid when it kills someone.”

“I saw a man in a second-floor window.”

“And?”

“He was not dressed.”

“Not at all?”

“No.”

She means he was nude.

She goes on: “He was watching something outside, very intently. I was curious to see what he was looking at, so I looked.”

“What was it?”

“Just a bird perched on a lamppost. The man must have been staring at it because it was blue, which is sort of uncommon for Manhattan. I’m sorry.”

How relevant to my life. I can imagine that this woman of the yellow car must be ashamed that such a stupid, stupid thing has killed my daughter (I say daughter because that’s who the woman must think Sara was). Well, it wasn’t
our
parrot who did it. No parrot of mine. No parrot of Sara’s. The parrot was part of Sara. Accusing the parrot is like saying she killed herself.

As for the nude man, of course, I would have preferred it if the woman had been looking at a bald man. Then I could hate bald men, not nude men, which would be more tolerable emotionally because I have a lot of hair, whereas I am the type of man who is not almost never naked anymore.

Well, that should certainly please people who think nude men brought on all the misery and insanity in this poor little girl’s life, you moralist shits. They even killed her.
Nudity is dangerous,
you’re gloating.
I told you so,
you’re gloating.
When little girls do naughty things, they get punished.
Very good turn of events indeed!

“Where were you going?” I ask the woman of the yellow car.

“To the veterinarian.”

I glance inside her car. There’s a dog in a box.

“Is it sick?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Is there a cure?”

“No.”

“So why were you going to the doctor?”

“To have him put to sleep.”

“I had a dying pet, and I would never have put it to sleep.”

“What animal was it?”

A little girl, I realize, is what I’m talking about. I’m about to tell her she should get fishes, but change my mind. Fishes die more easily than anything else in the world.

* * *

T
he ambulance comes. It takes Sara. I ride in it too. And the doctor comes also. He wants to help me in case I don’t feel well mentally or emotionally.

In the ambulance, I shout to the doctor, above the screaming siren: “Don’t tell her mother there was any hope, okay? Tell her there was no hope.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Now I am screaming, not just because of the noise but out of anger: “No, you must tell her there wasn’t any hope. Tell her there was no hope at all and that Sara was going to suffer terribly from her brain tumor,
okay?"

“I won’t call Sara’s mother, but if she calls me, I won’t lie to her either. She deserves to know the truth.”

A
t the hospital, I call Lady Henrietta.

‘‘That took long” is the first thing she says when she answers the phone. Then, almost breathless, she asks, “Is there any hope?”

“No.”

Silence. And then she says, very softly, “You see, I knew it.”

“Yes, I know.”

I hear her crying. And then she says, “Well, come home. It’s getting late.”

I am silent now. I want to say “okay.” It is on the tip of my tongue. I can hear it in the air, already.

“Okay?” she says. “Can you please bring Sara home now?”

“No.”

“Why not?” she asks, annoyed and curious, not at all alarmed, because people who are dying of a disease simply don’t die, on top of it, of an accident.

“You should turn on your tape recorder,” I tell her.

“It’s already on.”

“You should come to the hospital. There was an accident. It’s Sara.”

I tell her that her daughter is already dead.

Not only is there no hope, but your daughter is already dead.

I
am appalled by the parrot, who, as soon as we return to the apartment from the hospital, says, “Is it time yet?”

I am surprised that Lady Henrietta, very seriously, answers the parrot: “Yes, it happened. She’s dead.”

“And yet? And yet?” says the poor dumb parrot, as though mocking her answer. He raves on a bit: “Is it almost time yet? Death and dying?”

T
he parrot didn’t kill Sara. What nonsense. It was the street. Nude men and that street were responsible. No parrot of mine. No parrot of Sara’s. I take the parrot’s droppings and deposit them on the street where the accident happened, to punish the street.

I
feel as though I have been a spectator at a circus, and now the show is over. There was a talking parrot who belonged to a bearded lady who wore a dress the color of the sun, flew through the air on a hang glider, flipped coins, and killed fishes (cruelty to animals). It was a grotesque show with strong smells, blinding colors, and loud noises. Come to think of it, I was not only a spectator, I was also a performer: the elephant master. And I messed up the show. The elephant disobeyed me and trampled on the bearded lady.

O
ne night I have a strange dream, or rather a nightmare. I dream that Lady Henrietta and I are at the doctor’s office, and the doctor—Sara’s original doctor—is telling us that Sara did not die of an accident.