The Dying Animal (11 page)

His age? George was fifty-five. A stroke. He had a stroke. I was there when he had it. So were some eight hundred others. It was at the Ninety-second Street Y. A Saturday night in September. He was about to give a reading. I was the one at the lectern introducing him. He was sitting in a chair just offstage, in the wings, enjoying my introduction and nodding approval. Stretched out in front of him, in his narrow mortician's suit, were those long, lean legs of his—pliable George, in his suit, was a wire coat-hanger of a hook-nosed black Irishman. Apparently he had the stroke while he was sitting there with his six books of verse stacked up in his lap, waiting to come on, in lugubrious black, and charm the bejesus out of the crowd. Because when the audience began to applaud and he went to get up, he just tumbled out of the chair and it fell on top of him. Casting his oeuvre all over the floor. The doctors never thought he'd leave the hospital. But he hung on there unconscious for a week, and then the family took him home to die.

He was mostly unconscious at home, too. His left side paralyzed. Vocal cords paralyzed. A big chunk of his brain, just blown. His son Tom's a physician, and he oversaw the dying, which required another nine days. Took him off the IV, removed the catheter, took him off everything. Whenever George opened his eyes, they propped him up and gave him water to sip and ice to suck on. Otherwise they kept him as comfortable as they could while he slipped away at an agonizingly slow pace.

Every afternoon, at the end of the day, I drove to Pelham to see him. George had sequestered the family in Pelham so that, during all those years when he was teaching at the New School, he could have a free hand in Manhattan. There were sometimes as many as five or six cars parked in the drive when I arrived. The children were there in shifts, sometimes with one or the other of the grandchildren. There was a nurse and, near the end, the hospice person. Kate, George's wife, was, of course, there round the clock. I'd go into the bedroom, where they'd installed a hospital bed, and I'd take his hand, the hand on the side where he could still feel something, and I'd sit with him for fifteen, twenty minutes, but he was always out of it. Heavy breathing. Moaning. The good leg twitching once in a while, but nothing more. Pass my hand over his hair, touch his cheek, squeeze his fingers, but no response. I sat there hoping that he might come around and recognize me, and then I drove home. Then one afternoon I showed up and they said it had happened—he was awake. Go in, go in, they said.

They had George propped up on pillows and the bed half raised. His daughter Betty was feeding him ice. She was cracking slivers of ice between her teeth and putting the broken little bits into his mouth. George was trying to chomp on them with the teeth on the side of his mouth that still worked. He looked far gone indeed,
so
thin, but his eyes were open, and there he was, employing all that remained of his concentration in order to chew that ice. Kate stood in the doorway watching him, an imposing white-haired woman nearly as tall as George, but bulkier than when I'd seen her last, and far wearier. Attractively roundish, wry, resilient, radiating a kind of stubborn heartiness—that was Kate well into her middle years. A woman never known to shrink from reality, who looked now completely worn down, as if she'd fought her last battle and lost.

Tom brought a wet washcloth from the bathroom. "Want to freshen up, Dad?" he said. "How much does he know?" I asked Tom. "How much does he understand?" "There are stretches," Tom said, "when he seems to know something. And then he doesn't." "How long has he been awake?" "About half an hour. Go over to him. Speak to him, David. He seems to enjoy the voices."

Enjoy? Strange word. But Tom, in all situations, is the jovial doctor. I came around to George's unparalyzed side while Tom was mopping his father's face with the wet washcloth. George took it from him—to everyone's surprise, reached out with his good hand, grabbed at the washcloth, got hold of it, and jammed it inside his mouth. "He's so dry," somebody said. George pushed the end of the washcloth around inside his mouth and began to suck on it. When he took it out, there was something adhering to it. Looked like a piece of his soft palate. Betty let out a gasp when she saw it there, and the hospice woman, who was in the room too, patted Betty's back and said, "It's nothing. His mouth is so dry—it's just a little flake of flesh."

His mouth was aslant, hanging open, that stricken-looking mouth of the dying, but his eyes were focused and there even appeared to be something back of them, something of George that hadn't yet given way. Like the wall left jaggedly standing after a bomb goes off. With the same angry force with which he'd grabbed the washcloth, he pulled down the sheet that was covering him and began to yank at the Velcro at the corner of his diaper, trying to pull the thing off, and revealing those sad sticks that had been his legs. When the tungsten filament inside a light bulb goes—that's what his legs reminded me of. Everything about him, everything fashioned of flesh and blood, reminded me of an inanimate something else. "No, no," Tom said, "let it be, Dad. It's fine." But George wouldn't stop. Pulling angrily, trying in vain to get out of the diaper. When that didn't work, he raised his hand and, kind of growling, pointed at Betty. "What?" she asked him. "I can't understand you. What do you want? What is it, sweetheart?" The noises he was emitting were indecipherable, but it was clear from his gestures that he wanted her to come as close as she could. When she did, he reached out, put his arm around onto her back, and pulled her forward so that he could kiss her mouth. "Oh yes, Daddy," she said, "yes, you are the best father, the very best." What was astonishing was this force welling up in him after all those days of lying there inert and emaciated, somehow hanging on while seemingly breathing his last—the considerable force with which he'd pulled Betty to him and with which he was trying to speak. Maybe, I thought, they shouldn't be letting him die. What if there's more left than they realize? What if that's what he's trying to demonstrate? What if instead of saying goodbye to them he's saying, "Don't let me go. Do everything you can to save me"?

Then George was pointing at me. "Hello, George," I said. "Hello, friend. It's David, George." And when I got close to him, he grabbed me the way he'd grabbed Betty and kissed
me
on the mouth. There was no necrotic smell, no sickish stink, no stench whatsoever: just the warm, odorless breath, the pure perfume of being, and the two parched lips. It was the first time George and I had ever kissed in our lives. Again the grunting and he was pointing now to Tom. To Tom and then to his own feet, which were uncovered at the end of the bed. When Tom, thinking George wanted the sheet pulled up over his legs, began to straighten the bedding, George grunted still louder and pointed again at his feet. "He wants you to hold them," Betty said. "One of them he can't even feel," Tom said. "Hold the other one," Betty said. "Okay, Dad, I've got it—I've got you." And Tom began patiently kneading the foot in which there was feeling.

Next George pointed to the doorway where Kate was standing, watching it all. "He wants you, Ma," Betty said. I moved aside and Kate came over and stood where I'd been, beside the bed, and George reached up for her now, and with his good arm pulled her toward him, and kissed her as forcefully as he'd kissed Betty and me. Kate kissed him back. Then they kissed again, a long kiss this time, a quite passionate kiss. Kate even closed her eyes. She's an exceedingly unsentimental, down-to-earth person, and I'd never before seen her do anything so girlish.

Meanwhile, George's good hand had moved from her back around to her right arm, and he began to fumble with the button at the wrist of her blouse. He was trying to undo it. "George," Kate whispered softly. She sounded amused. "Georgie, Georgie..." "Help him, Ma. He wants to open the button." Smiling at the instructions from the emotional daughter, Kate submitted and opened the button, but by then George was at the other sleeve, tugging at
that
button, so she obligingly undid it as well. And all this time he kept hungrily going for her lips. Kate caressed his ruined face, that immensely lonely, cavernous face, kissed his lips each time he offered them, and then his hand went up to the buttons at the front of her blouse and he began to fumble with those.

His plan was clear: he was trying to undress her. To undress this woman whom, as I knew, as the children surely knew, he had not touched in bed in years. Whom he barely any longer touched at all. "Let him, Ma," Betty said, and so Kate again did as her daughter told her. She reached up with her own hand and helped George undo the front of her blouse. This time when they kissed, his one good hand was grasping at the cloth of her large brassiere. But, abruptly, that was the end of it. The force went out of him just like that, and he never reached her pendulous breasts. He didn't die for another twelve hours, but when he fell back onto the pillows, his mouth agape, his eyes closed, breathing like one who's collapsed at the end of a race, we all knew that what we had witnessed was the last amazing act of George's life.

Later, when I went to the door to leave, Kate came out onto the front porch and continued with me down the drive to my car. She took my hands in hers and thanked me for coming. I said, "I was glad I was here to see all this." "Yes, that was something, wasn't it?" Kate said. And then with her weary smile she added, "I wonder who it is he thought I was."

So George was only five months gone, and when Consuela called and left her message—"I want to tell you something. And I want to tell it to you myself, before you hear it from someone"—well, as I said, I listened to the message thinking something had now happened to
her.
This kind of thing, a premonitory dream followed by its fulfillment, is uncanny enough
in
one's dreams, but in real life? I didn't know what to do. Should I call her back? I thought it over for fifteen minutes. I didn't call back because I was afraid to. Why does she phone me? What can it be? My life is untroubled and back in my hands. Have I the resilience for Consuela and her aggressive yielding? I am no longer sixty-two—I am seventy. Can I endure at this age that mania of uncertainty? Do I dare relapse into that frenzied trance? Can that possibly be good for my longevity?

I remembered how for the three years after I lost her, even when I got up in the dark to take a leak, she was all I thought about: even at four a.m., standing over the toilet seven-eighths asleep, the Kepesh one-eighth awake would begin to mutter her name. Generally when an old man pisses at night, his mind is completely blank. If he's capable of thinking of anything, it's only about getting back into bed. But not me, not then. "Consuela, Consuela, Consuela," every single time I got up to go. And she'd done this to me, mind you, without language, without cogitation, without cunning, without an ounce of malevolence, and with no regard to cause and effect. Like a great athlete or a work of idealized sculptural art or an animal glimpsed in the woods, like Michael Jordan, like a Maillol, like an owl, like a bobcat, she'd done it through the simplicity of physical splendor. There was nothing the least bit sadistic in Consuela. Not even the sadism of indifference, which often goes with that magnitude of perfection. She was too square for such cruelty and far too kind. But imagine the sport she could have made of me were she not too well reared a girl ever to exploit to the limit the Amazonian strength of her endowment; imagine if she'd had Amazonian consciousness as well and Machiavellianly grasped the impact she had. Luckily, like most people, she was not practiced in thinking things through, and though she made the whole thing between us happen, she never understood all that happened. If she did, and if, in addition, she'd had the tiniest taste for tormenting the male who's on fire, I would have been a goner, wrecked entirely by my own White Whale.

But here she was again. No, absolutely no! Never again that assault on my peace of mind!

But then I thought, She's looking for me, she needs me, and not as a lover, not as a teacher, not so as to resume our erotic tale with a new installment. So I rang her cell phone and lied and said I went to the store and just got back, and she said, "I'm in the car. I was in front of your building when I left the message." I said, "What are you doing driving around New York on New Year's Eve?" "I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "Are you crying, Consuela?" "No, not yet." And I said, "Did you ring the doorbell?" She said, "No, I didn't, because I didn't dare to." "You can always ring the bell, always. You know that. What's the matter?" "I need you now." "Then come." "Do you have time?" "I always have time for you. Come." "There's something important. I'm coming right away."

I put down the receiver and I didn't know what to expect. About twenty minutes later, a car stopped, and the moment I opened the door for her I knew something had gone wrong. Because she had a cap on her head like a fez. And that wasn't something she would wear. She has dark black hair, sleek hair that was always cared for, always washed, brushed, combed; she would see the hairdresser every two weeks. But now she was standing there with a fez on her head. She also had a stylish coat on, a belted black Persian lamb coat nearly to the floor, and when she undid the belt, I saw underneath her coat the silk shirt with the cleavage—lovely. So I embraced her and she embraced me, and she let me take her coat, and I said, "Your hat? Your fez?" and she said, "You'd better not do that. The surprise will be too great." I said, "Why?" And she said, "Because I'm very ill."

We went into the living room, and there again I embraced her, and she pushed her body to me, and you feel the tits, the beautiful tits, and you see over her shoulder the beautiful buttocks. You see the beautiful body. She's now in her thirties, thirty-two, and not less but more lovely, and the face, which seems somehow to have lengthened a bit, is far more womanly—and she's telling me, "I don't have any hair anymore. In October I was told that I've got cancer. I've got breast cancer." I said, "This is awful, this is horrible, how do you feel, how does one deal with such a thing?" Her chemotherapy had begun in early November, and quickly she'd lost her hair. She said, "I have to tell you the story," and we sat down and I said, "Tell me everything." "Well, my aunt, my mother's sister, has had breast cancer, and she was treated for it, and she lost a breast. So I knew that in my family there's danger. I always knew this, and I've always been afraid of it," and all the time she was talking, I was thinking, You, with the most gorgeous tits in the world. And she said, "One morning I was standing under the shower, and I felt something under my armpit, and I knew that this was wrong. I went to my doctor and he said it's probably nothing to worry about, and so I went to a second doctor and a third doctor, you know the story, and the third doctor said it
was
something to worry about." "And did you panic?" I asked her. "Did you panic, my lovely friend?" I was so shaken,
I
was panicking. "Yes," she said, "enormously." "At night?" "Yes, I was running around my apartment. I was completely crazy." I started to cry when I heard this, and we were embracing again, and I said, "Why didn't you call me? Why didn't you call me then?" And she said again, "I didn't dare." And I said, "Whom did you think of to call?" And she said, "My mother, of course. But I knew she'd panic too, because I'm her daughter, her one and only daughter, and because she's so emotional, and because everyone has died. David, they're all dead." "Who has died?" "My father is dead." "How?" "His plane crashed. He was on that plane to Paris. He was going for business." "Oh, no." "Yes." "And the grandfather you loved so much?" "He died. Six years ago. It began with losing him. A heart attack." "And your grandmother, with her rosaries? The grandmother who was the duchess?" "She died too. After him. She was old and she died." "Not your kid brother—?" "No, no, he's fine. But I couldn't call him, I couldn't about this. He couldn't handle this. That's when I thought of you. But I didn't know if you were alone." "That's not a problem. Promise me now one thing. If you should start to panic during the night, during the day, anytime, phone me. I'll always come. Here," I said, "write down your address. Write down all your phone numbers, work, home, everything." And I was thinking, She is dying before my eyes, she too is now dying. Instability had merely to enter her cozy Cuban family life with the predictable death of a beloved old grandfather to set rapidly in motion a cascade of misfortune culminating in cancer.