I don’t say anything.
“You’re okay, Benna,” Gerard continues tiredly, though opening his eyes. “Look at you. There you are. You’re okay.” He is making amends. I can see him begin to drift off but fight it, the P.O.W. shadows deepening. I want to hold him, tight, but I don’t. Instead, not thinking he’ll hear me, I murmur to myself, “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” and suddenly one of his puppeted arms flies upward in the air, finger pointing. “That, my dear,” he says, “is a supreme compliment.” His eyes are still closed and his arm begins to drop back down, slow like a ballet of a dead bird. He smiles feebly. “That is a Diana Ross and the Supremes compliment.”
And that’s the last thing he says. He has fallen asleep with his mouth open. The nurse comes in and, worried, I ask her if Gerard’s all right, that he just sort of drifted off, and she smiles and says he’s only taking a nap, not to worry, just come back tomorrow, he might be more rested. Then she gives him an injection, and I just stand there with my coat in my arms and squeak out “ ’Bye,” like a mouse in a movie.
The next day is December eighteenth, a week before Christmas, and I’ve bought Gerard a beautiful new bathrobe from an import store. It has indecipherable Oriental lettering on the back, and I will tell him that it says “Howard Johnson’s” in Korean, which is probably what it does say. I’ve also brought him Christmas candy, little sugar stockings and bells, in case he’s off the tubes. I’m trying to feel hopeful, but today for some reason it seems hard, like a song you don’t really know but fake by coming in on the last word of every line.
Maple’s in the lobby by the elevator, sitting on a vinyl padded bench. He rises, walks toward me, dangerously slow, the swim of a nightmare. Something’s wrong. I’ve done something wrong. Maple stops about four feet from me. The corridor slows down. I stop too. He glares at me. He hates me, why does he hate me?
“He was in love with you, you know. You should know that. He told me that once.”
“Maple, what the hell are you talking about?” Maple’s face is wincing and withering and looking away.
“The fucking bastards! They were killing him!” And here Maple’s face crumples from hate to grief and rain pours out of his eyes.
“What? Maple, what do you mean?” Gerard! Gerard! I have candies! “Where is Gerard?”
Maple steps toward me, puts his arms around me, around my packages, his albino face trying to find my shoulder, the faint smell of patchouli everywhere on his clothes. I kick him, step backward, jerk away from him, almost lose my balance. The corridor flies up and down, deserted, undulating, a roller coaster in Lebanon. “Dammit, Maple, what are you saying?” I try to swallow, but I choke. “I mean, hold on here. Where is Gerard?” I’ve brought candies for him! I bought Christmas candy for him! and I step further away and begin digging, all alone, through one of the bags.
“There’s going to be an investigation,” says Maple quietly, standing off to one side, all leotard and amethyst; part Horatio, part swizzle stick; and then he brings his hands to his face, turns toward the wall, and sobs.
The teacher’s packages slip, and her boots stumble, twisting her ankle. Little stockings and bells have spilled to the floor and are rolling around there. She grabs hold of a table, of a sofa arm—hold on here, hold on here—anything could fly away now. Where on earth does everybody go?
Maple is harder and harder to see; he is bleeding into the wall. “Maple,” she cries out. “We’ll sue!” This is finally all she can speak: the words of a lawyer’s widow. “We’ll sue for everything …” but then she is at some door, brow against glass, a small friendless girl, standing in candy and vomiting into an ashtray with sand in it.
IV
Sometimes all life felt like this: a choice between Greyhound and Rent-A-Wreck. It reminded her of a joke she’d heard once about two shipwrecked sailors who land on an island of heartless primitives. “You have a choice,” says the island king to the first sailor. “Instantaneous Death or Chee-Chee.” The first sailor gulps. “I guess I’ll go with Chee-Chee,” he says. There is a loud gong. “You have chosen Chee-Chee,” announces the king, and two huge men appear and cut off the sailor’s arms and legs, disembowel him, skin him, then leave him in a steaming heap to die. “You have a choice,” says the king turning to the second sailor. “Instantaneous Death or Chee-Chee.” The second sailor is pale and sweating. “I guess I’ll take Instantaneous Death,” he says. There is another loud gong. “You have chosen Instantaneous Death,” says the king like a Las Vegas emcee. “But first—Chee-Chee!”
Benna opted for the bus, and found herself staring out the film of the window, at houses, trees, signs, as if she were starving for something. Perhaps it was all that motion within the single frame of the window, or the desire to be out and beyond the odors here, the smokey, not quite disinfected smell from the bus’s hindquarters, but her eyes felt lidless, unquenchable. She pulled things in, as she had her whole life, and then didn’t know quite what to do with them: the jagged eczema of snow along the river; the parsley-fur of tamaracks and pines; the clouds, which, without the anchoring ache of their dark bellies, looked as if they would wisp away. A Holiday Inn signboard on the highway read RELAX ETHEL AND DRESSER: YOU’VE MADE IT! The parking lot was full. Benna wondered if Ethel and Dresser were happy or whether they even thought about it. In a town called Bluewaters she misread a billboard that said CARPENTER’S: YOUR OWN PERSONAL WAREHOUSE, thinking at first that it said “whorehouse,” which broke her stare, turned her attention inward for a moment to her knees, to her magazine, to the empty seat beside her spread with someone else’s Times, to the old woman across the aisle who had just taken out a nectarine from a paper bag and bit and slurped and, napkinless, dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the edge of the paper bag. Benna looked back at her knees feeling that she’d been made, forever and for now, like her marriage vows, stupid with loneliness, bereft of any truth or wisdom or flicker of poetry, possessed only of the wild glaze of a person who spends entire days making things up.
The river raced alongside them, a dog barking and chasing.
Ah, warehouse. It said warehouse.
Her brother Louis lived in Queens. He’d been there for two years now and she’d never visited. She was going to stay at his apartment overnight and then catch a cab to Kennedy the next morning. Her plane left at nine-thirty a.m., a silly charter flight dubbed “Carefree.” A close friend of hers had died and she was getting away. She was going to the Caribbean, a package tour of desert islands, all rimmed in glitz: casinos, discos, dancing girls at the Americana. She would step off the plane and the heat and sun would hit her like a hallucination. She would eat one native tomatoey-banana dish per island; she would dance with men who spoke a halting English; she would eat canapés that looked like the asses of gibbons; she’d drink piña coladas on the rumrunner cruise; she would feed the starving, gunk-eyed cats that came rubbing around her chair legs in the cafés—she would drop them bits of roast beef. When fellow tourists confided doubtful things, she would say, “Don’t make my shoes laugh,” an island idiom. She would watch her purse. She would get a tan.
She slept and dreamed of a man who poked paper clips through his bottom lip.
The bus coughed and rumbled into Port Authority. She opened her eyes. The nectarine woman smiled at her and said, “Wasn’t the skyline coming in just beautiful?” Benna smiled back, nodded, then heaved her bag off the overhead shelf and bumped her way off the bus. The bus driver winked and told her to have a Merry Christmas. She’d almost forgotten: Tomorrow was Christmas.
She followed signs and escalators up to Eighth Avenue, then walked the one block to the RR, the air cold and acidic. Taxis whizzed by in the slush. She had once lived in New York, not far from here, before the terminal had been renovated, and she could still remember the same half-tourist, half-resident feeling she’d had even when she’d lived here. She’d had two love affairs and had, with each of them, gone to the top of the World Trade Center for drinks.
r /> She waited on the subway platform with two men, one of them reading a paper with a headline that said BRAIN-DAMAGED JFK HELD CAPTIVE IN SOUTH AMERICA, the other one pacing down at the opposite end, his steps echoing. Benna could hear other trains shuddering in the distance, above, but soon there was silence and only the man’s echoing steps. She stared at the tracks, glanced up once in a while at the Broadway show posters.
The train arrived in a clattering din and shrieked to a stop, all those little lighted rooms on wheels. The doors banged open, and she picked up her suitcase, readjusted her handbag, and scurried into the car directly in front of her. She was not a shopper. This was how she went through life. She took the first space she saw by the door.
She positioned her suitcase close to her legs. The train clapped shut and jerked forward. And as some sort of inexplicable dread filled her like an ink, all she could think was that she would rather be someone, anyone, else: the skinny Oriental woman rocked to a nap across from her, or the woman further down dressed in dirty animal skins and reeking of urine. She wanted to be the blind cripple with the tin, who got on at Lexington, and to whom she had given five dollars. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and rolled off into the next car.
Mostly, she was surrounded by men, and soon they were all, all of them, tunneling under the East River.
She got off in Astoria, usually a festive place, she’d been told, but today it seemed foggy, even deadly. A man set up at a card table had a sign propped in front of him: HELP KILL HENRY KISSINGER. DONATE A DOLLAR. It was Christmastime. She asked no questions. She donated a dollar. Then she moved on, struggled down the metal stairs off the elevated platform and made her way up 31st Avenue toward Louis’s apartment, following the directions he’d given her over the phone and which she’d written in red ink on a now-smudged three-by-five card. It was only five-thirty, but it was dark and all the stores were closed. She put her suitcase down to rest. A bus alongside her suddenly pulled away, spewing exhaust, and she held her breath so as not to breathe it. A train rattled loudly across the el above and behind her. She gasped for air then picked up her bag and continued down the sidewalk. An unskinned goat was hanging in the window of the Acropolis Butchery. Two men shouted to each other from across the avenue. “Hey, Dinny, you do this. Right?” A fruit stand on the next block was open. “You like avocado?” asked a thick-necked woman with black hair. She wore a red sweater and a green apron, an old parka draped over her shoulders. Benna floundered, groped, like a high school girl, for a personality. “Yes, very much,” she said, and moved on.
· · ·
“Eh, how you doing?” squeaked her brother Louis in a pitch too high for his age and body. Benna set her bag down and gave him a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said. He remained in the doorway for a long moment, one of his feet holding open the door. He seemed a little balder, a little heavier, his nylon shirt unbuttoned too far down his chest, more because it had been overlaundered and no longer fit than because of anything else. Louis kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of cigarettes and small, yellowing teeth. “Let me take your bag,” he said finally, mimicking, she thought, someone else’s graciousness. He nudged up his slipping eyeglasses and then lifted her bag into the apartment. She stepped into a narrow hallway which connected two rooms. The rear room was dim, musty, and bluish with a double bed and a window that looked out onto a concrete wall. Off this room, in the back, was a kitchen with fluorescent lights and a large bag of trash that needed emptying. The front room to her right had a TV, a sofa, a chair, two windows. She could hear kids outside, shouting.
“Louis, this is really a nice place.” He was thirty-six, divorced, alone; this was the first apartment he’d ever had as a bachelor that wasn’t a six-month sublet. “Louis, I’m serious. I’m impressed.” She was, she realized, sounding like her mother, their mother.
Louis smiled and seemed pleased. He set her bag down in the dim, blue room. “It’s okay,” he said, suddenly rather seriously looking about.
“I brought you a Christmas present,” she said. It was a sweater vest. She would give it to him after dinner.
Louis looked guilty. “I don’t have one for you,” he said.
“That’s perfectly all right,” she smiled.
“So, what’s new with my little sister?” Louis self-consciously gulped from his beer can. Benna drank hers from an old jelly jar he had apologetically provided for her. “It’s fine, really,” she’d said. “Don’t go to any trouble.”
“What’s new?” she repeated. She thought about telling him about her wisdom tooth. In America, two adults under forty stuck for conversation could always talk about wisdom teeth. “Well,” she began, feeling the impossibility even of this. She looked at Louis. As a boy he’d always been a recluse and a moper, odd, lonely, fat. He’d sit in his little room in the trailer and eat fudge and play cards and daydream and snarl at any knocks at his door. Then he’d gotten married and it hadn’t worked out, as they say. For reasons she was never told, he wasn’t able to get custody of his daughter. Benna had always felt overwhelmingly sorry for him, though she knew that was wrong—distancing and finally dehumanizing.
“A good friend of mine just died.” She blurted it. Lately it felt like the only thing she knew, the only thing new.
“Howdy die?”
“Excuse me?”
“How did he die?”
“Oh. He—it sounds absurd—got drunk and fell in his own bathtub. Then at the hospital they fucked up with the painkillers and the I.V.’s, and he went into a kind of coma and died.”
Louis whistled a glissando of amazement and shook his head.
Benna pressed one finger into the corner of her eye. She was going to say something about its being dumb and pointless, about its being something she would never get over, but her jaw locked and her eyes were too quickly awash for her to get anything out but a wobbly “Yeah.”
Louis got up, came forward, and bent over Benna to hug her, but it was awkward and made her feel uncomfortable. “Don’t want my little sister to get upset now.” She could feel his sideburns, his breath, his arms.
“Louis, really. I’m okay. Listen, can I use your bathroom to wash up before we go to dinner?”
Louis let go. “Anything you want, anything you want,” he stammered, attempting a grand theatrical gesture with his arms.
“Mr. Host,” said Benna, trying to smile.
In the bathroom there was only one towel, the size of a bathmat. It was stained a brownish gray and was draped at a careless angle on an aluminum rod.
“Louis, do you have another towel?” Benna called out the door.
“No, I don’t.” Louis’s voice cracked sheepishly from the living room. He had turned the TV on, a basketball game.
“Oh.” Benna poked her dripping face out. “Do you have paper towels?”
“Yeah. In the kitchen,” he grunted.
“I’ll get them.” She dripped out to the kitchen, tore sheets of toweling from a roll on top of the refrigerator, and dried her face and hands with them.
“Ah, good.” She found herself smiling self-consciously at Louis, who had come out to the kitchen to watch. She threw the towels away in an open brown grocery bag, next to the overflowing one.
“Where you wanna eat?” he said.
They put on coats and walked five blocks to a dark Italian steak house called The Charcoal Lounge. It was full of piped-in Christmas music and festoons of garlands, red and green. Louis kept announcing that the dinner was on him. “All right, already,” she smiled, finally. She liked to say that. It was something which growing up upstate she had never heard anyone say.
Louis suddenly seemed edgy, his voice loud. “Get what you want, get what you want! Drinks? You want a drink first? Get a drink.”
The waiter looked at Benna. “A drink?”
“A scotch and soda, please,” she said. She put her napkin carefully in her lap.
Louis ordered a beer. “So this friend of yours who died, he was a good friend?”
>
“Yes,” said Benna. She thought about Gerard for a minute, imagined him in a floaty pastel heaven where there was no opera, only church and church music, and knew he’d hate it there. “It’s so weird to talk about somebody who’s died. It seems to make them more dead,” she said.
“It’s rough,” said Louis, shaking his head again. He reached across the table, took her hand, held it for a while. They were long minutes. She squirmed, then gently slipped her hand from his and put it in her lap with her napkin.
When the food came—salads, veal cutlets, spaghetti—Louis ate quickly. When he finished he leaned back and belched, said excuse me, and then talked about his bookkeeping job, how much he made, what it was like having a woman for a boss, how much he thought he’d make in three years, how much the government took out of his paycheck in taxes. “When we get back home,” he said, “I’ll, I’ll show you a check stub. Three hundred dollars they take out. Three hundred dollars!” he squeaked and his eyebrows went up. His eyes rounded and his glasses slipped a bit on his nose.
“Wow,” said Benna, chewing.
“Would you like another scotch?” asked the waiter.
“God, no. It’ll go right to my hips,” she said, although no one laughed. Louis ordered a second beer and the waiter nodded and left.
“Yeah, I’m thinking of becoming a Big Brother,” announced Louis, lighting up a cigarette. Louis was the sort of person who, when changing the subject, lit up a cigarette and started his sentences with a long, drawn-out Yeah.
“The organization? Where you sort of adopt a little kid?”
“Yeah. I go, go for the interview next Monday.”
“Well, Louis, that might be great for you.” It was curious to her, this announcement to a younger sister that he was off to try to become a Big Brother, this announcement of loneliness and terror, of failure and of hunger for the most meager redemption—that of brother, even fake-brother. Benna thought of something she’d heard on a nature documentary once, something called The Stone Egg Theory, which said if you put a stone egg in the chicken’s nest, it’ll be encouraged to lay a real one.