Imaginary Men (7 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 38
overstuffed sofas with loose change so the boys would have something to hunt for. Weren't those kids lucky to have a grandfather like him? Still in good health, able to help out with a summer camp tuition here, a basketball hoop there. A grandfather who
spent time
with his grandsons. So what if Maury wasn't on his feet yet? Florence always said generosity and love never hurt anybody.
Maury phoned at 5:30 to report on Elaine. He told Harry the doctor had removed enough tissue to make another pair of breasts. Now they had Elaine packed in ice to prevent swelling. While Maury talked, Harry's gaze wandered to the den wallpaper, a pattern of grape leaves wound around fuzzy black vines. The room looked like a god-damn fruit farm. Why didn't he have a room like the ones in Chivas Regal ads? A leather-topped desk with gold flourishes all around the edges like a stock certificate. Wallpaper with a fox being chased by spotted dogs. The hunt. That's what he should have insisted on when Florence redecorated.
"Elaine's hot to take tennis lessons again," Maury was saying. "Nothing to get in the way of her forehand now."
"She should live and be well," Harry said. "Kiss her for me." He hung up.
He lay back in his Barcalounger, waiting and fidgeting. Florence had taken Bella with her to the beauty parlor and then to pick up the kids. Jolie Mae was in the kitchen fixing a feast. He could smell the caramel cake in the oven. His mouth watered. He remembered Bella's cookingstuffed derma, eggplant salad. Chicken soup with kreplach on Fridays. And the cooking odors that hung in the hallways of the apartment building where he grew up. Something happened to food smells trapped there. When they all came together, the result was awful, like inhaling someone else's belch. It made him sick to remember it.
He readjusted his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to summon the Clydesdale he'd invented at Dr. Toland's. He wanted to lie down in the pasture again, but it eluded him. Instead, the evening to come played like a home movie. Florence would arrive with Bella and the boys. Bella would have that damn blue hair, and Florence's hair would feel like wire lath.
When he opened his eyes, the grapevines of the wallpaper began to twist and slither like snakes. Stress, he told himself. He shut his eyes and opened them quickly. The room was glowing, as if it had
 
Page 39
heated up. The vines were so thick and active now they threatened to pull down the walls. The bookcase leaned and swayed, ready to crash to the floor. Harry jumped up and threw his back against it. Overhead, the chandelier glinted, its long crystal drops a hundred sharpened blades. He pushed until the bookcase knocked against the wall. Suddenly he felt his heart. Not the beat of it, but its weight and shape. Big and slippery and fragile. Like one of his top-of-the-line porcelain bathtubs being delivered through a window. His whole body was slick with sweat, little pools of it in the bags under his eyes, in the folds of his neck and chin. "I'm cracking up," he said. "The end. Finito." The sound of his own voice gave him courage. He began to feel cool. He let go of the bookcase and willed the walls plumb again, the furniture upright. Then he staggered to the bathroom and took a blood pressure pill.
He returned to the den, eyeing the room from the doorway until he was certain everything in it was normal. He stretched out in the lounge chair. I'm all right. I'm in my own house. So then what was all this tumult, this brooding? he asked himself. And in the same instant he had the answer. Dr. Toland had told him to pay attention to his fantasies, to the weirdest ideas that crossed his mind. He did. And what they meant was clear: he was dying.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
It wasn't as if he had pains in his chest or down his arm. He knew the signs of heart attack. This was more subtle, not symptoms but a premonition. On Saturday morning he made an appointment with the family doctor for Monday.
In the meantime, he enjoyed the easy courage of the condemned. He felt a sense of wisdom descend and wait nearby along with his own death. He was starry-eyed, like someone who had fallen in love. It irritated everyone around him. He was slow to answer questions, indecisive in the car on Sunday when they took the boys and Bella for a drive in the country. In exasperation, Florence took the wheel and drove them to Martin's Dairy. He didn't eat ice cream with the others but stood at the farm fence and watched the clouds float by, forming and re-forming like ideas in his head. A certain elegance inhabited his body.
He took the wheel for the ride home. As he pulled onto the main
 
Page 40
highway, he looked into the rearview mirror and saw Bella there, stiff as a little doll, a great-grandchild on each side of her like a set of bookends. Bella had never driven a car. How many times had she sat in the backseat, obstructing his view? A hundred? A thousand? "Mama, you're not made of glass," he said.
Bella didn't move.
"Switch places with one of the boys," he told her. "Sit by a door."
Bella was making faces, unaware he could see her in the mirror. She squirmed over and sat directly behind him.
Harry looked at the countryside flowing by. It was so beautiful, even in November with the fields died back. And the foothills, curved like a woman. Like hips and thighs and ass. God, the world was gorgeous. And he'd be leaving it soon. He'd seen his share though. He'd been to Puerto Rico and Las Vegas and everywhere plumbing conventions were held. He'd been to Israel. He and Florence had been pampered at the Duke University fat farm. He'd lived it up in ManhattanBroadway shows, Mama Leone's, the works.
"I'm not going," Bella suddenly whispered in his ear. "I even told Mel."
Harry swerved onto the dirt shoulder of the road and stopped. A cloud of reddish dust engulfed them.
"Where are we?" one of the kids asked.
"Nowhere," Harry said. "I'm resting."
"Resting my eye," Bella snapped.
"Mama!" Harry twisted around to face her.
"Grandpa's getting
mad
," the younger boy said.
"We're going for a walk, Mama." Harry opened the door of the Buick and helped her from the car. She was biting down on her lower lip. She was always biting down on her lower lip. He did all her banking, the hiring and firing of her maids. Schlepp, schlepp. He brought her to the house once a month for dinner. What did he get for it? Bella, biting down on her lower lip.
They started walking down the white sideline of the road. Harry turned briefly back to the car, sending a signal that nailed Florence and the boys to the spot. Don't move, his eyes said. Don't you dare move or speak. His chest was pounding. His lungs felt like two pockets turned inside out. Dust went up his nose, in his mouth.
"Crazy," Bella said. "
Meshugge
."
 
Page 41
Harry held her by the elbow as they walked along, taking small steps.
"I'm ruining these shoes."
"Shoes are meant to be walked in, Mama." A bird flew by. "Look at that," Harry said, pointing.
"A bird," Bella said. "So what?"
"So nothing. The whole world could be without birds. Would it bother you?"
"You dragged me out here to talk about birds?"
"I want to tell you something, Mama."
Bella stopped and pulled her coat around her.
"The story of the happiest day of my life," he said, not knowing what he would say next. What was the happiest day? His wedding? The day Maury was born? The day he moved into his big new office? No. Something farther back, simpler. "Remember when I graduated high school? June 1929. The seventeen-year cicadas were out."
"Birds," Bella said. "Now bugs. So?"
"So I was eighteen, and I had a white robe and a mortarboard with a gold tassel." He hadn't looked fat in the graduation robe. He'd looked massive, imposing, a walking Greek column. The day came back to him clearly. He could see the old-model cars on the street, big and shiny and black. "It was so hot," Harry said. The day had been all green and gold and white. On the bandstand were two hundred white scrolled diplomas tied with gold ribbons. Nearby, a green-and-white striped pavilion shaded long picnic tables full of iced lemonade, the glasses already sweating in the heat. The principal read the long list of names. It was hard to hear over the racket of the cicadas, the fuzzy gold insects that lived underground for seventeen years at a stretch, then emerged for a month to mate.
Harry Goldring
, the principal said. "Remember how slowly I walked across the platform?" he asked Bella. "I kept thinking, I'm the first person to graduate high school in the whole entire family. Me. Number one."
"Number one," Bella repeated.
"I remember that Polish girl who was the valedictorian," Harry continued. "She wrote the class motto. 'Each of us will go our separate ways, holding high the banner of excellence.'"
Separate
ways. He had believed it that afternoon. He had pictured himself living in his own small apartment, riding on trains, going to the movies on his
 
Page 42
own. He stared at Bella. "Everything was goldthe drinks, the sun, the cicadas sitting in the trees. Singing. That's a love song, that noise they make"
"I'm getting cold," Bella said. "It's nice you graduated. I'm getting cold just thinking how hot it was that day. A person could have passed out"
"Oh God," Harry cried at the sky. "Why are You letting her interrupt me?" He grabbed Bella by the shoulders. "Don't you understand? That day," he said more quietly, tears springing to his eyes. "That day. I'm telling you everything."
She looked at him blankly. "What?" she raised her voice. "What do you want from me?"
She didn't know. None of them knew. There was a fire in him now. The fat man starving, the shoemaker who goes barefoot. I can't get enough, he thought. Why can't I ever get enough?
"Take me home," Bella said. She looked frightened. He let go of her.
They walked back to the car and got in. Florence and the boys seemed to have stopped breathing.
"I'm begging you, Harry," Bella said, pulling out a handkerchief. "Don't make me go to that place."
"I'm not making you go," Harry answered. "Just promise me you'll try it for six months. Just that long."
The idea of a compromise had obviously not occurred to Bella until now. She took a long time to answer. "No," she said.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
On Monday, Harry went for a checkup. His EKG looked good, blood count completely normal. His pressure was a little high, but nothing alarming. Harry described in detail what had happened on Friday afternoon: the vines turning to snakes, the furniture about to topple, the certain knowledge that he would soon be dead. The doctor said it sounded like a panic attack.
"Do these panic attacks cause heart attacks?" Harry asked.
The doctor said they didn't. Judging from Harry's EKG, he wasn't going to have a heart attack any time soon. Harry was not relieved. The doctor suggested he talk to Toland.
 
Page 43
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
On Tuesday afternoon Harry didn't lie on the couch right away. He sat across the desk from Toland. Toland nodded the whole time Harry talked, writing notes occasionally. "I still feel like I'm dying," Harry said as he finished the story.
"Yes," Toland said. "I can see that."
"You can?"
"It's just an expression."
"Oh."
"Let's try some imaging on the couch," Toland said.
Even as he stretched out, Harry saw himself blanched white as an almond, lying dead on a rug somewhere, looking much heavier than he actually was because in that position the fat spread out. He banished the image from his mind, but it hovered at the edge like a page number.
"First, tell me what's been happening. At work. With the family."
Harry told him about visiting the Village with Bella. "Bella's eighty-two, and she's not worried about dying."
"Everybody's dying," Toland said.
"It's like a job," Harry said.
"What is?"
"Dying. You're born, and then you spend the rest of your life dying. Breathing in and out. Looking at trees."
"Close your eyes," Toland said. "Let your mind drift. You're very relaxed."
But Harry couldn't relax. What about Bella? What about the Village? No,
not
the Village. Screw the Village. Good God, why had he ever considered the place? Mel's stupid idea. What did Mel know?
Gornisht
. Bella would be miserable with a social life. Better to hire a companion, someone bossy with a sense of humor. An older Jewish woman, maybe, a pensioned widow
"You're not relaxing." Toland got up and put on a tape recording of masted ships in the wind. "Try again."
"All right," Harry said. Behind his eyes he saw nothing but a deep orange color. He listened to the peaceful creaking of canvas and rigging. The ocean yawned gently. The ships rocked in the white-toothed waves.
"Go wherever you like," Toland said.

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