The Unfortunates (11 page)
“Go away,” he says. “I’m busy.”
“You don’t look right,” 3D says.
“Fuck off. I haven’t shaved.”
“Iris is smarter than she knows.”
“Yes,” George says. “Probably. I think it’s going to rain. Do you?”
“You are an unfortunate person.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anybody has a look at you knows what I mean.”
Silent, a yellow-toothed sigh. 3D stands, stoops to lap a drainpipe at the corner of the house, turns the corner, and trots away.
Any luck, there’s lead in that pipe. George opens the door to his house, his house, and steps inside.
Her first night at the clinic, CeCe dreams of the iced mountains of the Crimea, which she visited with her father once as a child. The nettle is carpeted in snow. Snow gusts up the trees along the high forest path. She’s eighteen, nineteen, standing alone in the dark under the moon, wearing a sable over a pencil skirt. Two black horses come pounding down the path. They race into view without master or cart, bulging throat to throat. They bear past her into the thicket. They run an hour, a day, a year. She chases them over the black curve of the dark half of the world and all the way to dawn—blue between the trees, then bright between the trees. The sun’s rays break over the side of the sky. She falls. Her little black shoes twist in the snow. The horses leave her behind, burst from the thicket into white open country down into the valley like a powdered bowl of moonlight, where the one with the palsy will be an easy mark. The rifleman waits on the other side, the shadow of his hat a pinhole against the snow.
She wakes and doesn’t know where she is. She remembers and covers her face with her hands, waiting for courage to find her. Courage or not, she must get dressed; she’s to have breakfast with George before he goes. When he doesn’t come to her room, she gathers the two canes beside the door and with slow purpose locates the awful dining room with the dusty light and the spider plants. She accepts tea but refuses food. She frowns politely at the other residents as they file in and out, her back straight as a pin, in stiffness and in pride. After an hour, she returns to her room to call George’s hotel, but how to dial out?
Pound 2, star 2
,
wait for the tone.
She can’t make it work. Trading the canes for the chair, she wheels to the lobby and asks if she has any messages. “Just this once,” the receptionist says. “I’m not your personal secretary, dear.” No messages. The receptionist calls the hotel. George has checked out.
Back in her room, she practices her appeal to Dr. Orlow. I will stay in the trial, but at home. I will come up twice a week, four times a week, no matter the distance. I will buy whatever equipment is required. I will hire a nurse. I will hire a doctor, if you like. Hell, if you like, I’ll hire
you
. No, that’s not the right tone. Controls?
I can replicate the controls.
The rules of the trial have already been explained to her—to receive the Astrasyne and its army of auxiliary medications, a participating facility must supervise the data pool—nursing home, clinic—until preliminary FDA approval. “Almost unheard of,” her physician, an old family friend, had said. “Requiring that trial members be in-facility. They must want to monitor the heck out of it. Multiple quality-of-life applications, maybe. I imagine they’re confident in the drug’s efficacy. I’d try to place in, if I were you.”
She is a patron of the arts; how quickly she became a patron of the sciences. Could George really have left? No. A mix-up. When Dr. Orlow appears, he will help and she will try to seem grateful.
Am
I grateful? she wonders. Someone must have been rejected from the trial—or worse, their acceptance revoked—so she could take the vacant spot. Who was it? A woman? A blur knocking against the closed window of her conscience like a moth. A woman of her own general age and appearance, a woman losing or soon to lose autonomic function—the inevitability CeCe fears most. Inevitable, unless the Astrasyne does what they hope. This woman, a brumous silhouette, but not a ghost. More like her own bent shadow gliding ahead of her on the pavement. It could have been a man. She hopes it was a man, and one of no redeeming quality. She will gather herself. She must stay.
“Knock-knock?” A nurse bustles into her room—the same woman from the day before, Janet or Jean. Another woman enters, puts down a tray of English muffins and eggs, and leaves. Try to seem grateful! She smiles at the nurse, who begins listing the morning cocktail of pills. Her kingdom, the shadow’s, for the cocktail. Each time she hears the word, CeCe cloaks it in the same tired pun: rocks, sherry, twist, eau-de-vie? She must be pleasant, until someone of greater authority can be procured.
“You’re funny, Mrs. Somner. We’ll pretend we’re having drinks! Just these six, a stroll in the park. Let’s go big to small. Water first. Or, should I say, shooter first, and here’s your lemon, and here’s your salt. Bottoms up.”
“Shooter?” CeCe says, remembering her dream, “What’s a shooter?”
She swallows the pills. As she does, the nurse explains the rule and order dictated by each one and reminds her that the afternoon nurse will administer more. CeCe will take these separately and these together. These on an empty stomach and these with food. Why do they bother telling her when she’s not allowed to administer the doses herself? Under normal circumstances she doesn’t abide being managed. But she wouldn’t trust herself with this alchemy. This is why I smile at the nurse, she thinks, smiling at the nurse.
“How about meeting some of the other residents today?” the nurse says. “I can take you around. They’re asking after you, isn’t that nice? It’s a good group. Mr. Townsend and Dotty—Mrs. Burden—told me to tell you they’re planning a special activity for this evening. Songs at the piano.”
As she speaks, the nurse fluffs the bouquet of yellow tulips that appeared the day before, sent by Patricia. The nurse collects the fallen petals into her fists and slips them into her pocket. “I’ve got time to introduce you around,” she continues, moving toward the closet, into which CeCe had spent the better part of twenty minutes pushing the wheelchair. “How about it?”
CeCe waits—for some serene largess to fill her spirit, but this Dotty, whom she is already sure she should avoid, this Dotty’s name has cluttered her mind. She imagines Dotty smiling from the crinkled pillow with a dreary, dearie bed wisdom, accepting each pill with a darting pink eye.
“I’m indisposed,” CeCe says. “I’m expecting my son. And my daughter.”
A lie. She’s not expecting her daughter. Patricia—Seattle one-half the year, Rio the other, a senior Web producer for an urban-planning group specializing in the protection and modernization of favelas. With the
woman
, her wife, Lotta, Lotta the famous architect, six-foot Lotta wearing sneakers and a diver’s watch. Patricia is pregnant and will come to visit on her own time, or not at all. She was surprised Pat called so early in the pregnancy—twelve weeks along now—and while their conversation was short and strenuously cheerful, it gave CeCe more hope than she’s had in years. Their fight, over a decade gone, was nonsense, ostensibly about CeCe’s moving out of New York after 9/11, retreating to Stockport, filling two unused spaces in the garage with pallets of Evian. Pat, stalking out the front door, calling CeCe a coward and a limousine liberal. CeCe, waving furiously in the direction of the garage, shouting, “There’s no limousine in there, you simple-minded—it’s water!” The true, unspoken fight being about CeCe’s disparagement of Pat’s then-girlfriend, particularly her lip-pierce, and CeCe’s suggestion that Pat was dating women to get attention and to be special, as she hadn’t yet found any other way to be special. That was the unkind phrase she’d used. Maybe even this wasn’t the true quarrel, but something without incident or word. Prideful, Pat. Like herself in this respect. It spun away from them and in the end they’d said too much to forget but not enough to continue. Pat and Lotta, together five years, but Lotta, too busy for George’s wedding, apparently—CeCe has only seen her in pictures.
Along with the tulips, Pat has sent a stuffed sheep wearing an old-fashioned wimple that she must have ordered from the Internet. The sheep stands on the dresser among the petals that have already fallen since the nurse tidied up, as if in its own small field. There’s something indecent—she hates its fuzzy face. She doesn’t want to be introduced to anyone, even a Dotty, under such circumstances. A toy, flowers—pain is felt only when pain is felt! Unlike fear, or lust, or sadness, which a person can borrow, which in health she’d borrowed from the arts—happily, without consequence. In the old days, she’d screened movies in the pool house. The projector at one end of the pool, the screen at the other, the light beaming over the water in a thick moated shaft. The lapping, upside-down reflection of the film in the turquoise deep-end, the ladies clustered along the tile edge of the pool, holding their glasses at the stems—no one hosted better. No one, Nan said once, kissing her goodbye, her bark of a laugh, except Truman. CeCe couldn’t argue with that.
“Nurse,” CeCe says. “Could I have the bed shifted? Or could we have someone move that sheep?”
“Back hurts? That’s new for you or a regular thing?”
“Not my back, the sheep.”
“Isn’t that cute? Look at his hat. He’s here to watch after you when I’m not around. What a nice gift.”
The nurse snakes her arm behind CeCe’s shoulders and heaves her in an expert, cursory embrace. CeCe finds her face pressed into the woman’s cleavage. It smells like spearmint and tobacco. The nurse wedges a pillow into the vexed hollow between the sheet and her spine. The pillow causes an unnatural arch in her back. The angle affords her an improved view of the sheep.
“I’d like to rest.” CeCe closes her eyes, trading the room for darkness. “In the meantime, could you see that someone gets hold of my son?”
No answer, but she feels—her wrist lifted at the pulse. The audacity! She won’t open her eyes until this woman’s gone. She hears the nurse counting under her breath, then calling to someone in the hallway.
“Yes, she’s good … No, can you get me a Diet Coke?”
With her eyes still closed CeCe says, “Don’t call me she. It’s rude. Pronouns are for the absent. I’m right here.”
This is no place to be. She can’t stay. She’ll stay. The drug will work. She’ll not fade at home, shrink the house she loves to a few rooms. Spoil it with a bed put on the first floor and guardrails along the walls and a plastic stand-up tub with a low plastic gate swinging like a pigpen’s, with guest rooms turned into nurses’ rooms as the private-care consultant, six months before, had diagrammed in lusty red ink over the blue floor plan of her home. Mrs. Baker had recommended the consultant, had used him at her father’s place.
“That house,” CeCe had said to George, “is taken over by girls dressed as nurses, trying to get their visas! I don’t blame them but I don’t want them.” She suspected these girls handled Mr. Baker rough or kind as they chose, emboldened by their own private histories, more epic than the epic of his illness. Nor will she have her society visited upon her, peering in at how she and the house have shrunk—sutured, shuttered. She doesn’t want her people to see her like this. She’ll recover in private and return to resume her full life as if she’d never left.
She turns away from the nurse and opens her eyes to the curtains billowing in the open French doors, the bright morning between the curtains, a flip-book—green grass, a man cutting the hedge bordering the lake. The landscaper, wearing overalls and slick with sweat, working the shears. A bit close to the window! Tufts of vegetation fly. She hears the grind of a chain saw in the trees across the lake. There must be a crew. By the interval work of the saw, she imagines the tree’s rings tell back three hundred years. A blimp hangs above the treetops. The lake is smooth and bright—a fine view, no one lied about that. But how can it be that pain has brought her here?
The nurse is petting her arm. “Hey, now. Let’s get you dressed.”
“I am dressed.” She gestures with exasperation to her outfit, one she’d carefully planned—a silk pantsuit, taupe with a green stripe, unstructured but chic, with a tie at the collarbone. In this context, however, expensive as it is, she sees how it might be mistaken for pajamas. “If you thought I wasn’t dressed, why on earth did you open the curtains? Pull them shut!”
The man in overalls stops his work and glances up, incurious. To him she is a neck corkscrewed into a pillow. He nods, maybe to her, maybe to himself, and turns back to his work. “Pull the curtain,” she says again. “And go!”
The nurse draws in her breath. CeCe remembers herself and adds, “Aren’t you a dear. I should have said please. I should have said thank you. Thank you for coming. A pleasure. Do come again. Now I’d like to change clothes alone. Fetch me anything, no—the green one; there, and the jewelry from the top drawer. Allow an old lady a point of pride. Yes, that’s a good girl.”
“Make sure to eat,” the nurse says, nodding toward the tray, and leaves.
Cece turns her attention to the tray. Has she ever before laid eyes on such a terrible breakfast? Muffins made a million at a time, probably by pistons! Eggs, scrambled to jelly. George will call. She would like one of the breakfasts of her youth, brought up to her as it was each morning on a tray, through the cavernous, clicking lobby of this or that hotel when she accompanied her father on business, those summers before school and before he remarried. After John Stepney’s death, her father took over the company, and by the time she was born he’d bought and sold scores of rubber plantations, by then in South Asia—over port, under ivory, in the backseats of embassy cars. Before her enrollment at Miss Porter’s, he’d dragged her all across the map, though most winters she remained in New York City with the staff. The traveling months provided few objects of comfort or permanence, a reason, perhaps, she grew into an adult with convictions about routine. Such as: breakfast should consist of runny eggs poached with vinegar, butter pastry, chocolate in a silver pot. Where else but on a tray arranged by invisible hands does one find and acquire a taste for the tasteless kiwi? All her life, until today, she’s begun her mornings more or less thus.