Want Not (13 page)

Talmadge yearned to say as much—to
declare
something, to translate these feelings into language, language that would rouse them to action, to crash gates, storm trenches—but there were no words in his mind; only a warm radiant blur of emotion. Yet the silence was overripe, he felt; the moment needed seizing.

But Matty beat him to it. “How’s that pie coming?” he said, causing Micah to leap up, “Oh
shit,
” and flee into the kitchen. Talmadge watched Matty take a long, hard swig of whiskey, sucking on the bottle harshly and sloppily, the way old movie villains kissed resistant damsels—and then, unless Talmadge was mistaken, wink at him. But no, Talmadge decided, that mustn’t have been a wink. Just smoke in Matty’s eyes, or a trick of the shimmering candlelight. “She’s some’n, huh?” he said to Matty, who replied with a thumbs-up and a crooked, inscrutable grin.

T
HE MEMORY OF THE DEER
was still imprinted upon Elwin’s spine as he slid a two-drawer steel file cabinet out of the rear hatch of his loaner car, which he’d parked beside a snowbank on Henry Street in lower Manhattan. Objecting to this new burden, his spine telegraphed a complaint that went buzzing from his dorsal horn to his thalamus before being expelled as a loud, emphatic grunt made briefly visible by the cold air. Elwin paused, with the cabinet half discharged, and scanned the sidewalk for—for—for what he didn’t know. Help, advice, maybe an unattended forklift. Or maybe some drowsy vagrant with a
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
sign pitched upon his lap, because Elwin had the goods for a fair deal: Haul this cabinet across the street to the Roth Residence, that big old cranky-looking building right there, take it to room 109, the door’s marked
CROSS
, and there’s a plate of seared venison medallions in it for you. Medium rare, and glazed with a cranberry–port wine sauce. Peas and onions, too, and buttered carrots just like my mother used to make, back when she was—

But there were no drowsy vagrants. Only some kids, underdressed for the weather, making choppy snowballs and pitching them, violently, at a chain-link fence. From his brain’s amygdala, this time, came another message, this one more diffuse, darkening his mind the way an octopus’s ink clouds the sea: There’s no one out there. You’re alone as ever, bucko. This message—a familiar one—he expelled as a dim sigh. The file cabinet hit the street with a sharp clank.

The loaner car was a painfully small, egg-shaped domestic model for which he’d traded his Jeep at a body shop on Route 24—permanently, as it turned out. “I see my new ad brought you in,” said the owner, referring (he had to explain this to Elwin) to a dead buck splayed on the roadside, just beneath the body shop sign. “Found that one here this morning. I should hang him up with a banner saying
DEER COLLISION EXPERTS
.” His name was Sal, according to the blue patch on his shirt. Elwin had found him eating a footlong meatball sub at nine-thirty in the morning, a mildly impressive feat; faint whorls of tomato sauce spotted all the paperwork. Classical music was emanating from a conspicuously high-tech stereo system in the corner—and not just any classical music, Elwin noted: not the philharmonic Quaaludes you heard on public radio stations, but something jarringly avant-garde, Luciano Berio or somesuch. When Elwin complimented the soundtrack, however, Sal glanced back at the stereo as if he’d never noticed it before, shrugged, and dusted the hoagie-roll crumbs off the paperwork before sliding it toward Elwin.

“Been a crazy fucking month,” he’d said. “Hunnerd and fifty deer collisions already. Fucking suicide bombers, how they’re acting.” The worst-case scenario, he said, was two weeks in the loaner car; “unfuckingbelievable” was how Sal characterized his backlog. Rightfully concerned about the seating capacity of the little loaner—several years earlier he’d been ejected from a roller coaster because the safety bar couldn’t fit over his belly, causing his young niece to perish from terminal embarrassment—Elwin asked if there might be a larger vehicle . . . something with more “trunk space,” he said. Bearing width issues of his own, Sal saw right through the ruse; looking Elwin up and down, he said, “Tight squeeze but you’ll be okay.”

But then Sal had called him three hours later. “Your insurance company put the ixnay on the repair,” he told Elwin. “They wanna total it out.”

“Total it out?” Elwin squawked. “It’s just some front-end damage!”

“On a ’98 model, buddy,” said Sal, a funereal cello sonata playing loudly in the background. “Your guys, see, they go by the fifty-one percent rule. If the repair cost tops fifty-one percent of the Blue Book value, she’s a goner. Totaled. Finito. Kaput-ski.”

“How can it be totaled? I drove it to you.”

“Talk to your agent. I’m just repeating the news, okay?”

“I love that Jeep,” Elwin said.

“Love is cheap,” Sal advised. “Come back at me after the holiday, okay? I’m up to my fucking earballs.”

The file cabinet, salvaged from the Trueblood Center’s basement, was a gift to his father, though as with all gifts self-interest played a supporting role: Elwin couldn’t bear his father’s room any longer, piled as it was with the elder Cross’s research for the book he was trying to finish, or what Elwin’s sister Jane, rolling her eyes and squiggling her hooked fingers to make air quotes, called his “research.” Four-foot-tall stacks in the corners; precarious-looking piles on the windowsill, on the nightstand, the dresser; and a disheveled tower of manila file folders that had recently bloomed on the room’s single chair, forcing Elwin, on his last visit, to commandeer another chair from the room across the hall. Before all this—the swift mental skid and subsequent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease that had landed Elwin Cross Sr. in this nursing home—Elwin’s father had been painstakingly neat, a model of chilly organization. His three children had been born two years apart, and their heights, as adults, were precisely two inches apart; even his DNA was well-ordered. “He’d alphabetize the ties in his closet if he could only figure out how,” Elwin’s mother used to say. But now he’d grown slipshod, with everything out of place—his files, his glasses, his memories, his semantic processing, his brain’s crudded neurons. He was like a carpenter whose constant misplacing of his hammer limited him to pounding no more than a dozen nails a day, the bulk of his energies directed toward searching. Owing to this, Jane thought it cruel to encourage his writing. “How is he capable of finishing a book when he can’t remember Mom died?” she’d told Elwin. “It’s not fair to egg him on. And, Jesus, that room. He can’t look anywhere without it staring him in the face. It’s just wrong. It’s like sticking him in a maze that doesn’t have an exit. I mean, it even looks like a maze in there.”

So Elwin had engineered a compromise. As the middle child, that had always been his role: the Henry Clay of the Crosses. The file cabinet he was now lugging across Henry Street would ease some of the clutter—open the maze, at the very least—and buy his father some time, though it wouldn’t assuage Jane’s fears (or cold suspicion) that their father would be eaten by silverfish long before the Alzheimer’s could claim him. When he’d returned home from California, three years before, Elwin had thought the reason was to protect his father from the disease—a security detail that he partially blamed for the demise of his marriage. (Maura had been content, if never giddy, in the L.A. suburbs. The dutiful move to New Jersey, and the acid it generated within her, had thrown the marriage’s fragile pH level off kilter.) More and more, however, he felt as if he was protecting his father from Jane’s various acids.

Even as a teenager, tilting against his father for all the standard reasons, he’d never quite comprehended his sister’s hot animosity toward their father, admittedly a tyrant though of the classic benevolent order. That she could sustain the animosity now—no matter how she tried to frame it as “realism” versus Elwin’s presumed idealism—was an even darker mystery. “Is it possible that Jane is just, deep down, an asshole?” their younger brother, David, had emailed Elwin from a remote village in China, where he taught basic English while struggling to gestate a novel that, after twenty-plus years, was verging on the mythical. But then David, who was curiously alone in christening himself the family’s “black sheep,” came equipped with his own set of complications; distance, in this case, did not equal objectivity. He’d seemed to covertly relish the fact that Jane’s third husband, a Tribeca anesthesiologist, had more or less wiped out their father’s retirement savings by handing them over to Lawrence Muntner, whose arrest and conviction for operating a gargantuan Ponzi scheme had dominated newscasts a year and a half earlier. Maybe it assuaged some guilt David was feeling for contributing nothing to their father’s care; Elwin didn’t know. Elwin was sanguine about David’s absence in the financial schema, however. His little brother’s bohemian act—which at this late stage was no longer an act—exempted him, in Elwin’s mind, and to a lesser though still surprising degree in Jane’s. Though, “when that book of his gets made into a movie,” she’d said, “we’re socking him with a big fat bill. Interest included.”

Noting Elwin’s struggles to reconcile his load with the building’s double set of entrance doors—the exterior of which bore the phrase “
A LIFE FULFILLMENT COMMUNITY
”—a familiar male nurse helped him carry the cabinet to his father’s room. “Special delivery,” the nurse announced, visibly startling Elwin Cross Sr., who was propped up in his bed examining an envelope. The elder Cross frowned at the file cabinet. “What’s that for?” he said.

The nurse, glossy-faced and blubbery, with a neck the size of a wheelbarrow tire, replied, “All your stuff, man.”

“What stuff?”

“That stuff.”

“That’s not stuff.”

“Whatever. All ’em papers.”

Elwin’s father hadn’t seemed to notice his son, leaning against the file cabinet and breathing way more heavily than his cardiologist would deem appropriate. Up went Elwin’s hand, for a meek wave that his father also didn’t register; at this he felt a negative tingle. His father’s doctor had warned Elwin that it might happen one day: You’ll walk into his room, and he’ll ask who you are. He won’t recognize you. “You need to be prepared for that,” the doctor had said, neglecting to explain how. But surely . . . not
yet,
Elwin thought, staring solidly at his father as if to transmit some kind of telepathic introduction:
Hey Pop. It’s me. Don’t you dump me too.

“Put it over there, Boolah,” the elder Cross told the nurse, and in the same flat executive tone said to his son: “How was traffic?”

The negative tingle vanished, deactivated by relief. “Fine,” he said, far too brightly, and for that matter inaccurately: At the mouth of the Holland Tunnel he’d been trapped inside that blue egg for forty-five minutes, the steering wheel wedged hard against his belly no matter how he adjusted the seat. Scanning the radio, he’d discovered a weird surfeit of Billy Joel songs, causing him to conclude that Billy Joel must have just died—a fair hypothesis for why all of radioworld seemed to be paying him sudden and synchronous tribute. This saddened him, not because he liked Billy Joel—he didn’t—but because Maura did, and though their marriage was apparently over, he was still somehow conjoined with her, so that, imprisoned inside the Holland Tunnel, he felt the stab of her grief vicariously, as if some emotional satellite linkage had yet to be disabled. But none of the DJs mentioned any death, and neither did the cycling newscasts on the AM dial, so after a while Elwin realized he’d conned himself into mourning Billy Joel for Maura while both of them—albeit separately—were probably off somewhere giggling, as alive and vital as ever, while his poor belly flesh was slowly enveloping the base of the steering wheel in the manner of a white blood cell engulfing a pathogen. Another forty-five minutes in that tunnel, he felt sure, and full phagocytosis would occur, with the steering wheel becoming an indelible fixture in his gut.

“Boolah, meet my son.” A brusque wave. “Dr. Cross the Junior.”

Boolah, who’d been introduced to Elwin a hundred and thirty times before, said hidy.

“He’s an expert on dead languages.”

Boolah nodded like he always did. Like most of the world’s peoples, he had no response to that, even with practice.

“Boolah,” Elwin’s father said to his son, “is an expert on the New York Giants.”

Now it was Boolah’s turn to brighten, if just for a moment. “Played two seasons at Defensive Back, ’88 and ’89,” he said, which actually was news to Elwin. Elwin was about to ask him more about that—Elwin wasn’t a football fan but he was drawn to tragedy, and a former NFL star changing bedpans showed potential for that—when he saw Boolah’s expression darken. “Blew out my knee, y’know, so that was that. Not something I talk about. Ain’t that right, Dr. Cross?”

“They say he’s famous,” said Elwin’s father.

“Hush with that already,” said Boolah.

“But then I must be famous, too—look.” He spread open his hands to reveal the heap of plastic-windowed envelopes splayed atop his bedsheet. “It’s the only way to explain the amount of mail I receive. Junk—all of it junk.”

“I’ll help you clear some of that,” Elwin said. “But later. I brought you dinner. I just need to fetch it from the car.”

Boolah protested: “We got turkey today, man. It’s Thanksgiving.”

“We eat at five,” said his father.

“Turkey at five,” said Boolah. “With all the trimmings.”

“I’ll be back in a sec,” said Elwin.

“He don’t eat turkey?” said Boolah to Elwin’s father.

“It can’t be five already,” came the response.

Elwin’s father’s room was on the first floor, four doors down from the lobby where a dozen patients were gathered, in varying models of wheelchairs, around a bulky, low-def television. Not one of them, Elwin noted, was watching the football game on the TV; instead they sat slumped in their chairs, arms hanging as loosely and slack as their lower jaws, as if in the late stages of carbon monoxide poisoning. One woman was wearing an XXL sweatshirt emblazoned with a gleeful turkey and the word
GOBBLE
! A taut plastic sack of urine, dark as lager, peeked out from beneath a man’s gym shorts. Some were asleep, or if not quite asleep in a state much like it: eyes closed, heads comfortlessly lolling, consciousness cranked down to a low sludgy stasis. Others appeared to be scrutinizing the walls, which were painted the pale sulfurous yellow of a banana’s flesh. Their eyes rolled toward Elwin as he passed, but blurrily—as if an instinctual response to perceived movement, like the reaction mechanism of sea urchins. He was merely a sudden dark break in the wall color, for some of them—a flickering anomaly, an unmoored memory sinking too swiftly to rescue. He felt their failure as he went by, and felt guilty, as if just by his passing he’d bullied them into futile exercise—reminding them that he was no one they knew, because they no longer knew anyone.