Pop has never mentioned that night, not even in these recent months when it's just that kind of best-forgotten off-color item exclusively crowding his memory, and which he'll tell you all about, over and over again: the time he was playing golf on the Costa del Sol and caught the future King of Spain hocking a loogey in the water cooler on the fourteenth tee, or when he got the clap from a hooker in Kansas City and was afraid to touch Ma for three months, or the time he was out on a big job in North Hills and saw the lady of the house naked in the kitchen, brushing her nipples with salad oil, for no reason he could fathom. He'll tell you his awkward stories of all of us, of his cousins and employees and people on television and especially the politicians he reads about in the stacks of ultraright and left-wing newsletters he subscribes to, the power plays and conspiracies to cover up what he believes runs through everything and everyone, which is corruption, total utter corruption, of heart and mind and of the soul. Only Bobby, no surprise, is not subject, which is fine by me, and maybe even appreciated, because if Pop were exposing him, too, I'd wonder what light or verity was left to him.
For Pop, unlike Bobby, isn't so unconcerned about dying. Sure he talks about having me dive-bomb Donnie into this place, or bribing the nurse's aide to sneak him a couple bottles of Sominex, or dropping the next-door-suite lady friend's curling iron into his bathwater, but in fact he's as death-averse as any striving red-blooded man of his generation (or mine, for that matter), and would always prefer to cling to life forever, even if it meant constant physical misery and a near-vegetative mental state, not to mention the utter depletion of the Battle family reserves. The thing to remember about Pop is that despite the de-nuded superego and messy accidents there is nothing really too wrong with him; his blood pumps at more pacific pressures than mine and his bad cholesterol is lower and he still eats (and normally shits, he assures me) like a draft horse, and as long as he has someone helping him up and down steps and out of loungers and beds so he doesn't fall and break a hip, he might well preside at my funeral, part of me suspecting how it would give him a peculiarly twisted tingle of accomplishment, this last, last patriarchal mumble over his sole surviving issue, finally succumbed.
A soft triple tone goes off in a minor key, like you'll hear over the public address in many Asian airports, which immediately wakes Pop out of his slumber; it's the call for chow in the dining room for those who aren't otherwise being served a tray in bed. Pop points to his robe and I help him with it as he tucks his pontoon-like feet into his slippers. He's unshaven as usual and his oily silvery hair smells like warm beeswax, and though we're the same height he's seeming ever-shorter to me now, the hunch in his shoulders growing more and more vulturesque with each visit.
"How do I look?" Pop says to me, the one thing he'll always ask in earnest.
"Like a man with a plan."
"I'm seeing a woman, you know."
"You mentioned that last time. Who is she again?"
"A looker named Bea. But don't ask me anything else, because I don't know the first thing about her. It's just a lot of hot sex."
"That's great, Pop."
"Don't be such a wiseass, Jerome. At least your old man is getting his share in here. It's the only thing that makes this place bearable. That reminds me. Next time you come bring a bottle of that Astro Glide, and not a dinky-sized one, either. Get the one with the pump."
"Got it."
"That stuff is a miracle. They ought to make it taste better, you know."
"I said I got it, Pop."
"You'll see, when it's your turn. You'll want your whole life lubed up."
"I'm sure I will," I say, thinking how maybe I don't want to wait. "Listen, don't you want to throw on a shirt for dinner?"
"Bea's no uppity broad."
"All right. How about some real pants?"
"Forget it. Let's go, I'm starved."
Down the hallway we go, Pop holding tight on to my arm, and it shocks me to see how unsteady he is. Maybe it's that he's still somewhat sleepy, or it's just part of his well-honed act of late (Decrepitude on Ice), but it is frankly alarming to feel the dire vise-grip of his fingers on my elbow joint, the tremolos of each heaving step, and then to hear the wheezy cardiacal mouth breathing that is all too typical around here at Ivy Acres, these once exuberant smokers and whiskey drinkers and steak eaters now sitting down to three mostly color-free meals a day, easily eaten with a spoon.
The dining room is actually pretty nice, if you like pastelly framed harborside prints and bleached oak tables and chairs and piped in Lite FM (a Grateful Dead song actually came on once, freezing me and the staff, though only momentarily), the decor done right along the lines of Kissimmee Timeshare, which I'm sure is no accident. The ambience around here is meant to evoke the active vacationing life, which for most of these folks is exactly what they remember best and most fondly, not sweet youth so much as those first dizzying years of their retirements, twenty-five or thirty years ago, when all their spouses were still living or vital and they still could walk every side street of San Gimignano and dance all night in the cruise ship disco and didn't mind in the least a three-city routing on the way to the Marquesas Islands, so they could live (just a little) like Gauguin. (This is what Rita and I should be doing, rather than painting ourselves into recriminatory corners with love's labors lost, the fact of which depresses me all the more, knowing that I might not have such memories when it's my turn to be thoughtfully assisted into oblivion.) It seems a good quarter of the folks here in the dining room are wheelchair-bound, maybe half of those requiring help from the nursing aides to put spoon to mouth, and Pop leads us to the back of the room, far from the entrance, where the more able-bodied (if not — minded) types take their accustomed chairs.
Bea, Pop's object of affection, if that's what she is, is already eating her dinner of cut green beans and roasted turkey and mashed potatoes, and says, "Good evening, Hank," to him as we sit down, sounding uncannily like my- mother. He says hello back with no great passion, and introduces me to her again, for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. Bea has a little trouble with her short-term recall, which I don't mind because there's not much to talk about and so it's good to get acquainted over and over again. She is usually pulled together and face-painted for dinner or the evening movie, and then decked out in a strictly nautical/maritime style, with the sign of the anchor featured on every last piece of her clothing, even her little white socks, ap-pliqued and stitched in and printed on, repeated enough that it has begun to read like some ominous Occidental ideogram, this admonitory vision of the two-sided hook. I could go further into this imagery a la Theresa, how it suggests my own guilt about "placing" Pop here and my attendant anxiety about being dragged along with him (now in mind, later in body), but I won't, because despite the fact that this is the most socially acceptable means of getting back at him for all those years of his being a pigheaded domineering irascible bull in the china shop of life, your typical world-historical jerk, I still 110 percent respect the man, even if I can't love him, which I probably do anyway, though I would never ever say.