Without removing her dark glasses and floor-length black fur coat, worn to protect her from the cold, as she is old-school and confirmed in her habits, and, I believe, to annoy the environmentalists and vegetarians, Contesa crooks her index finger and points to a corner of the room, where photographs of local and national birds hang, entreating me into a conspiracy, and, hesitantly I rise, not just because I'm uncertain whether I can manage another conspiracy. I will instantly forfeit my comfortable seat to the dour man and the fretful woman, both shadow my movements and echo them, mimicking me in some way, and, as soon as I rise, with alacrity, they do replace me on the brocade couch. Mentally, I denounce them.
Contesa has planned an event for the evening, she tells me, ever mischievous, which will happen in the lecture hour after dinner, upstairs in the Rotunda Room above the main hall that has a small stage or raised platform, a reading of her first one-act play on whose creation she has labored in silence, since she wanted to surprise us, the Count and me especially. It's true I desire surprise, but my second heart rebels, my intestines twist slightly, and I blush again, for the play might reveal something I don't want to know or watch. Contesa has enlisted some of the residents, but she won't say whom, as well as others, to play the parts or read them. "You'll have it before your eyes soon enough," she teases, impishly lifting her dark glasses onto the top of her forehead, and her words echo someone else's, but I can't remember whose. We walk to the leather couches where we sit beside each other, while the new arrivals, a sallow, bearded man, who, I learn, is an obituary writer and professional magician, a gregarious, pretty woman, with smooth skin the color of eggplant, a poet and activist, named Rita, or "the saint of lost causes," she explains ironically, and a stout, florid man with a network of broken veins on his bulbous nose, a wine writer and art collector, make conversation with each other. They dot the area of the room near the big fire. Listening to their conversation with my eyes on the floor, I finish my Campari and soda, while Contesa draws out her gin and tonic. The magician has them engrossed in a story about a girl whose mother suddenly disappeared. The police listed the woman as a missing person, and after two years the case was closed. But every night the daughter dreamed her mother was locked up in a place and couldn't move. The nightmare was always the same, and the daughter began to suspect that her mother wasn't missing. One day she remembered that the freezer in the basement was locked, but it hadn't been before her mother's death. So she and her younger sister pried it open, found their mother's body, and went to the police station. Their father confessed to the murder. He had kept her body in the freezer for three years, he explained, because he didn't want to part with her. "Morbid," says Rita, the saint of lost causes. "I'm claustrophobic," says the Wineman. "But you know it gives me faith in people's dreams," says the Magician.
It is now just past 7:30, and the kitchen helper has entered to announce dinner, he catches my eye slyly, as the Count waits at the doorway of the dining room, staring sympathetically at his gold pocketwatch, and now my skin burns fiercely as if at noon I had stretched out under an August sun. With the announcement, Contesa entwines her arm in mine, and we head toward the dining room. The new residents stroll slowly toward the dining room, and, like most new fellows, two of them hang back, observing the flow and custom of the older residents, and only the stout, florid Wineman or connoisseur has broken away from them to join the other disconsolate woman, they already know each other, since he walks forward with assurance, hovering close to her, and plies her, I believe, with anxious, gratuitous questions, though he might be bringing her news from the outside or spewing his recent biography. When we have entered the dining room, whose lights I discreetly lower, they take seats at a small table near one of the windows, which is close to where I sit, alone for a moment, while the Count and Contesa confer in a corner.
— Is this table OK? the stout Wineman asks.
He looks about, so does she, she sees me and nods.
— Great, she answers.
I nod to her. The Wineman's fleshy nose is a map of purplish spider veins.
— I had a stroke last May, he says, loudly. I nearly died.
— I'm sorry, that's scary.
With this, he tucks her into her chair.
— I'm recovered. I just need rest. Want a glass of wine?
He sits down.
— I brought a case of Mouton Rothschild, he says.
— I'd love it, thanks.
— My son's turned eighteen, lives with my ex-wife in Des Moines, usually. He's the one who found me on the floor, unconscious. I had a seizure.
— That's terrible, but he found you in time. You're lucky.
— I'm alive.
Brusquely, in the manner, it seems, he performs everything, he uncorks the bottle, smells the cork, rolls it in his stubby fingers, pours a splash into his wine glass, swirls the glass, inhales the wine, and drinks, first rolling the wine on his tongue and in his mouth.
— Excellent. Needs to breathe. I think the food here is great compared with other camps I've been-everything but lunch. So, I was in the hospital for three weeks, and they discovered noncancerous polyps.
— You've had your share, she says, drinking greedily. I have asthma.
— I've had three colonoscopies, two angiograms.
— Bodies. I hate bodies, mine especially.
— But I'm good now, I have a clean bill of health. So, what do you think? Like the wine? It's vintage.
— It's great. To health.
She toasts and smiles, shows her red pulpy gums, I'd never seen this solemn twenty-eight-year-old smile broadly, her teeth are uneven and milky gray, as if she hadn't had enough calcium as a child, and, when she smiles, closes her eyes, like an ecstatic or someone who can be happy only when the world is absent. Her lower teeth are especially set back, recessed, which caused her weak chin, I suppose, she couldn't have had braces, orthodontics, as a child, what did her parents think, did they have no money, or didn't believe in straightening teeth, did they think it was just cosmetic, but the face grows with the body, sometimes ahead of it, my nose was suddenly long when I was short, then I shot up, my face filled out, while I lost my puppy fat. Orthodontics might have saved her from this unfortunate structural fault that makes her appear sadder than she may be, because now she hardly smiles, and when she does, displays sickening gums, and I feel an uncomfortable wave of nausea.
My mother often becomes dizzy, but not nauseated, she can barely stand without some dizziness, and when my mother had a seizure, after the first operation on her brain, she sat up in her hospital bed, her head pushed forward, her back bent forward, also, and sewed an invisible cloth, her fingers stitched neatly and never quit moving, in precisely the same way, again and again, seemingly inexhaustible, and she was unseeing, unaware of herself and me, the doctors, she said nothing for hours. Now, when she stands up too quickly, the room whirls pitilessly, her legs weaken under her, she holds her forehead dispiritedly and moans, so I tell her to breathe slowly in and out, count, one, two, three, four, and she does, imitating me like a child, but I have no idea if this actually helps her. In the days before my father died, when his heart failed and he lay in a coma for a day, brain-dead, he recognized trouble, and, ever vigilant about his body and medical condition, in a weak hand he had noted, with few crossings out, his symptoms: 1) I have no appetite, nauseous, 2) some stomach pain (little), 3) sleepy, and, at the top, he wrote: I do not w… He halted then. My father had many fears, of playing the stock market, of heights, of his mother, of incapacitation, of death, as I do, though I believe death is nothing, but then nothing can be frightening when it swallows your days and you don't know where time has gone, which may be why he didn't finish writing the sentence: "I do not w…" I'll never know. On the other side of the note, just a slip of paper, he wrote "wheeze-phlegm-sleeping" and recorded his meds, amiodaroni, lasix, coumadin, lanoxin. My father recognized he was dying, in his last night of consciousness, and he must have been disappointed with himself, afraid and failing again. He admired Winston Churchill, inordinately, for his bravery, and Churchill's final words were, "No more." Before my father fell into a coma from which he never returned, he smiled at his doctor, he was happy to see him, his doctor told me later, maybe he thought he'd beat death, but when my father died, he said nothing.