Margaret Millar
Ask for Me Tomorrow
To Charles Barton Clapp
Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.
Romeo and Juliet
Act iii, Scene I
One
It was late afternoon. As Marco dozed in his wheelchair the long lazy rays of the sun touched the top of his head and stroked the sparse grey hairs of his good arm and fell among the folds of his lap robe. Gilly stood in the doorway and watched her husband, waiting for some sign that he was aware of her presence.
“Marco? Can you hear me?”
Only a few parts of his body were capable of movement and none of them moved. No spasm of the fingers of his right hand which operated the controls of his wheelchair, no twitch of one side of his mouth, no flutter of his right eyelid, which was the one that opened and closed normally. The other eye remained as it always did, the lid half open and half closed, the pupil dead center. Even when he was awake no one could be sure exactly what he was looking at or how much he saw. Sometimes Gilly thought the eye was accusatory, staring directly at her, and sometimes it seemed amused as if it were focused on some wry joke in the past or bit of fun in the future. “It sees nothing,” the doctor had told her. “But I’m sure you’re mistaken, Doctor. It looks at things.” “The eye is dead.”
The dead eye that saw nothing watched Gilly cross the room. She made no noise. The carpet was silent as grass.
“You’re pretending to be asleep to get rid of me, aren’t you, Marco? Well, I won’t go. I won’t go, see?”
See? The dead eye didn’t, the live one stayed hidden under its lid.
Gilly touched her husband’s forehead. It was scarred with wrinkles as if some cannibal had started to eat the flesh, had dug his nails across it leaving tracks like a fork.
“It makes me nervous when people pretend,” Gilly said. “I think I’ll scream.”
She didn’t, though. Whenever she screamed, Marco’s nurse, Reed, came running and the gardener’s Airedale started to howl and Violet Smith, the housekeeper, had a sinking spell. One of Violet Smith’s sinking spells was as memorable as the Titanic’s.
“Violet Smith says we eat too much meat, so it’s fish again tonight.” That ought to do it. He hated fish. “Marco?”
Neither the threat of screams nor fish disturbed the rhythm of his breathing.
Gilly waited. It was hot and she would have liked to sit outside on the patio for a little while to catch the breeze that started blowing in from the ocean nearly every afternoon at this time. But the patio belonged entirely to Marco. Though she was the one who’d had it designed and built, she didn’t feel at ease there. She blamed it on the plants. They were all over the place, growing in stone urns and redwood boxes on the deck, and hanging from the rafters in terra-cotta pots and moss pouches held together by wire and baskets of sea grass and palm fibers.
Marco could maneuver his wheelchair among them quite easily, but Gilly was always bumping her shins on tubs of fuchsias and getting her hair caught in the tentacles of the spider plant. Marco’s patio was comfortable only for people in wheelchairs, or children or dwarfs. Full-grown upright people found it hazardous. Marco’s nurse, Reed, cursed when he was ambushed by the hidden barbs of the asparagus fern or the vicious spikes of the windmill palm, and even Violet Smith, who never swore, used a borderline phrase when she stepped into the lily pond while trying to avoid the soft seductive ruffles of the polypody.
For dwarfs, for children, for cripples like himself, Marco’s patio was a place of fun where grownups could be booby-trapped and ordinary people made to look foolish and awkward. No child ever saw it, of course. No dwarf, either. Just Gilly and Reed and Violet Smith and occasionally the doctor, who didn’t say or do much because there wasn’t much to say or do once he’d taught Gilly how to give injections. (She had practiced on oranges until it became quite natural for her to plunge the needle into something both soft and resistant. “As the Lord is my Savior,” Violet Smith said, “that is a silly thing to do, wasting valuable oranges when you could just as easy practice on yourself.” “Shut up or I’ll practice on you,” Gilly said.)
The sliding glass door to the patio was open and there were little rustles and stirrings among the plants as if they were whispering among themselves. They might have been fussing about the smell of fish drifting across the lawn from the kitchen. They were Marco’s plants, maybe they didn’t like fish any more than he did and their protests were as weak and difficult to understand as his. Not that protests would have done much good: Violet Smith had recently joined the Holy Sabbathians and each week she seemed to acquire a new conviction. This week it was fish.
“She’ll be here with your dinner in a few minutes, Marco.”
His rate of respiration had increased and she knew for sure now that he was awake and simply didn’t want to be bothered either with food or with her.
“If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you something else after Violet Smith leaves for her meeting. Are you hungry?”
One side of his mouth moved and a noise came out. It didn’t sound like an animal or even like one of the plants outside on the patio. It was a vegetable sound coming from a vegetable. “He’s a sorrowful figure,” Violet Smith often said in Marco’s presence as if the stroke that had paralyzed his vocal cords and most of his body had also deafened him. This wasn’t true. He had, as Gilly was well aware, ears like a fox. She and Reed had to be very cautious and time their meetings according to Marco’s pills and injections.
“How would you like to eat in your Ferrari tonight?” Gilly always referred to the wheelchair as some kind of sports car. It was intended partly to amuse him and partly to soften, for her, the constant and imposing reality of it. Reed supplied her with names, most of which were unfamiliar to her — Maserati, Lotus Europa, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Jensen-Healey.
He opened his right eye slowly and with difficulty, as if the lid had been glued shut during his afternoon sleep. It was impossible to tell from the eye’s expression whether he was amused or not. Probably not. It was a very small joke and he was a very sick man. But Gilly could not help trying. Trying was part of her nature, just as giving up was part of Marco’s. He had given up long before the stroke. It was merely a punctuation mark, a period at the end of a sentence.
“Okay, so it’s the Ferrari. The Lamborghini’s in the garage, anyway, having a tune-up... Eat a little fish to keep your strength up... Do you have to go to the john?”
The fingers of his right hand dismissed the idea.
“The doctor thinks you should drink more water if you can.”
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He had given up. His hunger was only for pills, his thirst only for the fluid in the hypodermic needle.
Violet Smith came into the room with the tray, using her bony butt to close the door behind her. She was a tall, light-skinned Indian from South Dakota, Oklahoma, Michigan, Arizona, depending on her mood and whichever state happened to be in the headlines at the time. A severe tornado in Oklahoma was likely to elicit stories of a childhood spent in constant danger darting from storm cellar to storm cellar. At these times her dull brown eyes would start gleaming like polished bronze and her smooth solemn face would crack up with excitement. She forgot all about the forms she’d filled out at the employment agency which had sent her out to Gilly less than a year ago. The information was simple: Violet Smith, now forty-two, had been born and raised, educated and employed, in Los Angeles. Gilly suspected that she’d never been east of Disneyland or north of right where she was now, Santa Felicia.