“How did your mother look when you saw her?”
“Well. . .” Daniel hesitated and, to his dismay, smiled. “It was horrible. I almost fainted.” His smile was watery, his lips felt weak—why was he smiling at all? He had exposed a tender spot. “I had to leave the room.”
“It is horrible.” His father vigorously uncrossed his legs. “Horrible and unfair.” He meticulously separated some lobster meat from its shell, then lost interest in it. “You know we had a bad relationship. That marriage was ruined by her family. But your mother and I are still close in a way I’ve never been with another woman. We’re still man and wife, even if we never speak to each other again.” He chewed rapidly and lightly, then swallowed. “Marriage means some-thing to me, and so does family.”
“Me too,” said Daniel.
His father looked up. “I still can’t believe that idiot family of hers. Sitting there letting nurses tell them what to do.” He snorted and poked his tongue around in his mouth. “Probably all doped out on Prozac.”
Daniel noticed a red-haired girl with large sweatered breasts at the next table. Her mouth was darkened with bad lipstick gone awry, but she handled her utensils very gracefully.
“How is Ray?” he asked. “Do you still see her?”
“Sometimes.” His father smiled, a little harshly. “She’s crazy as always. Last time I saw her, we went to some restaurant, pretty late at night. She had coffee and she poured about four sugars into it. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to eat so much sugar, and she went nuts. She said, ‘Everybody hates guys like you. What the fuck do you know about health, you alcoholic asshole?’” His father snorted mildly and shook his head, his mouth a rude line.
Then he noticed the redhead too.
It was late when they left the restaurant. The night cold reached in through Daniel’s nose and seized his lungs. Buildings and cars looked stunned and abandoned in the intense cold. His father’s big car shuddered in the wind. Its rusted, corrugated ass end stuck out beyond the other cars, proud and devastated. They got in the car and sat silently for several minutes while his father worked to make the engine turn over, grunting slightly as if he were lifting a heavy object. In the small, cold enclosure, Daniel felt his father intensely, felt him trying really hard.
Jacquie had never liked his father. “He’s a handsome prick,” she’d said once. “But he’s a prick.”
“Don’t call my dad a prick,” said Daniel. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
They tried to scoot to the far sides of the bed, but it was so mushy in the center that they rolled together anyway.
When he got home he called Jacquie. She was glad to hear from him; she had thought he was still mad at her. “I realized I must’ve sounded cold,” she said, “but that’s not how I meant it.”
“It’s okay. You were just freaked out.” He imagined Jacquie sitting invisible in the car with him and his father, feeling his father. He pictured an expression of understanding slowly altering her face. If they knew each other as he knew them individually, he thought, they would love each other.
“I was thinking about this thing that happened when I was a kid,” she said. “I mean, in relation to what I said to you about the accident.”
He thought of being with her on their bed, massaging the little ribs between her breasts. These bones were spare, and they gave slightly if he pressed hard. She loved to have them rubbed, especially the places in between the bones.
“We were going to the ice cream social at my school,” she said, “which naturally I liked because it meant a ton of ice cream and cake. But as we were pulling out of the driveway, we ran over our cat, Midnight. She was up under the wheel, and she didn’t get out in time. It was awful, because when we got out we saw her hips were crushed but she was still moving reflexively, trying to get up.”
He listened, alert and puzzled.
“I said, ‘Look, she’s still alive,’ and my mother said, ‘No, it’s just reflex,’ and my sisters immediately began to sob. But I didn’t.”
“Do you think you were shocked?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think I just wanted to go get ice cream. We went to the ice cream social, and I sat there and packed it in. My sisters were too upset to eat, but not me. My mother said, ‘Why aren’t you crying?’ I just shrugged, but later I felt guilty about it.”
“Well, it’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”
“No. And neither does my therapist.”
“What did your therapist say?”
“That I was probably not as oriented toward the sensate as my sisters. That I was probably a cerebral child and that plain death didn’t seem terrible to me. Like, the cat’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s go have our ice cream.”
“But it’s normal to care about pets.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just had a different set of responses than the conventional one.”
He sighed and stuck his feet in front of a furnace vent made of metal strips and dark, heat-breathing slits.
“Actually I remember getting more upset about Midnight’s brother, Walnut. He was obviously very distraught when he saw her body. He walked around the house for days, looking for her and meowing. That did seem sad to me. Partly because he didn’t understand what had happened and we couldn’t explain it to him.”
He got off the phone feeling okay. But later that night he lay in bed, wide awake and furious at Jacquie.
He visited his mother every day during the ten days he stayed in Iowa. He got used to the thin hoop haloing her impaled head. The tube came out of her mouth, and her eyes began to show expression—usually a dull and cantankerous one. Cards and flowers proliferated in her room. Daniel noticed with irritation that nothing had come from Jacquie.
Finally she was able to talk. “How is Jacquie?” she asked.
“Pretty good.”
“That’s good. She’s a nice girl.” Her voice was devoid of inflection, flat and invulnerable. There was an undercurrent of grudging bitterness in it, as if she had concluded some time ago that there was no hope for her but was willing to pretend otherwise so that you wouldn’t feel depressed, even though the pretense was a nuisance. Daniel realized with discomfort that she had talked like this for years. His mother’s eyes shifted vaguely around the room. “She is a nice girl,” she repeated. Her hand began to twitch on the rumpled bedsheet. He put his hand out to still it. It felt like an injured and panicking bird. His hand sweated, and he wondered if it repelled her. No, he thought. Just hold her hand.
“Has Harry been to see you?” he asked. Harry was a talkative gynecologist whom she had been dating for the last three months.
“Oh, yes. Several times. I think he’s afraid of running into your father.”
“How is he?”
“Oh, he’s Harry. He’s incredibly Harry.” She smiled, and her eyes wrinkled elfishly. He saw for a second the pert little girl that smiled at him from old black-and-white photos in the family album. “Tell me about your music,” she said.
He told her about his one steady job, in a dark little bar with a crippled neon sign that blinked “Free Crabs—Funk Nite.” He told her about playing in the park and being chased by cops. He told her about the time the famous piano player had told him he was “the death.” He wasn’t sure what it meant to her. It could seem seedy and pathetic.
He finished talking, and they were quiet. She whispered. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s just sit quietly together now.”
The flat rasp of her voice made the endearment strangely poignant to him. He shifted his sweating fingers, stretched them to air them out, and then took her hand again. The room was a lulling beige-and-cream terrain permeated by the muted hum of the building. He listened to it and became aimlessly thoughtful. He thought of Mrs. Harris, whose son had been killed in an amusement park accident several years before. He had liked the son, and yet, when confronted with the weeping Mrs. Harris, he’d been embarrassed and hadn’t known what to do. He wished he could see Mrs. Harris again, so that he could hold her and console her.