“Sweetheart, I don’t think the Messengers…”
“Of course they are,” she said, “but even if they aren’t…As long as I have strength to speak and warn I shall use that strength to speak and warn. There’s grime in even the purest death, things the clearest-headed among us wouldn’t expect. Well, the children are an example, aren’t they? Oafish Mary and tender Milly. Their grandfather and uncle try to turn their heads, to bribe their attentions away from truth. The fact is they’re quite successful. They are. My girls will remember their mother’s passing as a shower of gold. Tennis and swimming and private lessons. Golf and horseback riding and dinners at the club — all lovely summer’s fine rare prizes. They’re going to the academy this year. Daddy’s paying their tuition. I don’t mind. It’s hard for kids. Milly doesn’t believe me and Mary pees her bed.
“But I haven’t told you yet how we do it. The stitches and pain and my cancer shining through my skin like sunlight. How does he get it up, do you think?”
Sam got it up and left the room. He went through the small dining room into the kitchen.
“Poor Sam,” his wife said. “I won’t talk behind his back, only out of his line of sight. He hears me now. You hear me now, don’t you, Sam? You’re listening to all this, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Sam said, his voice fainted by the intervening rooms.
She lowered her own voice. “How does he get a hard-on? He wills it. It’s his decision. Why, it’s no more trouble to him than acquiring a tan or arranging his hair. It’s biofeedback, Sammy’s sex. Decisive grooming, like the way his pants hold a crease or the fact that his hands don’t get dirty. And there’s no weight. Our skins barely touch. Platonic fucking. Orgasms like something shuttled back and forth in a game. Because he never comes until I do.” She was speaking normally again. “You don’t come till I do, do you, Sam?”
“I’m a gent,” Sam said in the kitchen. “I’m something in armor, something in tails.” He was crying.
“Baby, don’t cry,” Judith said. “Hush, courtly lover.” And he hushed. “Bring me a pill, Sam.” They heard the faucet in the kitchen. Sam appeared with a pill and a glass of water. “See?” Judith said. “Thanks, darling.” She turned to the Messengers. “See? My last few months like a sort of pregnancy. See? Judith lying-in with doom and whim and old Sam hard by all hand and foot to fetch all the pickles of the grotesque, we never close.
“Sam, Sam, you Jew, you Jewish husband. Shall we tell them our news?”
“We’ve told them everything else.”
“No,” she said, “no we haven’t.” She turned to Paula. “Once, maybe two or three years ago, we gave a party. Cornell brought the ice, do you remember? Sam had called at the last minute to ask one of those gee-it-must-have-slipped-my-mind favors of his. Though we know better, don’t we, know that nothing ever slips Sam’s mind, that his mind goes around in galoshes and snow tires, radials, chains, and Cornell was high, stoned, and I’d been talking about TM, and your husband asked me to tell him my mantra. Do you remember that? Do you, Cornell?”
“I think so,” Messenger said. “Yes.”
“Yes,” Judith Glazer said. “And I wouldn’t tell you. Well I’ll tell you now. Lean toward me, I’ll whisper it.”
“I was kidding, Judith. I don’t have to know.”
“Suppose what I tell you were my last words? Not have to know what may be a poor dying woman’s dying wish?”
Messenger looked helplessly at his wife. She was already packed, checked out of the motel, all gone. He looked at Sam, similarly fled, browsing inside info on cordless telephones in Consumer Reports.
Messenger got out of his chair and went toward the poor dying woman. He knelt at her side and she blew softly in his ear as if testing a microphone. Then she whispered four senseless syllables into it which he would never forget. He felt himself blush.
“An obscenity?” Paula suggested.
“My mantra,” Judith Glazer said. “There. I feel better. Only Cornell and my guru know. I can give it away because I don’t need it anymore. You, Sam. I just gave away my three-thousand-dollar mantra to Cornell.” She smiled and Cornell felt something like affection for the nutty lady. “I’m dying,” she said jovially, “and going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam. Only I may look down on Sam, you know. I earned the privilege by living with him, earned it at discount, the odor of his odd-lot, uncut, 35mm film on my breasts when he came to me from the darkroom where he cut and rolled it onto used cartridges, the cutting and winding done at midnight in closets so that we didn’t have the expense of even that single low-watt dim red bulb. I’m going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam, on his thick soft bundles of hair, Sam’s plateaus of head like actual geography, and let him know if he’s fucking up as dean. That’s our news. Sam’s to be appointed dean when Adrian steps down at the end of the semester.”
“Under the circumstances,” Paula said, “I’m not certain congratulations are entirely in order.”
“Oh yes,” Judith said, “of course they are. I’m going to Heaven and Sam’s going to the Administration Building.”
She seemed actually gay, her jaundice a kind of radiance. She was gay, even her crazy close-order drill less irritating than it could have been. There was a sort of warmth and comradeship in their edgy intimacy. There was a kind of truth in truth, Cornell thought. “How do you know you’re going to Heaven?” he asked.
“My rector thinks so, all the church ladies do. Besides,” she said, “the Bible tells me so.” She grinned. “Well,” she said, “if you can’t put your friends through it, what good are they anyway? I’ve put you people through it this afternoon. You’re good sports. Once in a while you weren’t even humoring me. You deserve a reward.”
“I couldn’t touch another malted,” Messenger said.
“No,” she said, “no more malteds. You know,” she said, “these are still the good times. No one’s ever paid this much attention to me. Not even when I was mad. But now, in the springtime of my death, when the pain is still manageable and discomfort’s only the mildest death duty, easily paid, easily confused with convalescence even; now, when my weight is down and I look as I used to as a girl, better really, for I was crazed then and had on me the stretch marks of my terror, now it’s all easy and there are hold buttons on my telephones and people bring us their covered chafing dishes and best recipes all made up and ready to go like take-out or room service and there’s nothing to do but visit with my girls when they come in all tan from the club, scrubbed as princesses, and I’ve time and inclination to answer all their questions, posing others that they dare not ask, stuffing them like French geese with hope and love, it’s not so bad.
“I’ve no recriminations, none at all.
“But dying’s like the marathon, I think. There’s no way to go the distance till you’ve gone it. And sooner or later you hit the wall and whimper if you cannot scream. I seem a saint and so far think I am one.
“Listen, everyone. I make this pledge to you. There will be no trips to Mexico for Laetrile, and I’ll never call out for any other of those fast-food fixes of the hopeful doomed. Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus wants me He can have me. To tell you the truth, He can probably use me.
“Now, Cornell, I want a favor.”
“Of course, Judith,” Messenger said, “if there’s anything I can do.”