COLLINS AVENUE
His father was out when they arrived, so they sat in the kitchenette, Buddy inclined in the wheelchair with his head back so that Booker could feed him, a bird with its chick, Booker cutting the peanut butter sandwich into little triangles and forking them into the chick’s upturned mouth. His stepmother, Teddy, stood watching curiously at the counter as she told Buddy the kind of story she liked to tell, a story about a friend’s daughter who had recurring fibroids. The story grew increasingly morbid. It was almost gratifying to hear it with Booker there, a kind of triumph to have Booker witness it, to see that she was really like this. Her friend’s daughter was thirty-nine, Teddy was saying, and had never had children. Suddenly at age thirty-nine, after a first surgery had failed to cure her, her fibroids returned—“very, very serious,” Teddy said — and they’d had to give the friend’s daughter a total hysterectomy. It made her so despondent that she’d stopped going out, could hardly even go to work. Then the daughter’s close friend got pregnant and she decided she would try to help her plan a baby shower. The friend’s pregnancy brought the sick woman out of her despair for a while. She bought decorations and special paper plates and matching plastic silverware and she arranged for the caterers to bring platters of different kinds of sandwiches and a carrot cake, her friend’s favorite. All this planning and decorating helped her forget about her hysterectomy, helped her feel alive again, but then on the day of the shower, just when everything was going so well, the reality of it all hit her again. She drove to her friend’s house with her nicely wrapped gift and realized she couldn’t go in. She just stood outside the door for a minute and then turned around and got back into the car.
“She couldn’t face it,” Teddy told them. “It just broke her heart. What got to her was that she’d never had any children of her own.”
Booker cut the last of the sandwich into two little pieces and brought one on the fork to Buddy’s mouth. What got to her was that she’d never had any children of her own. Of course Buddy had no children of his own either. Of course that was what his stepmother was telling him. She was telling him that he was so obtuse that he’d never even realized that the one basic truth in life was children.
CAREGIVER
“She didn’t like me in her kitchen,” Booker said.
Buddy grimaced and closed his eyes while Booker wiped his face roughly with the wet cloth. “She doesn’t like me in it either,” he said.
“How long they been married?”
“Thirty years. It was secret for a while. He kept it secret for about two years.”
“Why?”
“Why not? That was more the thinking.”
AUDIENCE
His father was waiting by the pool, sitting at an umbrella table by himself with a folded newspaper in the oval of shade. Booker wheeled him out and Buddy did his best to sit up straight, hands dead in his lap, glad that at least now he was thin and not pudgy, not so coddled looking. He wore a blue blazer in the summer heat. His father wore a golf shirt and pale cotton slacks. He had lost all the color in his face and his hair was gray but still thick, still slicked back in the pompadour, his eyebrows full. He didn’t say anything when Buddy introduced Booker. There was all kinds of awkward clatter around the table, and then his father insisted that they sit somewhere else, beneath the veranda where Buddy would be out of the sun, and they made their way over there slowly, Buddy soaking wet beneath his clothes now, his breathing tight. You could feel your skin, you could feel the sweat, even feel the muscle and bone beneath the skin, but you couldn’t move any of it. It was the same as the embarrassed grin that always came to his face. Like the embarrassed grin, the stillness was involuntary but also seemed the truest possible reflection of who he was.
“Teddy will bring out something for us to drink,” his father said. “You didn’t have to wear a jacket. You know that.”
“I wanted to make the effort.”
“It’s July.”
“Where is everyone? Where’s the gang?”
“It’s hot out. They’re inside. I just came out to get some fresh air.”
His father looked off far into the distance, breathing in and out slowly. The way he breathed, it was as if it hurt him in various, small increments. The pupils of his eyes had contracted into two black disks that gave him a helpless, even sightless look at times. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands since he’d quit smoking.
Buddy craned his head up and back to try to catch Booker’s eye, but he couldn’t manage it, so instead he gave his sheepish laugh. Now that he’d come dressed in slacks and a blazer, he felt the same stilted discomfort he’d felt when he was ten years old and made to sit for a photograph in such clothes. He heard Booker’s shoes scuffing softly away on the concrete. Don’t say anything. Don’t say that you’re fine either. Just stick to the practical issue, the fifty dollars a day for your basic needs.
“The drinks,” his father said. “How are you going to manage?”
“I’m not thirsty,” Buddy said.
“You need to stay hydrated. What’s his name?”
“Booker.”
“Booker. We’ll get him to come back to the pool. Teddy will send him back.”
RIVIERA
The iced teas sat in their condensation puddles on the white fiberglass table, neither of them drinking, Booker not coming back. There was a feeling of being suspended in time, lulled by the heat and the rilled water of the unused pool. He remembered his father’s penthouse in the Havana Riviera, doves outside on the balcony, his father standing there at the window in his black tuxedo, the view of the Malecón. At dusk, there would be a special intensity of gray light, a kind of anticipation of what would unfold that evening, each evening like the one before it, the waves breaking on the jetty. The fountain with its seahorse shapes, the lobby with its low-slung chairs, the women in white gloves, men in dinner jackets. Even on the top floor, you would feel the vastness of the spaces below — the casino, the Copa Bar — the city’s lights outside the window, the traffic passing before night fell. He remembered they’d had a talk in the dim light about his new fiancée, Annette, and Buddy had explained that she was the right one, as if his father would understand at last and give him his blessing.