BUCK, BY AN EXCELLENT STROKE, HAS NOT NOTICED me. An encounter with him would zero out my Default Self before it even had its chance. The Beth Wessel corridor, which I now enter, is like a swank hallway in the Carlyle. No hint of infirmity or decline. Nothing wheelchair width, no wall grips, no SOS phones or defibrillator paks. Illness abides elsewhere. The walls are rich, shadowed wainscot and with an aroma of saddle leather, the above-part done in hand-painted murals of the Luxembourg, the Marais, the Seine and the Place des Vosges. Ann’s told me these are all re-done yearly and there’s a competition. Brass sconces add tasteful low-light accents. The carpet’s gray with a green undertone you don’t notice and lush as a sheep meadow. Every few feet there’s a framed, spot-lit photograph — a Doisneau, a Cartier-Bresson, an Atget — or at least their imitators. Sounds are as hushed as deep space. You expect the next person you see to be Meryl Streep in a Mets cap and shades, making a discreet exit out onto a side street off the Boulevard St. Germain — not the Great Road in Haddam Township.
Ann’s flat is at the end. 8-B, though there’s no 8-B on the door. Doris-Doug will already have announced me by wireless means — possibly a message transmitted direct into Ann’s deep-cranial band width. There are, of course, cameras, though I can’t see them.
I’m ready to ring the bell, but the door opens before my finger can touch the brass-and-wood buzzer button. Ann Dykstra stands suddenly before me. It’s ten before six. I know where my children are. They’re grown up and far away. Thank goodness.
“I’ve just been watching the local news about these poor hurricane people,” Ann’s saying, without a hello, a hug, a peck, just stepping back as if I was the grocery boy with sacks and can find my own way to the kitchen. “It just doesn’t end, does it?” I take one step back, then come forward inside, and have to fight off pantomiming that it’s cold as Alaska outside her door, and I’m lucky to be inside for warmth and a fire. There’s no fire, and I’m not cold, or lucky. I’m simply here, with no reason to be except this ridiculous, crinkly, clear-plastic sack with its lifesaving pillow, which I’ve been instructed to fetch and now have done. “No, it doesn’t,” I say. “It’s cold outside.”
“I guess your Sally’s over there and seeing it firsthand, isn’t she?” Ann regularly refers to Sally as my Sally as if there were hundreds of identical Sallys, and I just happen to have one. It could seem friendly but isn’t. It makes Ann seem like my grandmother. “Those poor, poor people. They have nothing left. And they’re paying property taxes on homes that’ve washed away. I’m lucky I’m not there anymore.”
“You are lucky.” Ann’s living room’s like a crisp stage set, and I feel too large to be in it. (Five minutes ago I felt too small.) I also feel like I don’t smell good — like sweat or onions — and that my feet have cow shit on them and my hands are grimy. Ann was always a neatnik and has become more of one since she got Parkinson’s and moved to smaller quarters. Feng Shui rules all here — promoting tastefully optimum healing propensities. No metal lampshades (too yang). Tree energy wall colors — for calm. The bed, which I’ve never seen and never will, has its headboard oriented north to conquer insomnia (Ann’s told me). What Feng Shui has on its mind about constipation, I don’t know. The living room has a big mullioned picture window with a single candle facing the flood-lit woods and the duck pond (good yin). Tiny lights from the birch-bark canoe institute prickle invitingly through the tree limbs. The apartment looks like a model home in The AARP Journal. Pale green couch. Bamboo floors. Floral-print side chairs. Lots of clean, shining surfaces with plants, ceramic fragrant-liquid containers, and a fishless aquarium — small but new, and everything in its ordinal position to placate the gods by making the whole space as uncomfortable and un-lived-in as possible. I know there are also tiny soundless sensors all around. These track Ann’s movements, tabulate her steps, record her heartbeats, check her blood pressure and brain functions, possibly digitize her relative empathy levels depending on stimuli — me in this case. Low. All are S.O.P. for the “Living Laboratory for Gray Americans Plan” she’s opted for — and that drove down the purchase price. She can check any of these by accessing her “life profile” on the TV — though I can’t see a TV. Ann was always a devotée of the Golf Channel. But golf on TV may be bad yang.
I set the crinkly pillow sack down on one of the floral prints and am instantly sure I shouldn’t. Pillows on chairs, plastic on textiles, plastic on anything conceivably dilutes the chi.
“Did you see Buck?” Ann closes the door with a clunk. Buck the flatfoot.
“I didn’t,” I say, not entirely literally.
“He was wanting to brainstorm with you about buying on The Shore now that prices are whatever they are. Less, I guess now.”
“Less’s not really the word for it. I retired from that line of work, though.” So much for those poor, poor people.
Ann presses her back to the closed door, hands behind her. She gives me a purposefully pained and thin smile. I’m irritable. I don’t know why. “Do you real estate people ever really retire?”
“I’m not a ‘real estate people.’ And we do. A lot in the last few years.”
Ann’s wearing a soft, aqua-velour pants-and-top ensemble and a pair of day-glo orange Adidas that have never seen out-of-doors. Both, I assume, have the Feng Shui thumbs-up, as though she was a contemplated piece of furniture in her own living room. She’s also accessorized using a gaudy gold-and-diamond teardrop necklace that husband number two picked up at Harry Winston back in the foggy past, and which she’s brought out to remind me how women were once treated in a civilized world. Her hair, always athletically short, has been even more severely cropped — into a kind of pixie that no longer hides the gray, and which I find unexpectedly appealing. Her whole affect has grown smaller, trimmer, more intense, just, it seems, since I last saw her — sized down near to the dimensions of her girlhood, when I met her in ’69, and we listened to jazz and took the boat to see Miss Liberty and made whirlwind drives to Montauk and didn’t think about jewelry, and had the time of our lives, which just never got better after that. Her skin is shiny though mottled, her facial bones more visible, her glacial blue eyes clear and strangely bright, and her once-soft nose gone beaky and sharpened, as if in concentration. Her breasts seem smaller. She’s, in fact, prettier than I remember her, as if having a progressive, fatal disease agrees with her. Though there is the circular tremor ghosting her chin, the source of her concentration. It may be more pronounced than in November. She is brave to have me here, since I record the progress of her ailment like one of the sensors charting her decline from the prime that seemed always to be hers. Indeed, the whole Feng Shui deal, the velour, the Adidas, the bamboo, the floral prints, the necklace — they all speak of illness, the way an old-fashioned drawing room with damask draperies, shaded lamps, full bookshelves, and a fireplace speak to me of our first precious son being dead in the funeral parlor. The world gets smaller and more focused the longer we stay on it.
I’m still gazing round the over-cogitated room, wishing something would take place: a smoke alarm going off. The phone to ring. The figure of a Yeti striding through the snowy frame of the picture window, pausing to acknowledge us bestilled within, shaking his woolly head in wonder, then continuing into the forest where he’s happiest. There’s not even a Christmas tree here, nor a mirror. Rules restrict such things. Vanities.