“Mr. Cutler’s not getting many visitors,” I said.
“Professor Cutler doesn’t have family,” the woman said. Professor! “He’ll be glad to see you. He’s in two-two-eight. Stairs on the left.”
His door was closed. I tried the knob, pushing it open slowly, then stepping into the inert body odor that hung in the small room like a sour baggy presence. Murray Cutler lay in a bed facing the window, an elderly woman beside him bent over a book, but turning her face to me, frowning, looking punished, when the door clicked shut.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“You’re supposed to knock. I don’t appreciate it when people don’t knock.” She sighed and hoisted the book. “We’re reading this. I’m one of the volunteers.”
In this interval, Murray Cutler did not stir. His head remained canted to the side, his mouth open.
“I can take over from you.”
“He taught English at Medford High.” She glanced at him as though for approval. “Did he teach you?”
“Yes. He taught me how to tell stories.”
“He loves stories.”
“I have some for him.”
In a softer voice she said, “He’s got an awful lot of challenges.”
That was when he looked at me, not moving his head, but lifting his eyes, and remaining expressionless.
Although I had not seen him since high school, I recognized him at once. Wasted, simplified, and revealed by illness, he was reduced to a skeletal caricature of himself, the way a sickness shows us who we really are by making us too weak to pretend. He’d always been thin, his close-fitting clothes made him a stick figure, but he was vain about his body. Teachers wore suits and ties then. His suits were well cut and stylish.
Exaggerated by his sickness, he was a skinnier version of a skinny man. His skin clung to his skull, a tissuey death’s head, a corpse’s face, yellowish, with dry split lips. When he drew a breath his eyes goggled from the effort. He looked weird and weightless on the bed, like a castaway adrift on a raft. His arms looked useless. Where there had been muscle, there was slackened sinew, less like flesh than old meat.
“I’ll leave him to you,” the woman said, rising from her chair and handing me the book.
Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls. I read the dark title aloud and made a face.
“Stories of survival and heroism,” she said, buttoning her coat. “We’ve just done Alexander Selkirk.”
“Robinson Crusoe and his man Freddy, the perfect partnership, he used to say.” I looked to Cutler for a reaction, but there was none.
“He’s had a stroke. Well, a series of small strokes. His speech is impaired but his hearing is perfect,” the woman said at the door. “His eyesight is challenged too, so please read to him — or tell him a story.”
When she stepped out and shut the door I put my face close to his.
“Remember me?”
He heard me. He seemed to strain, to focus his yellow eyes on me, his mouth gaping. His hands were folded on his chest, claw-like fingers, and a needle was inserted into the back of one hand, taped flat and attached to a clear plastic tube.
“I was your student. Jay Justus.”
In a measured set of whispered gasps that I had to translate, he said: “Had so many students.”
“You told me I was special.”
This took a moment to register, but when it did he seemed to smile, as though I’d teased him, and he opened his mouth wider, showing me what remained of his teeth, discolored stumps and raw gums. He was ill, but I could see that there remained in his shrunken body a distinct intelligence that was like an intimation of heat. I was convinced of it when he became impatient, and that spark kept me resolute.
“Story,” he said, and, urgent, working his dry tongue, he looked reptilian, as corpses often do.
“You were always a reader. You used to loan me books.”
Impatience surfaced on his bony face again, twisting his features at me, his bulging yet unastonished eyes.
“You went to Mexico one summer. You told us all about it. How the Mexican children called you Papacito and followed you everywhere.”
He lifted his head as though to bat away my talk, and, slurring, he said, “Story.”
His saying the word gave me so much pleasure I hesitated until he repeated it two more times, chewing it in his insistence.
“This is a story about my friend in San Francisco,” I said, and Murray Cutler smiled and looked content. “He was lonely, he lived on his own, he worked in a cubicle, he found it very hard to meet people. One day there was an earthquake, which they get now and then in San Francisco. His office was evacuated. He ran into the street and found a doorway for protection. A young woman from his office dashed in and cowered next to him. Can you picture it, the doorway framing them? As the tremors continued he put his arm around her, not saying a word. She welcomed it — she was terrified by the earthquake, the screams of the people on the street. My friend began kissing her, and, in her fear, she accepted this. When the whole business was over she still clung to him, and instead of going back to work, he took her to his apartment and assaulted her.”
Murray Cutler seemed to listen with his open mouth, widening it as if to understand better. When I finished he grunted with dissatisfaction.
“More,” he said.
“Another man, another time, another story”—and Murray Cutler looked bewildered. “During a fire alarm at a hotel, a man in his pajamas and robe found himself standing next to a woman who was clearly very frightened. Firemen, hoses, sirens, men with axes, men in rubber boots. The woman recoiled from them. The man took the woman’s hand and drew her close, and he spoke to her in a reassuring way. She too was in a single room in the hotel. An hour of this, and then the all clear — a false alarm. But the elevators weren’t working. The man helped her find the stairs and led her to her room. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said as she opened the door. He still held her free hand. He wouldn’t let go. He kicked her door open and said, ‘But I do.’”
I stopped talking, and in the silence I created so that this might sink in, Murray Cutler said, “Why are you telling me this?” in his gargly voice.
“I’m Jay,” I said. “Remember me?”
I was not sure it registered, nor was I certain he knew who I was. I said, “I’ll be back.”
But two days went by, the days of the wake at Gaffey’s. I tried to stay in the background as relatives filed in to greet my mother, to embrace her and remind her that she was a widow, to tell Rose and the rest of my siblings, Fred and Floyd and the others, what a great man their father had been.
My cousin Eva came up to me and said, “I dated a guy, Charlie Saurin, who was in Africa like you. Middle of nowhere. He was a medic in one of those jungle clearings. No roads. The only way in was by small plane. He said visitors made him feel lonely. Know how he survived it? He said, ‘When you don’t think about leaving, a place seems bigger.’”
“I used to fantasize about being in the bush like that, isolated and in charge. The solitary bwana.”
“So where were you in Africa?”
Standing near enough to my father’s casket, I could smell the heavy perfume of the flowers. He lay with his face lightly powdered, his cheeks rouged, his pale hands crossed over the handle of his Knights of Columbus sword. His presence, and that sword, cautioned me. He was a practical man who believed in the economy of the plain truth, that fiction was folly, and only jackasses and liars made up stories.
“I lived in a friendly city — Kampala. I was a teacher at a good university. I had a nice house and a lot of friends. I had a cook from the coast who was full of Swahili wisdom.”
“Sounds wild to me.”