“Hey, Rita, isn’t that your… boyfriend?” Cam asked.
“What?” I looked up. Standing at the reception desk was Paul, the last person I needed right now. He was shaking Herman’s hand, then Herman pointed at us. Paul turned and his eyes met mine behind his glasses. He looked upset, concerned, and guilty as hell. Good.
“Is that him?” Cam said again, standing up and hitching up his Sansabelts with a thumb. “I haven’t seen him in years. Full head of hair, still. He’s a good-lookin’ man.”
For a cheater. Paul walked toward us, wearing a striped dress shirt, a charcoal sports jacket, and loafers without socks. He’d evidently had time to change; I hoped he’d had time to move the fuck out.
“It’s Paul!” Sal said, rising to his feet unsteadily. He had only seen Paul a handful of times, but the tone of his voice told me he was grasping for all the family he had.
“Rita,” Paul said, “how are you? Dad and Mom send their love.” He grabbed me and hugged me, but I stepped out of his embrace stiffly.
“How did you know-”
“The police called the house. Your father had your name in his wallet for an emergency.”
“Hey, how you doin’!” Sal said, then practically threw himself at a somewhat startled Paul.
“Sal, it’s all right. Sal,” Cam said. He put his hand on Sal’s shoulder and gently pried him free.
“But he looks so good,” Sal said. “So good.”
Cam looped his arm around Sal’s shoulder, half in embrace, half in restraint. “That’s because he’s young, Sal. It’s easy to look good when you’re young. You can drive at night, the whole thing.”
“Good to see you, Cam,” Paul said, nodding at him. I was surprised that he knew his name. “Sorry we had to meet again under these circumstances.”
Herman walked over and he, Cam, and Paul began to make small talk. I felt myself withdraw. They batted around the crime rate and the judicial system; it reminded me of the conversation at wakes, where everyone lapses into group denial. I understood why it was happening now; there was nothing any of us could do for my father and we were all aching inside. Except for Paul. He didn’t belong here. I felt my anger rising, and before I could think about it I snatched a fistful of his jacket.
“Paul, could I speak to you alone?” I said. Without waiting for an answer, I yanked him out of the waiting room, past a surprised trio of my favorite senior citizens, and to the elevator. “Go,” I said, and punched the down button.
“Rita-”
“Get out. I don’t want you here.”
“But I want to be here.”
“Bullshit. You don’t even know my father. You never bothered.”
“You never let me. There was never time.”
“Great. Here we go again.” The receptionist looked sideways at us and I lowered my voice. “Do you think this is helping me, to fight? Do you think I need this right now?”
“I think you need someone right now.”
“Maybe so, but not you. Now go.”
“Rita, let me stay.”
The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. “Your stuff is packed and out of the house, I assume.”
He sighed loudly. “Fine. You win. You’re right, I’m not doing you any good right now.”
“You catch on quick. Did you move out or not?”
He fished in his jacket pocket and handed me a piece of paper as he stepped into the elevator. “I checked in at the Wayne Hotel. This is the number. If you need anything, just call.”
I read the numbers, in architect’s lettering, neat and boxy. I used to love his script. “Do me a favor. Hold your breath.”
He stepped into the elevator. “I love you, Rita.”
As the elevator doors rattled closed, I tossed the paper into the waste can and walked back to the waiting room. But before I walked in, I stopped without really knowing why. Herman was sitting uneasily next to Sal and Cam, and the three of them made a hunchy little row. They reminded me of a border of impatiens in autumn, clumped together and low-lying, petals curling and leaves cracking in the first cold snap. Their season was almost over. I felt a constriction in my chest.
I would lose them all, one by one. Lose their worn faces and their stuffy smells and their medical sagas. Their stories of stoopball and boxball, with spaldeens of pink rubber; their idolatry of Rita Hayworth and Stan Kenton; their wonder at the opening of Horn amp; Hardart’s automat downtown and their joy at the ending of the war on VJ Day. All the times they talked about at the card table-the times of their lives-vividly recalled and retold as the betting and the storytelling went round and round.
I’d spent a lifetime with these men. How could I lose them?
How could I lose my father?
15
By the next morning my father’s condition had a name: stable. An intern told us the news and Cam was so happy he group-hugged everybody with one arm, shoving Mickey awkwardly into Herman’s wife, Essie, and leaving Herman’s yarmulke hanging by a bobby pin. David Moscow and his lover embraced openly and only a hospital orderly looked askance. Sal wept for joy and so did I, reveling in the resonance of the word. In the assurance of it, the reliability. Stable.
I sent them all home to shower and breakfast, and as they shuffled down the hospital corridor, clapping each other on their thin backs, they looked like an old-timers’ baseball team that had just won a championship. I realized that I’d never seen them so happy in victory, though I had seen them win at cards many times. Then it struck me; a win at poker isn’t the same. A good night for you is a lousy night for your friends. It’d never occurred to me before.
I walked to the window that looked on to my father’s room in intensive care and watched his chest heave softly under the thin hospital blanket. He hadn’t come out of anesthesia, but he was breathing on his own. His face was a deathly white, his strong features oddly slack. A greenish tube ran underneath his nostrils, another one snaked under his bedclothes. Still, I counted his breaths, one shallow huff after another, twenty-seven so far, and thought the scene was the most beautiful I had ever seen. Except that his feet were uncovered again.
I checked my watch. Eight-fifteen. I would have to wait another forty-five minutes to go into his room under their stupid rules. “Tamika,” I called to the young black nurse at the desk.
“What?”
“Let me go in. It’s his feet.”
“Again?”
“Please. It’ll just take a minute. It’s cold in there.”
She shook her head. “We been through this, Rita.”
“Come on, I promise I won’t touch him or do anything that might speed up the healing process. Please?”
She sighed heavily. Tamika and I had dueled at dawn because she wouldn’t let me and Sal stay in my father’s room for more than the allotted fifteen minutes, and wouldn’t let Herman and Cam in at all because they weren’t immediate family. I’d threatened litigation against the hospital and Tamika had called me a bitch. You could see it had pained her to say this, she wore a thin gold crucifix and a frank expression that told me the truth: I was a bitch. So I had apologized, with the vague sense I was becoming a better person for it, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
“I’ll just take a minute,” I said to her in a conciliatory way. “I’ll cover his feet and go.”
Tamika got up. “I’ll go in.”
“Thanks a lot.” I was learning to compromise. I was so proud of me. “I really appreciate it.”
“Hmph,” she said, apparently not trusting the metamorphosis in my inner lawyer. She sailed by me into my father’s room, covered his feet efficiently, and walked out again. “Okay?”
I would have patted his foot, but never mind. “Terrific. Thanks a lot.”
She returned to her station without another word.