Her hands were glossy with oil. Her nails were short and rounded. Through her white pants and her short white smock, Henry could see the outlines of her underwear. When she pushed the heels of her hands against Brendan’s shoulder, the flesh rose and gathered in bloodless peaks. Henry narrowed his eyes and shifted on his seat. As Roxanne moved from Brendan’s neck to his right wrist and then wrapped his arm in her hands, Henry imagined his own arm encircled and caressed.
He felt the thumbs moving up the skin of his forearm, the fingers approaching the sensitive armpit, the first touch on his rib cage. He felt her breath on the back of his head. He felt the tips of her nails against his earlobe, their quick run down his neck, the pressure of the mound at the base of her thumb against his spine. And then, most delightfully (he had lost sight of Brendan completely, no longer saw his ruined flesh, no longer remembered that Brendan was in the room or that he, Henry, was not lying beneath Roxanne but sitting with crossed legs on a hard plastic chair), he felt Roxanne’s legs on him, her whole length pressed against his back. He imagined the feel of her breasts. He imagined how she might take her hand and grasp him, gently ….
“How’s that feel?” she asked, and Henry opened his eyes and drew a breath he knew she heard. She was talking to Brendan, not to him. She was working gently over Brendan’s painful kidneys, lifting up the heels of her hand and using only her fingertips.
Brendan mumbled, “It feels okay,” but he kept his eyes tightly closed and Henry wondered what he was thinking. On Hiva Oa, Henry imagined, Roxanne’s slender figure would be incandescent in bands of pale green and her feet would sink in the sand until her toes were buried. He could spin scenes around her golden hair and pale hands, the way that, when he’d been at his peak, he could envision neighborhoods rising from the featureless countryside. She was lovely, and he couldn’t keep his mind off her, and he couldn’t talk to his uncle while she was around.
Roxanne began telling Brendan about her old job. She used to work at the baths in Saratoga Springs, she said. In the summer, half her clients had been Hasidic women from Brooklyn, who came to take the waters. They had arthritis, she told Brendan, that would make his seem like a joke; the lack of food in the Polish and German camps had done obscene things to their joints. They came every day, sometimes twice a day, and lay in the hot, effervescent water groaning with relief. Later, when she rubbed their twisted bones, they told her stories. She had heard things, she said, that she couldn’t have imagined. She had heard things she’d never forget.
Brendan nodded thoughtfully at Roxanne’s tale and told her — not for the first time, Henry knew — about his stay in the Japanese internment camp in China. Henry closed his ears; he’d heard that story before. He studied Roxanne’s fingers, which continued to work while Brendan spoke. Roxanne moved her hands down to Brendan’s legs and Henry’s thighs tingled. He tried to think of other things — of his upcoming court date, of the money he owed his wife, Kitty, and could not possibly pay; of the fact that Kitty would have to leave their house very soon. Roxanne raised Brendan gently until he was sitting up on the white-draped table. Then, after averting her eyes while Brendan struggled into his pants, she transferred him to his wheelchair. She looked at Henry directly for the first time that morning.
“Would you help him finish dressing?” she said. “Would that be okay? I’m running late this morning.”
Henry nodded, unable to say a word. She had strong, shapely arms and legs, and when she turned the lilt and tilt of her walk reminded him of his mother. When she’d heard that his father was returning from the war, she had shed her hunched posture and unclenched her hands and danced with Henry and Wiloma in the kitchen of their cabin. She had balanced Wiloma, who couldn’t have been more than four, on her feet, so that Wiloma’s toes rested on her own insteps and Wiloma’s hands were clasped about her knees, and then she had danced as lightly as if she were not lifting Wiloma’s weight with every step. On the night of the accident, when the gray Plymouth had sailed off the curve of Boughten Hill and into the ravine below, she had been wearing a dress as white as Roxanne’s smock. White shoes, coral earrings, a coral belt and purse. There had been a frill around her neckline, Henry remembered — some sort of ruffle or flounce that fluttered when she moved. The coffin had been closed at the funeral and he’d never seen that dress again.
Henry knelt and eased his uncle’s socks onto his twisted feet. “I can do that,” Brendan said, and his voice was so crisp that Henry winced.
“I know,” Henry said. “I was trying to help.” All morning he’d failed to work the conversation around to the land, and now he realized that there was no point to this anyway. He had no money, no credit, no way to develop it. His uncle would hold on to the land as long as he lived, and Henry would go on visiting him each week. Since his own accident, when he’d felt his car lift off the ground so that he had, before the tree greeted him, flown the way his parents had, he’d felt a powerful need to cling to this last connection to them.
Brendan’s left foot sat in his hand like a broken basket. The big toe, huge and distorted, splayed almost perpendicularly across the others, which rose up, curled back on themselves, and formed a knot. The arch humped up sharply, the heel spread swollen and callused; a lump larger than an ankle marred the back. Henry eased on the other sock and then the terry-cloth slippers. He tried not to watch Brendan’s hands, as useless as paws, struggling with his shirt. The shirt closed with Velcro squares, which Brendan thumped into place.
“You should try a massage,” Brendan said. “Really. It feels pretty good.”
His left hand flailed at his neck brace, and Henry bent over and fastened it properly. “Maybe next time,” Henry said. The weekend stretched before him, bleak and unpromising. He had forty dollars to carry him through to next Friday and nothing in his checking account. The bank had snipped his credit cards to bits.
He stood behind the chair, released the brakes, and began wheeling Brendan out of the room and along the halls. Near the recreation center Brendan said, “There may not be a next time.”
“What?” Henry said. “Why not?”
“Because Wiloma’s planning to take me home with her. Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to set me up in her spare room and bombard me with positive thoughts until I’m cured.”
“She didn’t tell me,” Henry said, thinking of the way Wiloma had averted her face last night on the far side of the storefront window. “She didn’t even ask me what I thought. But it’s not like she ever tells me anything.”
They passed a man in another wheelchair, sitting perfectly still with his chin mashed against his collarbone and his hands drawn up over his heart. The hall smelled faintly of urine and disinfectant. “Would you rather stay here?” Henry asked. “Would you rather have the chemo?”
“Of course not. But that doesn’t mean I want Wiloma’s heathen healers all over me. They’re not even Christians, never mind not being Catholic — as far as I can tell, they think they’re all part of some amorphous spirit. Like the cells in a big sponge, or something. I can’t believe she believes in that.”
Near the solarium, along the hall that led to Brendan’s room, Henry stopped at the niche in front of the picture window. “So what do you want?” he asked.
Below them the park stretched rolling and green, and a wedding party decked out in shades of lavender posed in front of some shrubs. A very large woman, perhaps the mother of the bride, shouted something Henry couldn’t hear at the driver of the limousine. Brendan’s left arm drifted up from his chair and hung in the air for a minute.