“He hadn’t gone in for the tests last week.”
“What tests? He didn’t say anything about tests. He never mentioned tests. What’s going on with Jerome?”
“That’s what they’re trying to determine, Ben. I don’t understand it. Supposedly we’ll know in a few days.”
He called Jerome but there was no answer.
He called Helen.
“Christ,” she said thickly, “who the hell is this?”
“It’s Ben. Did I wake you? Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s only just past midnight here. I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet. You’re what, nine o’clock in Los Angeles?”
“I sound like the time and temperature lady to you, jackoff?”
“Hey, Helen, it’s Ben. It’s Ben, darling.”
“ ‘Hey, Helen, it’s Ben,’ ” she mocked. “Jeepers, douchebag, you’re some fucking bore. I spoke to you a month ago. You told me your knuckles had temperature. What’s up now, you getting electric shock in your snot?”
“It’s about Jerome, sweetheart.”
“Screw Jerome.”
“Helen, have you been drinking? You know how you get when you’re drinking.”
“Mind your business. What do you think this is? You some kind of wise guy? Nuts to you. Wanna fight? Get off the planet.”
He’d been calling them, feeding them his symptoms, the heavy weather, all the isobars and thunderheads of his multiplying sclerosis. (It was crazy, but it was as if the days when his paresthetic hands had troubled him, when his skin crawled in anything but natural fibers, when the nerves in his feet sent out shoots of electric quiver, had been a golden age, the halcyon good old days of manageable discomfort.) Now his body shipped a queer illicit cargo of intolerable contraband sensation. Things no torturer could make up. His body a host to amok feeling — and all still below the level of pain, things not pain, as if pain, as he remembered it, was only a matter of the degree of things honed and sharp, tender through sore to pinched, some verb wheel of friction and thorned flesh, only the surgical cutlery of bruise, nip, sting, stitch, ache, and cramp. Pain, he thought, he could take. Or could have afforded the addiction that would have purchased relief. These other things, these new proliferating sour dispensations were something else and lived, thrived — he knew, he’d tried them — beneath all the powerful analgesics — Demerol, codeine, laudanum, morphine. And had held back from his godcousins the really big stuff, the monstrous that he dared not put in words, dared not try them with. Held back all that was unimaginable: sounds that tickled his eardrums; his tongue rubbed raw in his saltwater saliva; the steady, constant Antarctic cold of his hands and feet and eyelids — he could not endure air conditioning and wore thick furred gloves in even the hottest weather — the impression he had that his body was actually striped like a zebra’s, the dark strips of skin and flesh, or what he imagined were the dark strips — he could see that he was not really striped — heavier somehow than the light, harder to negotiate in gravity; the sensation he had that he was wet deep inside his body, wet where he could not get to it — like someone with an unreachable itch — where he could not dry it with towels or rub it with toilet paper, though he tried. Though he wiped and wiped himself, he felt always as if he sat in some medium of diarrhea, minced, oozy, slippery shit. Also, his olfactory system was faultily wired so that he hallucinated tastes and smells, confused them crazily with their sources till finally, experimentally breaking the code, he ordered desserts and cakes at dinner if he felt like seafood, seafood if his body craved meat, meat if he had a taste for something sweet. Had not told them any of this who kept on now — he couldn’t say why, couldn’t account for why he did not kill himself, or had not died — by dint of a will and a set of motives he knew to be as illusory and unfounded as his impression that his body was striped.
“I have arrived,” he told Oscar, “at a stage of my life where I must manufacture reasons to keep going,” but not explaining this further, certainly not giving any indications that his love for them might be one of those reasons. But perhaps he did not believe this himself.
Was worried. Concerned. Not hurt (everything beneath pain). Even though he knew they knew where to find him, where he hung out to keep his eye on the landscapers and supervise the movers who daily brought the suites of motel furniture, where he oversaw the construction of the swimming pool and sauna and signed for the television sets he had bought over a year before from Nate Lace at the Nittney-Lyon, and kept a weather eye out for any nuance of movement in the impasse with the electricians, and conducted the business of all his remaining baker’s-dozen franchises throughout the country, become a sort of Nate Lace himself now, holed up, at once waiting and doing business. And still they didn’t call. Even though they knew of his illness (though not its degree, he having spared them that, spared them, even as he spoke to them, when he, that is, called them, the terrible symptoms of speech itself: that talking, making sounds, seemed to chafe the soft insides of his cheeks, raising blisters). Not even forgiving them. What was there to forgive? They’d told him. They’d grown apart.
“Loyaler,” as he told Irving, “than you guys have been, not even to me, I’m not in it, but to each other. Growing apart. What was it, you didn’t watch your diets? You let yourselves go? Genes, genes like that, like you had, are holy. A responsibility. Once-in-a-lifetime genes. To be protected. What’s the matter? You’re Finsbergs. Don’t you know anything about endangered species?”
“But why complain to me?” Irving said. “Jesus, Ben, I’m the one who held on. Don’t blame me,” racially prejudiced Irving said, “for the mongrelization of this family. Sure, I married a darkie, but damn it, Ben, I’m the only Finsberg who hasn’t changed. I look the same. A year older but still charting the Finsberg course, still with the old twin and triplet telemetry and trajectory. It was them. I’m right on target for what would have been the manifest destiny of Finsberg evolution. Gee, Ben, I didn’t grow apart.”
“I know,” Flesh said, “I know, Irving. You’re a good boy, a nice man, but how could I say such things to the others? To the ones who did let themselves go? Who did grow apart? Forgive me, pal, I’m just letting off steam.”
And the more worried, the more concerned — Jerome’s tests — the less there was to forgive anyone. Perhaps they didn’t want to upset him, felt they needed to protect him, as he protected them from his darkest symptoms. So he didn’t call. He stopped calling. Waiting for good news, waiting for the strike to be settled, waiting for something nice to tell them for a change.
It was settled in April. Ben nodded to the man who told him and went immediately to the telephone.
He called Gus-Ira. When the ringing stopped and he heard the connection completed, he began talking at once. “We’re cooking, the rank and file ratified and the boys will be…” There was a voice against his own voice. “Gee, I was so excited,” he said, “I didn’t even say hello. It’s me, Gus-Ira, it’s Ben. Say, I just…”
“…and that’s just for starters,” Kitty’s voice said, “you haven’t heard the…”
“Kitty, is that you? Hi, it’s Ben. There must be some freak connection. How are you, Kitty dear, how are you, Gus-Ira? ”
“…thing is he doesn’t stop. I think someone should call him off, tell him that (a) number one…”
“Kitty? Gus-Ira?” Ben broke in.
“…our own troubles, and (b) number two…”
“Hello? Hello?”
“ water is thicker than godblood.”