But one night, just as Joy climbed into bed, when Aaron pulled up his pajama shirt and poked at the pouch and said, “What the hell is this?” he yanked it out before she could stop him.
She cleaned him up. She changed the sheets. She settled him back in bed. He told her he loved her. She held him and cried, said again that it was because she missed her parents.
It began to happen frequently, regularly, sometimes twice in a night. What the hell is this, and a yank. Joy didn’t tell anyone. That would have been disrespectful to Aaron. But beyond that, she knew if she told anyone, her children, her friends, they would tell her she needed to hire help or that Aaron ought to be in a nursing home.
“Please don’t pull out the pouch tonight, Aaron.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. She’d gotten him into his pajamas but not into bed yet. He was in his chair watching television. The TV was on so loud she could feel the vibrations in her stomach. She brought him some ice cream, then canned pears. He smiled at her and asked for toast and tea. She imagined the plastic colostomy pouch puffing, swelling, being pulled off by his big restless hand.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the pouch when she got him settled in bed. “Your colostomy pouch from your surgery.”
“I had surgery?”
“It saved your life.”
Aaron looked away from her. “Some life,” he said with a sigh.
Joy rigged up the bed so that she could strip any wet or soiled sheets from his side without disturbing the king-sized bottom sheet. She put down layers of chux and towels and an extra sheet folded four times. They were not always necessary, he sometimes left the pouch undisturbed. But even then, he himself was disturbed, more and more, by noises, by movements, by Joy. The rustle of the sheets if she turned over, the click of the remote control if she watched TV, even with the sound off. If she got up to go to the bathroom, Aaron started, called out in fear.
Joy got very little sleep, even after she moved onto the lumpy living-room couch. If she was in the bedroom, she startled him and woke him up. If she was not in the bedroom, he woke up disoriented and called for her. She preferred the living-room couch. It gave her the illusion of distance and freedom, and the cushions seemed to fit her tired back perfectly. She slept like a cat, listening, curled in a ball, one eye half open. When her husband called, she woke immediately and leaped up. She did not slink gracefully from the room like a cat. She shuffled in her slippers and made small distressed murmurs, turning on lamps, holding the wall for balance. Sometimes, after soothing Aaron or getting him ginger ale or cleaning him up, she would be too tired to go back to the couch and she would fall asleep at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, as tired as she was, she couldn’t get back to sleep until morning. Those pre-dawn hours were excruciating at first. She paced and fretted and prayed for sleep. But after a few nights like that, she realized what a gift she was being given. She spread herself out on the couch and read whatever novel happened to be lying around. The time became precious to her. It was too late for anyone to still be out and too early for anyone to be out yet. The streets were hushed.
7
Joyful, Joyful, Aaron whispered. Their fingers were entwined. They lay on the cool sand. An orange moon hung dreamily on the horizon. We will visit every island on earth, Aaron said. We will go to Iceland and Corfu and Tahiti and Orkney and the Isle of Mull. We’ll live in Tasmania and Ischia.
Long Island will do, Joy said.
There once was a man from Nantucket, Aaron said.
Poetry!
And the moon rose above them, growing smaller and paler as the night grew darker.
8
“My father is very ill,” Molly said to the woman next to her on the plane.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to New York to see him.”
“I’m sure that will do him good.”
Will it? Molly wondered. She thought of Daniel so many years ago, when he was so ill. He was just a kid, eighteen, younger than Ben, her son, was now. Younger than Ben and in the hospital for so long, almost a year. Then in a wheelchair for months. How had he stood it? The way he stood everything, she supposed — by ignoring it. Had it helped Daniel, had it “done him good” when Molly came home from college to sit with him in his hospital room? She had tried to entertain him, telling him amusing stories, family gossip. She’d read the newspaper to him, brought him milkshakes, too. And she’d given him novels, Lucky Jim, A Handful of Dust, which he was too sick to read. Did any of that “do him good”? There he’d been in his hospital bed, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, squinting against the smoke, smiling at her, laughing at her funny stories, but when it came time to leave, she’d see his eyes sink back into their blank gaping stare of pain. Oh, she’d had some good fights with the nurses about his painkillers, such as they were, not that anyone cared what a college girl said. Their mother had been even fiercer, but still the doctors refused to give him sufficient pain medication, insisting it was too addictive for a teenaged boy.
So had her visits done Daniel any good at all? Would this visit to her father do him any good? Would it restore his short-term memory? Would it give him back his strength, his balance, so he could walk? Would it replace the colostomy bag with his own intestine? Would it make him healthy, would it make him whole?
“You’re such an absolutist,” Freddie had once said to her, and she had said, “Yes. That is the goal, at least.”
As soon as she got to New York she would call her parents’ various doctors. She would organize all their medications in little plastic boxes labeled with the days of the week. She would order a lamp with a high-wattage bulb for reading, a telephone with big buttons and an extra-loud ring. She would put all their bank accounts online and arrange for deposits and payments to be made automatically. She would set up Spotify and program it to endlessly play Frank Sinatra.
She said these things to herself to make herself feel better, but she knew what would really happen. Neither her father nor her mother would be able to decide which doctor she should speak to or find their phone numbers. The medications she organized would be the ones they no longer took. There would be no place to plug in the new lamps with their bright lightbulbs, every outlet in the apartment, and there weren’t many, sporting frayed extension cords already overloaded. They would change the appointments she did manage to arrange for them without telling her. Every television in the apartment, and there were too many, would not work. The radio would play only static, loudly. And then there was the computer.
“Why did you even talk to someone who called out of the blue and said he was from Microsoft?” she would ask her mother.
“Because he said he was from Microsoft.”
“Mom, Microsoft doesn’t call people like that to say your computer has a virus. They never call anyone. They don’t even answer calls. It doesn’t work like that.”
“They said it was urgent.”
It wasn’t Joy’s fault that an entirely new paradigm of communication and commerce had developed in her later years. Molly would say, “Okay, Mom. No harm done. As long as you didn’t give them any information.”
“Of course not! Just my name. I think just my name. Oh god, what if I gave them something else? Like my credit card number?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know. How can I remember everything like that? He asked me so many questions.”
And her mother, her inspiring, unflappable, competent, hardworking, distinguished mother, would berate herself, berate the modern world, then sigh helplessly. “I don’t know why Microsoft called in the first place,” she would say. “I really don’t.”