But that’s. Some. Fucking. Noise. This. Morning. But here, at last, the hard hiss of steam. He can feel it already begin to flood the room. Good morning, Thelonious. Time to rise. And shine. Make God your glory glory. Katya used to sing that to him long ago. Along with her dreidel rhymes.
He grabs hold of the bar and swings his knees across, scoots himself up in the sheets and goddammit it all to hell. He can feel it now, under his pajama bottoms. She has put him in a pad. Yes, a pad. Plain and simple, by any other word, a diaper. Why the hell does she do it? A goddamn diaper. And when in the world did she slip it on? How did he possibly forget? He can remember the sound of the traffic on Court Street fifty million years ago, he can remember Heaney at the Waldorf, Muldoon too, he can remember being born as a young lawyer, for crying out loud, the tie shop on Montague, Katya and her nursery rhymes, he can remember boarding the SOC-3, but he can’t remember Sally slapping him in a diaper just this morning?
The dark dogs of the mind.
— Sally!
Long and tall she is indeed, but quick on her feet she is not. Not the girl to sally forth: sally eighth more like it, sally ninth.
— Coming, Mr. J.
Well, so too is Hanukkah. So, too, is the twenty-second century. So, too, is the end of the visible world. Hurry on and help me, woman. A goddamn diaper. Why the hell did you sling this forsaken piece of foolishness on me? What did I do to deserve it? What crime? What cruelty? A diaper! I might have needed one eighty-two years ago, that’s true, Sally, my dear, and forgive my Polish, my Lithuanian, my half-baked Yiddish but for fucksake, woman, I hardly need one now.
He is halfway out of the bed and virtually suspended in mid-air when he hears a little wheeze and the rumor of a sigh, and then footsteps in the hallway. A slow shuffle. Sally stops, perhaps to catch her breath, and it takes him a moment to figure out whether she is moving towards him or away. The clockwatch. The waterboil. The plodalong.
The cruelty of time. Never enough of it when you need it. And always too much when you don’t.
— Sallllly!
Another sigh, an audible Uh-huhn, four more steps, and then the turn of the gold-plated door handle.
— Here I be, Mr. J.
Here she is, here she be, and have they no grammatical rules in Tobago at all? They mangle the language. Mingle it. Mongrel it. No Chicago Manual. No Strunk or White. Sally will never make it onto the pages of The New Yorker, that’s for sure. Nor the Times, nor even the Daily News. She might scrape up a position for herself at the Post, but only just, by the hair on her chinny-chin-chin.
Yet there is something lovely about her cadence. She speaks with bright coins in her voice. A tambourine in her throat. She swallowed a bird, Sally James, the first of the morning. In she breezes, cool as a treetop, tall as a redwood, sturdy as an oak. Her shape above him in the bed. Her dangling earrings. Her hair sticking out at fantastic angles. Half her life spent on that hairstyle. Curlers and irons and combs and all sorts of accoutrements. In the early days he could hear her getting up at four in the morning, just to get ready, curling, blowdrying, stitching, braiding.
She has a peculiar smell to her, a good smell, like furniture polish, dear Sally from Tobago, or is it Trinidad? And how, anyway, do they differ? And who, quite honestly, gives a flying fig? Does it matter if she’s north, south, up or down, east or west, when the simple fact of the matter is that he is wearing a diaper and it must be removed, hastily, quietly, now.
How in the world did it happen, Sally? What hour did you sneak up on me?
Imagine that, my pajamas down around my ankles, the pocket still over my heart, the BlackBerry clock, tick-tock, and I wonder what she thought, or thinks, of my equipment? I am not a man of great fire-hose potential. She has seen it now, uncoiled, or coiled, how many times. Seahorsed. Hooded. We can only hope that the living don’t snicker.
— Sally?
— Yes, Mr. J.?
— Did I really need the winter gear?
It has become his little phrase: the winter gear. The idea of calling it a diaper galls him, and an incontinence pad is too much of a mouthful, or rather a handful, or a bucketful. And what is it the British call it? Such a fine gift for language, the British, having learned how to use it from the Irish, or so Eileen always said. But even the great linguistic masters fail here. A nappy, by all accounts. What specimen of genius came up with that for crying out loud? What learned Oxford mind? After a napkin no doubt. Fold it up. Tuck it in.
— Sally, I don’t like it.
— It’s so you don’t spoil your sleep, Mr. J.
— Well, it sure as hell spoils my waking.
She rears her head back and shows her mouth full of dark fillings, but this is no laughing matter, Sally, no laughing matter at all. Here’s me. And there I be. She is bending down towards me, her sharp perfume, her tickling hair, and she draws back the duvet, performs a quick whipaway of the sheets. Oh, is there anything worse on God’s dark earth? He shifts sideways on the bed and he can tell right away. Lock me up, Your Honor. Throw away the key. Oh, Lord, you pissed and shat yourself Mendelssohn. Who owns this body, this foul little wreckhouse, this meshuggeneh mansion? Who allows us this filthy comedy? Divine it is not. How in the world did I sleep through all that? The ancient pisher in me. A fountain of Helicon indeed.
She steadies him and reaches across for his Zimmerframe — who the hell was Zimmer anyway? He leans across and says that he’ll do it the rest himself, remove the winter gear, ski to the bottom of the slope.
And then he says: Please.
Oh, smash this body entirely, Sally, break it up into little bits and pieces, and then I can walk around with the still-working head and heart, leave the useless pieces behind me. Fare thee well bowels, colon, pajama pocket, errant prostate, all ye untenable pieces. Let the Mendelssohn mind meander. Let the heart stroll. Leave the alter kocker behind. I have always gone according to the laws of nature. It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf. I was born in the middle of my very first diaper change. Not even my first, truth be told.
He leans close to Sally again and he can feel her strong hefty arms and her hand at the soft of his back and who would have thought that the last lady in his life would have breasts as generous and as round as Sally’s? Soft and fragrant. Round and juicy. Full and floppy. Oh, you’re a good woman, Sally James, from Tobago, or Trinidad, or Jamaica Plains, or wherever the hell it is, and what is it I pay you again? I should make sure, double sure, triple sure, that there’s something in the will for her, she’s a good soul, she means well, though she has no grammar, but neither do I at times, I is, I am, I was, I will be, but, oh, she has me halfway in the air, it’s all a matter of science now, lift me, bring me to the mountaintop, resurrect me, roll away the stone, and he can feel his body creaking forward, Sallying forth, and he half collapses onto the Zimmerframe and he heaves a big sigh of relief, even though he can feel the contents of the winter gear shifting down below.