“Oh, no,” he said, finding his place again in the lecture she probably hadn’t even recognized was one, “I’m all for it. I believe it’s exactly the thing, quite the right way to go. I mean after the initial outlay it’s rather economical. And Bill is right, a sense of security is the name of the game.”
“Well,” she said, gathering up some pieces of equipment and rising, “this is going to take at least a couple of hours. I’m afraid I have to tie up your phones; you won’t be able to use them till I’m done. If there are any calls you have to make you ought to try to make them now. Otherwise…”
“What if someone was trying to reach me?”
“Well, they’d get a busy signal.”
“At least two hours, you said. No one talks on a phone two hours. They’d think something was wrong, that I’d had an accident. Well,” he said, “they could call the operator, I suppose, ask her to check to see if the line really was engaged.”
“That’s right,” Miss Simmons said.
“I think of all the contingencies,” Schiff somewhat apologetically said.
“I see you do.”
“Occupational hazard,” he said. “Plus it has something to do with my being a gimp.”
“Oh, now.”
“No, really,” he said, “I could give you a whole song and dance about the cripple’s code. But I’d bore you silly.”
“Oh, now.”
Schiff, who still had some character left, was becoming as tired of the game as Miss Simmons.
“Really,” he said, “two hours?”
“If I get started right now.”
“I take your point,” he said, and gallantly moved his arm as if signaling her to pass, to play through.
She excused herself and disappeared from his living room.
Well, thought Schiff, reminded of sudden furious electrical storms when he was a boy on vacation with his parents in the summer bungalow they had in the country, of great howling winds and plummeting temperatures and of wide shadows that spread from horizon to horizon and came down over the bright, burning afternoon like dark paint, this is cozy. He meant it. His legs and his telephones useless, he felt stranded, shut off, closed down, all the abrupt, unexpected holiday of emergency, of every chore suspended. (He could have lived, he recalled thinking, like this forever, and remembered his disappointment when the storm passed and the world resumed.)
Miss Simmons had returned. She was screwing some tiny piece of equipment into the handset of the extension in the living room.
“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she said.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I think I may have dozed off.” It was a lie, but he did feel refreshed. He watched the efficient movement of Miss Simmons’s fingers, her accomplished cybernetics. It would be like this in a home, he thought. All the activity of the nurses, their aides, the physical and occupational therapists, the people who brought you your trays, the nimbleness with which they stripped the little lids from your jellies and butters and creamers, undid the impossible knots of Saran Wrap from around your salads and sandwiches. He wondered if he could talk the university into letting him teach his classes from his room in a home. He wondered if the laws protecting the disabled covered cases like that, if his entitlements extended to people to mark his papers for him, deliver his lectures, lead his discussions. Because otherwise, Schiff thought, the deal was off. If he had to lend anything to the process except his presence (his consciousness, he meant, his sheer witness) the spell would be broken. Because that’s what it was, all that activity — Miss Simmons’s, the nurses’ and aides’, the food servers’ and PTs’ and OTs’, as much as the sudden, explosive summer storm — had been — a spell, an enchantment, and as quickly broken. And the lines had been down then, too. (Perhaps that’s what had put him in mind.)
“Oh,” she said, “I forgot about your cordless. I’ll have to put an adapter in that, too.”
He handed it over.
“These,” said Miss Simmons, “are a son of a bitch.”
“Oh, now,” Schiff said.
She grinned. Schiff didn’t remember her but thought she must have been a good student.
“Is everything hooked up yet?” he asked when she gave back his phone.
“Almost. Maybe another half hour.”
Because of course there were calls he had to make. (As a cripple, he lived like a bookie.) The listmaker had not forgotten his situation, the necessary stations of his crip’s paced cross. Had not forgotten the party for his students that had still to be called off. Had not forgotten the probable roasts and hams, turkeys and pâtés, and could easily imagine the possible meaty haunches — goats’, stags’, and rams’—ticking their timed shelf life in Claire’s party-stocked refrigerator even now; the spoiling berries, oxidizing melon balls, and splinters of crystallized ice creams forming even as he thought of them, as they went on his lists; the sweet, separating, stratified milks and creamy desserts turning, going off, the freezer-burned breads tanning cancerous in the kitchen. Because (now it occurred) it wasn’t the banks he’d needed to call, it was all the little food boutiques, awning’d purveyors of powerhouse cheeses, of tinned smoked delicacies, oysters and fruits de mer (squid and tiny, fetal octopi, lavender as varicose veins), as if fed-up Claire, working their only recently annual party like a serial killer, had taken it into her angry old head that even getting even wasn’t enough, that only vengeance and wrath would serve.
“Jesus!” oathed Schiff, sniffing violently, taking rapid, shallow gusts of air into his hyperventilate nostrils, slapping his head, clipping it with the heel of his hand like a self- inflicted personal foul. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
“What,” Miss Simmons asked, “what is it? What’s wrong?”
And, believe it or not, it was suddenly revealed to Schiff that it was no mere accident that Jenny Simmons had been a former student of his, that she’d been — yes, he knew how he sounded, he knew just how he sounded — like Creer, like Beverly Yeager, bowed beneath the weight of their mad, customized agendas — sent like the closing couplet in some fabulous poetic justice to save them. Jenny d’Arc. If all that “Oh, now” had been genuine nurturing and not just conventional courtesy, let her nurture him now or forever hold her peace.
“I was thinking,” he said. “I haven’t had anything in my stomach all day. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“Really?” she said. “You haven’t eaten all day?”
“It puts me off my feed,” Schiff said, “when my wife walks out on me.”
“You’ve got to eat.”
“I know,” Schiff said.
“Shall I make you a sandwich?”
“Jeez,” Schiff said, “that’d be putting you to a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I’m going to have to get connected up with one of those Meals-on-Wheels deals or something.”
“Well, but I could make you a sandwich.”
“I am hungry,” admitted Schiff.
“I’ll just make you a sandwich. What would you like?”
“Gosh, anything. I think Claire may have left some stuff in the refrigerator.”