Don't Worry About the Kids (24 page)

Jane raised her glass to Mr. Pearlstein's voice. Together, she and Simon watched the bile travel upward to Mr. Pearlstein's mouth, out and into the receiver, through the wires, down into the walls of his apartment building. It rolled below the city's streets, gathering speed, tumbling toward her apartment. The underground cable was slick and sticky. Like what? Jane smiled, made an incision in the sidewalk, lifted the cable—a gleaming, slippery large intestine—unfurled it, stretched it to its full length so that the liquid rage within could flow more easily, so that she could see where, at each end, to slice the tube.

Simon passed the scalpel to her, complimented her on how deft she was. He said he would trust her to remove his brain, to cut out the sections of it that made him ill. He bent over the white sheet, sniffed it so he could determine which sections were rotting. He had read about Phineas Gage, he said. Phineas Gage was a railroad crew chief through whose brain, in 1845, a three-foot-seven-inch-long, 1.25-inch-diameter iron rod, weighing 13.5 pounds—dynamited into his skull—had passed. Phineas and others who suffered penetrating bifrontal brain injuries often regained full physical independence. Their characters and personalities, however, suffered major disorders.

Their brains survived, Simon said, but their minds didn't. How come?

Jane cupped Simon's brain in her hands, set it on top of the water, watched it bob, dip, drop downward. She imagined it becoming part of the coral reef, the reef turning to flesh, throbbing, Simon waking from sleep, rising from the bottom of the sea, grinning.

The question remained: what would she do with all the money?

She could pay back her medical school debts, look for a larger apartment in a safer neighborhood, redecorate her office, get her mother into a better nursing home, buy books, clothing, records, antique jewelry, eat elegantly in expensive restaurants, take long, luxurious vacations…

But where would she go, and with whom?

With me.

Why you?

Because I'm paying for the trip.

You're dead, Simon.

Says who?

She spoke with the building's superintendent on West 74th Street, told him she wanted to see Simon's apartment, to gather some items for a memorial service. The superintendent—a young Puerto Rican with the jaundiced, creased face of a man twice his age—stared at her ankles, her breasts. He lifted his T-shirt, scratched a scar that ran in a jagged diagonal across his stomach, said that he couldn't do it. He had orders.

I'm Simon's sister, she said.

He shrugged.

She handed him a fifty dollar bill. This is for all you did to make Simon comfortable. He liked living here.

It's your choice, lady. Only I never gave you nothing. If you want a key, I might arrange it.

She gave him a second fifty dollar bill. He gave her the key. Money is a wonderful thing, she said to him.

Better than sex, he said, articulating, to her surprise, the very words that were in her mind.

She unlocked the door, closed her eyes, imagined that she was entering a commercial for California wine. A handsome executive, in midnight-blue tuxedo, stood at the window, gazing out at the city. The slow movement of Bach's Second Violin Concerto floated toward her in crystalline waves. The carpeting was linen-white, the furniture and draperies shades of ivory, mauve, lavender, ruby. Jane blinked. A plush leather couch, armrests of gleaming chrome, curved under billowing drapes at the far end of the long room.

She moved forward, across a handsome oriental rug. Simon had left his small apartment in order. There was an oak buffet, a glass coffee table with three geodes on it, a couch upholstered in navy blue corduroy. On the walls were prints: Chagall, Klee, O'Keeffe. A framed poem, inscribed to Simon from Seamus Heaney, hung on the wall beside the couch. Jane looked into the narrow kitchen, saw the chef's wrought-iron pot rack above the butcher block island, noted the microwave oven, the blender, the espresso machine. The white countertops glistened.

Beyond the sink and refrigerator, next to a window that led to the fire escape, there was an old mahogany telephone bench, where, as in a love seat, you sat to make and receive calls. She imagined Simon's parents telephoning the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
to come and photograph the apartment, the
Times
running a sidebar featuring one of Simon's poems. In death, as never in life, he might, with enough luck and hype, join some of those poets whose reputations, he argued, had been inflated by suicide: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell.

She moved to the bedroom, imagined that she was walking across the sleeping bodies of hundreds of Angora cats. Simon's desk, a wide rectangle of golden oak, was at the far end of the room. The bed itself, between her and the desk, was, to her surprise, queen-sized, covered with a quilt, the quilt stained in deep parallel bands of purple, vermillion, cobalt blue. She moved to the desk.

A velvet-encased box-IN MEMORY OF JANE FOGARTY inscribed upon its cover—waited dead center, an electronic typewriter to its left, two volumes to its right:
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
. She sat in Simon's chair, untied the lacing of the case, looked at the title page. Once, during her junior year abroad, she recalled, she had pretended to be wealthy, had sat for two luxurious hours in a fancy London art gallery, opening such boxes, going through Flemish engravings.

She looked beyond the desk, to the fire escapes on the backs of facing buildings. She closed her eyes, thought of Dutch landscapes, of low horizons and wide vistas, saw the land slip downward so that there was nothing in the frame but sky. She could enter that sky with Simon, were he to trust her enough. If he could have closed his eyes and let himself fall into the white space, believing that she would never let him fall all the way—if he could have learned fully to depend on her until he could depend upon himself…

“We knew you'd be here.”

She turned.

“That's her, officer. Jane Fogarty—the lady we told you about.”

“She told me she was his sister and that he gave her the key. I don't know nothing else.”

Simon's father held up a camera, took her photograph.

The police officer moved forward, spoke to her about her rights, about trespassing, about pressing charges. Jane saw other people standing in the doorway, to either side of Mr. and Mrs. Pearlstein, assumed they were Simon's older brothers and sisters. She saw children. Simon's nieces and nephews?

“And I'm Samuel Axelrod, Dr. Fogarty—Mr. and Mrs. Pearlstein's attorney.”

“I'm sorry, darling,” Mrs. Pearlstein said. Mrs. Pearlstein touched the hem of her skirt, turned in a half circle, like a young girl. She touched the quilt. There were tears in her eyes. “Where did he get the money?”

“You've never been here before, have you?” Jane said.

“Don't answer her,” Simon's father said.

“It's like magic, being here,” Mrs. Pearlstein said. “That I should live to see the day my son had an apartment like this. When he was a boy he always helped me clean. He scrubbed the kitchen floor. One time he scrubbed the oriental rug and I yelled at him because it was so hard to get the Ajax out. He asked for the rug when he moved out of the hospital.”

The police officer had his pad in hand. Jane stared at the black leather holster that held his revolver, at the handcuffs that dangled from his belt. The children were laughing at her. She counted: there were nine of them. She wanted to tell them about the note Simon sent, with the policy—how he had mistyped a word, writing that he had
attacked
the policy to the note when he meant
attached
.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm very sorry. I liked Simon.”

“I'll bet you did,” Mr. Pearlstein said. “I've read articles about what you people do with your patients—”

“Shush,” Mrs. Pearlstein said. “She's a nice young woman. She helped Simon. Look around to see the proof. He needed help and she was there.”

“With her hand out.”

“Max is too upset to notice anything except revenge,” Mrs. Pearlstein said to Jane. “The first time Simon got into bad trouble—when he had spiders crawling over him and tried to kill his brother—Max was the one who calmed him down, got him to go to the hospital before he hurt anybody. Sometimes I think Max loved him more than I did.”

“I won't argue with you, Norma,” Mr. Pearlstein said. “It's not the time.”

“How?” Simon's mother asked. “How did he do all this?”

“I gave him money on the side.”

Mrs. Pearlstein kissed her husband. “I'm sorry I yelled at you when we were short on cash. I love you.”

Jane smiled.

“I don't need your condescending looks, young lady. You know when my son changed? When he stopped taking the pills you gave him. Because they were poison. If it was up to you people, you would have stuck a funnel in his mouth like for a goose and poured pills down him forever.” Mr. Pearlstein nodded to the officer. “Officer, do your duty.”

Jane almost laughed, even as the officer moved forward.

“Hi!”

Everybody turned toward the living room.

“I'm Tom Hoffman, a friend of Dr. Fogarty. And this is our lawyer, Emlyn Schiff.” Tom moved through the room as if he were a politician working a crowd.

Emlyn Schiff and Samuel Axelrod shook hands. Jane kissed Tom on the cheek. “My hero,” Jane whispered.

“She's sick,” Mr. Pearlstein said. “Didn't I tell you? Our son—her patient—is dead, and in his bedroom she makes jokes.”

Jane started forward. The police officer put up his hand, as if at a school crossing. Emlyn Schiff whispered to Samuel Axelrod. Samuel Axelrod whispered to Mr. Pearlstein.

“Okay. Let her go for now,” Mr. Pearlstein said. “But we haven't finished, believe me—not by a long shot.”

Jane tied the case, showed the officer that it had her name on it.

Tom was asleep. Jane slipped into his T-shirt, sat at her desk, sipped wine, began reading through Simon's poems. Tom had saved the day and had done so, it seemed, simply because he was worried about what she might be getting into. He wished, he said, she would act as im

pulsively and instinctively toward him as she did toward her patients. Though she had laughed with Tom about the scene—how crazy, pathetic, and comic it was—she felt now as if it were all a dream. She smiled. Of course. It was a dream—Simon's dream come true—and she was living in it.

“What are you reading?”

“His poems.”

“May I?”

He kissed her neck, and she reached up, stroked his cheek, his hair. He lifted a page.

“That's good,” Tom said. “He had a gift, didn't he?”

“That's Auden,” she said. “Not Simon. Here's Simon:
In the prism of his daze
/
Teach the free man how to craze
. Simon did that sometimes, to see if—”

She broke off, saw again the dazed expression on Mrs. Pearlstein's face.

“I like you, Tom. I like you a lot.” She turned and rubbed her forehead against his stomach, wanting to burrow into him as far as she could. “I'm trying. Really.”

“I know. You're very trying.”

She stood, pushed him out of the way. “Don't make jokes,” she snapped.

Jane looked around the table: five doctors, three aides, two social workers, three nurses. Only one of the doctors—Feinstein, fast asleep to her left—could speak English with any fluency. Two of the aides routinely beat up their patients. One of the nurses, she knew, was on morphine. Another drank heavily…

She had called her travel agent in the morning, had inquired about flights, cruises, tour packages.

What does an Irishman do on his vacation?

He sits on somebody else's stoop.

She saw her mother's mouth, heard her mother howling with laughter. Her mother's head was way back, her mouth so enormous Jane imagined it could catch whole fish, the fish pouring down from barrels, the barrels at the edge of the tenement's roof. She and Simon were children, on the roof, tipping the barrels over, raining the pickled water down on the grown-ups. Her mother laughed harder, repeating her old jokes—about the stoop, about the priest and the chorus girl—and when her mother stopped, to get her breath, Jane heard Schiff's voice, advising her to settle out of court, fifty-fifty. Yes, they probably could prove that Simon was in his right mind when he made out the will. But that didn't matter: one did not have to be mentally stable to purchase life insurance. Yes, he would take her case, and yes, he was confident they would, in the end, prevail. But the end might be a long way off. Axelrod was very smart and very persistent. He would delay, appeal, drag the case through the courts interminably. He would claim undue influence, would try to prove that Simon had been particularly susceptible to Jane's charms. The Pearlsteins would sue the hospital, would use the newspapers, would move for a change of venue due to the publicity, would get the insurance money put into escrow on suspicion of fraud. Jane would be attacked publicly, professionally, personally. The hospital might think itself within its rights to suspend her temporarily…

Mental Patient Leaves Fortune to Female Shrink. Bereaved Family Claims Alienation of Affections
. She thought of Simon's Crazy Jane poems, considered supplying him with new titles: Crazy Jane at a Staff Meeting, Crazy Jane and the Pearlsteins. Men come, men go, she recited to herself: all things remain in God. And what, Schiff assured her Axelrod would ask, had she
really
been doing in Simon's apartment? Had she been there before? How much would it cost, after all, to get the janitor to testify that she often spent the night there?

I had wild Simon for a lover, she mused, though, like a road that men pass over, my body makes no moan but sings on: all things remain in escrow.