The Man in the Window (8 page)

Iris walked down the back steps to the Intensive Care Unit, absently devouring the Mars bar she usually managed to save until just before dinner.

“Ooh. Calories, calories,” came an all-too-familiar voice.

Iris looked down at Leona Richards, the hospital dietitian, prancing up the stairs. Shit, she thought, here we go. Leona obviously had never partaken of a Mars bar in her life. She packed her petite frame into the tightest white slacks in the hospital, and the only male Iris had never seen react to her was the Tube Man. Even Iris always turned her head to watch Leona’s ass move down the hall, with a feeling of one part awe and two parts despair.

Iris bit into her Mars bar defiantly, and said, “How’s it going, Leona?”

“You should at least be eating a granola bar,” said Leona.

“Not enough sugar.” Iris sucked a piece of caramel off her front teeth.

Leona winced at the sight. “I’m giving a talk on alternative carbohydrates tonight at seven in classroom B if you’d like to come.”

“Sweet of you to offer… get it, sweet? But I’ll be too busy.”

Leona pressed. “Don’t you care about your body? I can get you a free pass to my gym.”

“Leona, this conversation’s absurd. I have to get down to the Unit.”

“How about walking? You can burn off—”

Iris had reached it. “Hey. What do you think will happen if I lose some fat? There’s just more fat underneath. It’s fat all the way. And here’s something else. Has it ever occurred to you that I like being fat and ugly? You ever thought about that? Huh?” Iris’s voice boomed in the stairwell.

Leona backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. Iris couldn’t help herself—she watched until Leona’s marvelous ass disappeared from view.

Iris put a quarter in the pay phone just outside the Unit, the one anxious family members always used to relay bad news about a relative. There’d be four or five of them, looking shocked and blank, handing the phone back and forth, probably scaring the hell out of whomever they were calling, because each of their stories would be different, even though they had all talked to the same nurse or doctor. Fear caused them not to hear straight, and Iris knew that even when they nodded their heads yes, little of what she said ever got through. They saw her lips move, but what they heard was, It’s bad, then it’s going to get real bad, then it will get worse.

Iris dialed her father’s number. She had moved up from Maryland two years ago to look after him when her mother died. Her father, Arnie, and mother, LuLu, had lived in Waverly only five years. Iris had moved ten times since she was born. Arnie, a retired auto mechanic, would suddenly say at dinner, “I feel itchy, you know?” and Iris and her mother would sigh. They knew that before the month was out, they’d be sitting down to dinner in a different house in a different town. When LuLu died, Arnie went into a deep funk. Iris said, “You going to get itchy again?” Arnie said nope, he didn’t think so, looked like Waverly was a
keeper. That scared Iris, so she invited him to stay in her little twin in Towson, Maryland, but he said nope again. Which scared her even more, so she moved up to Waverly to keep him from going out to the garage and inhaling carbon monoxide or taking a big gulp of battery acid—she imagined that if he did himself in, he would honor his profession and somehow involve a car. Not kill himself in a crash, he’d never take a car down with him, but maybe plug himself into the electrical system and hit the ignition, something like that. Arnie never actually brought up the possibility of suicide after LuLu’s death, but Iris, ever the nurse, had to consider it. She’d worked a year in Emergency and had seen people who killed themselves for the smallest and unlikeliest of reasons.

The phone rang seven times before Arnie picked it up. Iris held the receiver away from her ear in anticipation of his clearing his throat loudly, which is what he always did before he spoke. “Hello,” he finally said.

“That’s a disgusting habit,” said Iris.

“Hello?” Arnie said again. He used his deaf left ear, the ear he’d pressed against car engines for forty years to listen for the little clicks and gurgles only a mechanic can decipher.

“Don’t clear your throat—”

“Wear my coat?” said Arnie. “Who is this?”

“Iris!”

“Iris? What you calling for, girl? You forget your coat?”

“It’s summer, Arnie. Why would I be wearing a coat?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who called.”

“Forget it.”

“Okay, then. See you later.”

“Arnie!” Too late. He’d hung up. The pay phone swallowed her quarter. She waited for the dial tone to return, then she put in another one. Fifty cents to talk to that old fool, she thought, dialing.

She waited for him to finish with his throat noises. “Hello,” he said.

“Arnie, this is Iris. Don’t hang up.”

“Why would I hang up?”

“Well, you hung up on me last time.”

“Girl, don’t they give you enough to do at that job of yours, you got all this time to spend on the telephone? It’s no wonder people are always dying in hospitals.”

“Arnie, you’re a pain in the ass,” Iris said. A visitor frowned as he walked by, and she frowned back at him.

“That’s why patients are dying, because nurses are talking dirty and spending all their time on telephones.”

“You’re in rare form today, Arnie.”

“Thank you. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in forty years.”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“It seems like forty years,” Arnie muttered.

“Listen, will you please. I forgot to feed the dog. Will—”

“Need a dog!” Arnie shouted. “What the hell do we need another dog for, girl?”

Oh Jesus. Iris slumped her head against the pay phone.

Arnie’s pump was primed. “Another dog? Ain’t we got enough piss on the floor? You want two dogs pissing all over the place? And you know how much a can of dog food costs? Kal Kan went up to fifty-three cents, and you multiply that by two dogs, and that comes out to something like five million dollars a year for dog food. And they won’t eat the dry stuff you see taking up all that room in the stores. Fifty-pound bags. Who buys fifty-pound bags, and what do they use it for? Mulch? ’Cause no dog will eat it. Ours won’t, anyway, and if you think I’m going to take that from
two
dogs, you’re wrong, girl.”

“Arnie. Arnie, I have to go now,” Iris said, restraining herself mightily.

“Do you? Too bad. Enjoyed talking to you. Call anytime.”

CHAPTER THREE

A
RNIE HUNG
up the phone. That’s a strange girl, he thought. How old she say she was? Thirty-seven? How’d she get to be thirty-seven? I thought I was thirty-seven.

“Where’s the time go, eh, Duke?” Duke was Arnie’s dog, a big reddish-brown mutt he’d hit with his car on the way home from the grocery store five or six years ago. Arnie had stopped the car and gone over to the dog, and when the dog licked his hand, that added another layer to Arnie’s guilt, so he gathered him up and took him home. The dog’s recuperative powers were remarkable—all it took was one big bowl of Kal Kan, and he turned absolutely frisky. Arnie eyed him and decided he’d been had. The dog was probably an old pro at throwing himself in front of cars for a free meal. Arnie said to him, “Okay, Duke,” (he didn’t know why he called him Duke, the name just came out of him) “you’re welcome to stay as long as you pull your own weight.” Arnie wasn’t sure what he meant by that, since he had no sheep to herd or dogsleds that needed pulling, but he thought he’d better put his foot down, especially with a dog that made its living throwing itself in front of cars. Over the years Duke proved himself better at gaining weight than pulling his weight.

“Where’s the time go?” Arnie said again. “Come over here and get your scratching, Mr. Duke.”

Duke ambled across the kitchen to Arnie, then turned himself one hundred and eighty degrees and let out a kind of sigh. The scratching would begin at the base of his tail, then move up his spine, and leave him paralyzed with pleasure. Duke sighed again. Only Arnie could deliver this sort of scratching, which had less to do with technique than with equipment. Arnie had a metal hook where his right hand used to be—he’d lost his hand
twenty years ago when an engine block from a Chevy Impala snapped a hoist chain and crushed it. The hook, with its opposable device for grasping, while something of an inconvenience on his job as a mechanic, was great for scaring children and even better for scratching dogs. Arnie gave Duke a long one. When he finished, the dog shuddered, then collapsed in ecstasy on the floor.

Iris kept bugging him to “update your prosthesis. You don’t have to look like Captain Hook, you know. They got better things on the market these days. You’d have more freedom, and you wouldn’t be scaring the hell out of little kids anymore. You notice how the Girl Scouts avoid our house during cookie season? I haven’t had a chocolate mint Girl Scout cookie in ages because of that hook of yours.”

But Arnie wasn’t having anything to do with any “prosthesis.” Prosthesis sounded like
prophylactic
to him, which shifted matters into the realm of the sexual, a place he never liked to be in discussions with Iris.

He rubbed Duke with his toe, thinking about Iris. He wondered, not really wanting to wonder, what she knew about sex. As a nurse, she had to know something, they take all those body courses in school, but what did she, and this made him really uncomfortable, know on her own? He came, as always, to an immediate and inevitable conclusion. Nothing. Not one damn thing.

Iris had been an unappealing baby—and babyhood, as it turned out, was her physical high point. She went from unappealing to unattractive, and by the time she moved into adolescence she’d become undeniably homely. Even her parents, who loved her, who gave her every benefit of the doubt and then some, could not dispute the evidence. LuLu would despair, “She’s just so, just so…” “Homely,” Arnie would finish for her, because he thought it best to face the facts. “But what’s it matter?” he’d say. “In the end, who gives a good goddamn?” And then he’d think, Just about the entire male population of the world, that’s who.

Like the boys in Iris’s senior high school class. Iris’s looks compelled them, as beauty would have compelled them in the opposite direction, toward unkind acts. During the month before the senior prom, she received a phone call every night from some unknown, and ever-changing, male voice. “Hey, Iris, how about it, you wanna go to the prom? Just get a face transplant and I’ll take you.” Hysterical laughter from five or six boys. “Hey, Iris. If the prom was a costume party, you could go as a bowling ball.” Ha ha. Click. Arnie caught the tail end of one or two of these, and when he went downstairs to comfort his ugly duckling of a daughter (who would never become a swan), she shrugged him off. “Fuck ’em, Daddy. I don’t care.” Quite a word to come out of his teenage daughter’s mouth, but he let it pass. Of course he let it pass.

Duke groaned and shifted on the kitchen linoleum. Now that Iris had moved back in after seventeen years out of the house, not this house of course, since he and LuLu had moved four times since Iris left, she had become his burden again. When she arrived, she said cheerfully, “Well, Arnie. Looks like you’re face-to-face with my face again.” He could not pretend, as he and LuLu had tried, that away from home Iris might have some sort of luck. Seeing her every day, his bowling ball daughter, rolling around the house, made him smile at the folly of his hope, as thin as it had been.

“She’s my burden, Duke. And I’m her burden. And you’re everybody’s burden, ain’t that right?” Duke got up and went over to his bowl and let out a low whine. Arnie regarded him for a moment, then said, “I forget to feed you? Is that right? Now where’d she get a notion we needed another dog? I can’t even feed you.” Arnie reached up into the cupboard and snared a can of food with his hook. He opened it, then dumped its contents into Duke’s bowl. Duke stared at the bowl, then gave Arnie the dog equivalent of a puzzled look.

“What’s the matter with you?” Arnie examined the contents of the bowl, which
did
look kind of peculiar. He picked
up the can. Spaghetti-O’s. He’d just filled up the dog’s bowl with Spaghetti-O’s.

He tried to cover for himself. “Hey, look. I thought you might like a change.” Duke stared at him, unblinking. Obviously he wasn’t buying it.

“So I screwed up, okay?” He tossed out the Spaghetti-O’s and filled the bowl with Kal Kan. “You won’t tell Iris? It’s between you and me, right?” he said, half-jokingly.

Spending too much time around the house, he thought. That’s the problem. You get a little dippy. Last week, instead of his Polident tablets, he’d dropped two Alka-Seltzer tablets into his denture cup. His dentures turned a light green, which Iris had not failed to notice. The week before that, he had poured V-8 juice on his Frosted Flakes, and ate three spoonfuls before he caught himself. Fortunately, Iris had not yet come down to breakfast.

Christ. I’m deaf in one ear, I got no teeth, I’m missing my right hand, and now I’m going senile. Senile’s the thing.

“Senile’s the thing, right, Duke?”

You go senile and they put you right in the Home. Course now, this ol’ hook may present them with a little problem. Yep. I’ll be able to fend them off for a while. Unless I lose the damn thing, which is likely the way things are going. Hell, Iris’s a nurse, she’ll take care of me. I don’t know, though, being a patient of hers might go pretty rough. No. I’d rather be in the Home. No. They’d take my dentures, take my hook—I’d sit around in one of those rolly chairs and pee-pee on myself all day. Least Iris would keep me tidy.

Duke licked his bowl clean. “Think I’m getting dippy, boy? No, I’m just cooped up here too much.”

The thing was, he never thought he’d have to live without LuLu. They just snatched her away from him, like they snatched his hand. He thought the two of them would go together, in bed, like it was their honeymoon—instead of their whole lives stretching before them, the end of life would await them, and
when he’d imagined it that way, he wasn’t frightened. But with LuLu gone—the entire business scared the bejesus out of him. He’d never, ever discussed it with LuLu, but he’d been counting on her. He should have discussed it—maybe she would have hung on, waited for him. But she couldn’t have waited. The stroke would’ve got her, just like the engine got my hand. Things get you. Iris’ll tell you about that, all her hospital stories.