The Privileges (32 page)

“Why did you bring all this food?” Novak said. “This is way too much. Nobody else is coming, right?”

“Just me. I just wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got a sampling.”

“A what?” Novak said. He scowled. “You’re here to steal from me.”

“No. Absolutely not. Like I said on the phone, I’m kind of a fan of yours. I went to a fair in Chicago and some of your drawings
were hanging on the wall there. I thought they were really beautiful. Did you know that people as far away as Chicago think you’re a great artist?” He could hear himself talking as if Novak were a child, but how else was he supposed to handle it? How did you know what aspect of him you were speaking to?

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Novak said.

“I will pay you a lot of money for your art, if you’re willing to sell it. But I’m not going to steal anything from you. I promise. Why, do you think other people have been stealing from you?”

“Do you think other people have been stealing from you?” Novak repeated, licking his fingers.

“Like your brother, maybe?”

“Like your brother, maybe?”

He said these things that seemed sarcastic or childish or angry but the tone of his voice didn’t really change significantly, nor did the look on his face. The sandwich got the lion’s share of his attention. He wore glasses with clear plastic frames, and what hair he had was so fair as to be almost invisible, like a baby’s hair; his pale skin was still touched by acne. Most remarkably, though Jonas was uncomfortable even noticing it, was that these features sat on a head that was so small he thought he could have palmed it like a cantaloupe. Novak put a handful of french fries in his mouth and then went over to the door and locked it.

“I don’t like other people seeing my drawings,” he said.

That’s what makes them so worth seeing, Jonas thought, but instead he said, “I can understand that. It’s private. What do you usually do with a drawing after you finish it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How often does your brother come to visit?”

“I don’t know.”

Jonas stopped trying to make eye contact with him; he felt the need to make his own presence less provocative somehow. As his eyes grew used to the overpowering lighting, he thought he picked something up from the walls themselves, something other than just the shocking white. He took a few steps forward and saw, or thought he saw, the ghost of a face.

“Do you draw on the walls sometimes?” he asked. Novak reacted as if he’d been poked, jumping up and walking toward the papered-over window, lacing his fingers on top of his head. “Only sometimes,” he said. “Not that much. She just painted again. She was really mad. I only do it if I’m out of paper and can’t go out, when I’m not feeling good.”

“When you’re
not
feeling good?” Jonas said. No reply. “Does drawing make you feel better?” No reply. He felt like he was burying himself deeper but he had to keep going until he hit on the right question to ask. “What makes you feel like doing it?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Novak said, pacing now.

The wall drawings were an interesting idea but Jonas’s first thought was that of course there would be no way to get them out of the apartment itself. Unless he came back with a camera. But right now it was hard to imagine Novak ever letting him back in here again. “Joseph,” he said, “you know, if you like, I would be happy to give you some more paper so you don’t run out. I could buy a lot of it for you. Is that something you’d like?”

“I don’t know,” Novak said.

“You don’t know? But then you could draw all you wanted, and you wouldn’t have to worry about her”—he didn’t know who he was referring to: Novak’s landlord, he assumed, unless it was his mother—“getting mad about the walls.”

“She said she’d throw me out,” Novak said.

“Right, so this way you could keep drawing and not have to worry about that. What do you like to draw with most?”

“Sharpies,” Novak said miserably. He stopped pacing in front of the papered-over window, with his back to Jonas.

“Sharpies cost money too, right? I could get you all of those you wanted. You could draw whenever you felt like it without getting into trouble. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

It could have been the “I don’t know” of a three-year-old, just a conversation stopper; anyway, Jonas chose not to hear it. “Really?” he said. “Then why do you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Novak said, and turned around, and started
walking forward; and Jonas, when he saw the expression on his face, took a step back toward where he thought the door was. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” Their eyes met, and for one incredible moment he knew they were wishing the exact same thing at the same time, which was that Jonas had never come here; and then Jonas started a little too casually toward Novak’s front door, but before he could figure which of the two locks to unlock, something hard, harder than a fist anyway, connected with the back of his head. He had never really been hit before, not ever, his whole life long. Everything went white, as if his eyes had rolled all the way around, and it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later that he opened his eyes and was looking up at Novak sitting on a stool in the kitchenette, eating another one of the cold Arby’s sandwiches, and looking very worried.

Time, of course, would not stand still in the way Cynthia wished it to, and so eventually the door to the veranda opened and Irene came back squinting into the darkened room. The change in light was such that Irene didn’t seem to see her right away. Cynthia didn’t say anything for fear of waking her father, though she was unsure why, when she had rushed down here precisely because his death was imminent, she should now be placing such value on his sleep. Then Irene began gesturing with her thumb, like a hitchhiker, and Cynthia understood that she was suggesting the two of them go out into the hallway.

They shook hands. Cynthia put her age at about sixty; she appeared younger than that, but she had the look of a woman who was older than she looked. She smelled like cigarettes. Her hair had that sculpted sexagenarian appearance Cynthia had become familiar with through her time on the charity circuit. She was almost a head shorter too. Her skin was amazingly fair; how could you live in Florida, Cynthia wondered, and have skin that looked like that? Did she never go outside?

“Oh, I’m so excited to finally meet you,” Irene said. “Charlie talks about you all the time. He’s so proud of you and your husband,
and all the success you’ve had.” Cynthia, with no similar civility to offer in return because she had had no notion of this person’s existence until a few days ago, smiled weakly. She could see already that Irene was the sort of woman who wore every emotion, no matter how fleeting, on her face, and so it became clear that she had been anticipating a more expansive Cynthia, as if there were already a bond there, as if this were a long-awaited reunion rather than a meeting of total strangers. “Anyway,” she said, “part of the reason I wanted to talk to you out of the room is that there are some things you may want to be prepared for before Charlie wakes up.”

“What is that?” Cynthia said. There was something about this moment, about Irene’s status as an intermediary between Cynthia and what was happening to her, about the spectacular presumption of her kindness, that was threatening to reveal itself as unbearable. Irene closed her big eyes, giving Cynthia a look at her horrifying blue eye shadow, and sighed.

“So at Charlie’s request they’ve taken him off every type of medication except pain management. One of the side effects of that is that his blood pressure has dropped so low that it’s affecting the blood flow to his brain, and so he’s showing some signs of dementia. Nothing big—sometimes he doesn’t know where he is, and sometimes he thinks he’s somewhere else—but he’s in and out of it, and it can be kind of scary, especially if you’re not expecting it. He’s been sick a long time but still, it’s happened so fast. Part of it is going off the medication but really it’s amazing how fast he slipped physically once he’d made the decision to let go. Amazing to me, at least. Marilyn says that it happens that way all the time.”

She finally found the Kleenex she’d been fishing around for in her bag. Nurses and other personnel moved around them with perfect impassive grace as Irene stood there crying in the middle of the hallway. The fact that you never saw them look the least bit disconcerted or surprised should have been soothing but instead Cynthia felt a little undermined by it.

“Anyway,” Irene went on, “I’m sorry to drop that on you first thing, but when I saw you sitting there beside the bed, I didn’t want you to be too upset if it happened, or if he didn’t know right away
who you were. I’m sorry for the circumstances but it really is such a privilege to meet you. I’m really looking forward to us getting to know each other. It’s never too late, right?”

“What have you signed?” Cynthia said. Her sudden curiosity about this surely could have waited, but Cynthia felt a strong, almost fearful impulse to keep things on a certain officious level. “Here at the hospice, I mean. If he’s not sure where he is they must have needed somebody to sign some consent for this or that.”

“Charlie signed everything. He was still perfectly lucid. They only stopped the medication after he was admitted.”

“It’s not that I don’t take your word for all this,” Cynthia said. “But are there any actual doctors here during the day? Or is it all just nurses and priests and whatnot? Because I wouldn’t mind speaking to an actual medical professional at this—”

But then, she saw, or rather felt, that one of the nurses who slid so unobtrusively behind her back had gone into her father’s room. “Good afternoon, Charlie,” Cynthia heard her say. “You have some visitors here. Is it okay if I turn a light on?”

Cynthia spun and hurried back through the door, just as the nurse snapped on the lamp beside the bed. She had implored herself over and over not to let herself be shocked, for her own sake and for his, but it was no use. His face was like a skull. He was wearing some kind of nightshirt, much nicer than the standard-issue hospital gown but antiquated and ridiculous all the same. His neck throbbed perceptibly, like a frog’s, and his mouth still hung open. His eyes seemed almost to protrude from his head, but then Cynthia caught on that, unlike the rest of his face, the eyes were actually expressing something; they were especially wide right now because he was trying to figure out where he was. He was staring right at her but he couldn’t figure it out.

“Your daughter is here,” the nurse said softly to him. She didn’t make it into a question, like she was trying to reorient him; it wasn’t condescending in that way. There was no more progress or recovery, in that sense, to be made. It was just about making him less terrified.

Incrementally, the light came back into his eyes. From that terrible leveling impersonality, he returned to occupy his own face, and
where a minute ago he hadn’t really seemed in the room at all, now he dominated it again. He struggled to raise himself up on the pillows, and his hand started vainly toward his hair before falling back on the comforter. He licked his lips. “Hello, Sinbad,” he said hoarsely. “What do you make of all this?”

The nurse was already backing away discreetly from the head of the bed before Cynthia even realized she was moving toward it. She hadn’t heard herself called Sinbad in about thirty-five years.

There was no getting around it: he felt like a total pussy for having been taken out and disoriented so completely by one blow to the head. One’s head, he felt, should be tougher than that. He didn’t see any blunt object around and so was thinking that maybe it was only Novak’s fist after all. And Novak was a figure whom he would have naïvely estimated, as recently as a couple of hours ago, that he could take. Fear and heedlessness were all the guy was really armed with, and it turned out to be enough.

He was still a little in and out, maybe just from the shock of it all. He was sitting on Novak’s rancid couch, at the end of the living room farthest from the door. He had to squint a bit against the blazing lights. He could see that a lot of the furniture in the room had been pushed around so that it was no longer in the configuration he remembered from when he first walked through the door. Most of it was now in front of him, and one wall, the wall directly across from him, was cleared away. Novak wasn’t in the room but Jonas could hear him moving around somewhere—maybe around the corner in the kitchenette. Then he heard something else—a ringing phone—and he recognized the ring as his own, though it was coming not from his pocket where his cell phone belonged but from somewhere else in the apartment.

Novak came around the corner from the kitchenette, holding Jonas’s cell phone in front of him like a compact mirror. “Stop it,” he said. After the fourth ring it stopped. Novak put it back in his own pants pocket and left the room again.

What the fuck is happening? Jonas asked himself. He couldn’t
make sense of it. He wasn’t restrained or tied down in any way. It was possible to get up, and yet he couldn’t, and he realized that what was really going on was that he was frightened, almost to the point of paralysis. The series of events that had led to his being here in this room at all was so bizarre and arbitrary that it seemed to him like if he thought about it logically enough, he could actually undo it, like snapping himself out of a dream—prove to himself that he wasn’t here, but somewhere else much more familiar.

He felt like he might throw up, but instead he went to sleep again, and when he woke up, a good portion of that blank white wall in front of him—the upper third of it or so—was covered with a picture. The whole place now smelled like Sharpies, which was sickening but still something of a blessing considering the other smells the Sharpies were masking. The picture itself was fantastically detailed, full of dogs and cats and televisions and those signature open-mouthed faces, like a Brueghel almost but without the technique, an unpatterned riot of primary industrial color, and it might have been beautiful, but Jonas really couldn’t see it.