The Privileges (35 page)

Cynthia turned to Irene. “Well,” she said brightly, “it looks as if we have a few hours anyway. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

One of the orderlies directed them to a Cracker Barrel just across I-75. Cynthia rode shotgun in Irene’s car. She didn’t know what time of day it was anymore but she ordered a huge breakfast. “Breakfast served twenty-four hours is one of the things that makes America great,” she said to Irene, who wasn’t really sure what that meant but smiled delightedly. It was the opening Irene had been waiting for, and after they ordered she began by asking Cynthia some perfectly reasonable questions about her children: how old they were, whether she carried any pictures of them, the degree to which they looked like their mother and grandfather.

“I have three grandchildren,” Irene offered. “The oldest is in the navy, living on a submarine, if you can believe that. I don’t know how he does it. My two daughters are homemakers, one in Charlotte and one all the way out in California, in Silicon Valley. Jackie has a son who would be just about your son’s age. Wouldn’t it be something if they could meet?”

Cynthia waved to the waitress and mimed drinking a cup of coffee.

“You know,” Irene said in a different tone, “I know that your father may not have been the most stable figure in your life. But some men just aren’t made that way. For what it’s worth, I know he had a lot of regrets along those lines. There are a lot of things he would have done differently.”

“Irene?” Cynthia said.

Irene gave her the look of a patient receptionist as the waitress set before them two plates so laden that food tilted over the sides.

“I do not want to talk about these things with you,” Cynthia said.

“Why not?”

“It’s past. There’s no point.”

“But it helps to talk about it. Right? I know it helps me to be able to talk about him with you.”

“It does not help. You weren’t there. You cannot insert yourself into it and honestly the thought of you talking about it at all seems kind of obscene to me.”

Irene looked stricken.

“I’ll tell you my thoughts about the past,” Cynthia said, leaning back against the plush booth. “It’s like a safe-deposit box: getting all dressed up and going downtown and having a look in there isn’t going to change what’s in it. I have very little time left with my father. The closer the end gets the more suspenseful it all is and to be honest I don’t have the time to learn anything new about you or about anybody else he might have shacked up with. I don’t have any interest in any kind of half-assed bonding experience with you, like you’re going to be my stepmother or something. And if he’d wanted things to be like that between you and me, he would have mentioned you to me back when he still could have. You know, I’ve changed my mind. It actually does help to talk about it.”

The corners of Irene’s mouth were weakening. “May I ask, then,” she said, straining to be dignified, “why we’re here?”

“Because there’s something I want to ask you, Irene, and I haven’t really known how to ask it. But as I’m sitting here, I realize that it doesn’t matter what you think of me. It doesn’t matter. So what I’ve been wanting to ask you is this: what is your endgame here? Because I’ll tell you something. I don’t know you very well, obviously, but I know him well enough to guess what kind of relationship the two of you had. He was a man who got off on being admired, and when that feeling wore off he would move on, but since you had the good fortune to be there at the end you probably think it was a love that would have lasted forever. He didn’t really live
much of a life but if he had a woman in the room with him who thought he was just the shit, well, that’s all he needed to feel good about himself. He could be a little cutting sometimes, right? Pumped himself up by teaching you things and making you tell him how smart he was? And I’ll bet he had lots of good reasons not to get married whenever you brought that up. But the bottom line is you have no real legal connection to him, no obligation, and to be brutal not even an emotional relationship with him anymore, considering that he doesn’t know who you are.” She put some half-and-half in her coffee, because that was the only option on the table down here in fat country. “Do you see where I’m going with all this, Irene?”

Irene’s lips were pursed, and her face moved irregularly like a bobblehead.

“I think our interests here actually coincide,” Cynthia said. “I would imagine that you, an older woman with no visible means of support, as they used to say, are thinking that your years of devotion to this fun guy with the rich daughter, if you can hang in there until the end, deserve some recompense.”

“I beg your—”

“And I,” Cynthia went on, “I would like you to go away and let me have this little bit of time alone with him. I would like that very much. I feel like I can see a way for these desires to dovetail nicely. Can you?”

Irene’s face had gone bright red.

“It’s not about you,” Cynthia said. “You seem like a nice enough person.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I mean, I don’t want to be rude.”

“If not now, when?” Cynthia said.

“He abandoned you,” Irene said, and then put her hand over her mouth. “I know that he was a terrible, terrible father to you. He knows it too. And he took your money. All those years. He never asked for it, but he could have refused it. He should have.”

“Au contraire. He could have had anything he asked me for.”

“I wasn’t even sure you’d come down here,” Irene said. “I really wasn’t. He said you would, but I thought that was just the way he wanted to see things. And yet you seem so in denial about it all—”

“You had fun with him, didn’t you? I can tell. It’s sad when the fun comes to an end. Somewhere in the world a woman learns that lesson every day.”

Irene closed her eyes. “I’m just trying,” she said, “to honor his wishes. I’m just trying to do what’s right. Money has never even occurred to me.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s true. Let it occur to you now. You honored his wishes. That part is done. I’m asking you to honor my wishes now.”

She began eating. It seemed as if even Irene’s hair had started to come undone as they sat there at the table, as if she were riding in a convertible or sitting uncomfortably on a boat. Into her eyes came the glaze of the rest of her life. Cynthia knew her father well enough to know exactly what he had meant to this poor woman, all the high spirits, all the promise, all the purpose implicit in taking care of someone who expected to be taken care of. But now he was on his deathbed and there were no more high spirits for Irene. Abruptly her mouth fell open, and she emitted a laugh that was more like a bark; she shrugged, with her hands in the air, and shook her head as though denying that she was even the person saying what she was about to say.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

“Done,” Cynthia said. She reached for a napkin and pulled a pen out of her bag. “I’m going to give you a number to call. Call it tomorrow. There’ll be something for you to sign as well.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Cynthia was about to insist, as she knew she should have, but something in Irene’s face advocated for mercy. Instead she looked down at the table and spun the syrups meditatively. “God, this is decadent,” she said. “Do people down here really eat like this? Boysenberry syrup? Well, okay, what the hell. When in Podunk.”

“Do you,” Irene said, and then closed her eyes and put her head in her hand. “Do you need a ride back to the hospice?”

“That is very kind of you,” Cynthia said, reaching for her cell phone. “But no.”

When Jonas’s cell phone began ringing more insistently, Novak, who could not figure out how to turn it off, came up with a novel solution: he walked briskly into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. Jonas saw it when he went in there. He was allowed, it seemed, to get up from the couch—nothing but fear restrained him—though whenever he did, Novak would stop drawing and stare at him, inscrutably, like a cat, until he was back in his seat again. Jonas was left unsure whether his status was that of a prisoner or hostage of some kind or whether he was simply free to leave. Novak had already demonstrated how far he was willing to go to enforce his own sense of it, though, whatever that was, and Jonas didn’t really feel up to the risk of testing him again. At least not yet.

One of the things that enervated him was the fact that he hadn’t eaten in—well, he didn’t know anymore how long he had been here. Along with the phone he had been relieved of his watch, though for some reason not his wallet or his car keys. The paper had been torn down from the windows but the shades were drawn. Novak had pulled a two-step ladder out of his bedroom, presumably for covering the parts of the wall too high for him to reach, and Jonas thought maybe that would be the time to break for the door, but he hadn’t seen him use it yet. The food from Arby’s had been sitting in the kitchen long enough to contribute to the rank, maddening airlessness, which was almost enough by itself to put you back to sleep.

Novak worked without stopping but he didn’t work particularly fast. Jonas decided, maybe too dramatically, that whatever was going to happen to him would happen once the wall drawing was finished. Of course there were other walls to fill, though filling them would require moving the furniture again. There was no look of rapture or emotion on Novak’s face as he drew; just concentration, that was all. As for what he was drawing, it was just another reconfiguration
of the same shit he always drew; it was obsessive and incomprehensible and conveyed nothing, which would once have presented itself as a virtue but was frustrating now that there was something Jonas actually wanted to know. Novak’s mural was no sort of key or portal to anything. And drawing pictures didn’t seem to liberate him from his inner misery at all. If anything he looked grayer and more haggard than he had when Jonas first arrived. It was all one burden, a huge burden, but one for which Jonas had lost all capacity for empathy or even interest. It would not admit him. For the life of him he couldn’t remember why he had been so excited about coming here.

Out of nowhere there were footsteps on the stairs outside Novak’s door, and then a knock, not a friendly one. Jonas’s head lifted up like a dog’s, but Novak did not even react. His fingertips were completely browned by Sharpie ink of all colors. “Joseph?” a woman’s voice called. He went about his business, not responding but not making any effort to be silent either. “Joseph?” More knocking. “Joseph, if you are in there, I have warned you about taking garbage out. I know you don’t like to do it but you have to. I can smell it from all the way down on the sidewalk. Do you hear me?”

Novak may or may not have needed glasses but he worked with his nose almost touching the surface on which he drew. He was working now, in green, on one of the square, blank-screened, rabbit-eared TVs he favored. This particular one sat on the roof of a gas station.

“By tonight,” the woman said. “By tonight or I am calling your brother.” The footsteps receded.

Use your key
, Jonas yelled in his head,
use your fucking key, you idiot
, and then, cursing himself for his cowardice, he jumped up and ran for the door. Just as quickly, Novak dropped his pens on the floor and cut Jonas off, just by standing between him and the exit. Jonas stopped and put his hands up in front of him, his head pounding. Novak’s leg started to shake. Tears came into his eyes. “Just please be still,” he said. “Just be still. Unless you have to pee or something, and then just use the bathroom. This isn’t my fault, you
know. You think you’re so smart but you’re stupid. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now?”

What exactly was she hoping might still happen? She was desperate that he not die, that was true, and she knew there was something shameful about that feeling because of its obvious defiance of what he wanted, back when he could want anything. She would never have admitted out loud to anyone how much she needed him to stay alive. But that wasn’t because there was something she had to have from him before he went. It was more that she couldn’t imagine herself in the world without him somewhere in it too. He was the living rebuke to whatever other people may have said or thought about his selfishness, his delinquency, his supposed mistreatment of her, because his adoration of her was no fake, no pose. He knew how to do it, and to make her feel it, from afar. He believed in her self-sufficiency. She adored him too. Everything was good between them, but she needed him alive in order to prove that.

So as bad off as he was, it was agony for her to watch him slip even farther. In his sleep his breathing degraded into a terrible sort of rasp: she’d heard the phrase “death rattle” before and at first assumed that this was it, but then maybe not, because he woke up again. He hadn’t spoken in a day. She took over from the nurse the task of balming his lips, which were cracked all the time, because he no longer had the wherewithal even to lick them.

Still, when she would start awake in the chair by the head of his bed, or when she would rush in from the veranda overlooking the phony lake because she thought she’d heard a noise, she tortured herself with the thought that he had said something and she’d missed it.

She stopped going back to the hotel. She called the front desk to make sure Herman would continue on a 24/7 retainer, with whatever increase in pay that necessitated. It was silly but without Herman she was cut off from everything else she knew. She had no idea where the hell she was. On the other hand, maybe Marilyn the
nurse could give her a ride somewhere if she needed it. Maybe they’d even have to stop off at Marilyn’s home first, on their way to wherever they were going, so Cynthia might get a glimpse of how such people lived.

Time had shrunk down to the point where its only unit of measure was each irregular breath. One night, or day, she woke up in the chair and found him staring right at her. “Sinbad?” he said. His skin was drawn taut around his skull, but the film that seemed to lay across his eyes most of the time was gone.

She sat forward. He seemed a little sweaty; she dampened the washcloth and gently patted his forehead, his temples, his cheeks. “That’s nice,” he said clearly.