The Spectator Bird (2 page)

At the bottom of the hill I came out of the tunnel of trees where the culvert leads the runoff under the road and between two big eucalyptus trees. At one stride I passed from chill to warmth. The sun flowed over me, the grass brightened, the goose pimples smoothed out on my arms, my low spirits briefly rose. California February, as new and green and sodden as a fern basket dipped in a pond. Hoc erat in votis, Horace said. This used to be among my prayers: a bit of land not too large, which would contain a garden and near the house an ever-flowing spring, and beyond that a wood lot.

Exactly. What we came for, what we have. I should be as placid in my mind as those two deer ruminating my shrubbery up on the hill. For a while I was, at times I still am. At the moment, in the generative sun, I felt practically no pain. O brave new world, that hath such Februaries in it.

Or Febuaries, as Cronkite and half his tribe would say.

I walked on past the Hammond cottage, which I will never get over thinking of as the Catlin place, though Marian died and John and Debby moved away four years ago. People we loved; there are too few of them. The very sight of their house darkened the day again for me.

Nobody home, as usual. Mrs. Hammond sells real estate, the girls are in school, and old Hammond is off in Baluchistan or somewhere training gendarmerie for the Iraqi government, exporting American know-how to help put down the Kurds—the
valiant
Kurds, as I remember them from “Sohrab and Rustum,” the Kurds who are demandeen self-government, as I hear from Cronkite.

Damnation. Instantly irritable, I compose a letter to the press instructing news commentators that those who use the language publicly and professionally should be advised that there are two r's in February, that ing is not pronounced een, and that verbs enjoy other possibilities than the present participle.
The White House announceen today that it has called a meeteen of business leaders for early Febuary.
Just saying it to myself, like the old pantaloon I am getting to be, brought my blood pressure up to about 250/200, and when I found that the mailbox was empty, that the postman was late again, I announced a loud God damn to the startled creekside and sat down to wait on a pile of timbers that was once a bridge until I replaced it with a culvert. My internal grumblings went on, the way a high-compression engine running on low-octane gas will go on galloping and coughing and smoking after the ignition is shut off.

It's a bad sign, I know it. Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn't. (
I
mustn't.) She hates to drive anywhere with me because I am inclined to cuss out drivers who don't please me. What good does it do? she cries. They can't hear you. All you do is upset me. It lets off steam, failing which I might explode, I tell her. What are you doing now but exploding? she asks.

Right, absolutely right. Faultfinding doesn't let off pressure, it only builds it up. It is only one of many processes, none of which I like and most of which I can't seem to help: the decreasing ability to stand heat or cold, something to do with the expansion and contraction of the capillaries. The slowing down of the mitotic rate in body cells, with resultant deterioration and lessening of function. The accumulation of plaque in the artery walls and of calcium spurs in the joints and of uric acid, sugar, and other undesirable chemicals in the blood and urine. Inescapable, irreversible, hateful.

Like last week, when the dentist told me that the molar he has been trying to save by root canal work will have to go. I can read the future in that direction without cards or tea leaves. First a bridge, if he can find anything to hitch it to. Then a partial plate. Finally a complete cleaning out of old snags in preparation for false teeth, on television called dentures. There will be a morning when I look in the minor and see an old sunken-cheeked stranger with scared eyes and a mouth like a sea urchin's.

I can stand it, and I really ought to try not to let it and other things make me crabby. But I damn well don't look forward to it, and I don't like any of the signs that the cookie has already started to crumble. The other day at the museum the young thing at the gate took one look at me and said brightly, “Senior citizen, sir?” and passed me out half-price tickets. That shook even Ruth. The way I felt, half price was an overcharge.

 

I had been sitting on the old timbers for about ten minutes when Ben Alexander drove in from the county road in his convertible. His top was down, his hair was tangled, and he had Edith Patterson in the seat beside him, looking like a raccoon in her wraparound Hollywood shades. It was all so young and gay and California that I had to laugh. Ben is the very chief of the tribe that makes old age out to be a time of liberation. He is writing a book about it.

He stopped beside me and ran down the window and sat looking at me with his hands on the wheel. Until he finally retired a couple of years ago he used to be my doctor, and he can still make me feel as if I am sitting there on the table, ridiculous in my shorts, waiting for the rubber hammer under the kneecaps and the steel handle against the soles of the feet, and the finger up under the scrotum (cough), and the rubber glove up the ass trespassing on my most secret prostate. (How's the urine? Good stream? Have to get up in the night?) He is a man I admire and trust, one of the godlike ones who direct lives, their own and others'. Maybe that is what keeps me from ever quite relaxing around him, for I am one of those to whom life happens. Maybe I disbelieve his pollyanna doctrines about old age. Or maybe it is only the doctor-patient relationship that makes me slightly uneasy. It is hard to be relaxed around a man who at any moment might examine your prostate.

His gray medical eyes were noting the condition of my eyeballs, my paunch, the stiffness with which I stood up, for all I know the spots on my lungs and liver. “Resting, roosting, or nesting?” he said. Edith, with her curved, reflecting blackout windows turned toward me, made a little smile.

“Brooding,” I said, and rose and dusted off my pants. “Molting. Hello, Edith. Don't you know a girl can be compromised, running around in a convertible with this old rooster?”

Which was plausible enough to be not so plainly spoken. Ben being Ben, you always wonder when you see a woman with him. His wife, who was wonderful and whom he adored, died several years ago. Ben is seventy-nine, he has sons over fifty and grandsons who have voted in the last two presidential elections, he wears a hearing aid when he wants to hear from the right side, a pacemaker is implanted under the skin of his chest, and his left hip joint is aluminum, newly installed. Nevertheless, with vitality like his, you never know.

As for Edith, she is always a little cool and aloof and amused. Not unattractive—she is as attractive a sixty-year-old as you ever saw. Her air of faintly mocking imperturbability has a remembrance of Dietrich sultriness about it, and though I never saw anything even slightly askew between her and Tom Patterson, an architect whose name is as well known in Karachi and Tel Aviv as in his home town, and who has had two operations for cancer of the tongue, that didn't prove anything either. One of the few wise sayings I am sometimes tempted to pass on to breathless posterity is that anything is possible at any time.

“They fight
for the privilege,” Ben said. “What are you doing,
waiting for the mailman?”

“What else do you do for the damned mailman, except give him five dollars at Christmas?”

“Ruth home?”

“Yes.”

“Edith wants to see her a minute. Edith, why don't you take the car and go on up? Ill sit down here and console Joe.”

Edith, who had been looking off down the creek, turned her black windows again. The molded mouth and nose and cheeks below them were expressionless. She nodded, and as Ben got out, helping himself with a cane, she slid over, put the car in gear, quirked her mouth in the slightest of smiles, and drove on. Ben stood with his cane planted and both hands stacked on it and looked down on me from his stooped six feet five.

“I wanted to ask but didn't quite dare,” I said. “How's Tom?”

“He's a dead man. I've just been down at the clinic with Edith while she heard it from Arthur.”

“Oh, Christ I
thought
she was being pretty silent.”

“She's all right You know what she wants to see Ruth about?”

“What?”

“To tell her she can't play the piano for the shut-ins for a while. Wants to arrange for someone else.”

I thought about how much my mind would be on those shut-ins if I'd just got Edith's news. “That's touching,” I said. “Does Tom know?”

“He's known for a week. I talked with him.” The gray corkscrews of hair stood up on his head. The breath he breathed down on me was loud and sour. “We both thought it was better she should hear it from his doctor. Tom couldn't quite tell her. That's a very close marriage.”

“I guess,” I said. “They're always so composed about everything you get to thinking of them as unflappable.”

A little gust of wind came up the valley, the roadside darkened under a swift cloud shadow. I rubbed my goose-pimpled arms. “Well, damn everything,” I said. “Damn the clouds. Damn the dawdling mailman. Damn the collective carcinogens. How do doctors stand being always cheek by jowl with the grim reaper?”

“Death?” Ben said, surprised. “Death isn't that much of a problem. It's as natural as living, and just as easy, once you've accepted it. I've been dead twice myself. Both times when they hooked up my pacemaker I died on them, and they revived me.”

“Well, at least your book on old age has a logical ending.”

I must have sounded bitter, because he fixed his old medical eyes on me again. “I haven't seen you around much lately. What've you been doing?”

“Tending my garden.”

“You ought to wear a sweater in this kind of weather. Been having any more pain?”

“Who told you I'd been having any pain?”

“Your doctor,” Ben said. “To whom I referred you. I looked at your last tests. Jim thought he might have depressed you with that diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Did he?”

“Depressed me? No. I didn't exactly cheer, but I wouldn't say I'm depressed.”

“What's he giving you?”

“Allopurinol for the uric acid, indocin for the pain, synthroid for general metabolic reasons, oronase for the blood sugar, something else for the cholesterol, I forget its name. I just take the handful of pills Ruth hands me.”

“I forget, have you got a heart history?”

“Myocarditis once, years ago. Or pericarditis, endocarditis, nobody ever quite labeled it. I got these chest pains, and the electrocardiograph went crazy, and I dropped about twenty pounds. They kept me in bed and it went away after a while.”

It was just like his office. He made me feel defensive, standing there planted on his cane and scowling at me. He grunted and wheezed, and again I smelled his sour breath. It annoyed me to have this giant ruin acting as if he was immune and immortal, and probing around in my insides, when he was ten years closer to the edge than I was. Sure enough, he undertook to reassure me.

“That's one thing that suggests rheumatoid to Jim, that myocarditis,” he said. “It's associated with rheumatoid the way rheumatic fever's related to coronary disease. But I don't necessarily believe he's right. Lemme see your hands.” He examined the knuckles of the hand I held out, then ordered up and examined the other. He did not say what the inspection told him. “Even if he should be right,” he said, “you're not to worry yourself into a wheel chair.”

“I'm not worrying.”

Wheezy and loud, his voice rode over mine. We stood in the green angle of the roadways, with the creek rustling in its deep channel, as if we were engaged in a quarrel that we didn't quite want to make plain. “Diseases don't live up to their full potential any oftener than people do,” he said. “You've got at most one chance in five it will really cripple you. You get plenty of exercise?”

“We walk, I work in the yard.”

“Good. You're in good shape. You'll make it into the eighties.”

“Why, thanks, Doctor,” I said. “I appreciate the offer.”

That old reptilian eye again, a snort through the long nose. “You know what you've got? You've got a bad case of the sixties. The sixties are the age of anxiety. You feel yourself on the brink of old age, and you fret. Once you pass your seventieth birthday that all clears away. You're like a man with an old car and no place in particular to go. You drive it where you want to, and every day it keeps on running is a gift. If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with a sensible diet and regular exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever. Strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any such thing as old age. You can keep chicken tissues alive indefinitely in a nutrient broth.”

“You know, it's a funny thing,” I said, “I never had the slightest desire to live in a nutrient broth.”

I exasperated him. “You're bored with your garden. If I'd been there when God set Adam and Eve in that perfect place I'd have given them about four months. They'd have lasted longer in Las Vegas. Who do you see? Who are your friends, besides the ones I know?”

“Have you been talking to Ruth?”

“No. Should I?”

“No. But she has this notion you do, that I need more people around. I never have needed many people around. I always had more than I wanted. A few friends are enough. There are lots of perfectly pleasant people whom I like, but if I don't see them I don't miss them. What kept me in New York was work, not people. When the work ended, most of the people ended, all but the handful that meant something. Maybe that's alarming, but that's the way I am.”