The Waiting Room (19 page)

It pleased me to see my name there, on that wall. Maybe it was the same kind of pleasure I'd gotten from trying to kick the closet door in—see
this
, feel
this
?!—
I'm
in control here!

And when I was done scratching my name into the plaster, I went up to the second floor.

W
hat
struck me first about the second floor of the beach house were the colors. Someone had gone crazy with high-gloss lacquers—red, pink, green, yellow, purple; I could see no black, no white, no cream or beige, nothing neutral.

I stood at the top of the stairs, at the beginning of a very long hallway that had high ceilings and a number of tall, narrow, apparently unpainted doors. The colors were arranged in a hippie-ish pattern—"psychedelic" is the word—as if gallons of various bright-colored paints had been thrown willy-nilly into a very strong wind, frozen, then transferred to those walls. In the middle sixties a cousin who had painted her room like that had explained that it was "life art."

"Huh?" I'd said.

"Life art," she repeated, adjusting the hem of her granny dress. "You look at it and you say to yourself, ‘The person who did this is
alive
.' You know? This is the art of the living."

~ * ~

It was cold in that hallway, as Abner said it would be. And there was a vague, indefinable smell wafting about. Every now and then my nose caught it briefly and I said to myself,
Yes, that's the smell of
. . . but I could never finish the thought because by then the smell would be gone. The phrase
mown grass
comes to mind now.

~ * ~

I counted eight doors in that hallway: three on the left and five on the right. They looked as if they might have been oak, but it was not until I screwed up some courage and looked closely at one that I realized it was covered with an oak-print Contact paper that was bubbly and torn in spots and peeling at the edges. As tacky as it was, it merely carried on with the tacky theme that the psychedelic walls had begun.

It was very quiet. I hadn't expected that. I'd expected . . . devils, I think. I'd expected that some gateway to the Other Side was being hidden up there and when I looked too closely I'd find it and unleash a whole crowd of drooling, gelatinous monsters.

I was
hoping
for monsters. Because with monsters, at least it's clear right from the start who your enemies are.

I knocked on the door I'd looked closely at; I got no answer. I knocked again. Then I tried the knob. It turned. I let it rotate back. I hadn't expected the room to be unlocked.

"Hello," I called again.

I heard from within the room, "Who's there?" It was a woman's voice, and it surprised the hell out of me because it was so human, so annoyed-sounding. "If you're selling something, I'm not buying."

"No," I managed.

"What?"

I stepped closer to the door. "No, I'm not selling anything." My voice sounded pathetic, gurgling. I cleared my throat. "I'm not selling anything. I'm looking for someone."

I heard her curse. I heard what sounded like a chair being pushed back on a hardwood floor, then the sound of footfalls. Moments later the door was pulled open and a tall, handsome middle-aged woman dressed in a long green satin robe appeared. She pursed her lips. "And
who
are you?" she said.

"Sam Feary," I answered.

She nodded once, casually. "Yes. Abner's friend. I was wondering when you'd show up." Her annoyance seemed to have changed to resignation. She had a square face and shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair which she wore full around her head. Her hazel eyes were large, and expressive of much living—they were the eyes, I thought, of someone who has seen quite a lot and knows with grim certainty that she will see much more. She had a habit of pursing her lips often. At first I thought it was the result of her annoyance; later I grew to realize that it was a sort of nervous habit. "I suppose you have to come in, don't you?" she went on, and gestured vaguely toward the room.

"Do you live here?" I asked.

She smiled wearily. “I live where I have to," and she turned and went into the room. I followed.

~ * ~

She sat in a very large white Queen Anne armchair. She looked aristocratic in it, especially in that long green satin robe. It seemed to please her to sit, as if she were tired from her little walk to the door and back. She nodded to indicate a love seat to my left, near the door. The love seat was covered in a worn flower-print-on-white fabric and had dark stains at the arms. I sat in it, and glanced quickly around the room; there were several hundred books in a tall dark oak bookcase between two windows, some knickknacks in a white plastic étagère near the love seat, and on a tall thin mahogany end table next to her chair, a battered, dirt-smeared softball.

"My name is Madeline," the woman said pointedly, as if the fact of her name were something that hinged not only on the rest of our conversation but also on everything that concerned me at the house.

"Madeline," I said, and added, "Yes, I've heard of you."

She pursed her lips. "Through Abner, I assume."

"Yes. Through Abner."

She nodded. "I'm no one." I could tell from her tone that she meant it. "I'm only a middle-aged former housewife whose son has ... "—a small, quivering grin came and went quickly on her mouth"... has passed on. We'll be reunited someday. I know that. I have no doubt of it. It's as clear and true to me as gravity. But, until then, what I have chosen to do . . ." She stopped, thought a moment. "No, that's incorrect: What I have been
forced
to do, Mr. Feary, is to sit here in this . . . this
throne—
it
is
something like a throne, isn't it? And it isn't very comfortable either; it puts my backside to sleep, so when I get up and try to walk around, Lord—I look like a goddamn drunken sailor." She stopped, apparently having lost her train of thought. She went on after a moment, pursing her lips again, "What I have been forced to do, Mr. Feary, is to try and dissuade people like you from doing the abominably stupid things that people like you invariably end up doing." Another quick, quivering grin. "So humor me, won't you?"

She looked and sounded like Maude from the old sitcom of the same name, the kind of woman who is very easy to talk to, but hard as hell to contradict, the kind of woman who makes no bones of the fact that she is the bearer of wisdom and that those around her are merely the bearers of sweet ignorance. There was no overt manifestation of ego in this. Only truth, as she saw it.

I started to say something about the house, about the cold and the smells and the bizarre things that happened in it, and she held her hand up to stop me: "I have a little speech, Mr. Feary. When I have delivered it, and you have absorbed it, as I am
certain
you will"—her voice was dripping with sarcasm—"then you can say whatever it is you have to say, and we can both go about our business as if we never met." She stopped, apparently as a cue for me to settle down and listen; so I did.

"Good," she said. "Thank you. You're much easier to talk to than your friend." She crossed her legs and leaned forward in the chair with her hands on her knees. "This is my speech, Mr. Feary. Listen closely:

"Mind your own
p
's and
q
's." She smiled thinly.

After several moments of silence, I said, "Yes. Continue."

She said, "I'll bet you can't tell me where that comes from? That phrase. 'Mind your own
p
's and
q
's.'”

"Sorry," I said.

"Printers used it," she said. "It has something to do, you know, with the fact that the
p
's and the
q
's are the same, only reversed, and I guess it was easy to put a
p
into a
q
box by mistake."

"That's your speech?" I asked.

Again she shrugged. "Who likes speeches? I do have another one prepared, if you want to hear a speech. It's a speech about
them
and about
us
and how we're really all the same but actually quite different, about—now get this: This is a quote—about how 'Death changes nothing but a person's biology,' and 'You are now what you will always be.' That sort of thing. But I've retired it, you know. Too long-winded. And, anyway, what it all boiled down to was simply that—‘Mind your own
p
's and
q
's.'
 
Another thin smile. "You can go now."

"I don't want to go," I said. It was true. I didn't want to leave her. I liked what she represented. She was solid. She was real. Those nonexistent devils and zombies and gelatinous monsters could suddenly burst into the room, all of them hell-bent on gobbling me up, and she would know precisely how to deal with them. She would wave her hand in the air and say with regal exasperation, "Oh, get
out
of here!" And they'd leave, each of them muttering an apology.

She shrugged. "So stay," she said.

"You don't understand," I said.

She smiled thinly once more. "Of course I do, Mr. Feary. You know very well that I do. " She reached out suddenly, grabbed the battered, dirt-smeared softball on the end table near her chair, and threw it to me. I reacted none too soon; as it was I had to juggle the ball for a few seconds to keep. it in hand. "What's this?" I asked.

"It's a softball."

"I can see that it's a softball, what I mean is—"

"Gerald's in it. Gerald's my son."

"Huh?" I got an image of her boring a hole in the skin of the softball, injecting the ashes of her dead son into it, meticulously mending the hole, then covering its edges with dirt. "You mean his ashes are in it?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No.
He's
in it.
Gerald's
in it. " She held both hands up. "Throw it back, would you?" I got the uncomfortable idea that we were going to play catch. I gave the ball a stiff but accurate underhand toss. She caught it and put it back with a thump on the end table. She must have seen my look of surprise because she said, "You're thinking that if Gerald's really in this ball then why am I being so careless with it?"

"No," I lied, "not at all."

She smiled, pleased. "I like you, Mr. Feary. You're polite. Abner wasn't polite." She grabbed the softball again and began tossing it back and forth between her hands. She said as she tossed it, "When Gerald was a baby, of course, I had to be careful with him. I could tickle him, throw him a few inches into the air. But if I dropped him, he'd hurt, he'd have pain. And then, as he grew, I had to watch out for various diseases. He had chicken pox once. It devastated me because I hated to see him so sick." She stopped tossing the ball, held it tight in her left hand. "But he's dead now, Mr. Feary, so I don't have to be careful anymore. Just like the mother of a college kid can stop worrying whether he's turned out okay, because by then whatever he's turned into is going to stick, and whatever she tries to do to change him isn't going to mean doodly squat." She set the softball down again, a bit more gently. "In other words, Mr. Feary, what's done is, in point of fact, done."

I had no real idea what she was talking about. I asked, feeling like a child, "Do I
have
to go?"

She nodded slowly, apologetically. "At some time or other you do, yes. I mean, I can't feed you, and the toilet facilities are downstairs, of course, such as they are." She cocked her head to one side and pursed her lips. "You've sort of latched on to me, haven't you, Mr. Feary?"

That got me flustered, as if she'd caught me stealing. I stammered, "No, no, of course not, it's just that . . . it's just that—" I could think of nothing to say.

She smiled broadly, as if pleased. "You may stay for as long as you wish, Mr. Feary. But you should know that your friend isn't here. In this room I mean."

This jolted me back to reality, to the reason I was at the beach house in the first place. "Well, yes," I said, "I
know
that, I can
see
that."

She smiled thinly yet again, as if at an old and tired joke. "You're not quite as . . . intuitive as your friend. You're more courteous, it's true. But you're not as intuitive. You don't
see
Gerald, do you? And yet, he is here"—she nodded—"in that softball."

"I'd have to accept that on faith, wouldn't I, Madeline?"

Another thin, weary smile. "What you accept and why you accept it really is of little consequence, least of all to me, Mr. Feary." This was not said unkindly, as a put-down, but merely as a statement of fact. "I'd say you've probably seen more than enough in these past few days to put your . . . how do the writers say it?—your 'willing suspension of disbelief' on a pretty low level, isn't that right?"

"I haven't become a gullible fool, if that's what you're saying."

"You're losing your patience, Mr. Feary. Remember—
courtesy
; where would we be without courtesy? The Japanese are the most successful people on the
planet because of their courtesy. My God, they're even courteous about killing themselves."