Van Gogh's Room at Arles (2 page)

But he set all that aside for the moment and took up the phone to see if he could get some idea where he stood.

The dispatcher at the cab company—Schiff had made a mental note of the number on Claire’s taxi—said he’d like to help but the computer was down. (Schiff, who didn’t believe him, wondered what the fallout would come to from such solutions.) He checked with the airlines, but since he couldn’t give them Claire’s destination, let alone times or flight numbers, they couldn’t help him. (Couldn’t or wouldn’t. He insisted that even without the specifics they ought to be able to punch up her name on their computers. Claire Schiff, he said to one agent, how many Claire Schiffs could there be riding on their airplanes? She was his wife, for God’s sake, and he didn’t know of another Claire Schiff in all of America. Suppose this had been a
real
emergency. A
real
emergency? “Sure. If the plane went down, God forbid. If there’d been a hijacking.” “If the plane went down, if there’s been a hijacking?” the agent said slyly. “God forbid,” said Schiff. “She’s your wife,” another agent said, “and you don’t even have a destination for her?” “Well, my girl.” “Oh, now she’s your ‘girl.’” “My daughter,” he said, “we think she’s run off.” “Your daughter, is she?” the agent said. “Listen, you,” Schiff, getting defensive, said aggressively, “I happen to be a Frequent Flyer on this airline. I have your platinum card, more than a hundred thousand uncashed miles and enough bonus points to practically charter my own goddamn plane. Either look up Claire Schiff for me or let me speak to your supervisor.” The son of a bitch hung up on him. They’d whipped him. “I have to find her,” he told the very last agent he spoke to, “I’m disabled and we’re giving a party.”) He probably spent thirty or forty dollars on long-distance fishing expeditions. Their friends, proclaiming no knowledge of her plans, went on fishing expeditions of their own. “No,” he’d say, putting them off, “no trouble. As for myself, my condition’s pretty much unchanged, but I think Claire may be getting a little spooked. Well,” he said, still fairly truthfully, “we’re both getting on. Hell,” he said, “I’m close to sixty. So’s Claire, for that matter. Maybe she thinks she won’t be able to lift me much longer.” But finally as cavalier with the truth as he’d been with the airline son of a bitch who’d hung up on him. “She’s been depressed,” he said. “I’ve got her meeting with a psychiatrist three, sometimes four times a week. We’re starting to think about institutions. We’re starting to think, now they’ve got a lot of the kinks worked out, about electroshock therapy. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? Yeah, well, if you should happen to hear anything, anything at all, you have my number, give me a ring. Dr. Greif and I want to get this thing settled as soon as we can. Tell Marge hi for me.”

No longer bothering to pick up the litter he left after these flights of fancy, no longer even thinking about it. Just working his new situation. And was still working his new situation when the idea came to him to call Harry Aid in Portland. Once he thought of it he didn’t screw around.

“Harry, it’s Jack. Is Claire with you?”

“With me? Why would she be with me?”

He recognized the tone in Harry’s voice. It could have been the tone in his own voice when he was handing out his God forbids to the airline agents and transforming his wife’s identity into his girlfriend’s and then declining that one into some daughter’s.

“Why? Well, for starters, I think she may still have a thing for you, you big lug.”

“That was years ago, Jack. Christ, man, I’m sixty years old. We ain’t high school kids any longer.”

“Is she with you, Harry?”

“Jack, I swear on my life she isn’t.”

“Yeah, all right, it’s a four-hour plane ride to Portland. Is she on her way?”

“Honor bright, Jack, I’m telling you that as of this minute I have absolutely no idea where she is.”

So, Schiff thought, she’s run off to play out her life with her old sweetheart.

“Okay, Harry. Hang tough. Stonewall me. Just you remember. I’m a helpless old cripple with a degenerative neurological disease who has to be strapped into the chair when he goes down the stairs on his Stair-Glide.”

“Oh, Jack,” Harry said.

“Oh, Harry,” said Jack, and hung up.

It wasn’t that satisfactory but at least now he knew where he stood. (Well, he thought,
stood.)
What he’d told his wife had been true. He
couldn’t
afford to be single. Not at the rate his exacerbations had been coming. Only a little over a year ago he’d still been able to manage on a cane, he’d still been able to drive. He’d owned a walker—a gift from the Society—but hadn’t even taken it out of its box. Now they had to tote him around in a wheelchair he hadn’t enough strength in his left arm to propel by himself. Now he had to go up and down stairs in contraptions on tracks—— Schiff’s little choo-choo. Now he couldn’t stand in the shower, there were grab bars on the sides of his handicap toilet, a bath bench in his tub, he had to sit to pee, and couldn’t always pull the beltless, elastic-waistband pants he wore all the way up his hips and over his ass. (Now, for the same reason, he didn’t even wear underwear.) There were ramps at both the front and rear of the house. And every other month now there was some elaborate new piece of home health equipment in the house. Indeed, where once it had been a sort of soft entertainment for him to go into the malls and department stores, now it had become a treat to drop into one of the health supply shops and scope the prosthetics. On his wish list was the sort of motorized wheelchair you’d see paraplegics tear around in, a van with a hydraulic lift in which to put it, and one of those big easy chairs that raised you to a standing position. Also, although in his case it was still a little premature to think about just yet, he had his eye on this swell new electronic hospital bed. He found himself following ads for used hospital beds in the Society’s newsletter. (“Don’t kid yourself,” he told colleagues, “it takes dough to be crippled and still have a lifestyle.”)

You could be crippled or you could be single. Schiff, though he made a pretty good living at the university— Check, he reminded himself, the savings and money-market accounts, see if she cleaned you out before she split— didn’t know anyone who could afford to be both. Oh, maybe if you went into a
home
maybe, but unless you had only three or four years to live that was prohibitive, too. (Wasn’t everything up front? Didn’t you have to sign your life savings over to those guys? He should have known this stuff, but give him a break, until this morning he hadn’t even known his wife would be running out on him.) And, though he’d never actually been in one, he didn’t think he’d like the way it would smell in the corridors.

So he was checking his options. Still working his new situation, he meant, still, he meant, thinking about the blows he would be taking in his comfort, he found his mind drifting back to that wish list. He found himself idly thinking about the skeepskin whoosies crips draped over the furniture and across their wheelchairs and sheets to help prevent lesions and bedsores. It was astonishing what one of those babies could go for in a wicked world. (It varied actually. They came in different grades, like wool rugs, fur coats, or diamonds. Lambskin was the most expensive, then ewes, then adult males, but it wasn’t that simple. There were categories within even these categories, and certain kinds of sheep—castrated fully-grown males were an example—could sometimes be more expensive than even the finest virgin lambskin. Once you really got into it, it was a waste, a waste and a shame, thought Schiff, to be crippled- up in such an interesting place as the world.) Oh well, he thought, if he really needed them he could afford all the sheepskins he wanted. Sheepskin deprival wasn’t his problem. His wish list wasn’t. He
had
been drifting, he
had
been thinking idly. With Claire gone his problem was the real and present danger he was in, his problem was singleness and emergency.

He picked up his cordless phone and called Information. (Another thing he didn’t understand about his wife. Since his disease had been first diagnosed, even, that is, when he was relatively asymptomatic, he’d asked the telephone company, and with a supporting letter from his neurologist received, for its free Unlimited Information Privilege. For years now he hadn’t cracked a phone book. Claire had telephone numbers written down in a small, worn black spiral notebook she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. When she wanted the number of a plumber, say, or the man who serviced their air conditioners, she’d go all the way downstairs for it rather than call Information. Recently, it was the cause of some of their biggest fights. “Ask Information,” Schiff offered expansively, almost like a host pressing food or drink on a guest. “The number’s in my book,” she’d say. “Why not ask Information? It’s free.” “I’ve got the number downstairs. Information has better things to do.” “It’s their
job,
for Christ’s sake. What do you think the hell else they have to do?” “That’s all right, I don’t mind.” “I mind,” Schiff would say, and he’d be shouting now.
“Why?”
he’d yell after her.
“This is some passive-aggressive thing, isn’t it? Sure,”
he’d shout, “
this is some lousy passive-aggressive thing on your part. Just your way of showing me who the cripple is in this outfit!”
Sometimes, out of spite and with Claire as witness, checking what was playing at all the movie houses, when the feature was scheduled to begin, he’d rack up a dozen or so calls to Information at a time. Or patiently explain to her, “You know, Claire, the Information operators don’t actually look anything up. It isn’t as if they were ruining their eyes over the tiny print in the telephone directory. It’s all computers nowadays. They just punch in an approximate spelling and the number comes up on the screen.” “It’s wasteful,” Claire might say. “It’s free.” “It’s a drain on the electricity, it’s wasteful.” “You clip goddamn coupons for shampoos and breakfast cereals and shit we wouldn’t even eat unless you got fifteen or twenty cents off the price of the goddamn box!
That’s
wasteful! Do you know what they charge for a call to Information?
Forty-five cents, that’s what! Forty-five cents!
They’re ripping you off I’ll tell you the truth, Claire, I feel sorry for people who aren’t handicapped today, I really do. I probably save us a dollar eighty cents a day. You know what that comes to over the course of a year? Practically six hundred fifty dollars a year! Go buy yourself a designer dress, Claire, go get yourself a nice warm coat.”
“Big man!” “Big fucking passive aggressive!”)

“S.O.S. Corporation,” a woman said when the number rang through. “How may we help you?”

“I’ve seen your ads on TV and I’d like to speak to one of your sales representatives,” Schiff said.

“Bill isn’t busy just now. I’ll put you through to Bill.”

“I’m disabled,” Schiff told Bill. “My wife of thirty-six years skipped out on me today to be with an old boyfriend in the Pacific Northwest and left me high and dry and all alone in the house, pretty much a prisoner in it, in fact. Claire left me the car, and I have my handicap plates—my ‘vanity plates,’ I call them, with their stick-figure, big- wheeler wheelchairs like a kid’s toy—but I haven’t driven in over a year and don’t even know whether I still can.”

The salesman started to explain his company’s services but Schiff interrupted him. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve seen your ads on TV,” and continued, teaching Bill his life and current situation. Then the good political geographer went on to explain what he called “choke points” in his home, fault lines along which he could be expected most likely to fall, how close these were to the various telephones in the house. When he was done, the fellow, if he’d been paying attention at all, could have passed, and might even have aced, any pop quiz on the material that Schiff cared to give him.

“Yes sir,” Bill said, “that’s pretty clear. I think we’ll be able to serve you just fine.”

“I think so,” Schiff said, “I’ve seen your ads on TV, I’ve heard them on the radio.”

“Pretty effective spots,” Bill said.

“Long-time listener, first-time caller,” said Schiff.

“Hey,” said the salesman, “you can rest easy. We could get the equipment over to you and set you up today.”

“Well, I do have
some
questions.”

“Oh,” Bill said, disappointed, realizing things had gone too smoothly, sensing the catch, “sure. What’s that?”

Schiff wanted to know if he could wear the thing in the shower, whether there was any chance he would be electrocuted. The shower was one of the major choke points; if he was going to be electrocuted the deal was off.

“No chance at all,” Bill, who’d actually often been asked this same question, said brightly. “The emergency call button works on the same principle as the waterproof watch. Besides, everything in it, the case, the working parts, are all made of high-grade, bonded, heavy-duty plastic. The only metal part is the copper wire that carries the signal, and that’s locked in bonded, heavy-duty, high-grade plastic insulation.”

Schiff said that that was good, that people his age had been known to recover from broken hips, but that he couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever come back from an electrocution. Bill chuckled and, feeling his oats, wanted to know if Professor Schiff had any other questions. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he had. If he wasn’t near a regular phone would it work on a cordless? The salesman was ready for him. He slammed this one right out of the park. “Yes, absolutely. So long as it’s in the On mode. Then of course, since the battery tends to drain down in that position, it’s your responsibility to see to it that you keep your phone charged.”

“I could do that, I’m not completely helpless, you know,” said Schiff, who, from the salesman’s quick answer to what Schiff thought a cleanly unique question, suddenly had a sad sense of himself as a thoroughly categorized man.

“Of course not,” Bill said. “Anything else?”

There was the question of price. Bill preferred to wait until he had a chance to meet Schiff in person before going into this stuff—there were various options—— if a doctor accompanied the paramedic on a call, whether Schiff would be using some of the other services the company offered, various options—but the professor was adamant. He reminded Bill of all he had yet to do if he was going to call off that party for his graduate students. He wouldn’t budge on this one. The salesman would either have to tell him what it cost right then and there or lose the sale. Bill gave him the basic monthly rates, installation fees, what it would cost Schiff if they had to put in additional phones. He broke down the costs to him of the various options and offered a price on specific package deals. It was like buying a good used car.