Nude Men Page 20

  “I was nervous.”

  “And your nails too?”

  “No, I don’t bite my nails. I prefer skin.” She presses a Kleenex to her lips. The blood seeps right through, and the Kleenex holds there by itself.

  “You don’t have a cold?” I ask.

  “No; I didn’t want Sara to see me bleeding,” she answers, the Kleenex flapping in the wind of her breath.

  “What brought this on?”

  “News.” She opens the bottle of alcohol and starts disinfecting her fingers.

  I sit on the window seat, sensing it will take a bit of time to get things out of her. “Yeah... ?” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. Flap flap of the Kleenex. She looks like a flag.

  “Is it good news or bad news?”

  “That’s a good question. And that’s the reason I ate myself. I can’t decide. Or rather, it’s both, perhaps.” She wraps Band-Aids around the tips of her fingers.

  “What is this news?”

  “Wait. Let me put on the last Band-Aid.”

  I wait in silence. When she is finished with her fingers, she unsticks the Kleenex from her mouth and applies Vaseline to her lips. She then sits motionless and does not speak.

  “Can you tell me now?” I ask.

  Her pupils turn to me. She springs off her chair, runs to her bed, and dives on it. She buries her face in her pillow, clutching it with clenched fists, her knuckles white. Before I can decide if I should be worried, she slowly gets up, looking much more relaxed now, and comes to sit by me on the window seat. She stares outside.

  “Sara’s doctor called me,” she begins. “He said he spoke to a doctor friend of his, a specialist, about Sara’s condition.” Her pupils slide from the window to my face and then back, like a puppet’s eyes. “... a doctor friend of his,” she repeats, “who said there may be a cure for Sara.” The puppet’s eyes slide again to me and back outside. “He needs to test her, to know.” The eyes are on me again, full of water now, no longer a puppet’s.

  I get a bit of my own water in my vision. A smile develops on my face, expressing my joy, but she shakes her head, frowns, and says, “No! That’s why I ate my skin. It’s because we cannot let ourselves be happy, or it might kill us later.”

  I take away the smile.

  “Jeremy, be careful,” she says, mechanically putting one of her fingers in her mouth, to eat its cuticle, and taking it back out instantly when she tastes the Band-Aid. She begins unconsciously to unroll a corner of the Band-Aid. “This news, I’m sure, is just a cruel trick of destiny,” she says. “Our hopes will go up, and then they will be crushed when the doctor says, ‘Oh, well, I was wrong, there’s no hope for Sara, sorry, oops.’ ”

  “Oops,” says the parrot, walking into the room like a little person.

  The door has been left ajar. Henrietta rushes out, and comes back a minute later, saying, “Sara didn’t hear a thing. She’s in the kitchen, flipping coins.”

  Henrietta picks up the parrot and holds him next to her on the windowsill. She strokes his head, and he starts purring loudly (a feat he learned from my cat, Minou, when they met recently).

  Henrietta goes on: “I’m afraid I might kill the doctor, or do some such thing, when he says sorry oops.”

  “Doctors are prepared for that. They have protection,” I say. “You mean like bodyguards.”

  “Or muscular secretaries.”

  “You mean nurses.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meow,” says the parrot.

  “I want you to take her to the doctor for the test,” she tells me.

  “Why?”

  “Because when the doctor says sorry oops, I will cry. Sara should not see anyone cry about her death. You will not cry.”

  “I might.”

  “I don’t know if you’re saying that because you think it’s nice or if you truly believe it. But I know you will not cry. You don’t care enough about her.”

  There are many things I want to answer to that, but as each one enters my mind, I don’t utter it. We sit in silence, so the parrot whispers, “Is it time yet?” (He knows how to whisper.) “Time for what?” asks Henrietta, feigning ignorance.

  “Is it time for the death and dying of the yet yet?”

  The parrot sometimes startles us with complex sentences. “It’s not funny,” says Henrietta to the parrot.

  “The yet yet?” says the parrot.

  “No, death.”

  “Death! Death!” shrieks the parrot, flapping his wings, excited at hearing someone other than himself mention his word.

  Henrietta squeezes his head with her thumb and forefinger, which always makes him stop. “I want to love him,” she says, “but he makes it very difficult.”

  The parrot calms down and goes back to purring loudly.

  “I do care about her,” I finally say. “But a lot of things have happened.”

  “Therefore you will not cry.”

  “I might not,” I concede, but I don’t bother trying to convince her that it’s not because I don’t care about Sara but because I feel as though I have cried out all the tears in my body.

  People start to clap when she’s walking down the street.

  I take Sara to the specialist. She smells rotten. The fruit in her, which previously produced the sweet smell, has rotted. She is past due. The key was to die before the fruit rotted. Poor Sara. I can smell it. It comes out in her breath when she talks.

  The doctor tests Sara and then tells us the test was successful, and that therefore there is a possible cure, with a fifty percent chance of success. I look at Sara. She looks at me, her eyes wide. We simultaneously get up from our chairs and hug each other.

  “Will my beard go away?” Sara asks the doctor, while we’re still hugging.

  “Yes,” he answers.

  “The stubble and everything?”

  “Yes. You will be exactly as before.”

  We talk to the doctor some more. I am frisky, fidgeting, and wagging my tad. Once everything has been said, the cure is given to us in a little bottle, and Sara and I decide to go eat some ice cream in the coffee shop across the street. Walking out of the doctor’s office, we talk excitedly to each other, about Sara’s possible future, about things she’d like to do if she lives, except that she doesn’t say “if,” she says when she lives.

  In the hallway, she flips her coin in the air and catches it over and over again, absentmindedly, just for fun. “Now I can really flip the coin to see if I’ll live or die,” she says. “It really is a fifty percent chance now.” But she doesn’t look at the coin when it lands.

  While we wait for the elevator, she says, “I suddenly have a very strong craving for pear ice cream. Why don’t they make pear ice cream?”

  Outside, she says, “When I live” (notice the “when”) “do you think there’s a chance you could ever love me, in a few years?”

  “I don’t know. We shouldn’t think of that now.”

  “Tell me, Jeremeee,” she says, yanking my arm. “Like when I’m seventeen and you’re thirty-five, or, if that’s still too young, when I’m eighteen and you’re thirty-six?”

  I don’t answer, hoping she’ll change the subject.

  “So, do you think? Why not, huh?”

  I am trying to think of a reply. I must call Lady Henrietta to tell her about the incredible fifty percent news, which will make her ecstatic. I will call her as soon as we get to the coffee shop, which is right across the street we are now crossing.

  “Tell me!” She yanks my arm on “me.”

  I laugh, a bit exhausted. We are now crossing it, that street across which the ice cream is and, more important, the phone is also.

  “Jeremy, I’m serious. Don’t you think you could ever be in love with me? I love you.” Sara is holding my hand but lagging behind me, making me pull her a bit as she dreams about her fifty percent chance of a future, which is now, suddenly, yanked away from her by the same car that yanks her hand out of mine.

  Sara ge
ts hit by a car and dies. That’s in other words. Run over by it. Instantly. Without suffering. Her body twitches.

  I am screaming. Everybody is screaming and crying. Sara is silent. There is blood everywhere, except on the little white elephant that is gleaming up at me, spotless, from Sara’s neck. So familiar. So disconcerting.

  The doctor—the specialist—is now in the street, and he pronounces Sara dead.

  As I bend down over her, a voice inside me repeats: “Oh really? Oh really, Fate, oh, really?” I am bending down over her, confused. Something went wrong. I don’t get it. It’s like reading a novel, and something happens, and you weren’t paying attention for a moment, and suddenly you don’t understand what’s going on anymore. I go back over the events I have just lived, to figure out if there’s a logical link, you know, cause and effect, or anything similar. The visit to the doctor, the news that she may get well, the happiness and plans for the future, the decision to get ice cream, exiting the budding, Sara’s question, the crossing of the street, Sara’s question again, the yellow car driving right into her. I get it: There’s nothing to get.

  Sara’s fist is clenched. I unclench it. In her palm lies the coin. I take it and dig my fingernail into it, hoping to hurt it, before putting it in my pocket.

  Sara’s dead eyes are open, aimed at the sky. Although they are not aimed at me, she is looking at me out of the corner of her eye, I know. “I’m serious, Jeremy. So, do you think?” she does not say, but her eyes are still demanding the answer from me. She still wants to know, even now.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, holding her hand. “When you’re eighteen and I’m thirty-six. It’s a possibility.”

  Now the voice in my head is repeating something else: “You didn’t even brake. You didn’t even brake,” over and over again. I go up to the woman of the yellow car, who is crying.

  The interrogation:

  “You didn’t even brake,” I tell her. She just stares at me startled, so I say, “Why did you hit her?”

  “It was my fault,” she says. “I wasn’t looking.”

  “What were you looking at?” I ask, sensing that this question is tremendously important and that its answer will help me understand everything. “What were you looking at?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter?”

  “It matters a lot. I must know what you were looking at.” She remains silent. Maybe she does not recall, because of the shock of the accident.

  “Perhaps if you look back at the street,” I suggest, “you might remember what caught your eye.”

  Finally, she says, “I didn’t forget.”

  “So you know.”

  But she does not say more.

  I try to reassure her: “Don’t feel bad about telling me. I know that whatever you were looking at, it was probably a stupid thing to look at. Anything would be stupid when it kills someone.”

  “I saw a man in a second-floor window.”

  “And?”

  “He was not dressed.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No.”

  She means he was nude.

  She goes on: “He was watching something outside, very intently. I was curious to see what he was looking at, so I looked.”

  “What was it?”

  “Just a bird perched on a lamppost. The man must have been staring at it because it was blue, which is sort of uncommon for Manhattan. I’m sorry.”

  How relevant to my life. I can imagine that this woman of the yellow car must be ashamed that such a stupid, stupid thing has killed my daughter (I say daughter because that’s who the woman must think Sara was). Well, it wasn’t our parrot who did it. No parrot of mine. No parrot of Sara’s. The parrot was part of Sara. Accusing the parrot is like saying she killed herself.

  As for the nude man, of course, I would have preferred it if the woman had been looking at a bald man. Then I could hate bald men, not nude men, which would be more tolerable emotionally because I have a lot of hair, whereas I am the type of man who is not almost never naked anymore.

  Well, that should certainly please people who think nude men brought on all the misery and insanity in this poor little girl’s life, you moralist shits. They even killed her. Nudity is dangerous, you’re gloating. I told you so, you’re gloating. When little girls do naughty things, they get punished. Very good turn of events indeed!

  “Where were you going?” I ask the woman of the yellow car.

  “To the veterinarian.”

  I glance inside her car. There’s a dog in a box.

  “Is it sick?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a cure?”

  “No.”

  “So why were you going to the doctor?”

  “To have him put to sleep.”

  “I had a dying pet, and I would never have put it to sleep.”

  “What animal was it?”

  A little girl, I realize, is what I’m talking about. I’m about to tell her she should get fishes, but change my mind. Fishes die more easily than anything else in the world.

  * * *

  The ambulance comes. It takes Sara. I ride in it too. And the doctor comes also. He wants to help me in case I don’t feel well mentally or emotionally.

  In the ambulance, I shout to the doctor, above the screaming siren: “Don’t tell her mother there was any hope, okay? Tell her there was no hope.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Now I am screaming, not just because of the noise but out of anger: “No, you must tell her there wasn’t any hope. Tell her there was no hope at all and that Sara was going to suffer terribly from her brain tumor, okay?"

  “I won’t call Sara’s mother, but if she calls me, I won’t lie to her either. She deserves to know the truth.”

  At the hospital, I call Lady Henrietta.

  ‘‘That took long” is the first thing she says when she answers the phone. Then, almost breathless, she asks, “Is there any hope?”

  “No.”

  Silence. And then she says, very softly, “You see, I knew it.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  I hear her crying. And then she says, “Well, come home. It’s getting late.”

  I am silent now. I want to say “okay.” It is on the tip of my tongue. I can hear it in the air, already.

  “Okay?” she says. “Can you please bring Sara home now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she asks, annoyed and curious, not at all alarmed, because people who are dying of a disease simply don’t die, on top of it, of an accident.

  “You should turn on your tape recorder,” I tell her.

  “It’s already on.”

  “You should come to the hospital. There was an accident. It’s Sara.”

  I tell her that her daughter is already dead.

  Not only is there no hope, but your daughter is already dead.

  I am appalled by the parrot, who, as soon as we return to the apartment from the hospital, says, “Is it time yet?”

  I am surprised that Lady Henrietta, very seriously, answers the parrot: “Yes, it happened. She’s dead.”

  “And yet? And yet?” says the poor dumb parrot, as though mocking her answer. He raves on a bit: “Is it almost time yet? Death and dying?”

  The parrot didn’t kill Sara. What nonsense. It was the street. Nude men and that street were responsible. No parrot of mine. No parrot of Sara’s. I take the parrot’s droppings and deposit them on the street where the accident happened, to punish the street.

  I feel as though I have been a spectator at a circus, and now the show is over. There was a talking parrot who belonged to a bearded lady who wore a dress the color of the sun, flew through the air on a hang glider, flipped coins, and killed fishes (cruelty to animals). It was a grotesque show with strong smells, blinding colors, and loud noises. Come to think of it, I was not only a spectator, I was also a performer: the elephant master. And I messed up the show. The elephant disobeyed me and trampled on the bearded lady.


  One night I have a strange dream, or rather a nightmare. I dream that Lady Henrietta and I are at the doctor’s office, and the doctor—Sara’s original doctor—is telling us that Sara did not die of an accident.

  “Do you mean she was murdered?” I ask, because of movies. “No. She died of her brain tumor, as was expected,” says the doctor in my dream.

  “So what was the car accident? Was that her brain tumor?” asks Henrietta sarcastically.

  “Exactly,” says the doctor. “It was a new symptom: a cancer.”

  “Cancer of what?”

  “Cancer of her space.”

  “What?”

  “Cancer of the space, or place, her body fills in the universe. It is also called cancer of her air, but generally it is called cancer of one’s space, place, or air, not her or his space, place, or air. In this case, however, since we are talking about a very specific person whom we knew, we may say her.”

  “Was it some sort of psychological problem, this ‘cancer’?” one of us asks.

  “Far from it. Cancer of one’s place means that the place one’s body occupies in the universe has become cancerous.”

  “We really don’t understand what you’re talking about,” we say.

  “When your place is cancerous, it means it’s always at the wrong time. Accidents happen to you.”

  “Do you mean like being at the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “No. Your place cannot be wrong, but when it is sick or cancerous it becomes at the wrong time, just as a watch can become at the wrong time, except that with your place it’s far worse than merely the wrong time; it’s the bad time, the tragic time; accidents keep occurring in your place. With Sara, the first accident was the last.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I knew it the first day you brought her to me, when I saw the nature of her brain tumor. You may want to sue me; you may hate me for having known and not told you about this symptom: for having known and not told you that it was the last symptom she was going to have and the one that would kill her. I decided to withhold this information from you for your own good.”

  “Then why are you telling us now, for God’s sake? Why not just let us believe she died of a real, down-to-earth accident?”