“Can I have ice cream?” Gerry asked his parents.
“That’s for tonsils, buddy,” his father said.
“Yes,” said his mother.
February 12
THE NIGHT NURSE is named Aileen and she does not read. This is almost the first thing she tells Gerry about herself, after inspecting the shelves that cover the top floor’s walls. The shelves were one of the few things that Gerry had to have installed in the apartment. He brought more than thirty boxes of books from New York, and that was after a ruthless culling. He had four boxes of kitchen equipment.
“You have so many books! I hardly read at all. I suppose I should.” Her complacent tone suggests she doesn’t really believe this, that her admiration for his books is a social nicety.
“How will you pass the time?”
She turns and looks at him as if he’s not very bright. “Time passes on its own. It doesn’t need my help.”
That’s almost wise, he has to admit.
“I mean at night, when you’re here. It must be—” He’s about to say boring, but stops. No one wants to hear one’s job described as boring. “Lonely.”
“Why, I’ll watch television,” she says. “Maybe movies.”
“The study, which is probably the best place for you to hole up, doesn’t have a television. I’m afraid the only television is up here.” He points to the plasma screen, mounted to the center of the wall and now surrounded by books. The wall is really a nonwall, an architectural feature that, the Realtor said, was intended to define the various living spaces of the top floor. Gerry had shelves affixed directly to it, so the television is now surrounded by books; it almost disappears within the wall of books, a visual effect of which he approves. “It looks like something one might see in a gallery,” Thiru had said, adding, “A very jejune gallery.”
Gerry likes it, anyway. The news, glowing softly from inside this collage of books, has less impact, more context.
“Oh, I won’t need a TV,” Aileen says. “I have my tablet.” She brandishes an iPad in a case covered with a pattern featuring cats doing human things. Cooking, riding bicycles, knitting. Reading. So cats read, but she doesn’t. Whenever Gerry hears the word tablet, he imagines Moses holding the Ten Commandments, but now a tablet is a hunk of plastic, probably assembled by tiny children’s hands in China. “You have Wi-Fi, I was told.” She holds up a bag with yarn and needles. “I knit, too. If you don’t bother me too much, I’ll finish this coverlet before you’re ready to let me go.”
Gerry wants to protest, to insist that it is his prerogative to “bother” her as much as he likes, given the wages he will be paying her, but he decides she’s what people now label as “on the spectrum.” A little dense, emotionally and mentally, artless as a child, garrulous as a senior citizen. Perhaps that’s a good quality for someone whose job involves wiping another person’s ass.
Gerry’s injuries are severe, but his hope for a fullish recovery is reasonable. He is in good health, although he was shocked to discover that X-rays revealed his bone density had already been compromised. He thought that was a female thing. But his primary injury is a bilateral quad tear in his right leg. He needs to remain flat on his back for eight to twelve weeks in this hulking beast of a hospital bed. His injured leg is braced to keep it immobilized and a “trapeze” hangs over him—he has to grab that if he wants to change his position in his bed or use what Aileen calls the “commode”—the correct word, yet one that irritates him to no end.
He has been told repeatedly how lucky he is—lucky that he didn’t hit his head, lucky that he was on the floor for “only” twelve hours, lucky that he can pay for a nursing aide at home, otherwise he would have to be in a rehab facility. Aileen arrives at seven o’clock every evening, in time to lead Gerry through a round of exercises, serve him dinner, and then sit through the night as he succumbs to the jumbled slumber of medicated sleep. She departs at seven in the morning, leaving him alone for only two hours before Victoria arrives for her shift, which spans nine to five. And what is “alone” really? The front desk is a mere twenty-five floors and one phone call away, although it is unmanned—unwomanned—until Phylloh arrives at eight Monday through Friday.
Because the apartment’s top floor has a full bathroom with a walk-in shower, it has been decided to keep him here, although it will be weeks before he visits the bathroom on his own. The walker at his bedside is, he supposes, an aspirational object. And because of the apartment’s layout, the best spot for the bed is in the center of the great room, facing the very stairs that tried to kill him, perpendicular to the wall with the TV. The bed is a bad smell, an insult, an indignity, a reminder of what waits for everyone. Even Victoria, as young and incurious as she is, seems nervous around the rented bed. The rolling tray used for meals also allows Gerry access to his laptop, but he cannot work on a laptop. He needs his full-size screen, he needs the darkness of his office; who can write in all this light? Gerry would have been well-suited to serve on a submarine in his youth, not that men his age had to worry about serving anywhere.
His coccyx was badly bruised in the fall as well, another excuse not to try to write because even if he could struggle to a sitting position, he couldn’t hold it long. The word registers in his mind—excuse. He had been looking for an excuse not to write and here it is. Those lacy spots in his bones will respond, presumably, to the calcium supplement, which Aileen provides every other day with his nightly dose of pain and sleep meds. His bones will be fine. It’s the lacy spots in his brain that he’s worried about.
“The day I fell,” he says to Victoria when she enters with his lunch, “the day I fell—I was going for some mail I left in the office.”
“Yes, you tried to talk to me about it when I, um, found you.” Victoria seemed terribly embarrassed by discovering him, probably because he had been forced to relieve himself. And yet—she has insisted on helping him in his recovery, saying she will learn to do whatever is necessary so he will require only one nursing shift, not 24/7 care. Which, frankly, he does not want. The idea of other people being under his roof constantly is the worst nightmare he can imagine. During the last year, the annus horribilis when Margot basically squatted in his New York apartment, he learned he can no longer bear living with anyone. Maybe he never could, which is as good an explanation as any for three failed marriages.
But Victoria quickly learned how to be here without making her presence known. He hopes she can teach Aileen the same trick.
“Any mail?” he asks.
“Nothing real.” Mail itself is barely real to Victoria, who conducts her life via her phone, even depositing her paycheck by app. But Gerry insists on paper bills, paper checks, paper records.
“The night I fell—there was one letter in particular—a local one, in a—” He almost says woman’s hand, but quickly corrects course. “In an old-fashioned cursive handwriting. Did you find that?”
“You asked me that already,” she says.
“I know,” he says crossly. “I just wanted to check again. I’m quite sure there was a personal letter among the things Thiru brought me.”
“No,” Victoria says. “There was nothing like that.”