JAY WAS SITTING UP in bed, not sure what to make of himself in that room, or of me facing him from the visitor’s chair, with my hands like nesting birds in my lap. A bar of sunlight slanted in across the foot of the bed, bypassing the cyclamen that wilted on the windowsill. Jay said, “Try and bring a few books. There’s that thing on Churchill on my night table and see if you can get the new Pauline Kael. Don’t forget the folder in the bottom left-hand drawer.”
I said, “Do you need more pajamas? Do you want another pen?” And we went on like that for a while in sentences that might have been simple translations in a foreign language class. Are you hungry? Would you like the blinds closed? What time is it?, until my hands flew up restlessly to the sides of my face. I brought one hand down and looked at my watch.
“Do you have to go?” The question was so quick and his voice so high with disappointment that I felt ashamed, as if I had been caught in a rude gesture.
“Yes,” I said, “no, I could stay a while. The children …” My words trailed off. In this new setting, the green walls and the modest curtains, we had nothing to say to one another. On the first day we had disposed of all the obvious comments and the jokes about hospital odors, about the voice on the loudspeaker summoning doctors as if it announced sales in the bargain basement. Ladies, ladies, for the next hour only, on our lower level …
I stayed another half hour and then I left in a rush of activity when another patient was brought into the room to occupy the other bed. He was older than Jay and his wife walked behind him with her eyes down. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he murmured, as if he had intruded upon us in our own bedroom.
Jay said, “I’ll come with you to the elevator.” He took my hand, now disguised in a glove, and we walked down the hallway. “Don’t worry, sweetie—and drive carefully.”
“I will. I’ll bring the books.”
“So long.” His arm hooked across my shoulders, circling my neck. It was slightly painful, as if he were demonstrating strength and power that the sag of his pajamas and the shuffle of his bedroom slippers belied.
It had snowed lightly again and I wiped the windshield with my woolen glove until the sting of the cold came through to my hand. I put the radio on for company and part of the way home I listened to a song about eyes that haunted, like pools of night. “Like po-ols of night,” I sang, “I ca-an’t forget you.”
Harry came to the door first. Even as my key turned in the lock, I could hear scuffling sounds on the other side. I bent to embrace him and he let me, his face passive. How was it possible to be so controlled at five? Then his brother pushed between us and my face was wet with passionate kisses.
The baby-sitter, who is a neighbor’s adolescent son, came from the living room with a cupcake in one hand and a radio pressed against his head as if it were a poultice to soothe an aching ear. There were crumbs clinging to his lips. The sight of him, that half-finished look, his shirt on his shoulders as if it hung from a wire hanger, filled me with sadness.
“Hello, Joseph,” I said.
He tried out his voice. It was the strange croak of a large flightless bird destined for extinction. “Hello,” he said. “How is Mr. Kaufman?”
“All right. Was everything okay here? Did you have any trouble?”
He shook his head and then Paul, my younger son, wrapped his arms around the tower of Joseph’s legs. “Don’t go home, don’t go home,” he begged with a false cry of love. A three-year-old’s such a baby, still capable of innocent deceit. But Joseph believed him and was flattered.
I too wanted to cry “Don’t go home!” as if that tall stooped creature with bitten nails, who was already loping toward the door, could save me from anything.
I went to see Jay every day, twice a day when I could manage it. When Joseph was unable to stay with the children, his mother would come. But this was less satisfactory, because his mother had an insatiable hunger for medical detail, for terrible truths. When she said “How is he?” there was a light in her eyes that pierced bone and traveled bloodstreams. Her arms folded under her breasts, she waited for answers that I couldn’t give. But she would know, even in the absence of words. Then, I thought, everyone in the building would know, as if a coded message were being sent in the clanking of the incinerator door and the moan of the elevator. Every day Paul said, “Is my daddy in the hospital?” When I said, “Yes, you know. I told you this morning, I told you yesterday,” he smiled.
Harry didn’t ask. He knew where Jay was. He knew my moods with the sensitivity of a lover, but he gave no sign and no comfort. At night his head banged against the wall that separated our rooms. I wished then that Harry was my favorite, that I could love his mystery more than Paul’s easy charm. Everyone loved Paul best; he hardly seemed to need me as well.
Jay said, “I feel better today. I know I feel better because I’m going crazy in this place.”
The man in the other bed lay back with his arms folded behind his head as if he were taking a sunbath. Every time I looked at him, he was looking back and he was smiling.
I smiled at him too. I smiled at Jay, at the nurses, at orderlies who sang in the hallways with the easiness of people working in a summer field. Then I tried not to look at the other man at all. “Jay,” I said. “I miss you.”
He turned his head and slyly, out of the corner of his mouth, he whispered, “I miss you too. I’ll come home and you can give me the golden cure.”
“Oh, I will.”
His hand moved carefully and came to rest in the slope between my knees. I looked at the other man. He smiled and looked toward the window.
“I really feel better,” Jay said. But that night he stayed in bed when I walked to the elevator.
Joseph’s mother was the baby-sitter. “Everything okay?” she asked, and I looked away from the eager face, fat and flushed as if she had just bent over a hot oven.
Instead I cuddled the children, pulling Harry up onto my lap while Paul pushed to replace him. Then I opened my purse to pay her.
“They can do miracles today,” she said cheerfully, and with the triumph of the last word, she waddled out the door.