AFTER HIS NURSE TOOK some blood from my arm, Dr. Croyden listened to my chest for a long time. “Sounds pretty good in there,” he said. “How have you been feeling?”
“Not bad,” I said. “Fine, really.” I knew that the occasional heaviness around my heart was emotional, not physical. It came and went with my optimism, with how I assessed my chances of getting back together with Paulie. Seeing her at Ann’s the other night had made me feel lousier in a way, and yet more hopeful, too. I must have replayed that kiss at the station a million times. She’d kissed me back—I was certain of that—but I’d been the aggressor, the needier one. I supposed there was a kind of poetic justice in my wanting her as desperately as she had once wanted me. But God knows none of this was any of Croyden’s business. “Fine,” I said again.
His nurse set me up for an EKG, and Croyden read the long sheets with satisfied grunts. He told me to get dressed and meet him in his consultation room. I had to wait there about five minutes before he showed up, and I spent the time reading his diplomas and looking at the framed photos of his wife and kids on the desk.
“Watching your diet, Mr. Flax?” Croyden asked as he walked in. It was like being given a pop quiz as a punishment for goofing off.
I turned my gaze back to the diplomas. “Sure,” I said, although that wasn’t exactly true. It was a lot easier to pan-broil a steak than to prepare salads and pasta. I trimmed off most of the fat, as a compromise, and used margarine to fry the onions, instead of butter.
Croyden sat down behind the desk and began reading my chart. “Not smoking, are you?” he said, without looking up.
“Uh-uh,” I said, to the top of his head. Actually, I’d worked it out to odd-and-even smoking days, and I was using brands I didn’t really enjoy, to help me cut down.
“Getting enough mild exercise?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good,” he said, and his wife seemed to smile her approval at me, too. He wrote something on the chart and then he looked up and held me with his eyes. “I want to give you a stress test about a month from now.”
“Like the one at the hospital?” I asked. That had taken place right before I was released. It wasn’t too bad, as I remembered it—just climbing up and down a couple of steps a few times. And I’d passed with flying colors.
“Oh, no, this one’s much more strenuous,” Croyden said. “It separates the men from the boys.”
“Maybe I’m not ready,” I said. “Maybe I’m still one of the boys.”
“I thought you said you were feeling fine.”
“I did. I am,” I said. “But, hell, I don’t think I need any more stress right now. I’ve had plenty of it lately, and look, I’ve come through it all right.”
“That’s fine, but not very scientific,” Croyden said. “Miss Green will set up the appointment, and I’ll see you in a month. Try to keep any other stress to a minimum until then.”
Easy for him to say, with his family in their proper places on his desk and in his life. I left his office and walked briskly around the parking lot, partly for the exercise, and so I wouldn’t be tempted to have a cigarette. The Virginia Slims were on the dash of my car, where I’d deliberately left them. I hadn’t expected Croyden to frisk me and find them, but I was worried that they’d fall out of my jacket, and I didn’t need the lecture that would have followed. Although he might have merely shrugged and said, “It’s your funeral,” the way Gil did that night at the restaurant.
After our jam session at his house, I’d told him that my father had been a funeral director, and that I figured I might as well live, since I couldn’t get a break on the rates anymore. He didn’t laugh. “That’s no joke, Howie,” he said. “Do you know what those things cost these days?”
“What, funerals? No, I haven’t been pricing them lately.”
“Well, I have,” he said. “And you can’t get away with less than three or four thousand.”
“You mean you can’t get away for less,” I said.
“And that’s with a pine box you wouldn’t use for kindling.”
“Hey, you’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” I said.
“I sure am. I’ve told Sharon that I want mine short and sweet. And simple.”
“You mean cremation?”
“No, I don’t like the idea of that—I’ll burn enough in hell, probably. I don’t like the idea of burial, either, to tell you the truth. But I’m mainly concerned with keeping the costs down, and leaving more for the living.”
I saw the lid slam shut on the light, heard the thunder of dirt overhead. “Boy, this conversation is really making my day,” I said.
“You think not talking about it makes it go away?” I knew better than that, yet I’d always tried to avoid the subject. Visiting my father at work when I was a kid hadn’t helped me get used to death. If anything, it created an earlier than usual anxiety that never went away. There was an old man named Pete who worked as a handyman at the funeral home. He looked half dead himself, but he was full of sick, morbid jokes, and I think he got off on scaring the shit out of little kids. Once, when my father wasn’t around, Pete took me into the back room, which was off-limits to me, and he lifted the lid on a corpse. He shut it again right away, but that wasted, waxen image was indelibly printed on the back of my eye. I could call it up anytime I wanted to, and it simply appeared, unwanted, plenty of other times. I couldn’t say whether there’d been a man or a woman in the coffin, and maybe that was the worst part—that you became an “it” after you died, a nameless, genderless nobody.
Years later, soon after Jason was born, I decided to buy some extra life insurance. I’d only had the ten grand from the V.A. until then, and I wanted to make sure Jason could go to college someday, and even on to medical or law school. But talking about it with the insurance salesman, who was a musician buddy of mine in his other life, made me feel rotten. It wasn’t only the contemplation of the worst, of the inevitable—I even hated the language. Term. Straight life. Beneficiary. Manny kept saying, “If anything should happen to you …” and his eyes never met mine. After he left, I paced around the apartment like a caged animal. Paulie kept begging me to come to bed and forget about it. Of course, lying in the dark, with the clock ticking away near my ear and Pete’s nameless corpse between us in the bed, didn’t help. I loved my family and I wanted to protect them—it was just that thinking about it in such concrete terms really got me down. In the middle of the night, Paulie put her arms around me and whispered that she wouldn’t ever let me die. Now maybe I’d have to do it all alone.
Gil told me he’d included instructions for his funeral in his new will. Sharon had revised hers, too, and the lawyer was coming over one evening soon for their signatures. Paulie and I had never gotten around to making out wills. I knew this was my fault—I’d invented a different excuse every time she brought it up. “What’s the hurry?” I used to say. “Have you got a contract out on me or something?” Then, later, I’d remind her that everything was in both our names, anyway, and the kids were our automatic heirs, so what difference did it make? After a while, she simply gave up.
Gil asked if I’d witness the signing of their wills. “I’d ask Paulie, too,” he said, “but I don’t think she’d come.”
“It would be like the ultimate bad blind date,” I told him. “But I’ll do the honors, if you want me to.” One more evening spoken for, I thought. I had to be hitting rock bottom, accepting an invitation I would have fled from a few months ago, and then thinking about it as a kind of social engagement.
The will signing took place a few days after my physical. That entire day at the studio I was obsessed with thoughts of death and dying, and I felt uneasy about having lied to Croyden about everything. I’d been relieved to get away with it, at first, but now I worried that the tests couldn’t be valid if they hadn’t caught me out. To calm down and to keep myself from smoking, I took a couple of Mike’s Valium before I left the studio.
Gil and Sharon’s place seemed different to me this time. It wasn’t particularly cloudy or foggy out, but I’d swear the house was shrouded in gloom as I drove up. The lawyer was there already. His car was in their driveway, behind Gil’s Toyota, as if to block their escape. Sharon let me in. Gil was sitting in the living room with the lawyer and a gray-haired woman in a bathrobe, and he jumped up when he saw me. “Howard, glad you could make it,” he said. “This is Don Berger, our attorney, and this is our neighbor, Mrs. Haskell. Rita, Don, this is Howard Flax.” We shook hands all around and Mrs. Haskell sat down again, holding her robe closed over her knees. “You’ll have to forgive my appearance,” she said. “The truth is that Harry, my husband, was supposed to do this and he’s not home from work yet. You know the traffic. You know the Expressway at this hour. Sharon caught me in the bathtub, and I came right over, dressed like this. I guess there’s no law against it,” she said, darting a glance at Berger, who didn’t give anything away.
I was feeling pretty mellow from the Valium, and I had the giddy thought that if anyone wanted to contest the will, they could argue that it had been witnessed by a man on drugs and a woman in a bathrobe. I smiled to myself, and Sharon, who hadn’t been acting very friendly toward me, said, “Is something funny, Howard?”
Her cold appraisal sobered me up fast. It reminded me of all the other things wrong with my life besides mortality. “No, not really,” I said, and I dropped into one of the chairs.
The lawyer cleared his throat as soon as everyone was seated. “Thank you all for being here,” he said. “This won’t take very long. Gil? Mr. Danzer? Have you read this will?”
“I have,” Gil said.
“And do you find that it’s fully in accordance with your wishes?”
“I do,” Gil said.
“Then please sign here,” the lawyer instructed.
Mrs. Haskell and I each signed the will after Gil did, and then we went through the same rigamarole with Sharon. It was like a wedding, in a way—the “I do’s,” and the solemnity of the occasion. There was even a small reception afterward; Sharon brought in a pot of coffee and a platter of cake. Berger became less formal and more expansive once the legalities were over. He told us about a “floozie” clause that some of his married female clients were insisting on in their wills. He said it protected the children’s inheritance, in case the grieving husband was grabbed up by some little gold digger before his wife was cold in the ground. Sharon cast me a meaningful look and clattered her cup against its saucer. Mrs. Haskell, who was beginning to look casually elegant, told the old joke about the woman who has her portrait painted wearing nonexistent furs and jewels so that her husband’s second wife will go crazy looking for them. We all laughed politely. When the chatter died down, I found myself searching for something to say to extend the evening. It wasn’t that I was having such a good time, but that I wasn’t ready to go home by myself yet. The Valium was probably wearing off, and I was being overtaken by a clear and terrible consciousness. “How about some music?” I asked Gil, indicating the stereo, but Berger looked at his watch and said he had to be going. As soon as he left, Sharon began gathering up the coffee things and Mrs. Haskell yawned, as if Berger had been the life of the party and it was fizzling out fast without him. “I guess I’ll be on my way, too,” I said, and nobody argued with me. “May I walk you home, Mrs. Haskell?” I asked.
We cut across the lawn toward her house, which was lit by a blaze of lights. “Oh, Harry’s home!” she cried, her voice so rich with pleasure it hurt my chest.