TIME BEGAN TO FEEL COMPRESSED.
ONE AFTERNOON CHUCK CALLED ME AT the hotel where I was staying to say Jack had asked that the three of us go out to dinner. He said Jack wanted to eat somewhere other than in Bexley.
“Do you think it’s because he doesn’t want people he knows to see him with the oxygen?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Chuck said. “He told me he’s not bringing the oxygen. I think he just wants to see some different sights.”
When Chuck picked me up that night, Jack was already in the car. We drove to a restaurant north of downtown Columbus, somewhere I’d never been.
“This is good,” Jack said as we entered. “It’s not filled with people who are going to come up and talk.”
So that was it; he preferred to have a meal with just the three of us present, and not have to explain to people—people with the best intentions, people who had known him for years—how he was getting along. He was looking more pallid, and I don’t think he wanted to put himself on that kind of display.
It was a quiet meal. He kept getting too warm, and then too cold. He would tell Chuck and me about it, and we would ask the waiter to adjust the temperature in the restaurant, or to open a door or close a window. We could hear it when Jack breathed; there was a watery sound in his lungs, and it was audible even across the table.
He was silent a lot. On the way home, Chuck asked if he wanted to stop at the Bexley Monk, and I was very surprised when he said yes.
The Monk came into existence when Bexley finally modified its laws so that restaurants were allowed to serve alcoholic beverages with meals. For all the years of our growing up, the town had been essentially dry; it was no coincidence that the Top had been built just outside the city limits. But when the law had changed, the Bexley Monk had opened, back at the far reaches of the parking lot of a little shopping strip.
It wasn’t the most glamorous location, but the food was good and the bar was a popular gathering point just about every night of the week. That’s why I hadn’t expected Jack to say he wanted to go there. If he didn’t wish to deal with people he knew, the Monk was the worst place for him to be.
“We might as well,” he said. What he didn’t have to say is what Chuck and I both understood: Evenings when he felt strong enough to go out might be coming to an end very soon, and he wanted to sit in the Monk one more time.
The place was crowded, but there were some available stools at the bar, and we took them. It was noisy; I knew we wouldn’t be staying long.
“I was supposed to call and get my CAT scan results this afternoon,” Jack told us.
He’d had another full-body scan a day or two before; the purpose was to tell him if the new chemotherapy medicines were slowing the progress of the cancer.
“How did you come out?” Chuck asked. He, like I, found it odd that Jack had waited until this late in the evening to mention it to us.
“I didn’t call,” he said.
“You didn’t?” I said. “Why?”
“Because if the answer was bad, I’d be thinking about it all night tonight,” he said. “I wanted to have the night with you guys without knowing the answer.
“I just wanted to enjoy the evening.”
HE WAS SITTING BETWEEN CHUCK AND me, and when I looked over past Jack the worry in Chuck’s face made him appear older than his years.
For just a moment I had a vision of Chuck and me being here—in this place—and Jack being gone. Such a setup had happened remarkably infrequently over the years. Most of my memories of Chuck include Jack in the picture.
There was one ABCDJ night, though, when I know for sure that Jack was absent. I’m not certain why he wasn’t with the rest of us—it was a winter evening, maybe he was home with his father—but what I recall, clear as a photograph, is Chuck, Allen, Dan and me walking along snow-fringed sidewalks, wearing Beatles masks.
They had been provided by Chuck’s dad, a master at buying up carloads of merchandise at distressed prices, just at the moment the sellers were most eager to unload. Such a moment had come after the Beatles’ first flush of saturation-level success in the United States; there were so many Beatles products on the market that first year, consumers were getting a little surfeited, if not bored. So Sol Shenk, at rock-bottom prices, had agreed to purchase an unwanted warehouse lot of plastic masks bearing the likenesses of all four Beatles. He’d bought enough of them that, even by marking them up just a nickel or so, he knew he could turn a profit.
He had given four of the masks to Chuck, and on that winter night the four of us, minus Jack, had decided to go on a date with nature. The concept of “dates with nature” had originated with Dan; it was his term for walking around aimlessly outdoors on nights when any girls you might have asked out had told you no. The customary dialogue: “Hey, Dan, did you have a date tonight?” “Yeah—a date with nature.”
On this night we slipped the elastic bands over the tops of our heads and adjusted them in back until the masks were held firmly in place against our faces. The masks, from the inside, had that newly-molded-plastic smell; each of us couldn’t see himself, but through the eyeholes we could see the others. Chuck was Paul McCartney, Allen was John Lennon, Dan was Ringo Starr—we had put on our masks beneath the pale illumination of a streetlight amid the falling snow, and I hadn’t looked closely at the front of mine, but after seeing the others I knew I had to be George Harrison.
We walked up and down the frigid streets, plastic Beatles on our date with nature, our voices muffled. When I try to visualize it now, I see the grinning likenesses of the four musicians on the fronts of the four masks, and in memory the four of those faces are so achingly youthful. But we were even less far along in life than they; we were pretending to be four men who were irrefutably older than we were. They—the newly famous men on the painted masks—were the seasoned grown-ups; we were the kids.
And Jack wasn’t there. That’s what I remember most of all, because it was so out of the ordinary. Tonight I looked over at Chuck on his barstool, his face lined and weary; I looked at Jack sitting next to him. We had been so young behind the masks, and now here we were, and I tried not to think about Chuck and me coming back here some night alone.
AT THE BAR, JACK TOLD ME SOMETHING that he’d already told me twice in the last twenty-four hours. Exact same story, for the third time in a day.
He was loopy again—forgetful. It was happening more and more often—the loopiness, as it had been defined by him and Chuck, was getting more pronounced. I could sense that he had no idea he had told me this particular story, in almost the same words, twice before. I didn’t interrupt; I could see that Chuck had heard the story, too, but we just listened until Jack was finished.
IN THE MORNING HE AND JANICE CALLED for the CAT scan results.
“Bad,” she said to me on the phone.
HE WANTED TO BE ALONE THAT DAY, BUT the next afternoon he told me that he was going to watch the Ohio State football game from bed, and that he’d like me to sit with him.
The nurse was in his bedroom when I got to his house; the television set was tuned to the pregame show.
The nurse—I felt a little sympathetic for her, she was in a room with two guys who had known each other all their lives, she had to have been feeling like the outsider in the group—was doing her best to keep Jack’s spirits up, and as part of that effort she said to him:
“Go Bucks!”
He was languid from the effects of the day’s medication, and there was a brief delay between when he heard her words and when he looked over at her to acknowledge them.
“Are you going to wear your ‘Go Bucks’ hat?” she asked in a cheery tone.
My goodness, I thought. It’s an Ohio State football Saturday, and he’s being talked to as if he’s an old man. It wasn’t her fault; she wasn’t intending to patronize him. The desperately ill man in the bed was the only version of Jack she’d ever seen.
“My hat?” he said to her.
“I thought I saw you had an Ohio State hat when I came in the house,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Downstairs.”
The ball was kicked off, and, hearing cheers, we turned toward the noise coming from the box.
IT WASN’T MUCH OF A GAME, AND JACK was doing all right, so after a while the nurse asked us if we’d like to be alone to talk. We didn’t want to offend her; it must be very difficult, coming into people’s homes, trying to do your job in a setting that’s well-known to everyone except you, among people who appreciate your presence but wish fervently that you didn’t have to be there. We said that if she wanted to take a break, that would be fine.
So she went to get some coffee or something, and Jack shook his head at me—what a mess, the gesture seemed to indicate—and then he said:
“Do you think Janice will get married again?”
Nothing could have caught me more off guard.
“Why are you saying that?” I asked him.
“It’s just something I’ve been thinking about,” he said.
“Does the idea make you jealous?” I said. “Is that why you’re thinking about it?”
“No, no,” he said. “I’d be happy for her. I want the rest of her life to be happy.”
“Jack, don’t spend your time thinking about that,” I said. “You and she are still here.”
“Well, I can’t help it,” he said.
Someone intercepted a pass, I think. The roar from the television set grew a little louder.
THE NURSE RETURNED. WE ALL WATCHED the game, and then she read to Jack—his ability to concentrate on written words had diminished drastically, but he still hungered for the kind of narrative contained in books and magazines; television left him feeling empty—and when she had finished he returned to the football.
A commercial came on during a time-out, and one of the actors was a man wearing a tuxedo.
“Was it the pinstriped one your dad wouldn’t let you have?” he said, smiling.
There it was again: The loopiness might be making him hazy on things that were going on right now, but on something like the pinstriped tuxedo—or the pickles from the Town House Drive-In—he was as keenly tuned as ever.
“I think it was seersucker,” I said.
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as a seersucker tuxedo,” he said. “Mine was madras.”
“It was just the coat part of the tuxedos, right?” I said. “Not the pants.”
“Obviously,” he said. “If the pants were madras, it wouldn’t be a madras tuxedo. It would be a madras suit.”
We’d been invited to some kind of dance, and the invitation had said the event was formal. Formal dances, when we were in school, meant only one thing: O. P. Gallo’s.
O. P. Gallo’s, with a bustling street-corner store downtown, rented tuxes. Jack and I had gone down to O.P.’s and, feeling potentially natty, had asked the salesman if he had anything available for rental other than the standard black tuxedos.
He did. He showed us what he had. I selected a light-blue-and-white pinstriped model, Jack selected a green-and-red madras. We were to pick them up the next weekend.
“Man, your dad went crazy,” Jack said.
The nurse was taking in every word.
“And he hadn’t even seen the tuxes,” I said. “We didn’t even have them yet.”
“I know,” Jack said. “That was the great part. He was bawling you out just on the principle of ordering a pinstriped tux. He didn’t need to see it to hate it.”
“He made me cancel the order, right?” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “He said he would not pay a cent to rent a pinstriped tux. He said a tux that wasn’t all black was not a tux. He said that a tux had to be black and plain because the whole purpose of a tux was to make a man look dignified and elegant.”
“Right,” I said, “because if our tuxes weren’t black, then people on the street in Bexley might not mistake us for Cary Grant and Fred Astaire.”
“He wouldn’t even let you change your order on the phone,” Jack said, laughing. “He made you go back downtown so there would be no possible mix-up.”
“Did you have to change your madras tux?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “My dad didn’t care.”
We looked at each other. No words were needed. We’d been having these conversations for fifty years. And I was the one who was going to be left to miss them.
THE LEAVES WERE BRIGHT RED. BIG, brittle red leaves, covering the sidewalks.
They’d turned suddenly, in the weeks just past. They had been green and waxy, secure on their tree branches, and now they’d dropped. They were quite beautiful. I knew I’d seen leaves just like them somewhere.
Were they maple? I picked one up, and as I touched its thin stem I knew where I had found leaves like this before. Right here—on these sidewalks. We had pasted them into scrapbooks. It had been some sort of elementary school project—identify trees by their leaves, collect the leaves and paste them, properly labeled, into scrapbooks for class. I hadn’t paid attention to the leaves on the sidewalks in years. But Jack and I, when we were very young, had walked all over town, picking them up from the sidewalks by their stems. I knew it now.
I was on my way to his house again. It was almost time for me to be heading back to Chicago. I followed the route he and I had been taking this year: past the ABCDJ brick, past the hill by the side of the house where he grew up, both the brick and the hill today scattered with those fallen leaves.
It was around noon, and I thought that maybe he would be hungry, so I set off for Rubino’s. It’s the pizza place on Main Street where our families had been going since the week it opened in 1954. Probably that’s why I had never, before this year, set foot inside Pizza Plus, on the site of the old Toddle House: some sort of vestigial loyalty to Rubino’s. I was going to order Jack a pizza and carry it to his house; I didn’t know if he’d have the appetite for it, but if he didn’t maybe Janice or Maren would want it.
The traffic-light boxes made their clanky shifting mechanical hum while the lights, as if copying the maple leaves, switched from green to yellow to red. Maybe traffic lights in every city make that metronomic metallic gears-changing sound, but I’d only noticed it here, and only forever. Maybe it was because here there were few competing sounds. It was a sound as familiar to me as crickets on a central Ohio summer evening, the cricket songs that decorated the air as we’d sit outside and talk late into the night.
Summer was long gone now. Just in the time since I’d been walking today, the temperature had seemed to drop ten or fifteen degrees; it had already been chilly when I started out, but now it was stingingly cold, and a harsh rain had kicked up. My clothes were soaked within a minute.
Such are the hazards of a date with nature. At Rubino’s I sat in a back booth as they cooked the pizza; “How’s Jack?” they asked, and I said fine, not knowing what else to say. I told them that I was taking the pizza to him for lunch, and this seemed to please them. They asked me to give him their best. By the time I was half a block down Main Street toward the turnoff corner to his house, the white paper that wrapped the pizza was wet and soggy. Probably I should have asked for a box, but we never liked Rubino’s in boxes; the white paper was puffed up like a chef’s hat, we always thought the pizzas tasted better when they were wrapped that way. Made no logical sense, I know, and by now, what was the difference.
I HADN’T ASKED IN FRONT OF HIM, BUT I had suspected it:
The nurse who had been coming to see him was a hospice nurse. A nurse who is there not to help you get better, but to make your dying as humane and merciful as possible.
Janice told me that these first days of hospice were intended to be a way for Jack to decide how he felt about it; he was free to stop hospice at any point, if he determined that he wanted to go back to aggressive chemotherapy, perhaps even experimental treatments. But as sick as he was, he and Janice, through their doctors, had asked that hospice come out to start him down the path.
The nurse was reading to him again when I arrived from Rubino’s. He seemed to be half asleep, the oxygen tubes snaking onto the hospital-type bed in his room.
“You brought me a pizza?” he said, both approvingly—he had always loved Rubino’s—and chidingly—did he look like a guy who, at the moment, was ready to dig into a large pepperoni, well done?
“Maybe not the best idea,” I said.
“I’m sort of tired,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Why don’t I come back later. I’ve been walking around. I can do that some more while you nap.”
“Greene,” he said, propping himself up on the bed. “What are you wearing?”
I looked down at my clothes. I had on a light windbreaker and a pair of jeans, both wet from the rain.
“What do you mean?” I said. “You see.”
“You can’t wear that if you’re walking around,” he said. “It’s almost freezing out there. It’s raining.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I knew it was going to be cold. I’ve got two shirts on underneath.”
“No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a heavy jacket you can wear.”
“I don’t need it,” I said. “This is all right for me.”
He called out to downstairs: “Janice?” She didn’t respond. He strained to call even louder: “Jan?”
“Jack, I don’t need a heavier jacket,” I said. “I wear this one all the time.”
“You’re not leaving without my jacket,” he said. He sat up further, pushed the oxygen tubes to the side of his face, and tried to shout for her: “Jan?”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It can’t be good for your voice to be straining it like that.”
“I won’t do it if you promise you’ll take my jacket,” he said.
Janice appeared in the doorway; she had heard his last beckoning.
“I have a heavy black jacket down in the back closet,” he said to her. “Look at what Greene’s wearing. Don’t let him go out without my jacket on.”
She looked at me and shrugged. “You heard him,” she said.
He lay back down. “Promise me, Greene,” he said.
“I won’t leave without the jacket,” I said.
He drifted off to sleep; Janice and I walked down the stairs. She went to a closet in a hallway off the kitchen, and retrieved a black jacket made of winter-ready material.
“Wear it,” she said. “You know he’s going to ask me about it when he wakes up.”
So I did. The temperature seemed to have dropped another few degrees, the air was still wet and raw, and I left the house as he rested. Full circle, I thought. He’s still looking out for me. At the very beginning, when we first met, more than fifty years before: Bob’s hurt. And now, weak as he was, as he approached the end: You’re not leaving without my jacket. I don’t know how a man becomes so lucky, so blessed; I don’t know what a man does to deserve such a friendship.