The shift had been busy. One patient moved toward a surprising recovery, but an old woman who seemed to have beaten the odds was back, resigned in a way that often signaled the end. She remembered me, told me about a Gordon she’d once known, admitting that he, too, was, as she said, “A homosexual. Though he’d had to hide it.”
“What happened to your Gordon?” I asked.
Her serious face gave me the answer. I held her hand until I was needed elsewhere.
The shift done, I passed any pertinent information on to the next nurse, then went to find my friend Susan. Since nursing school a decade before, she’d been one of my people. We’d sat together in the back of our classes, whispering and writing on each other’s notebooks, though we always knew the answers when we were called on. People sometimes took Susan’s refusal to engage in bullshit as meanness. I saw it as the opposite. She made me laugh until I cried and told me with blunt kindness when I was engaging in what she called my “Gordon nonsense.” I sometimes spent Christmas with her family at the far edge of Brooklyn, her aunt joking that I was the white devil each time I showed up. But now Susan and her husband were struggling. That morning she texted me, Need to tell you things.
When I got to her ward—one that catered to leukemia, larger than the blood cancers one I worked on—Susan was busy, so I waited at the unit desk. I talked to a PA about a TV show we both were ashamed to love, then Obama’s chances for reelection. Another nurse, Rueben, short and fit, someone Susan and I wondered about in terms of his area of interest, joined us behind the desk. He took a sip of his coffee, telling us he was on his way to check on “His Highness.”
“The old queen actually isn’t that bad,” Rueben added, his word choice making it clear what team he was on. “Just the way he talks makes him sound like he’s giving commands, even when he’s, like, asking politely for some water. And his name: Philip Belshaw.”
Susan and I went to the cafeteria. I listened over scalding coffees as she told me how her husband suddenly didn’t know if he wanted kids when kids had always been their plan.
“Maybe the two of you should talk to someone?” I asked.
“Try getting Kevin to do that,” she said.
Kevin was quiet and proud, my friendship with Susan a strange amusement to him.
I went back upstairs when Susan’s break was done, telling her I needed to ask Rueben a question.
“Like if he’s a top or a bottom?” she asked. It was nice to see her smile for a moment.
The elevator dinged, one floor, another.
“Rueben’s definitely a bottom,” I said.
When Rueben came back to the desk, he said, “Still here?”
“How was Philip Belshaw?”
“Good memory.”
“I used to work for him,” I said, and asked if anyone named Nicola had visited. “Italian and fancy.”
“Fancy people have visited for sure,” he said.
A doctor appeared, a resident, I guessed, from his baby-faced determination. He went to a computer, typing fast and loud.
“You were his nurse?” Rueben asked.
“This was before.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “You were in art school, maybe wrote poetry. I dated one of those once. He sat in coffee shops all day and his parents paid most of his rent.”
“I wasn’t a rich kid,” I told him.
I wanted to find Philip’s room, to see his spark of recognition. But it was late and this wasn’t my ward, so I told Susan to call me later. She went into the room of a young woman whittled down by sickness. The young ones still startled me, even though I’d been working there for years.
After Philip had given me the money, I took a day-and-a-half bus trek back to the city, sleeping so hard and long that a man across the aisle shook me awake to make sure I was still with the living. I found a cheap room so far out in Brooklyn that I had to take a bus to the subway, in a house rented by three PhD students. I wanted to sleep with one of them, though I knew better than to try. That felt like growth to me.
I found a new temp agency and somehow did well enough on the typing test to qualify for non-receptionist jobs. A few weeks into working for them, I got a shift in the billing department of a Manhattan hospital. The woman who ran its HR office was a lesbian named Carol. She took a shine to me and kept me in billing for three days. The next morning the temp agency told me Carol had requested me again. That day I covered the desk in the ICU. The first few hours, with the combination of my inexperience and the high stakes, I was terrified. A man died. His family left his room, arms linked and mouths open as they wailed, too run over by grief to notice me. Knowing I wasn’t the center of things made that job easier. And I liked its busyness, calls to answer and people to give directions to and forms to complete.
I became Carol’s regular temp. One day, I was assigned to the hospital’s main information desk. People came in rattled and confused. I looked up room numbers, told them how to make their way to the ER. Carol brought me a coffee, told me the ICU had an opening for a unit secretary. “You need to apply.”
“And if I don’t get it?” I asked.
“Why is that the first thing you ask me?” she said.
I spent the lulls between visitor questions completing the application.
I got the job, its shifts so busy I had little time to think about Pavel or Philip or my father’s death. I worked the day of his funeral and told no one about it, though in its quiet moments I couldn’t escape the thought of his body in a box being lowered into the ground.
At work I answered phones and held the hands of women whose husbands had had strokes or heart attacks, and anything outside the hospital walls fell away. After each shift, exhaustion won out. I was glad for its bossy company.
Carol invited me to her house for dinner. She lived in Queens with her girlfriend, a nurse named Liz. We ate pasta and drank wine. I told them about growing up in Minnesota and my PhD roommates who might have been communists, but avoided talk of Philip or my dad. When it got late, they insisted that I spend the night in their guest room. I agreed, thinking of the collection of sofas and air mattresses and floors I’d laid claim to. A month later, at their house again, Liz gave me the card of a friend of hers who ran the nursing program at the city university. And though I felt ashamed at the way I let others lead me to things, I thanked her and called, kept my job at the ICU while I went to school so I was always busy, always tired. While people talk about this job as a calling, for me it’s truer to say that it fulfills a need I have for motion, a satisfaction in tackling tasks that matter, with a clear beginning and end. I show up in rooms to worried faces and see hope that I’ll be able to take some of that worry away with an injection or a few softly spoken words. A hand on an arm to let them know they’re less alone, at least in that moment.
After I graduated, I ended up at a hospital specializing in cancer. I bought an apartment in a Brooklyn neighborhood just before gentrification had dug its claws in (though I was part of that gentrification, or as Susan liked to say, “Its poster boy”). I ran in the park and saw art house movies and went to dimly lit bars where I found it easier to pursue men than I once had, telling them what I wanted almost as thrilling as when we finally yanked off each other’s clothes, or when they pressed their weight onto me so for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I had a boyfriend for a time, smart and funny though I always worried he was one step away from leaving. We got as far as moving in together. But in the end, he told me something was missing, though he couldn’t or didn’t explain just what, which broke my heart, turned work into a necessary narcotic, a break from thinking of the mistakes I had made and would keep making without meaning to.
At the end of my next shift, I stood outside Philip’s room. I was debating whether to walk in when I heard him say, “Yes?”
His eyebrows were wilder and whiter than before. I wondered if my scruff or the gray that had begun to populate my hair, the laps I ran through the park most days, made me unrecognizable. So I said, “I’m not sure that you’ll remember me.”
“I’m not here for dementia,” Philip said.
Flower arrangements crowded his windowsill. Beyond it were buildings, evening’s last light lava on the river.
“You still wait until you’re invited to do things,” Philip said. “Sit down. Come in. Et cetera.”
“I work here,” I said.
“Gordon, I know how to put two and two together.”
His face was all teeth and bones, and skin sagged off his arms, like an overworn sweater. Liquid fell from his IV in bright blips.
“Perhaps not where you expected me to end up,” I said.
“I saw you walking past a few days ago,” Philip said. “You still walk the same way. And I don’t know if it’s surprising. You were always most comfortable caretaking.” He added that I’d grown into my face, asked if I’d forgotten to shave or if I was doing what so many young men seemed to be then. “Perpetually as if they shaved two and a half days ago.”
“I guess I’m doing that.”
An orderly came in with dinner. Philip ignored it.
“You should eat,” I said.
“The food isn’t good,” he said. “And eating just delays the inevitable.”
“Starving yourself is an especially unpleasant way to go.”
He rearranged food with his fork.
“I’ve often wondered about you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about the plate.” I worried that he’d gotten some memory tangled. “Shortly before Nicola moved out for the final time, I’d grown jealous and distrustful. I was going through his things and found a plate he’d insisted you’d stolen. It was the reason I’d agreed to fire you. It had value, sentimental and otherwise.”
He rested one hand, blotched in bruises, on top of the other.
“But when I found it,” Philip went on, “I wondered about other things Nicola had accused you of. You’d had friends at our place, irresponsible though not so unexpected. And he kept going on about the clothes of his you’d taken, though I’d practically encouraged you to help yourself. It was the plate that was our end. That’s when I started looking for you.”
“I was in Mexico City for a time,” I said.
“This was after Pavel got tired of you as he gets tired of most things. That money I’d sent. A sliver of the commission we got for the paintings of you.”
“I didn’t paint them.”
“No need to be coy, et cetera.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Et cetera.”
“I never heard from you after I sent that money.”
I’d drafted several versions of a thank-you note. Some were too effusive, others came off as cold. Another so pathetically apologetic that I ripped it up before I finished. After a while I stopped trying, told myself I’d send one soon, but then a few years passed and embarrassment erased any possibility that I’d answer. But as Philip stared at me, my excuses felt piddling, so I said, “I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.”
“I sent you five thousand dollars.”
Philip’s eyes and gums were a raw red. He had a week, I guessed, two if his body stubbornly dug its heels in.
“It allowed me to come back here,” I said. “To get an apartment. To do everything, really.”
“I’d wanted to hear from you.”
“You should have said as much.”
“I thought I had.”
He made a huffing noise then fell asleep. I stayed and read a magazine.
When he woke up, he said, “Always waiting. Remember those dogs we had?”
“You’re still mean,” I said.
“Honest,” he said.
“Both.”
“I don’t know how you still are,” he said. “Haven’t seen you out in the wild, as it were. I hope things are easier, though.”
“Easier than what?”
“The way you were when you worked for us, any attention was a necessary sunshine.”
Tiredness raked his throat. I helped him sip water. His tongue curled toward the straw. I held a hand behind his neck, felt the sharp turn of his bones.
“I don’t know that I’m that way still,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s easier either.”
Outside, a boat floated up the East River. I told him he must be tired.
“Dying will do that to you,” he answered. I held his hand, my fingers rested across his hard-wormed veins.
“I’ll let you sleep.”
“Not yet,” he said.
Rueben had told me there’d been no record of any Nicola visiting.
“You still talk to Rebecca?” I asked.
“She was so sad that I’d fired you. Told me I’d let Nicola win. I tried to find you,” he said again.
“I guess I didn’t want to be found.”
“I have a painting of you still, that Pavel did. It’s one of the few pieces in my bedroom.”
He turned toward the window, a shyness in him that I hadn’t noticed before. I wondered what else I’d missed then, when all I could consider was what he thought of me.
“That makes me happy,” I said.
I asked if he still lived on Morton Street. He told me he’d given that up for an apartment years ago. “A famous actor lives in that house now. I imagine he has parties there all the time. Not that any of it matters. I won’t be going back to my apartment either, I imagine.”
“That’s probably right,” I said.
“I appreciate your lack of bullshit. But tell me. Besides working here. Tell me things.”
“I went to Mexico City after.”
“Things I don’t know.”
“After that I had nowhere to go and stayed with my father for a time. He was dying, though I didn’t realize. It was nice until it wasn’t.”
“A thing to put on a tombstone,” he said. “May I ask you something?”
“You want to smell me?”
His smile showed off his swollen gums.
“I’m guessing you don’t smoke anymore,” he said. “But I want to ask. It’s strange, but I don’t care. This might be my last chance to have someone lie next to me.”
I closed the door to his room, took off my shoes, and climbed onto his bed. I rested a hand on his chest. Breathing and bones. He put his hand on mine and said, “There’s still time.”
I was going to ask what that meant, but I liked the vague hopefulness of those words, hope at its most potent without specifics to knock it back to earth.
“When do you work again?” he asked.
“Two days,” I said.
“Come back then,” he said. “I have more things to say to you. But stay until I’m asleep, if you’re able.”
“I’m able,” I answered.
He closed his eyes. I rested my hand on his arm and his breathing slowed. I hoped I’d be with him when he went from living to gone, his body losing color without blood’s animating traffic. I wanted that more than I’d wanted anything for a while. “I’m here,” I whispered, embarrassed at my earnestness, though I said those words again, letting sincerity win. When it was clear he was asleep, I got up and found my shoes. And just before I left, I leaned down and kissed Philip’s mouth.
The next time I visited, Philip was asleep, so I found Susan and we went to a Mexican place we loved for its kitschy décor and strong drinks. She told me how she’d suggested to her husband that they talk to someone and he answered that he’d think about it. “But he never thinks about it,” she said. “Once he says those words, he never thinks about the thing again.”
“Maybe this time he’ll be different,” I said.
“Why would it be different this time?” she asked.
I didn’t have a good answer.
Two days later, when I tried to visit Philip again, I found the bed empty, Rueben undoing the machinery.
“You missed him,” he said.
The narrow indent of Philip’s body still lay across the sheets. I touched them, no heat left to feel.
“By how much?” I asked.
“An hour officially. But he hadn’t been awake in a while.”
“Since the last time I was here?”
“I’m not sure.”
I wanted that to be true, for the last thing he felt to have been my arm across his waist, my mouth on his. Tears began. I didn’t fight them. Rueben said he’d give me a minute.
I hadn’t been there when Dad died, imagined it would be the same for Mom, who was now married to a man who listened to conspiracy theory talk radio and lived in Tallahassee. The heaviness I hadn’t felt for some time returned, though I knew it would pass. One of the benefits of aging, I suppose, is to know that most feelings aren’t permanent fixtures.
On the table next to his bed lay a large, shiny watch. He’d worn that same watch or one almost identical years before. I slipped it into my pocket and walked outside. Rueben was waiting for me. He told me his shift was done, that we should get a drink.
The wind outside was insistent and cold. Rueben complimented my coat. I told him I’d had it for ages, didn’t mention that I’d bought it with money Philip had given me, that I wore it so often I’d had its lining replaced.
In the Irish pub next to the hospital, as we ordered beers, I turned shy. But I took a few sips then told Rueben that Susan and I had been unsure of what team he was on. Rueben laughed and closed his eyes. I wanted to touch his face, his mouth.
“Yours, of course,” he said, then asked how I knew Philip. I told him about that job.
“But then I did some dumb things,” I said.
His face lit up at gossip’s possibility. I talked about the party and the man I’d had to their house, the name of the actor who owned it now. Rueben ordered us more beers. Hope that this was more than a friendly drink quickened in me.
“I did another dumb thing,” I said, and pulled the watch from my pocket.
“That’s his?” Rueben asked. I nodded.
“Somebody might get in trouble. One of the orderlies,” he said. “Fired or worse.”
Rueben moved his finger across the rim of his pint glass. The shortsightedness of that party I’d had years before, the things I’d taken from Nicola, some of which I still had, pulled me back into what I thought I’d gotten away from. I stood up.
“What are you doing?” Rueben asked.
“Bringing this back,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly before. Grief, et cetera.”
Rueben’s face stayed serious. Mine warmed with stupidity. I asked him not to leave.
I returned to Philip’s empty room and placed the watch on the table by the bed, just under a box of tissues so that, when it was found later, it would look like an oversight. For the elevator ride back down, the walk toward the bar, I hoped Rueben had stayed. He could report me. I could lose my job and have to sell my apartment and scrape by, my needling, juvenile impulses knocking down what had taken years to carefully construct.
Rueben sat where I’d left him, my beer next to his. I thanked him for waiting, told him where I’d left the watch, how the room hadn’t been touched since we’d left it.
“It was dumb,” Rueben said. “But you fixed it.”
I wanted to believe that, so I smiled and asked if I’d repaired things enough to go back to flirting with him. He answered that he had a person, that they weren’t open that way.
“Tell me about your person,” I said.
“I would,” Rueben said, “but I need to get back. He’s probably starting to wonder.”
“He’s the jealous type?” I asked. It came out cattier than I’d meant.
“I’m sorry about Philip,” Rueben said.
He told me he’d paid our tab, then kissed my cheek and headed out the door.
After I got off the subway, I stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked in close to a decade. At my apartment, I climbed onto the fire escape. It was cold out. I lifted up my coat’s collar. A delivery person zipped by on a bike, and a sparsely populated bus rumbled past. The first inhale startled me. I held in its smoke and picked up my phone. Janice answered after one ring.
“Like you were waiting for me,” I said.
“Always, sugar,” she answered.
She lived in Cape Cod with her wife and family. Her wife taught elementary school; Janice managed a restaurant. They had a small house and two daughters, the complicated older one still alive then, already causing trouble. Janice told me she was driving back from the restaurant, the moon on the water, almost like it was following her.
“Guess who I ran into,” I said.
“You know I’m bad at this game.”
“Philip Belshaw.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Until a few hours ago. He was in the hospital. I found out accidentally and got to spend a few hours with him.” I told her how he’d asked me to lie next to him, how I’d kissed his sleeping mouth and hoped that it was the last thing he felt. “That’s probably bullshit, though.”
“Speaking of bullshit,” she said. “Are you smoking?”
“I don’t know.”
“So much bullshit,” she said.
“Bullshit’s why you like me.”
She asked me to describe the cigarette’s taste. I closed my eyes, pretending she was on the fire escape next to me.
“But I wanted to be there,” I said. “When he died. It felt important.”
“He was already gone, I’m sure,” Janice said.
“Even so. It’s quieter now on your end.”
“I pulled over. Didn’t feel like a driving kind of conversation.”
“You’re too good to me,” I said.
“Just good enough.”
I began to cry, was sure Janice could hear it, but she didn’t say anything. I got it together enough to tell her about the watch I’d taken and returned, wondering if my reckless impulses would ever settle down. Thought, too, about what might still change for me, what would stay the same. Janice and I would have these same kinds of conversations for years. When her daughter died and I tried to get her to slow down her breathing. When the virus appeared a few years after that and I talked to her about how tiredness was the only thing that kept me from freaking out as I intubated one patient then another, most soon joining the morgue’s riot of bodies.
But that night, she just said that it was good that I’d returned the watch, added that I should focus on that decision rather than the taking and asked if I was going to start smoking again.
“I’ll throw this pack out as soon as we get off the phone.”
I took a drag, felt the awful burn.
“You sound sad,” she said.
“I am,” I answered.
“Tell me what you’re looking at right now.”
I described a man walking his dog, the airplanes angling into LaGuardia in a blinking row. Also the people in the apartments across the way watching television and folding laundry on unmade beds, a woman awake who was often sleeping. Janice asked for more. So I told her about the cars parked close and the haze from nearby Manhattan, the bodega on my block, the L in its sign blinking, beginning to waver. Also more about Philip, and what it was he might have wanted to tell me.