Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“I don’t remember you being so goddamn tall,” Eddie croaks, up on his pillows. He is still monkey-ish. I edge closer without wanting or meaning to. The room is a bedroom. Heavy curtains block the windows. Pale outside light seeps around the edges, turning the air greenish. It’s possible to think it’s three in the morning, not ten A.M. Eddie has a gooseneck lamp shining onto where he was reading his Economist . His bed is cluttered with books, newspapers, Christmas cards, a copy of Playboy , a laptop, a plastic player that pipes music to his ear via a wire, but lying unused on the sheet. A tiny, un-majestic, plastic Christmas tree sits on his bed table, something Finesse has no doubt bought at CVS and brought along. Elsewhere on the bed are scattered a bunch of what look like brochures — the top one proposing “Best Buys in Kolkata”—as if Eddie was planning a trip. Fike, little Christian brigand, has left behind a shiny pamphlet with a red cross on its front above the words “We Appeal to You.” I’ve brought nothing, not even my full self.

“Look at that shit,” Eddie rasps, his voice clipped and high-pitched after coughing. He’s gesturing behind me at two big TVs, bracketed high up, side by side, over the door I just came through and that Finesse is now gliding back out of, saying “Y’all just carry on y’all talkin’. I’ll be in here.” Both TVs are going but silent. On one, a group of big smiling white men in business suits and cowboy hats is crowded behind the podium of the stock exchange, soundlessly ringing in another day’s choker profits and looking blameless. On the other is an aerial view of The Shore. Surf sudsy. Beaches empty. The famous roller coaster, up to its knees in ocean. Somewhere down there my wife is at present counseling grievers. Possibly everything to a dying man is an emblem of the same thing: it’s all a lot of shit.

Eddie’s commenced coughing again, though he also seems to be laughing. He’s shaking his head, trying to talk. “We don’t really achieve much clarity, do we, Basset Hound?” His laughter’s encountering serious obstacles down deep. “I don’t think…” (cough, grind, gag, gulp) “that information’s…” (last laugh attempt, then the deep “Uh-ooo” groan I heard on the phone) “… that information’s really power, do you?”

“Maybe not. I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Why would you?” Eddie manages. “Everybody knows everything. It’s probably better.” He subsides back into his bunched pillows and goes silent.

Eddie’s the poster boy for death-warmed-over. No one was ever intended to look like Eddie and be breathing — his facial skin gone to parchment, his eyes deep in bony, zombie-sockets, his temples caved. Someone (Finesse) has smeared Vaseline on his clean-shaven cheeks to keep him from what? Drying up? Liquefying? His face glistens evilly. The whole room feels soggy and muggy, the breathable milieu of the soon-to-be-gone. Why did I come here when I could’ve stayed home, humming Copland and practicing my Narpool? Just because I could ? That’s not good enough.

And where’s the mellow-voiced male companion I talked to on the phone? Obviously Finesse has taken his place. I miss him even without knowing him.

On his bed table beside the pathetic plastic Christmas tree, sit cluttered all the odious sick-room implements Eddie needs in order to die better — tissues, a covered metal tray, a silver beaker with a white flexible straw for him to get a sip. Several printed prescription containers. Though there’re no resuscitative trappings — no wall defibrillator or electric paddles to stand clear of, no digital gauges to tick off the heart’s gradual sink-sink-sink to sayonara. Only a shiny new walker and an empty wheelchair folded into the corner. The patient’s not walking out of here in a better frame of mind.

Eddie, however, has also dyed his thick hair as black as tar. Though the dye, something else Finesse grabbed at the CVS, has run below Eddie’s hairline, making him look even weirder — worse than he’s going to look once he breathes his last. At the end, life does not become him.

Strangely — to me, anyway — just beneath the wall TVs hangs a color picture of Smiley Obama, big teeth white as aspirins, elbows faux athletically tight-in to his skinny ribs, bending forward shaking hands with a small, grinning, gray-haired man who used to be Eddie. Behind them hangs a square red-and-gray banner with MIT Entrepreneurs Club For Barack printed on it. I’m sure Fike took it in.

“So.” Eddie’s staring upward at the blank ceiling. He coughs smally, and with his spectral fingers pulls his sheet closer to his chin, straining the tubing to his hand. Possibly he’s practicing being a corpse. “How are you, Frank?”

“Pretty good,” I say, whispering. Why?

“What’re you reading?” Eddie breathes in deeply. A rusty-metal clank noise comes out of him, not — it seems — through his mouth.

“I like to read the letters of famous writers,” I say. It’s true. “I feel like I’m in on an interesting conversation. I’m reading Larkin’s letters to his girlfriend. He was an anti-Semite, a racist, and a cad. I find that pretty interesting.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie grunts. Not interested. Another small cough. “I got this crud flying through that goddamn volcano ash from London a few years ago. Or, who knows, maybe the goddamn hurricane did it. I don’t know. Nothing else makes sense.”

I pause. Not likely. “Maybe so.”

Eddie moves his small left foot to the side and out from under his bedsheet. The top of his foot is angrified, dried and scrawny — vestigial. He wiggles his toes and raises his head to give a look and re-affiliate with his foot’s existence. For some reason — it’s an awful thought — I think of Eddie being helped out of his bed in his gaping green smock (to get to the john) and exposing his awful ass and poor, same-sized dick. I would avert my eyes.

“You wrote a book, didn’t you?” Eddie returns his scalded foot to the covers’ protection.

“A long time ago,” I say. “Two. I wrote two. I put the second one in a desk drawer and locked it and burned the desk.” Not true but true enough.

“I wonder,” Eddie says, his brow and mouth for a moment relaxed. “I always wonder. I was an engineer.” The past tense naturally fits the moment. “I wonder, when you write a book, how do you know when you’ve finished it? Do you know ahead of time? Is that always clear? It baffles me. Nothing I did had an end.”

This of course is the question my students used to ask thirty years ago when, for a few fierce months, I taught at a small New England college while my first marriage circled down the drain in the aftermath of our son’s death. Why they were interested in that always baffled me , since they stood at the bright beginning of their privileged lives, had never finished anything of importance and possibly never would. Eddie is/was (he’s both) probably one of those people who wants to know all about everything he’s doing at the precise moment he does it. In this case dying.

“Endings always seemed pretty arbitrary to me, Eddie. I wasn’t very good at them. I’m not the only person who said so.”

Eddie’s little raisin eyes move slowly my way behind his smudged glasses. A look of giddy reproach. He is an awful sight — dyed hair, Vaselined cheeks, Jolly Roger smile of doomed intensity. Though he can still cerebrate and feel reproach. “You mean you just stopped when you felt like it?”

“Not exactly. I asked myself if I had anything more to say — if I’d gotten myself fully expressed. And if the answer was yes, I stopped. You bet. But if I didn’t, I kept on putting words down.”