Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“Doesn’t sound right,” Eddie says. He coughs three shallow, staccato gaks, then gropes for a tissue from the box on the bed table. He gaks again and deposits something ungodly into a fold of the tissue, then wipes a bit of it back on his lips. Probably he’s ready to start in again about there being too few people dying, and how we need to do something about it pronto. He’s still trying.

I hear Finesse in the next room. She’s left the door open to keep tabs on us and is talking on her phone. “I thought he’d come up and get me, okay?” she’s saying sternly. “I thought I knew him. But you can’t ever think you know nobody. You know what I’m sayin’? I mean, if I’m s’posed to fuck a sixty-year-old man, it’s damn sure gon’ be my husband. Uh-huh.”

Eddie’s gaze has wandered back to the TVs. One’s tuned to evil-empire Fox. The other, to blandly see-it-your-way CNN. Fox has begun showing the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, where half the world is on the ice below a preposterously large and lighted Christmas tree. CNN’s rehearsing last weekend’s NFL offerings. My sudden fear is that Eddie’s literary interest means he’s about to hit me up to read something — something he’s written — his own memoir, or a “novel” whose central character’s an inventor named “Eric.” Once you publish a book, even a hundred years back and have lost the sight in both eyes, you’re still fair game.

Finesse’s big coifed head suddenly appears in the door from the seafaring room. She’s holding her red cell phone in her hand. “You all still alive in there? You awful quiet.” She looks pityingly in at us. “I don’t hear no laughin’ and tellin’ jokes. You ain’t got all serious, have you?” She gives me a mock-serious frown. “I don’t want to have to give both you an enema. He done had his. My sister up in Newark says it’s a big storm comin’ on. I hope neither one of y’all’s plannin’ a Christmas trip.” I am. She disappears again.

“You know, they’re not keeping me alive here, Frank,” Eddie says — hoarse, his voice strained and boyish. “Hospice doesn’t do that. Life just happens or it doesn’t. Bravery’s not involved. It’s interesting. Everybody ought to do it at least once.” Eddie’s deviled, dyed-hair, Vaseline-smudged face looks shocked, as if he’s trying to laugh again, but can only register alarm. “Oh,” he manages. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”

“Can I do anything for you, Eddie?” I’ve inched closer to his bedside but am not inclined to touch him.

“Like what?” Eddie croaks.

“An enema.”

Eddie’s eyes snap at me. “You’d probably like it.”

“Not all of it,” I say. “Ole Olive. You’ve got yourself in a pickle here, haven’t you?”

“Do you think so?” Eddie says, his parched lips curled.

Finesse laughs at something her sister in Newark has had to say. “I was never a good sleeper, anyway,” she says and laughs raucously.

Eddie takes a deep clattering breath. Each one of these could be his last. Eddie could pop off as dead as a mallet with me standing here pointless, hardly knowing him. “Mr. Medley expired while joking with an unidentified man about enemas.”

Audible outside the house, across the soggy, puddly grounds of casa Eddie, comes the lonely ping-ping-ping and guttural heave ’n’ hump of a heating oil truck. Skillman’s — I’ve seen it when driving over. It’s making a delivery, possibly to this very domicile. I hope my Sonata’s not in the way when the driver starts backing up without looking.

“You know”—Eddie gulps hard and dry and thin—“all this shit you think you can’t live with. Colostomy bag. Vegetative state. Commandant at Bergen-Belsen. You can live with anything. The mind just goes back to a previous state.”

“Maybe that’s enough clarity,” I say, beside his bed.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Eddie breathes again almost easily. For a moment, he seems less under subversive attack, as if his brain had struck a truce with his body’s assailants. Maybe my being here is a benefaction. A very bad smell now escapes from under Eddie’s covers. No telling what. “What I can’t live with — it’s awful to say. Awful to know . I realize I won’t ever pass a woman in a revolving door and have her look at me in that way. You know? That’s over. It’s shameful to say that. Every productive thing I ever did came from that feeling. I know it about myself.” Eddie fiddles up under his sheet with the hand not tubed up to the drip bag. “Ohhhh,” he moans and averts his face in recognition of whatever he’s come into contact with down there. A catheter or some equally monstrous intrusion on his person. So many things can go wrong, it’s strange any go right. I’m thinking maybe two miniature Vietnamese masseuses — a mercy flight from KumWow — might offer Eddie a better send-off than I’m managing; affirm his faith that life happens ’til it doesn’t. Finesse wouldn’t mind.

“It’s not shameful, Eddie,” I say, relative to the origin of his species. “Everything comes from someplace.”

“I have to tell you something, Frank,” Eddie says quickly, his chest expanding under his blue sheet, as if he’s trying to suppress a new onslaught.

“That’s what I’m here for.” Not literally true. Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence. Death makes of everything in life a dream.

“I have to get this out of my head. I don’t want to die being driven crazy by it. I might as well not die.”

“Give me your worst, Eddie.” Wise to keep all responses to a minimum. Locate my Default Self. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway. Eddie and I are of one mind — life is a matter of subtractions.

Finesse again leans into the doorway, gives us another look of worried but mock disapproval. “Y’all ain’t no fun.” She fattens her cheeks as if she’s disgusted. Eddie and I might as well be one person.

“I fucked Ann.” Eddie’s staring straight up — fiercely — out of his vanquished, soon-to-be-untenanted body, his ghastly beady eyes unblinking behind his specs, in their hollow, bony sockets, the tops of which have black hair-dye encroaching.

At least, I believe that’s what Eddie’s just said. His stricken face indicates he thinks he said something important.

“What?” I could’ve heard him wrong. Neither of us is talking very loud. Then in case I’m right, I say, “When?”

Eddie lets go with an immense cough — a bottom scraper. This time he covers his mouth and emits a groan. For a moment he seems incapable of speaking and purses his gunked lips like a zipper.

“What?” I say again, still not very loud, but pushing in a little closer.

Eddie clears his throat and makes an awful gasping-gurgling noise, then very fast says, “You-were-away-teaching-someplace-in-Mass. It-wasn’t-that-long-after-your-son-died-she-was-alone — Jalina-had-left. Uhhhhgh. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was careless.”

“What?” I say a third time. “When I was… teaching? You fucked Ann?” A pause. “My Ann?” Another pause. “Why’d you do that?”

It isn’t so much I’m saying these words as much as they’re being vocalized through me. I hear them when Eddie does.

“I can’t put the genie back in the bottle now, Frank.” Eddie gulps, then gurgles, then averts his head as if he wants to recede into the deathly air, like the specter he’ll soon be. Outside, the Skillman Oil truck’s commencing its large liquid infusion. Durning, durning, durning, through the house pipes, into a cast receptacle. “I fell in love with her, Frank,” Eddie’s strangled voice manages, his monkey face still staring away. “I wanted her to live with me in France. In Deauville. Take her on my boat. She said no. She loved you. I don’t want to die with that deception as my legacy. I’m so sorry.” Eddie heaves. Pain, sob — what’s the difference?