Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“As a story writer and all that.”

“Do you read my stuff?”

A look of suffering or at least sheepishness in his eyes, the visible evidence of a temptation to lie, like pressure on his head, and at last he said, “My wife’s the reader.”

When I snorted instead of replying, Hankey said, “Cutler taught us the word ‘procrustean.’ All these years, I’ve never used it.”

“And ‘transpicuous.’”

“Whatever that means. You probably used that somewhere, eh?”

“Not yet.”

He shrugged and said that the hospice was near the Winchester line, on South Border Road. “The Elms. Big old house. You can’t miss it.”

South Border Road, of all places, in the wooded Fells, where I’d spent so much of my innocent youth, where I’d left my innocence behind.

“Jay, we were worried about you,” my mother said at Gaffey’s as I entered the waiting room. She sat compactly, hands clasped, my sister Rose next to her, both of them pale and stunned, as though waiting to see a doctor.

Rose said, “They’re getting the catalogue. For the caskets. It’s real stressful. I never thought—” But she didn’t finish the sentence.

In that awkward silence I said, “I just bumped into Ed Hankey.”

“Oh?” my mother said in a high and querying tone, her way of asking for details.

“He sent his regards. He asked how you were. He was sorry to hear about Dad.”

“Oh?” She wanted more.

Rose said, “I remember Eddie.”

I could not turn away from my mother’s imploring face. I said, “He claimed that when his father passed away his spirit still lingered. Eddie could feel it in the house, and sometimes it seemed to be inside him. Unconsciously Eddie became more like his father. Used the same expressions, began to be frugal, adopted some of his father’s attitudes. It made him feel better.”

“I can relate to that,” Rose said.

“The memory of his father made him stronger. Helped him with decisions.”

My mother was on the verge of tears, dabbing her eyes with a balled-up tissue.

“Eddie was a nice-looking guy,” Rose said.

“Your father was so kind. He had no business sense.” My mother was clutching her leather handbag. “Now you have to take his place. You’re in charge now.”

They stared at me, bereft. I sat closer to them and said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but Eddie had a couple of funny stories about online dating, things going wrong.”

A sad smile floated across Rose’s lips.

“One of the women posted a picture of her much prettier sister, wearing a tracksuit. ‘I like working out,’ she wrote under it. ‘Get physical.’ But when Eddie met her he didn’t recognize her — he said she weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. She ate a huge meal. He sat there dumbfounded.”

My mother said, “Oh?”

“Another one met him for drinks. He said she seemed nice, but a bit goofy. Anyway, they ordered some salads at the bar. Then a strange thing happened. This woman got a nosebleed, but didn’t seem to notice it. She says, ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘Yeah,’ Eddie says. ‘You’re bleeding into the caesar salad.’ So she gets up, and he figures she’s going to the ladies’ room. He never saw her again!”

“Something druggy about nosebleeds,” Rose said, smiling broadly as she hugged Mother.

“God forgive me,” Mother said, holding her rag of tissues to her mouth, laughing.

“Everything seems like a good idea on coke,” Rose said.

And then a solemn man in a dark suit appeared, and we were invited in to peruse the catalogue.

Driving along the road the next afternoon, I glanced to the right and moved through a map in my mind, from Bellevue Pond to Panther Cave to Wright’s Tower and the Sheepfold, until the shadow of Murray Cutler fell over the memory, and I realized that I was coming face to face with the man after all these years. I had no idea what I would say to him, but I needed to see him before he died.

At a bend on South Border Road, a large old house loomed from between tall trees, fieldstone and brick, with a pair of heavy-lidded dormers on the roof and bosomy bow windows on the front, set back from the road. The Elms: Hospice and Palliative Care appeared in green and gold on a swinging board at the opening of the circular driveway: a family mansion converted to a medical facility.

Inside, at the periphery of the lobby area, a white-haired woman in a blue sweater sat at a desk behind a glass partition and a slid-aside window opening onto a counter, like someone selling bus tickets. She stood and, plucking her glasses from where they had rested on her head and dropping them onto the bridge of her nose, leaned toward me. The odor of new paint and fresh flowers in the lobby and the way the woman greeted me made me think of their opposites, decay and deception and death, sinister and obvious distractions, especially the smile.

“Please sign in,” and she indicated the visitors’ book. I was reminded of the leather-bound visitors’ book we had chosen the day before at the funeral home.

I flipped pages, searching the column under Destination. Murray Cutler’s name did not appear on any of the pages I saw.

“Mr. Cutler’s not getting many visitors,” I said.

“Professor Cutler doesn’t have family,” the woman said. Professor! “He’ll be glad to see you. He’s in two-two-eight. Stairs on the left.”

His door was closed. I tried the knob, pushing it open slowly, then stepping into the inert body odor that hung in the small room like a sour baggy presence. Murray Cutler lay in a bed facing the window, an elderly woman beside him bent over a book, but turning her face to me, frowning, looking punished, when the door clicked shut.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“You’re supposed to knock. I don’t appreciate it when people don’t knock.” She sighed and hoisted the book. “We’re reading this. I’m one of the volunteers.”

In this interval, Murray Cutler did not stir. His head remained canted to the side, his mouth open.

“I can take over from you.”

“He taught English at Medford High.” She glanced at him as though for approval. “Did he teach you?”

“Yes. He taught me how to tell stories.”

“He loves stories.”

“I have some for him.”

In a softer voice she said, “He’s got an awful lot of challenges.”

That was when he looked at me, not moving his head, but lifting his eyes, and remaining expressionless.

Although I had not seen him since high school, I recognized him at once. Wasted, simplified, and revealed by illness, he was reduced to a skeletal caricature of himself, the way a sickness shows us who we really are by making us too weak to pretend. He’d always been thin, his close-fitting clothes made him a stick figure, but he was vain about his body. Teachers wore suits and ties then. His suits were well cut and stylish.

Exaggerated by his sickness, he was a skinnier version of a skinny man. His skin clung to his skull, a tissuey death’s head, a corpse’s face, yellowish, with dry split lips. When he drew a breath his eyes goggled from the effort. He looked weird and weightless on the bed, like a castaway adrift on a raft. His arms looked useless. Where there had been muscle, there was slackened sinew, less like flesh than old meat.

“I’ll leave him to you,” the woman said, rising from her chair and handing me the book.

Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls. I read the dark title aloud and made a face.

“Stories of survival and heroism,” she said, buttoning her coat. “We’ve just done Alexander Selkirk.”

“Robinson Crusoe and his man Freddy, the perfect partnership, he used to say.” I looked to Cutler for a reaction, but there was none.