Stanley Elkin - George Mills

She was absolutely sane, solid as a rock. I swear it by all that’s holy!

I was with her day and night for more than a month and had plenty of opportunity to observe her. She tried to get us killed. She was bats, nutty as a fruitcake. So help me God. Amen.

But he was no good as an examiner, was without subtlety, could not lead his witness, could not trap him — it’s the blood, Mills thought, it’s my thousand-year-old blue collar blood — could, in the end, only ask outright his cruel, crucial question.

Messenger, surprised, looked at him.

“These are my friends,” Messenger said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Mills said.

“I mean both sides.”

“Sure.”

“Sam’s a colleague.”

“Yes.”

“However difficult Judith may have been, I always respected her.”

“Yes.”

“She was nobody’s fool.”

“No.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“There’s a buck to be made.”

“Come on.”

“Operation Bootstrap.”

“You’re too late, George,” Messenger said sympathetically.

“Maybe not.”

To stall him he told him something else.

“Victor couldn’t take it anymore,” Messenger said softly. “He had Audrey committed. They took her belts away. He had to sign for her shoestrings. Restraints, the whole shtick. She won’t swallow pills, so they have to force-feed her. When they put her on an IV she tried to chew through the tube and jimmy an air bubble into her vein. They can’t use an IV. They’re afraid she’ll try to turn on it and impale herself. A male nurse who used to be her student gives her shots in her arms, in her ass. Two men hold her down. She’s black-and-blue from these euphorics, so dry from drugs her tongue is chafed, the roof of her mouth. She can’t close her mouth for the pain. She cries even when she’s sleeping and the salt tears run into her mouth. There are lesions inside her cheeks, all the soft tissue. They slake her from eyedroppers like you’d feed a sick bird. When he visited her last time she signaled him over to the side of the bed. She could barely talk. He had to lean down. Even then he could hardly understand her. She was smiling. The first time he’d seen her smile in almost a year.

“ ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘The shore? What about the shore? You want to go to the shore? Get better, sweetheart. When you get well. I promise. When you get well we’ll go to the shore.’ They have this place on Cape May. He patted her forehead and promised to take her.

“He says you’d have thought he’d given her a jolt of—”

“This is—” Mills said.

“—electricity,” Messenger said. “That’s how fast she jumped away from his touch. Her loathing was that clear. ‘Well, what about the shore?’ he said he said angrily. ‘You don’t want me to come? Swell,’ he said he said hurt, ‘get well. Go by yourself. I won’t stop you.’

“She shook her head and now he said he could see that it wasn’t loathing at all. He said it was a different thing entirely, and while she wasn’t smiling the expression on her face was almost a sane one and some—”

“This is all—” Mills said.

“—thing else he hadn’t seen in almost a year. It was just sane, ordinary, angry, outraged human frustration, and he realized he’d misunderstood her. He apologized and leaned down again over her pillows. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’

“ ‘Not shore,’ she said. ‘Bedshore. Bed shore.’

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘ Bed shore!’

“She was telling him about her bedsores, that she meant to kill herself by poisoning her bedsores, by peeing on her bedsores and infecting them, by rolling her sores in shit. He told her doctor he wanted her catheterized. He demanded she be rigged to her bedpan.

“All right,” Messenger said, “what is it?”

“The public record, the sunshine laws. They write this stuff down on her chart,” Mills said coolly. “They say things like this at the nurses’ station. They’d tell me this crap if I called the front desk.”

He thought Messenger was going to hit him.

“It’s gossip, Cornell. A king told my ancestor that gossip’s horizontal, that nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin.”

“What am I, a traitor to my class? I ain’t even high. This is my best stuff.”

“I don’t want gossip,” Mills said.

“What, what do you want?”

“The goods. I want the goddamn goods on them! ” George Mills exploded.

Which he was not to have for a while, Messenger feeding him as he might have fed the Meals-on-Wheelers, in installment, moiety, some awful, teasing incrementality, telling him what Mills did not care to hear not because he enjoyed, as Judith Glazer might, the damage of the thing, the tightening, dangerous coil of consequence he could not keep his hands off and wound and wound like the stem of a watch, but because of the flashy, reflexive, ricochet’d attention and glory, perhaps his melodramatist’s or bad gambler’s hole-card hope — the same thing that kept him glued to the telethon, that drew him to “20/20,” “Sixty Minutes,” the news, that made the Watergate years — how he envied Deep Throat! — the best of his life.

“He can’t stand what he’s done. I think Victor’s gone nuts. Losey says so too. The man’s a surgeon but he sees plenty of this emergency room guilt. Sure. When they sign the papers. To lop off a leg, to hacksaw crushed fingers or take away tits.

“He thinks he should have sent the kid off instead. He could have sent his son to aunts in Pittsburgh, to a brother-in-law in Maine.”

“What happened?” Mills asked. (Because he was asking questions now. Because he knew that Messenger would tell him what he needed to know but that first he would have to hear all of it, Messenger’s scandals like the devised sequences and routines of the Cassadagans. Because he was something of the straight man now too, the old Florida Follies Kid. Thinking: You don’t ever grow up. Nothing changes, nothing. Certainly not your character.) “What happened?”

“She wasn’t suicidal. Even the psychiatrist said so. She wasn’t suicidal. She just wanted to die.

“That’s what she kept telling the boy. That she wanted to die. Can you imagine? How old can he be? Eleven? Twelve? The kid home from school and making chocolate milk, Horlick’s, his Ovaltine. Slopping sardine sandwiches together and nibbling Fritos off some cleared portion of the dining room table. (Because the kitchen table’s overflowing. Not from breakfast, understand. Or anyway not from that morning’s breakfast, or even yesterday’s, but the cumulate dishes, spoons, knives and egg-tined forks of maybe three days’ meals. And more in the sink. Sure. There’s three in the family. Say they’ve got two sets of dishes, for dinner parties, for everyday. Service for twelve, say. The cleaning lady comes once a week. That’s four days of meals on the everyday. Another two or three on what they’d serve to their guests. But be fair. Audrey’s not eating. But be fair. They fill up her plate. Even she don’t eat they got to dirty a dish. And suppose the girl calls in sick? I mean she’s seen that mess. She hired on as a cleaning lady, not a pearl diver. Suppose she calls in sick. In eight days they have to take their meals on the coffee table in the living room. In two more they’re taking them separately. On the back porch, the stairs. The kid’s fixing his snack on the ironing board in the basement.)

“So there’s, what’shisname, Danny, trying to make a simple sardine or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking now out of the jelly and yahrtzeit glasses and actual Corky the Clown mugs from the old highchair days, wolfing it down because though he’s not athletic and is normally a housebound child content to stay home and read, do homework, it breaks his heart to hear his mom cry and he can’t stand absolutely to hear her complain how if there was a God she’d be a goner by now, and he’s got to get out of there, back to the playground to get in a game which he knows he’s not only bad at but hasn’t even learned the rules of yet, even the goddamn object. Not go for a walk, kick leaves, ride bikes with a pal, read books on a bench, but back to the playground where he doesn’t like to be even at recess, back to the actual goddamn playground where he knows damn well they’ll choose him, even choose him early, before the better players, the ones who’ve got it together, whose reflexes hum like gears in fine machinery, whose timing and power and speed and concentration make them good up at bat, who wear their fielders’ mitts as naturally and comfortably as Dan wears scarves, coats; who’ll choose him early for the simple good fun of just making them laugh, giving them by simple dint of picking him for their side the right — the right —to denounce his errors, mock his play, him. To call him bad names and nudge him with elbows and push him around.