Stanley Elkin - George Mills

Of course they’d reach their goal, Messenger thought. Everybody was watching the telethon. Besides, the fix was in. Eleventh-hour operetta was ready to put them over the top. Soft drink, ballpoint pen, timepiece, fast food, twenty-four-hour Mom and Pop shops, roller skating and dancing school cartels were already in the wings. An afflicted airlines executive and a backyard carnival representative stood by. Why, his own kids had dropped three or four bucks at a neighbor kid’s carnival two months before. Then what was the telethon for anyway? TV time that Messenger’s twenty bucks and the fifty or sixty the kids had raised and the perhaps half-dozen million or so of other private grievers all across the country might not even cover, make up? What was it for?

Why, the griefs, the griefs, of course — remotest mourning’s thrill-a-minute patriotics, its brazen, spectacular top hat, high-strutting, rim shot sympathies.

Cornell was high. For three years now it was the only way he would see people. His friends knew he smoked grass, as they thought they knew — as even his acquaintances and some of his students did — almost everything about him. He was contemptuous of whatever quality it was, not sincerity, not candor, not even truthfulness finally, that compelled his arias and put his words in his mouth. It was as if he had felt obliged to take the stand from the time he had first learned to talk, there to sing, turn state’s evidence, endlessly offer testimony, information, confession, proofs, an eyewitness to his own life who badgered his juries not only with the facts but with the hearsay too.

“Anybody see the telethon?” he asked the group around the pool. “I pledged twenty dollars. I was going to give twenty-five but at the last minute I welched because I got sore at my kids.”

They were his closest friends. One — Audrey — was having a nervous breakdown and cringed like a monkey in the shade of a big sun umbrella that bloomed from a hole in Losey’s summer furniture. Losey was the proprietor of this big house with its flourish of rose and sculpture gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, potting sheds, patio, and large paved area outside the garage like the parking lot at an Italian restaurant. There was even a dish antenna on the grounds like a giant mushroom. Losey was having an affair and had hinted he might even be in love. Nora Pat, Losey’s wife, was a second-year architecture student in the university and was probably going to flunk out. Thirty-one years old and the wife of a successful surgeon, she was on academic probation. Messenger’s wife, Paula, had her own sensible troubles. Victor Binder, Audrey’s husband, did. What the hell, they all did, some of them with griefs so bad they had had to stay home.

There was a blight on their lives even (speaking for himself, as he would, did) unto the next generation. He preferred not to think about it. He preferred to be high. He preferred television, movies, music. (He had bought quad, which had never caught on — the griefs, the griefs — and albums were piled high on each of his four speakers. They could have been mistaken for the collection of a teenager.) What he really preferred was watching the news high, welcoming public crisis, absorbed by all the terrorism and confrontations, obsessed as a president by interest rates, inflation, unemployment, living from one “Washington Week in Review” and “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation” to the next, from one “Issues and Answers” to its sequel; “NBC Nightly News” the best half-hour of his day, “Sixty Minutes” the best hour of his week. He was burned out, at forty-five reconciled to death.

Though only Judith was actually dying.

Judith Glazer had pancreatic cancer. She was the only person Messenger had ever known with six months to live, the only one who had ever had to listen to such a pronouncement. He had known others with cancer, fated as Judith Glazer, but their cases, though terminal, had been open-ended. Some lived years, some were still alive. Only Judith’s life was timed. That this should be so struck Messenger as extraordinary. “There is,” he’d said, “a cancer on her cancer,” and he did what ordinarily he would not have done when a friend was ill. He paid a call, the high seriousness and formality of the occasion so strange to him that he did not go high, visiting as callers must have done in old times, with the sense that he went gloved, hatted, walking-stick’d. As one might go to a salon, or visit a duchess. Bearing no gift save his presence, offering the sober ceremony of his conversation and hoping he was up to it, that Judith would feel them both under some superior obligation and not fuck around with him. Not acting, behaving certainly but not in the least acting, he on his part stripping himself, for all that he felt himself diplomatically dressed, prime ministerially encumbered, of all airs.

Paula went with him. Even without a strategy worked out between them beforehand, they had both chosen their garments — it was September, the woman would be dead by the end of February — with great care, as if they were going to an afternoon wedding, flown to some city three or four hundred miles distant, come not from their home but from a good motel near the airport, say, all dressed up after their morning poolside, their breakfast things still on the ground-level patio outside their room. It might have been a wedding, it might have been an anniversary luncheon. It could have been a funeral.

They had not been good friends. Judith had always been too testy for Messenger, something vestigially about her not so much mad — she’d been institutionalized for years before Cornell had ever met her — as angry, the anger a sort of prerogative clung to, even cherished, Messenger supposed, from the days when she’d been wacky, and he still didn’t understand her flash points, the vagrant, moving lesions of her multitudinous grudges. To disagree with her, even about a movie, was to risk the challenge of her wrath or, what was worse, to hurt her feelings. He had never outright told her that she was a pain in the ass, and that was how they got along. That was how even her husband, Sam, got along with her, humoring her fidget convictions.

So, though Messenger genuinely liked her, he had never been comfortable with her, had never adjusted to her own impatience with herself, her modest, willful withdrawals inside her muu-muus when she felt herself too fat, all her tense temperance. My God, he’d thought on more than one occasion, I treat her exactly the way Sam does, and, indeed, it was as if they were married. He’d imagined himself married to the woman, a fantasy never indulged with friends’ wives — and there were many, or used to be, till they got too old — who actually turned him on.

Now, near the start of her precious six months, she surprised them all. (He hadn’t yet seen her. She’d returned only recently from her devastating tests at the hospital.) Report had it she had become gracious, solicitous, a hostess of last resort. Having taken herself seriously all her life, she would, he supposed, treat her last months on earth with all the composure — whatever lingered of her madness was a sort of composure, a kind of sky-high deportment grander than Messenger’s in his Sunday best — of which she or any other terminal human being was capable. It was — Cornell knew he was wrong to feel this way — Sam who had most of his sympathy, and not only because his wife was dying. He had it because in Sam’s place Messenger would have felt put upon, outraged even, the duties of nursing become a sort of horrible, ultimate housekeeping he could not have held up under. Bedclothes, laundry, picking up children, taking them to lessons, preparing meals, even paying bills — these were things Messenger would not or could not do. He did not condone his sloth. Detail crippled him. Errand raised him to rage, then reduced him to tears. He was overwhelmed by such things, a man content only with contentment, truly happy only when others, too, were at leisure, made nervous even as a guest if his host was not as comfortably seated as himself. He was a summer soldier, a sunshine patriot, a good time Charlie.