Stanley Elkin - George Mills

So they had called and been given a time for their audience. (Visits as such were forbidden. Always formal, punctilious about their hospitality, mixing their guests with the scruples of pharmacists, Judith and Sam had in misfortune become tyrants of timing.) They parked their car and walked up to “The Cottage.” (The Glazers’ home seemed exactly what it was called on the sign above its small screened porch at the side, the only house in this neighborhood of $100,000 to $125,000 homes — their inflated values — to have a name. There was something vaguely European about it, or British — its brown woodwork, the flowered wallpaper in its living and dining rooms.) Though it was no smaller than the homes surrounding it, it seemed so. There were pebbles beside the walk leading to the front door, bushes growing in the center of the lawn, great cement urns beside the steps which dwarfed the tiny flowers they contained, making them look, for all their color, like so many cigarette butts or discarded gum wrappers. Inside, the rooms were ugly, the sofa and chairs protected from their two elderly dogs by thin blankets. The Oriental rugs were threadbare, the stuffed chairs deflated. One wouldn’t have guessed Judith an heiress, her husband the head of his department.

Messenger rang the doorbell, annoyed as always by the “Operation Ident” decal on the window of the front door. Thieves were warned that all objects of value had been “etched for ready identification purposes by the appropriate law enforcement agencies.” That meant the stereo and Sam’s expensive camera equipment, purchased at discount in duty-free shops in the Middle East when the Glazers had spent a year abroad. (They had gone around the world and their house was tricked out like the gift shops of selected international airports.)

Sam opened the door, looking, as always, confused by visitors. “Oh,” he said, “hi. Judith’s on the phone. All right, come in.” He seemed feverish to Messenger, the eyes in his youthful face — he was seven years older than Cornell but looked ten years younger — lustrous with mucus. “The phone company put in a special phone with hold buttons. Judith gets so many calls we really need it. Now if someone calls while she’s talking, she gets a signal that there’s a second call on the line. All she has to do is excuse herself, put the first person on hold and take the message from the new caller. It works just like the phone in my office.”

“Who shines your eyes, Sam?”

“What? Oh, yeah. I haven’t been getting much sleep. Judy? Honey? Here are the Messengers come to see you.”

The woman waved at them to sit. Messenger waited while Sam chased the dogs from the chairs. Judith Glazer chatted amiably on the telephone, her skin as jaundiced as her blond hair. Sam had disappeared.

Messenger had the impression she was performing for them, dragging the call out till someone else rang up so she might demonstrate the complexities of the new phone. She prattled about third parties, alluding to people Messenger had never heard of, would never meet. Her speech was for Sam too, he thought, off and busy somewhere in the house, her voice raised theatrically, its octaves just beyond her vision. She spoke with all the authority of her doom, arranging with only a minimum of consultation all the car pools of ordinary life. She spoke not as if she were not going to die before the winter was out, but as if she was never going to die.

Sam returned with the glass cylinder from a blender. It was filled with some sort of pinkish malted. He poured out the thick pink liquid for his wife and set the cylinder down on a community newspaper. Messenger noticed that the yellow hold button was lighted. “If we’re interrupting—” he said.

Judith shook her head, her strawberry mustache like a third lip. “Sit still,” she said. “Talk to Sam. Comfort Sam.”

Sam smiled. “People have been wonderful,” he said. “Judy’s lining up next week’s dinners.”

“Next week’s dinners?” Paula said.

“They bring casseroles, roasts, full-course meals. Bunny Fletcher’s coming over later to barbecue steaks for us.”

“What a way to go,” Messenger said comfortingly.

“It’s a picnic,” Sam said.

“We heard about it when we were still in Vermont,” Paula said. “Bill Richards told us.”

“What else did the provost say?”

Paula shook her hands helplessly, lowered her voice. “He told us about the prognosis. I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shrugged. “Bill’s been super. He stayed with me in Judy’s room during the exploratory. Adrian was there, too.” He looked down at his fingernails. “When the surgeon told me what they’d found, Adrian held my hand. How do you like that? He just took my hand and held it. When we got to the restaurant the chancellor was already there, waiting for us. Bill must have phoned him, or Adrian. Anyway, there he was, waiting for us. He still had jet lag. He and Bunny had just flown in from London that day.”

“Who picked up the check,” Messenger asked deliberately, “dean, provost, or chancellor?”

Sam laughed. “Life goes on,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Judith said, her phone call ended. “Why am I missing all the fun?”

“ ’Cause you’ve got cancer,” Messenger said, stripped of diplomatic status and settling for bad taste in this house of bad taste where Consumer Reports lay on the surfaces of the furniture like coffeetable books. Sam’s meanness was famous. Even Judith, who came from money, an heiress who would never now collect her birthright, whose great expectations had been shut down by the doctors and who, though her wealthy, highborn, Episcopal parent be struck dead that afternoon or catch the lightning in his hair, would never live through probate, joined in this joke on Sam. Who brooked no criticism of him, whose trigger-happy anger was always at his disposal, always in his defense, as much a species of big brother to him as wife, permitting no slight to her slight Jew and going along not so much dutifully as obediently with all Sam’s bargains and schemes, all his duty-free, marked-down, consumer-reported tchotchkes and appliances, his Sam Goody records and bulk film, his examination copies and suits by Seconds — and Sam a clotheshorse — and international flights by mysterious charter clubs and groceries from a co-op some assistant professors and grad students had founded, his order actually smuggled into their kitchen by some eligible TA. Why she even enjoyed his fabled economies, the fabled part anyway, encouraging them, Messenger supposed, as a harmless outlet for an anti-Semitism she had been unwilling entirely to surrender, writing them off as a cute trait of her clever Yid, much, he hoped— oh, how he hoped, his sense of propriety in the balance now — as she accepted the hold buttons on her telephone and the command performance dinners and her jaundiced skin the color of Valium, and her cancer.

“I never,” she said, “objected to your bad taste, Cornell. It only matters that you love me.” And she waited for his declaration.

“Of course I love you,” Messenger said, the heat on.

“All right,” Judith said, swallowing malted, refilling her glass from the cylinder, extending the glass. “Drink,” she said, “it’s delicious. There’s no medicine in it. It’s only a strawberry malt. I take it to fatten me up for when I start my chemotherapy on Thursday. Will you drink from my glass?”

“I’m already fattened up,” Messenger said.

“Maybe the Messengers would like to hear our news,” Sam said, suggested.

“They may hear our news when they have broken malted with us. They may hear our news when they have sipped from the glass touched by my pancreatically cancered lips.”