Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Sure, Judith. Gimme,” Messenger said.

“Here,” she said.

He downed all the malted. “Gee, Judy,” he said, “there’s nothing left for you.”

“The news, of course, is that I’m dying. Well, that’s my news. People are so embarrassed by other people’s deaths that I’ve drawn up a sort of list— ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Judith Glazer’s Death But Were Afraid to Ask.’

“First. The girls know. I told them as soon as I learned the results of the operation. Milly doesn’t accept it yet, I think. I mean she doesn’t believe it will happen. That’s unusual, because of the two she’s the more mature, though she’s younger than Mary. We told the two of them together. Mary’s the one who cried. Now she wets the bed and goes around stinking of urine. Well, I understand rage. It’s always been one of my subjects. But she’s twelve years old and almost six feet tall and she won’t change her underwear and goes about soiled and—”

“Look,” Messenger said.

“Oh, you’re just like Milly, aren’t you? Isn’t he just like Milly, Sam? He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t accept things.”

“I accept things.”

“No,” Judith Glazer said, “if you don’t want to know you can’t accept things. Oh. You’re embarrassed. For all your tough talk, you’re embarrassed, gun-shy. There’s hope for you. Shyness is a kind of love, too. Like chugalugging from the cancer cup.”

“Come on, Judith,” Messenger said, “cut it out.”

“Standing up to me is. It’s all right. If I bring you these messages from the deathbed it’s not because I want to rub your nose in things you aren’t up to, but because I love you, too, Cornell. I never loved Paula. Paula, I’m sorry but it’s true. Perhaps I will now, I can’t be sure. I shall certainly have to try. You, for your part, Paula, you shall have to try, too.”

“I’ll try,” Paula said.

“Do. Please do,” the woman said, and went on. “Have I told you about the girls? My medication’s wearing off, my pain confuses me. Where was I? Oh, yes, the girls.”

“If you’re tired, sweetheart,” Sam said.

“I have cancer, not fatigue. Try not, please, to be humiliated by me. You never were before. All those years I was crazy. Stand by me now. These are the facts, pet, this is the way I wet my bed. Humor your horrible wife.” She had been lying on the sofa. Now she sat up, her housecoat parted and her nightgown hiked. Messenger saw her bald, prepped groin and looked away. “I shall make a family man of him yet. I’ve barely more than five months, but we’re well begun. Oh, yes, we make furious love.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t think the Messengers…”

“Of course they are,” she said, “but even if they aren’t…As long as I have strength to speak and warn I shall use that strength to speak and warn. There’s grime in even the purest death, things the clearest-headed among us wouldn’t expect. Well, the children are an example, aren’t they? Oafish Mary and tender Milly. Their grandfather and uncle try to turn their heads, to bribe their attentions away from truth. The fact is they’re quite successful. They are. My girls will remember their mother’s passing as a shower of gold. Tennis and swimming and private lessons. Golf and horseback riding and dinners at the club — all lovely summer’s fine rare prizes. They’re going to the academy this year. Daddy’s paying their tuition. I don’t mind. It’s hard for kids. Milly doesn’t believe me and Mary pees her bed.

“But I haven’t told you yet how we do it. The stitches and pain and my cancer shining through my skin like sunlight. How does he get it up, do you think?”

Sam got it up and left the room. He went through the small dining room into the kitchen.

“Poor Sam,” his wife said. “I won’t talk behind his back, only out of his line of sight. He hears me now. You hear me now, don’t you, Sam? You’re listening to all this, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Sam said, his voice fainted by the intervening rooms.

She lowered her own voice. “How does he get a hard-on? He wills it. It’s his decision. Why, it’s no more trouble to him than acquiring a tan or arranging his hair. It’s biofeedback, Sammy’s sex. Decisive grooming, like the way his pants hold a crease or the fact that his hands don’t get dirty. And there’s no weight. Our skins barely touch. Platonic fucking. Orgasms like something shuttled back and forth in a game. Because he never comes until I do.” She was speaking normally again. “You don’t come till I do, do you, Sam?”

“I’m a gent,” Sam said in the kitchen. “I’m something in armor, something in tails.” He was crying.

“Baby, don’t cry,” Judith said. “Hush, courtly lover.” And he hushed. “Bring me a pill, Sam.” They heard the faucet in the kitchen. Sam appeared with a pill and a glass of water. “See?” Judith said. “Thanks, darling.” She turned to the Messengers. “See? My last few months like a sort of pregnancy. See? Judith lying-in with doom and whim and old Sam hard by all hand and foot to fetch all the pickles of the grotesque, we never close.

“Sam, Sam, you Jew, you Jewish husband. Shall we tell them our news?”

“We’ve told them everything else.”

“No,” she said, “no we haven’t.” She turned to Paula. “Once, maybe two or three years ago, we gave a party. Cornell brought the ice, do you remember? Sam had called at the last minute to ask one of those gee-it-must-have-slipped-my-mind favors of his. Though we know better, don’t we, know that nothing ever slips Sam’s mind, that his mind goes around in galoshes and snow tires, radials, chains, and Cornell was high, stoned, and I’d been talking about TM, and your husband asked me to tell him my mantra. Do you remember that? Do you, Cornell?”

“I think so,” Messenger said. “Yes.”

“Yes,” Judith Glazer said. “And I wouldn’t tell you. Well I’ll tell you now. Lean toward me, I’ll whisper it.”

“I was kidding, Judith. I don’t have to know.”

“Suppose what I tell you were my last words? Not have to know what may be a poor dying woman’s dying wish?”

Messenger looked helplessly at his wife. She was already packed, checked out of the motel, all gone. He looked at Sam, similarly fled, browsing inside info on cordless telephones in Consumer Reports.

Messenger got out of his chair and went toward the poor dying woman. He knelt at her side and she blew softly in his ear as if testing a microphone. Then she whispered four senseless syllables into it which he would never forget. He felt himself blush.

“An obscenity?” Paula suggested.

“My mantra,” Judith Glazer said. “There. I feel better. Only Cornell and my guru know. I can give it away because I don’t need it anymore. You, Sam. I just gave away my three-thousand-dollar mantra to Cornell.” She smiled and Cornell felt something like affection for the nutty lady. “I’m dying,” she said jovially, “and going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam. Only I may look down on Sam, you know. I earned the privilege by living with him, earned it at discount, the odor of his odd-lot, uncut, 35mm film on my breasts when he came to me from the darkroom where he cut and rolled it onto used cartridges, the cutting and winding done at midnight in closets so that we didn’t have the expense of even that single low-watt dim red bulb. I’m going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam, on his thick soft bundles of hair, Sam’s plateaus of head like actual geography, and let him know if he’s fucking up as dean. That’s our news. Sam’s to be appointed dean when Adrian steps down at the end of the semester.”