Stanley Elkin - George Mills

Meanwhile, though he did everything, there was not much he could do for her. Occasionally, in the cool mornings, Mills still carried her outdoors and bundled her in one of the lounges where she could watch the children playing in the water, holding their breaths, racing, playing Marco Polo. But soon she lost interest in even this passive diversion and asked to be taken back to her room.

He fetched and carried from moment to moment and caught real glimpses of her only during the brief respite between the chores he performed in the name of her body. Which had gone into crisis, some emergency alert lived, or at least felt, at the pitch, the up-front prerogatives of her thirst or her weariness or even of the foul taste exploding in her mouth like the bomb of a terrorist.

Handling her nausea was a two-person affair, one to describe it, the other to chip the light dusting of salt from her soda crackers and feed them to her in pieces. She had lost impassivity only where her body was not concerned and guided him now through his massages, telling him where the flaccid muscles in her foot still pinched, warning him of a cramp developing in her neck, detailing discomfort as well as suffering, totally involved in getting off every last one of her body’s messages, in translating from further and further away the foreign language that was all around them, all the sense of her senses. He was an expert, reeling off for them, the nurses and doctors at the clinic, Judith’s infinite symptoms and impressions with an impressive and devastatingly authentic Siamese collaterality. (“This woman I live with…” he’d said to the pharmacist, scraping away the last conjugal implications of the phrase. He meant lived with.)

“I have,” she said, “a thickish wet in my groin.”

“I’ll get Kotex,” he said, for he somehow understood that she was describing not some new trial but the onset of her period, which, oddly, had not yet stopped.

Then, suddenly, she stopped even that crimped sharing. She lay in waiting, somewhere between the terror of calling it off and going back home and the terror of continuing in Mexico.

On the one hand she knew the Laetrile had failed, on the other that in Mexico she was out of the hands of the doctors, that in St. Louis they would start the chemotherapy again, baking and stewing her with their lasers, their cobalt, turning all the peaceful uses of atomic energy against her.

“I’ve been a fool, Mills. I could have died a martyr to cancer by letting them treat me. Tell about today’s episode.”

She was no longer well enough to watch “Maria, Maria,” and kept up by having Mills read her the synoptic squib in the El Paso paper.

Father Merchant came in one Friday evening but Mills gave him the key to his room and waved him off. He waited there until George called him. It was past nine.

“She’s had her bath,” George said softly. “She’s almost comfortable. The señora can hear you. Go ahead, please.”

“Madam,” said the old man, “this week Maria’s father is released from the jail and finds the patrone to who he have saled his daughter. Of course he does not recognize her because it has been nine years and she has flowered. The girl was hardly barely inside her puberty when he has sell her. He have a beard now and white hairs.”

“Mills has read me all that,” Mrs. Glazer said. “The courtship scene, please, Father. The dialogue and fine points.”

“Buen dia, señorita. ‘ No, no, please don’t get up, por favor. Well well, I have not see such a lovely creature as yourself since, since…My my, it is the truth, there are none such pretty ladies in the country from which I have came. ’

‘ What is that country, señor?’

‘ Its name is loneliness. ’

‘Señor!’

‘ The thousand pardons, señorita. The hand of my arm is a rough beast. The filthy scoundrel is forgot its manners. ’

Por favor, señor!’

‘ If you would but permit it to touch the face of your head. ’

‘ But— ’

‘ It is just that it cannot believe such a haunch is real. ’

‘ Oh. Ooh!’

‘ Ai ai! It is the miracle. ’

Por— ai ooh ooh ai! — favor, señor! This thing that you do is glorious but shameful. I must ask that you stop. ’

‘ But señorita—’

“I must ask that you stop,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Get my morphine, please, Mills.”

“She has pain? She wants her medication?” Merchant said. He examined the vial into which Mills had just plunged a hypodermic syringe. “Twelve milligrams of morphine? Twelve? Not fifteen? What have you done, señor? What have you allowed them to sell you?”

“You’d better leave now,” Mills said. “Her stomach hurts badly. Your voice grates her ears. There’s this indescribable itch in her left shoulder blade, and when she tries to ease it by rubbing it against the sheet a horrible pain shoots through her calves and jaw.”

And he knew, too, when the narcotic caught hold, when the nerves relaxed, aligned themselves and fit once more into their sockets. He did not feel these things himself but knew she felt them. And knew, at one that morning, the immanence and alarm she’d felt in her sleep — it was not a dream, no vision or prophecy, neither Shekinah nor rapture, but information, disclosure, some red message of the blood — that her body was done with its phases, that death was by.

He called St. Louis but at the last moment withheld his news.

“Who’s this — Mary? Hi, Mary. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m still mixed up about the time difference. It’s me, Mills. Is your daddy there? May I speak with him, please?” Rushing the words because all the time he was watching Mrs. Glazer. Who seemed momentarily to have quieted. “Who’s this? Isn’t this Mr. Glazer? Who? — Cornell Messenger? — What about your son? I don’t know your son. Where’s Mr. Glazer? Never mind. Listen, she’s waking up, I’ve got to go.”

“Marco,” she said.

He rushed to her side. She was feverish, so covered with sweat she seemed to lie under a thin layer of magnification. Her yellow wig had slipped off her head and her skull gleamed. The thin scuzz of gray fringe about her temples had turned dark with moisture. George bailed at the perspiration with towels that said Juarez Palace Motel. She was so thin she gave an impression of incredible flexibility.

“I’ve called the doctor,” he said, and watched the pains arc and register along all the fronts of her body as if pain were almost some repressed geological flaw, and her skin, joints, bones and orifices the weathered, levered, earthen flash points and levees of prepped vulnerability.

“Marco,” she whispered.

“I’m going to give you some morphine. An injection would hurt too much right now. You’ll have to take these by mouth.”

“Marco?”

He took her jaw in his fingers and pried it open. He tried to roll the morphine capsules they used now down her throat. Her mouth, for all the moisture on the surface of her body, was dry as fire. Some of the gelatin casing stuck to the inside of her cheek, and he had to tear it free, like cigarette paper caught on the surface of a lip.

“Marco,” she said.

He pulled the two halves of the capsule apart and powdered her mouth with morphine. Her pain was so great it had doused her sense of taste. The stuff lay in her mouth neutral as teeth.

“You’ve got to swallow,” Mills said. “Please swallow. I’m going to wet your mouth.” He dipped a teaspoon with some congealed dessert still on it into a water glass and tamped the water into the corners of her mouth, sprinkling it there as if he were ministering to a bird. The drug turned to paste. He took up the glass of water and began to pour it into her mouth a little at a time until some vestigial reflex took over and she gulped.