Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“It was something to sit in those Morristown drugstores and see the doting purchases of the healthy, magazines for the relatives they were soon to abandon, cosmetics to make them presentable, pens, stationery, portable radios — all the sick man’s sick-room detritus. It may have been a sign of my lassitude at this time that sitting in those drugstores as the cash register rang up the sales I thought no more about it than that it ultimately takes very little to live, that the desert isle and the beachcomber are worthy fictions. I owned a radio myself, of course, and listened to the Morristown stations. I wonder why I never realized while I was there that they were the same as radio stations anywhere. Probably the station managers thought the shut-ins wanted the world on normal terms. But nobody does.

”I lived in the home with Miriam, in the staff quarters, which were really no different from the facilities elsewhere in the home. There were rubber treads in the bottom of our bathtub, and a vertical hand rail screwed into the tile. There were conveniences all about the room, closets deep enough to store wheelchairs and whirlpool baths, a customized feel to the special heights of the furniture, defenses against arthritic stoop and arthritic stretch. We slept in a double bed with hospital sides — I’m just a prisoner of love. There were no locks on any of the doors, not even the door to the toilet. And the coils of our hotplate were a bright, cautionary fire red even when the electric was off. I have not been entirely comfortable in any room I’ve lived in since. Once one knows the hazards …

“That my physical appearance did not certify me an invalid was no special problem. Many of the people there seemed as healthy as myself. In fact there was an entire population of the unscarred: men and women whose lameness was in the blood, ruddy six-foot fellows as hollowed out as chocolate Easter bunnies, their stony-muscled arms piled high with blood pressure, their wrists with racing, warbled pulse. We were — I speak now not only for the community but for myself as well (‘as well,’ ha ha)— weaklings, our strengthlessness imposing an obligation on others, so that it exerted its force too, as everything alive does.

“Miriam, who knew my real condition, labored to make my assumed one come true. She made tight hospital corners on the very sheets we made love on and kept a bedpan for me within easy reach of the bed, and there was always a full glass of ice water on the nightstand. She sometimes gave me bed baths, first outlining one side of my body with towels and pushing the towels against it tightly like one beginning a sand construction, then pulling my pajama bottoms down—‘Can you raise your hips a moment?’—the length of the bed, producing them from beneath the sheet at the foot like a minor trick of magic. ‘Turn on your side, please,’ she’d say. ‘Can you turn on your side?’ Then, arranging the sheet so that just my back and the upper part of my buttocks were exposed — I felt prepared, lovingly set up, set off, appetizing as vegetable-ringed meat on a plank — she would begin to rub my back with the warm, soaped cloth. She spoke as she worked, peaceful, passive monologues, her voice more distant than her hands which turned and rubbed and stroked, telling me not the jokes now — she had run out of jokes, though she was always careful to tell me the new ones her patients told her — but about her life before she met me.

“‘I have to help people,’ Miriam said. ‘I thought I’d be a schoolteacher. In Iowa you don’t have to be a college graduate. You can get a temporary certificate so long as you’re enrolled in college and earn at least six credits a year. A lot of teachers never graduate. They just sign up for summer school year after year, but I’ve known some who manage to save enough so they can take off every third year or so and maybe get their degrees in eight or nine years. Of course, those who get positions in Ames or Iowa City have an advantage: they can teach and go to the university at the same time. Those are the plum jobs, though. They’re very rare.’

“‘Mnn.’

“‘When I graduated high school I did teach for a year. Fourth grade. I liked it very well. It was very interesting and I enjoyed being around the children, but you know — when it comes right down to it that’s not really helping people, teaching school. I mean, kids aren’t in trouble, not even if they’re poor, not even if they don’t always get enough to eat. I mean, they’re kids, you know? Kids can play. I guess really the only kind of trouble people can get into is to be sick.

“‘I mean, their bodies can be in trouble. That’s really all that can happen to a person. I’ve always been strong. I’m very thankful for that. I love being strong. I mean, if we were to wrestle I’d probably win. I wouldn’t try to hurt you but I’d win. Here.’ She handed me the washcloth. ‘Do your private property.’ She giggled. ‘That’s what we call it. Or “family jewels.” Isn’t that silly? Sometimes we say that to the men.’

“‘You do my private property, Miriam.’

“‘Don’t be wicked, Marshall.’

“‘Miriam, you do my family jewels.’

“‘Now I’ve already spoken to you, young man.’

“‘Do my cock, Miriam. You do my prick. Please, Miriam, do my wang wang.’

“‘Marshall!’

“‘You said you liked to help people.’

“‘People in trouble. You’re not in trouble.’

“I turned on my back. ‘There’s trouble and there’s trouble.’

“‘No,’ Miriam said firmly. ‘Whenever I wash you down there you just come all over the sheets and there’s nothing left for me.’ She looked down at me and laughed. ‘Look at you. You’re just like one of the old men around here with their big old things.’

“‘Do the old men get hard?’ I was interested; I hadn’t known this.

“‘Of course they do. It’s a reflex, silly. There are some men around here who get an erection when I feed them.’

“‘Who? Who does?’

“‘Never mind. That’s a nurse’s confidence.’

“‘Who does? Who gets an erection when you feed him?’

“‘Never mind. You’ll never get me to violate my professional ethics.’

“‘What about enemas? Do they ever get one when you give them an enema?’

“‘Enemas too,’ Miriam said.

“‘Jesus.’

“‘Turn around. I’ll do you back there.’

“Gently she reamed me. When Miriam had finished one of these baths you could eat off me. Then we made love. Me and Nurse. Calmly, not like on the bus, but languidly and with long graceful glidings like paddling canoes in dreams. Afterward I lay back with my hands behind my head, and soon it was me talking. I told her about being on the radio.

“‘Mnn,’ Miriam said, for neither of us were much at discussion. There was give and take but it was of a certain kind, like the rules of service in a ping-pong game. I’d serve five times, then Miriam would. It’s the way people who will grow closer speak while they still don’t know each other very well.

“Miriam talked only when she was doing something — I suspect it was a habit she picked up from her rounds, a compulsion to fill up the silence imposed on patients whose blood pressures or temperatures are being taken. There was something curiously polite, not to say efficient, about this habit, as though language were one more service she rendered. For my part I seemed to speak only when spent, as after lovemaking.

“Miriam was making us some bouillon on the hotplate. She was naked despite the fact that there was no lock on our door; this, together with the domestic tour she made about the room — fetching the kettle and bouillon cubes, going to the bathroom sink for water— seemed very erotic to me, like the establishing of the story line in a stag film.