Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“Yes. Oh, yes.” They were so close now that Jenny could see the separate springy dark hairs of Lee’s heavy baroque eyebrows, the faint scatter of freckles over the strong bridge of her nose. “Did you?”

“Yeah.” Lee moved closer, and first offered, then received, a long, soft kiss. “You can stay for lunch, can’t you?” she asked finally, moving back.

“Oh, yes,” Jenny repeated.

“That’s great. There might not be much to eat though, except bread and cheese. I didn’t have time to shop.”

“It doesn’t matter. I love bread and cheese.” Jenny smiled, and lifted her hand to stroke Lee’s thick, dark hair. I can touch her now, she thought. I can touch her whenever I want.

“There might be some tomatoes. Let’s go see.” Lee started for the kitchen, then turned back abruptly, almost banging into Jenny.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, I’m just going to put on the answering machine.” Lee smiled. “We don’t want to be interrupted.”

“Nobody’s answering either number,” Barbie reported, coming into the hospital room where Wilkie lay—no longer in acute pain but blurred, bruised, and exhausted by this pain, and by the many shots and tests and procedures he had endured over the past several hours, including one in which he had had to drink a glass full of thick, sickly-sweet, nauseating liquid chalk. It was the fourth or fifth time Barbie had tried to phone his wife, first at the lodge and then at home.

“I don’t understand it,” he said, sounding as if he were speaking from the bottom of a cold, foggy well. “Jenny should have been home hours ago.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Better,” he managed. Physically, this was true. Mentally, however, Wilkie was frustrated and enraged. Why was he still alive? What was the point of such agony, if it wasn’t the prologue to a speedy death?

“It doesn’t look like a heart attack to me,” the doctor on call (a small, skinny, probably incompetent young man) had said. “But I’d like to keep you under observation overnight, do some more tests, right?”

“Awright,” Wilkie had agreed, confused by pain and thinking, You’ll find out you were wrong. A mistake. If he wasn’t going to die today, he had better get out of here as soon as possible, before they turned him into one of those half-corpses that are kept half-alive in intensive-care units for weeks and months producing profits for a hospital. Hooked up to tubes, and a machine to monitor his heart.

And even if I do get out today, Wilkie thought wearily, it’ll be too late to swim. That means another entire day to drag through before it’s over. Again, as often in the past weeks, he saw Death retreating from him along the shore. He visualized him as a classical Ingmar Bergmanesque figure: tall, pale, stern-faced, skeletally thin, wearing a black, hooded cape and carrying a scythe and an hourglass full of dark sand. But that was wrong, he thought. Death was not retreating any longer, but turning to look over his shoulder, waiting for Wilkie to catch up.

“Is there anything I can get you?” Barbie interrupted.

“No,” Wilkie muttered. “Thank you,” he added, not managing to smile at Barbie, though he was, or should be, grateful to her. After she understood what was happening she had been reasonably competent. She had called a taxi, remembered that he would need his wallet and insurance cards, helped him into the cab, and accompanied him to the hospital. And once there, she had insisted on immediate treatment.

“This is Professor Wilkie Walker, he’s a very important, famous person. You’ve got to take care of him right now, right now!” she had more or less screamed at the emergency-room staff, while Wilkie, half-fainting from pain, almost unable to speak, slumped in a plastic chair. “If you let him die it’ll be on TV and in the newspapers. I’ll tell them all about it, and everybody in America who cares about animals will hate you forever.” And almost immediately someone had located a doctor.

If I wasn’t going to die, Wilkie thought, I’d do something for her, something for the manatee. (In his drug-blurred mind they were still merged.) A moving but scientifically sound essay in the Atlantic, say. Something that would counteract the public disregard for ugly endangered species—nonphotogenic, noncuddly.

“... Or maybe Mrs. Walker went to the grocery,” Barbie’s voice said; apparently she had been speaking for some time.

“Possibly,” Wilkie agreed faintly, opening his eyes halfway. Again he felt irritation at his wife’s foolish, low-status job. It was clear that she was being exploited, paid not much more than their cleaning woman back home. Normally he would have strongly discouraged Jenny from working at any guest house. But, wanting her to form local connections, he had decided not to interfere.

“I’ll try Mrs. Walker again in fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Thank you,” he repeated. It occurred to him that seen from below and to the side, as he was seeing her now, Barbie Mumpson, like the manatee of whom she had reminded him, was what many people would call “cute” or “cuddly” rather than childish and overweight. The manatee of course was not overweight; it only seemed so because of its streamlined, fat-insulated shape. But so did seals and penguins, whose images were all over the museum and nature shops. With proper handling, and the right sort of illustrations—drawings, not photos—the manatee could probably be made to seem cute, even cuddly.

“I appreciate your help,” he added, realizing that something of the sort was called for.

“Gosh, that’s all right,” Barbie gushed. “It’s a privilege. I mean, really, it’s great for me to be some use to somebody, especially somebody like you.” She swallowed audibly.

“Mm,” Wilkie said, his attention beginning to drift again. A children’s picture book, with a preface for their parents; that might be a good idea, he thought. He could probably get something down tomorrow morning, leave it for Jenny. Manny the manatee. Or did that sound too Jewish? And you had to think of the PC angle these days too. Maybe Manny and Annie. He could already imagine the stuffed toys, though, thank God, he wouldn’t be around to see them. Jenny and his agent would find the right artist and the right publisher, and the profits could go to Save the Manatee.

“And I guess my husband had an excuse, in a way,” Barbie was droning. “I just kept messing up with reporters, and I couldn’t even give him a baby.”

Irritated by the interference with his thoughts, Wilkie gave Barbie an impatient glance that she missed because she was staring at the floor. “Maybe he couldn’t give you a baby; did you ever think of that?” he said.

“No, I—” She shrugged helplessly. “We were going to go for tests in D.C., but then everything got bad and I left. But it was probably my fault. I mean, everything usually is.” Her voice wavered. “So I was really low when I got here. But Mom says I’m just being selfish.”

“Selfish?”

“Well, yeah. Thinking only about myself, and not about Bob and how he needs me to support him and be there for him. A wife belongs with her husband, Mom says.”

Though in general Wilkie agreed with this statement, he said nothing. Why was Barbie telling him all this? he thought. Why did she imagine he was interested? If she would go away he might get some rest.

“Anyhow, Mom said if I didn’t go back it could ruin him, was that what I wanted? Didn’t I love him, like I promised in First United Methodist?” She gave a wet sigh.

“Mh.”

“So I said, I didn’t know if I loved Bob now, not really. But she said that didn’t matter, and it was my Christian duty to forgive his sins and cleave only unto him.”