Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

Am I getting too old for this town? he asked.

No, of course not, she said. Don’t be ridiculous.

She was wearing one of her silky robes and it fluttered and fanned out around her as she sat on the arm of his chair.

I used to feel like I could ride this place like a cowboy, like an astronaut.

You still can. You still do.

I felt young until about ten minutes ago, he said.

You are not old, she said.

Maybe I’m having a bad dream right now.

He started coughing again and it lasted a long time. Patrizia hovered beside him, holding the water glass. When he had finished she suggested they call the doctor.

I was right, he said. I am having a bad dream. And he stayed in the chair until she had gone back to bed and gone to sleep.

—

The next day he stood in the foyer, about to leave the apartment, when a light-headedness overtook him and his back seized up in pain. Neva was in the next room and heard a quick sound and she rushed to him. As he fell he reached and took hold of her head in his hands and began to explore her face. His eyes moved under heavy lids, darting, as he pulled her downward with him. He had her whole head in his grip as if she were some orb that he was clutching and examining for prophetic purposes.

When his curved back and then his head reached the floor his arms seemed to fall with a heavy weight and he had no choice but to let her go. That’s when she loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, saw his gray chest hairs rising and falling as if some wild creature were running over his body, making him shudder up and down, and called out to the housekeeper to phone an ambulance and kept talking to him, saying that everything would be all right.

It seemed inappropriate for her to get into the ambulance with him. She took a taxi and followed. The short trip to the hospital took only a few minutes. By the time they arrived Patrizia had been alerted and a little while later she was there, managing the doctors and speaking calmly into her phone, informing Alix and Jonathan and a few key people in Steve’s office. Everyone agreed that Poppy and the twins should not be disturbed while in school. And the whole world didn’t need to know. This was private. Neva would pick up the boys as usual and tell them then. In the midst of all the activity, confusion, and emotion, no one thought about who would tell Poppy.

As it turned out, the task fell to Neva. Poppy looked ashen, stricken for a few minutes, and then visibly set the pain aside, relegating it, Neva thought, to that place where images of Diana must live in Poppy’s mind. Poppy said she had a ton of homework and was going to a friend’s house to study.

—

Steve stayed in the hospital for several days undergoing numerous tests. After a while the boys expressed a desire to see him and Neva brought them to the hospital after school. Walking down the brightly lit halls Felix thought about whether his father would live or die, what the nurses felt toward various patients, how the doctors never seemed to get tired, whether it made sense for all sick people to be housed together or if it would be more sensible to keep them at home, away from other infectious beings, even if that meant less access to the newest medical equipment. All these questions swirled in his head and made his brain tingle as if each atom had its own thoughts and feelings, and he felt himself glide down the halls as if he were a cloud of spinning electrons, a force of energy moving through space, not one person with a coherent set of beliefs but many thousands of thinking beings magnetically connected, orbiting, intersecting, bouncing off one another and held together with love, fear, some kind of cosmic, invisible glue. Roman appeared to have an entirely different relationship to the present events, as if questioning the circumstances of Steve’s hospitalization or the nature of life in the hospital or life itself, for that matter, were not an option or, worse, a waste of time. Felix could tell that Roman viewed any situation as a playing field of power and movement, a landscape in which to make progress but not to dwell. Felix accepted their opposing points of reference and yet he could not help feeling that Roman’s way of looking at things was not only more useful but more in keeping with Steve’s perspective and therefore made Roman more like Steve and, as a result, closer to Steve. Although Felix recognized that Roman did not actually feel very close to anyone, Felix could not help the stirrings of jealousy and loneliness brought about by the sensation that his outlook on the world made him essentially another kind of person from Roman and from Steve.

Felix knew that his father appreciated his sensitivity, even, at times, valued it as a type of intelligence that elevated Felix and made him special, but he knew that Steve believed in a world dominated by people who thought the way Roman thought, who looked on life as a game, a battle, a theater of war. Felix admired his father, wondered in awe at his power, sensed in his bones and blood that Steve was the personification of power, neither good nor bad just pure power, a thundering wordless force. This left Felix unsure of how to view himself. What he knew was that his way in the world was all words and sensations and thoughts and feelings. He was not power, but at least he knew that about himself.

So it came as a shock and a nauseating, sickening blow to see Steve in bed, in a hospital gown, hooked up with tubes to machinery and what appeared to be a dangling water balloon, his face drained of color, his hair matted in parts, tufted in others, his big hands immobile on the sheet, his lidded eyes like drawn shades in an empty room. Felix felt the giant weight of his father reduced to a fatty, bony, wispy body, a ragged vehicle for breath. Felix stopped far from the bed, took everything in, and only then slowly approached Steve. Roman ran into the room and went straight for the window, drank in the view of the coursing river, and then picked at a fruit basket on a table, taking a handful of grapes whose purple skins fading to the palest green near the stems were bursting with juice and flesh and a muscular pull when he plucked them from their branch. Dad, can I turn on the TV? were Roman’s first words to his father that day and, as far as Felix could remember later, his last.

When Patrizia appeared shortly thereafter she spoke quietly to Steve for a few minutes, conferred with the nurses and a doctor, and took the boys home. Felix placed his hand on Steve’s wrist as he said goodbye. Roman grabbed a banana. Neva was asked to stay until Jonathan showed up, which was expected to be sometime in the next hour. Steve was improving, according to all accounts, and Patrizia seemed relieved and ready for life to return to normal. As she left with the boys she pulled on her coat and swung her bag with a quotidian efficiency that conveyed an impression of moving on with things whether or not Steve improved, as if this were the appropriate way to behave. Neva could not tell if this was a false front covering anxiety, a complete denial of how frail Steve seemed, or if Patrizia were simply thinking of other things, if for her, as for Roman, life moved on, today was a game, and sentiment was for lesser creatures. It was impossible for Neva to know. All she could be sure of was that her own feelings were stormy, rough, and just below her own surface calm coursed a charging current of fear flowing into determination. The room was now empty except for Neva and Steve. She sat in the chair by his side. He was breathing, resting, not sleeping, rising, falling, not dead, alive.

—

She sits upright, watches the day fade, a March light being absorbed into the room, the medical equipment, the paint on the walls, the sheets. It is as if the room is thirsty for light. Steve lies still, breathing loudly. On the other side of the barely open door feet hustle, doors open, conveyances are wheeled, voices lift and lower and laugh, occasionally. Once she turns around in her chair and glances out the window where birds are dipping and gliding over the molten river, a barge slides along, cars race along the veins of highway that line the water, helicopters — she has flown in them — lift off on this gray day. When she turns back around something about Steve seems changed: he is breathing slightly more heavily. He says: There is no mystery. Or: This is history. Or something that sounds like that. His fingers pat the bed. She stands up and touches his head, which feels the same. She looks over the various pulsing and beeping machines and they make no sense to her but nevertheless she feels that something is amiss. She pushes a button for a nurse. Should she leave the room and go searching? Then if someone comes there will be nobody to explain. Should she wait patiently for a nurse or doctor? Then what if they come too late?