Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 6

I t didn’t happen right away. Eddie’s white count held for another ten months before it started creeping up. Those ten months were good. I would go over to his apartment when school let out. Sometimes I would bring him dinner. He was trying without success to teach me how to play bridge. He brought me advance reader’s copies of the books he knew I would like. “You and Skip,” he said. “No one else.”

Later things began to tilt. Often when I came by, he was sleeping, or when we walked, I could hear his shortness of breath. He took my arm. One day over lunch, he told me that he had retired.

“You’re going to retire?”

He shook his head. “I did it. Needless to say, they pretty much ran me to the door as soon as I mentioned it. ‘Goodbye, Mr. Triplett! Good luck, Mr. Triplett!’ They’ve been waiting for me to give it up for years now.”

“But you love your job.”

“I do,” he said carefully. “I did. But everything comes to an end. I’ll keep editing the books I’ve been working on, maybe do some freelancing after that. No authors left behind. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Because I’m afraid you won’t be happy. Because I’m afraid this means you’ll die. “I’m surprised, that’s all. Give me a minute to catch up. Is there going to be a party?”

“Will Polly rent out the Century Club but this time decorate in a book theme? Will Skip give a speech about my wasted potential? Will there be a sheet cake in the shape of a book that all my former assistants will come to eat a square of?”

I told him all sheet cakes were in the shape of books.

“The answer is no, no party, and the going-away lunch is right now and you are the only person I’ve invited. In fact, I’m going to order a glass of Chardonnay to celebrate.”

“Does this have to do with your health?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “Things were so much nicer back when you were in the dark.”

“The dark is no longer available.”

“Well, I shouldn’t complain. If Polly hadn’t spilled the beans, I never would have met Dr. Ocean, and I love Dr. Ocean.”

Eddie’s oncologist, whom he had seen so irregularly since his first diagnosis, had retired some months after his last treatment, and Jonathan got him in to see a woman named Dr. Ocean who practiced on the Upper East Side. Her office was in a building beside a hospital. Jonathan thought it was the hospital Eddie should go to should a hospital become necessary in the future.

“In fact, I’m going to chemo on Thursday,” he said. “Are you free?”

“Of course I’m free,” I said, which technically wasn’t true but would be true by Thursday. I had not retired, but I knew how to take a personal day from school.

Other things had changed in those ten interim months. Jonathan and his sister finally finished emptying the house in Fond du Lac. Near the end, Bea found a heavy lockbox in the wall behind the hot water heater. “What even made you look there?” Jonathan asked when she led him to the basement.

She crouched down. “Look. There’s no mortar between the bricks,” she said. “I was going to put it on the repair list.”

They drove the box to a locksmith, who had to make a key, a production more costly and time-consuming than they had imagined. Inside were six pocket watches from the 1800s, two of them solid gold, seventeen gold coins, and a diamond solitaire that neither brother nor sister had ever seen before—a small treasure chest. “Which is why you don’t hire a company to get rid of the past for you,” he told me over the phone. After the house had sold, they used part of the money to take the trip to Norway they had talked about. They went to Tromsö to see the northern lights, swaths of bright green illumination arching through the night sky. They both agreed it changed their understanding of what the world was capable of.

When all of that was over—the sorting and cleaning and sale and trip—Jonathan was left with only our relatively tidy house to manage, and he paced around it looking for things to do. He cleaned out the garage and built a new set of raised beds in the backyard. He went through all the files in his home office, and the files on his computer, getting rid of everything that could safely be gotten rid of, but it wasn’t enough to occupy him. There was only so much winnowing a person can do. Then he got a call from someone he knew at the hospital in Bronxville, not two miles from where we lived. Their chief administrator had been tapped for a better job in Chicago, giving three weeks’ notice. The hospital’s second-in-command was not sufficiently commanding. What they needed was an interim head who could steer the ship until a hiring committee could be assembled.

Did he run to the hospital? Did he dance his way there?

“Don’t make fun,” Jonathan said, confiding to me alone that his plan was to make himself indispensable.

I told Eddie I’d pick him up at his apartment on Thursday.

“That’s silly,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”

I told him that’s not how chemo worked.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Trust me,” I said. “I’m picking you up.”

And I did. We took a taxi to the Upper East Side. I brought a thermal bag of drinks and snacks. I signed him in.

“Oh, this is nice,” I said as the nurse led us down the hall. Every patient had their own pod with frosted-glass dividers and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. The space was small but private, luminous.

“Even on a gray day like this, we don’t get complaints about the view,” the nurse said.

Eddie got into what looked like a dentist’s chair, and she brought him a blanket. “Watch me. I’m going to fall asleep.”

“You can’t fall asleep,” I said. “You have to keep me company.”

“You should get a hygienist,” Eddie said to the nurse. “People could get their teeth cleaned while they’re having chemo. Maybe a pedicure.” He wagged his feet back and forth.

“You’re ambitious,” the nurse said.

“I like to get things done,” Eddie said.

“Me, too,” the nurse said, and then she was gone.

“She’s off for the poison,” he whispered to me. He was careful to keep his voice down as the pod had no door.

I looked out the window at the light fall of February snow. “They could rent these out at night, market it like one of those tiny Japanese hotel rooms.” The pod had a small sink. There was a toilet down the hall and surely, somewhere, a shower.

Eddie agreed. “They’d make a killing. This is a very comfortable chair.”

“There isn’t room for the hygienist and the manicurist if the nurse and I are both in here with you.”

“Take shifts. I’m here for hours.”

Eddie’s was the last pod on the left, and while I hadn’t meant to notice, every patient in every other pod had someone with them. Everyone had found another person to sit with them through chemo. Not having any doors was the thing that made the design possible for the nurses who went in and out with their hands full, keeping an eye on all the sparrows. It also meant the people on the right-hand side of the hall could still enjoy the view. It was masterful. “The place where Buddy had chemo was nothing like this,” I said.

Eddie smiled. “Of course you took Buddy to chemo. Of course you did. What was that like?”

“It was one big room, all the chairs in a circle, all the nurses going around checking on everybody. Don’t get me wrong, it was great, or great for chemo. Everyone was incredibly kind, but some of the patients were so sick, and when I see a place like this, I think how nice it would have been for them to have had a little privacy.”

The nurse returned and asked Eddie to state his full name and date of birth, which he did, cheerfully, even though it was the fifth time he’d been asked the question since we arrived. “Edward James Triplett, May 2, 1949.” He held out his arm and she scanned his wristband.

“How are you feeling today, Mr. Triplett?”

“I have a smile on my face and a song in my heart.”

The nurse smiled at him. “I noticed that. No fever, no pain?”

He shook his head.

“In that case, I’m going to hook you up.”

Eddie didn’t have a port, and so the nurse started a line on the front side of his elbow. “A stick and a sting,” she said. I turned my head.

“What’s that called, that vein?” Eddie asked, admiring her work.

“The median cubital vein.”

“Well, now you’ve taught me something new. Median cubital. We come to chemo to grow.”

She got the chemo running, and when she was sure the line was good and Eddie had everything he needed, she left. That’s when Eddie returned to his question. “I was vague,” he said. “I didn’t mean, what was the treatment center like, though don’t get me wrong, I find it all interesting. I meant, what was it like for you to take your father to chemo?”

“Oh, that,” I said, suddenly flush with memory. “I loved it. Is that a terrible thing to say? I bet if Buddy were here, he’d tell you the same thing. We had such a good time. We’d never spent much time together before. When he first called to tell me he was sick, I don’t think I’d seen him in a year or more. I was in Newton then, and he only lived over in Gloucester.”

“He stayed in Gloucester?” Eddie asked.

“Born and raised and died. Aside from college and those few miserable years he and my mother were married, he was always in Gloucester. You remember the apartment he had when we were kids?”

“Don’t tell me,” Eddie said.

“Same place. He couldn’t care less where he was sleeping as long as he had a good bed and a washer and dryer. Laundry mattered to him. Other than sleeping and laundry, he might as well have lived on the boat. The boat was a lot of the reason I didn’t go see him more. He always wanted to go out on the boat, but the smell of the fish and the smell of the diesel exhaust and then whatever chop there was in the water always did a number on me.”

“I can see how chemo would be preferable to that.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Me? I’m fine.”

I nodded. “Buddy, too. Buddy was always fine. He had people lining up to take him to chemo, his brothers and his brothers’ wives and my cousins and other fishermen and the waitress in the diner where he had breakfast every morning. The fact that he asked me to go with him meant a lot.”

“Everyone was in love with Buddy Zabriskie,” Eddie said.

“The nurses ,” I said. “Oh my god, the nurses came over to check his line every two minutes. As soon as Buddy came in, they were all putting on lipstick. Who tries to pick up a guy with a port? It really was a sight to behold. All my life I’d thought of my father as an obligation that I wasn’t attending to. I felt guilty about not seeing him more. Come to find out my father was doing fine.”

“What was it he had?”

“Metastatic melanoma, same as Candy Fuller.”

“Oh, that’s right. You told me that.”

“He’d already had a melanoma taken out of his ankle. It looked like he’d been bitten by a small shark. He was fine for about three years and then he started coughing. The cancer had spread to his lungs, his pelvis.”

Eddie shook his head. “How old was he?”

“When he died? Fifty-four.”

Eddie and I looked at each other. “How had I not thought of that?” I said. I was fifty-four.

“If you searched ‘picture of health’ on the internet right now, I bet you’d still get a picture of Buddy Zabriskie. He was the man least likely to die young.”

“It’s funny, but when I was growing up, he used to tell me there was nothing healthier than working on a boat. He said your body stayed strong because you used all your muscles pulling in the nets and stocking the ice, and your brain stayed sharp solving problems because something you’d never thought of before was always going wrong with the engine or the nets or the fish. You had to be fast, use tools, have good balance on the slippery deck. He said fishermen always had friends, both the immediate family of your own boat but also the other people on other boats. Everyone helped each other out and would go looking for you if your boat didn’t come back. They all met up for a beer at the end of the day to tell their fish stories and the socialization was good for you and the beer was good for you. You stayed outside in all kinds of weather so you built up your immune system. And on top of that there were long stretches of nothingness spent staring out at the beautiful ocean, seeing dolphins and porpoises, maybe a whale, and that gave you a sense of wonder and maybe peace. I grew up thinking my father, who I pretty much never saw, lived some magical existence, and then one day I realized that fishing was hard, dangerous work and he was telling me a story so I wouldn’t worry about him drowning.”

The nurse came in to check the bag. “Still good?”

“I get to see you,” Eddie said. “I get to see her. What’s not to love?”

“Your friend has an excellent temperament,” the nurse said to me.

“My father,” I said. Buddy wouldn’t have minded that; Buddy, who was always happy to share.

She looked at us, one and then the other.

“Genetics are a mystery,” Eddie said.

The nurse nodded. “Do you want anything to drink? Coke? Ginger ale?”

“All good,” Eddie said. He waited until she was down the hall. “Did he die in the hospital? I hate the thought of dying in a hospital.”

“You’re not going to die,” I said.

Eddie laughed. “I hate to break this to you.”

I corrected myself. “You’re not going to die anytime soon. You’re not going to die in a hospital.” What was it about death that made people lie this way? I had no idea how or when or where Eddie would die; I only knew I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Like Buddy, I hoped that telling a story would make the story so.

“Buddy,” Eddie said, steering the conversation back.

I looked out the window. We were high enough up to see the East River, and yet the East River had disappeared beneath the low-hanging clouds. “He said he’d become an old boat. There’s a leak in the starboard, and while you’re plugging it up, a leak springs up in the aft, and you plug it, but then there’s water seeping up between the boards of the deck and you don’t know where it’s coming from, but the starboard leak is going again and then you’re not trying to plug anything, you’re bailing, and the pump chokes.”

“I get the picture.”

“Later on they’d found a melanoma in his brain, a small one but still, bad news. Then he got pneumonia from the chemo. His lungs were shot anyway. They had to put him back in the hospital then.”

“So he did die in the hospital.”

I shook my head. “Don’t get ahead of me. This is when Jonathan Fuller arrives. Well, we’d already met him a few times before that. The hospital in Gloucester was small. There were plenty of opportunities to run into the friendly administrator.”

“You must have looked like springtime to Jonathan, like wildflowers in a glass.”

I shrugged. “Hard to remember. Did we ever look like springtime?”

“Yes,” Eddie said in his great dental chair. “Both of us.”

I liked the thought of this—both of us—because I had known Eddie in his springtime, when he was beautiful. I went back to my story. “Once Buddy had pneumonia, once he was very sick, Jonathan came a lot. Buddy’s room was always full of family, my grandparents, my uncles, my cousins, all the fishermen in and out. As far as anyone could tell, Buddy had been happy with his life and had two regrets: he was sorry that he’d never been on an airplane, and he was sorry he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean.”

“Buddy had never been on a plane?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know it either. I guess the work on the boat never stopped and the money he made went back into the boat, so he didn’t go anywhere. If he took a vacation, he went to the Cape or he went to Maine and worked on other people’s boats for a week. He once drove his mother to New York because she wanted to see Jesus Christ Superstar .”

“You’re making that up.”

“It was the seventies. Anyway, that was Buddy’s one trip to Manhattan and he’d be the first to tell you that it was not for him. But he was sorry that he never saw the Pacific. He had wanted to go to Big Sur. That was his dream. He’d seen pictures, and he liked the name. So one day there were too many people in the room and I went to sit in the hall and here came the hospital administrator I would later marry, and I started talking to him. Did he think Buddy could make it out to California?”

A stricken look passed over Eddie. “Did he die in California?”

“Stop,” I said. “Seriously, listen. Jonathan said he thought Buddy could make it. He said I should wait until he was stronger, but he thought it would work. He said as long as I got a nonstop flight, I should be okay, which was good advice. I bought two first-class tickets, Boston to San Francisco.”

“First class?”

“You remember how tall Buddy was, and he had a lot of pain in his back. I couldn’t fold him up in coach for such a long flight. I had no idea how expensive it was going to be. Then there was the rental car, the hotels, all of it on the credit card. My grandparents and my uncles wanted to kick in, the fishermen wanted to kick in, but nobody had any money. Thanks to the Power of Positivity, I’d made it through college without student loans, and everyone I knew had student loans. This would be my debt. Buddy and I were having a good time being together and I wanted to do that for him.”

“So how was the trip?”

For two people who had spent their lives looking at the Atlantic Ocean, it was like nothing we had ever seen—cliffs and rocks and the crashing sea. “Beautiful,” I said. “Have you ever been?”

Eddie nodded. “A long time ago. I went to some legal convention in San Francisco with Skip, a full-blown holiday. We rented a convertible and drove to Monterey, Big Sur. I’m glad Buddy got to see it.”

I did not let my story be derailed by the thought of Eddie and Skip driving down Highway 1 in a convertible. I only regretted that I hadn’t thought to rent one myself. “The trip exhausted him, but he was so happy. They loaded him up on steroids and antibiotics before we left. Sometimes he would walk a little ways, but mostly we stayed in the car. There were places you could park and the view was unbelievable. One day we were right there looking out at Big Sur and he told me he’d always thought he would drown. He said it was hardly an original idea, fishermen always think they’re going to drown. You know people who drown, and you hear the stories about the ones you didn’t know, and on top of that you’re looking at water all day. He said it wasn’t that he wanted to drown, but he felt like he’d spent his whole life planning for the wrong thing.”

“Did you ever have a premonition about how you were going to die?” Eddie asked.

“Me?”

“The only other person in the room,” he said.

“Car accident.” I had never said that before to anyone.

He nodded. “Exactly. All my life I was sure I was going to die in a car accident. It’s like we beat the devil once, so it must be coming back around for us later.”

“We’re all looking for the death we know. I’m sure that Buddy went over the side of the boat a time or two.”

Eddie nodded.

“Well, Buddy didn’t drown in the Pacific. We had a wonderful trip. It was the single smartest thing I’d ever done in my life. He never wanted to eat, so I’d get a couple of milkshakes and bring them back to the hotel room. We’d lie in our beds and he’d talk and talk. Buddy had never been much of a talker, so the whole thing was a revelation to me. He told me about fishing and my mother and how they met and when they got married. He told me how bad he was at having little kids and how much it meant that I’d come through for him anyway. He was so tired by then. He was tired and he was happy.”

“How long were you out there?”

“Four nights. The hardest part was driving into San Francisco at the end, leaving him in the terminal with the luggage, taking back the rental car, taking the bus back to the terminal. I’d been with him every minute and I didn’t want to leave him alone. But when I got back, he was sitting right there where I’d left him, big smile on his face. When I think of him now, I always see him at the airport terminal, waiting for me to come back. I got a wheelchair and I pushed him to the gate. He said, ‘In my next life, I’m going to be a Californian.’”

“So he died when you got home?”

I shook my head. “What was it you said to me? Why do people always guess?”

“It’s because I’m nervous.”

I went on with the story. “Buddy had the window seat, and I had brought one of those space blankets to cover him up.”

“Are you kidding? Like the one in the Buddy emergency bag?”

“Buddy swore by those things. He got so cold once he was sick. He didn’t have any fat left. He wore that blanket in the car. I put it over him in the hotel bed.”

“I can picture him on the plane, this great big silver man.”

“Ten minutes after we took off, he was asleep, and every time the flight attendant came by, I said, let him sleep, let him sleep. Then I went to sleep. We were both tired. When I woke up, he was dead. We were still an hour, hour and a half out from landing.”

“My heart just stopped.”

“I had rolled up my jacket for him to use as a pillow and the jacket had slipped. When I leaned over to fix it for him—”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. He was dead. I mean, no one was going to save him. I was terrified if anyone knew they’d have to land the plane and put us off in Erie or Elmira or wherever we were flying over, and then what was I going to do? I wanted to get him home. My uncle Jay was meeting us at the airport and I knew he would help me.”

“So you just sat there?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. He died of a pulmonary embolism, by the way. They did an autopsy. He might have thrown a blood clot without being on a plane, but the plane certainly didn’t help. Leda says if I would do some work, I could probably get the whole thing sorted out in my mind, put the trauma in the trauma box and the grief in the grief box, but I don’t want to. Buddy’s life ended and my interest in being on an airplane ended at the exact same time.”

“Sure,” Eddie said. “You live in New York. There’s no place you need to go.”

“That’s what I think.”

“So how did it end?”

I thought about it for a minute. I thought of Buddy and me in a parking lot at the beach, looking at the waves. “It was sad. That’s all it was. When the plane landed, I told the flight attendant and she went around quietly and told the other flight attendants. There was no announcement. Everyone got off the plane in the usual way. Then two of the flight attendants came back and sat in the seats across from us. They were so kind. What you realize in a situation like that is not only are you not the first person whose father has died on a commercial flight, but they’ve trained for this. There’s protocol. We had to wait for the medical examiner to get there and pronounce him. The flight attendant asked if there was anyone meeting us and I gave them Jay’s name, and fifteen minutes later, there’s Jay. Once I saw Jay, I fell apart because he was crying and I felt so sorry for him. I gave him my seat and he sat down next to his brother. All their lives they’d been together, pretty much every day. The flight attendant asked me if there was anyone I should call, and I thought of that hospital administrator, Jonathan Fuller. Jonathan Fuller would know how to get Buddy back to Gloucester. Nine o’clock at night, a Sunday night, and Jonathan picked up the phone right away and I told him what had happened. He said he’d take care of it. That was pretty much it for me. In all the sadness and confusion, there was also this overwhelming gratitude. If he’d shown up with an ambulance and a justice of the peace, I would have married him on the plane.”

“People have no understanding of how love works,” Eddie said. “They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.”

I nodded. “Oh, the relief was huge. Jonathan got there before the medical examiner. I can’t imagine all the things he had to do to get through security, to get on that plane, but he did it. When the examiner came with the transport people, Jonathan said Jay and I should go down the jet bridge and wait, so we did. We just wanted someone to tell us what to do. Fifteen minutes later, they brought Buddy out. He was in a body bag on a rolling stretcher.” I shook my head. “Jesus, this was not a good story to be telling you at chemo.”

“It’s better than the story I told you about Mary Carter seeing all her dead relatives when we were freezing to death in the car.”

I conceded the point. “Maybe,” I said. “A little.”

“How did your mother take it?”

Sometimes I forgot that Eddie knew my mother, that Eddie had once been married to my mother. “Her head blew off.”

Eddie nodded. “That would have been my guess.”

“Really? It wasn’t my guess. My mother wouldn’t hear a word about Buddy. When we were growing up, we knew not to talk about him. That never changed. I might have said that he’d been sick, but I never told her I’d been going to Gloucester to see him. I certainly didn’t tell her I’d bought first-class plane tickets to take him to California. But then I told her he had died. I told her over the phone. Huge mistake.”

“Your mother never got over Buddy Zabriskie.”

“Are you serious?”

“College love, first love, true love. It was one of the things we had in common. I loved Skip and she loved Buddy. When Buddy came to see Leda in the hospital but he didn’t come to see her? It was awful. Then Skip came to see me in the hospital. She wanted Buddy to come back for her then. She wanted him to see how much she needed him.”

“Okay, maybe then,” I said, still not believing it. “But by the time Buddy died, she and Lucas had been married for going on twenty years. They had the boys.”

Eddie shook his head. “It didn’t matter. Your mother had traded down. Lucas Ekker was no Buddy Zabriskie.”