Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 8

E ddie went to the opera and he went to the theater. He saw the plays on Broadway but also saw plays in Brooklyn. He had memberships at the Whitney, MoMA, the Frick, and a twelve-ticket package to the Tribeca Film Festival. He attended lectures at the New-York Historical Society, the Center for Fiction, the 92nd Street Y, as well as occasional dharma talks at the Shambhala Meditation Center. Despite being retired, he continued to go to bookstores to see his former authors. He passed on dance.

I went with him to some things, or Jonathan and I did, and on occasion it was only Jonathan, who was happy to serve as a fourth in a Sunday bridge game that Eddie had been a part of for years. My husband and my stepfather played bridge. Skip played bridge, but he often canceled at the last minute, unable to get away from the responsibilities of Darien. Sometimes Leda and Steve met Eddie for dinner, and I wouldn’t hear about it until after the fact, and twice over the summer he took Steve and Leda’s son, Henry, to the Blue Note because Henry was cultivating an interest in jazz. Eddie was a popular man, and the few members of our family didn’t begin to fill his social calendar. We accepted the invitations that were extended, and we offered invitations in return. But I got to take him to chemo. I was clear about that.

“Okay,” he said. “Time to go.”

It was July again, and so there was nothing I needed to cancel. I picked him up at his apartment, and Jonas, the doorman, hailed us a cab. Eddie had a cane now, not a statement piece but the kind you buy at Duane Reade. There was a bit of a struggle getting it into the taxi, closing the door. “I have become a tri-ped,” he said.

“It is the natural progression of time.”

“Just think,” he said, touching my sleeve, “if you’d left me in that car to freeze all those years ago, none of this would have happened.”

The day was hot and bright, and it seemed almost funny to remember how cold we’d been. How alone. Forty-five years later we were stuck in traffic on the FDR, watching the boats slicing their way up the East River.

The sunny waiting room was crowded. In some cases you didn’t know who was the patient and who was coming along for the ride, but then there were the people who looked like they’d been assembled from a bone kit, translucent and bald in their wheelchairs, their sock hats pulled low against the air conditioner’s chill. We made our way through, found two empty seats.

“Will you tell them we’ve arrived?” Eddie asked me, and lowered himself into his chair. Taxi to the curb, across the sidewalk, into the building, across the lobby, into the elevator, out of the elevator, down the hall, through the door, it had exhausted him. I carried his canvas tote bag—a thick book, a yellow legal pad, potato chips with half the salt. I went to sign him in. When I came back, his head was tipped against the glass behind him.

“Not sleeping,” he said.

“You can if you want,” I said.

“Dr. Ocean knows exactly how long I can go before I start to wear out. Then she beats back the rising tide of white cells with her elixir.”

“She’s very good,” I said, and it was true. I, too, had become attached to Dr. Ocean, this place, our routine. I had become attached to Eddie’s life.

“I love her,” he said.

“Lucky Dr. Ocean.”

“I love you more,” he said.

“Then lucky me.”

“Tell me about your mother. Was she able to get a mushroom casket for Lucas?”

The casket, of course, was months ago. I had told Eddie the first half of the story, then failed to follow up. “She did! I don’t know who she paid off, but she did it. They told her it wasn’t going to be possible, and the next thing I knew, he was going into the ground in a hemp basket.”

Eddie nodded. “Every publicist should have the privilege of burying at least one of her authors.”

“Certainly the authors they marry. Oh! and she sold the house.”

“She told me that,” he said. “I asked her about the house. I didn’t think it was my place to ask her about the casket.”

“You’ve been talking to my mother?”

“We write each other notes, back and forth, back and forth. It’s like texting for people with large collections of stationery.”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” I said.

“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret. This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life.”

I assumed he was speaking metaphorically and so, metaphorically, I agreed.

“She says she might come to see me,” he said.

“Really?” My mother never came to see me.

Eddie, reading my mind, said she hadn’t been able to leave Lucas, not when he was well and not when he was in decline. “She has the flexibility now.”

“Meaning what, she would have been visiting you all these years if it hadn’t been for Lucas?”

“No. I think she’s feeling a little left out is all. If you and I are friends, then she thinks it might be nice if she and I were friends. After all, your mother was once a great friend of mine.”

I took a moment of interior assessment to see if this bothered me and found it did not.

We continued to wait. Chemo was running behind schedule. The people who were so much sicker, the ones who were already here when we arrived, they were waiting as well.

Eddie opened his eyes, checked his watch. “Late,” he said.

“They are.”

He smiled at me and closed his eyes again. “I appreciate the fact that you’re not going to the desk to tell them how long we’ve been here.”

I laughed. “Chemo takes as long as it takes. They can’t pull out one person’s line to get the next person in there faster.”

“Once upon a time, at my first chemo appointment, the friend who accompanied me, we need not say her name, lost her ever-loving mind when we were kept waiting. She marched back to the desk and told the woman that she knew people, lots of people, and they best see me right away.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The only people I know are other English teachers. We have no sway.”

Eddie was quiet. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“What? You didn’t say anything.”

Eddie nodded. “Thank you. I’ve made an important decision,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m never going to be angry at anyone ever again,” he said, and then he fell asleep.

It was another hour before his name was called. The waiting room for oncology patients was always quiet, unlike some other waiting rooms where they kept a television going with HGTV. In the oncology waiting room, people were less likely to talk on their phones. They conserved their energy so as to take inventory of the heart’s collected shards of glass. We were in the quiet car now, both the patients and their guests. I read the novel I’d brought while Eddie slept. Every now and then I put my hand on his wrist because I could.

The nap did him a world of good. When at last we were taken back to the hallway of frosted-glass pods, we were given the same room on the left that we’d had the time before. The coincidence made us giddy—giddy!—though only a hopeless person would see such a thing as a promising sign. Eddie handed me the cane and settled himself back into the dentist’s chair. “Let Jonathan know I’ll be keeping you out later than expected,” he said.

“I will.”

“I’ve been reading about impermanence. That’s the part about retiring that no one tells you, how you get to read any book you want to read.”

It was a different nurse than the one he had the last time, but right away we liked her just as much. One imagines generalizations could be made about oncology nurses: nice people.

“No port,” she said, looking at his chart. “Old-school.”

“I don’t come in much,” he said.

“Good for you,” she said. “And good for me. You’re keeping my skills fresh.” She left and came back with her packaged needle on a silver tray, her clear plastic bags. She rolled the vein with her gloved fingers until she got it where she wanted it. “Stick and a sting,” she said.

I always turned away.

“What about impermanence?” I asked once the nurse had gone.

“That’s all there is!” he said cheerfully. “Every single thing is going to end, so you need to get used to it. Then, when our time comes, we won’t get stuck in the bardo.”

“Eddie, what are you talking about?”

“The bardo ,” he said. “You know. You read the George Saunders novel. Apparently death can be confusing, and it’s hard for the dead person to accept that they’re dead because no one likes change and life is all we’ve ever known. The bardo is supposed to be a place of transition, but if you don’t accept your death, you get stuck there, which would be like getting stuck in Penn Station for eternity.”

Perish the thought of such a perishing. “I think you’d know if you were dead,” I said, but the truth was I’d never thought of it one way or the other.

Eddie shook his head. “Think of Lucas lying in the lilac bed. Do you think he accepted the fact that he was dead? Lucas, who still hadn’t accepted that the Positivity series dried up in 1985? Lucas, who, at ninety, refused to sell his five-thousand-square-foot house with no bedroom on the first floor because he didn’t like change? What if his soul is still out there in the grass somewhere, yelling for your mother to come get him up?”

“Then it’s good she sold the house.” Though it probably wasn’t the sort of thing that should be disclosed to potential buyers.

“You’re supposed to talk to the dead person right after he or she dies. Talk to them for a couple of days, keep telling them they’re dead. Tell them it’s fine, this life is over, and now they need to go.”

“Where was he supposed to go?”

“Forward,” Eddie said firmly. “It’s a whole process.”

“There are a lot of other things I’d have to accept before I could accept that Lucas is still in the lilac bed.”

“Sure, sure, but this is chemo,” Eddie said. “For the sake of this conversation, let’s say it’s true and this is the way the system works: no one wants to change even though change is the never-ending engine of existence. We are attached to our life, so we want to stay alive even though we know we’re going to die. Are you following me here?”

“I am and I’m not,” I said. I didn’t like where it was going.

“So by practicing nonattachment and recognizing impermanence, we might have a happier life, and we might have an easier death.”

“Are you telling me this for a reason?”

Eddie nodded. “When the time comes, I want you to promise to tell me I’m dead. Maybe ask Leda to do it, too. And Henry, get him to do it. There’s a kid who’d be happy to tell someone they’re dead.”

“What about Jonathan?”

He considered Jonathan for the part. “I’m very fond of your husband, but I don’t want him to think I’m a fool.”

“What if he thinks I’m a fool, telling you you’re dead after you’re dead?”

“It’s not like you go around the house saying it. In fact, I think you can do the whole thing in your head, like a prayer. You can be praying to me: Eddie, you’re dead now. Trust me. You’re going to be fine.”

An enormous sadness came over me then, less like a blackbird passing the window and more like a pterodactyl, its great, leathery wings blocking the light. “Has Dr. Ocean told you something?”

“This isn’t about my death,” he said. “Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s more about death in general. You can think of it as your death, too. Once we’re comfortable with death, we’ll do a better job with our lives.”

“What have you been reading?”

“ The Tibetan Book of the Dead .”

“Is it cultural appropriation to want to die like a Tibetan?”

Eddie looked at me sternly. “I want to do a good job,” he said. “I’d like my transition to be peaceful. I’m asking you for help.”

“Are you going to ask Skip and Polly to tell you you’re dead?”

Eddie ignored me. “This is what we’re going to do, right now, we’re going to practice. We’re going to tell Lucas Ekker that he’s dead and he needs to move on.”

“But you said it needed to happen in the first few days and he’s been dead for months now. The mushrooms have already finished him off.”

“This is about his spirit, not his body. Let’s assume his spirit is stuck in the bardo. Even if we’re late, we’re not going to do him any harm. And if we’re not late and he still needs guidance, we’ll be providing an invaluable service. I imagine that no one has checked in on his soul’s transition.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“Then we’ve wasted ten minutes of our lives that would have otherwise been spent sitting here. What difference does it make?”

“Okay,” I said, but I still had my doubts. “Are we doing this aloud?”

He shook his head and closed his eyes. “No, go ahead, start.” And that was that. He was already thinking of Lucas.

Eddie had gone to a Buddhism seminar two weeks ago, the same week Jonathan and I had rented a house in Wellfleet. We had invited Eddie to go to the beach with us, but he said no. The speaker was someone he was excited to hear, someone whose books Eddie had read. Now I couldn’t remember who it was. I looked at Eddie in his giant chemo chair, the slowly collapsing plastic bag suspended overhead from a silver pole, the slender tubing bringing the poison into his body through the median cubital vein. Do your work, I prayed to the poison. Beat the odds, I prayed to Eddie. And then, because I’d been asked, I went forward in my own imagination to find my mother’s third husband. I didn’t think I was supposed to see him, and yet I did. I went into the backyard of the Winchester house that same late April morning he had died. My mother was sleeping, and I was the one who went outside to see what had taken him so long.

Lucas was in the grass, both of his long legs slightly twisted at uncomfortable angles, his blue chambray shirt and cloth jacket soaked with dew on his left side, the side he was lying on. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open and his white hair—Lucas did have beautiful hair—spread across the black dirt at the edge of the lilac bed. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. I thought I would be meeting him in the bardo, but what did I know about the bardo, or about his spirit for that matter? I knew this man in this body. I knew this yard. That’s what I got.

I lay down beside him. This was my imagination, of course, so it didn’t matter that the grass was wet. All my life I’d kept a distance from him, standing back an extra six inches, twelve inches, from what might be considered normal. What had started as a child’s quiet protest became a space that stayed between us for the rest of our lives. He was never a danger to me. I just couldn’t stand the change. Now I looked at his skin, his nose, his eyelashes, which were white and remarkably long. I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’re dead,” I said to him. “You had a good death, a sudden death but it was fine. Everyone’s fine. You need to stop hanging around now. Mom’s good. She sold the house. The new people need you to leave. We all need you to leave.” I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Goodbye, Lucas.”

I wondered then if Buddy had gotten stuck anywhere, but I doubted it. Buddy loved his life, but he knew it was over.

When I opened my eyes, Eddie was watching me. “How was it?” he asked.

“Perfectly fine. Not what I expected. You?”

“I didn’t really know him, of course. The last time I’d seen Lucas, I was still at Houghton, so he was young then. But I told him we were thinking about him, and I told him he should go.”

“What about Mary Carter?”

“What made you think of Mary Carter?” Eddie asked.

“Death makes me think of Mary Carter. Do you think she was stuck in the bardo? Is that what happened to her?”

He thought about it for a minute. “I keep forgetting you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“You know what I mean, you knew of her. But the answer is no. That was a whole other circumstance. Mary wasn’t dead.”

I pulled out the bag of cherries I’d brought from home this morning. There should always be some small surprise. “But all the people who visited her were dead. Maybe they were stuck.”

Eddie took a handful of cherries, and I handed him a paper cup for the pits and stems. “I think she was about to die,” he said. “She was in the space between life and death when you can see the people who died before you. I guess that’s a kind of bardo, too. I should ask. I remember when my mother was dying and she said her sister kept coming to see her. My mother said her sister would sit on the edge of my mother’s bed and pat her ankle. ‘Everybody’s waiting for you, Rosalie,’ she’d say.”

“Well then, maybe it’s the same thing. Everyone needs someone to tell them they’re dead.”

“I guess that’s right,” Eddie said.

“So Mary Carter’s people got there too early. Or maybe she was about to die, but then the horse came back for her.”

“I told you that story when you were nine ,” Eddie said.

“I’m still working through the details.”

Eddie sighed. “I know. I think about it, too.”

A late start invariably resulted in a late end. When finally the bags had emptied and the nurse removed the line and taped a cotton ball into the crook of Eddie’s arm, we went out through the waiting room to find that even the receptionist had gone. At the elevator bank, Eddie held my arm with one hand and his cane in the other. I kept his bag with his legal pad and The Tibetan Book of the Dead over my shoulder.

“Put me in a taxi,” he said, then yawned. “You’re not going all the way downtown and then coming back up to get the train.”

I pulled him into me. “That’s the way this day ends, on the curb out front. Goodbye, Eddie! Good luck getting home.”

A woman in the elevator looked at the two of us. “She’s not letting you go,” she said to Eddie.

“Not a chance,” I said.

“I’m going to be fine,” he said.

“If I had my way, you’d come home with me,” I said. “And if you didn’t want to come home with me, I’d go home with you. I’d sleep on your sofa, at least for the night.” Eddie had a good sofa.

“You’re not sleeping on the sofa,” he said.

“Then the least I can do is take you home.”

“You should have been a lawyer,” Eddie said.

“Do what she tells you,” the woman in the elevator said. “It’s easier.”

And so we went back downtown together, Eddie and I, book and bag and cane. Jonas, the doorman, ushered us in. “Big day, Mr. Triplett?” he asked. That was how tired Eddie suddenly seemed.

“Long day,” Mr. Triplett said.

“But Daphne’s looking after you.” Jonas was a big man, probably my age. He was wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt, a black tie and hat.

“Daphne’s always looking after me,” Eddie said.

“I’m going to get him upstairs,” I said to Jonas.

“You’ve got company,” Jonas said to Eddie.

Eddie looked around the lobby, but there was only one woman there going through her mail, some variety of doodle waiting at the end of a leash.

“Upstairs,” the doorman said quietly.

We leaned against the back wall of the elevator as we rode to the sixth floor. There were no end of people who might have come to visit, but probably only one who had the keys. Only one person other than me who Jonas knew to wave up. When we went down the hall, the door was open or Skip opened the door—it was hard to say.

The living room was bookshelves floor to ceiling. Whenever I was in Eddie’s apartment, I was thinking about all the things I meant to read, though I wasn’t thinking about that now.

“I thought maybe you were dead,” Skip said, and Eddie walked straight into him, leaned against him as one might a tree.

“Everything was late,” Eddie said.

“You might have called,” Skip said. He was in his sock feet. In the dim light he looked considerably less foreboding. I wondered if he’d been taking a nap.

“I might have, except I didn’t know you were coming in.”

“That was the surprise,” Skip said. “I brought dinner.”

Eddie’s eyes stayed closed. “How big of a surprise? Is Polly here?”

“She’s at Mae-Mae’s. I told her I was coming in to check on you.” Skip put his hand on the back of Eddie’s head. “You got yourself a cane.”

“I don’t use it,” Eddie said, his face still leaning into Skip’s chest.

“I’m going to go,” I said.

Skip shook his head. I want to say he shook it sincerely. “Don’t go. We’ve got dim sum,” he said. “There’s plenty.”

I wondered if he bought food the same way Polly did. I told him I had to get back to Bronxville. Jonathan was waiting with dinner as well.

“Jonathan,” Skip said. “I liked him.” He was remembering our disastrous, long-ago brunch.

I tugged the cane from Eddie’s hand. He let it go. “Get some rest, okay?”

“She keeps saving my life,” Eddie said to Skip. “It’s not like this is our first go-round.”

“She’s a good one,” Skip said, and then he looked at me over the top of Eddie’s head, mouthed the word Okay?

I nodded. I kissed the side of Eddie’s head. Somehow in that exchange, Skip gave my head an affectionate pat. I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship. Looking at these two men leaning against one another in the middle of the room like a couple of support beams, one of them too tired to even go and sit down, I realized the answer was nothing. I knew nothing at all.

I managed to make it down in the elevator, through the lobby, and out onto the street before I called my husband. “Are you home?”

“Of course I’m home. Where are you?”

“Everything was late,” I said, and then I had to stop because I was afraid I was going to cry. I leaned against Eddie’s building, much the way Eddie had leaned against Skip.

“Daphne? Where are you?”

“I just got Eddie home. I’m on my way to the station. I wanted to tell you I’m late.”

“Do you want me to come and get you?”

“No,” I said, though honestly, I wasn’t sure if I could remember all the steps I needed to retrace to get back to my own life.

“Are you walking?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Okay, point yourself uptown.”

I looked at the street signs to orient myself. “Uptown,” I said.

“We’re going to walk until you see a taxi, then you’re going to get in the taxi and go to Grand Central. Or you can stay where you are and I can call you a car.”

“No, this is good. I want to walk.” How had I missed how hot it was? The day itself was hot to begin with, but now the pavement and the buildings were all releasing the heat they absorbed over the course of the day. At least the phone was cool against my cheek, the phone having spent the day inside my dark purse.

“When I would take Candy for treatment—” Jonathan said.

I stopped him. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Why is it not the same thing?”

“Because she was young and she was dying and you had two children and she was the center of your life.”

He ignored me. “I’d make sure they’d schedule her first thing in the morning because then it was easier for me. We’d take the girls to school and I’d bring her to the hospital. I’d go with her to chemo and they’d get her started, and then I’d tell her I needed to run upstairs for a minute. I’d tell her someone was coming in for a meeting or that I had a call to return. I’d tell her I’d be right back. Are you walking?”

“Jonathan, don’t do this.”

“Are you walking?”

“I am.”

“And Candy would always say, fine, go. I’d tell her I’d be right back and then I would talk to anyone who came in my office. I’d go looking for people to talk to so I didn’t have to go back down there and sit with her.”

“You did the best you could.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “Not even close. And the worst of it was her sisters could have been there with her, or her mother, or her friends. They all wanted to go, and I said no because I was the one who took her to chemo. Everybody knew that. I took her there and then I left her by herself.”

“If the goal is to make me feel better, you’re not succeeding.”

“It’s hard to show up for someone you love when they’re suffering,” Jonathan said. “I think I could do it now. I think I could do it for you, but when Candy was dying, I was too afraid.”

“I know.”

“You do know,” Jonathan said. “That’s what I’m saying. Eddie is sick and you’re there. Same way you were there for Buddy.”

“Wait, there’s a taxi.”

“Okay,” he said. “Go get the taxi. Let me know when you’re on the train.”

I told him I loved him in my most rushed voice and then ended the call. I did love Jonathan, but I didn’t want to think about the ways he had failed Candy any more than I wanted to think about the ways Skip had failed Eddie. All I wanted was to be one more person on this hot and anonymous sidewalk thinking about nothing at all. Except maybe Whistler. Whistler, who had exceeded everyone’s expectations.