George Mills Part 24

The boy was standing beside a door three rooms down. "Good," George said, "I thought I'd missed you."

"No, man. There's this Mercedes SL 100 I watching out for on this side. Joo see it?"

"No."

The boy shrugged. "Maybe they checked out."

"He says room service is closed," he told her.

"It's just as well," she said. "Everything is so expensive." She questioned him closely about their expenses, recalling each traveler's check she'd given him to cash, and demanding an account of how it had been spent.

"We don't get a good rate of exchange," she mourned.

They lived in waves, something peristaltic to their moods, reality pus.h.i.+ng them to the wall one moment and surrendering not to joy so much as to a sort of deranged confidence the next. He understood that their burlesque hope had its source in her pain's by now ludicrous remissions. In an odd way he had become dependent on Mrs. Glazer's morphine, remotely hooked on the woman's transitory well-being. He telephoned St. Louis only when she was without pain.

Also, he was still unaccustomed to himself in a foreign country. This was more difficult to figure, but it had to do with his horizon vision, his sense of a life lived within parallel lines. Ciudad Juarez was situated in the open end of a three-sided valley, a trough of drying world set down within the clipped, broken waves of the surrounding hills and mountains. These became landmarks and mileposts. More. They were the spectacle mien and proclamation of his distance, exotic and outrageous as a milliary column in a woods. Snakes oozed in the hills. Queer lizards turned their heads in strobic thrusts. He was where the mountains were who had lived on plains beneath unpunctuated skies. He came from there. He was here. He was here and not there. And lived with a notion of having doubled himself. It was not unlike what he had felt in Ca.s.sadaga when he was a boy.

She had started her treatments. After her terrible night there were no more delays. The curious dalliance was over. "It won't work anyway," she'd said the next morning. "Let's get going."

They wanted to keep her in the clinic annex for two days to administer calcium in an IV solution. The nurse touched Mrs. Glazer's hair lightly. "It will help keep your hair that pretty yellow color."

"My pretty yellow hair fell out. This is a wig."

George went with her to a sort of orientation seminar in the clinic's cafeteria. They sat with other patients in the Eleventh of May Cafeteria. Father Merchant, at a rear table, was picking from a cylinder of popcorn. A tall man in hospital whites leaned against a stack of trays and greeted them.

"Buen dia. I'm Dr. Jesus Gomeza. So," he said, "I will answer all your questions about I'm Dr. Jesus Gomeza. So," he said, "I will answer all your questions about el grande el grande C. C.

"You know, not so long ago, people like you would hear cancer and think, Oh boy, sure death. Certain curtains. Even now. I know. I know what happens. I interned in your country. These white duds are from a Sears Roebuck in Omaha. So I know what happens.

"The tests come back. The doctor breaks the news to a wife, or to some take-charge guy in from Portland with a good vocabulary. The patient is the last to know. Listen, I've been there. It's this hush-hush, very top secret disease. The family c.o.c.ks around with each other for weeks. Then this one tells that one, somebody else overhears someone on a telephone, but no one's ever sure who knows what. Am I right? They're not even sure if Pop knows what's what, and he's the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d losing important pieces of himself on the operating table. They're getting ready to bury him and the whispering campaign still ain't over. 'Did he know what he had? Does he know that he's dead?'

"But you know, don't you? You folks know what you have, so we don't have to worry about that part. You've got cancer. Say it. Say 'Cancer, I've got cancer! cancer!'

"I don't hear you. Good golly, am I wrong? Have I made a mistake? Aren't these the cancer people? Father Merchant, you rascal, have you played one of your tricks on me? Did you bring one of your tour buses by? Are you folks healthy? You don't look look healthy. h.e.l.l no, you look like you've got cancer. Why, I can see the tumors from over here. I can hear the brain tumors rolling around in your skulls like marbles. I see extra lumps in the bras. I can almost make out some of the more difficult stuff, the c.r.a.pola tucked away in your organs like contraband. Hey, Mister, the guy in the green s.h.i.+rt--don't turn around, you're the one I'm talking to. What's wrong with you?" healthy. h.e.l.l no, you look like you've got cancer. Why, I can see the tumors from over here. I can hear the brain tumors rolling around in your skulls like marbles. I see extra lumps in the bras. I can almost make out some of the more difficult stuff, the c.r.a.pola tucked away in your organs like contraband. Hey, Mister, the guy in the green s.h.i.+rt--don't turn around, you're the one I'm talking to. What's wrong with you?"

"I've got a cancer," a man said shyly.

"Sure you do," Dr. Gomeza said cheerfully. "And the lady at the long table holding the flower, what have you got?"

"Cancer."

"I want," he said, "to see the hands of everyone who believes that the national medical a.s.sociations have conspired to suppress our so-called unproven treatments, that vested establishment interests are afraid to risk a head-on confrontation with the proponents of Laetrile research. Let's see those hands.

"So many? Tch-tch. The cancer's spread that far, has it? It's bitten that deep? No no, put your hands down. You're too sick to be waving them about like that. Your disease has metastasized. It's into your beliefs by now, it's knocked the stuffing out of incredulity. Your gullibility glands are amok. Tch-tch.

"So that's why you've come. Not to be cured but to stand up and be counted on the deathbed. What, you think this is a protest rally? You hate your doctors? You begrudge your oncologist because he made you nauseous? There's no conspiracy. They're good men. My G.o.d, G.o.d, folks, nine out of twelve of you came down here with their permission, with their folks, nine out of twelve of you came down here with their permission, with their blessing blessing even. I'm going to tell you something. American doctors are the best diagnosticians in the world. Those guys even. I'm going to tell you something. American doctors are the best diagnosticians in the world. Those guys know know what's wrong with you. And I'll tell you something else. If it were in their power they'd even what's wrong with you. And I'll tell you something else. If it were in their power they'd even cure cure you! you!

"Say it," he commanded. "Say 'Cancer! I've got cancer!' " "

"Cancer!" they called out cheerfully, "I've got cancer!"

"I've got something to tell you," Dr. Gomeza said.

He told them about Laetrile, how it was found in the pits of peaches, apricots and bitter almonds, and gave them a chemistry lesson, explaining amygdalin and how hydrocyanic acid worked against the betaglucosidase in tumors, and even listed for them the drug's pleasant side effects. He went over with them just what they must do, describing the regimen to them, a book of hours for their three daily injections, their course of special enzymes, the ritual of their vitamins, their diet.

"Look," he said, "we're going to lose some of you. People still die of appendicitis, too. And sometimes even a paper cut has been known to derange the system and the victim dies. So maybe you're out of luck. It could even be you're stuck with some fluke cancer which doesn't respond to fruit. It's possible. This is the world. Unexpected things happen. Go ask Sloan-Kettering. How many of their their guys go down?" guys go down?"

He wished them luck.

And when he finished they applauded. Even Mrs. Glazer. Even George.

Father Merchant finished his popcorn and left.

Now he was her visitor as well as her employee. She sat in one chair by the side of her bed, and he in the other. Since coming back from the clinic she had somehow created the illusion for him, for them both, that when he arranged a pillow behind her head or poured her a drink of the clinic's bottled water or brought her the El Paso newspaper or turned the channels on the TV set until they found a program acceptable to them both, it was as a guest, some loyal companion who might almost have been female, a bridge partner, say, someone who had served with her on committees.

"What are you having for dinner?" she might ask.

"I thought I'd go to that Mexican place again."

"Oh, don't say it. I'm fond of Mexican food, too, but my husband won't touch it. We almost never go."

"It's time for your injection."

"Could you you do it? The nurse the clinic sends bruises me so. I've never really been a delicate woman. It's cancer which softened my skin and made me pet.i.te. Just look at these legs and thighs. You'd never suspect that at one time I had the limbs of a six-day bicycle racer." do it? The nurse the clinic sends bruises me so. I've never really been a delicate woman. It's cancer which softened my skin and made me pet.i.te. Just look at these legs and thighs. You'd never suspect that at one time I had the limbs of a six-day bicycle racer."

At four in the afternoon they would watch a program on Mexican television, "Maria, Maria," a soap opera set in the nineteenth century, about an illegitimate servant girl l.u.s.ted after and badly treated by all the men in the benighted town in the obscure province in which she was indentured. It was the most popular program in Mexico, one of those shows that stops a country's business for an hour or so and encourages people to believe that they are partic.i.p.ants in an event of carefully resolved attention, their own lives temporarily forgotten in careless, throwaway sympathy. Mills and Mrs. Glazer had been watching for a week, and though neither understood the Spanish they knew the characters, and by reading the El Paso paper, which followed the plot with a daily summary like the synopsis in an opera program, they were able to understand the story.

"The president is watching this now in the capital," Mrs. Glazer said. "He is suspicious of Maria's new friend while the Minister of Internal Affairs plots against him with his most trusted generals."

"The Minister of Internal Affairs? His generals?"

"Oh, Mills, they are no fans of that poor, troubled girl."

One day when she was dejected she speculated that she might die before learning the fate of the characters. Mills tried to rea.s.sure her. "Then before I've lost interest," she said. "I could die while I'm still curious about that new one. What is his name?"

"Arturo?"

"Arturo. I may not be around while I still have questions about Arturo."

"Don't talk like that. You're feeling better every day."

"Am I? I believe," she said, "in life everlasting. I believe in Heaven, yet there are no dramatics there. G.o.d would not permit His angels to be troubled."

Mills was not at all certain he was correct in his a.s.sessment of her treatments. It was certain that she had not again had the kind of night that had so frightened them both, but her energies were low, and she was no longer up to the car rides she had at first been so intent on. He suggested that if she was still concerned about expenses he could return their rental car and take taxis whenever they went to the clinic. She told him she thought they should hold on to the car a bit longer. "I may feel stronger. We would need it to get around when I am well enough to give alms again."

Now he was giving her all her injections, feeding juices from the pits of apricots into her bloodstream, daubing alcohol across her once maddened flanks and stirred despite himself at the sight of her yellow, degraded hips. He knew he must be hurting her but she was unwilling to let anyone else do it. He didn't know why.

And now he was bathing her too, carrying her naked to the tub and lowering her into it like an offering in pageant. Her eyes were closed all the time he washed her, and she was the very type of humiliation, stoical, never wincing, patient degradation on her like a scar.

"I was nuts eleven years," she said. "In a private hospital with a small staff for the elegance of the thing. They couldn't watch you all the time. We did frightful things to each other. Soap my crotch please, Mills." And as he lowered the cloth she opened her eyes and forced herself to stare at her oppressor.

Because she believed in martyrdom. She hadn't told him this but it was the only thing that explained her actions. Because she believed in martyrdom. Saint Judith Glazer of Cancer. Because she needed holy bruises, some painful black-and-blue theology of confrontation. And that was when he realized she was dangerous.

"Those people we picked up on the bridge and gave rides to," she said one evening.

"Yes?"

"They were wetbacks."

"They were coming into the country, not leaving it."

"They were illegals. They go over for the day to work. The maid who cleans the room told me."

"I don't follow."

"I could drive to El Paso. I could dose up on morphine and take someone with me. He could use your tourist card."

Mills excused himself and returned to his room.

Where he hid, where he tried to figure out what to do. He remembered the times they had driven through the city seeking out beggars, showing their funds, flas.h.i.+ng their pesos like scalpers. And recalled the visit to the barrio, her lap filled with cash. She would be a saint and throw herself into all the trenches of virtue, poised as a zealot for the last-ditch stand with her ducks-in-a-barrel innocences and vulnerabilities. He was only beginning to understand the Turk role she had a.s.signed him, the barbarian and Vandal and red Indian possibilities. Stuffing money in his pockets, putting needles and syringes in his hands, her jaundiced c.u.n.t, bald as a babe's, making him privy to her weakness, her body's worst-kept secrets, a seductress with nothing left but the final, awful charms of earth and the terrible with which to provoke him. Leading him right up to the distant cusps of extradition and dismay, the very borders of flight and exile.

"I want," she said, "all the traveler's checks cashed."

"It's entrapment, Judith."

"I want them cashed," she said. "I'll need it in pesos."

"Sure," he told her, and brought the money to her, the heaps of paper with their spurious glaze of value, like stock certificates, like Eagle stamps, like lottery tickets and the come-on bonanzas brought in the mails. He didn't even tell her to count it. "That's twenty-five hundred dollars," he said.

"Yes," she said. "I've called the desk. They've agreed to take a personal check. They called my bank. They sent someone to their bank. The money will be waiting for you at the cas.h.i.+er's office. You'll have to sign for it."

"Sure," he said. She made out a check for fifteen hundred dollars. He fetched her money. "That's only four thousand dollars," he said when he'd placed it beside the money from the traveler's checks. "Do you really think I'd murder you for four thousand dollars?"

"Oh no," she said, "there's my rings and pearl necklace. There are things in my jewelry case."

"Sure," he said.

"There are my infuriating ways."

"Get the maid to do it. Call room service. Ask the caretaker kid. Sit parked in the car. Everyone in town recognizes it by now."

Because it was no secret anymore. And when she told him again she'd been crazy eleven years, he corrected her. "Twelve," he said. "It used to be eleven."

"No," she said. "I know you won't do it. You misjudged me, me, not I you. What's so disruptive to your imagination," she asked him, "about the idea of getting something for one's death? Cancer gives you little enough return on your money. Not like bludgeoning. Not like street crime or poor Maria's trusting betrayals. This is a Catholic country. No one here will harm me for my faith. Oh, Mills, they're not I you. What's so disruptive to your imagination," she asked him, "about the idea of getting something for one's death? Cancer gives you little enough return on your money. Not like bludgeoning. Not like street crime or poor Maria's trusting betrayals. This is a Catholic country. No one here will harm me for my faith. Oh, Mills, they're all all Catholic countries now. They pray openly behind the Iron Curtain. My options are closed off. There are no more frontiers. When I die there will be no arrows in my breast. I won't be torched like St. Joan or crucified on the bias like St. Francis. Beasts will never chew me. So where's the harm in flaunting my pesos or flas.h.i.+ng my jewelry? It's only a farfetched possibility anyway, too oblique a contingency that I might ever be killed doing good deeds. It pa.s.ses the time. And perhaps some bad man will take the bait, and G.o.d never notice that it was entrapment." Catholic countries now. They pray openly behind the Iron Curtain. My options are closed off. There are no more frontiers. When I die there will be no arrows in my breast. I won't be torched like St. Joan or crucified on the bias like St. Francis. Beasts will never chew me. So where's the harm in flaunting my pesos or flas.h.i.+ng my jewelry? It's only a farfetched possibility anyway, too oblique a contingency that I might ever be killed doing good deeds. It pa.s.ses the time. And perhaps some bad man will take the bait, and G.o.d never notice that it was entrapment."

"I noticed," Mills said.

"We'll leave the money lying around just in case."

She did. When he came into the room now it was always there, at the foot of the bed or on the sink in the bathroom in the way of the housemaids or the man who came in to fix the air conditioning. Only Mills took money from the strewn cash. For expenses. For the serums renewed and paid for daily and kept in a refrigerator in the motel's restaurant. For the El Paso newspaper, for Father Merchant, who had become a sort of dragoman, the sidekick's sidekick.

It was Merchant who brought the medical supplies from the clinic, Merchant who sat with him sometimes while Mrs. Glazer dozed.

"Apricot pits," he scoffed. "How could an extract of apricot pits cure a cancer?"

"Don't talk so loud," Mills said.

"She knows she's dying. The senora senora is a realist. But is a realist. But apricot apricot pits? Where is the realism in apricot pits?" pits? Where is the realism in apricot pits?"

"I know," Mills said. "You're going to say it should have been peach pits."

"Chemotherapy," Father Merchant said. "Surgery. Maybe a nice hospice. But she should never have smoked. She should have watched her diet from the beginning."

Mrs. Glazer opened her eyes.

"You shouldn't leave your money lying around, senora. senora."

"Oh," she said listlessly, "he knows about the money. He knows about my jewelry. Now I shall be murdered in my bed."

But no one wanted her life, and their life together-for now he lived with the woman more intimately than ever he had with his wife-had become relentless.

He knew the shape of her appet.i.te, the shade of her stools. It was extraordinary. He knew her past-as she knew his; he told her about the first George Mills, he described Ca.s.sadaga for her and the Mills who had intrigued with courts and empires, filling her in on how the family had bogged down in history, how it remained untouched by the waves of rising expectations that had signaled the rest of Western civilization out of its listlessness, giving her the gray details of a survival that was neither hardy nor valorous-but with her own governing, emergent la.s.situde, she had broken off her once ordered narrative. There were odd lacunae. She was nuts in one frame and securing a large dance band for her elder daughter's confirmation party in the next. He learned about the struggle for Sam's deans.h.i.+p, Milly's progress in piano. But what had happened to Judith, any coherent feel for all that had predated their introduction to each other on the strange occasion of his going to collect her condolence call, all, that is, that was beyond his immediate observation, or not pertinent to either her needs or her demands, remained privileged information. He was interested of course. She was all he had to fill up his time. And, as she herself had insisted, she had no secrets. If she had stopped talking, if she had stopped listening, it was because all she had to fill up her time was herself. She was simply too busy now feeling her way along the murky routes and badly graded switchbacks of her decline and separation from the world to have much time for him.

Meanwhile, though he did everything, there was not much he could do for her. Occasionally, in the cool mornings, Mills still carried her outdoors and bundled her in one of the lounges where she could watch the children playing in the water, holding their breaths, racing, playing Marco Polo. But soon she lost interest in even this pa.s.sive diversion and asked to be taken back to her room.