Millard Salter's Last Day Read online

  Delilah had a gift for badinage, a contrast to Isabelle’s plainspoken earnestness, yet less edgy and caustic than Carol’s dry wit.

  “Can I say something totally inappropriate?” asked Millard.

  “If I say no, will that stop you?”

  “Honestly, yes,” said Millard.

  “No, it won’t,” replied Delilah. More sober now. “You’ll just find another way to say it. At a different time. Might as well spit it out and get it over with.”

  She waited. Patient? Coy? Opposite Millard, the ersatz clock stood permanently frozen along its tangent to midnight. He didn’t even know how to begin. Or whether he should. The notion that he’d fallen in love after six weeks seemed implausible—outlandish. It wasn’t as though he doled out his affections carelessly. He’d only said “I love you” to three other women in his entire life—and he’d walked down the aisle with two of them; he still wore Isabelle’s engagement ring on a chain around his neck. There had been a time, of course, before Isabelle, before Carol, when his eyes trawled for sex, when every woman between seventeen and forty had the power to raise his prick to full staff. Or, at least, almost every woman. But lusting was not the same as sincerely desiring—and if he’d ever had a genuine opportunity to play lothario, which he hadn’t, to cut in artlessly on the dance floor at Roseland or to pick girls willy-nilly off the beach at Coney Island, he’d have taken no pleasure in his conquests. His affair with Isabelle had been a fluke. An aberration. To his surprise, as much as he missed her, he hadn’t been particularly lonely since her passing. When Art Rosenstein in pediatrics had offered to fix him up with his widowed sister-in-law—once a stage actress of some repute—he’d demurred. So why did he suddenly feel flustered, like a fourteen-year-old in the back of a picture house?

  “You don’t consider this a doctor-patient relationship, do you?” he hazarded.

  Delilah’s eyes honed, ruts deepening in her brow. “Why would I?”

  “Because I am a doctor, after all. And I’m afraid I’m about to commit what in psychiatry we might term a boundary violation.”

  He paused, affording her ample opportunity to stop him. He’d never felt especially bashful around women—at least, not since adolescence; psychiatry had drummed the shyness out of him. If he didn’t turn heads on the street, he’d kept trim and held on to his hair. But at sixty-two, Delilah, who eschewed all makeup and lathered her face every morning in rutabaga extract, looked closer to fifty. Young enough to pass for his daughter. What a fool he’d be to disrupt her final months with unrequited sentiments. What a narcissistic fool. Yet she was right: He would find another way to share his secret, however noble his intentions.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  She laughed—a brief, warm laugh, as though he’d told a joke she already knew. She appeared more amused than displeased.

  “Not a good idea,” said Delilah.

  “Not a good idea why? Because you can’t love me? Or because you’re dying?”

  “Not a good idea because we each have a role to play. Like in classical Japanese drama. Noh. Kabuki. I am the dying woman. You are my gentleman guide.”

  “I’m sorry,” Millard said quickly. “I shouldn’t have.”

  She surveyed his face. He must have looked particularly hangdog, because she said, “My goodness. You really are falling in love with me.”

  “It was a selfish thing to say. Please don’t be upset.”

  “I’m not upset, just surprised. Flattered, really . . . .”

  Millard stood up. “Maybe I should go . . . .”

  “Don’t be ludicrous,” replied Delilah. “Oh, Millard. You’re a very romantic man—romantic in the artistic sense. Like Byron or Keats. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Carol called me a pipe-dreamer. Does that count?”

  To Carol, who’d been the first female executive at Bell Labs, everything that couldn’t be demonstrated with a scientific formula was a pipe dream. This included acupuncture, Reiki, yoga, even psychotherapy. You headshrinkers and your psychoanalysis, she’d once said to Millard’s former chairman, a celebrated Jungian. Overpriced astrology, if you ask me. A person might as well sit inside an orgone box all day. How on earth had such a bonfire of gusto and disdain—for his first wife had been an incorrigible cynic, not merely a vigilant skeptic—produced a son who fostered orphaned bunnies and couldn’t be bothered to wake up before noon? Isabelle had been a better match for him: less ambitious, more forgiving. And Millard had realized, maybe too late, that he required a lot of forbearance.

  “You know you won’t get a dime out of me when I’m gone,” said Delilah. “Half to my niece and half to the Theater Guild. It’s entirely settled.”

  “Please don’t think—”

  “I’m joking, for heaven’s sake. Jesus Christ. You are smitten. Poor boy,” she said, almost as though he weren’t present. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “Let’s just drop the matter,” said Millard. “Please. It was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Okay, but I do want to offer one last word on the subject.”

  “Yes?”

  Delilah’s eyes met his again—and he looked away. “One of the aspects of theater I’ve always loved most is its room for experimentation, for breaking rules,” she said. “What I’m saying is, sometimes you know something will be a bad idea, but you try it anyway.”

  Millard let his gaze meet hers. “Does that mean . . . ?”

  “Yes,” replied Delilah. “Why not? Just don’t get mad if I die on you.”

  NOW FOUR MONTHS had passed and she’d be dead in under twelve hours. Millard surveyed himself in the Louis XIV mirror opposite the elevators, re-skewing his necktie in puerile rebellion against Elsa, and after affording his neighbor a solid thirty seconds to dissolve into pedestrian traffic, he exchanged good mornings with the Armenian doorman and pushed through the revolving doors into the early morning din, en route to the IRT. Only it wasn’t the IRT any longer: No more IRT, BMT, Third Avenue El. Now the subways were all numbered sequentially for the benefit of tourists and nitwits. Referring to the IRT dated you—like calling the MetLife Building the Pan Am Building or pronouncing the second syllable of “Loew’s” in Loew’s Paradise Theatre. Another piece of his city gone the way of Schrafft’s, and S. Klein on the Square, and Harmony Bar & Restaurant. He recalled one glorious evening of his adolescence—he must have been thirteen or fourteen—when his father took the family to Lüchow’s to celebrate something (a birthday? an anniversary? Papa was always splurging!), and they sat two tables away from Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante. And today, you could ask every student in the entire medical school who Jimmy Durante was, and you’d get blank stares. What better sign that the time had come to throw in the towel? Good night, Mrs. Calabash—as Durante would say—wherever you’ve gone.

  So he ambled along 86th Street toward Lexington. A teenager from the Korean deli was hosing down the sidewalk; delivery bikes wove between lanes. Already the July heat steamed off the asphalt, percolating, menacing, but Millard barely noticed. He was momentarily living in an era of gentlemen’s bars and hatcheck girls, of Automats, of milkmen and icemen and piano hoisters. When was the last time he’d seen anyone hoist a piano? Hal Storch had told him a story—with Hal you couldn’t be sure if it were true, but it made its point nonetheless—about how he’d visited his son and new daughter-in-law in Santa Fe, and when she’d mentioned how much she loved New York City, Hal had grumbled that the city hadn’t been worth a piss since they’d torn down Penn Station. “They tore it down?” the girl allegedly exclaimed. “Why, we were there just last year!” Millard might have been the only kid on the entire Grand Concourse who hadn’t given a damn whether Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays were the better center fielder, but now that they’d razed the Polo Grounds for public housing, he felt bereft, cheated. Opposite the subway entrance, he purchased a bouquet of freesia and delphinium.

  “What’s the occasion?” asked the florist.

>   An obese, olive-skinned man of fifty in a silk shirt with a Nehru collar. Afghan? Iranian? His short forearms rested on his enormous torso, a cardiac tinderbox, but he beamed with the confidence of an Adonis. Millard recalled when the man had been younger, but not thinner.

  “Birthday celebration. Taking the missus to Lüchow’s.” A mischievous impulse seized Millard and he added, “We’re meeting up with my old friend, Jimmy Durante.”

  The florist tied off his bouquet, beefing it with gypsophila. “Jimmy Durante, the comedian?” he asked without turning. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Different Jimmy Durante,” Millard said quickly.

  He accepted the flowers and waited for the florist to tally his bill. The man scribbled on an onion-skin order pad with a pencil stub. “I used to love Jimmy Durante,” said the florist. “All those old-timers. Henny Youngman. Joey Bishop. You don’t know funny until you’ve heard Alan King dubbed into Bengali.”

  Millard suppressed his urge to ask the natural question: How had a Bengali florist taken an interest in Borscht Belt comedy? Not today. And if not today, never. But that was unavoidable. Maturity meant accepting the infinite expanse of existence, that there were many things one would simply never know or do. A few weeks earlier, he’d sat down after supper and started to catalogue them—a bucket list in reverse: how to play mahjongg, paint, juggle, read Attic Greek; wine; gems; caves; string theory. He’d never be able to quote Shakespeare or the Bible at any great length—not for want of trying. He’d never swim with penguins in the Galapagos Islands or feed baby lemurs in Madagascar, never know whether another Clinton or Bush was to be elected president, never publish his paper (yet unwritten) reinterpreting Winnicott’s theory of false selfhood. As July 15 approached, all of this seemed less essential. What mattered at the moment was an arbitrary date on the calendar: He’d initially suggested the day to Delilah as a joke—“I’ve always found birthdays morbid anyway”—and somehow that joke had transformed itself into a binding commitment. And now, riding the subway to 68th Street, he was going to fulfill his part of the bargain. What a strange creature I am, he reflected. Nearly two million dollars in investments saved up and still too cheap to take a taxi.

  On the IRT—the so-called number 6 train—Millard thought about Hal Storch. Ever the Freudian analyst, Hal had kept his progressive heart failure from his patients to the end. When he finally succumbed—six months after Isabelle’s death, just as Millard was regaining his sea legs—the task fell to Millard to inform them. Three hundred fifteen phone calls. Are you Alice Albertson? My name is Dr. Millard Salter. I’m a colleague of Hal Storch’s . . . . Are you Luis Arcaya? Are you Thomas Ardenhammer? One woman refused to believe him—warned that she’d report him to the 19th Precinct; another had threatened to jump from her balcony. Why on earth would I make something like this up? he’d asked the doubtful woman. If Isabelle’s death had fortified his belief in assisted suicide—“aid in dying,” as the Compassionate Endings folks insisted upon calling it—then seeing Hal Storch propped on four pillows, gasping himself blue, confirmed for Millard that he wanted no part in a drawn-out death of his own. Quit while the going is good. That was the winning ticket, his father used to say. Fortunately, as a hospital-based consultation psychiatrist, he didn’t have to worry about terminating care with any long-term patients.

  Delilah’s doorman, a burly Montenegrin, greeted him by name. If the Compassionate Endings folks had heard this exchange, they’d have choked on their own helium; at a minimum, his handler, a Hopkins-trained pathologist, would have suspended his assignment. (Millard still found the jargon that his sponsors used—handler, asset, cell—unsettling, as though these diehards had read Darkness at Noon one time too many.) At first, he’d strived to maintain some semblance of cover, sharing only his first name with Delilah, and avoiding visits that overlapped with her neurologist’s house calls, yet by week three, he’d listed himself as the emergency contact on her Do Not Resuscitate forms and recommended a pulmonologist in Tel Aviv to her niece. Once he’d decided on his own suicide, the whole Compassionate Endings protocol went to the wind: What was the point of maintaining anonymity if you’d be dead within months—or, now, by morning?

  “How’s Miss P?” asked the doorman.

  “Dandy,” replied Millard.

  He tried to give the fellow the benefit of the doubt—but how was Delilah supposed to be when she hardly had the strength to raise her forearms? With each passing day, Millard found his sympathy for these inquiries—curiosity, masked as empathy—ebbing. Okay, maybe that was too harsh: The doorman seemed a compassionate enough sort, and a far improvement over the weekday doorman in Millard’s co-op, bull-browed Barsamian, who had a knack for conveying tacitly, during every interaction, that his time would be better spent elsewhere. But did this fellow really want him to describe how frequently Delilah missed the bedpan?

  “Please send her my best,” said the Montenegrin. “Obviously, if she needs anything . . .”

  “I’ll let her know,” promised Millard.

  He was relieved to find himself alone in the elevator. One by one, he unlocked each of Delilah’s deadbolts and entered the apartment. By prior arrangement, she’d cancelled her private nurse for the day—some tale about how an apocryphal cousin, visiting from Philadelphia, would be looking after her. A lethal stillness hung in the warm air of the foyer. On the kitchen table, he noticed Delilah’s “library of self-extermination”: Derek Humphry’s Final Exit; George Mair’s How to Die with Dignity; a collection of bittersweet essays titled How to Succeed in Suicide Without Really Trying. Also a paperback volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. Atop the counter beside the toaster, like a handy kitchen appliance, stood the helium canister. She had paid for it in the end: $37.50. Death’s price tag. Just like the Hindenburg, he’d quipped—and Delilah had reminded him in her sandpaper voice that the Hindenburg had run on hydrogen fuel.

  He called out her name, announcing his presence before retrieving a vase from the cabinet and arranging the bouquet. Then he gave her a full two minutes to compose herself—following the second hand on his watch—before advancing up the railroad hallway into the sitting room. Delilah had once staged table readings for emerging playwrights in this space, including one at which a newly divorced Jason Robards signed an actress’s bare thigh with a fountain pen; now she lay at a seventy-degree angle on a hospital bed, angelic in the early morning light. She’d slept in her velour dressing gown with the cherry blossom print, a lover’s gift from a Japanese set designer. (One of countless lovers—dozens? scores?—of which he’d be the valedictorian. He’d mustered the audacity to ask how many, but she’d just laughed coquettishly and replied, “A lady never turns down quality.”) Oleander-scented candles flickered on the bedside table, masking the nascent odor of human decay. Shadows rolled like ghost ships along the plaster. With considerable effort, Delilah remained able to self-transition from the therapeutic mattress to the motorized chair, but over the past week, she’d fallen twice. The queen-sized bed in the adjoining room, where they’d first made love, had long been surrendered to boxes of adult diapers and cases of puréed baby food. A second childhood lacking the only solace of the original: hope.

  That first night together in bed—there had been nearly forty, all told—Delilah had already had difficulty unfastening her skirt. She’d shared a joke as a stalling tactic to cover her ineptitude. “So Wilbur is in a nursing home, but at the age of ninety-nine, he still has certain urges,” she’d said with false cheer. While she spoke, she fumbled with the buttons. “One afternoon, chatting with ninety-eight-year-old Edna, he explains how much he misses the feel of a woman’s hands on his member . . . and not having had sex in four decades, Edna readily agrees to cradle Little Wilbur. This goes on for several months, until one day Edna walks into the nursing home garden and discovers her roommate, Gertrude, clutching the old man’s organ.” By now, Delilah’s face had flushed with frustration. “ ‘You two-timer! How could you do this to me?’ Edn
a demands. ‘What does she have that I don’t have?’ Wilbur smiles sheepishly and answers, ‘Parkinson’s.’ ” As she delivered the punch line, Delilah’s own hands dropped to her side, her fingers useless as hams. “Damn these buttons,” she cried. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  Millard had the skirt unfastened in an instant. “Next time, you should get yourself a funny disease like Parkinson’s,” he’d said. “Something you can laugh about.”

  “Next time, I’m going to get something contagious,” she’d rejoined, “so I can pass along a memento to my enemies before I go.”

  A desperation clung to their lovemaking, as though Delilah’s impending demise added a teenage urgency to each caress. Also a candor. No room for promises, expectations. No question of whether they would formalize their arrangement. The idea of proposing to her had crossed his mind in the final weeks, but to what purpose? A marriage license would be a windfall for the probate lawyers, nothing more. (He couldn’t even consult his college roommate, Art Hallam, who’d written his will pro bono, because Art, that son of a bitch, had gone rafting on the Colorado River and capsized.) Yet over the past few days, he’d taken to calling Delilah “the missus” when interacting with the strangers who frequented her apartment: delivery boys, rent-a-cleaners, a Filipino manicurist willing to make house calls. How long could he do this, he wondered, before he risked a common law union?

  He set the bouquet beside the candles and settled onto the cusp of the mattress. Delilah reached for his arm and clasped his wrist.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said. Each word was a struggle, a minor miracle of tongue and voice box and palate. “I thought we said later . . . .”

  “I came to check up on you.”

  “To rush me, more like it.”