A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [35]
By the end, Rolph wouldn’t speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in it.
Lou’s big bed with the crushed purple spread is gone—thank God. The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Lou’s tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Lou into clear plastic bags I try not to look at.
A dog barks. Lou’s eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse-butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.
So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I can’t help it, I start to cry. Rhea puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesn’t hesitate. Her skin hangs loose—freckled skin ages prematurely, Lou told me once, and Rhea is all freckles. “Our friend Rhea,” he said, “she’s doomed.”
“You have three children,” I sob into her hair.
“Shhh.”
“What do I have?”
Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies on computers. A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I’m trying to learn Spanish. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.
Three children. The oldest, Nadine, is almost my age when I met Lou. Seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line. “It was all for no reason,” I say.
“That’s never true,” Rhea says. “You just haven’t found the reason yet.”
The whole time, Rhea knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.
“I got lost,” I say.
It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she’ll say, “Forget the Spanish,” and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we’ll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.
The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Lou watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. “Haven’t been. Outside. In weeks,” he says, coughing a little. “Haven’t wanted to.”
Rhea pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital bed could cause an explosion. I’m afraid the real Lou will be outside by the pool where he lived with a red phone on a long cord and a bowl of green apples, and the real Lou and this old Lou will have a fight. How dare you? I’ve never had an old person in my house and I’m not going to start now. Age, ugliness—they had no place. They would never get in from outside.
“There,” he says, meaning by the pool, like always.
There’s still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a fruit shake next to it. The nurse-butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.
Or Rolph? Could Rolph still be here, taking care of his dad? Rolph in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if he’d walked in a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Lou yelling for me, “Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn!” Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I’d done by then.
In the mirror, Rolph’s chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.
And when it