The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [226]
“It’s crazy to hate a baby for crying,” Richard said, “but I really hate that baby.”
Ned spread a blanket over Richard’s lap, then tucked it around his legs. He sat on the floor and bent one arm around Richard’s blanketed shins. “Richard,” he said quietly, “there’s no baby. We’ve gone through the building floor by floor, to humor you. That noise you get in your ears when your blood pressure starts to drop must sound to you like a baby crying.”
“Okay,” Richard said, shivering harder. “There’s no baby. Thank you for telling me. You promised you’d always tell me the truth.”
Ned looked up. “Truth? From the guy who just told the Puerto Rico story?”
“Or maybe you’re hearing something in the pipes, Richard,” I said. “Sometimes the radiators make noise.”
Richard nodded hard, in agreement. But he didn’t quite hear me. That was what Ned and I had found out about people who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.
Two days later, Richard was admitted to the hospital with a high fever, and went into a coma from which he never awoke. His brother flew to Boston that night, to be with him. His godson, Jerry, came, too, getting there in time to go with us in the cab. The experimental treatment hadn’t worked. Of course, we still had no way of knowing—we’ll never know—whether Richard had been given the polysyllabic medicine we’d come to call “the real stuff,” or whether he’d been part of the control group. We didn’t know whether the priest from Hartford was getting the real stuff, either, though it was rumored among us that his flushed face was a good sign. And what about the young veterinarian who always had something optimistic to say when we ran into each other in the transfusion room? Like Clark Kent, with his secret “S” beneath his shirt, the vet wore a T-shirt with a photograph reproduced on the front, a snapshot of him hugging his Border collie on the day the dog took a blue ribbon. He told me he wore it every Friday for good luck, as he sat in oncology getting the I.V. drip that sometimes gave him the strength to go to a restaurant with a friend that night.
Ned and I, exhausted from another all-nighter, took the presence of Richard’s brother and godson as an excuse to leave the hospital and go get a cup of coffee. I felt light-headed, though, and asked Ned to wait for me in the lobby while I went to the bathroom. I thought some cold water on my face might revive me.
There were two teenage girls in the bathroom. As they talked, it turned out they were sisters and had just visited their mother, who was in the oncology ward down the hall. Their boyfriends were coming to pick them up, and there was a sense of excitement in the air as one sister teased her hair into a sort of plume, and the other took off her torn stockings and threw them away, then rolled her knee-length skirt up to make it a micromini. “Come on, Mare,” her sister, standing at the mirror, said, though she was taking her time fixing her own hair. Mare reached into her cosmetic bag and took out a little box. She opened it and began to quickly streak a brush over the rectangle of color inside. Then, to my amazement, she began to swirl the brush over both knees, to make them blush. As I washed and dried my face, a fog of hair spray filtered down. The girl at the mirror fanned the air, put the hair spray back in her purse, then picked up a tube of lipstick, opened it, and parted her lips. As Mare straightened up after one last swipe at her knees, she knocked her sister’s arm, so that the lipstick shot slightly above her top lip.
“Jesus! You feeb!” the girl said shrilly. “Look what you made me do.”
“Meet you at the car,” her sister said, grabbing the lipstick and tossing it into her makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her purse and almost skipped out, calling back, “Soap and water’s good for that!”
“What a bitch,” I said, more to myself than to the girl who remained.
“Our mother’s dying, and she doesn