“You want coffee?” said his attendant, Wanda’s friend Marta.
Karl shook his head. “Go, go,” he said. “Enjoy.”
Joy and Karl sat silently awhile. Joy pulled her hood up. She stood to dump the remains of the sandwich in the trash can, but Karl took it from her and tossed it like a basketball.
“You have good aim,” Joy said. “We never went to a basketball game, did we, you and I?”
“Baseball. You’re a dirty rotten Yankees fan. I remember.”
Did he remember the ride home on the subway, hand in hand?
“Are you still a dirty rotten Yankees fan?” he asked.
She laughed. “I don’t pay much attention to sports.”
“My wife was a dirty rotten Yankees fan. She died two years ago. It’s terrible, Joy. I know it’s terrible.”
They looked at each other. Why, his eyes were the same, the same eyes they had been when they were young, hazel eyes specked with green. There were tears in them.
“It’s so windy,” she said.
“My children want me to move.”
“Oh, that,” Joy said. “Pay no attention.”
But sometimes she did worry about her own situation. She did not want her children to send her away to a home. If she became weak enough … well, stranger things had happened. They watched her like hawks to make sure she was okay, and like a field mouse she scuttled and hid. Yes, I’m doing quite well, she would say. Nothing to report. They seemed to believe her. They wanted to believe her. They told her she was a good sport.
But the illusion of good sportsmanship was becoming more and more difficult for her to pull off. She did not want to burden them with her problems. That might push them over the edge. She didn’t want assisted living; just, sometimes, a little assistance.
“There’s so much paperwork,” she said to Karl. “In life.”
He nodded sympathetically, but he continued to talk about his son who wanted him to move to Rhode Island and his other son who wanted him to move to Denver. “I can’t move. I mean, look at me. I, literally, can’t move.”
The papers accumulating on Joy’s dining-room table had begun to haunt her, zombies from another life, infinite and unfinished though Aaron was finite and gone, as if the magazine subscriptions addressed to him were more important, more vital than he had ever been. He lived only in the gruesome form of debts and appointments, doctors’ bills.
“I have enough money, I have a nice apartment, I have Marta, who’s a godsend. Why don’t they leave me alone?”
“Who would want to live in someone else’s city?” Joy said. But she was thinking about the piles of papers waiting for her. The papers oozed across the table, an accusing slop of obligation, neglect, pressure, the pressure of a hostile world to pay attention and to pay, pay, pay. She was old and she was alone, and the papers took no pity.
“They mean well,” Karl said.
The papers had begun to take on a mythical quality. They were an angry god of chaos who never stopped reproducing himself, growing bigger and stronger, tentacled, menacing, choking her to death.
“I don’t understand how they pile up so fast, the papers,” she said.
“Maybe it would be nice to move away, just leave all the mess behind. I never thought of it like that.”
“Absolutely not,” Joy said. “That mess is your life. Don’t ever let ’em tell you any different.”