“And?”
“There’s nothing on your floor, Mr. Andersen. Nobody coming and going. Nobody. No one in the elevator.”
“How can that be?”
“I guess nobody came to see you then, after all?”
“HOW CAN THAT BE?”
A rhetorical question, but dutiful Phylloh tries to answer. “It is an unusual time to pay a call.”
That night, he stays awake like a child waiting for Santa Claus. Like a child, he can’t go the distance. Like a child, he sees nothing.
Like a child, he still believes.
1970
AT THE AGE OF TWELVE, Gerry was much too old to believe in Santa Claus. But this, the first Christmas since his father had moved out, he decided to give his mother whatever pleasure he could by pretending to keep the faith. He even wrote a letter to put out with the cookies and milk, promised not to wake her up too early.
Only this year, he had no problem falling asleep and he knew he would have no problem staying in bed until a reasonable hour.
Christmas Eve had been a flat, gray day, with no chance of snow. The next day was expected to be quite cold, in the teens. He would be cooped up in the house with his mother, with no place to go, even if he did get the new bike he coveted, the one with the banana seat.
He was pretty sure he wasn’t getting a new bike and the cost was only part of the problem. A week ago, his mother had struggled for hours to secure the tree in the holder, at one point going into the kitchen to weep. But she had come back out, eyes defiantly dry, and managed to get the tree up.
Still, he couldn’t imagine his mother assembling a bike. What would he get tomorrow? He had, of course, taken a careful census of the presents beneath the tree. There had been one or two gifts large enough to be promising. And his stocking was always filled with interesting things.
When Gerry woke up and saw that it was four A.M., he was determined to go back to sleep, let his mother sleep in until at least eight. He wondered why he had awakened. Oh no. She was crying again. Or maybe talking in her sleep. More than once, he had heard her call out his father’s name at night, angry and bitter. At least, he assumed that was the Gerry whose name she called, given the tone.
Yes, there it was again. His name. But also his name, the man who had left them. She was saying it over and over and over. “Oh, Gerry. Gerry, Gerry, Gerry. Please, Gerry.”
He hated hearing this, but it usually ended after a minute or two. He never tried to interrupt because waking up a sleep talker had to be as bad as waking up a sleepwalker.
Only it didn’t end tonight. She sounded as if she was in pain. He got up and tiptoed to the hall. His mother’s door, usually closed tight at night, was cracked. Gerry put his eye to the gap.
His mother was sitting upright in bed, moving up and down, as if she were on a merry-go-round, but going very fast.
She was on top of a man.
She was on top of his father.
Her back to him, her dark hair loose and wild, she couldn’t see him. But his father seemed to look right at him. It was all Gerry could do not to scream or run. But he backed away slowly and went to his room, marveling that they were still going. He had learned about sex in school that fall, but he had assumed it happened quickly, requiring no more than a few seconds. And he thought that the man had to be on top. But maybe that was for making babies. Clearly, his mother and his departed father wouldn’t be trying to make a baby.
His mother’s voice notched up a bit. “Do you love me, Gerry? Am I the one you really love?” He couldn’t make out his father’s answer, a low rumble.
He put his pillow over his head and, somehow, went back to sleep. When he woke to the cold house—their old oil burner was no match for temperatures in the teens—his mother was already up and dressed, her bed made.
She was in the kitchen. Alone, thank God. It was a dream. It had to be a dream. What a strange, awful dream to have about one’s mother.
“Look at you, slugabed. I guess you want to get right to the presents before breakfast. Just let me get my coffee.”
When there had been three of them, they had each taken a turn opening a gift. This year, the first with just two, Gerry started by giving his mother his present for her, a boxed set of perfume and moisturizer from Hutzler’s.
“Now you pick.”
He knew which of the two big boxes he wanted to open first and was about to grab it when he noticed a third box, even bigger than the other two.
“Where did this come from?”
“Read the card,” his mother said.
To Gerry, from Dad.
“When did this get here?”
“Oh, your father had it sent weeks ago.”
“When, though? I get home from school before you come home from work. I’m the one who signs for packages.”
His mother paused and he saw, in the pause, that she was deciding which lie to tell.
“He sent it to Dr. Papadakis’s office, knowing what a nosy parker you are. It’s been hidden in the basement for weeks. I put it out last night,” she said. “After you went to bed. Your old mother still has a few tricks up her sleeve.”
Oh, don’t you just. Could it have been someone else in his mother’s bed? Another man, not his father? Maybe another woman, too. There had been two strangers in his mother’s bed while she was readying the house for the morning. That made more sense than what he thought he had seen.
His father’s gift to him was a tool kit, but a babyish one, insulting. Gerry was already using real tools, the tools his father had left behind, learning to make small repairs as the house needed them. Sitting there with this toy in his lap, knowing he was long past toys, Gerry decided his next project would be going to the hardware store in Towson and buying a chain lock for the front door, which would keep him and his mother safe at night, while making it impossible for anyone to come and go.
March 8
AND SO, at the age of sixty-one, Gerry enjoys—no, that’s the wrong verb—Gerry receives his first actual house call from a doctor. It has not been easy to arrange. In order to find a specialist who is willing to see him in his home, he first had to join a so-called concierge medical practice, talk to the doctor, and then ask for that doctor’s help in procuring a neurogerontologist, one who is willing to travel to him. The head of the practice asks him a lot of questions about his pain medications, seems far more interested in those than his mother’s Alzheimer’s. But, ultimately, she finds him a specialist.
The specialist has a name, Andre Bevington, that could be lifted from the pages of a romance novel—and a face to match. He is beautiful, there is no other word for it. Devastatingly beautiful, there is no other adverb for it. Gerry has never been attracted to men, was never comfortable with the way Luke joked about corrupting him. Complimented, but not comfortable. But this man is like a work of art. No—in portrait form, his beauty would be crass, not unlike that portrait of Donald Trump that Trump bought for his own country club, using his foundation’s fund. In art, this kind of perfection is tacky. But as a work of nature, it is something at which one can only marvel. Gerry finds himself thinking, Of course you work with geriatric neurological issues. If you worked with age peers, everyone would fall in love with you. Good lord, if you had been a gynecologist, women would be begging to climb into those stirrups three times a year. A connoisseur of beautiful women—isn’t every straight man?—Gerry has never really spent much time thinking about beautiful men. But this! What’s it like to walk around inside such a body? Does the doctor know? How could he not? Is he grateful? He’d better be.
“Andre,” he says, holding out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”