The greeting on her answering machine said: “You can all go to hell. All of you. For what you’ve done to me. I hope you all burn in hell.”
That’s not something you hear every day on an answering machine. A little scary. If it was playacting, it was damned good acting.
I left a message: “Rose, it’s me. How did things go at the doctor’s?”
Her own greeting I ignored. Hell behooves no comment.
I knew the greeting on her answering machine was meant for me. I’d been the last one to call.
In my columns, I sometimes hide coded messages for people. Messages which either reach the addressees, or never reach them at all. But that’s different. A newspaper column is not an answering machine.
Before my trip to Europe back in February, we saw each other about three times a week. The last time had been during a Carnival celebration. She wore a black mask all evening. We drew a lot of attention.
I found her pleasantly eccentric. And that was the way it should have been. If you’ve almost hit eighty and you’re still not eccentric, you’ve been doing something wrong.
One time she cried.
I asked her: “Why are you crying?”
“Because you’re so beautiful,” she said.
All feigned modesty goes by the board then. Funny, smart, ingenious. Sincere or not, I’d heard it from time to time and forgotten about it again.
But no one had ever cried over my beauty.
It made sense. Real beauty makes you cry, sure as slicing an onion.
People have good reason to spend more on being beautiful than on being smart.
To be is to be beautiful.
We should all take our pocket diaries and tear out the pages for each day that we weren’t beautiful.
When I got back from Europe, I noticed a change. She claimed to have seen me walking down the street a few times.
“I must have a doppelganger then,” I said. “I was in Switzerland, climbing mountains.”
She’d lost weight.
She said: “Love won’t let me eat.”
That love tears the bread from the mouths of fifteen-year-olds is fine by me, but love should leave octogenarians alone. Because then it’s called murder.
I began keeping a little distance, claimed I had too many deadlines to meet.
Her dentures didn’t fit anymore. That’s what you get when love tears the bread from your mouth, your dentures start rattling. We serve a cruel goddess.
I said: “I’m not a physician.”
In the middle of the night, about four o’clock, I found twelve messages from her on my answering machine, all of them passing along different recipes containing asparagus.
Eccentricity was becoming a nuisance.
Murder, all right. But I’m only willing to play executioner. Play, mind you.
She said: “You’re the best friend I ever had.”
Me, a friend? The best, but above all the last, the sole, the only remaining.
A cup of coffee at the end of the afternoon, I could slot that in. I said.
She also had a gift she wanted to give me. If I could come by and pick her up. She was feeling weakish.
Weakish, another euphemism. The cruel goddess was tearing her apart at the seams.
The gift: the contents of her medicine cabinet.
Thirty different kinds of painkillers, and a lot more than that.
“I can’t accept this, Rose,” I said, and laughed.
Between all the medicines was a jar of canned asparagus. I decided to keep that. Along with the mask she’d worn at the Carnival celebration, and a book from the Fifties on how to mix cocktails.
There was some quiet weeping again.
“If I had money, would you want me then?” she asked.
“Money’s not the issue.”
I waited for the unanswered question about what the issue was.
The question didn’t come. What did was a story about a dentist who had tortured her on purpose. She called his office a den of Satan.
“Dentists make mistakes,” I said, “but I don’t believe a dentist would purposely torture you.”
When I want, I can be the picture of reason.
Eternity, what an appalling concept.
That evening she called: “There are people walking in and out of my apartment. Could you call a locksmith for me?”
I mumbled something in protest.
She said: “I’m being tortured here.”
A torture session is more urgent than a deadline.
I don’t really want to see any more tortured people, not even in a museum behind glass.
The 28th floor. The door was wide open, but no one was walking in or out. The doors to the balcony were open too.
Rose said: “I’ve got uranium in my throat, I can’t swallow.”
The whole place was turned upside-down.
It was time for nine-one-one.
“Who are you calling?” she asked.
“The alarm number for the desperately infatuated.”
She could laugh at that. That helped.
A friend is a medic who isn’t allowed to prescribe drugs.
The alarm number turned out to be a kind of dial-a-joke.
“I’m here with Mrs. X. She says she has uranium in her throat.”
“Where’d she get the uranium?”
“I think it’s safe to say that this is a hallucination.”
Who was the one hallucinating here?
Success, whatever that may be, sees to it that other people occasionally come to visit you in your hallucination. And when other people come to visit your hallucination, it’s no longer a hallucination. Just so you know.
An hour later, the high priests of love arrived. Nice men in their early twenties. Attentive, what else is there to say?
They’d brought the police with them, just to be sure. Obviously they’d figured: uranium in the throat, must be a spy.
The ambulance ride was, on the whole, convivial.
Rose said: “The U.S. Air Force has been put on high alert. Between four and five in the morning, you can hear the jet fighters flying over.”
The high priests were busy keeping an eye on her blood pressure.
Bellevue Hospital it was, the psychiatric ward.
I didn’t have to say goodbye. The tortured one was whisked away discreetly.
All I had to do was answer a few questions. As to whether she had any family, who could say? I didn’t mention being the last one to call her and, seeing as I wasn’t hallucinating, I was allowed to go home on my own recognizance.
That Wednesday I had an appointment with someone I hadn’t seen for three years.
I was looking forward to it, and I wrote them: “I’m delighted to be able to welcome you to my hallucination. It’s clean here, you can eat off the floor. So don’t bother bringing anything.”
In the end I decided to rent a suite at the Sherry-Netherlands, mostly because they have an elevator boy.
Other people have hallucinations too, but theirs don’t come with an elevator boy. Never underestimate the competition.
Dinner was pleasant.
Lots of chitchat.
Three years ago, our love had remained unconsummated. The clock was ticking.
At eleven o’clock I said: “I want to show you something.”
The elevator boy did his best. “Can I help with your bags, sir?”
“There are no bags,” I said.
The suite made her sigh.
More chit-chat. At one-thirty, when I began to sense that time was of the essence, I slipped into a bathrobe.
“I’m so beautiful,” I said, “it makes some people cry.”
Isn’t it cozy, being in each other’s hallucination? Only mine isn’t a place you should hang around for long. It’s sort of drafty.
A little before four we brought each other, exhausted but entirely unconsummated, to the elevator.
Seldom have two people left each other as unconsummated as we did that evening.
At the hotel exit I said: “Melancholy is better than your body, but in the future I’m prepared to accept second best.”
I went back to the suite.
Sleep refused to come, so I called Rose. The greeting still told us we could all go to hell. A powerful message. Last words, especially that.
Then I heard it. The city shivered, shook.
I opened the window. Jet fighters were flying above New York.
Someone had put the air force on high alert.