His iron will alone awakened Leonard Rosenthaler in the five-o'clock trout-colored morning. He was remembering two zebras in a meadow. He concentrated as he always did on detail. He had less than six hundred of his dreams on file. Butterflies. The male had mounted the mare in a broken A. His own erection strained against the sheets. Why was the dream cocooned in torpid somnolence when he was horny as the zebra here and now? Why yellow butterflies, the hills behind reminding him of Estoril, the sea spread out beneath the nets of ancient fisherman, mermaids gone long since. He made a mental note.
He flung the Amish quilting off, eager as always to start the day, inviting chilly April air to cool him down. Still naked at his window high above the Drive, he exercised, briskly swinging long hands, jogging nimbly in place, flapping wrists and whooshing softly as his hairy toes made contact with the Persian rug's thick pile.
He took the night-time cover off the cage of Danny the Red. He flipped the CD player on and began the Gieseking from the beginning. The "Variations" never bored. They'd made him whole last night over his supper for one, the Cabernet Sauvignon winking redly at him in the candleshine. He ran his bath, bemused with butterflies, with zebras in flagrante delicto. Was there a furry creature, owl perhaps, who flirted with him under lifted wing, cocking one eye up?
Standing at his bathroom mirror, self-portrait facing him, hair no longer raven, not yet gray, he noted that his cheeks were drawn. He scratched distractedly at blotches near his clavicle. What could they be? He rarely paid attention to his body, eternally enwrapped, as now, in character and plot, exploring old and new terrain for incident that he might use for Viscera, novel sixteen. He scratched again and even as his nail drew blood (one single droplet only, glistening like wine beneath the bulb, suspended like a daub of oil on drill) he realized he'd been itching for some days, some weeks. Not this severely certainly. How long? He thought to place it, wrinkling his brow. Wasn't it the very day that marked the vernal equinox, right after his seventy-fifth birthday which he had celebrated cozily with Ariel before she'd left for London, slipping from his bed at five o'clock? He frowned darkly at his image in the glass. He thought of Ariel and then of itch. Impossible!
He got his magnifying mirror from the drawer. It made the creases in his skin seem like rilles of the moon, the reddened skin itself like Bacon's drawn and quartered men, the drop of blood an antique garnet stone. Ariel? It made no sense.
Itch or not, his yellow pad awaited him. He turned the hot off, running just the cold. He'd have to calm the itch.
Wanting to disturb his regimen as little as he might he went to get his pad and ballpoint from his desk. He chose a Papermate from his Channel 13 mug, then shed his bathrobe on the scatter rug. The water was a shock. He stretched his long legs out. They looked like Giacometti limbs. The water soothed his skin, not even tepid, but not cold once you got used to it.
He always wrote his thousand words a day, as he had done for fifty years. It might take all the morning or all day. The words were not each one as true as Hemingway had urged, but some. He rewrote constantly and that reclaimed a lot. He reread what he'd written yesterday before the afternoon had died away into the dusk, and he had made his lonely supper for himself. For now he edited, deleted, made transpositions as he went, tongue between his teeth. His skin felt fine now he'd immersed himself, although once in the bath he really wasn't well-disposed to write, chilly water to his chin. A sense of sorrow struggled through sufficiently for him to be aware of it.
He let his big-boned hand with yellow pad appendage slip down the bathtub porcelain toward the floor, remembering Louise, not at the end last July, with agonized and puffy eyes, but early on, ten years ago, when she was radiant with loving him, abloom, and he in touch enough with feelings, if only momentarily, to love her back, redeeming time as though it was some fabulous pawned treasure from a shop. To love her back! To roll the years away and start afresh. But how delusional to postulate the possibility of change. Chameleons changed color but not substance, shape.
Tears gathered at his eyes. Not for Louise, the loss. No, she was irretrievable. The tears, if he could pin their source, infrequent as they were, might be self-pity, only that. The palpability of loneness. No, never loneliness, for he knew everyone. The tears were for an absent place. A void. Adventures, sexual or not, travel, interchange, were not equivalent with what he knew he'd missed, might never find, although he searched forever in his changeless way. And him a firm believer that each moment opened up another chance, for him as well as characters he brought to life. Not chance for change; for drastic change. But chance for movement, glacial though it be.
He took another bath at noon. And one at five. Writing, water dripping on the page, quarter-turned uncomfortably, he thought of Marat bleeding in his bath, fingers dangling manuscript two inches from the floor. Alone.
Weeks later when his itch required seven baths a day he called a dermatologist.
*
Altman had a reassuring smile. Bullous pemphigoid was not, at least, life-threatening, although it was indeed the auto-immune system itself malfunctioning. No, no, it wasn't AIDS or cancer, nothing like. And not transmissible. Even though the world itself seemed always poised to self-destruct (you'd think with communism dead what could its problem be, he said facetiously), progress in the healing arts at least was great. Steroids -- prednisone was one, made previously hopeless ailments treatable. Not curable, but still. The marvels of the new technology. A wonder drug.
The air of early May was vibrant when he came out on the sidewalk through revolving doors. The sun seemed only showy in the cloudless sky, the temperature an unseasonal forty-six. He'd left Altman's office numb with fear despite the reassurances. His body gone awry!? What did he know of anybody's body? His? He was ashamed that he had thought of Ariel as causative, chagrinned at the invariability of his response -- some sudden stress: his mind went panicked as a scrambled egg. Had Altman said incurable? He hadn't said quite that. The use of steroids sometimes brought remission and sometimes, although rarely, cure.
The slight breeze brushed his cheek as chill as death. It whispered: while you itched and shivered with the cold, felt pain, even if it was the pain of anomie, the pain of never marrying your pain, your emptiness, then you were still alive. And in his pocket were prescriptions that would keep him comfortable. Well, reasonably so. At least his itchy skin.
Hurrying against the wind he turned his mind to lunch. He'd beat Jan to the check this time. At eighty-one Jan seemed not to have slowed a whit, optimistic constantly. Why not? Amy, fair-haired Amy, his associate and lover, was dedicated to the pleasurable work of making Jan's world turn.
He'd been quite secretive about this stay at Doctor's Hospital. Just overnight he'd said. He'd been there for a week. And no reports. No telephone.
He'd thought it was outrageous, Jan walking off with Amy, (at the same time he had found Louise) ten years ago, at one of Ariel's parties by coincidence. Amy had been in her forties, still slight of build, with purply pupils verging on jet black, a way of listening that said she heard. It seemed she had found him, until Jan came along with an assertiveness that said I've lived the necessary years to know the person that you are, and then the party had expanded rapidly and he had met Louise. He'd thought about it often since. The difference it might have made.
What was it Jan possessed that brought the women in his life to glow? Amy was the eighth. The eighth? The eighth long-term. Every time they dined together, bicycled, played bridge, he envied both of them their calm assurance with each other, with themselves. He spoke of everything with Jan except this envy. The mystery of Jan's powers remained opaque to him.
Jan had started agenting with Langston Hughes, Laxness, Dorothy Parker, everyone important on the left. And him of course, Leonard Rosenthaler. Their candor with each other and their love of words, the passion of their politics, had moved them past the business aspects of his work. Now Rosenthaler was a name to reckon with. At least in matters literary, with fifteen books in print, translated into nineteen languages, and known beyond the narrow circle of the literate. Jan Wijdeveld and he had shaped and shared his career as well as his life, for all the fifty years.
His itch, Marat's disease, was something shameful, nothing to be shared.
He nodded to André behind the bar who seated him in the back at their regular table where he and Jan could talk undisturbed for as long as it pleased them. He was first of course, as always. The texture of the linen tablecloth was reassuringly civilized, as was this restaurant, this meeting place. No hundred decibels. No tables jammed together for the feeding of the boomers' kids, caught between their yogurt and their Carrie Nation anti-nicotine campaign. And his ailment? -- was controllable. Viscera progressed quite steadily.
And then for just a moment he felt a razor-blade of pain that sliced him, heart to gut. It was the married state itself he missed. Even bad as it had been. The feel of it. The possibility of linkages. He felt a welling up. The unplugged hole ached physically. He closed his eyes, permitting this violence of hurt to do its worst, then willed himself to move on by. The aching ebbed.
Unasked, André served him with his chardonnay. He nodded his acknowledgment of being made to feel at home. He frowned. Had Altman said no drinking with the prednisone? Well, it was only wine for heaven's sake and who could have a meal without a glass? He'd have to call and ask, but wine?
He gawked and sucked in air. Good Lord! Could that be Jan!? It couldn't be. That wispy fellow entering, propped up precariously by a cane, a black patch covering his left eye as if he were a mad imposter playing pirate king, braced against the slight incoming breeze that threatened it would shiver all his timbers into smithereens? Jan, the shaper of the literary landscape? Lover nonpareil? World traveler? Good Lord. Not Jan. It hadn't been three weeks ago he'd seen him last. How shaky was the Universe.
Jan craned his neck about, nodded to André for help, thin hair almost white, progress tenuous, urged blindly toward the back, his probing nose lifted so his good right eye might see, and then he spotted Leonard and could make his careful way.
Leonard had already risen with his arms outstretched. "Dear friend," he gulped and folded Jan against him, Jan shorter by a head, Leonard feeling for the first time that it was a loose-constructed bag of bones he held, bones as light as of some slender quail, this man, this powerhouse.
Jan hugged him, cane and all, patting at his back with a free left hand. André returned with a glass of Liebfrauenstift for Jan. He seated them.
"Jan! What's happened to you, Jan!? Amy said nothing at all of this when we spoke. I had no notion . . ."
Jan seemed to have lost ten pounds or more. He concentrated dismissively on the menu with his right eye. "Leonard, Leonard. First things first. We order, yes? Today I have the Veronique, if grapes are ripe. If not, gravlox. And you?"
"Jan! What is the patch?"
"Dear man. I will satisfy your curiosity. But first choisi! Coquilles? Des moules? Their salmon mousse?" His tone was different. The style remained. The edge was gone.
"Salmon, yes. Before you get proprietary as usual -- my check today."
"No Leonard. It is I who pay. No argument. OK?"
He took Jan's slight hand in his, André writing as Jan gave the order in an accent richly spiced with equal traces of Walloon and Plattdeutsch, voice as dry as Moet sec. His cheeks seemed to have caved in, making his eye sockets more prominent. His eyes were silver-bright as though he'd taken drugs. His skin was touched with jaundice and with gray.
Jan raised his glass when André left. "To you, Leonard. The work goes well?"
"Of course the work goes well, dear friend. It's life that's hard. But you? What have they done to you?" Indeed it was a shock. His friend was old! Old! And he . . .
"Remember what Model telegraphed to Hitler from the Russian Front? The situation is hopeless but not desperate."
His heart felt weighted as with stones of prescience. "Hopeless? What? What's hopeless?"
"I. Me. I'm mortal, Leonard. Where's the news in that?" His smile was sweet, distorted now, the cheeks so thin.
As though he were already visiting a mortuary, his voice keyed low. "What is it, Jan? You're ill?"
Jan's gray right eye met his straightforwardly. "Ill enough. Leukemia. I have three weeks. They tell me four. Don't look so down, dear man. How many live the life I've led?"
No. Oh, no. Not yet, dear friend, don't go. Not now. Not when I need you most. Tears trembled at his eyes but didn't fall. How casual and how direct. How long have I before I follow you? "What are you saying, Jan, four weeks? They've got all manner of new wonder drugs. They have machines that pump the body full of brand new blood. There's chemotherapy."
"I know all that, dear man, I know. We knew the second day. But then they wouldn't let me go and I was prisoner."
"Prisoner? What kind of prisoner?"
"They wouldn't take my 'no,' Leonard. As though they were the rulers of my destiny. Neither my own doctor nor the hospital. You understand? I turned them down. I said I didn't want their help in reaching a decision. I said I had one of my own. I said that all of us, we have our private yes and no. I refused to them their understandable desire to prolong my life so they could study me. They freed me only when I threatened them. And you? You look peaked, as they say." He took a sip of wine, his gaunt hand trembling just a little bit.
"You turned them down!? How can you turn them down, Jan? This isn't some publisher's rejection, this won't do but try again. You turned them down? You're saying if you don't take steps you have four weeks? And what's the patch?"
Jan fingered the elastic stretched against the black. "Four weeks or three. I thought it was the eye. That's why I went to hospital. Leonard! Think of it as I do. Please. You've seen the victims of chemotherapy looking to scrape nine days more out of the bowl? I've lived a life. I'm mortal as the rest. But you, dear man. The work goes on. We need you in good health."
"I'm talking about you, Jan. You've told Amy? She's sensible. What does she say? We're supposed to let you go your merry way and die? Like that?"
Jan raised his hands, palms up. "Like what, Leonard? What can they gift me with their billion-dollar miracles? Six weeks? No, Amy says the life that's left, the will that's left, is mine and mine alone. And she accepts."
"Accepts. She accepts? That's it?"
André set their plates before them with his old-world flourish. "Bon appetit," he said.
Leonard seized Jan's weightless hand again as if to will some energy, some force to the argument. "What is it, Jan, your stubborn genes, you're Dutch?" he whispered fiercely. "I don't have a word to say? Amy? Only you?"
Jan's right eye blinked away a tear. "A word? Much more than one. But only about you, Leonard, not me. My decision was arrived at, when, oh years before this incident. No more on that, now please. We speak of you. You don't look well." He fixed his rheumy right eye on Leonard's face. "You're normally so fit, as if you warn diseases if they mix it up with you they have a fight."
Jan had made up his mind?! To die!? How could he answer Jan with his so-minor bullous pemphigoid? His insecurity got the best of him before he could prevent himself. "I do have something, Jan. An itch. Of no comparison."
Jan looked at him, his forkful of fish suspended. "An itch? To err and itch is human, no? They gave you something?"
"Yes."
"I trust them with such ailments of the flesh. But not with life or death. Ariel returns?"
"In June." He hesitated briefly. "I don't know how to take your equanimity, Jan. My concentration's blown." He sipped his chardonnay, holding on to life, the day. "I'll make a stab at normal conversation if I can, in deference to you. Let's see, this morning, writing in my bath at Viscera, I was considering a world in shambles, Jan, patched up with Band-Aids and yet the world's intact. You understand? Of course you do. We both were present when the edges went awry and the center could no longer hold. And it was possible, just possible, that socialism, imagine, socialism might prevail. Until the real world spent it six feet under, sinking it. New-fangled warfare, Jan. They may have found the means, the means. Computer chips? TV? Who knows? To keep the most of us unruffled in our beds while craters roar and spew and peter out in smoke. They have succeeded, Jan, in turning all our vision in upon ourselves. Racists in Belgrade, Jan. It's inconceivable. Remember in Blockade where Henry Fonda asks 'Where is the conscience of the world?'"
"Remember? Naturlich. John Howard Lawson wrote the screenplay. I was still then in the underground. Later I became his agent, just before the Hollywood Ten business."
"And yet with all my knowledge, Jan, with all, they've even affected me. My mind went drifting in my bath from all the hot spots of the world, kids killing kids you understand. I left the problems of the world to sort themselves and turned my eye inside to Ariel and me. There is some layer of myself that I keep scrabbling for, a layer where I wish, I yearn for something more. A deeper liaison. I've achieved its palest shadow with Ariel, Louise, Marie, the whole parade."
Jan pursed his lips. "To make a perfect union, nij? A plumber's join? But you are married to yourself, your work. There's no free end to hook you up. Don't look so hurt, Leonard. Surely this is known to you. This isn't some slander of the right wing press. It's your disease! We have to know our own disease, n'est ce pas? Hold it close and feel its heat? I have my own of course, just not the same as yours. Me, I’ve been too sybaritic always to be the brightest firebrand. Yet it’s brought me life. My wives still living send me gifts, all three of them, call me on my birthday, take some lunch with me. I say this not to boast. Too late for that. Versteh? You get good women, Leonard -- why not -- you're an attractive man. You bring them water, sun? You nurture them? You lift your eyes up off the page?"
As patent as all that!? Blind only to himself. "I haven't been without my deep companionships. My marriages have been of long duration. I welcome strong committedness. You know that, Jan." But even as he spoke he felt Jan's truth. He didn't let his lovers in. "What shall I do if you should leave me, Jan? No one knows me well as you, cuts through."
"Not if, dear man, but when. Three weeks."
The mousse with just a hint of dill was moist, delicious with the chardonnay. Outside the cold sun lit the world. Would he himself be strong enough to say goodbye to it with Jan's aplomb? Who'd weep for him?
"Leonard," Jan waved his fork. "I have a matter to discuss."
"Yes, Jan." Of course there was the business side of agenting, of rights, negotiation. Yes. Commerce even now.
"You remember still Ariel's party where you met Louise?"
"Yes, yes. Of course."
"It's ten years later, I apologize. Affairs have to be left in order, no?"
"Apologize?"
"We've spoken of it many times, Amy and I. She liked you then. Still does. I'm too aggressive, nij? I intervened. I shouldn't have. I've always been competitive."
"Jan, Jan. That's ten years past. And anyway you had a perfect right . . ."
"Of course."
"Then why apologize?"
"Because I die. I like it if you visit frequently the next three weeks."
"You make a match? A time like this?"
"Why not? Dear boy, what is an agent or an agency? A vehicle for change, for going on. You see I agent even as I die. I'm leaving her my business, so she'll be provided for. Just royalties alone will pay her bills. Our co-op doesn't have a mortgage on it. Your itch? Your concentration on yourself? Who doesn't have disease? Even Amy, Amy has disease. If you two make a match you'll know. I'm talking of disease, versteh? The painful ones."
Leonard put his hand on Jan's frail shoulder, committing to his memory this last one of the faces that his friend had worn. "And you want me in good health for -- Amy? My work? Three weeks you give me, Jan, to say goodbye to you. It is no time at all."
Jan put his fork down and took Leonard's right hand between his bony ones and looked at him. "Your work, of course. I talk only now about the most important thing. The life is what? Our work, just that. Work on self, on politics, on art. It is the lesson of politicals. The work is never done. Remember how Brecht testified, tongue in cheek, before the un-Americans who tried to corner him, rob his words of their significance, diminish him, his passport safely in his purse, his passage booked? A Pirate Jenny of his own creation, no? The East German Government that took him in reluctantly -- what could they do with him? He laughed at them."
Leonard took Jan’s hands into his own. "And you, Jan, do you laugh at us, your passage booked? You leave me here without a guide, with work that traps me in my skin so that the words come out, like natural effluvium, but nothing gets inside. You get inside, Jan, you. You will bereave us, Jan."
Jan smiled a crooked, patient smile, a teacherly farewell, the gaunt cheeks and the black patch luminous. "Not true, dear boy. We are resilient and amazing human beings, all of us. If you and Amy can construct again, I live. Perhaps she’ll break you out of jail. And when you lift your pen you have the gift to say what possibilities we have. We beings, yes? We blaze, each one, with genius, no? Unique! Quite beautiful. How always that is there. Lives end but death is nothing when the work goes on.
"We talk too much. I’m hungry now. Let’s eat."
This story was published by Eureka magazine Vol. 10, no.1, Sept. 26, 2001.
