Right
now I’m eating bacon and eggs in a large restaurant in San Francisco. It’s
sunny, noisy, crowded—actually every table’s occupied, and so I’m sitting at
the bar that runs the room’s entire length, and I’m facing the long
wall-mirror, so that the restaurant behind me lies spread out before me, and
I’m free to stare at everyone with impunity, from behind my back, so to speak,
while little yelps and laughs from their chopped-up conversations rain down
around me. I notice a woman behind me—as I face her reflection—sharing
breakfast at a table with her friends, and there’s something very familiar
about her… Okay, I’ve realized, after staring at her a bit, quite without her
knowledge, that her face looks very much like the face of a friend of mine who
lives in Boston—Nan, Robert’s wife. I don’t mean it’s Nan. Nan in Boston is a
natural redhead, whereas this one’s a brunette, and somewhat younger, but
there’s so much of Nan in the way this woman moves her mouth, and something
about her fingers—her manner of gesturing with them as she speaks, as if she’s
ridding them of dust, precisely as Nan does—that I wonder if the two might be
sisters, or cousins, and the idea isn’t far-fetched, because I know Nan in
Boston actually comes from San Francisco, and she has family here.
An impulse: I think I’ll call Nan and Robert. They’re in
my phone (odd expression). I’m gonna call…
Okay. I just called Robert’s number. Immediately someone answered and Nan’s voice cried, “Randy!” “No, I’m not Randy”—and I tell her it’s me. “I have to get off the phone,” Nan says, “there’s a family emergency. It’s awful, it’s awful, because Robert…” As in a film, she breaks down sobbing after the name. I know what that means in a film. “Is Robert all right?” “No! No! He’s—” and more sobbing. “Nan, what happened? Tell me what happened.” “He had a heart attack this morning. His heart just stopped. They couldn’t save him. He’s dead!” I can’t accept this statement. I ask her why she would say such a thing. She tells me again: Robert’s dead. “I can’t talk now,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of people to call. I have to call my sister, all my family in San Francisco, because they loved him so dearly. I have to get off the line,” and she did.
I put away my phone and managed to write down that much
of the conversation in this journal, on this very page, before my hand started
shaking so badly I had to stop. I imagined Nan’s fingers shaking too, touching
the face of her own cellphone, calling her loved ones with the unbelievable
news of a sudden death. I rotated my barstool, turned away from my half-eaten
meal, and stared out over the crowd.
There’s the brown-haired woman who so resembles
redheaded Nan. She stops eating, sets down her fork, rummages in her
purse—takes out her cellphone. She places it against her ear and says hello…
—I left my breakfast unfinished and went back to the
nearby hospital, where I’d dropped a friend of mine for some tests. We called
him Link, shortened from Linkewits. For many weeks now I’d been living with
Link in his home, acting as his chauffeur and appointments clerk and often as
his nurse. Link was dying, but he didn’t like to admit it. Weak and sick, down
to skin and bones, he spent whole days describing to me his plans for the
renovation of his house, which was falling apart and full of trash. He couldn’t
manage much more than to get up once or twice a day to use the bathroom or heat
some milk and instant oatmeal in his microwave, could hardly turn the pages of
a book, lay unconscious as many as twenty hours at a stretch, but he was
charting a long future. Other days he embraced the truth, made decisions about
his property, instructed me as to his funeral, recalled his escapades, spoke of
long-departed friends, considered his regrets, pondered his odds—wondered
whether experience continues, somehow, after the heart stops. These days Link
left his house only to be driven to medical appointments in San Francisco,
Santa Rosa, Petaluma—that’s where I came in. Now, while I sat in a waiting room
and the technicians in Radiology put him under scrutiny, making sure of what
they already knew, I took out a pen and my notebook and finished jotting a
quick account of my recent trip to the restaurant and my sighting of the woman I
believed to be Nan’s sister. I’ve reproduced it verbatim in the first few
paragraphs above.
