Vladimir(73)
But on the day of his release, it is sunless, cool, and spritzing rain, the final gasp of the dismal upstate New York spring giving way to summer. It is probably for the best, I tell myself. I don’t know how either he or I will feel in the presence of each other, it would be a mistake to try and force us into some scene, I don’t want to negotiate with the pressure of my own expectations, and besides all that, I don’t know what the money means for us, for me, for us. A few days earlier a home health-aide service installed a bed on the ground floor, as John apparently still had some time before he could climb the stairs easily, and I’d spent hours since then arranging our knickknacks and furniture around it so that it felt somewhat coherent with the room. Two months after my release I am still physically compromised, and I break our Shiite mask and crack the glass on several pictures, unable to lift and move things properly. That morning I lug a heavy nightstand to the side of the bed and one of its legs cuts a long white gash in the wooden floor. I arrange the stand with a lamp and a bouquet of hyacinth I cut from our garden, then lay down for an hour to recover my strength.
His facility is two hours north of us, a wooded and rural area, populated mostly, as the signage would indicate, by a spread-out smattering of communes, hunting enthusiasts, eccentrics, and evangelicals. The final stretch I drive for thirty miles on a gravel road through dense forest, the spring flora—yellow, hot pink, lilac, ghost white—showing in patches through the green of the trees, the colors overbright and unsettling against the gray of the day. The entrance has imposing stone gates, followed by a long approach drive flanked by two low stone walls draped with ivy and edged by dripping, blooming forsythia. I feel momentarily jealous—my rehab place had been a new-construction building in suburbia—but when after some winding I arrive at the parking lot, I relent. The building itself is nothing to speak of: squat, brick 1980s architecture with disproportionately small windows spaced in awkward distance from each other, a few grubby benches in front, and a plastic gazebo I’m sure nobody ever uses tilting on an uneven patch of ground like an afterthought.
A young woman in pastel camouflage scrubs leads me to John’s room. “He’s a nice man,” she says, and when I feebly joke that she probably says that about all the patients she smiles and tells me that she does, but with him she means it. At his door I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths to settle myself before knocking. Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation. The young woman in scrubs, who I don’t realize is still standing behind me, misconstrues my hesitation and reaches around my waist, raps at the door, then turns the handle and pushes it ajar. “You’re fine to go in,” she says, encouraging me. “He’s waiting.”
I find him, bags packed, sitting in an armchair reading a newer translation of Life Embitters by the Catalan writer Josep Pla. He’s lost about twenty-five pounds and his leanness suits him—he looks elegant and patrician. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I had expected, in line with some clichéd scene, to walk in on him numbly watching bad daytime television, smiling and drooling, his mind and spirit dampened. The fact that he is upright and reading, and reading something of substance, that he is still holding himself to a level of intellectual rigor even though he is injured and battered and dismissed from the world…
“Where’s Sid?” he asks, in his style of abrasive fatherly concern. “Why are you here? Is she all right?”
I reassure him and explain my thinking. “We were going to see each other at home anyway,” I say.
He nods, is still for a moment, and then, gripping the padded armrests tightly, he stands. I see that the hair from the back of his neck to the crown of his head is completely gone, replaced by a reddish-purple graft. He notices me looking and swivels his neck to reference it. “It will fade,” he says. “I might be able to get plugs eventually, or so they tell me.”
Later he tells me he was disturbed to see me, he had been thinking of the drive home as a spiritual enterprise, a journey he was trusting to gradually reacquaint himself with his old familiar world. “I pictured myself getting out of the car and touching the shrubs and hose on the side of the house and laying my hands against the siding,” he says. “And then coming in through the back porch and finding you inside, bent over a magazine or puttering in the kitchen.”
At that time, though, he offers no objections. He slowly bends down to retrieve an electric-blue sock cap from the corner of the chair. It is a fashionable and arresting color, and when he puts it on it conceals most of the back of his head, brings out his eyes, and, with his weight loss, makes him look like a weathered European longshoreman from a travel brochure.
“Your daughter bought it for me,” he says, sheepish.
I nod my approval. “Shall we go?” I ask.
He agrees but doesn’t move, and I realize one of his hands is still tightly wrapped on the arm of the chair for support. A cane rests against the wall, slightly out of his reach. I hand it to him and he takes it without looking at me. “We’ll have to call someone for the bags I imagine,” I say.
“Unless you can take them,” he replies.