"Are you able to sleep?"
"Oh yeah. At first there was a little problem, but now they've gotten that part straightened out."
"Do you talk to a doctor during the day?"
"Yeah." Brad laughed, and for the first time sounded something like himself. "He doesn't do any good. He's nice. He tells you to buck up and everything's going to be all right."
" Bradford, remember when you were pissed at Clarence about something and gave him two weeks' notice? I told you not to leave. You said, 'But I've resigned.' 'Rescind your resignation,' I said. And you did. Who else but Clarence and what other agency would have put up with that crap from a copywriter? You did it twice, as I remember. And stayed another ten years."
He'd gotten Brad to laugh again. "Yeah, I was always nuts," Brad said.
"We worked together for a lot of years. Endless silent hours together, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands and thousands of silent hours together in your office or mine trying to figure things out."
"That was something," Brad said.
"You bet it was. You were something. And don't forget it."
"Thanks, buddy."
"And so what about leaving?" he asked Brad. "When do you think that's going to happen?"
"Well, I don't really know. I imagine it's a matter of a couple of weeks. Since I've been here I've been far less depressed than when I was out. I feel almost composed. I think I'm going to recover."
"That's good news. I'll call you again. I hope to speak to you under better circumstances very shortly."
"Okay. Thanks for calling," Brad said. "Thanks a lot. I'm awfully glad you called."
After hanging up, he wondered: Did he know it was me? Did he truly remember what I remembered? From the voice alone I can't imagine he'll ever get out of there.
Then the third call. He couldn't stop himself from making it, though learning of Brad's hospitalization and Clarence's death and seeing the damage caused by Phoebe's stroke had given him enough to ponder for a while. As did Gwen's reminding him of his teaching Nancy to sing "Smile" like Nat "King" Cole. This call was to Ezra Pollock, who wasn't expected to live out the month but who, astonishingly, when he answered the phone, sounded like someone happy and fulfilled and no less cocky than usual.
"Ez," he said, "what's cookin'? You sound elated."
"I rise to conversation because conversation is my only recreation."
"And you're not depressed?"
"Not at all. I don't have time to be depressed. I'm all concentration." Laughing, Ezra said, "I see through everything now."
"Yourself included?"
"Yes, believe it or not. I've stripped away my bullshit and I'm getting down to brass tacks at last. I've begun my memoir of the advertising business. Before you go, you've got to face the facts, Ace. If I live, I'll write some good stuff."
"Well, don't forget to include how you'd walk into my office and say, 'Okay, here's your panic deadline – first thing tomorrow I need that storyboard in my hand.'"
"It worked, didn't it?"
"You were diligent, Ez. I asked you one time why that fucking detergent was so gentle to a lady's delicate hands. You gave me twenty pages on aloes. I got the art director's award for that campaign, and it was because of those pages. It should have been yours. When you get better we'll have lunch and I'll bring you the statue."
"That's a deal," Ez said.
"And how's the pain? Is there pain?"
"Yes, there is, I have it. But I've learned how to handle it. I've got special medicines and I've got five doctors. Five. An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist to help me overcome the nausea."
"The nausea from what, from therapy?"
"Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally."
"Is that the worst of it?"
"Sometimes my prostate feels like I'm trying to excrete it."
"Can't they take it out?"
"It wouldn't do any good. It's too late for that. And it's a big operation. My weight is down. My blood is down. It would make me so weak and I'd have to give up the treatment, too. It's a big lie that it moves slowly," Ezra said. "It moves like lightning. I didn't have anything in my prostate in the middle of June, but by the middle of August it had spread too far to cut it out. It really moves. So look to your prostate, my boy."
"I'm sorry to hear all this. But I'm glad to hear that you sound as you do. You're yourself, only more so."
"All I want is to write this memoir," Ez said. "I've talked about it long enough, now I have to write it. All that happened to me in that business. If I can write this memoir, I will have told people who I am. If I can write that, I'll die with a grin on my face. How about you, are you working happily? Are you painting? You always said you would. Are you?"
"Yes, I do it. I do it every day. It's fine," he lied.
"Well, I could never write this book, you know. Once I retired I immediately had blocks. But as soon as I got cancer most of my blocks fell away. I can do whatever I want now."
"That's a brutal therapy for writer's block."
"Yeah," Ez said, "I think it is. I don't advise it. You know, I may make it. Then we'll have that lunch and you'll give me the statue. If I make it, the doctors say I can have a normal life."
If he already had a hospice nurse, it seemed unlikely that the doctors would have said such a thing. Though maybe they had to lift his spirits, or maybe he'd imagined they had, or maybe it was just arrogance speaking, that wonderful, ineradicable arrogance of his. "Well, I'm rooting for you, Ez," he said. "If you should want to speak to me, here's my number." He gave it to him.
"Good," Ezra said.
"I'm here all the time. If you feel in the mood, do it, call me. Anytime. Will you?"
"Great. I will."
"All right. Very good. Bye."
"Bye. Bye for now," Ezra said. "Polish up the statue."
For hours after the three consecutive calls – and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink – what he wanted to do was not only to phone and speak to his daughter, whom he found in the hospital with Phoebe, but to revive his own esprit by phoning and talking to his mother and father. Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
When he next went to the hospital for the annual checkup on his carotids, the sonogram revealed that the second carotid was now seriously obstructed and required surgery. This would make the seventh year in a row that he would have been hospitalized. The news gave him a jolt – particularly as he'd heard by phone that morning of Ezra Pollock's death – but at least he would have the same vascular surgeon and the operation in the same hospital, and this time he would know enough not to put up with a local anesthetic and instead to ask to be unconscious throughout. He tried so hard to convince himself from the experience of the first carotid surgery that there was nothing to worry about, he did not bother to tell Nancy about the pending operation, especially while she still had her mother to tend to. He did, however, make a determined effort to locate Maureen Mrazek, though within only hours he had exhausted any clues he might have had to her whereabouts.
That left Howie, whom by then he hadn't phoned in some time. It was as though once their parents were long dead all sorts of impulses previously proscribed or just nonexistent had been loosed in him, and his giving vent to them, in a sick man's rage – in the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness's deadliest trap, the contortion of one's character – had destroyed the last link to the dearest people he'd known. His first love affair had been with his brother. The one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for this very good man. He'd made a mess of all his marriages, but throughout their adult lives he and his brother had been truly constant. Howie never had to be asked for anything. And now he'd lost him, and in the same way he'd lost Phoebe – by doing it to himself. As if there weren't already fewer and fewer people present who meant anything to him, he had completed the decomposition of the original family. But decomposing families was his specialty. Hadn't he robbed three children of a coherent childhood and the continuous loving protection of a father such as he himself had cherished, who had belonged exclusively to him and Howie, a father they and no one else had owned?