“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. I should have known better. But the way you looked just now, that’s not okay, either. You’re not twenty anymore, Ralph. Not even forty, I don’t mean you’re not in good shape-anyone can see you’re in great shape for a guy your age-but you ought to take better care of yourself. Carolyn would want YOU to take care of Yourself., “I know,” he said, “but I’m really-”
“All right,” he meant to finish, and then he looked up from his hands, looked into her dark eyes again, and what he saw there made it impossible to finish for a moment.
There was a weary sadness in her eyes… or was it loneliness?
Maybe both. In any case, those were not the only things he saw in them. He also saw himself.
You’re being silly, the eyes looking into his said. Maybe we both are. You’re seventy and a widower, Ralph. I’m Sixty-eight and a widow -How long are We going to sit on Your porch in the evenings with Bill McGovern as the world’s Oldest chaperone? Not too long, I hope, because neither of us is exactly fresh off the showroom lot.
“Ralph?” Lois asked, suddenly concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, looking down at his hands again. “Yes, sure.
“You had a look on your face like… well, I don’t know.”
Ralph wondered if maybe the combination of the heat and the walk up Up-Mile Hill had scrambled his brains a little. Because this was Lois, after all, whom McGovern always referred to (with a small, satiric lift of his left eyebrow) as “Our Lois.” And okay, yes, she was still in good shape-trim legs, nice bust, and those remarkable eyes-and maybe he wouldn’t mind taking her to bed, and maybe she wouldn’t mind being taken. But what would there be after that?
If she happened to see a ticket-stub poking out of the book he was reading, would she pull it out, too curious about what movie he’d been to see to think about how she was losing his place?
Ralph thought not. Lois’s eyes were remarkable, and he had found his own eyes wandering down the V of her blouse more than once as the three of them sat on the front porch, drinking iced tea in the cool of the evening, but he had an idea that your little head could get your big head in trouble even at seventy. Getting old was no excuse to get careless.
He got to his feet, aware of Lois looking at him and making an extra effort not to stoop. “Thanks for your concern,” he said. “Want to walk an old feller up the street?”
“Thanks, but I’m going downtown. They’ve got some beautiful rose-colored yarn in at The Sewing Circle, and I’m thinking afghan.
Meanwhile, I’ll just wait for the bus and gloat over my coupons.”
Ralph grinned. “You do that.” He glanced over at the kids on the scrub ballfield. As he watched, a boy with an extravagant mop of red hair broke from third, threw himself down in a headfirst slide… and fetched up against one of the catcher’s shinguards with an audible thonk. Ralph winced, envisioning ambulances with flashing lights and scream laughing.
“Missed the tag, you hoser!” he shouted.
“The hell I did!” the catcher responded indignantly, but then he began to laugh, too.
“Ever wish You were that age again, Ralph?” Lois asked.
He thought it over, “Sometimes,” he said.
“Sit with us awhile.”
Too strenuous. Came on over tonight, “Mostly it just looks “I might just do that,” she said, and Ralph started up Harris Avenue, feeling the weight of her remarkable eyes on him and trying hard to keep his back straight. He thought he managed fairly well, but it was hard work. He had never felt so tired in his life.
Hearing sirens, but the carrot-top bounced to his feet.
CHAPTER 2
Ralph made the appointment to see Dr. Litchfield less than an hour after his conversation with Lois on the park bench; the receptionist with the cool, sexy voice told him she could fit him in next Tuesday morning at ten, if that was okay, and Ralph told her that was fine as paint. Then he hung up, went into the living room sat in the wing-chair that overlooked Harris Avenue, and thought about how Dr. Litchfield had initially treated his wife’s brain tumor with Tylenol-3 and pamphlets explaining various relaxation techniques.
From there he moved on to the look he’d seen in Litchfield’s eyes after the magnetic resonance imaging tests had confirmed the CAT scan’s bad news… that look of guilt and unease.
Across the street, a bunch of kids who would soon be back in school came out of the Red Apple armed with candy bars and Slurpies.
As Ralph watched them mount their bikes and tear away into the bright eleven o’clock heat, he thought what he always did when the memory of Dr. Litchfield’s eyes surfaced: that it was most likely a false memory.
The thing is, old buddy, you wanted Litchfield to look uneasy, but even more than that, you wanted him to look guilty.
Quite possibly true, quite possibly Carl Litchfield was a peach of a guy and a helluva doctor, but Ralph still found himself calling Litchfield’s office again half an hour later. He told the receptionist with the sexy voice that he’d just rechecked his calendar and discovered next Tuesday at ten wasn’t so fine after all. He’d made an appointment with the podiatrist for that day and forgotten all about it.
“My memory’s not what it used to be,” Ralph told her.
The receptionist suggested next Thursday at two.
Ralph countered by promising to call back.
Liar, liar, pants on fire, he thought as he hung up the phone, walked slowly back to the wing-chair, and lowered himself into it.
You’re done with him, aren’t you?
He supposed he was. Not that Dr. Litchfield was apt to lose any sleep over it; if he thought about Ralph at all, it would be as one less old geezer to fart in his face during the prostate exam.
All right, so what are you going to do about the insomnia, Ralph; “Sit quiet for half an hour before bedtime and listen to classical music,” he said out loud. “Buy some Depends for those troublesome calls of nature.”
He startled himself by laughing at the image. The laughter had a hysterical edge he didn’t much care for-it was damned creepy, as a matter of fact-but it was still a little while before he could make himself stop.
Yet he supposed he would try Hamilton Davenport’s suggestion (although he would skip the diapers, thank You), as he had tried most of the folk remedies well-meaning people had passed on to him. This made him think of his first bona ride folk remedy, and that raised another grin.
It had been McGovern’s idea. He had been sitting on the porch one evening when Ralph came back from the Red Apple with some noodles and spaghetti sauce, had taken one look at his upstairs neighbor and made a tsk-tsk sound, shaking his head dolefully.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ralph asked, taking the seat next to him. A little farther down the street, a little girl in jeans and an oversized white tee- shirt had been skipping rope and chanting in the growing gloom.
“It means you’re looking folded, spindled, and mutilated,” McGovern said. He used one thumb to tilt the Panama back on his head and looked more closely at Ralph. “Still not sleeping?”
“Still not sleeping,” Ralph agreed.
McGovern was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he did so in a tone of absolute-almost apocalyptic, in fact-finality.
“Whiskey is the answer,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“To your insomnia, Ralph. I don’t mean you should take a bath in it-there’s no need of that. Just mix a tablespoon of honey with half a shot of whiskey and hook it down fifteen or twenty minutes before you hit the hay.”
“You think?” Ralph had asked hopefully.
“All I can say is it worked for me, and I had some real problems sleeping around the time I turned forty. Looking back on it, I guess that was my midlife crisis-six months of insomnia and a year-long depression over my bald spot.”
Although the books he’d been consulting all said that booze was a vastly overrated cure for sleeplessness-that it often made the problem worse instead of better, in fact-Ralph had tried it just the same. He had never been much of a drinker, so he began by adjusting McGovern’s recommended half-shot dosage down to a quarter of a shot, but after a week of no relief he had upped the ante to a full shot… then to two.
He woke up one morning at four-twenty-two with a nasty little headache to accompany the dull brown taste of Early Times on the roof of his mouth, and realized he was suffering his first hangover in fifteen years.
“Life’s too short for this shit,” he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.
Okay, Ralph thought now as he watched the desultory mid-morning flow Of customers in and out of the Red Apple across the street.
Here’s the situation McGovern says you look like shit, you almost fainted at Lois Chasse’s feet this moring, and you just called and canceled the appointment you made with Ye Olde Family Physician. So what next?
Just let it go? Accept the situation and let it go. The idea had a certain Oriental charm-fate, karma, and all that but he was going to need more than charm to get him through the long hours of early morning. The books said there were people in the world, quite a lot of them, who managed very well on no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. There were even some who got along on only two. They were an extremely small minority, but they did exist. Ralph Roberts, however, was not among their number.
How he looked wasn’t very important to him-he had a feeling that his matinee-idol days were well behind him-but how he felt was, and it was no longer just a matter of not feeling good; he felt horrible. The insomnia had begun to pervade every aspect of his life, the way the smell of frying garlic on the fifth floor will eventually pervade an entire apartment building. The color had started to drain out of things; the world had begun to take on the dull, grainy quality of a newspaper photograph.
Simple decisions-whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example-had become difficult, almost agonizing. In the last couple of weeks he had found himself coming back to the apartment from Dave’s Video Stop empty-handed more and more often, not because there was nothing at Dave’s he wanted to watch but because there was too much-he couldn’t decide if he wanted one of the Dirty Harry movies or a Billy Crystal comedy or maybe a few old
