“Look at the amount!” said Arnold Ullman.
I said I had seen it and that unless we decided to work together, he owed me nothing, let alone the enormous sum on the check.
“So look at the date, Doctor!” The date was six months in the future. “That’s my expiration date. That’s what my doctor calls a ‘reasonable estimate’ for how long I have to live. Focuses the mind! Thanks to him I’ve recently discovered the joys of getting squared up.”
“Squared up?”
“In advance! Because something could happen. What they tell me is that one way or another, maybe sooner, maybe later, something will happen. Hard to disagree with that, isn’t it, Doctor?”
Five or six years earlier he had been treated for cancer of the colon. After a partial liver resection, his scans came back clear for several years. “Was I cured? I never knew. I can tell you I was relieved after the scans, and that I dreaded each one like my execution day. And I can tell you I wasn’t surprised when finally one lit up, nodes, lungs, spine, lit up like a Christmas tree.” It was then that a strange thing happened, he said. Of course he hadn’t forgotten how to panic, but the dread of the CT scans vanished, and when it appeared that the palliative chemotherapy was slowing the progress of the metastases more than expected, he felt a strange restlessness. The irony, the “colossal irony,” he said, spreading his arms wide, was that the cancer itself wasn’t what was going to kill him—at least not directly. One of the recent scans had picked up an enlargement of the aorta, an enlargement that proved upon closer investigation to be an advanced aneurysm, the result of metastatic infiltration of the artery. Because of the location and the nature of the vascular involvement, surgery was out of the question. “I had to learn how to do nothing,” he said.
“So you are waiting,” I said.
“That I am,” he replied. “But you doctors, you never say what you think, do you? I had the dickens of a time getting my guy to tell me what to expect.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Well, finally, he admitted that I was likely to die of what he called a ‘CB.’ ”
“What is a CB?”
“That’s what I asked. It’s a catastrophic bleed.”
“A catastrophic bleed.”
“A couple of minutes. Maybe five. And that will be that.”
After a pause I asked, “And what is ‘that’?” though I immediately regretted saying anything. He smiled his mulish smile, as though with no other intention than to alleviate my regret.
“That?” he said. “It! That will be it!”
“It—” I said again in spite of myself.
“So I’ve paid you in advance, in case I go early.”
“But then you will have overpaid me,” I said.
“Who will have overpaid you? Not me! Just some guy named Arnold Ullman nobody sees around much anymore.”
This time I managed to say nothing.
“And anyway, you can buy something nice for your kids. You have kids, right?”
I said I would cash the check only after we had completed six months of treatment.
—
As for treatment itself, from the beginning Arnold Ullman referred to it as “polishing the car.” He had lived upstate for many years with his partner, Raymond, where they owned and managed an antiques store in Rhinebeck. At a furniture show, he’d gotten a lead on an old Mercedes 220 in reasonable condition, so he’d bought and restored it, completing most of the work himself. He and Raymond drove it nearly a hundred thousand miles through the back roads and byways of New York and New England, before Raymond’s death and his own illness required him to move back to the city. He had no more use for the car, and he’d need the money for his medical bills, so he sold the car to a collector.
“Goodness sakes I made money on that car,” he said. “Eight times what I paid for it, though God knows what I poured into it in the meantime…” Arnold Ullman spent the weekend before the collector took delivery detailing the Mercedes, shampooing the floor mats, massaging lotions into the leather, buff-waxing the exterior to a high gleam. “The happiest I ever was with that car—and believe me I loved that car—was that weekend. I was like a country kid getting his prize heifer ready for the fair.” The collector who had bought it had been so delighted with the condition of the car that he’d sent Arnold a bottle of champagne. “I won’t say I didn’t drink it because I did; summer evenings, Raymond and I had always had champagne in the gazebo, but I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong! That was one beautiful bottle of bubbly. It was just that the buyer had put a little ding in my new acquaintance with disinterested pleasure.”
Since then, he had wanted to speak to someone, to talk with someone, so that he could attend to his life as he had attended to his car, preparing it for a journey without him. “The old carcass is about to change hands!” he exclaimed, evidently pleased with the phrase. “And anyway,” he went on, “where I’m going, you won’t be able to send me champagne.”
In this way our sessions proceeded, serendipitous, breezy, anecdotal. “Ain’t dead yet,” he would say, swinging his legs up onto the couch. “Last I checked, at least!” His stories centered mostly around Raymond, who had died of AIDS some years before. Mr. Ullman had bought a gazebo at an estate sale and had it set up in the backyard; they spent Raymond’s last weeks together there, reading the paper out loud to each other or listening to the radio. All summer long that lasted and into the fall, at least until it was too cold to stay outside, and by that time Raymond
