No one at the party called the police. No one jumped on Sid Feeney and pinned him to the floor. No one freaked out and ran around the room pulling out her hair and ululating. No one fainted. One by one, people drifted in from the terrace. The constellations broke apart. People started swaying again, almost like dancing. Their arms moved as though they were shoveling dirt into a narrow channel of shared memory. All was forgotten. Except by me.
Part III
15.
He was in a hospital. There was water to the south. Albert’s eyes felt like oblong, distended cones straining against his eyelids, the cornea aching against the tender conjunctiva like a hatchling working at the shell. They wanted out, they wanted to see! Oh, deny not the sweet delight of oculism! But deny he did, clenching tightly as he lay in the bed listening to the clicking wall clock and timing his breathing to the second hand in approximation of a sleeper’s respiration. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. The nurse was still there. What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing?
Polishing her nails? He’d never known a nurse to do anything more than the absolute minimum required. Needle in, needle out, roll, cover, and tuck. Their smug polyester hips and square shoes, the stern architecture of their caps. Where were those romantic nurses of the Great War, plump, young, and dimpled, so eager to subsume their own desires to the recovery and carnal repair of the wounded soldier? Of course, not even the most patriotic example would be able to bring herself to minister to Albert’s sallow flesh. He remembered what it was to be young; to have no awareness of one’s body as anything other than an instrument of pleasure. He hadn’t lost that memory. To be old was to be an encyclopedia of the plights of the flesh, lord of a crumbling manor. It made you zealous in your adherence to those routines that, when performed in the proper order, might reduce your pain one-tenth of one percent. Constant awareness of your own decrepitude. How many times had he been in and out of the hospital over the last ten years? Five? Ten? Prostate, heart, colon, an iron triangle of ailments, each one a subtraction of pleasure: a good orgasm, a good walk, a good shit, all gone. Leakage, palpitations, fear of the outside, depression.
What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing? He heard the soft rustle of polyester, an inhalation strumming the harps of her nasal cavity. Slowly he lifted his eyelids, just enough to peer through his eyelashes’ dewy prisms at the penumbra of her shoulders as she stood at the window, her back to him, arms crossed as if to warm herself, her fingers clasping the backs of her arms. Christ’s sake, she was watching the snow fall? He waited until she dropped her hands and smoothed her uniform. By the time she’d turned toward him, his eyes were closed and he was a vision of peace.
The nurse squeak-rustled nearer, past him, out the door. Hermetic swoosh, latch snapping into strike plate. He waited thirty ticks of the clock before attempting to lever himself out of the bed. Once he’d gotten his feet on the floor, he made his way across the linoleum to peek through the crosshatched glass. The angle was bad for a full sweep of the hall, and he cracked the door for a better look. They never left you alone for long. He’d have to be quick about it. To the right, the hall was clear to the elevator bank. To the left was the nurses’ station, and though he could hear their voices, they came from somewhere else, down the corridor, around the corner. Satisfied with his chances, he removed the gown, located his pants, shirt, and shoes, dressed, and crept out. He did not bother with the buttons on his sleeves.
All his life, he’d relied on logic to survive. On the playground, scrawny Alfie had been able to demoralize bigger kids with his argumentative powers. That hadn’t stopped the beatings, and often enough invited them, but he secured his intellectual superiority early, and it became his source of power. In court he was an assassin, logic his dagger. He argued with an otherworldly calm that unhinged opposing counsel—the more devastating the argument, the more beatific his countenance. It wasn’t a strategy, one of those synthetic plays lawyers trot out to woo jurors. It was genuine. The more decisive the blow he’d dealt, the dreamier the look in his eyes. And he’d won, and won, and won, piling up a record of dominance that made him not only rich but deeply feared. Nothing in his life suffused him with the warmth he felt constructing a perfect stone wall of argument. In those days, his mind had been so supple he could recall every legal argument he’d ever made, each one a dark line traversing the Irish countryside, the full effect like a Mondrian scored into the rolling green, the interplay of precedent and analysis, policy and proof, arguments intersecting and reinforcing one another. A grand construction, a life’s work, from his first, in Constitutional Law with Professor Haggerty, 1923, to the last, New York State Supreme Court, 1971. Logic had been a reliable companion, a guide with whom he had been unafraid to wander the darkness. It had been his only comfort. And what more did he need? The capacity for reason was the only measure of a man.
Now his reason was failing him, or, more precisely, he was failing it, failing to abide by its tenets. He was on iffy terms with cause and effect. To wit, his failure to consider the weather’s ability to foul up his suicide plan. The plan itself—that Goldbergian construction of fake
