joke. He heard someone say,
“Listen, Stafford,” Lanigan said, starting to sound nervous, “we don’t want any trouble, not here, not today.”
“That punch is going to be warm before I get to taste it.”
He did not know what to do. People three tables away were looking at him now. He saw himself as they would see him, in his white shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, with that glass of pink stuff in his hand and a nerve jumping in his cheek. Lanigan had turned sideways on his chair and was looking up at Claire, signaling to her silently to take her little man away and keep him out of trouble.
“Come on, honey,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”
When they were back at their table Andy’s left knee began to twitch up and down very fast, making the table vibrate. Claire was pretending nothing had happened. She sat with her chin propped on a crook’d finger, watching the dancers and humming, and weaving her shoulders to the rhythm. He imagined himself snatching the punch glass from her hand and breaking it on the edge of the table and thrusting the shattered rim into her defenseless soft white throat. He had done it once before, long ago, when he slashed the face of that high school prom queen who had laughed at him when he had asked her to dance, which was another reason for him never to go back to Wilmington.
JOSH CRAWFORD WAS IN ALMOST A LIGHTHEARTED MOOD TODAY. HE liked to savor the fruits of his success, and the sight of his staff disporting themselves amid the greenery in this glass pleasure dome was sweet to him, he who these days had to taste so much of bitterness. He knew there would be few more such occasions; this might even be, for him, the last. The air around him grew thinner by the day; he sucked at it in a kind of slow panic, as if he were slowly sinking underwater with only a tube to breathe through that was itself becoming increasingly fine, like one of those glass tubes he remembered from his school days, few and long ago though his school days had been-what were they called, those tubes? He found in a strange way comical the process of his accelerating dissolution. His lungs were so congested he was swelling up and turning blue, like some species of South American frog. The skin on his legs and feet was as taut and transparent as a prophylactic; he joked with the nurse when she was cutting his nails, warning her to be careful not to puncture him with the scissors or they might both end up in trouble. Who would have thought that time’s betrayal would strike him as funny, at the end?
He rapped his knuckles now on the arm of the wheelchair to make the nurse stop pushing and attend him. When she leaned down from behind him and put her face beside his he caught her pleasing, starchy smell; he supposed it must in part be a smell he was remembering from his long-dead and long-forgotten mother. So much of his concern now was for the past, since there was so little of the future left to him.
“What’s the name of those things that chemists use,” he said hoarsely, “those thin glass tubes that you put your finger on the top of to keep the liquid held inside-what do you call them?”
She gave him that skeptical, half-smiling, sidelong look that she did when she suspected he was teasing her. “Tubes?” she said.
“Yes, glass tubes.” His patience was fraying already, and he beat again at the arm of the chair. “You’re a nurse, damn it, you’re supposed to know these things.”
“Well, I don’t.”
She straightened, disappearing behind him, and began to push him forward again. He could not stay angry at her for long. He liked people who stood up to him, although with her, he believed, it was less a case of courage than of stupidity: she did not seem to realize just how dangerous he was, or how vindictive he could be. Or maybe she did know, and did not care? If no man is a hero to his valet, he thought, then maybe no man is a monster to his nurse. On her first day at the house he had offered her a hundred dollars to show him her breasts. Fifty bucks apiece! She had stared at him and then laughed, and, stung, and unexpectedly discomfited, he had tried to bluster his way out of it, telling her it was something he asked all his female staff to do, by way of a test, which by refusing she had passed. That was the first time he had seen that archly mocking, faint smile of hers. “Who says I’m refusing?” she said. “I might have shown you them for nothing, if you’d asked me nicely.” But he never did ask again, nicely or otherwise, and she had not repeated the offer.
The couples at the edge of the dance floor had noticed him by now, and they had stopped dancing and stood watching his approach, awkwardly together, two by two, like children, he thought contemptuously, in their gaudy party outfits. Unlike the nurse, they knew his reputation, and what he could do, and had done, when provoked. One of the women began tentatively to applaud, then her partner joined in, and then so did the rest of the stalled dancers, and after a few moments the great glass hall was filled with a storm of clapping. It was a sound he hated; it made him think of penguins, or was it seals? He lifted a hand in a limp, papal gesture, nodding acknowledgment to one side and then the other, wishing they would stop this awful racket, in which the band members now joined, rising to their feet and launching with their instruments into a string of farts and whistles that he dimly recognized as a parody of “Hail to the Chief.” At length, when the last, would-be ingratiator had let fall his or her hands, and the band had sat down again, he made an attempt to address the crowd, to wish them the happiness of the season, but of course his voice failed him, and then he began to cough, and soon he was doubled over on himself, almost falling forward out of the chair, gasping and shuddering and dribbling mucus on the blanket covering his knees, and the nurse was fumbling with the stopcock of the oxygen tank that was slung under the chair between the wheels, and then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice said:
“You called, dear?”
ROSE CRAWFORD WAS A HANDSOME WOMAN, AND SHE KNEW IT. SHE was tall and slim with narrow shoulders and a narrow waist and a panther’s stalking stride. Her eyes were large and black and lustrous and her cheekbones high-it was rumored she had Indian blood-and she looked down upon the world in general with undisguised, sardonic amusement. Josh Crawford liked to boast that she was his most prized possession and joked that he had swapped a Rembrandt for her, though there were some who thought it might not be entirely a joke. She had appeared in his life seemingly out of nowhere, sporting a ring on her wedding finger with a diamond set in it that was surely the size, someone had said, of Josh’s prostate. There had been a previous Mrs. Crawford-two, in fact, the first of whom had died-but she had been bundled away into a fancy nursing home and now no one could remember clearly what she had looked like, the memory of her eclipsed entirely by the far more ritzy Rose. It seemed something out of a fairy tale, or maybe one of those stories out of the Bible, more like, the union of this hard but beautiful woman and the bad old man. People looked at Josh Crawford looking at his so much younger wife and were reconciled for a moment to being not as rich as he was or as good-looking as she.
Rose took the plastic face mask brusquely from the nurse’s hands and pressed it over Josh’s nose and mouth. The hiss of oxygen in the rubber pipe always made her think of snakes-with brittle affection she often called Josh her old cobra. Today, crouched hugely in the wheelchair with rounded shoulders and gasping into the muzzle of the mask, he resembled more a wounded moose. The interrupted dancers had been gaping at him with anxious interest as he struggled for breath-he was their meal ticket, after all, she reflected, though he certainly did not overfeed them-but at one sweeping glance from those inky eyes of hers they turned hastily away.
Josh tore the mask from his face and flung it aside. “Get me out of here!” he snarled, gasping. He was furious at being seen like this by the workers. The nurse made to take the handles of the chair but he twisted about and swung a fist at her. “Not you!” There was white froth on his lips. Rose smiled at the nurse in her blithe, bland way and turned the chair about and set off toward the archway that led into the house proper. Josh was scrabbling now with his nails at the leather armrests of the chair and muttering to himself some word that sounded like
“Not a bird!” he croaked. He had heard what she was thinking, as he so often did; it impressed and alarmed her, in equal measure, this uncanny telepathic knack he had. “A pipette,” he said, “that’s what it is, the thing that chemists use.”
“Whatever you say, darling,” she answered with a sigh, “whatever you say.”
WHEN CLAIRE GOT ANDY ONTO THE FLOOR HE WOULD NOT DANCE, could not, he was that drunk. The room was spinning around him and everywhere he looked there were faces shiny and red from laughing. Claire, worried at
