I
JACOB IS DYING. He’s sworn us to secrecy, but slowly and then faster, people have begun to realize—the clothes that hang on his once portly frame, his yellowish pallor, the bedroom slippers because his feet are too swollen for shoes. A fool could see he’s ill. At a poetry reading he gave in early June, friends and colleagues gathered in the downstairs bar afterward, whispering. There was his shocking appearance, but also the new depth and vulnerability of the work itself (mortality had finally given him a subject). They dabbed at their eyes, barraging us with questions, but we gave them little. We had our orders.
Jacob loves westerns. His favorites feature a lone fighter standing up to the mob: Shane, Fire Creek, High Noon. In this case, though, he recognizes the need for reinforcements. When he calls us his posse, he means the small group of armed men summoned by the sheriff, though many of us are women, and we’d summoned ourselves years ago, worried by Jacob’s insistence on his own invincibility. For decades, he’d refused to sleep more than four hours a night because why waste time? He’d been told to hydrate—those nasty kidney stones—but never liked the taste of water (“How can you not like water?” we’d all asked at one time or another). And while we biked or climbed gym walls or did yoga, Jacob refused to walk even the four blocks to the subway, preferring to crawl on the crosstown.
Even those of us who were not in show business worried, approaching middle age, about the few extra pounds, the faint parentheses around the mouth, or how our once thick and wavy hair had begun waving goodbye. But Jacob powered on, seeing in the mirror the same charmer he’d been at twenty-five, regardless of the growing belly or the blue-green circles under his eyes that became bags and finally craters, not to mention those facial tics that waxed and waned, but once briefly disappeared altogether after the weekend when, forgetting to set his alarm, he slept for twenty hours straight. He was aging well! Blood pressure 118/78! Eyesight 20/20! So that he proceeded, for another ten years, at the same relentless pace. Then came the chronic pain in his lower back—there were two different kinds of kidney stones now; he’d battle one only to be felled by another—and the sprained ankle that never quite healed, so that by forty-seven, he limped like an old man, and the crosstown became truly necessary.
Still, he was rarely late for anything, even when the list of places he had to be extended for pages. He took on the tasks no one wanted at a variety of coalitions and forums, national and local, nonprofits founded by creative people in New York and attracting certain movie, TV, and stage stars. At first the celebrities ignored Jacob, until he opened his mouth at meetings, making two then four then ten smart suggestions for organizing the diesel bus or Hudson River cleanup campaigns or that world peace weekend with the Dalai Lama. He was all talk but also all action. So that over time, he worked his way to vice president. That was his title in so many organizations, second in command, left with all the work while the distracted celebrity presidents took all the credit, though on the streets of New York Jacob exacted his reward. If one or two of us happened to be with him when he ran into the sitcom phenom, or the politician from a famous family, or the guy with the face, he rarely bothered with an introduction, might even wander away to continue his conversation as if we weren’t there, but we understood (well, we teased him and complained, but still).
Trying to get a word in was not easy. Over the years, I regularly fell asleep with the phone next to my ear, only to wake up two hours later and he’d still be talking—about being smacked around in boarding school, a scholarship kid, from Queens no less, surrounded by children of presidents, congressmen, heads of multinationals. The boys with Roman numerals and family trusts, who had a satiric ear for too much enthusiasm, loquacity, or a regional accent. Yet now Jacob was VP of the alumni association too, and those same boys shook his hand, invited him on golf outings, and confessed to having admired his fortitude and drive back then, even as they bullied him. But such personal revelations were rare from Jacob; usually he’d want to go over the group he was assembling for that workshop, how he had to get the mix of actors and playwrights just so. Or he’d talk about the fall syllabus for his Rebels in American Cinema class or imitate his mother relaying some cousin’s bedroom problems. No need for a response, just a running monologue. It might be weeks, even months, before he’d ask me a single question, but there was something relaxing in this, the feeling I would get twenty years later from listening to a podcast.
All those hours of extracurricular talking, meeting, organizing, and flirting, along with his teaching, writing, and directing gigs; the many workshops and reading series he ran, the literary prize he administered, the film collection, the mother. Even sleeping so little, how did he find the time? Turns out he used it up like a line of credit, so that at sixty-three he’s now in a hospital bed in his living room, unable to sit up or turn over without help.
II
Grace is the leader—she makes sure one of us is always there. She met Jacob forty years ago in London, where he was trying to keep a tiny theater afloat and she was his stage manager, and then his girlfriend, though their friendship long ago eclipsed all that. A therapist now, Grace still has a backstage clipboard brightness. She arranged for the hospital bed in the living room and with help from Marco, a poet and freelance tech consultant, set up a new laptop, plus phone and printer, basically Jacob’s whole office accessible from that bed. Grace pays bills, calms family, is his emergency contact, next of kin, and power of attorney all rolled into one.
Her next-in-command is Ken, Jacob’s college roommate, who lives on the other side of the city but bikes over regularly. He is as fit and youthful as Jacob is sallow and sickly and has accompanied Jacob to all the medical appointments. A detail guy, a science writer, Ken keeps files of records and bills that stack up a foot high, knows the name of every doctor, the date of every test, and the whole sad history. He submits to insurance, asks questions that no one else thinks of, and feels alternately furious and grief-stricken, slumping with the weight of all that’s been overlooked. The two different urologists who, for over a year, insisted Jacob’s pain was the usual stones and never did the needed scans, until finally a third doctor discovered the cancer that had spread to the kidneys, contained only briefly by chemo. The famous specialist who found him drowsy in recovery after exploratory surgery and announced that he should “go home and get his affairs in order,” then walked away.
One by one Jacob has scared off the hospice workers: asking the rabbi complicated Talmudic questions, quizzing the Russian nurse on the works of Sergei Eisenstein, and falling asleep more than once on the soft-spoken social worker. To him, their arrival acknowledges that he’s dying—they love the word “palliative”—when he intends to live. He much prefers the private nurses Grace hired. They are the best in the business, usually employed by the wealthy and powerful to take care of their parents. Jacob has little savings, certainly not enough for private nursing, but it is Elizabeth who pays. She’s another former girlfriend—from some time in their late twenties, or was it early thirties? Is girlfriend even the right word? Elizabeth waves her hand, who can remember? She’s an heiress, always traveling here and there, wrapped in hand-hewn textiles; she’s coordinated, quiet, but also, like most of her kind, slow to trust; people so often want something from her. What wore her down were the birthday presents. What do you give a woman who has everything? The answer doesn’t matter, so few even try, but Jacob did, sent books and movies, plus regular shipments of the tasteless crackling-something-or-other cereal she likes, made only in a certain Manhattan health food store. That’s Jacob. Mention once that you like something, and it’s yours forever. He called her last month, full of gratitude, but she wouldn’t hear it.
There are others, of course. Like Melanie, Jacob’s muse, the star of many of his plays and readings. The work he gives her has never been remunerative, but he has high standards, and she sucks up his praise like a sea sponge. She brings tales of the theater club they belong to, the fight over much-needed building repairs, talk of a corrupt treasurer and squandered funds. Without him to referee the warring factions, all her stories imply, it’s hopeless. Also, there’s Tonia, his strong-willed college girlfriend. In moments I can imagine them married, in others I think they’d have destroyed each other, but he didn’t know what he wanted (what else is new?), so she moved to LA and married someone else. She calls regularly, signing off with her characteristic bluntness: “You really wanna live? Drink some fucking water!”
Now it’s July, when New Yorkers escape the city. Grace must return for a few months to her family and work in New England; Ken goes upstate, as do Melanie and a few others, and it’s my turn. Like Jacob’s, my life revolves around an academic calendar, and since I no longer live in New York, summers are my time to return, not escape, so I move into the master bedroom.
Fifteen years earlier, I slept there for different reasons. Jacob was in his late forties then, but the room was still furnished with the heavy oak bed, mirror, and dressers that had been part of his parents’ trousseau, the drawers stuffed with his deceased father’s sweaters and the closets full of electric-hued sport jackets, gifts from his theatrical mother. I can’t say the décor or the clothing helped Jacob in the romance department. He finally redecorated just before he got sick, but by then our brief liaison was long over.
There are seventeen years between us. Today, little is written about the appeal of older men—all of whom are assumed to be up to no good, taking advantage, or guilty until proven less guilty. But pushy and exhausting as Jacob could be, he was also vulnerable and generous. I loved going with him to film festivals, sitting in on readings he directed, hearing his brilliant friend Percy Lepkoff record those Chopin preludes. Jacob’s the type of person I had moved to New York to know—his apartment hemmed in by Norton Anthologies and the Complete Oxford Shakespeare, back issues of the New York Review of Books and every play Samuel French ever published, CDs and vinyl from Bach to the New York Dolls, but most of all, films. Foreign and classic, B movies and cult (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), noir and silent, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of movies. “When the apocalypse comes, I’ll never run out of things to watch, read, or listen to,” he used to say but doesn’t anymore.
I’d been born too late for the Partisan Review days, the Cedar Bar or the Algon-quin, but here was a place where interesting people dropped by to debate an idea, rehearse a script, or eat a knish. Jacob was like an extra year of grad school. He helped fill in the gaps left by my blue-collar childhood, educating me about Preston Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, Hal Hartley, Michelangelo Antonioni, and everything Rosalind Russell. I don’t need to ask myself if Jacob would do the same for me were the situation reversed, because it once was: Just after we met, I had to have surgery on my foot, a cast up to my thigh, and Jacob picked me up from the hospital, moved me into his apartment for a month, drove me to all my doctor’s appointments, and cheerfully waited on me until I could walk again.
Things didn’t end because of his age, or sedentary nature, or lack of funds. I left because of sex. Specifically, his proclivities, involving a playful dominance, a running script about sexy servant girls and kidnapped maidens in distress; restraints,
passwords. I had no interest in playing Helena to his Demetrius, as my predecessor Suzanne had done, down on all fours begging him to strike her with a leather crop. Such differences in desire are difficult to bridge.
Was this the case with Grace or Tonia or Elizabeth? Or had I caught him at a particular time? Careening toward fifty, broke from supporting his mother, and still no commercial productions of plays or screenplays, perhaps Jacob needed to dominate somewhere? I don’t know the others well enough to ask, nor are we here to compare notes. Still, history will impinge. Like last week, in the kitchen, when Grace mentioned how back in the day Jacob used Tonia to make her jealous—just as, in my time, he sometimes brought up Suzanne, who’d by then moved to Denver but might wash up in the city any moment, he insisted, for a night of fun. Always hedging his bets, our Jacob. Yet when I left him for someone else, he made a big, dramatic fuss, called me repeatedly, even showed up outside my window insisting I’d misunderstood the seriousness of his intentions and broken his heart.
Luckily, not for long. Four months later, he met Jolie, a romance writer operatic in her love for him. She hung around for three years, maybe his longest sustained relationship, constantly hinting about a ring, even enlisting his mother in her cause—like bringing a nuclear weapon to a gunfight—until he ended things. Even now, from his sickbed, he has a new woman, even younger, whose work he reads, full of hope and flirtatious emails, when it’s clear to all of us she wants only an editor. Force of habit, I suspect, a way to say I’m still here.
Meanwhile, his body is shrinking by the day, his cheekbones are sharp, his hair gone, and his eyes are noticeably larger and more hazel. It’s the first week of my tenure at his bedside. “You know I love you, right?” I stroke his forehead, kiss it. Finally, my words are not heard as an indictment of the past or an invitation to bed. “Yes, I know now,” he replies, eyes closed. That’s the thing about dying: It clarifies.
Then Jacob opens his eyes and asks, “Want to watch something great?” He sends me to one of the movie walls, foreign section, Italian shelf, to locate Seduced and Abandoned and Divorce, Italian Style. This is followed by a short discourse on shifting class structures in postwar Sicily, with a transition to the shocking youth of Stefania Sandrelli (in Divorce, she’s fourteen years old). He knows I love Italian cinema but also sees that, while I dried my eyes before entering the room, they are puffy from crying, and it’s no time for neorealism.
“At some point,” he says, “let’s watch The Godfather.” We’ve each seen I and II multiple times, including twice with each other. There’s no reason for the repetition but the joy of shared experience, the way we recite aloud the iconic lines about the gun and the cannoli and a sentimental weakness for my children, but in Jacob’s tone is an acknowledgment that whenever we watch again might be the last time, and he’s not ready yet for that kind of finality. We do not consider watching Godfather III.
In those first weeks, after the nurses change shifts and settle in, my days are spent shopping for food that will encourage Jacob’s appetite. It’s wonderful to have a job. Now, he can have anything he wants, and no doctor, lover, or friend will chastise. At Ess-a-Bagel, he likes a toasted everything with lox and cream-cheese spread. At Veniero’s he prefers New York cheesecake to Sicilian. There’s Second Avenue Deli for pastrami on rye with coleslaw. We’ve put the kibosh on Italian from the family-owned place on Third Avenue—he can’t handle the red sauce (an evening worth forgetting). And sometimes what’s best is most pedestrian, like Baskin-Robbins mint chocolate chip milkshakes, sold just across the street; he often has one before bed. We can’t stuff him fast enough.
One nurse is always on duty, while a second naps in the spare room that was once Jacob’s office, and a third comes in afternoons for a few hours to help with the heavy lifting. Like most people who make existence tolerable in this city, they are immigrants, in this case from Jamaica. While they speak to each other sometimes in a soft patois, they don’t make much reference to their homeland. Once through the door, their focus is Jacob, and his tidal-wave-sized will to keep going. The nurses do all the things too sensitive or complicated for the rest of us, like administering painkillers (Jacob insists on the minimum), washing and changing him, turning him over, checking for bedsores, exercising his legs and wrapping them to reduce the edema. But no matter how careful they are, he sometimes screams so loudly that I have to hide in the back bathroom, hands over my ears.
One afternoon while Jacob naps, Rose and I drink tea in the kitchen. She’s the head nurse, organizing the schedule and daily tasks. She knows Ethlyn, asleep in the next room, from church, and they have worked together for decades. Part-timer Robert is her brother. Veronica lives in her Bronx apartment complex. They have done this for countless families, and Rose shocks me with the lousy stuff people say to each other over the body of a dying patient, about rotting in hell, or where is the money, or I never loved you. The children and siblings who are forever arriving but never appear. At first, she explains, the nurses were suspicious of us: How many are there? What could they be after? Why don’t they have real jobs? But over the past month, they’ve come to understand. Jacob has surprised them with gifts, knows the names and destinies of their children, and, when they look tired, begs them to sit down. He flirts, helpless not to kiss a hand or compliment a hairstyle, and thanks them for every tiny thing. The nurses aren’t offended by his adoration, Rose assures me. They’re used to being invisible or putting up with insults—they don’t want this time to end. “So long as he keeps eating,” she repeats, aware that at least one doctor predicted he’d be dead by now. Then she fills a glass with the remains of yesterday’s milkshake and gives it to me to take to the patient, who is waking up.
III
It’s early August, a hazy humid day threatening to reach ninety-five, when the air-conditioning unit begins to overheat. An ancient warhorse, it is the only kind allowed in this nine-block-long apartment complex of eighty thousand people—something to do with the uniformity and shape of the casement windows, or what happens to the wiring when so many apartments use too many BTUs, or else someone years ago had a kickback going with the manufacturer. As if in reply to such speculation, the machine heaves, starting and stopping like an asthmatic old man, then suddenly begins to puff out smoke. I turn it off. The nurses are nervous—this one air conditioner cools the entire apartment, and without it, their patient could dehydrate. Jacob explains that you can’t just call up a handyman; there’s a shop across the street, the only place that keeps the outdated replacement parts and knows what to do with them. “There’s no sign,” he says, squeezing my hand. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
It is early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I cross First Avenue, walking three blocks south to what appears to be a junk shop with a heavily smudged front window displaying piles of tangled wires, chunks of dented plastic and mysterious metal tubing, torn filters, dirty rags, and three small, rusted motors, all blanketed with dust. The door is open, and a queue extends outside, releasing any cool air into the thickening heat. I get behind three elderly ladies chatting loudly in Russian. They wear shapeless cotton housedresses and plastic sandals, and after a few minutes, two more arrive behind me. They are perhaps reliving days in the former Soviet Union when they stood in lines just like this, waiting for they knew not what. Growing impatient, I push to the front, incurring the wrath of the crowd and the large man they are all waiting to reach, sitting in his tiny metal chair, chomping the end of an unlit cigar. In a Slavic-sounding accent, he barks, “Go back to end of line!” Another old lady by the front desk grabs my arm, and she has quite a grip. “It’s a matter of life and death!” I blurt out, a character in my own B movie. Then, lowering my voice, I summarize the situation. The babushkas stare but stop chastising. “We send Alexi,” the man says. “We send him right away. Give address.”
Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, a pale, sandy-haired man is at the door, well over six feet tall. As he maneuvers himself around the hospital bed to get to the machine, he looks terrified, not of the air conditioner but of Jacob, who is sound asleep. The covers are pulled up, and all you can see is his waxy pate, the high forehead and sunken, closed eyes. When did Jacob start sleeping at one o’clock in the afternoon? He only woke up an hour ago.
For half an hour, Alexi will work within inches of the patient, never once glancing over. He has walled himself off in the land of the living—though later I will decide Alexi is not afraid so much as respectful of cramped space and the dignity that should be accorded to suffering. He needs a part, disappears, then returns ten minutes later, rushing back to his post, finishing just over an hour after my arrival at the shop. In the annals of air-conditioning repair in the complex, this must be a land speed record. As he bolts for the door, I offer Alexi a tip, but he shoos me away with a look of disgust and is gone.
The following week, Jacob eats little but chicken broth. He sleeps more and more. A steady stream of visitors arrives, hoping to tempt him. Melanie, back from vacation, brings her sweet and sour cabbage salad. Cousins bring pastry and reminisce about Jacob’s father. A college friend in a pinstriped suit and polished loafers, smelling of braised flesh and capitalism, hands over bags of ribs, sliced brisket, barbeque chicken, coleslaw, mac and cheese, and key lime pie. Had he been on death row, which in a way he is, Jacob might have requested this very menu for his last meal. He manages the most he’s eaten in weeks, but the next day he sleeps almost round the clock, and when he finally wakes up his appetite is gone, this time forever.
Surreptitiously, we call anyone who might not know. Jacob has his share of enemies, but no one wants to be in a feud over a casting decision with a man who has weeks to live. Even now, he keeps score, mentioning more than once, for instance, that while Suzanne has phoned several times, Jolie, who knows what’s going on, has been radio silent. Meanwhile, food piles up in the kitchen, and we try to get him to eat small bits. The rest we push on visitors, or the nurses and I stand at the kitchen counter, wolfing hunks of cheesecake or mouthfuls of pastrami between tasks. One night, I sit by Jacob’s bed as he reluctantly takes a few sips of milkshake, then puts it aside. His face is so small, skin pulled tight over his cheekbones. “Will you miss me?” he whispers. “Will the others? That’s the thing I fear most. Being forgotten.”
His directness catches me off guard. “You’re too much of a pain in the ass to ever be forgotten.”
He frowns. Not a time for jokes, and he’s never liked them at his own expense. I try to reassure him, but no matter what I say—about the hole his death will leave in the fabric of our lives, how I’ve never known anyone quite like him, how more people want to visit than the nurses will allow in the apartment—he is agitated, disbelieving. He has no children, only a nephew in Canada; a mother confused and past ninety. All the things he’s accomplished will likely wither when he’s gone. His university classes will be taken up by someone else. His books and plays, published by tiny presses, were not much read or performed even when people still bought books and took chances on unknown playwrights. His rent-stabilized apartment will pass to strangers. The celebrities will pick different vice presidents. The young women will find healthier, more successful old men. Suddenly he sees how he once took up so much room but will vanish without a trace. He’s not the only one.
By now Jacob can’t read or write, but he periodically dictates emails to me or asks me to read aloud from “the book,” a thick compendium of baseball statistics that help him compose a roster for his fantasy baseball league. In his refusal to give up, he is like his beloved Mets, who are on a six-game losing streak but give strangely optimistic interviews even as fans abandon the stands. Perhaps he’s right, because in their third matchup with the Cincinnati Reds, on a rainy night in the mud, rookie pitcher Matt Harvey doesn’t allow a base runner until the fifth inning. In the sixth, when Jason Bay sends a fastball over the fence into right field, we explode in applause—me, Rose, Marco, and Ken. The phone rings, and it’s the guy with the face—his TV drama was recently canceled, but no matter, he’s still a celebrity, and he and Jacob analyze the turnaround, predict what will happen next. The shades are drawn in the twilight, and I can see in the reflected glare of the fifty-five-inch television a boyish gleam in Jacob’s eye, hear the old enthusiasm in his voice, as if these few minutes of pretending he’s not sick have suddenly cured him.
After the Mets win, 8–4, Jacob signals Ken over and asks him to contact the one doctor who has agreed to consider another round of chemo. “The witch doctor,” Ken calls her later to me and Marco in the hallway, for clearly Jacob’s body cannot withstand even transport to the hospital. And yet, why derail his determination? Who is going to tell him?
Not me. In two days, I fly home; Ken will pick up the baton. After that night’s excitement, Jacob sleeps all the next day and into early evening, until I fear I won’t get to say goodbye before my morning flight, or assure him, and myself, that I’ll be back next month. When he finally wakes up, it’s around eight in the evening, and I’m sitting by his bed. He agrees to a few sips of Ensure, but even the act of sucking on a straw seems to exhaust him again, and he sinks back into the pillows, eyes moving around the room to rest on a certain shelf. Then he says, in a voice barely audible: “Let’s watch The Godfather.”
“How about The Searchers? Or Stagecoach?”
“You hate John Wayne.”
True. Despite all the DVDs Jacob’s sent me over the years, I’ve never much cared for westerns. High Noon might be the exception that proves the rule—hard not to love Grace Kelly in that bonnet, or the wildly underrated Mexican actress Katy Jurado, who steals every scene she’s in—but if you’re more comfortable with post-Vietnam moral complexity, and all the reasons humans love each other that make no sense whatsoever, you don’t look to a white guy on horseback wearing a ten-gallon hat and carrying a six-shooter.
Jacob can call us his posse all he wants; he is more Don Corleone than Will Kane or Ringo Kid. The hugs he bestows on male and female friends alike. His tenderness and love of secrecy. How he hates displays of temper in his cast and always takes his revenge, eventually, if someone speaks against his authority. He has wanted nothing more his whole life than legitimacy, has told me that all of us gathering round, showing such loyalty—this has been the one gift of his disease. To know finally and definitively who is on his side.
As The Godfather loads, I wait for that first line from the undertaker about his belief in America and wonder how I’ll get through this. Rose puts a mug of blackberry tea on the table in front of me, where someone’s left a pile of chocolate chip cookies on a plate, and she and Ethlyn, about to change shifts, instead draw up chairs as if gathering around a fire. Jacob puts his hand out, and I take it in my own, feeling the life in his flesh. So that by the time we meander through the wedding—“longest continuous opening scene in film history,” Jacob rasps—and Connie dances with her father to the famous theme, I find myself strangely buoyed.
The nurses and I eat cookies, Jacob and I periodically whisper the lines to each other, and we are all utterly sucked into the story, Rose and Ethlyn for the first time, Jacob and me for the twelfth or fifteenth. That’s the thing about movies, and this movie particularly: You experience it over and over again in the present tense. So you might say that someone dies, too young and in terrible pain, when his heart finally gives out the last week in August, but the next week, or month, or for years to come—in a revival theater, or walking on a summer night through the park, or on your couch flipping channels—there he is, larger than life in front of you, still commanding, still granting favors, still holding out his warm hand to be kissed.
Sharon Pomerantz’s fiction has appeared in many literary magazines as well as in Best American Short Stories and on Selected Shorts. Her novel Rich Boy (Twelve) won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.
Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
