RECEDING PORTRAIT by David Galef
In old age, what’s hard, softens; what’s soft, hardens. Muscles and mind; arteries and joints. Has my attitude toward life relaxed or tightened? Toward death? Sometimes they get snarled. If living and dying are two sides of the same coin, which is heads and which is tails? I think of this conundrum as I contemplate the wreckage at Brightwell Gardens, the inpatient rehabilitation facility where I expect to spend the next three months. Or IRF, which sounds like a forgotten branch of the military. The average stay is supposed to be one to three months, even if it seems like a year.
The incident that landed me in Brightwell was a stroke. I was walking in Murray Park when part of me went numb. I felt lopsided and couldn’t balance. By the time an ambulance arrived, I needed treatment for my brain and for a badly bruised hip. When I got out of the hospital, it was time for rehabilitation, which I elected to do at home. My talking was unaffected, thank God. But I tended to fuzz out and required help just making coffee. My son, Benjamin, a lawyer who lives three hundred miles away, moved in for a week before giving up. He spoke to me in that frank, uncompromising way I used to admire. “Face it, Dad. You need help.”
My first day here, a personal care assistant named Addie showed me around: the physical fitness center, with its gym mats and recumbent bikes; the dining hall, which smelled of ketchup; the common room, with its nonstop television and mini-library. I was introduced to the nurse, the physiatrist, some other nurse, and my case worker. I’d be sharing a room with Warren, who had some kind of brain damage and smelled of old piss. “Residents sometimes need assistance with ADLs,” Addie informed me. Activities of Daily Living: personal care, meal preparation, medication management, and hygiene assistance. I didn’t need to ask about that last one.
I hate my new walker, an aluminum aid that I kick occasionally. At least I’m not in a wheelchair, a bunch of which clog the hallways like stalled cars on a freeway. I take a battery of medications, prompted by the nurse pushing a trolley that I wish was loaded with cheese Danish and coffee. “What if I promise to eat my vegetables?” I want to say.
The residents here have everything from spinal cord injuries to brain impairment. Those hearing I’ve had a stroke call me lucky: no slurred speech or mental issues. Just my body that won’t cooperate. “Get with the program!” I tell my legs. They shuffle and stutter. The physiatrist says my body needs re-education. I also receive speech therapy, though I talk just fine, and occupational therapy, though everyone knows I’m retired.
I can’t decide whether I like or loathe physical therapy. It’s three hours a day, and it hurts, but at least it’s something to do. In a long but narrow room, we perform balancing exercises. We hold onto the rail and try standing on one foot, then the other. We plod on the treadmill and practice walking heel to toe. We march in place and support, I’m not sure why, a long stick in one open palm.
“That’s good,” says the therapist, a tall, erect woman whose name always evades me, with a tread so even that she could carry five books on her head of auburn hair. “Now let’s lie on the mat and try some leg rotations.” Also an arm stretch with clasped hands, and one that pinches, called a clamshell.
After a week, Diane (that’s it) claps me on the shoulder. “You’ve really improved your balance, Richard.” I still feel mixed about these sessions. Yet the feeling of achievement makes me grin top to bottom for a day.
The other residents or inmates I meet gradually, as if they’re shy guests at a party. Who? I was never great at names. Overshadowing the guest list is Sophie, my wife, who died of a heart attack two years ago. She appears mainly at night, calling me in that throaty voice I still find sexy after sixty years. She took care of me until I took care of her. Once she was gone, I found I couldn’t look after myself too well. I miss the small dinners she cooked for us. I miss her tired smile.
“One should live until one starts repeating oneself!” I announce to the Dominican orderly.
“You said that before, Mr. Kaye,” he says in that quiet way of his, worse than laughing at me. I do have moments of extreme lucidity, when I might as well be forty-five and playing mixed doubles tennis with Sophie as my partner. The word lissome was invented for how she swung her racket. Benjamin was halfway through high school, an awkward boy who clumped around in Doc Martens and offensive T‑shirts, mainly to gain attention, I realized later. What should I wear so the personal care assistant pays attention to me when I have a request?
Late one afternoon, I start to tally what improves with age. I stop at fine wine and cheese. Speaking of which, the food here is overcooked and bland. Salisbury steak and mushy green beans, chicken in white sauce, boiled carrots. Cottage cheese and soup for those who can’t chew well, sometimes an entire piece of meat ground into paste. When Benjamin came to visit, he brought a box of chocolates. Long gone.
Growing old shifts my priorities to paths too late to embark upon, from job changes (I used to be Mr. Kaye, an English teacher) to hobbies (I wrote on the side). It’s too late for a second career as a surgeon. I’ll never take up whittling. What activities can one pursue with mind and body deteriorating? Maybe jigsaw puzzles. It’s important to begin something new, so that one can see improvement rather than decline. Start piano? Learn to draw? More modest ambition: When I have nothing left to give, I want people still to like me.
The exchanges I’ve had with other guests include pleasantries over meals, even when my interlocutor isn’t sure which end of the fork to use. Or making comments at book club, where a gaunt lady calls me George. I can’t participate in the dance class, but I watch from the sidelines as three detainees bob and sway.
“You have a great sense of rhythm,” I compliment the middle one afterwards, and she nods as if to say “Of course.” I admire people who know their own worth. Her eyes look demurely downward when she speaks. Her name is Emma, and we agree to have dinner tomorrow. I look forward to this event with joy and terror, like a kid on his first date.
Most of the people here look, to be pitiless, as if they’re well on the road to decay. Sunken chests, bent posture, seamed and spotted skin, though here and there illuminated by a radiant smile. Should I go on? Fallen breasts, bent backs, skin crepey and liver-spotted like freckles gone bad. Gravity and friction get everyone in the end. My roommate, Warren, is a five-foot gnome with a permanent scowl.
You’re as unattractive as they come, I think, then realize I’ve said it aloud.
“Yeah, well, you’re no rose!” He turns on his heel and stalks away.
Should I apologize? Warren is ugly. But who am I to talk? When I look in the small bathroom mirror, I’m startled. My face is like a badly paved road.
Sophie thought I was handsome.
A visit from a friend! Art Schulberg, another English teacher from Xavier, who used to tell his students, “I am your coach!” Now he’s bent over from osteoporosis but still quite ambulatory. He’s so sympathetic to my situation that it annoys me. We talk about Sophie, whom he seems to have liked better than his own wife.
Those who praise the wisdom of the elders haven’t visited an IRF. The wandering eyes and minds. The drool and urine – why does incontinence seem so witless? But the inmates haven’t all lost it. As the middle-aged doctor here puts it, there’s young-old and old-old. He doesn’t say which category I belong in.
Anyway, even the old-old can surprise. This afternoon, one of the OTL or “Out to Lunch” crowd, a huge, craggy gentleman named Jim, has a moment of astounding clarity. He rears up from his wheelchair. “I’ve been here – what? two months? – and have yet to see any improvement!”
Surprise! I’ve struck up a real friendship with Emma Biersdorf. We talk about everything over meals, from the idiotic administration governing our country to the paternalistic administration at Brightwell. She has an agile mind. When she started going deaf, she learned to lip-read. She’s in here because she’s begun going blind. “You are a delight,” I tell her, but I’m not sure she hears me.
Many of us have forgotten our manners or just grown tired of politeness. One old woman with a J-shaped back badmouths the staff to anyone who’ll listen. A glowering geezer named Ron, maybe, kicks people. “Hey, watch out!” I tell him. He makes to kick me again. I whack him with my walker, astonishing even myself. That stops him, though. And no one but a couple of OTL see me doing it.
Repression grows porous in old age. Amazing what’s escaped the hedge of my teeth. Did I really call the Dominican orderly a little shit? Why am I getting cruder as I grow older? Belching, farting, picking my nose in public. It bothers even me.
Another visit from Benjamin, who reminds me how far away he lives. This time, he brings a giant bag of Bachman’s pretzel sticks, my favorite. He absent-mindedly eats half. He’s taller than I am now and doesn’t look much like me. At forty-eight, he’s divorced without kids. We talk about his ex, whose hugs he misses. We end up at Sophie, who waited so many years for grandchildren that didn’t arrive. Me, too. Sophie: now a void in both our lives.
He gestures in the general direction of the past. “Did you ever forgive Mom?”
“For what?”
“For Art Schulberg. With Mom. That affair she had.”
Huh?
Art? With Sophie? When? Where did she find the time? The questions crowd my brain, and I’m on the verge of erupting when I see Benjamin’s expression and with a great effort clamp down. I half-nod. “That was a while ago.”
I don’t fool Benjamin, who’s wearing a peculiar look. “Sorry. I thought you knew.”
“Just – just because you know something doesn’t mean you want to discuss it.”
“You really didn’t know, huh?” Benjamin does something with his hands. “That’s, that’s – “
“Shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”
“All right, I’m outta here.”
After he leaves, I go to the bathroom, my one truly private room, and howl. Warren tells me to shut the fuck up.
Half-buried, like a bubble in wet beach sand, is the memory of the one affair I had, a fling with another teacher at Xavier, ended by mutual fear of being caught. I can’t even recall her name right now, though I see her body.
“Time is relative here,” I inform Warren during what should be an afternoon nap. “It’s as long as the corridor to the common room, as short as an emphysema wheeze.” Warren owns a railwayman’s pocket watch that long ago stopped working, but now he pulls it out to consult it. “What are you doing that for?”
He glares. “I want to measure how long you’ll go for.”
How many days have I been here? How many weeks? A herd of residents have already checked out, picked up by family and friends. A new flock has arrived, like wobbly planes landing on a runway. ETD is Estimated Time of Departure, not Estimated Time of Death, though some overlap is understandable. “You should have at least an hour of layover time at the airport. Of course,” an old friend once joked, “if you die en route, you won’t have any time at all.” All right, the friend was Art. May he get stuck in eternal layover.
Must try for some sort of buoyancy as a stay against depression. None of the drugs I’m taking help with that, and I don’t want another pill. When we have chicken-something for the third time in a week, I send it back with a little note, “ENOUGH OF THIS HORSESHIT.”
It’s not really the meals. I am responsible for my own mood. I am the captain of my fate. I may be misquoting.
Song to sing in the shower:
I may be out, but I’m not down,
Or maybe it’s the other way round!
Warren tells me again to shut the fuck up.
It doesn’t feel like even a month, or maybe it feels like eternity. Anyway, I may be leaving soon, though I’m not sure I’ll really escape. The corridors in this facility smell of ill health and close in on me like a trap. But where would I go? The other day I signed up for a morning shopping expedition. The joy of getting out to see the world again! I bought nothing. I came back empty-handed.
I walk away from the television when faced with yet another stupid sitcom. Now that I’ve reached my eighties, I have the integrity to declare “This is nuts!” when confronted with the absurd, or alternately “How refreshing!” I say that one night when we have salmon instead of chicken.
I see Emma a lot: Emma in the Book Nook, Emma in the afternoon over a cup of tea. Her hearing is bad, her vision worsening, but we can still have a conversation. Unlike so many of the residents, she remains curious, her face animated. You can see, under her black sweater and slacks, that she once had an elegant figure. When she reaches out to touch my arm, I feel the old electricity. I walk her back to her room, entertaining ridiculous thoughts.
This morning I crossed swords with Amanda Cartwright, the assistant director here. She’s a formidable woman who smiles a lot to mask her anger. She wanted me to turn down my radio. There’d been some complaints. Warren denied making them. So who else?
“Music is important to my life,” I declared.
She smiled. “Yes, but maybe at a lower volume.”
“I can’t hear with the sound turned low!” I thrust out my arm to make this point, lurched, tried to right myself, and ended up plowing into Ms. Cartwright. It felt wonderful.
I remember heading for a downtown club to hear a venerable jazz musician. At eighty-eight, the man at the keyboard acted like a kid, tapping his foot, bobbing his head, lips moving, sometimes tongue protruding, his face lighting up when he hit a particularly vibrant chord.
That’s the secret, isn’t it?
Last night I listened to the radio, an old Dizzy Gillespie set on WBGO, with earphones that Ms. Cartwright had found somewhere. Her kindness made me weep, but I didn’t want to show it.
I continue to see Emma, even though she can’t quite see me. I kiss her soft, dry lips. She gives me a squeeze. What she whispers is none of your business. It has to do with tongues in places they don’t usually go.
Rehab really works! For over a week, I haven’t needed my walker, and the physiatrist says I can be discharged soon. But then –
I take a spill. This morning, I’m headed for breakfast when my foot catches against I’m still not sure what. I fall on my hip, then down on my head. That’s the last I remember before I surface in an ambulance gurney. Not how I wanted to leave Brightwell, I think cloudily.
In the hospital, they assess the damage and order hip replacement surgery. “Is that really necessary?” I ask, a line the doctor thinks is funny. Turns out I suffered a concussion on top of the broken hip, so they have to wait a day. Small hospital room; woozy with pain meds. Surgery means another blackout, then seven days of supervised hobble-stepping – with the cousin of my old walker!
Benjamin visits me, bringing a fruit basket. “How’re you doing?” he inquires.
“Not bad, I guess.”
“That’s good.” Then he tells me he’s moving to California, but he’ll be in touch. When he hugs me awkwardly, I find myself crying. The room is bereft when he leaves.
Finally I can go home, but home is Brightwell.
Back home, I lie in bed a lot because suddenly I tire easily.
“How’s my man?” asks the Dominican orderly, making me wonder if I really did tell him off. Ms. Cartwright exudes sympathy. Emma gives me such a horizontal hug that she takes my breath away.
Warren glares at them, all intruders on his privacy. His dementia is turning him into a growling ape man.
Everyone says I’m lucky the break was clean. “Just a setback.” But I can’t bend forward or sit down on a low chair. “You have to be careful,” says the physiatrist. “You might just fall again.” Or have another stroke, he doesn’t say.
This is it, I figured in the hospital. This isn’t it, I eventually think. But it will be. I sit up in bed, my head in my hands.
Faced with a longer stay, I widen my group of acquaintances. One young-old man with the vestiges of an athletic build and palsy used to be a tennis pro. He likes to watch tournament matches on ESPN. Me, too, though I was nowhere near his level. “Willya look at her serve!” He slaps his thigh. “Boy, I’d like to be her racket.”
A tiny woman who laughs out of context does it because of some neurological disorder. She has a rhythm. “Ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha!” It’s an oral form of incontinence. She plays the piano in the common room most afternoons, punctuated by fits of giggling.
A dignified gentleman named Hamilton, I think, used to be a composer. We discuss music education in the schools. Hamilton suffers from an undiagnosed degenerative nerve disease: muscle stiffness, problems with movement, occasional confusion. Help isn’t on the way. The proper means of assistance hasn’t even been invented yet.
Then there’s Warren, who sulks a lot these days. So what? I just use him as a sounding board. I utter my profound thoughts to a short man in a mauve cardigan. “If dignity comes with age, it leaves for the same reason. How can you feel stately when a nursing assistant has to feed you or wipe up your shit?”
Warren pretends not to hear. Oh, he heard, all right. Warren is losing sphincter control.
“Or what if you’re losing your mind? Heard that guy down the hallway who cries out every night for his mother?”
“No,” Warren allows.
“Easy at the end, that’s all I’m asking for.”
Warren looks stricken.
A middle-aged woman in a kaftan, talking a lot with her hands, stands at the front of the common room, addressing a small flock of chairs and armchairs. The topic: “Staying Optimistic.” There will be a Q & A session afterwards. The afternoon lecture crowd smells of old folks’ breath.
“That we all die doesn’t make life a tragedy, but it does blur the genre,” I announce to an unaware Warren. “On a grander scale: If
history happens first as tragedy, second time farce, what about the third time?”
“One plus two makes three,” he tells me triumphantly.
My life by now encompasses more than two cycles. And the staff here never understands my cultural references: Howard Johnson’s, Adlai Stevenson, flipping baseball cards. Most of the inmates do, their memories better for what happened in past decades than for ten minutes ago.
What am I afraid I’ll forget? The same stuff I don’t want to remember? Why did Sophie once leave me for a month? Is Benjamin still mad at me after all these years for crashing in on him and his girlfriend in the garage? No use blaming time for all these ills, but it’s tempting. “Age sits in the room it built years ago, as the lights dim,” I tell you-know- who. Or maybe I didn’t say that out loud. It’s growing hard to tell.
My move from seniority to senility: It’s time. Now it’s past time. That wasn’t long, was it? Sometimes I feel as if I changed from a boy to an old man overnight. But more often I feel like a gradually loaded container of years. I need to walk slowly or I’ll spill over.
Any person who doesn’t get a little philosophical by the end of his life isn’t a human but an ant. Yet my philosophizing leads to only one conclusion: It’s not enough. It’s never enough. It will have to do. I want! I want! William Blake.
Poor, elegant Emma is on the decline, her macular degeneration making her vision patches and shadows. A therapist is helping her retrain to move differently. Meanwhile I offer to hold her hand to help her navigate the hallways. Last night, ushering Emma back to her room, I went in. Her skin felt smooth, the back of her neck kissable. Other parts, too. Her hands knew where to go and made me feel young again. Her body was surprisingly . . . lissome.
Afterward: guilt dreams.
I meet with the visiting psychotherapist, Dr. Bowen, a plump man in a cardigan who comes every Friday for half a day. He laces his hands and asks, I swear, “What seems to be the problem?”
“Ha ha ha” – I sound like the laughing woman. After I finish cackling, I give him a real answer. “The daily routine annoys me.”
“Not stimulating enough?” He steeples his fingers.
“Maybe. And I have all kinds of fears.” The decay of my body balances with my feeling that I don’t belong here.
He takes a few notes, then looks up. “Have you considered an anti-anxiety medication?”
“No.” But for a little while after Sophie died.
I decide to embark on my own self-help campaign: Practice humility. Wake up grateful. Or ditch the guilt and keep the anger.
Money doesn’t much exist in an IRF. But how much is this costing Medicare? $1,600 a day, I’ve heard. I owned my own house and had a fair chunk of savings from the four decades I taught at Xavier High School. I didn’t think to transfer the money to Benjamin to avoid paying it all to Brightwell. Come to think of it, I didn’t think of a lot.
“What’s the resale value of what I’ve accomplished? What does a life add up to? Must it total something? Am I waiting for when life starts returning dividends? At my age, when I get a free ride, is it because I paid for it years ago?”
I ask Warren these questions when he’s trying to sleep. Better than a kick in the slats. He mutters something. It occurs to me that I might be his entertainment.
The end of the beginning is an auspicious, hopeful occasion. I was thirty and about to get married to a girl named Sophie Klein. I had just transferred to Xavier and liked the students. A bunch of teachers played tennis on the weekends at the municipal courts. I had a mean backhand and fondly thought I might get better.
The beginning of the end is a sober, thoughtful time. I had just retired from Xavier, still uncertain as to how to spend my time. Sophie had already stopped working at the real estate office and wanted to travel more, but she had her first coronary incident about then. Benjamin had dropped out of law school and was thinking of reapplying in a year.
The middle of the middle is happily oblivious. I was finally teaching AP English and was approached to be department chair. Benjamin had his first teenage job, as a clerk at CVS, and Sophie was busy learning about real estate for her certification. Family dinners were catch-as‑catch- can.
And at this point? I sit on the bed, staring at my hands. That’s how I begin every morning.
The aftereffects of my spill aren’t fading much. My balance remains unsteady, and I have unaccountable dizzy spells. Neither the physical therapist nor the psychotherapist seems to help much. But should I expect improvement or just a stay against confusion?
I’m still mentally sharp, or at least I think I am. I desperately don’t want to move to a nursing home. People die in there.
I figured I knew Hamilton, whose musical career renders him a man of culture. His incurable nerve ailment makes him more of a tragic figure than most of us. His brave smile is almost inspiring.
I catch him leaving my room, clutching my razor. Sophie gave it to me when I turned sixty. “Hey! Hand it over.” I hold out my arm too far and almost fall over.
“Sorry.” He gives it to me reluctantly. “I thought it was my room.”
“Right, right.” Brandishing the razor, but carefully, I lecture him as if he were Warren. “Now that I’ve arrived at old-old age, why am
I still perplexed by liars and thieves? Why?”
Why, indeed? When I enter the room, I notice that Warren is right there but has said nothing.
In a mood of false cheer after breakfast, I inform Miss Cartwright, “The spirit of goodness should govern human affairs. Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities.”
She puts on what they used to call a Pan Am smile. “That’s a lovely sentiment, Richard.”
Ha. Half the eternal verities suck. The rest are irrelevant.
Time to take stock, to make an inventory of what I have left. One unsteady set of legs, a leaky brain in a battered skull, two serviceable lungs, and a pair of tired feet that tend to wander. Not much trade‑in value.
I feel surer when I’m in Emma’s arms.
The way Benjamin used to storm out of the room when he was seventeen! I should have run after him. I should have apologized. I should have been a better father. Now I wish that Benjamin were a better son. The last time I saw him was too long ago.
It might as well be summer camp, and me, a lonely camper confined to the cabin, waiting for a care package from home. I put on my coat and take a very gingerly walk on the flagstone path surrounding Brightwell.
This life will have to do. You won’t get another.
Five minutes too late versus twenty years too late. Still time to make a better life for myself if I shift the boundaries?
Hello, Emma. I kiss her hand. She’s been awfully weak lately, unclear why. She’s failing, despite everything.
Ms. Cartwright approaches me after lunch and tells me that I shouldn’t take unsupervised walks around the grounds. She stands tall and inflexible, anticipating resistance. I close my eyes and imagine being disciplined by her, put across her knee and spanked.
I want! I want! What famous person said that?
How will I know when it’s time to leave? People will stop pretending I belong here. Do others manage their departure better than I do? Those who can see the outcome don’t necessarily play a better game. My new philosophy: Follow your bliss till it turns into bile.
A lifetime of achievement, they say. But by the time I got or achieved something, whether a publication or a promotion, I no longer cared about it. There ought to be a name for this species of irony. With the right attitude, everything can be sad and funny at the same time.
“Want to hear something funny?” I ask Warren, who’s playing with his watch.
“Sure. Why not.”
I pause for the delivery. But nothing comes.
In music as in life, I fade in and out and in and out. Mostly diminuendo, like whatsername’s piano-playing in the common room that slowly died out. It’s not hard to imagine the world without me: a minor gap and then not even that.
Belated advice to myself: Don’t regret too much. Save some for another occasion. A painting of an ocean liner hangs in the common room. It gets me thinking. I feel another pronouncement coming on. “What to do if you’ve missed the boat: Don’t try to track what’s sailed away or stare at the wake. Watch a few ships in the harbor, not too long or intently.”
Yesterday my dreams were wrapped in wool, but when the grayness cleared, I saw a procession of oldsters getting up to dance in a ballroom larger than the whole facility here. We stepped back and forth, moving to the strains of an invisible orchestra. I held Emma in my arms, though she was also Sophie. I felt light and lissome. I woke up to the same leaf-patterned curtains as always and a wet bed.
Emma, Sophie. No, Sophie, Emma. Did Sophie really have an affair? And what if she did? How much do I actually know about Emma? How much did Sophie learn about me?
Here I am at the end of life with my little bundle of sticks. Life’s a series of tradeoffs till you’ve nothing left to trade. We all pay with our lives. But I still have so many questions. Maybe the answers are beside the point. When I wake up in the middle of the night, groping my way back from the bathroom, sometimes I head for the window to smell the moon.
David Galef is the author of two story collections, Laugh Track (University Press of Mississippi, 2002) and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc, 2011), and three novels published by The Permanent Press, including How to Cope with Suburban Stress (2006). His most recent book is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook (Columbia University Press, 2016).