Truth in Advertising Page 0,39
Ian at home with Scott, getting ready to host their big dinner tomorrow. Paulie with his wife in Mamaroneck, putting the kids down so he can put toys together. Stefano and his wife in the West Village, making dinner. He mentioned that his mother was flying in from Italy today for the holidays. Malcolm, as always, spending the holidays with Raj and his wife. I pick up my laptop bag and my knapsack and start walking. There’s a part of me that wants to go home but it would be empty and sad, too much of Amy left there in the silence. I walk hundreds of yards through the airport, past Sunglass Hut (two of them), past Cinnabon, past Sbarro, where a man looks at me for a long time, having just taken a massive bite of pizza, a comical look that says he wants to harm me, past a woman slowly mopping the floor, to the gate for the flight to Hyannis, Massachusetts, with brief layovers in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. I buy a ticket on a half-empty flight to spend Christmas with my father, a stranger I have not seen in twenty-five years.
• • •
He’s dead.
This is what I think when I look at him from the doorway of his hospital room. His eyes are closed and he’s not moving and his face and hands are an unnatural color for a human. It looks like him but it doesn’t. I can’t believe he’s dead. Except he’s not. The sheets are pulled tight around him and you can see his chest rise and fall slowly, hear the beeps and blips of the machines that signify he’s alive.
And just that quickly I wish I hadn’t come. Why am I here? It’s not for him. It’s for the idea that it seemed like the right and noble thing to do. It’s something one might see in a commercial: Open. An airport. Night. Tired businessman about to board a flight when his cell phone rings. “Hello?” Long pause. “Where? No, it’s just . . . we haven’t seen each other in a while. No. Okay. Thanks.”
He walks to the jetway, is about to hand the ticket to the attendant, when he turns and runs.
Cut to him pulling up to the hospital in a cab.
Cut to him in his father’s room.
Cut to a tight shot of him holding his father’s hand.
Cut to a nurse, buxom, leaning over the bed . . . wait . . . lose the nurse.
Cut to his father opening his eyes, the surprised look. “Fin. I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice hoarse. “Don’t leave me.”
United Airlines.
I like it. It works. It works because we can imagine it, because we’ve seen it or something like it hundreds of times. It’s emotional comfort food, a known narrative, like the ABC Sunday Night Movie or Leno jokes.
Except here, now, someone’s not following the script. My father’s not waking up to say his lines. Even if he did I wouldn’t really care. I want to leave and head as fast as possible to New York, to the Ear Inn, to the White Horse Tavern, to Corner Bistro. I want to call Ian, call Phoebe, call someone. Yes. I will do that. I do not want to be here. It’s Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake. I want to be home. Or at the very least on a plane to Mexico. I don’t know whether to stand or sit.
“Can I help you?”
A nurse appears beside me. She looks like a nurse. I wonder if I look like a copywriter in my blue jeans, boots, and $300 James Perse sweater that Ian and Phoebe made me buy.
“I’m Fin Dolan.”
“His son. Of course. I’m Margaret Nash.”
His son? Legally, I guess.
We shake hands and I think of the proximity her hands have to death and disease. Where does anatomical waste go? (According to an article in Harper’s some time ago, it goes primarily to one of three places: New Jersey, Staten Island, or Delaware. What is it, exactly, about these places that willingly accept ill-functioning kidneys, spleens, and bloody, viscous tissue?)
“I’m so sorry,” Margaret Nash says. “This must be very difficult for you.”
“It is, yes,” I say with a pained look, as if I’m a character on a soap opera.
“He’s stable now. It’s a matter of time, of course, until we know something. The doctor should be around shortly.”
“Thank you,” I say to Margaret, who may be forty-eight or may be sixty-two. She has short, shiny silver hair. She’s