“There was one son,” Gregor said. “Anton. He died in the service. Vietnam, I think. He left, I think, three.”
“Well, one of the other two must have had sextuplets. The kids are everywhere. It’s really amazing. It makes me think I’m right, though, about not wanting to die in a hospital.”
“People go to hospitals when they’re sick,” Gregor said. “Are you trying to tell me you want to be hit by a bus?”
“No, I’m saying that if I get to the end of my life and there isn’t much anybody can do for me but lessen the pain, then I’d rather have them do it in my own bedroom. It would save on the amount of time nurses would have to run around telling everybody not to disturb the other patients.”
“I think I’d rather get hit by a bus,” Gregor said.
“I’m going to go back to Cavanaugh Street,” Bennis said. “I’m tired and I’m depressed and I miss you, but that does not mean I want you to come right back home. There’s no place to sit in the living room, anyway. I’ve got curtain samples on the couch.”
“I don’t understand why you’re worrying about curtain samples when you say we’ve got to redo all the window treatments, whatever those are.”
“It’s the windows themselves we’re redoing. A lot of them have to be recaulked. I’m going to go, Gregor.”
“Call me when you get back to the apartment,” Gregor said. “I don’t like City Avenue in the dark.”
Bennis hung up. Actually, she did the cell phone equivalent of hanging up, which was something like disappearing into thin air. Gregor missed real hanging up, where there was a click or a bang and you really knew where you were.
He walked back to the bed and put the phone down on the night table. There was a regular landline phone there. He wondered if anybody ever used it.
Then he walked over to his suitcase and started looking through the things Bennis had packed for him so that he’d have something clean to put on after he took a shower.
2
Gregor Demarkian called the hospital as soon as he got out of the shower, only to be told that Mr. Tekemanian was sleeping. The nurse at the desk said this as if he should have known, as if there was something about—What? Seven o’clock?—that made it obvious that people in hospitals would be asleep, that anybody with any sense would be asleep. He got less information out of the nurse than he had gotten out of Bennis. He thought about calling Martin, but that seemed excessive. Martin and Angela probably had enough to do with all this already.
He wasn’t really very good at walking around doing nothing. He was less good at doing what had to be done next when there was something else he wanted and couldn’t have. He got dressed. He put on a tie. He sat down at the room’s little desk and picked up the things on it one after the other, as if they could tell him what he ought to be doing. Finally, he had a thought that required some kind of action.
He was hungry.
There was a restaurant downstairs. Of course there was. When Gregor was growing up, Howard Johnson meant restaurants to him, not “motor inns.” He left his room and went down the hall to the elevator. He went down the elevator to the lobby and then across the lobby to the restaurant. There was a hostess waiting at the door, which appeared to be necessary. The restaurant was nearly full.
The waitress showed him to a booth in a back corner, so far away from everything else that it was almost like being put in Siberia. Gregor didn’t mind it. He had things to think about and he didn’t really want to listen to people talk about their dogs or their relationships or the terrible things their mothers-in-law had done to them. The waitress brought a menu, and Gregor thought it would be a good time to indulge in something fried. Tibor wasn’t here to rat him out to Bennis. Bennis wasn’t here to give him the impression that, now that he was married, he had no right to try to commit suicide by saturated fat.
He had just about started on his enormous pile of fried clams when his telephone went off, the 1812 Overture again, not a number he was supposed to recognize. He got the phone out and looked at the caller ID. It wasn’t an area code he knew, which meant it wasn’t likely to be Bennis or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street.
He put his fork down across his plate and said, “Yes?”
“Is this Gregor Demarkian?” a man said.
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“Good. This is Ferris Cole. I’m with the New York State Police. I’m a medical examiner—”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “I was going to call you in the morning. Isn’t it late? Are you working late?”