“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
“You can’t drive it,” Betsy persists. “Meantime we’re paying for insurance and parking, does that seem intelligent to you?”
“She’s got a point, Dad. I mean, that’s costing you, what, a couple of hundred bucks a month or something?”
“Don’t use that tone with me,” Bernie says. “The two of you, always ganging up.”
“He won’t give that car up because it’s his manhood. All old men have to give up their cars, Bernard. He thinks he’s eighty-six going on twenty. You’re old, Bernard, and you have to go on dialysis or you’ll die. He won’t even listen to the doctors.”
“Let me die, then, if I’m old.”
“This is what I have to put up with, day and night. And he stinks. It’s embarrassing being seen with him.”
Bernie glides to the first floor where Reese waits with the wheelchair.
“Is there anything I can get you at the store?” Reese inquires.
“I have a list,” his mother says.
A woman in a hat is shouting at her dog. “Grow up! No other doggie on the street behaves like this. Do you see any other doggies on the street behaving like this?” Reese retrieves a shopping cart. Just once he would like to walk into a supermarket and not hear Karen Carpenter singing, “We’ve only just begun ...”
He looks at the list. The same as last week and the week before that: cream, bacon, butter, cold cuts, white bread, butter and lemon tarts, Ripples (sour cream and onion), canned peaches, cream cheese, pineapple juice, tonic water, Minute Rice, Campbell’s soup, croissants, butter pecan ice cream. Their diet would kill normal people.
Nobody offers to help him at the bed store. He lies on several beds in an effort to release neck tension. He tries different positions, different pillows. Looking up, he sees a sombre woman with a name tag that reads Mary Jane Lovering looking down at him.
“I need to buy a bed,” he says, uncomfortable at being viewed lying down by a woman standing up.
“That’s a Stearns & Foster queen,” she tells him. “Very popular.”
“It’s very springy.”
“You don’t like springy?”
He sits and bounces up and down. “Not particularly.”
“Try this one.” She points to an even bigger Stearns & Foster. He sits and checks the bounce factor.
“Less springy?” Mary Jane Lovering asks.
“A little.”
“That’s absolutely top-of-the-line.” She has narrow front teeth that angle inward, providing a flash of rodent.
“How much are these?” Reese inquires.
“With the pad you’re looking at five thousand.”
“Dollars?” Immediately he realizes how stupid this sounds. He had no idea that a bed could cost five thousand dollars. Clearly this is a quality bed, a bed that Roberta would envy. He could mention it in passing: “I slept great last night. That Stearns & Foster queen is top-of-the-line.” She would know that he bought a quality bed without her, and that it was a queen, which could only lead to more comfort and contented sleeping, a finer state of love with some unnamed woman, and an all-round happier, more productive life.
He had no intention of spending five thousand dollars on a bed. He doesn’t have five thousand dollars to spend.
“I can tell you’re not in love with it,” Mary Jane Lovering observes. “You’ve got to be in love with your bed.” She points to another bed. “The Shiffmans are manufactured more traditionally. They have an eight-way, hand-tied box spring and use only natural fibres.”
“Which are?”
“Compressed cotton and wool instead of synthetic foams. Try it.”
“Definitely less springy.” Natural fibres sound promising. He hasn’t really thought about synthetic foams, hasn’t really thought about what’s in a bed.
She pulls back the duvet. “Make yourself comfortable. It’s the only way to find out.”
He lies on his side and she pulls the covers over him, sending him back to boyhood, when Mummy had healing powers. Which must be why he wanted her after he killed the pigeon. Which must be why he wanted her after he killed Amir Kassam. Because Betsy, whose chain-smoking has destroyed her circulation, believes her son incapable of ill-doing. Even when she saw Reese’s Scout shirt smeared with pigeon blood, she believed that Dudley Dancey did it. Betsy’s beliefs are unshakeable. She considers the health warnings on cigarette cartons to be propaganda. A doctor recently cut off two of her toes and advised her that if she didn’t quit smoking he’d have to cut off her foot, maybe even amputate to the knee.
“Do you have any allergies?” Mary Jane Lovering inquires.
“No.”
She pats the Shiffman. “Then this might be the one for you.”
“It feels hard.”
“Hard?”
“I can feel my hip and shoulder pushing into it.”
“What is your current sleep system?”
“A futon.”
Mary Jane Lovering looks saddened for a moment, as though he’s just told her his dog died.
“Actually,” Reese clarifies, “before the futon I slept on a quality bed.”
“Do you remember the brand?”
“No. My wife bought it.”
“I see.” She averts her eyes, unable to meet the gaze of such a bottom feeder. “Why don’t I let you browse?”
“Thank you.” Losing conviction, he tries a Sealy with a pillow top, which smothers him. Mary Jane Lovering turns her attention to a young couple in corporate attire who lounge on the beds, together and individually. “How long will one of these things last?” the young husband asks.
“Forget how long it lasts,” the young wife interrupts, “we’ve got to get the bed that feels right, we can buy another one later.”
“If you buy a bed and don’t like it,” Mary Jane Lovering advises, “you can send it back within thirty days.”
“I already told him that,” the young wife says. “Sweetie, people send beds back all the time.” She reclines on the bigger Stearns & Foster and takes a call on her cell. The young husband lies beside her while she converses at length with someone else about what she received at her wedding. Will this be their life, on a succession of Stearns & Foster queens, talking on cellphones about recent acquisitions because they can’t talk to each other? Acquisitions and beds that will soon be on their way to landfill sites? Like Bernard and Betsy, once the children are grown or dead, will the corporate couple practise tolerance until bowel function becomes impossible to ignore? Is Reese’s marriage destined for such a fate? Is he genetically programmed to destroy relationships? Should he remain devoted to Elena who is dead and therefore unthreatening? Whenever he cooks a chicken he thinks of her. They bought the Romertoph together. “A clay pot?” he argued. “Do you know how much energy is required to heat a clay pot for two hours?”
“You’ll taste the difference,” she said coolly, handing the pot to the cashier.
And he did. The chicken was tender and juicy on the inside, crispy on the outside. They cooked many chickens together and ate them with their fingers then had greasy sex. Roberta still has Reese’s Romertoph. He must retrieve