Audio: Han Ong reads.
Roscoe could stand to lose twenty pounds. Closer to thirty would be even better. It would ease the burden on his heart. One blessing, though: he’s still ambulatory. At his most intrepid, he makes do with an aluminum cane. Not for him the “suave” models he and Flavia marvelled over in a catalogue “for the dapper older gentleman,” which had appeared in Roscoe’s mailbox, but with somebody else’s name on the address label. One cane had a detachable metal-eagle handle and a tapered body whose tip was sheathed in copper. Another had a concealed dagger that you accessed by unscrewing the head, which was of a beagle, deceitfully hapless.
Most days, Flavia takes him for a walk, circling the two or three blocks around his Ridgewood home, and he uses a walker. The only exception is when there is ice on the sidewalk; then they sit on the porch to inhale the exhaust of passing cars, Roscoe under a couple of wool blankets and Flavia with her down jacket zipped up all the way to her chin.
They have been together for just over a year. It was for Roscoe that Flavia left her job with the Safe Dispatch Nurse Services, for which she’d given up her previous stint at the Blessed Rest Retirement Home, in Jackson Heights, where she was frequently scheduled on the night shift, with Artung and Lucing, and also on the weekends, with Loreen and Wanda. It feels like a lifetime ago, and she can’t believe she has been able to survive without Wanda, in particular—the closest she has come in this world to a mother figure, with her filthy mouth and her sound life advice. But she has, she has.
There is also a back yard at Roscoe’s, where she has taken it upon herself to make him exercise, passing a yoga ball back and forth, for at least fifteen minutes. She also gets him to reach skyward with both arms, as she keeps him upright by holding on to his waist. If Roscoe’s in a good mood, he will begrudge her at least half an hour. If not, then it’s the leather recliner in the living room, in front of a television that never settles on a channel for long, as he is convinced that something better is just a few clicks away. Flavia refers to days like that as Roscoe’s “wrist exercise” days.
He won’t reheat food that’s been in the fridge for more than two days, so it’s useless to prepare anything for future consumption. She does the best she can, within the parameters of what he, as a diabetic, is allowed, although it’s her philosophy that a patient can cheat every once in a while, because eating is living, and, if you’ve lost the thrill of the former, surely the end of the latter is forthcoming? She does not tell Roscoe’s daughter, Veronica, this, and, besides, the cheat meals she prepares are polished off in one go, so there are no leftovers to expose her. Spaghetti with meatballs is an example of a cheat meal, since white pasta is bad for blood sugar, and he has to take a few more units of insulin than normal to be able to absorb the voluptuous unhealthiness of the meal.
Today is only a half day, because Veronica is coming later, for movie night, and she will stay until the next morning.
Veronica is ten years older than Flavia and, like Flavia, lives alone, in an Upper East Side co-op paid for outright by Roscoe. Veronica is his sole living offspring. There was a son, five years older than Veronica, who died of a heroin overdose a dozen or so years back, when he was only in his twenties. Every so often, Roscoe will exclaim, apropos of some stray thought he doesn’t see fit to share, Ah, what would Bill say! Bill was the name of the deceased son. Flavia has noticed that Roscoe never utters the dead boy’s name when Veronica is around, at least on the visits when Flavia is there. That Roscoe has the presence of mind not to trip up—this speaks of still sharp mental faculties.
What movie you going to see with Veronica tonight? Flavia asks.
I don’t know. Ostensibly, Roscoe is watching television, but there is that dead look in his eyes, and the television, to Flavia’s mind, has become a kind of tanning machine, bathing his skin in the light of different channels, now orange, now blue.
He didn’t sleep well last night. This soured him for today, and he didn’t want to go for his customary walk, or to sit in the back yard and bask in the healing ambience of the bright sun.
Maybe a bath will make you feel better. Which is a way of saying that his body odor is starting to be able to get up off the recliner and go for a walk in his stead. Maybe a week, a week and a half, has to pass before this becomes true, because she is habituated to the musk, which is not altogether unpleasant. Over this is laid the scent of his pomade, at one end of him, and his shoe polish, at the other, because even indoors he wears his leather lace-ups every time she visits. Even when they’re not going out.
A bath? Roscoe says, without looking at her. It’s the middle of the day.
When was the last bath you had? And with Veronica visiting tonight? You don’t want to be fresh for her?
After a minute, he gets up, and she hears the tap running in the bathtub. Roscoe loves his daughter. And he loves Flavia, too, in his own way. And she? Has she grown to love Roscoe, a year on? Part of being a health aide is the emotional outlay. She is grateful to him, that’s how she would put it. Grateful also, and mostly, to Veronica, who, three months into Flavia’s periodic visits, sat her down at the kitchen table and talked her through the math.
Listen, Flavia, my father likes you.
And I like him.
Thank you for saying that, because he is not always an easy man, and I say this as a daughter who loves him. We would like to hire you on a more permanent basis. Veronica’s tone went interrogative on the word “permanent.” I mean, we still can’t guarantee a full forty-hour workweek, because I will be dropping in on him. Also, he wants time to himself. But what I would like to propose is that we contract with you directly.
Contract?
You don’t understand. We would like to pay you directly is what I’m saying. We pay the nurse services twenty-six an hour for your visits. I’m guessing you get half, maybe less—you don’t have to tell me. What I’m proposing is, we pay you directly, we deal with you directly, and you get all twenty-six dollars. Actually, we’re willing to pay you twenty-eight an hour. We think it would only be fair. In exchange, we ask that you be more flexible with your time, so that would mean taking my father as your sole client. And we can start with a minimum guarantee of thirty hours a week. That’s close to a thousand dollars. So, for a month, that would be nearly four thousand.
The figure was too miraculous to be successfully absorbed, and, also, fear was predominant in Flavia’s mind. But the company . . .
They’ll make trouble for you? I know it says in the contract that should we choose to hire you outright, from the nurse services, they will be owed a finder’s fee, half of it from us, half from you. But that’s only if they’re aware of the situation. What if they don’t know?
They will ask.
We will tell them that we’ve found family to take care of my father.
And when they ask why I quit?
Tell them you are going to school. And, meanwhile, you can actually go to school. You’re, what, twenty-five, twenty-six? And we’ll work with you. With your class schedule, within reason.
Only later, weeks after everything happened as Veronica had advised, did it occur to Flavia what a miracle it was to have crossed paths with the Ratkowski family.
Still, the situation will not last—in addition to diabetes, Roscoe has a bad heart, and he’s eighty-eight, almost eighty-nine. She has to continue her abstemious ways, living out the hard-luck immigrant narrative she signed up for when she left Manila for New York, where she knew no one.
For now, she is taking a course on the history of Western art, at Queensborough Community College. In her mind, the class is an experiment, though there is no question of dropping it now, halfway through the semester. It is hopeful role play, pegged to some shadowy notion of “improvement,” rather than a proper next step, which would lead to, say, accounting, or working at an office with computers—a veritable leap past sensible projections of the future, one that takes her beyond the borders of a legible map. For this kind of fancy, she has Roscoe to blame.
It helps that she is not the only female in History of Western Art. It also helps that the men are nearly all middle-aged, and the two young ones are gay. One of the older men is a Latin Romeo, with a pencil mustache and festive guayaberas, whose sweet talk is poison, only he pretends offense when you bring it to his attention. For such a man, Flavia has no energy to spare. She gives him the death stare, instead of wasting time on words, and he has learned to leave her be. Beyond contempt.
Beyond or beneath contempt?
She is working on a mid-semester essay on Vincent van Gogh, his art and the meaning of his life. If Wanda or Loreen heard about this, they would be laughing their asses off. But it’s been almost two years since Flavia quit the Blessed Rest Retirement Home, and almost a year since she last saw them, along with Artung and Lucing, for an early-morning catch-up over coffee, where the conversation was rowdy one moment, fitful the next. Rowdy because of the ebullience of the two Black women—Loreen, originally from Jamaica, and Wanda, from Liberia—and fitful because of Artung, who is Chinese, and Lucing and Flavia, both Filipina and with a diffidence that is almost familial.
In class, Flavia was the first to snap up van Gogh, leaving everyone else to settle for less popular artists. Poor Arturo, one of the two young gay guys, was stuck with the last choice—Braque!
Braque is wack.
But she has an inkling: Braque was someone who hated the way a book is formatted—maybe he was a struggling reader as a schoolkid—and his adult endeavor was to tear up those pages, thumbing his nose at the jailers and the wardens of his youth.
Who knows?
On the subway, each person has a life that Flavia can, if she wants to, embroider on, tease out into a story. But that’s the key: if she wants to. Most days, she can’t be bothered. Most days, she has adopted the hard-heartedness of her new home town, and stares straight ahead so that the mass of bodies becomes sweating, swaying wallpaper.
She reserves her emotion for Roscoe—that part of her life.
And also for Alina Viramontes Cruz, the professor of History of Western Art at Queensborough Community College. Who is also teaching Flavia’s new class: Modern American Painting. She admires Professor Viramontes Cruz.
Also for Veronica, who teaches E.S.L. at John Jay College, and might be going back to get a Ph.D. in special education. With Veronica, the mood is always upbeat, a transfer of energy, Flavia recognizes, from her E.S.L. classes, where patience and optimism are paramount.
Why is she thinking of Wanda and Loreen now? She has received a voice mail from Artung, asking her to be Artung’s date at a small reception in honor of Lucing’s engagement. Why did the invitation not come from Lucing herself? She hasn’t called back.
Here’s a triumph: Flavia has gone through the contents of both of Roscoe’s closets and got his judgment on each shirt, each tie, each coat, each pair of pants, each suit, and, most difficult of all, each pair of beautiful men’s shoes. (Not for Roscoe the dowdy comforts of athletic footwear or, God forbid, orthopedic shoes.) This was in response to a nudge from Veronica, albeit a soft one because of the morbid implications. The way Flavia put it to Roscoe was: You wear only your favorites and if there is room in the closets you can fill it with more new favorites. Also, she brought up St. Anthony’s, which has reached out to parishioners and Good Samaritans for men’s clothing that can be passed to the unfortunate who are living on the streets in Queens.
There is a second pass, and then a third, because it takes time for Roscoe to agree to part with things. In the end, there are nine large trash bags of donations. Flavia takes pictures on her phone and sends them to Veronica, who responds with three thumbs up. At day’s close, a volunteer from St. Anthony’s appears with a van, and Flavia helps him move the bags from the foyer to the rusty vehicle. In return, she gets a receipt that leaves the value of the gift blank, for Roscoe’s taxes.
The fucking government, Roscoe says, putting the receipt in a candy bowl on the ledge that separates the kitchen from the living room and is no longer used as a dining surface.
He once more mentions having had to disclose a secret Swiss account to the I.R.S., during a period of amnesty when the only penalty for withholding the information was back taxes and no jail term. With Roscoe, and, to a lesser extent, Veronica, this is what money talk sounds like. Though, to them, it is not so much money talk as life talk.
Roscoe holds a patent in mining technology. Something having to do with a system that separates water from grit—each going into a different tube—when you extract precious minerals from bodies of water. This accounts for Flavia’s thirty-or-so-hour workweek, four thousand dollars a month. Also for Veronica’s co-op on the Upper East Side.
Roscoe has agreed to late-in-the-day exercise, in the back yard, with the yoga ball, not just passing it back and forth but picking it up and then placing it down on the ground, to flex his waist and hip muscles, and the muscles of his abdomen. In exchange for the P.E., Flavia has agreed to sleep over. It’s a movie night that Veronica can’t make. Flavia will not be paid for these extra hours, and she does not know how much Veronica knows. She is not comfortable bringing it up. It is Veronica who hands her the paycheck, and Veronica who sends the weekly schedule, via e-mail; it is with Veronica that Flavia has to negotiate, if there happens to be an overlap with Modern American Painting.
Still, Roscoe has asked her to stay over only twice before, and he has never awoken in the middle of the night, or, if he has, he had the presence of mind not to bother her. Also, there is no thought to the dangers of nighttime’s main activity: sex. As she told Wanda and Loreen, who teasingly assumed that her prettiness had landed her such a lucky assignment, Roscoe is far from that kind of man. Not once has she caught him looking at her in that way, and he has never attempted to brush against her, with hands or crotch, as some other patients had, hiding behind their forgetfulness or diminished mental capacities, suggesting that her peeve was entirely self-manufactured. If truth be told, Flavia thinks that Roscoe may be gay. Well, not entirely, of course—there’s Veronica and Bill—although the more she thinks about it the more pointed the absence of talk about Roscoe’s dead wife becomes.
Her impression comes from patching together fleeting references in his conversation. Something about a friend. Something about during the Korean War. This was before his marriage. His dead wife’s name was Moira, and to find this out Flavia went snooping. There is a guest bedroom that holds the bulk of Roscoe’s junk, including his cane, and many photo albums with shots of the same woman—at least, Flavia thinks she is the same woman—partnered over and over again with Roscoe, with his unmistakable high forehead, his bushy eyebrows, and his lantern jaw. On the back of one of these black-and-white studio images, longhand identifies the pair: Ross and Moira.
Roscoe’s talk about his personal life is full of hints and elisions. But about the movies he is a burbling fount of information and opinions. Once in a while, the two intersect. He’d come this close to investing in a movie. This was in the nineteen-sixties. A project that would star Rod Steiger. Did Flavia know who that was?
Ah, what would Bill say! Roscoe said when Flavia shook her head. But thank God he’d pulled out at the last minute. In the end, the producers got their money elsewhere and the movie was a big flop. They couldn’t land Steiger and had to settle for a B actor.
The first movie night, Roscoe had been a master talker. They’d started at seven in the evening, and by the time they were done, three movies later, it was one in the morning. Time passed without Flavia noticing. The house was no darker at one than it had been at seven. They’d taken in one black-and-white film after another. Barbara Stanwyck. Edward G. Robinson. The Hays Code, pre- and post-. Roscoe knew when to talk and when to leave Flavia alone. Of course, she retained very little from the tumble of names and information. But it was hearing his confident words that persuaded her to sign up for History of Western Art. She had been rereading the course description online for days, without committing.
The way Roscoe spoke to her, there was a presumption of fellowship, of equal intelligence. He was didactic but never condescending.
And he asked her about the movies in the Philippines. He’d seen a couple, but couldn’t remember much about them now. This was in the days when he had his office in Manhattan, and it was easy to knock off early from work and slip into what he called “repertory houses,” where they played art movies. She told him that she’d grown up in a devout Catholic family and her parents had forbidden the children to go to the movies. This was only half true. She didn’t reveal that she’d cut classes with her best friend, Rosario, and the two of them had sneaked into matinées of romantic comedies and, more scandalously, soft-core productions whose plots always endeavored to disrobe the female leads and put them under the spying gaze of one or more of the male characters.
Tonight, they order fried chicken. It’s what Roscoe always has with Veronica—the one cheat meal she allows him—and he won’t let Flavia cook.
They have the meal first, as he does not approve of eating and watching at the same time. When they are done—the bones and soiled napkins and paper plates in the garbage, and the leftovers for Flavia in the fridge—the entire house goes dark, the only source of illumination the large flat-screen.
Tonight, a Japanese movie is on tap. It could be the first of three Japanese movies. Roscoe loves his curations. They are both a jog to his memory and an opportunity for a display of expertise. In Flavia, he has a captive audience. He has ascertained this without having to ask. Sometimes she gets the impression that he is merely talking to himself, to remind himself of all that he knows, his brain still well oiled, his memory not yet dimmed, at least in this one capacious area. She doesn’t mind. Let his words spill over into the surrounding, companionable dark, and let whatever can’t be absorbed by her mind be taken in through her skin, her fingernails, her hair—this, too, is a kind of money, wealth. History of Cinema, Japanese Category.
In the first film, a wandering samurai falls in love with a woman he later discovers is a ghost. Roscoe is largely silent throughout the movie, a testament to its spell. He doesn’t ask her how she liked it. She helps him up to go to the bathroom.
When he’s resettled in the recliner, he asks if any of her family members were killed by the Japanese during the Second World War. She has to think for a moment, and then she says that she doesn’t know; her parents rarely talked about family history in front of the children.
He asks her if she minds watching a silent movie, also Japanese. Not entirely silent, of course—it has music. She says she doesn’t. Two young boys move into a new neighborhood. Among the excitements and difficulties is making friends. What does your father do? they are asked. The boys big him up. He works for “the company.” Later, they end up in the boss’s house and have the chance to witness their father making faces and cracking jokes, for the boss’s pleasure. Upon returning home, they throw a tantrum. Why do you have to bow and scrape before that man? they ask their father. Why do you have to act so lowly? You don’t understand, their father says. That is the way the world works.
What time is it? Roscoe asks.
Flavia reads it off the digital counter on the DVD player. Ten-fifteen.
You have good eyesight. He asks if she minds a long movie.
What is she going to say?
We don’t have to finish it, of course. If you’re tired. If we’re both tired. Roscoe is being disingenuous. This is one activity for which his energy is unflagging. Usually, he’s in bed by nine, but on movie night none of the regular rules apply.
To fight off bandits, who will return when the barley harvest is complete, a village secures the services of freelance wandering samurai—there are those two words again: “wandering samurai.” In History of Western Art, Professor Viramontes Cruz showed slides of ancient Chinese scrolls, for context, scenes that depicted what she called “wandering scholars” drinking in taverns and pavilions, and also getting drunk on the beauty of mountains and the surrounding scenery. The smiles on their faces were sly, and their costumes billowed out around their waists and legs.
Because of his age and his various conditions, Roscoe sees five doctors, which means that there is sometimes a medical visit every week. Flavia accompanies him to Manhattan in an Uber, and, because nearly all the doctors are in the same vast hospital complex on the East Side, two or maybe even three appointments may be scheduled on the same day, for convenience’s sake, with anywhere from a half hour to an hour between each, to absorb the possible delays or extended waiting times. On three-doctor days, Flavia starts around eight-thirty in the morning, and by the time she gets back to her apartment it may be twelve, thirteen hours later.
Today, there are two appointments. Roscoe’s nephrologist, an older Iranian man, is among his more attentive physicians. Roscoe’s kidneys have to be monitored because his heart and diabetes medications present dangers. With the fistful of pills that he has to take daily, who knows now what is cause and effect?
Cancer is the worst, Roscoe says while they’re in the waiting room.
You don’t have cancer until next week? Flavia is suddenly unsure about the schedule. Another side effect of the medications: one of Roscoe’s heart pills (or is it for the kidneys?) may cause cancer, so he has his blood drawn and analyzed every month by an oncologist who doesn’t practice in this complex.
Cancer is the worst and kidneys are the best, Roscoe says. I’m talking magazines. Look. They have everything here. And all up to date. While in cancer all they have is Vogue, and the issues are five years old. Which only you will read.
It’s to pass the time. Flavia shrugs.
Another patient enters. After signing in, he sits in a far corner and busies himself with food magazines. He is maybe a decade younger than Roscoe, but thin, in an unhealthy-looking way, with half-moon shadows under sunken eyes.
Veronica tells me she gave you her Netflix password, Roscoe says.
She’s very kind.
Are you using it?
I’ve been too busy, with classes. Flavia has signed up for two next semester, a giant undertaking: Poetry and Light of Matisse and Photography of Diane Arbus. It helps that they are on the same day, which she will block out on her Roscoe calendar. The Matisse class is Professor Viramontes Cruz’s. Flavia is worried about the risk of the new professor, for the Arbus class.
It would be a shame not to use it.
Flavia doesn’t reveal that she can’t really afford Wi-Fi on her strict budget. Instead she says, I guess I’m spoiled. To watch stuff on my laptop, when I’m used to your big TV?
Then get a TV. How much could they possibly cost these days?
There’s no room in my apartment.
Don’t tell Veronica this, Roscoe says. He leans in. Flavia does not like this—being asked to keep things from Veronica, to be a buffer between father and daughter. And then Roscoe surprises her with the most innocuous of lines: I’m having trouble thinking of this movie.
Flavia puts a humorous look on her face for Roscoe. You?
It’s about a talking monkey. Roscoe becomes impatient with himself. Not about. It has a talking monkey. Ah, what would Bill say!
Are you asking me if I know the movie?
You could find out, couldn’t you?
What’s so important about this movie? Flavia doesn’t want to admit that there’s an unspoken clause: if it even exists. The thought is a betrayal of Roscoe, whose body may be falling apart, but who, up top, is as sharp as a tack.
It just popped into my head, and now it won’t leave.
Is it American? Flavia thinks of a stupid comedy—from the nineteen-seventies—about a brainiac monkey working in a science lab, but does the monkey in it talk?
No. Argentinean. No, no. Algerian.
You could just go on Google, you know.
Roscoe waits a moment before answering. His voice sounds sad. I don’t want Veronica to find it in my search history.
The day is not done when Flavia and Roscoe return to Queens. Because of the Wi-Fi situation in her apartment, she has to compose and send the e-mail to Veronica from Roscoe’s. Each doctor’s visit is recapped, so that Veronica can stay informed about her father’s health, so that Roscoe and Veronica do not have to talk about it. The first time Flavia sent a report, Veronica wrote back immediately: You are such a good writer!
Thankfully, Roscoe has not asked her about the monkey film again.
She has found nothing. “Talking monkey movie” on Google produced three distinct results: the reboots of “Planet of the Apes”; a nineteen-eighties documentary about a gorilla who learned sign language; and an unappetizing tween comedy of recent American vintage.
“Algerian talking monkey movie” and “Argentinean talking monkey movie” led only to scores of “Learn to speak Algerian” and “Learn to speak Argentinean” sites.
There are no further movie nights for Flavia, because Veronica is able to make them. She has quit her job and embarked on her Ph.D. program, so her schedule is freer.
Now Flavia is working only twenty hours a week with Roscoe, and Veronica has assumed some of the responsibility of accompanying her father to the doctors. Luckily for Flavia, she has been able to pick up extra income as Professor Viramontes Cruz’s personal assistant. It is somehow comforting, when ferrying the professor’s dry cleaning, to discover that the professor lives alone in a messy and disorganized apartment. The professor won’t allow Flavia even the most minimal attempt at tidying up, because “How will I know where to find anything?” As for the possibility of snooping—where would Flavia even start?
One afternoon, it is time for the bimonthly paycheck and Flavia waits for Veronica in the back yard. From where she’s seated, she can hear Roscoe’s TV. She can hear the greeting between father and daughter. And then she is walking out of the house with Veronica, but there is still no envelope with her paycheck inside.
Let’s take a walk around the block, Veronica says. Flavia cannot look at Veronica’s face. It would only worsen her sense of foreboding. My father told me about the movie nights, Veronica says. Their walking pace is slow. He said it was three nights. Does he have that right?
Flavia nods.
So around thirty-six hours, give or take?
Maybe?
Veronica hands Flavia the pay envelope. You’ll find it reflected in the check. If it’s more, you have to tell me.
You don’t have to, Flavia says.
You have to tell me these things, Flavia. You can’t let him take advantage of you.
And yet why does Flavia get the strong feeling that she is being blamed for her generosity, and that Veronica’s own generosity, reflected in an increased paycheck, is the equivalent of severance? They don’t even make it around the block, but simply retrace their steps to the sidewalk outside the house. To Flavia’s great surprise, she hears Veronica say, So my father will see you next week?
Once Flavia is home, her fear reëmerges. What about the cheat meals? Will Roscoe reveal them, too, to Veronica?
When it comes, the rupture is easy.
Once again, it’s Veronica who takes Flavia aside. Asking if there has been anything strange in her father’s talk lately.
Strange? Flavia says, but maybe Veronica can see that she is only trying to buy time.
Anything that stands out? Loose talk? Nonsense talk?
No. And then, feeling sure that it will cause no trouble—why would it?—Flavia volunteers information about the supposed talking-monkey movie.
Veronica looks grim. And Flavia gets the distinct sensation that their talk has rounded a corner. She is glad that she kept Roscoe’s exhortations to the dead Bill to herself.
Interactions with Roscoe go on as before. He is a man of whims, and nobody knows this better than Flavia. Walks, exercise (or not), the constantly blaring TV (because Roscoe’s hearing is another diminishment in his life)—Roscoe is the master of his days. What he says always, always goes. Even the infrequent bathing, for which he turns down Flavia’s help. Even when she tells him, There’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Even the undriven car, sitting in the garage. It’s there because there is a property upstate, what Roscoe calls “the cottage” and Veronica “the country house.” The few times a drive there is proposed, there is little energy in the idea. And Flavia understands that Roscoe is simply reminding himself that, even at his advanced age, he still has choices in his life—that his days as a dashing inventor have bought for him this atypical American fate.
And then, one day and without any warning, Roscoe refuses to engage with Flavia. Not answering her questions about his sleep, about whether he is ready for a walk, or some exercise. Even when the price of keeping his mouth shut is being served a lunch that he doesn’t want—in this case, reheated minestrone soup—he will not speak. Flavia tells herself it’s nothing personal. This, too, is part of a patient’s deterioration.
His pointed silence is repeated on her next visit. Should Flavia tell Veronica? But what if the daughter blames her? What if it is personal? Have I done something? she asks Roscoe. He’ll allow her to get close, to check the blood-sugar monitor plugged into his belly when it beeps. But he’ll hold himself rigid until it’s over, as if her nearness were a punishment. He won’t even shake his head to reply in the negative, when she asks about sitting in the back yard. What have I done? she repeats, to no avail. And, when she tells him to please look at her, he moves his head away.
This goes on for a week. And then Flavia can’t get the front door to open, and she understands that Roscoe has had the lock changed. But when she takes a deep breath, and tries again, she sees that the key moves inside the lock. It’s only that the door won’t budge. There’s something blocking its path. She has no choice but to alert Veronica. She doesn’t wait around for the resolution of the whole mess. Veronica calls to cancel the rest of the week.
Two weeks pass before Veronica has a free day. They sit out on the porch, Veronica bringing two tall glasses of iced coffee. Somewhere inside sits Roscoe, though Flavia can’t hear the TV. She doesn’t touch her iced coffee. She has agreed to the meeting hoping that her dutifulness will save her.
It’s my fault, Veronica says. I asked him about the movie.
Flavia understands immediately. The monkey movie.
He told you not to tell me. That’s what he said. And now he won’t forgive. Forgive you, forgive me—it’s the same thing.
But no, Flavia thinks, it’s not the same. Veronica he has to forgive. Eventually. Or learn to endure her presence. It makes sense, in Flavia’s view of fate, that it would be this tiny, throwaway detail that would fell her relationship with Roscoe.
Veronica shakes her head. It’s not looking good, Flavia. Not for him. He had a brain scan last week, and, a few days before that, an MRI. We won’t see the doctors until next week, but one of them called to prepare me for the news. He won’t say dementia or Alzheimer’s, but . . . I know he always talks to himself, but this time there’s something different. I’m afraid, more so because it doesn’t worry him.
So Flavia slots her role in the recent narrative: she has been the provider of proof in the prosecution against Roscoe. These things that Veronica talks about—Flavia has not seen them. But, then again, she no longer spends the night, when Roscoe is at his most talkative, demonstrative. How did Veronica bring up the subject of that movie? Did it come out of nowhere, a staccato intrusion when Roscoe wouldn’t face up to the truth—to Veronica’s truth? Well, how about that movie you asked Flavia about? Is there even such a movie? Among the things he’s made up, without knowing that he’s made them up. Among the subjects he gabs about with unseen interlocutors. Maybe he’s even called on Bill, dead Bill, finally slipping up within earshot of Veronica. What a stupid way to wrap up a relationship of two-plus years—a meaningful relationship.
Of course, this is not what Veronica is paying for with the additional twenty-five hundred dollars in Flavia’s last check. Friendly though she is, Veronica is not ruled by emotion, at least not with Flavia. As always, there’s a practical consideration: the twenty-five hundred is for the abrupt cessation, to pay Flavia while she waits out a period of unforeseen transition. Veronica is nothing if not scrupulously fair.
One last push at redemption, though Flavia doesn’t know why she bothers. On Google, combing through at least twenty pages each for a variety of word combinations: “talking monkey,” “monkey movie,” “Algerian monkey,” “talking Argentinean monkey,” “monkeys in movies.” Nothing. There is nothing. Ah, what would Bill say! She is so angry she could cry.
So the virus is here, obliterating swathes of work and also the meaning of work. Flavia is lucky that her new job is the kind that can be done on the computer, from home. She is a junior staffer in the curatorial department at the Museum of Modern Art. Hired barely a year ago to do digital research. During her three years “in the wilderness,” despairing, she worked as a receptionist, as a gallery assistant, and then, with a recommendation from Professor Viramontes Cruz, as an intern at the museum, where she heard about this opening.
The news is of high mortality rates among hospital workers and health-related professionals. Of course, this should come as no surprise, but, still, it is sobering to see it in constant rotation.
She calls Artung, with whom she hasn’t spoken in seven years. Artung was one of the few Chinese women she met in the health-aide field. A funny character, prone to sulking and to breaking into tears at the first criticism. Artung would weep shamelessly, even extravagantly, after being upbraided by their superiors at Blessed Rest Retirement Home. They learned to leave her be. Her crying was a force that had to exhaust itself, like a passing squall.
Artung answers in her impenetrable English, but to Flavia the Chinese woman is as clear as a bell.
Yes, she’s still working at Blessed Rest, and she doesn’t know how to say this, but their old gang is now minus one—Wanda caught the virus and passed away. She was one of two staff fatalities in the nursing home. Her husband was also infected, and he is in the hospital.
Whatever Flavia was expecting, it was not this. In Flavia’s mind, Wanda had moved to Florida, queenly Wanda had retired and was living off her Social Security and savings, imperious Wanda was definitely out of harm’s way.
Five weeks into the quarantine, Flavia and a dozen of her colleagues at the museum are informed, in a group Zoom, that they are being let go. They are the most recent hires, and so the first to have the axe fall on their heads.
Once again, I am a wandering samurai, Flavia thinks.
Thankfully, the salary bump of her museum job did not interfere with her penny-pinching ways, though she now has the added monthly expenditure of Wi-Fi, which was a work necessity. To disconnect it would mean paying a penalty for breaking the two-year contract. And, besides, how would she be able to receive dreaded news, of deaths, further decimations?
She has no movie or TV subscriptions. And she won’t sign up for them—not after having been fired.
And then she remembers: she goes to Netflix and types in Veronica’s username and password. It’s been at least four years. A suspenseful poise of her fingers in the air before she hits Return.
She’s able to revisit Roscoe’s movie selections on Netflix. She wonders if he is still alive.
To her, Roscoe and Veronica have become swaying, sweating wallpaper. The intervening years have downgraded her relationship with Roscoe from significant to just north of businesslike. Of course, there was the astounding pay and the personal consideration. But Roscoe’s questions for Flavia never probed very far—they were asked so that he could demonstrate the requisite politeness, taking no notice of how shallow Flavia’s replies were, very likely preferring them no deeper. In the way Flavia answered, there was never any hint of the great unhappiness, the familial rift that had catapulted her to this part of the world, a runaway, a refugee of sorts. But, then again, there has been nobody skillful enough to make Flavia unburden herself. Except maybe Wanda, who struck a motherly tone in their talks. Wanda, with her advice and her borderline-cruel teasing. This is what Flavia said to Wanda: My family and me, we’re not close, we’ve been out of touch for more than a decade, and I am the only one to risk coming to America. And Wanda patted her hands and said, Time can be wiser sometimes than our own intentions. Death, as it often does, has traced and retraced a bright outline around Wanda, rendering her more legible, significant.
Ten weeks. The lockdown will last forever. She is selecting movies on a whim. No matter how terrible, she sticks with these pictures. Her brain is mush. She understands this to be a sign of depression. Self-punishment by movie.
One day—finally. She comes face to face with it. Thank God she doesn’t stop play in the early going, before she understands that it is the movie.
It turns out that there is a Part 1 and then, without explanation, a seemingly completely different movie that is Part 2.
It’s this second part that gets her. In fact, her breath catches when the recognition comes. An actual, physical pain.
The heightened disruption of logic in Part 2 forces a renewed attentiveness.
Soon enough comes the scene with the talking monkey.
It’s not that the monkey talks, exactly, but that the director flashes a stream of subtitles to translate its chittering, its nearly birdlike calls, for the protagonist and for the audience.
This is Roscoe’s movie. She is sure of it. Not Algerian or Argentinean but Thai. To think that this four-letter description was all that would have been needed for Google to yield an answer.
In the first part of the movie, two young men, one of them a soldier, fall in love. Flavia thinks, Just like Roscoe and his “friend,” “during the war.” Roscoe’s mental search for the title of the movie—for the movie itself—was a keening backward in time, as if to reclaim a personal memory. This could be the truth, or largely Flavia’s fancy, and both scenarios have their unsatisfactory elements.
In the second part of the movie, one of the young men turns into a tiger. (If Roscoe had had the presence of mind to relay this facet of the plot, would it have been taken as further proof of his deteriorating mind?)
The left-behind young man, still human, goes in search of his beloved. Hence the jungle. To be recognized. Even to be consumed by a tiger.
The movie is called “Tropical Malady.” And Flavia clicked on it because the first word hinted at a return to her home country—nostalgia, like depression, is a feature of the quarantine. What she was expecting was the only kind of return she can bear: speculative, poetic, and (she thought) completely risk-free. ♦
