In The Neighborhood Read online

  The Y’s six-lane, Olympic-size pool was busy that morning. In the shallow end, a young woman instructed a dozen elderly men and women in water aerobics. In the deep end, a few women paddled slowly around on flotation noodles.

  Lou dove in. He did a vigorous freestyle from the deep end to the shallow end, then swam back to the deep end, where he treaded water for several minutes, talking with a friend.

  One of Lou’s buddies was the first to be done swimming and dressed and out of the locker room. He was eager to leave because that was the one day each month when he volunteered at the Red Cross. I said good-bye to him, and then to the others. Lou, now out of the pool and dressed, was also ready to leave.

  In the car, I asked Lou about the man who volunteered at the Red Cross. “He hands out cookies and juice, sets up tables,” said Lou. Somewhat dismissively, he referred to the man as “the ultimate volunteer.” On other days, he said, the man stays up all night at a nursing home with dying people who have no relatives to hold their hands. But when I asked if maybe Lou would like to do some volunteer work, he rejected the idea. “That’s not for me,” he said, and changed the subject. He wanted to tell me about something that happened to him recently at the mall.

  “This young girl comes up to me. ‘Oh, my car is out of gas’—he used a girlish, pleading voice—‘and I have to get home. Can I borrow some money, please?’ The stories are all the same,” he said, almost snarling. “The addiction makes them become total liars. Total liars!”

  I assumed that when Lou talked about that drug-addicted girl at the mall, he was thinking of his youngest daughter, Mary Lou, who lived in California. Earlier, he’d told me about her alcoholism and drug addiction, and his frustration at not knowing how to help her.

  The Lexus was momentarily silent as Lou pulled out of the snow-covered parking lot.

  “So, what are we going to do? Go to the VA?” he asked, regaining his cheerfulness. Every couple of months, Lou went to the Veteran’s Administration to get his prescription medications.

  “No, no VA,” I said. I knew a trip there was not on his schedule that day. “Just do what you’d usually do on a Monday after the Y.”

  “I have nothing to do,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of my life.”

  BACK home, Lou and I fixed sandwiches for lunch. As we seated ourselves at the kitchen table, we both noticed the back of his left hand was bleeding. The wound was in the bruised area we had talked about at the Y. Heidi must have scratched him as she jumped up to greet him when we got home. He put a small bandage on it.

  While we ate, I asked Lou to tell me about the various dogs he’d owned over the years. He named several but didn’t say anything about one of them being run over. I prompted him by asking directly if any were ever hit by a car, and he told this story: many years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, while he and Edie were at home with friends playing bridge, a man came to the door to say he’d hit their poodle and killed it.

  “Do you remember who the man was?” I asked.

  “No,” Lou said. “I have no idea. It was a long time ago.”

  Well, that was awkward. Lou was being so open with me—about his childhood, his career, even his daughter’s struggle with drugs. And here I was withholding information about his dog. I didn’t want to sour our budding relationship, but what was the proper etiquette for telling someone your father killed his dog, especially if your father was still living? I wondered if Lou noticed my momentary grimace—it could have just been the sandwich going down the wrong way. Heck, the whole thing was forty-five years and half a dozen dogs ago. I decided to let dead dogs lie, and said nothing.

  On a portable TV on the kitchen table, Lou watched the noon stock report while we finished our lunch.

  Afterward, we cleaned the dishes and went to the living room. Lou sat on the sofa and I sat on the loveseat—same positions as last night when we talked before bedtime. Heidi lay under the coffee table, chewing a bone. Lou turned on the big-screen TV to watch a business show, and began paging through the newspaper.

  Then he announced he was ready for a nap.

  I asked if I should answer the phone if it rang.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll wake up to get it. It would be very unusual if it were to ring, though. Very unlikely.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I realized the phone hadn’t rung since I got there the night before.

  Lou turned off the TV. Then he turned it on again. “I need a little background noise,” he said.

  Within minutes, Lou was on his back on the sofa, snoring. His left hand rested at his side, and on the back of it, where Heidi had scratched him, a spot of blood was visible through the bandage. Soon Heidi, too, was asleep.

  I got up and walked quietly around the living room. In one corner there was a baby grand piano painted blue; on it stood a photo of Lou and Edie, waving as they leave for their honeymoon.

  Looking at Lou asleep on the sofa, I suddenly realized I could be looking at my own future: alone in a big house, a house where you never unlock the front door because no one uses it, where you keep the TV on just for background noise, and where the phone never rings. At least Lou had enjoyed the main prize: fifty-two years of a happy marriage. Maybe someday, I thought, I could remarry.

  I went back to the loveseat and put my head down to try to rest.

  HEIDI barked, waking both Lou and me. It was 3 p.m. He seemed groggy as he got up to let Heidi out. When he came back, he was holding a small stack of mail, which he tossed, without looking at it, onto the coffee table. The mail landed next to a drooping poinsettia plant. Earlier, I’d asked Lou why he didn’t put up a Christmas tree anymore. “What am I going to do with a Christmas tree?” he said. “Sit here alone and watch it?”

  “Lou,” I said, “the market is up forty points. You probably made a little money while you were sleeping.”

  The news didn’t seem to lift his spirits.

  He headed back to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of liquor in each hand.

  “What are we drinking today?” I asked.

  “I start with this,” he said, raising in his right hand a bottle of gin. “Two ounces with tonic water, and then I’ll use this”—he raised in his left hand a bottle of scotch—“for floaters. Want one?”

  I said I’d join him but only if he made it weak. I get drunk easily.

  “I’ll make you one like I make for the girls,” he said, referring, I guessed, to his daughters. We both went back to the kitchen.

  “The guys at the Y really look up to you,” I said as Lou fixed the drinks.

  “They do,” he agreed. “They wait for me to come in. Did you notice that?”

  He sliced a lemon.

  “I love those guys,” he continued. “They use me—”

  “They ask you medical questions?” I asked.

  “No, not so much,” he said. “They use me to set the tone, get the conversation going.”

  Lou took two plastic tumblers from a kitchen cabinet and filled one halfway with gin. It looked to me like more than two ounces. I filled my own glass to the brim with water and then emptied it back into a measuring cup. “These are ten-ounce tumblers,” I told Lou. His glass was filled not with two ounces of gin, but five.

  “Well, I make it last,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Lou filled the rest of his glass with tonic water, then poured a weaker drink for me.

  In the living room, Lou placed his glass and a bowl of ice on the coffee table. “Old people have to be careful with alcohol,” he said. “This is how I control it: I feed the ice in slowly, let it marinate. This way I can make one drink last an hour.”

  I asked Lou about the woman at the Y who took his blood pressure. She had described him as intimidating. Does he think people see him as intimidating, even gruff?

  “I know they do,” he acknowledged. “It’s a curse. I scare people away. I can be very hurtful with my words. I think it comes from my mother’s side. She was a perfectionist. I remember once she bought a Stu
debaker. In those days, the car dealer would bring a new car to your house. By the time that man left our house, he was crying. Nothing was ever good enough for my mother.”

  “But with your friends at the Y,” I said, “you’re the ringleader.”

  “I’ve become the focus of five or six guys there,” he agreed. “Everyone wants to talk to me. I recognize that. They’re not as well educated as I am. Sometimes I’ll say a word and realize they don’t know what it means. I have to watch out for that. But these guys are all veterans. They’ve raised families. They’re all heroes as far as I’m concerned. I’m humbled by it. They don’t realize it, but they do more for me than I do for them, like with my friend Carlo DeSantis.”

  Then he told me the story of Carlo, who died of throat and brain cancer. “I visited with him at least four days a week,” said Lou. “I’d take him shopping, we’d go on photography trips, work in his greenhouse, go to Italian grocery stores, where he loved the sights and smells. That took care of about the first two years of my retirement. Carlo came to depend on me. He felt guilty, but I said, ‘Please, Carlo, you’re making my life for me.’ Then he died.”

  Later, Lou cared for another man who was ill, a vice-president of Kodak. “I’d go over to his house and play gin rummy. I’d take him to doctor appointments. He died, too.”

  Lou muted the TV.

  “I took care of those two like I took care of Edie,” he continued. “She had macular degeneration. I had a pair of glasses made for her with telescopic lenses—the kind cardiac surgeons use for fine work—so she could see the cards when we’d play bridge. She couldn’t stand, but once I got her up, she could walk. We put handholds around the house. We did okay. We did better than okay. We did magnificently.”

  I again asked Lou if he wouldn’t want to volunteer to help others.

  “No,” he said firmly. “The doctor at the VA says the same thing. I’m driving her crazy because I have no interests. I have nothing to do. She says, ‘Get involved. Volunteer at the VA.’ They’re desperate for doctors at the VA.”

  “Does that appeal to you?” I asked.

  “No, volunteering has no appeal to me, but I would do it for individuals. I’d like to find someone I could take care of,” he said, adding with a smile, “I could take care of you!”

  It was 3:30 p.m. Lou looked through the mail, sipping his gin and tonic. “I waited all day for this . . . garbage, bills!” he said.

  He opened one envelope. It was a notice of the annual meeting of the Creekside Estate Homeowner’s Association.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  It was the apartment he bought in California for Mary Lou, he explained.

  Lou sipped his drink.

  “My problem with Mary Lou is the same problem every father has with a drug- and alcohol- addicted daughter,” he began. “If it was Louie”—his son—“I’d shut him off. No money—you’re on your own. But with a daughter, you can’t do that. Where would she end up, living in the back of her car? Whoring on the street? I couldn’t do that. Her sisters and brother say, ‘Tough love! Shut her off!’ They say I’m an ‘enabler,’ providing an apartment she can use as a crack house. But I couldn’t abandon my daughter.”

  Lou had tried bringing Mary Lou home, he’d tried forbidding her to come home, he’d tried counseling for her, expensive rehab, giving her money, and the apartment. Nothing had seemed to help.

  Lou sipped the gin and tonic.

  “Maybe the other kids are right,” he said. “But I couldn’t abandon her.”

  That Lou was willing to talk with me about this sad part of his life made me feel closer to him, and reminded me of a story in the Jewish tradition: Two men come out of a tavern after having spent some time drinking together. One drapes his arm around the other and asks, “Tell me, do you love me or don’t you love me?” His friend replies, “Of course I love you very much.” But the first man objects, “How can you say you love me if you don’t know what makes me sad?” From this the rabbis teach that to truly know another person, we must know not only their pleasures and successes but also the sorrows they bear.

  AT 5 p.m., Lou turned again to the television. “Let’s see how the market finished,” he said.

  As the TV droned, he went to the kitchen to make another “floater”—water with gin.

  “Alcohol is a big problem for older people,” Lou said again, settling back on the sofa with his drink. “I had patients with real problems. One old lady got drunk every night.”

  “Could you go a day without a drink?” I asked Lou.

  He shot back, “Why would I want to? What else is there? It buys time for me. All I’ve got is time, for Chrissake.” His speech was a little slurred. “I’m sitting here alone all day. What have I got to look forward to?”

  I was struck by the two Lou Guzzettas I’d seen that day. There was the public Lou, the Lou at the Y: well-groomed, charming, caring, dispensing good cheer. I’d seen him like that on earlier outings, too. The previous week, when I’d gone with him to the supermarket, a developmentally disabled man whom the store had hired to help customers load their cars approached us in the parking lot. “You are magnificent, young man!” Lou said in a booming voice. “Everyone says that about you.” The man beamed. (Later, Lou couldn’t resist adding, confidentially to me: “I got more bullshit than an elephant!”) Yet he had done the same thing with the girl at the checkout, joking, and helping the time pass as she scanned and bagged his groceries.

  But then there was the private Lou: unanchored since his retirement, lonely without Edie, burdened by his daughter’s addiction, trying to fill the hours, trying to drink slowly.

  Lou announced we’d be having duck for dinner. He had bought it, as he often did, precooked at the supermarket. That I don’t eat meat was not a problem for Lou. “You can eat duck,” he told me. “Duck’s not meat!”

  Lou insisted on preparing most of the meal himself, but asked if I would set the table in the dining room. I reminded Lou I wanted us to eat in the normal way, but he insisted he often does eat dinner in the dining room because from there he can watch the news on the living room’s large-screen TV.

  When dinner was ready, Lou poured wine for each of us and lit two red candles in the middle of the table. I didn’t for a minute believe that Lou normally dined by candlelight on Monday evenings, but I made no further objection; he’d prepared a lovely meal and this was a delightful way to end our day together. Dinner was delicious. Apparently, I still responded obediently—perhaps as I had as a child—to Lou’s gruff side: last night I wore the nightshirt; today I ate duck.

  The dining room was hung with oil paintings of some of the family’s ancestors. Lou’s father, Lou told me earlier, had lived to be ninety-three. Would Lou like to aim for one hundred, I asked?

  “Live to a hundred?” he shot back. “I don’t care if I go tomorrow or in twenty years. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. Why? Because I have no life. With Edie I had a life. Oh, for my children and grandchildren I have a role, but for myself, it’s no life. I have nothing.”

  Could he imagine ever remarrying?

  “It will never happen,” he said.

  I mentioned a woman who recently had been widowed, who lived across the street. Lou said he had occasionally talked to her late husband, and knew her “casually,” but repeated that he wasn’t interested.

  “Trust me,” he said. “I am so satisfied, you can’t believe it.”

  Would he ever leave Sandringham?

  “You mean because this is a big house? People ask me that question and I tell them, ‘This is not a big house—twenty-five-hundred square feet; twelve-fifty on a floor.’ Anyway, where would I move? I’ve been to a lot of nursing homes, and they all stink.” Lou said he had discussed this issue with his eldest daughter, Cecily, a lawyer, who assured him he will never have to leave the house.

  “I’m okay living alone,” he continued. “But sometimes if the girls call and I don’t answer, they get concerned. Like, I get ter
rible back spasms sometimes. One time, I was in bed—it was about two a.m. I woke up and couldn’t move. Somehow I inched over to the phone, called 911, and told them to call Cecily and Bill and have them come over.”

  Cecily and Bill, her husband, live in an outlying town about a twenty-minute drive away.

  “Did they call her?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And how long did it take her to get here?”

  “Well, she’d been sleeping, of course. It took about an hour,” he said. “She came over with Bill and they got me out of bed.”

  He added, “And she changed the bed.”

  “Changed the bed?” I asked.

  “I was waiting an hour and I couldn’t move,” he said. “I wet the bed.”

  Lou’s admission startled me. The image of him alone in the house, lying in a wet bed, troubled me.

  Returning to the question of whether he’d ever leave Sandringham, I asked Lou how, over the years, he’d liked living in the neighborhood.

  “The neighborhood’s been fine,” he said. “We’ve had some great people—except for a few here and there.”

  “But Lou,” I said, “you’ve lived in this house fifty-three years, yet when you woke up at two in the morning and couldn’t move, are you saying you had no one to call but 911 to ask them to contact Cecily, who lives at least twenty minutes away?”

  I couldn’t shake the image of him alone at night on those wet sheets.

  “Who else could I call?” he asked. “Everyone’s busy doing their own thing. I couldn’t call you because I didn’t know you then. This is not a neighborhood of neighbors, obviously.”

  “But you just said the neighborhood’s been fine,” I reminded him.

  “What’s fine?” he asked. “This guy across the street now, I wouldn’t know him if I saw him. All I know is he drives a Corvette. And there’s a woman down the street I know. Well, actually, I don’t know her. I talk to her when she’s walking her dog. I really don’t know her.”