Nigel woke up disoriented, and while I was trying to quiet him down, a nurse rushed into the room and locked the door behind her.
“Get down,” she said.
I am ashamed to say that I just stared at her. It was only when she hit the floor that I understood and slowly got to my knees. At my age that’s not easy.
“What’s going on?” Nigel complained.
“One of them got loose,” the nurse said. “Shhhhh.”
“What are you talking about? What got loose?”I demanded, trying out all the possibilities running through my head. A lion. A serial killer. One of the monsters from the television.
Nigel began coughing.
I could see the tension in the nurse’s expression. She clearly wanted to tell him to stop but was enough of a professional to understand that would be useless. He couldn’t.
“One of the infected ones,” she told me, now that quiet was off the table.
“Why would one behere?” I hissed at her.
She made a gesture of exasperation. “Because some of them have money. A lot of money. They put her in a coma and—”
I heard the crash of a door opening so hard it hit the wall. Footsteps. Our doorknob turned before catching on the lock. I caught my breath. Nigel coughed harder, tears leaking out of his eyes. His hand covered his mouth, trying to muffle the sound. The nurse moved toward the attached bathroom, and I could tell that bitch was clearly planning on locking herself inside if our door opened.
The doorknob rattled. It rattled again. Then the steps went on, looking for doors that hadn’t been barred.
From the room beside ours, there came a scream so horrible that it made the hairs on my arms stand up. I wish I could say that was the end, but it wasn’t. The man pleaded for help, then screamed some more, cries that went on and on and on. The nurse wept, while Nigel and I looked at one another in shared horror and grotesque relief.
April 9, 2004
Despite death passing us by that night, Nigel’s lungs still failed him. By the time he died, theTimesreported that one whole floor of our hospital had been devoted to locking up infected people. It was a terrible scandal—front-page news week after week—but what did that matter to me? Nigel was gone.
Curfews had started by then too—no one was supposed to go out after dark—and burials of intact bodies had become fraught.I was sent back to our Upper West Side apartment with a box of ashes.
April 11, 2004
Our daughter, Diane, came down from Massachusetts, with a story about passing a mall beside the Springfield “Coldtown” that rebranded itself as the Dead Last Rest Stop. Although many people were trying to get out of the Coldtown, it seemed that some were trying to get in. To them, vampirism meant living forever. Vampirism meant never having to be afraid.
Our son, David, flew in from Florida, where there hadn’t been any reported outbreaks yet. He was terrified to be in New York, and told Diane and me so, many times. He said that anyone who’d nearly been attacked by one of the infected was insane to stick around and I was just lucky that he was such a dutiful son.
For her part, Diane informed me that she’d left her three-year-old daughter and eighteen-month-old twins with her husband, so whatever we were doing for her dad couldn’t take long. Diane takes after Nigel; she has no time for sentimentality.
April 12, 2004
We held a celebration of life in Central Park at midday, swiftly assembled, but full of touching speeches. In addition to writing his own plays, Nigel taught at the New School, and so, along with actors, rival playwrights, directors, costume designers, and all of the people involved in a production, there were a whole host of devoted students ready to mourn Nigel and hold forth onhis lost wisdom. It turned out that no one enjoyed making a tragic speech like an actor, except for a playwright yet to stage their first production and who hoped to catch the attention of someone important.
“Nigel once told me that we create not for the people who’ve come before or after, not for our friends or lovers, but to tell the truth,” declaimed a curvy actor who’d been in several of Nigel’s plays and with whom I suspected him of having an affair. “He believed that it was the small moments that conveyed the greatest emotional weight.”
“Nigel explained that if I didn’t stop writing scenes with close-ups that were supposed to be performed on a stage, he would smash his coffee cup and cut my throat with the jagged remains,” said a former student. I had to admit, that did seem much more like something Nigel would have said.
“Dad said that living well is the best revenge,” said David, heaping clichés on his poor father’s grave. “And he sure did that.”
Afterward, half of them took the subway to my apartment and we drank wine for an hour or two and cried. I crieda lot, I am not ashamed to say. I drank a good deal as well. The curvy actor who had probably, maybe, almost certainly had an affair with Nigel put her arms around me, and I sobbed on her blouse. People are complicated. Relationships are complicated. Nigel’s death felt horribly, monstrously uncomplicated.
April 15, 2004
Two days later, David and Diane sat on either side of the couch and told me how they saw my future.
“You should come live with me, Mom,” Diane said. “At leastuntil things settle down in the world. It’s not safe to be in a city anymore. Besides, everything costs so much here. And I could use help with the kids. If you were covering part of the mortgage, we could get a bigger place.”
