Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Read Free Book Online Page B

restaurant owners, she does not need him at all.
    I call or write a long list of churches, finding each call a trial because I hate using the telephone but more because I dislike asking for anything. I devise a mental stratagem to drive me to the phone. I think of Carlos Calderon, my AIDS patient two years ago at Capitol Hill Hospital in Washington. When he left the hospital, I followed him to houses and apartments provided by the Whitman-Walker Clinic where he was able to stay when he could no longer live alone. Once he told me he wanted to see Wayward Books (our bookstore on 7th Street). He climbed painfully into my car, and I drove across the city and helped him into the store.
    He had no energy left to look at books but I remember him saying: ‘I like being in a place where there are books.’ His gaunt, handsome face looked happy; he shook hands heartily with Sybil as though she were part of the ambience he liked.… Remembering all this (and Carlos’s death six months later, one week before we came down from Maine last year) made it possible to make those telephone calls.
    Why do I hate to beg? Which of course is what we were really doing. Even in a good cause. Because, I suppose, I was taught ‘to pay your way,’ never to ask for anything, to live honorably. I think it would be easier, were I in need, to steal than to beg. The act of stealing is private, involves some skill, I would think, and a sense of accomplishment in the face of the danger of discovery. If one ‘gets away with it,’ a sort of victory over peril is achieved. Whereas begging is public and ignoble, and is only accomplished by assuming a lowly attitude of need and unworthiness.
    Last night we had dinner with friends Gail and Celeste. The other guest was John Preston, a writer with whom I had corresponded and for whose books (on AIDS) I have written blurbs. He now lives in Portland and is not entirely well, having had one stay in hospital. But he is full of intellectual (and physical) energy, has contracts and plans for two or three books, and has just taken on the care of a new puppy, an exuberant vizsla dog he tells us is a Hungarian breed, overfriendly, but yet a good guard dog, used in the past to protect the Hungarian border.
    Next day: A young woman comes by, accompanied by a photographer, from the Bangor Daily News . It turns out she is an entry in my Small World file. After the interview she tells me about herself. She was born into a working-class, German-American, Catholic family, the first of six children. She has Washington, D.C., roots, was a student at American University during the time I taught there, and raised a child born out of wedlock while she studied. She had no classes with me, she says, but used to walk by the closed door with my name on it, and wonder about me. She has battled depression (as well she might have), but now works as a journalist, doing the arts interviews for her paper.
    The photographer takes so many pictures that, at last, I put a stop to it. I dread being photographed, more than I ever have. Not being photogenic makes one dislike the camera, the way Sybil, who fears heights, hates bridges.… At seventy, I wrote about my discovery before a full-length mirror of the decadent changes in my body, a section of the book that, to my horror, was often quoted in reviews. Interested in what the review had to say, I was forced to read that odious description again and again.… Now I am sure his pictures will reveal all the aged ridges, lines, valleys, sagging and blotching of my face and neck, the unreal mask I think my face has become in order to hide the unseemly youth I see in my mind’s eye.
    New York: Another radio interview, this one from New York by satellite to Philadelphia. Then I go to lunch on the east side of the city with my friend Hilma Wolitzer. She is enveloped in middle-aged contentment, having four good novels ‘out there,’ her novelist-daughter Meg