Write me a Letter

Mom,” I said. ”Saw a hockey game and thought about you and Feeb, when you used to go. How are you, anyway?”
    She said she was fine, she was taking a little rest after lunch was all. I said so was I. I didn’t bother telling her where I was taking it. Or why. If she didn’t have enough problems already, tell me who did. We made the same small talk we always did when she was lucid, what a word, then rang off.
    Then I had a visitor. A reporter visitor, a pert young thing in a pink jogging outfit and with a pink headband around her curls.
    ”Knock-knock,” she said, breezing right in. ”Anyone alive in here? Betty Morrison, Bee.” She waved the hand that didn’t have her camera in it at me.
    ”Daniel,” I said. ”V Other than that, no comment. No photos, either.”
    ”So what were you doing creeping around the Star Hotel at dead of night, Daniel? The lieutenant said he was satisfied your being there was incidental to what happened, and I quote. You expect me to believe that?”
    ‘At my age, one expects from life roughly what one expects from hospital cooking—very little, my dear, also lukewarm.” She grinned and hopped up on one of the beds.
    ”And you may quote me, just this once,” I added magnanimously. I wondered if the lieutenant had divulged to her what my line of work was; that I could do without, I’d never get rid of her.
    ”Well, what were you doing at the Star Hotel aside from being incidental?”
    ”It was to have been a sentimental pilgrimage,” I said. ”My wife and I spent the first night of our honeymoon at the Star Hotel. I hoped like a fool, that if we revisited it together after all these years, we might regain some of the happiness we frittered away.”
    ”So what happened?”
    ”She wouldn’t come with me,” I said. ”She went to visit her mother in Sarasota instead.”
    Miss Morrison looked at me suspiciously, then sighed. ”OK, OK,” she said. ”I get it. No comment. How do you like living in L.A. ?”
    ”Been at the hospital records again, have we,” I said. ”Naughty, naughty. Los Angeles has many attractive qualities. The Dodgers are one, the Lakers are one, and I forget the third one.”
    ”What kind of work did you say you did?”
    ”I don’t believe I did mention it,” I said, ”but actually I travel in ladies’ undergarments.”
    ”Yeah, yeah, tell me another,” she said, hopping down off the bed.
    ”With pleasure,” I said. ”This here was my father’s favorite. It’s the tsar of all the Russias ’ birthday.”
    ”See ya,” she said. Swish went the door.
    ”The tsar,” I continued unabated, ”was greatly impressed by a trained-bear act. So much so that he asked the trainer and his bear back for his next birthday party, when he wanted the bear to have learned one more trick—to be able to talk in Russian.
    ” A pleasure!’ cried the trainer. ‘See you next year, O mighty tsar.’
    ”On the way out of the castle, the trainer’s apprentice says to him, ‘Master, not even you can teach a bear to talk in a year, so how come you agreed?’
    ” ‘Listen, schmuck,’ the trainer says. ‘A year’s a long time. In a year I could be dead. In a year, God forbid, the tsar could be dead. And believe me, next year at this time if I’m not dead and the tsar’s not dead, you can bet your last kopek that fucking flea bag’s a goner.’ ”
    And, talking about betting, comrades, I’ll bet you ten zillion kopeks to one you can’t guess who my next visitor was, and I’ll give you an enormous hint—she was someone’s imaginary wife. Not Benny’s—mine.
    It was a couple of hours later. I’d napped awhile, on my back like I was supposed to, and once I even moved, all the way to the bathroom. I pushed myself erect on the edge of the bed as instructed. Ouch. I stood up, expecting the worst. Mild ouch only. I shuffled. Mild ouches, strong swear words. Some genius had fastened metal hand grips on both sides of the toilet, which helped greatly. It didn’t hurt that much, actually, a dull ache was all it was, the problem was trying to forget how much it had hurt the night before and overcoming the fear that the slightest movement would make it hurt that much again. Constipation—like living in the land of the rising sun, that’s another complication a guy with a bad back does not need, I realized as I sat there trying to make a little hat out of a piece of toilet paper. Pop used to make us kids hats out of a sheet of newspaper. He taught