He began to feel less confused. His exhaustion hovered momentarily, like a bird that’s flown too far from the roost . . . and then it was gone. “Could I buy you a drink?” he offered.
When he awoke late the following morning, there were messages from May and Caroline, the latter of whom said, “Call me.” It occurred to him that he could do that—call his wife—without guilt or resorting to subterfuge, because he hadn’t slept with his editor or with May (though May’s body language had seemed to intimate that she was up for it, despite her friendship with Caroline, which went back to before Caroline had even met, let alone married, him), or with the woman—Sandrine—who was not a prostitute or a lunatic but an apparently sane and decent book lover who’d recognized him from the picture in the paper promoting his book signing. She’d put her arm through his, unfurled her umbrella to shelter them both, and led him up the ramp to the barge, where she negotiated a table by one of the windows overlooking the dark roil of the river.
What did she do in life? He didn’t know. She told him, but he wasn’t listening. He’d reached a point at which he was beyond listening, except when she was staring directly into his eyes and praising his books. She had a salad and pain et beurre and a glass of wine; a small inner voice told him that he’d had more than enough wine, so he ordered a Cognac. She insisted on paying, even restraining his hand with a surprisingly firm grip when he tried to present his card to the waiter. That was a moment. Her hand was on his, communicating a level of intimacy that on another occasion might have sparked him to action despite his wedding vows, which he’d always taken more as aspirations than as absolutes, but he was beyond exhausted and she had uneven teeth and a runny nose and kept punctuating her stream of chatter with a delicate cough that she muffled with her fist. She walked him back to the hotel, chattering away. He promised to personalize her book at the book signing. They parted. He dropped into bed as if from a great height.
Then it was noon and he was in the dining room, eying a soft-boiled egg in a ceramic cup and a mug of heavily creamed and sugared coffee and staring into his phone, a device he resented, hated, even, because of the demands it made and made again, hour after hour, day after day. He didn’t particularly want to call Caroline, thinking it could only be bad news—if her mother had finally died, there was no way he was flying back for the funeral because he’d just got here, hadn’t he?—but that wasn’t it at all.
“Hello?” Caroline chimed, her voice coming at him magically, on the first ring, though it was, what? Six in the morning there?
“I made it,” he said.
“Are you jet-lagged?”
“Mais oui.”
“Listen,” she said, “I just wanted to tell you that they’re saying on the news to be careful. This virus is really beginning to cause problems in Italy and France, too, and you know how you always get sick when you travel.”
He wasn’t a hypochondriac and he wasn’t yet one of the elderly (fifty-eight on his last birthday), and he didn’t have any of the comorbidities that made you especially susceptible to this, but her warning froze him for a moment. On his flight, a couple had been wearing surgical masks, which he’d thought bizarre—ludicrous, really—and in his haze of clouds and champagne he hadn’t wanted to parse the implications. Now, staring into the bright, glowing yolk of his egg, he decided to tune it all out, since there was nothing he could do about it, in any case. “How’s your mother doing?” he asked.
Getting into the spirit of things, Caroline said, “Comme ci, comme ça.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just send me a hazmat suit, O.K.? I’ll wear it on the flight home.”
They were fairly well insulated on the farm, which had come with 6.3 acres of woods backing up on former hay meadows that now sprouted various architectural wonders designated as single-family homes, though they could have accommodated whole tribes. The air was crisp and clean. A late-March snow smoothed out all the angles. Caroline came down with a cold, but he felt fine.
The fifth day back, he took her to Eladio’s, a twenty-minute drive from the house on roads that were ice-ribbed and haunted by ghost images of snowstorms past but well worth it for the cuisine (Milanese, no fusion, no gimmicks). Western New York wasn’t Paris. Which was why he liked it—the deep trance of the frozen nights, the icy panoply of the stars. Who needed haute cuisine? Or, for that matter, the Louvre? To visit, sure, but then you come home to the real world and take your wife out to the only restaurant deserving of the name for fifty miles around.
He had two drinks before they ordered. Some people they knew stopped by the table for a peripatetic chat about nothing in particular, a kind of catechism of the usual, then Eladio himself made an appearance, dispensing small talk in his soothing basso profundo. Caroline had a Martini, but she barely took a sip of it, and when the food came—she ordered the osso buco—she didn’t do much more than push it around the plate with the tines of her fork. She took two bites, maybe three, but he wasn’t really paying attention because he was talking, running off on a monologue about May and Mireille and even the woman with the umbrella, Sandrine, a fan, a true fan, and how about that?
Caroline didn’t respond. Her Martini was getting warm, her osso buco cold. At that moment, the music paused—Vivaldi, far too insistent—and he could hear the faint rasp of her breathing, a human soundtrack with too much static in it. “Are you O.K.?” he asked, not alarmed, not yet, but getting there.
This was Caroline, his wife, his beauty, his love, the woman who’d stridden into his life like a warrior-savior on the heels of his second divorce, she who was consummately fit and polished and never at a loss for words. But not tonight. Tonight she looked washed-out, even in the forgiving glow of the candles, and she’d hardly said a word. She shook her head, balled up her napkin, and pressed it to her mouth, the first cough predicating the second and the third and then a whole taut string of them.
“Just get me home,” she said finally.
The infection, if that was what it was, was viral, so antibiotics had no effect, which meant that there was no treatment beyond the cold medications, syrups, and lozenges that anybody could get over the counter. It began with sniffles and developed into a cough, and what you read in the paper or saw on the nightly news tended to minimize its impact on healthy adults. Caroline, who was supremely healthy and fourteen years younger than he was—a child, an infant—went straight to bed that night and didn’t get up until after ten the following morning, and then only to use the toilet. He was downstairs at the time, at his desk, scrolling through his accumulated e-mails as a way of postponing the moment at which he would have to plunge back into the book he hadn’t glanced at or even thought of since he boarded the plane for France, when he heard the toilet flush overhead and then the ascending notes of a ragged fit of coughing. By the time he mounted the stairs she was back in bed, her face flattened and reduced. She put a hand to her mouth and produced a long, dredging cough.
“You sound terrible,” he said.
“It’s just a cold. But I feel wiped out, like I climbed a mountain. Like I can’t catch my breath.”
He wanted to make a joke about altitude sickness or Sherpas or something—yaks—but it was no good. “You want me to call the doctor?”
“I just need sleep, that’s all.”
“How about something to eat? I could bring you some toast, a cup of tea? Or a muffin—you want a muffin?”
She shook her head.
“Tea? Juice?”
Her voice was so weak he could barely hear her. “Juice,” she rasped, then coughed into her fist.
“O.K.,” he said. “O.K. I’ll be right back.” And he turned and thumped down the stairs, converted in that moment into her nurse, a role for which he’d never auditioned and was hopelessly ill-prepared, because it was Caroline who took care of the domestic details—the grocery shopping, the meals, the cleanup, the feeding of the cats, and the emptying of their shit-fouled litter into the compost pit out beyond the denuded apple tree, where the wind knifed down out of the north.
She was asleep by the time he got back upstairs with the juice—and a muffin, because she had to eat something, didn’t she? He saw that she’d thrown back the covers as if the weight of them were too much to bear. Her hair was ragged. And her feet, her beautiful, perfect feet, whose arches he’d kissed a thousand times, were blotched and discolored. He was about to leave the tray on the night table and back out of the room when her eyes flickered open. Caroline coughed. Her face flushed. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered.
It always irritated him when people said “I don’t like hospitals,” as if they were expressing an original thought, as if anybody anywhere liked hospitals. You didn’t go to the hospital by choice or for pleasure—you went because your choices had been reduced to zero. Caroline coughed all the way there, coughed as the doors drew back to admit them, and kept on coughing through the ritual at the desk and the long, grim wait in the emergency room while gurneys angled past and everybody stared at the floor. At some point—they’d been there an hour, at least—a nurse called Caroline’s name and took her into a back room, and at a point beyond that, after he’d sat packed in, elbow to elbow, with the snifflers and the groaners for who knew how long while trying to read an article about bass fishing in the sole magazine left in the place (not that he gave two shits for bass or fishing, either), a doctor appeared and called his name.
The doctor was tall and young, dressed in surgical scrubs, a mask, and nitrile gloves. There was a bump where the bridge of his nose poked at the fabric of the mask. His eyes, isolated in the space between mask and cap, gave up nothing. “Your wife tested positive for the coronavirus,” he said, “and we’ve isolated her in the I.C.U. for her own safety and everybody else’s, too.”
Riley felt a shiver of fear. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she? I mean, it’s just like a cold, isn’t it?”
“Truthfully? Your wife’s the first case we’ve seen here, not that we didn’t know it was coming sooner or later. She tells me you’ve been abroad recently—France, wasn’t it?”
“Paris. Last week.”
And then the eyes, interplanetary eyes, eyes attached to nothing, fastened on his. “You’ll have to self-isolate. And we’re going to need a list of everybody you’ve been in contact with since you got back. If you begin to show symptoms, consult with your own physician—but if at any point you feel that your breathing’s compromised or you’re running a fever, you’ll need to have somebody bring you back here. I can’t stress this enough—don’t hesitate.”
“What about a test? Can’t you test me?” He felt as if he’d been shoved over a cliff, legs churning in the air, hands grasping for something, anything, to cling to.
“We’re only testing patients with active symptoms.”
There was the hiss of the intercom. A siren shrieked from beyond the windows, then died abruptly. “Can I see her?” Riley asked.
The doctor shook his head. “I told you, she’s on the isolation ward.”
Words were Riley’s intimates. He knew definitions, nuances, implications. Caroline was isolated. He himself had to get home and self-isolate. Still, he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
When his own mother was dying, ten years ago—or more, maybe more—he’d been apprised of it in a late-night phone call from her second husband, whom he really didn’t know that well. His name was Patrick—not Pat—and he was an eerie replica of Riley’s father: skinny, Irish, a drinker. They lived in San Diego. Riley saw them maybe once or twice a year. As far as he knew, they were in reasonably good health for their age, so the news that his mother was “gravely ill,” as Patrick put it, came as a shock. At first, he tried to deny it—his mother couldn’t die, no way in the world—and then, to his shame, he began calculating how he could avoid the whole thing, deal with it from a distance, on the telephone, and, yes, send the ashes here to me and I’ll spread them in the woods, because she always liked nature, didn’t she?
He was between wives at the time, so he had no one to nag him to do the right thing, the only thing, but within minutes of hanging up the phone he’d come around, because this wasn’t about him, it was about her, his mother, and whatever the end of her life might mean. By the time he got there, standby on the first flight out of Buffalo, she was in a coma. Liver failure. Her system was shutting down. And, no, there would be no transplant, or even any possibility of it, because donor livers were in short supply and went only to people who could fully utilize them, people far younger than she was.
Patrick and the doctor (fiftyish, deeply tanned, a yachtsman, and fiendishly, as it turned out, an aspiring screenwriter who wanted to talk about nothing else) preceded him into a low-ceilinged room with twenty or more patients crowded into it. My mother, he was thinking, my mother, and here were all these people—strangers—dying their antiseptic deaths alongside her, as if it didn’t matter whose mother she was. As they made their way across the room, dodging gurneys, the doctor was saying, “So R. T. Blankmanship—he’s my protagonist?—winds up bottoming out on a reef off of Tonga, and it wasn’t even on the charts. . . .”
Riley didn’t recognize his mother. She was bloated and yellow, like a piece of fruit, like a vegetable. He was afraid to touch her, but he forced himself, just a tap there at the shoulder, and he leaned in close and whispered to her, saying the sort of things none of his characters would ever say on the page. Clichés. Only clichés could blunt what he was feeling.
And now Caroline was the one in the hospital. With a breathing tube down her throat because she couldn’t breathe for herself. And who’d put her there? Who’d come back from France, the hotbed of infection, and kissed her, breathed on her, shared sips from a wineglass, and slept in the same bed? But, if he was the guilty party here, why wasn’t he coughing? Why wasn’t he in the hospital instead of her? Would he trade places with her the way the selfless heroes did in the movies? Yes, he told himself, yes, of course, but he knew it wasn’t true. She was stronger than he was, younger, and she’d never smoked and didn’t drink even half as much as he did.
He called the hospital in the morning. Nobody knew anything. It took him fifteen minutes just to get through to a human being, and that human being transferred him to another human being, who, after audibly tapping at her keyboard and consulting with another live voice, informed him that Caroline was in isolation.
“I know that,” he said, fighting to control himself. “I’m the one who brought her in. I want to know how she’s doing, for Christ’s sake—is she better? The same?” A term came to him, a term you heard on the news, and he employed it now. “Is she stable, at least?”
The human being on the other end of the line—he pictured a nurse, or was she just a receptionist?—said, “If there’s any change, you’ll be the first to know.”
His own doctor, Marv Zwaga, with whom he was on a first-name basis and who had, through the years, treated him for a whole spectrum of ailments, from a dislocated shoulder to wasp stings, broken toes, and a particularly nasty knife-sharpening mishap, told him over the phone that he had no tests available. Nobody did. “Just assume you have it.”
“And do what, drink plenty of fluids?”
There was a pause as Marv assessed the level of animosity here. Then he said, “It’s never a bad idea. But, really, you just need to isolate until we find out what’s going on with this thing.”
“So I wait?”
“It’s nothing personal. I just have a hard time being vulnerable.”
Cartoon by Johnny DiNapoli
“You wait. Some people are asymptomatic, but if you start to show symptoms—fever, chills, a cough—call me right away.”
“And then?”
“Then we get you to the hospital. A.S.A.P.”
Waiting wasn’t Riley’s strong suit. He called the hospital every couple of hours—that day and the next and the day after that—but all he got for his trouble was “She’s resting,” and when he asked if he could at least speak to her—or FaceTime, what about FaceTime?—he was told that she’d been sedated. What he didn’t yet understand was that you had to be sedated to tolerate having a polyvinyl-chloride tube jammed down your throat 24/7 while a machine did your breathing for you. Or that the virus produced lesions of the lung tissue, which scarred over and made it still harder to breathe on your own, progressively harder, minute by minute, day by day. Or, worse, that the intensive-care unit wasn’t necessarily a place you graduated from. Oh, it sounded good on the face of it—care, intensively given—but there were limits to what care could do, no matter how intensive it was. Nobody bothered to mention that.
Layered atop all this was his fear for himself. Every sniffle and sneeze, every hiccup, was fraught. Did he have a sore throat? Was he feverish? Weak? Dizzy? He tried to work, but it was impossible. There was TV, but he hated TV. He took long drives. He started drinking earlier in the day, until by six, when he should have been slipping a frozen entrée into the microwave, he was passed out on the couch. By the fourth day, he’d had enough of isolation. He got into the car and drove to the hospital under a cloudless sky, the sun laying a brutal hand on the snowbanks, ice gone to slush, the blacktop glistening because all of a sudden it was spring, and where were the pussy willows? Should he stop someplace and pick some up for Caroline? Or lilies? What about lilies?
He walked right in, and nobody said a word to him. People were wearing masks—the staff were, anyway—and he almost turned around and walked back out. But he didn’t, because he was angry and scared and he needed to see his wife, see Caroline, who was locked up in here like a convict in prison. He knew enough to avoid the desk, instead going straight to the elevator and pressing the button for the third floor, where the I.C.U. was. Two other people rode up in the elevator with him, both in scrubs, both masked. When the doors opened, he hung back a moment, then followed them out into the hallway, with its windows like panels of light and the faint, lingering odor of human decay that no amount of disinfectant could ever erase. The door to the I.C.U. would be locked, of course, he knew that, but here were these two people ambling along ahead of him, these nurses or doctors or whatever they were, and they punched in a code and the door swung open to admit them. It was nothing to lean forward and catch the handle on the rebound.
At first nobody noticed him, which was a kind of miracle in itself, and as he moved deeper into the unit he saw the way it was configured—a central desk, bristling with nurses, and the patients’ rooms, each with sliding glass doors for easy visibility, laid out on all four sides. Two of the rooms were unoccupied, but in each of the others he could see the dark forms of patients stretched out on their backs and immobilized as if they were corpses already. But which one was Caroline? Where was she? What did she even look like?
“Sir!” a voice cried out behind him. “Sir, you can’t be in here!”
In the next instant a pair of nurses converged on him, the shorter of the two taking hold of his wrist, the way Sandrine had done in the restaurant in Paris, intimately, forcefully, and with a show of strength that he found alarming—and unnecessary, because he was just here to see his wife, that was all, to know something, to be informed, and wasn’t that his right?