Everyman

He was only called upon to be at all specific when he stood beside Millicent and saw what she could do and how fast she got better. He could sense right off that she had a knack that was i

Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it's the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it's what's inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.

"Don't you have some medication you can take?" he asked her.

"I took it," she said. "I can't take any more. It doesn't help but for a few hours anyway. Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse. I'm sorry I'm in such a state. I apologize for this."

Near her head on the bed was a back brace she'd removed in order to lie down. It consisted of a white plastic shell that fit across the lower spine and attached to a web of elasticized cloth and Velcro straps that fastened snugly over the stomach an oblong piece of felt-lined canvas. Though she remained in her white painting smock, she had removed the brace and tried to push it out of sight under a pillow when he opened the door and walked in, which was why it was up by her head and impossible not to be continually mindful of while they talked. It was only a standard back brace, worn under the outer clothing, whose plastic posterior section was no more than eight or nine inches high, and yet it spoke to him of the perpetual nearness in their affluent retirement village of illness and death.

"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked her.

He could see by looking into her eyes how difficult the pain was to bear. "Yes," she said weakly, "yes, please."

Her husband, Gerald Kramer, had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a county weekly, the leading local paper, that did not shy away from exposing corruption in municipal government up and down the shore. He remembered Kramer, who'd grown up a slum kid in nearby Neptune, as a compact, bald, opinionated man who walked with considerable swagger, played aggressive, ungainly te

"You can continue to lie here if you like," he said to Millicent Kramer after she had drunk some of the water.

"I can't be lying down all the time!" she cried. "I just ca

"Would a heating pad help?" he asked.

"You know what would help?" she said. "The sound of that voice that's disappeared. The sound of the exceptional man I loved. I think I could take all this if he were here. But I can't without him. I never saw him weaken once in his life – then came the cancer and it crushed him. I'm not Gerald. He would just marshal all his forces and do it – marshal all his everything and do whatever it was that had to be done. But I can't. I can't take the pain anymore. It overrides everything. I think sometimes that I can't go on another hour. I tell myself to ignore it. I tell myself it doesn't matter. I tell myself, 'Don't engage it. It's a specter. It's an a

"Do you have any of your medication with you?" he asked.

"I already took one this morning."

"Take another," he told her.

"I have to be so careful with those pills."

"I understand. But do yourself a favor and take another now. One more can't do much harm, and it'll get you over the hump. It'll get you back to the easel."