We present “From Dawn to Noon”, the first chapter of The Last Day of Millard Salter, a novel that portrays the suicide intention of the psychiatrist Millard Salter when he turned 75 years old.
On the day he was going to hang himself, Millard Salter made his bed for the first time in fifty-seven years. He struggled a bit with the fitted sheet, but by immobilizing the mattress with his good knee he managed to get the elastics around the corners. Then came the envelope, the pillowcases, the silk duvet that his second wife, a dialysis nurse, had received as a gift from an elderly patient in Taiwan. Millard called it duvet until Isabelle — rest in peace — pointedly pointed out the difference (words used to matter to Isabelle: “Paintings hang,” he could hear her berating him, “People hang themselves”). Finally, she spread the quilt over the comforter, letting the edges hang down at the feet like the hem of a skirt, and tucked the cushions and pillows against the headboard. When finished, shortly after six o’clock, the queen-size bed looked as well decked out as a luxury hotel. Only one mint was missing on the cushion. I guess they’ll cut the rope and lay me on the covers, Millard thought. “And what is wrong if they presume that every morning I made my bed with such care? It is not a crime! ”.
Soon the birthday presents would arrive from her children – or at least the three who will most surely remember, because with Lysander you never knew – from her younger sister in Tucson (her younger sister who was now sixty-eight! years!) and Virginia Margold, a high school friend who, after her divorce, had dedicated herself to contacting still-living Hager Heights Class of 1957 students by phone to commemorate special occasions. Virginia would be sure to take the news that the even-tempered Millard Salter — Salty, as she’d known him — had closed his own book at seventy-five.
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That, fortunately, would not concern him. How odd it was, Millard thought as he tied his shoes — a complicated process since developing a herniated disc — that dressing did not appear to be any different in this latest performance. The same striped tie. Same round neck cardigan. The same black bag, a gift from her father when he graduated from medical school. Only the choice of a belt led to some reflection. She pulled her two best belts out of the closet — the closet where Isabelle used her makeup decayed to a cardboard warped by water, waiting to be discarded — wrapped the leather around her fists, and tempered hard to test its resistance.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsHe intended to wear one for his pants, the other for his neck; the last thing he wanted was to be found swinging in the bathroom with his pants gathered around his ankles. In addition, he had once read that hanging caused erections, and although he was amused by the idea of greeting the “rescue” team with an alert member, a kind of exaggerated raised middle finger gesture, he did not want to leave the world in shock. that he had been angry at his life, or even disappointed, because that was not the case at all.
Millard took over the elevator from the ninth floor to the fourth, when Elsa Duransky approached him and filled it with a scent of lavender. He wore an old Yorkshire terrier under his elbow, little black claws flapping in the void. Her husband, Saul, who had once been a respected endocrinologist, had become another one of those unfortunate creatures who dressed for work every morning, flawless as a martial guard, but with no patients to attend to, flirting between steering committees, group tours of the clinic and case conferences, leaving behind a trail of tangential and tedious questions. In short, he represented everything Millard resisted becoming. “How is the veteran?” He asked, referring to the dog. He never remembered the name of the animal, which was either Mr. Spark, or Mr. Spike, or something similar. “The ‘veteran’ walked out the door thirty minutes ago,” Elsa replied, rolling her eyes, and Millard realized that she thought he was asking about her husband. Still she didn’t seem offended. It was one of those misunderstandings that weren’t worth clearing up; much less in his last meeting with Elsa Duransky, and this one seemed almost certainly that it would be. No, a clarification now would only generate discomfort, it would not be sincere. Much better to grin like a jerk while Saul’s wife spread her gossip around the elevator (“He smiles like a jerk” … He would probably be fired these days if he used those kinds of expressions in the hospital or, at the very least, forced to listen to a mindless talk to be more empathetic).
She recalled how Isabelle had described her neighbor in two words after a particularly tedious building meeting: “Half of what that woman says is true. The problem is that she doesn’t know which half ”. Isabelle always had that knack of verbally destroying people. “I ran into Lysander,” Elsa said. Had I already told you? The boy’s name caught Millard’s attention. It wasn’t like she could still legitimately call him a boy, not when he was forty-three. At twenty-five, even thirty-five she could afford it, she could speak of him as a young man of potential, given his early penchant for mathematics and his prodigious imagination – he was even a Wesleyan graduate – but two decades later Lysander was not. he had done nothing with that imagination except daydreaming.
“In the park,” Elsa continued. Walking their dogs. “So she ran into him…” “Loving those dogs he has,” the woman said. Although Mr. Scratch present here disagrees. The dog scowled at Millard, his hideous nose was like Elsa’s and his frown resembled Saul’s, as if the beast had become the son they never had. The elevator stopped at the second floor, but there was no one in the corridor; someone had grown impatient and taken the stairs. “We’re going to have lunch together,” Millard said. I’ll give you Mr. Scratch’s regards. Elsa barely noticed his point and asked: “What are their names?”
It was a moment before he realized that she was referring to the dogs; Then he felt a twinge of anger, an uncommon anger, due to Elsa’s interest in something so trivial. Or maybe he didn’t really care and just wanted to fill in the space-time continuum or his stunned gray matter. And, damn it, what were the names of those dogs? The doors opened and they reached the lobby, where a scent of damp wood – like “old New York” cologne – hung perpetually in the shadows.
“Adolf and Benito,” he replied. It was the first duet that appeared in his head. He could have easily said Abbot and Costello, or Sonny and Cher.
Not that it was anything of real importance. He responded to the reassurance of knowing that he would not live to see the sunset: sheer shameless irreverence. Elsa’s neck perceptibly tensed, then relaxed. “Well, whatever, he’s so good with animals,” she said. Perhaps you will soon have a vet in the family.
Perhaps, though unlikely. What gnawed at Millard was not that his youngest son had wasted twenty-one years of his graduate life without a full-time job or serious relationship or even filing his own tax return, but that he, his father, burdened with external affairs. , let that happen. Still, preparing for death, Millard found himself considering whether a man who had not yet got down to business could create a masterpiece of art or literature at the age of forty-three … or at least embark on a career. That was indeed the purpose of his lunch; their last meal together, Millard repeated to himself, their last chance to lead the boy “on the right track,” as his own father would have put it.
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All week — all month — he had weighed those “last”: his last visit to the public library, his last conference to medical students, his last visit to the dentist, although it was difficult to justify that in planning his last ten days of his life a man will include his second dental cleaning of the year. He swore to himself that he would not deviate from his normal routine. Thus, he renewed his subscription to the Psychosomatic Medicine and Architecture magazines, paid his monthly payments in the faculty club, requested an absentee vote, as he always did, for the primary elections, in which he would not be alive to vote in person. . That gave him the opportunity to withdraw, to reverse course even at the end. However, the appointed day was approaching, and more than fearful, or indeed reticent, he felt resigned, as if, paraphrasing the sacred Amida sermon, his name was already written on the casualty list in the Book of Life. Millard’s only concern was method, not purpose. Self-destruction had not been intended for the soft-hearted, which explained why so many attempts were unsuccessful. How many patients did you know who had ingested a tube of commercial painkillers, and who had been “rescued” by their good neighbors or perhaps a nosy mailman, and then woke up for a liver transplant? No, the pills involved a lot of uncertainties.
With carbon monoxide, you ran the risk of suffocating your neighbors. Or, God forbid, set the entire building on fire and leave a legacy of rage and rubble. For weeks he had considered a black market pistol, but illegal weapons were very difficult to come by in his social circle (obtaining a legal pistol, even if it did secure one, was a bureaucratic process of months). In the end he ended up giving value to those words of Dorothy Parker that had barely entertained him as a teenager: “Guns are not reliable, ropes give way, gas smells; You might as well end up alive. And since living wasn’t an option Millard took seriously, a makeshift rope seemed the least bad of the alternatives. Taking it for granted, of course, that she would muster the courage to knock the chair down from under her feet.
“What about you, Millard?” Elsa asked, as if suddenly noticing Salter’s presence again. Then he began to adjust his tie as he blocked his escape and said, “How are you?” “I’m fine,” he said. Life is good. Life, in general, had been good with Millard; probably, she admitted, more generous than he had been to her. With his ex-wife, Carol, he was a benevolent tyrant; and raised three adult children, two of them successfully. The oldest, Arnold, had moved to St. Louis, where he was general counsel for a consortium of beer distributors and coached a boys’ soccer team. Their daughter, Sally, married a naval architect, who inherited a fortune from the lumber industry, and had given birth to twins. He divided his time between Suffolk County, in a house renovated from a nineteenth-century farmhouse overlooking the Long Island Estuary, and a small duplex on New York’s Gramercy Square. And with Isabelle, they had had Maia — the stubborn Maia, with crystal clear eyes; a wonderful blessing of mature life. If it weren’t for Lysander … “In baseball,” Millard joked to Isabelle, “three out of four is enough to get into the Hall of Fame.”
“Good,” Elsa said. I’m glad to hear it.
But the woman gave her words such a tone of doubt that, as she disappeared behind the revolving doors, Millard found himself wondering what she might have meant. Perhaps she wanted to imply that he was not well, but that she was willing to maintain the illusion of prosperity if that was what he wanted her to do. And was he actually in such good shape? After all, he was going to kill himself.
Had it been one of his own patients, he would have called 911 immediately. Who was in the position to say whether a suicide was rational or irrational, justified or unforgivable? A lifetime of reading Hume and Durkheim did not bring him the least bit closer to a truth worth defending. One had to operate from a blind instinct, a visceral sense of right and wrong. He remembered his mother’s father, a gaunt and precise man, who would take him to look for acorns in Van Cortlandt Park and tell him: “One day, Thousand, in the blink of an eye, you will be an old man.” Well, one day, he would be married, in the middle of his career as a psychiatrist, enjoying a casual affair with a dialysis nurse; And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, she would have a second family, a daughter two decades younger than her half siblings, and somehow one of those half siblings would have gotten out of hand.
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“You’re a typical Tony Randall,” Storch, his best friend, now dead, teased him. And patting him on the back he continued: “A typical Saul Bellow… a typical Strom Thurmond.” How much he missed Hal Storch. Others had called Millard all sorts of things, less generous, that was clear. The talk always came back to him like poison ivy. That was what they would talk about at the funeral.
Not from the tormented souls he helped in his forty-nine-year career. Not about his passion for German opera or his fishing trips in Sheepshead Bay. Not from that morning, five decades ago, in the butterfly farm at the Museum of Natural History, when he proposed to Carol. No, they would whisper in that intriguing, malicious tone about their second family; They would murmur knowing that his affair with Isabelle, more than any intrinsic character flaw, had spoiled Lysander’s potential.
And they would associate his death with despair, with his two years of widowhood, because who, if not a depressed person, hangs himself in a bathroom on Fifth Avenue in New York – one that was a luxurious bathroom, equipped with ambient lighting and finishes? in copper — on his seventy-fifth birthday? But that won’t be any of her business either, though she couldn’t help wondering if Carol, who she hadn’t spoken to since the divorce, would make a portrait beside her grave. She had already surprised him with a condolences card when she learned of Isabelle’s death, impersonal but very tasteful; then it might as well catch him off guard again.
How foolish they would be to think that they could understand his motives. He could hardly do it himself. All Millard knew for sure was that he didn’t want to die depending on someone or handicapped, like so many of his shabby colleagues – like Hal Storch, like Isabelle! – and that everyone had to go eventually, and what, damn , he had fallen in love with the woman he intended to murder.