Home Again

“He told me you were a cardiologist’s nightmare.”

“That’s why I like Kennedy. He’s more honest than your average doctor.”

Dr. Gerlaine slipped the chart back into its sleeve. “Kennedy says he told you six months ago that if you had another episode of heart failure, you were going to—in his words—be in deep shit. And son, it doesn’t get much deeper.”

Angel laughed. “Slow down, I can’t keep up with the technical jargon.”

“Kennedy told me you’d make jokes. But I don’t think anything here is funny. You’re a young man. Rich and famous if the girls at the nurses’ station are correct.”

Angel thought about the stir his presence must be creating and felt a jolt of adrenaline. “They’re right. I’m both.”

There was a pause before the doctor spoke again. “You’re not taking this seriously enough, Mr. DeMarco. You’ve been sick for a long time. The viral infection you had as a young man weakened your heart. And still you drank and smoked and used drugs. The cold, hard truth is that you’ve been using up that heart of yours at a very rapid rate, and if we don’t do something soon, we may not be able to do anything at all.”

“I’ve heard that before. But I’m still here, Doc. You know why?”

Gerlaine eyed him. “It’s certainly not because you listen to doctor’s orders.”

“Nope.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Here’s my secret, Doc: Only the good die young.”

Gerlaine leaned back in his chair, studying Angel. Minutes clicked by on the rhythmic tide of the monitor. Finally the doctor spoke. “Do you have a wife, Mr. DeMarco?’

Angel gave him a disgusted look. “I think she’d be here if I did.”

“Children?”

He grinned. “Not that I know of.”

“Dr. Kennedy said in all the years he’d treated you, he’d never seen anyone visit you in the hospital except your agent and a horde of reporters.”

“What is this, Doc, some macabre ‘This Is Your Life’? You going to bring out my high school guidance counselor to confirm that I never played well with others?”

“No. I’m asking who will grieve for you if you die?”

It was a mean question, designed to hurt, and it succeeded. He thought suddenly of his brother, Francis. All at once his childhood was inside him, and the nostalgia was so sharp and sweet, he could smell the grass and the rain and the sea.

Thinking about the past made him feel … disconnected. He knew that his Hollywood acquaintances were just that. Not the kind of friends his brother had once been. They didn’t see him, that group of hangers-on who drifted through the movable feast that was filmmaking.

For a split second he felt a stinging regret, a sense of loss for all he’d walked away from, the brother he’d left behind. Ruthlessly he shoved the emotion aside and stared hard at the doctor. He wanted to tell him to go to hell; but damn it, he needed the man. It was time to turn on the charm that had gotten him so far, so fast. “Hey, you’re right, of course. This must be where they got that famous line ‘serious as a heart attack.’ Well, you can bet your ass I’m going to take my health seriously from now on. No drugs—or hardly any. And I’m going to give up booze. Just beer. Beer’s okay, right?”

Gerlaine stared at him in obvious distress. “If you don’t do something quickly you’re going to die, Mr. DeMarco. Soon. And whatever dreams and hopes you have will die with you. No second chances.”

Angel smiled. Same old schtick. “Define ‘soon’ for our viewers.”

Gerlaine responded with the expected shrug.

Angel smiled triumphantly. That was always the way of it—that shrug was doc body language for sometime between this second and 2010. They didn’t have any real answers, just advice and more advice. “I’ll die someday, is what you mean. Well, pal, so will you.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Gerlaine answered evenly. “If you don’t do something, Mr. DeMarco, I think you’ll die this year.”

Angel’s cocky smile faded. “This year? But it’s almost October.”

“Yes, it is.”

Angel couldn’t comprehend what he was being told. Something was wrong, his hearing was going. “Are you shitting me?”

Gerlaine gave him a superior look. “I don’t ‘shit’ patients, Mr. DeMarco, I inform them.”

This year. No one had ever said anything like that before. It was always a bunch of hemming and hawing about somedays and future times. Lectures about alcohol abuse and the accumulated effect of cigarette smoking and fat in your diet.