Sandstone

My mother and I are sitting in her private room at Sandstone, where she is now a permanent resident. Heavily sedated, she has her sunglasses on and keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they’re shaking. She tries to smile when she asks what I want for Christmas. I’m not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her. I’m wearing a two-button wool gabardine suit with notched lapels by Gian Marco Venturi, cap-toed leather laceups by Armani, tie by Polo, socks I’m not sure where from. It’s nearing the middle of April.

“Nothing,” I say, smiling reassuringly.

There’s a pause. I break it by asking, “What do you want?”

She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands, at dried blood, probably from a girl named Suki, beneath the thumbnail. My mother licks her lips tiredly and says, “I don’t know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve spent the last hour studying my hair in the mirror I’ve insisted the hospital keep in my mother’s room.

“You look unhappy,” she says suddenly.

“I’m not,” I tell her with a brief sigh.

“You look unhappy,” she says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark blinding white, again.

“Well, you do too,” I say slowly, hoping that she won’t say anything else.

She doesn’t say anything else. I’m sitting in a chair by the window, and through the bars the lawn outside darkens, a cloud passes over the sun, soon the lawn turns green again. She sits on her bed in a nightgown from Bergdorf’s and slippers by Norma Kamali that I bought her for Christmas last year.

“How was the party?” she asks.

“Okay,” I say, guessing.

“How many people were there?”

“Forty. Five hundred.” I shrug. “I’m not sure.”

She licks her lips again, touches her hair once more. “What time did you leave?”

“I don’t remember,” I answer after a long time.

“One? Two?” she asks.

“It must have been one,” I say, almost cutting her off.

“Oh.” She pauses again, straightens her sunglasses, black Ray-Bans I bought her from Bloomingdale’s that cost two hundred dollars.

“It wasn’t very good,” I say uselessly, looking at her.

“Why?” she asks, curious.

“It just wasn’t,” I say, looking back at my hand, the specks of blood under the nail on my thumb, the photograph of my father, when he was a much younger man, on my mother’s bedside table, next to a photograph of Sean and me when we were both teenagers, wearing tuxedos, neither one of us smiling. In the photograph of my father he’s wearing a six-button double-breasted black sport coat, a white spread-collar cotton shirt, a tie, pocket square, shoes, all by Brooks Brothers. He’s standing next to one of the topiary animals a long time ago at his father’s estate in Connecticut and there’s something the matter with his eyes.