Florida, Mt. Everest

When I arrived at his estate on the morning of our interview, he was, in my mind, still a hulking immortal. I located an intercom in a hedge beside the front gate, pressed the button, then wiped the grit of corrosion from my fingers. Beyond the gate, full heads of dandelion grew from long fissures in the asphalt, waiting for wind. No one answered. I wandered around the perimeter and found a side entrance where, to my surprise, there was no gate at all.

Stepping from his colonnaded colonial, he asked me to call him by his middle name: Mitch. His thin hair had a dewy glisten, and what remained of his recognizable appearance hung on his face in an odd, uncomfortable way like he was a much older sibling of the more famous man. He took me across the drive and through a dormant rose garden to a thatched cottage his late wife had built on the property, lamenting on the way at the lack of dependable gardeners. He carried a cane but only employed it to push open the cottage’s door, one that bore half-moons of varying freshness from the cane’s ferrule.

“Mind your head,” he said, entering first.

First a tobacco-thick darkness, then a study with latticed windows that delivered a smeary view of an overgrown lawn and a tennis court. The room seemed to slumber until Mitch turned on a lamp.

“How do you know Mitch?” he asked, settling behind a desk of executive proportions.

“I know you from your days with—”

“Not me. Your editor.”

“Ah.” I had never thought of Mitchell as a Mitch, nor had I ever heard him go by that abbreviated form. It added more distance to our already strained association. “College days,” I said, not: late wife’s former paramour.

“College is the place to make connections, I’ve been told. I never went. You’d know that if you’ve done your homework.”

I lied and said I did.

“And?”

“And what?”

“It hasn’t hurt me, I expect you to say.”

I ignored his bullying. “Do you mind if I record our conversation? For reference.”

“I mind. But sit, for Chrissake.”

I slipped my old microcassette recorder into my shirt pocket, pulled my notebook from my coat, then chose one of the two plastic chairs on the other side of his desk. My notes opened onto jottings I’d made a few years earlier in a much different room. I turned the page and did a second pass at this one. Mitch’s study was low-ceilinged, with heavy furnishings and a faded tan tapestry that sagged on the wall behind his desk. A bit of imitation Bayeux Tapestry, although with the rich, you never know. Along the room’s perimeter were piled books and magazines and bankers boxes. Framed prints not yet hung, or perhaps recently taken down, leaned against the piles. The desk, though, was uncluttered. It held the lamp, an old rotary phone, and a leather blotter. No computer, no cell phone. A single blue sticky note, flaring off the rim of the orange Anglepoise, was the only hint of disorder. Mitch plucked off the note and wadded it in his meaty fingers before dropping it into a desk drawer.

“Do you know that no one from Florida has ever summited Mount Everest?” he said.

“You climbed as high as the Hollywood Hills, though.”

He pointed at me. “Good. Put that in.” He adjusted the lamp, which gave off a springy creak of tension. “Though maybe some nut from back home has climbed Everest by now. It was years ago that I had my assistant look into it. Kept her occupied for a week. Now it’s tap tap tap, and they give you an answer far sooner than you want it.”

I turned in my chair, expecting to see the maligned assistant in the shadows.

“Relax. I got rid of mine, or she got rid of me. Now what about a drink to get us started?”

I demurred. Drinks at this early hour were one of the things that had put me in my dry spell.

“What’s the best advice you ever received?” he said.

“Don’t get into journalism. I didn’t listen.”

“Mine was never refuse hospitality. Still no? Alright. Don’t want you putting in there that I’m a drunk. God knows I can wait awhile longer.” He pointed at my notebook. “Why aren’t you writing? I’m not going to wax Shakespearean on you.”

“You played Hamlet in those commercials.”

“You have done your research.”

I hadn’t, but who could forget those commercials for the freeze-dried coffee? Though, now, I couldn’t precisely remember how they’d tied to Hamlet’s soliloquy. I remembered that there’d been a lawsuit because of the lip rashes and the cases of asphyxiation. Mitch had recovered from the bad publicity but not without a bit of indelible tarnish that made his later falls not entirely unexpected.

“Acting wasn’t for you,” I said.

“Only in small doses.”

His telephone rang, an ancient thing with an actual bell. The phone’s spiral cord had gone slack and was wrapped in liberal quantities of electrical tape. I made a note to tell the photographer coming out later to snap a photo of the phone. Maybe there was a sidebar in it: The oldest rotary phone in the city belongs to none other than…

At the seventh or eighth ring, Mitch pounced. “Lucy, you bitch,” he snarled into the receiver after only a few moments. “I don’t care what your excuse is. I’m coming down there tomorrow and if I don’t find you gone I’ll bury you in the fucking ground!”

He slammed the receiver, then leaned back and gave me an interminably long stare before his face pulled a grin. “Confuses the hell out of the telemarketers, but it’s the most interesting call they’ll make all week.”

“Acting.”

“In small doses.”

“What were they selling?”

“Solar panels. Bogus IRS refunds. Make something up. You’re the writer.”

“Mitchell, Mitch, my editor, says you’re finishing a three-volume autobiography.”

“Don’t tell Mitchell Mitch Your Editor, but the ghostwriters haven’t worked out. We have half a volume. No one buys half a book.”

“But I heard a French publisher did. Don’t you hate the French?”

He smiled. “They’re not getting their advance back.” He swiveled and pointed at the window. “What about one last game?”

He said it like we were old acquaintances and had sat here a hundred times, shooting the shit before hitting the tennis court.

“I don’t play.”

“Afraid of an eighty-five-year-old?”

“Yes.”

“Good!” he said and led me outside.

I wondered if my interview—one in a series of pieces the magazine was doing on the last icons of a vanishing last-century Hollywood—was instead going to be about an old celebrity breaking a hip. I demurred again, but he insisted we at least return some balls from the machine. The machine wouldn’t turn on, and there weren’t any rackets or balls in the little shed where Mitch directed me. We returned to the cottage, the mist making it seem as though we had finished an exhausting game.

We moved from the topic of tennis to baseball, football, wrestling, then boxing. “If I’d had the build for it, I’d have become a boxer. You can nearly kill a man to cheers and hollers. Going almost there and then drawing back. No edge like mercy.”

Mitch’s cottage held no mementos from his years as an athlete; the only photograph in the room depicted him standing beside a tree. He caught me looking at the photo, then turned and plucked the frame from the console table behind his desk. He rubbed his sleeve across the glass, then placed the frame in front of me, resting an index finger on the top edge. He, or someone, had drawn pin-prick eyes and a crooked smile on his fingertip. Did he have grandchildren? Great-grandchildren?

“This was taken outside Palermo, early ‘70s. The neighbors were feuding. One of them had his gardener turn a cypress and a couple shrubs into a giant cock and balls. I had to take a picture.”

The man in the photo had not lost any of his fame. But Mitch today, I imagined, could walk undetected anywhere, not only because he wore the disguise of age and neglect, but also because most of his fans had reached an age where they keep indoors. Or resided underground.

Mitch returned the photo to the console table, swiveling his chair there and back with a dozen precise footfalls. He laced his fingers together. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” he said. “The thing you really regret.”

“Who’s interviewing who?”

“Whom, college man,” he said.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve done?” I said, allowing his prompt.

“The old litany. Would land me in court today. We’ve become a sensitive species.”

“That’s not to your liking.”

“What’s to like?” He rubbed his dry fingers on two worn spots on the desk blotter in a way that was uncomfortably suggestive.

“Care to be specific?”

“No thanks, Father,” he said.

“Are you still at your trysts?”

“Funny man,” he said, and stopped rubbing the desk blotter. He touched his fingertips to the side of his face, where, I imagined, they felt hot. “You’re what, late fifties? Get it before it’s gone, because it’s going to go quickly.”

I told him I was married, which, strictly speaking, was no longer true.

“Your loss,” he said, then stared off for a bit. “The finest fuck I ever had was a girl in middle school,” he said, apparently changing his mind about specifics. “Mind you, I was in middle school at the time, too, and she was in the grade ahead of me. Don’t dare leave that bit out. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so we tried everything. Every woman after her lacked daring. We mourn the kids that die young, but aren’t they saved from a lifetime of disappointment? It’s the grieving parents we’re really sorry for, if we’re honest.”

Had he lost a child? I couldn’t remember, but I was fairly sure he had. I looked down at my notes, my handwriting cramped and withered. I turned to a fresh page. “Going back to your autobiography,” I said, but he waved that off.

He swiveled again in his chair with nimble steps and pulled a book from a pile on the console. He had begun to open it when the phone rang, sounding again like a call from the past.

“Give it a go,” he said, putting aside the book. He shoved the base of the phone toward me on shuddering rubber feet. “Answer it.”

I humored him and lifted the receiver to my ear. I could smell decades of warm smoky Mitch-breath sighing off the plastic.

It was a pitch for solar panels. Mitch motioned. I consulted my notes.

“Lucy, you bitch,” I read. “I don’t care about your excuse. I’m coming down there something something fucking ground.”

“Sir?” said the salesman on the other end.

I hung up.

“Dreadful,” Mitch said, laughing. He cleared his throat unpleasantly, then plucked a dime and a silver push pin from the middle of the square of dust where the phone had sat. He dropped both into a drawer, then dragged the receiver back to where it had been and adjusted it in place like a mason setting a brick.

Our interview was a sport, and I finally came out and played, asking the tougher questions: about his failed political race, the big trial, his children—those whose lives were warped by his fame and neglect and who (I pretended to remember) had been dead for decades, as well as those still alive but from whom he was estranged. His grandchildren were old and greedy, he said. He was surprisingly candid. Had he still employed a personal assistant, they might have done well to touch his shoulder at certain points and suggest he might wish to be more reticent. I started the cassette recorder while he was preoccupied with a coughing fit, my wrist too sore to do more than mimic note taking.

Despite the flood of answers, I could see why his autobiography was on hold. All lives, even those of the famous—maybe especially those of the famous—are an unconnected tangle of luck and frustration. Even Mitch’s sporting life, save for the rush of the championships, would bore all but his most loyal fans this many years past the glow of glory.

And yet, Mitch was trying to give me something beyond honesty in our volley. A sense that he couldn’t have done better or achieved more in his time given his talents, his opportunities, the Mitch-sized shape the world gave him to occupy, and the temptations it placed in his path.

The room darkened from passing rain. I soon heard a dull rhythmic tapping as drops of water fell into an empty bucket. The ceiling above the leak was the color of old paper. The plaster had formed a little nub, like a budding stalactite, from which the water dripped. I said something about how it must be difficult to find roofers who can repair thatching, but Mitch only grunted.

He excused himself and visited the bathroom, and I excused myself to do the same when he returned to his desk. In the bathroom, a high open window let in the sound of rain and the distant call of a peacock. There was a gilded mirror and separate taps for hot and cold that poured into a giant clamshell. I washed my hands and straightened and could feel the little motor of my cassette recorder as it slowly spooled the tape.

When I returned, Mitch had poured me a drink and was refilling his.

I pretended to look at my notes. “We were talking about the emptiness of winning.”

“Winning is a big nothing,” Mitch said. “You forget that fact until you win again and discover it doesn’t do anything for you the next morning. We need a world where win isn’t allowed to have a past tense.”

“You winned once.”

“I winned a lot, but it does fuck-all for me now.”

The tempo of the water into the bucket increased, even though the rain had slackened and allowed a milky glare to enter the windows.

Mitch fumbled with the upper buttons of his shirt, then gave up and sat straight. His hand misjudged the distance to his drink before he grasped it, drained it, then placed it back on the table. Both hands shook in a way he’d been able to conceal from me all morning. He was far from that hulking immortal.

He cleared his throat. “The thing is…when you’re young…oh Jesus. Like that, huh?”

Because I was pretending to write this down, I didn’t see him lean forward, though I heard the scratchy thunk of his head hitting the blotter. I looked up and saw blood pulse from his nostrils.

“Mitch?” I rose and went to his side of the desk. “Mitch.”

I listened for breathing and was relieved to hear it until I recognized it as my own. I gave his shoulders a shake. His dangling arms swayed. I called his name again. Then, with a finger at his neck, searching for a pulse, I realized I was the only living person in the room.

I always intended to call 911, but I never considered that he might be saved. And I didn’t know CPR, not really, and even if I knew how and was successful, I’d be bringing Mitch back into whatever pain my resuscitation would have caused—broken ribs, extensive bruising. I didn’t have money for a lawyer.

I wondered, could Mitch still hear me? A nurse at hospice had told me that the senses and the brain of the dead continue to function for some time after the heart (I checked again) and lungs (ditto) stop. Conjecture, possibly. I also wondered about the accuracy of a coroner’s time-of-death calls. Could I remain alone in Mitch’s study for a quarter hour without the timing of my eventual 911 call seeming…off?

The blood from Mitch’s nostrils reached one of the worn spots on the blotter where his elbows would no longer rest and pooled there, black in the light. I pulled at his desk drawer, then thought better of it and freed a few tissues from the box on the console behind him. I rubbed down the handle and used the tissues to slide, unlatch, and move aside everything I got myself into. It didn’t make me happy to know that Mitch might be listening to me rummaging through his things—if his brain was still whirring. I imagined that much of his body had not yet heard the news that the end had come. DNA was still replicating, white blood cells were still battling, his mouth was still wet with saliva that drooled onto the table and touched the blood and seemed to take it up. I’d seen death before but never a fresh death. His body seemed both wounded and hungry.

I discovered hundreds of crumpled sticky notes in a desk drawer, mostly yellow ones, but a few dozen blue ones too, like the note he’d plucked from the lamp earlier that morning. I unwrapped a few. They each said NOT TODAY in a shaky hand. There was paperwork in another drawer, old and uninteresting. My search for anything unsavory or revelatory led me into the cottage’s bedroom where the man’s private odors still lingered. I imagined Mitch stayed here when he didn’t want to bother walking back to the main house for the night. I found a printout of his partially completed autobiography in the room’s closet and paged through it hastily. Who knew it was here were it to go missing? But scanning the outline, my eye caught on nothing of interest. I put it back.

There were pill bottles on the nightstand from three different doctors. In the top drawer I found a wad of Polaroids. The shots were tamer fare than what I would have expected, given the stories. I put the Polaroids back, then thought better of it and did Mitch a favor, burying the dated snapshots of debauchery at the bottom of a wastebasket.

The tape recorder clicked to a stop against my chest as I reentered the main study and saw Mitch there, his head still on the desk. I went to the book Mitch had brought out to show me. It was a history of sports records. There was nothing scribbled in the margins. No slips of paper dislodged themselves as I fanned the pages over the floor. I opened the desk drawer and unfolded more of the sticky notes. NOT TODAY. NOT TODAY. NOT TODAY. FLORIDA, MT. EVEREST. By now, Mitch’s nosebleed had filled the slight depression. Bubbly red saliva lined the blood pond’s shore. How long had it been since Mitch had nodded off, as it were? I hadn’t heard a drop fall into the bucket for some time.

I called 911 and reported the death, then walked to the main house. The front door was unlocked. No one was inside, not even a housekeeper I could break the news to. The place was unfurnished, the rooms so cold they must not have been heated all season.

The EMTs had no clue who Mitch was. The police arrived and took my statement as Mitch was wheeled out on a gurney, rain falling with a muffled patter on the black vinyl of the body bag. I left sticky notes on the doors of the cottage and the main house for a gardener, a housekeeper, friends, for whom it may concern. A note to say he’d passed on.

By the time I was home, I felt a cold coming on. I left a message with the magazine’s photographer to tell her of Mitch’s death, then I listened to Mitch’s voice on tape. I turned up the volume and heard the faint sound of his head hitting the desk. And then, following more quickly than it had felt at the time, the sound of my rummaging. I rewound the cassette and took the unit outside, then hit record and left it leaning against the empty pot on my balcony table as it spooled up the sound of traffic and birdsong. I was erasing my actions, my distasteful and pointless scavenging. I noticed a bit of green coming up in the pot’s spent dirt between the cigarette butts of infrequent visitors. But when I touched the growth, it fell over. It was just something that had fallen from the trees.

An obituary appeared in the next day’s paper. Mitchell tightened my deadline, given the circumstances and the interest. I felt worse: a rawness in my throat, bad chills. Mitchell called back the next day with news that wouldn’t make it to the public for a week. What Mitch had in his system could kill a man a dozen times over.

I sat with this knowledge. Our interviewer/subject roles rewrote themselves into attendant/patient. Maybe he hadn’t thought of doing it that morning. Maybe something had developed between us. An ease. I was someone he felt he could die around. He’d learned from Mitchell that I had some experience in these matters. I flatter myself; it was equally plausible that something about me put him off of living. Or maybe he simply didn’t want to be alone when he checked out of life’s hotel; he was accustomed to an audience.

I figured he’d swallowed the pills when he was in the bathroom. Or when I was in there. He was a man who’d decided—due to his age, undisclosed illness, and whatever else he was tired of carrying with him—TODAY.

I called Mitchell and thanked him for throwing work my way, but I told him I couldn’t finish the piece. The cold had taken me. I had a fever of 103°. I tore out the pages from my notebook and had them couriered over with my rough outline. What remained between the stiff covers of my notebook were the words I’d scribbled while my wife lay in hospice in her final days. Half a book that no one else would read, or should.

Mitchell assigned the piece to another writer, who phoned me with complaints.

“What am I supposed to do with this? I can’t even read it. And who’s Lucy? How does she fit in? Do you have her number?”

When the other writer texted that evening with more questions, I wished he’d called instead so I could pull a Mitch and pretend he was someone I could threaten for having wronged me, for not having made a more generous shape for me in the world. But Mitch wasn’t here to appreciate that act, and I knew the writer was just doing his job, trying to sell something between the ads—a life, in this case. A life that, once upon a time, had meant much to many.

—We played a game of tennis, I texted the other writer, to throw him something, even if it wasn’t strictly true.

—At his age? C’mon.

I’d taken just one thing from Mitch’s cottage: the sticky note. Florida, Mt. Everest, which now hung on the edge of my own desk lamp.

—Did you know that Mitch was the first Floridian to climb Mount Everest? Back in the ‘70s. No one was paying attention to mountain climbers then. The gas crisis was going on. He was sore about never getting the recognition. You should mention it.

—Everest. Got it. What else? Mitchell wants details about the last moments.

I looked at my index fingers and the eyes and smiles I’d drawn there in my fever state. My fingers kissed. The possibility came to me that Mitch hadn’t downed pills but had dissolved the drugs in the drink he’d also poured for me but which I hadn’t touched. He’d wanted to bring me with him. I was flattering myself again.

I put my phone aside. My head throbbed, my throat was on fire, everything was colored in fever’s unkindest hues. It felt like the end, but it was only a simple cold with no more to teach me than grief. I rested my head on my desk and listened to my crackling lungs and waited for my mind to wander so that my body could again take up the automatic act of breathing.