The Right Hand Man
BY Noah Leznoff
Martin Butler, freshly unemployed and trying to make a sandwich, was slicing cheese and tomato and bread as thinly as these things can be sliced by hand, but—rarely cutting clean through—ended up with lots of slivers and wet crescents that he had to keep refitting with his fingertips between crumbling tapers of bread. He kept repeating, in a varyingly passable British accent, “Mrs. Ackerton, and how are you today?”—each time letting his voice ride and bend a new phoneme, a variant inflection, modulation, slightly different each time, for a couple of measures. Yesterday, lying on the couch in the den, he had bounced an old tennis ball against the wall for much of the afternoon: a seemingly endless pleasure there—though, let’s face it, quickly annoying for anyone else who happens to be in the room.
As he wiped down the counter, he suspected that the permutations, the arc of a voice or ball, were not really infinite, circumscribed as they were by the limits of naturalism. And that these limits, in turn, became more precisely defined with each repetition, approximate repetition, of the act. Even accounting for silent space or a ball resting in the hand.
Mrs. Ackerton. And how are you today?
At college, a decade earlier, he had done something similar as a theatre exercise, and for a week the spring of his graduating year had played, though he was no actor, the right hand man in Richard Newand’s The Right Hand Man. The play was to have been a comedy, he was to have been understudy. (To preempt a possible misimpression here for those unfamiliar with the script, for those imagining that Martin Butler could assume, even as contingency, the lead role in a dramatic production: The right hand man, despite the play’s title, by no means does most of the talking; rather, he remains largely a figure of discussion, an offstage presence whose momentary appearance at the end of the second act nonetheless demands, according to those who know these things, considerable skill in rendering.) No small roles, as they say—but yes, a small director. Becoming more diminutive, as Sheila, the love interest he’d begun dragging along to later rehearsals, started relieving her boredom by flirting, and more, with the tight-shirted stage manager. It could have been funny. Had not the cast become distracted and volatile watching the little martinet go fascist (his name was Nat; detractors—and by the end the cast was polarized—began calling him Gnat). So instead of humour and swelling camaraderie, all the predictable tempers, vanities and accusations of the theatre erupted, the original right hand man disappeared at the last minute, and Martin’s inept performance was only one failure in a production that ended up a three-night embarrassment for both audiences and cast. Fortunately for Martin, no one he knew—he knew few people to begin with—had attended any of the performances.
Until the movie scene in which mrs. Ackerton punctures her teenage daughter’s throat with a paring knife (an attempt to circumvent a piece of apple that is asphyxiating her), the curiosities of college theatre and The Right Hand Man were far from Martin’s recollection. And the well-being of Mrs. Ackerton had not yet, of course, taken hold. The ball rested on the coffee table; Martin watched children starve on TV, their imploring upturned eyes. He watched light-hearted commercial portraits of domestic chaos threatened, then magically—if chemically—averted. He flipped to the election commentary: The results, no surprise to anyone, seemed still to merit analysis. Images (of human activity) persisted—colourful, provocative and senseless. Martin wept inwardly, moved little but his thumb on the remote. Finally, he happened upon the scene which would, for the rest of the day, lodge the line in his head—the line about Mrs. Ackerton and how she was.
The difference between a hypochondriac and a malingerer is that the hypochondriac wants the world to come to her, to single her out, to attend; the malingerer, on the other hand, wants the world to vanish. Some weeks earlier, still employed then, Martin Butler had said to himself out of the blue, standing under the showerhead, “I think I’ll malinger.” Liking the sound of the word.
So here we are:
The Ackertons three at breakfast, the father invisible behind the paper, rising briskly, gone. Mrs. A. intending to call something to the departing spouse—Martin feels it will be a kind word, a gentle reminder—but she retracts the gesture and merely rests her hand on the back of the vacant chair. Radio music, swing brass, plays tinny in the background in a way that suggests post-war reconstruction, though the setting is definitive ’70s. Jam is passed; dishes clank; the square-headed daughter, 12 or 13 maybe, arrests a casual gesture and begins a series of gawks and pantomimes, the upshot of which is that she can no longer breathe.
Martin has since remembered hearing that emergency tracheotomy can be performed with the barrel of a ballpoint pen, but in the movie the procedure ends up a desperate miscalculation. We see ambulance attendants standing on the stoop; over their shoulders the front door, oak, swings inward: a snag of damp, distressed hair, then Mrs. Ackerton’s face—brilliantly inanimate—emerging by increments from behind it. Her cardigan’s shocked with blood that must have come from a sudden spurting.
After the first, tanked performance of The Right Hand Man, Nat or Gnat had pulled Martin aside and told him: “The nut of drama—” he held out a fist “—is latent emergency.” The director’s lips curled inward, and Martin noted for the first time a trace of impediment. They stared at each other, Martin hoping to elicit an acknowledgment of the other’s pain. Nat said, “And you’re not the fucking postman!”
Later he looked it up: “e-mergency”—a rising up as if from water; literally and paradoxically, an out-plunging.
“I am not the fucking postman.”
Fade to black. Martin leaning forward on the edge of the couch, ball in hand, squeezing. Then up to a hospital bed, a woman lying with her back and shoulder to us, but we recognize the hair. A prolonged, grainy silence before—here it comes!—an off-camera voice (loud, male, British) startles us: “MRS. ACKERTON, AND HOW ARE YOU TODAY?” It was at this point that Martin turned off the TV, exhausted and a little hungry.
The wind rustled in the cedar hedge and a grey squirrel skittered, then paused, on the telephone wire outside the kitchen window behind which Martin was slicing a tomato. The mayonnaise jar sat open on the counter, attracting a winter fly. The line about Mrs. Ackerton began to assert its possibilities, neural vectors fired in pleasing sequences, and Martin, hearing the line in his head, again tried to picture the unseen doctor.
Hair: dirty blond, slicked; the hair of a man who—though overworked—keeps himself groomed.
He spent the sandwich trying to get it right—the authoritative, medicinal cheeriness, not always stopping to chew properly. He busied himself working to ready the house so that it would be tidy before his wife, Elide, returned, repeating as he dried and stacked the dishes or folded the laundry: “Mrs. Ackerton, and how are you today?” On his way to the bathroom, lavatory, loo, he caught himself in the oval hall mirror; in passing he’d picked up a large children’s picture book, was holding it to his chest as a clipboard. Cocking his head, tapping his chin with a pen, he delivered the line three or four times.
At 5:30, Elide returned, holding the sleeping baby; Leanna, their eight-year-old, an entanglement from a previous marriage, hers, was in tow. Martin said to Elide, “Mrs. Ackerton, and how are you today?” She shot him a look that seemed to confer a momentary hatred, then annoyance, then realism, then handed him the baby.
“I could have driven this afternoon,” he said—then added silently to himself, “Mrs. Ackerton.”
She didn’t look up.
“I’m glad you’re home,” he said.
“Rough day?” It was Leanna.
Martin winked at her, a futile gesture, then stepped back into the hallway, giving them—Elide and Leanna—plenty of room to extricate themselves from coats and boots. And, later, as the baby fussed on the change table, Martin put his finger lightly to the depression in his daughter’s throat and, terrified, felt her heartbeat.
