she said. “I just can’t.” Odd, the things that stuck with you from school. Infante hadn’t been much of a student, but he’d liked history for a while there. In Jane Doe’s hospital room Friday morning—and he was insisting on thinking of her as Jane Doe, now more than ever—Infante was reminded of something he once heard about Louis XIV. Or maybe XVI. The point was, he remembered how certain kings made their servants watch them dress, and that was supposed to establish their power. Dress and bathe and God knows what else. As a fourteen-year-old in Massapequa, he hadn’t bought it. Who looked less powerful than a naked man, or a guy taking a dump? But watching Jane D. do her thing this morning, the history lesson came back to him. Which isn’t to say she was disrobing for him—anything but. She was still in her hospital gown, her bony shoulders draped with a bright shawl. Yet she was ordering around Gloria and the hospital social worker, what’s-her-name, in this very queenly fashion, acting as if he weren’t in the room at all.
