HOW TO GET YOURSELF SENT AWAY

     A semi-famous painter, an abstract expressionist who studied in Paris in the forties and fifties, Mr. Peyton was gray haired, stocky, lumbering like an old bear, genial.  He was always cheerful, though sometimes slightly addled, forgetful, since he was after all in his eighties.  He was sociable, and always stopped to shoot the breeze, sometimes beneath his own large canvas, which hung prominently, in a place of honor in the hotel lobby.  One sensed he had had a good life, over all.  You never heard him complaining.
     Mr. Peyton had one of the best apartments in the whole building, on the tenth floor, filled floor to ceiling with his paintings—really a studio, an atelier, I suppose, though he worked only sporadically now—which opened onto a huge patio on the roof.
       I was up on the tenth floor visiting friends one evening, when the fire alarms went off.  We all piled out into the hallway to see what was going on, just in time to see smoke streaming from the open door of Mr. Peyton’s apartment, rolling out along the ceiling.  Mr. Peyton stood there outside his door, frantically fanning at the air.
     “What happened?” I asked.  “Are you OK?”  Everybody on the floor was popping their heads out of their apartments to ask, basically, the same question.
     “Don’t worry, it’s just steam,” Mr. Peyton said.  “I overflowed the tub.”
     Of course, nobody believed that for a moment.  The hall was filled with smoke, not steam.
     “We’d better go downstairs and wait until it clears,” I said.
     “No, it’s nothing,” Mr. Peyton said.  He refused to go downstairs.
     He was right that it wasn’t much: Mr. Peyton had burned something in a casserole dish in the oven, forgot he was cooking and dozed off.  The fire had gone out before the firemen even arrived, though they made a big fuss with their sirens and about fifty of them tromping through the hotel lobby.  Better safe than sorry.  Most of the residents didn’t even notice it anyway.
     Mr. Peyton’s children got wind of the incident, of course.  Now his son came to live with him, to take care of him, to make sure he didn’t try to cook anything too ambitious.
     A few months later I noticed that I hadn’t seen Mr. Peyton lately.  Hoping that he wasn’t sick, I asked his son what had become of him.
     "He's in France," the son said.
     “Oh,” I said, surprised. “What’s he doing there?”
     It turned out they had put him into a nursing home there.  The time Mr. Peyton had spent in Paris in his youth had apparently qualified him for government benefits, including a free stay in a nursing home.  “I checked out several places upstate, and even in New Jersey, but they were all too expensive, they wanted an arm and a leg,” the son said.  “We won’t get to see him that much now, but we decided that this was just the best situation for him, over all.”  Now the son lives in Mr. Peyton’s old apartment with his wife and two kids.
     Now we tease all the older residents, especially the ones who burn candles: "One slip up and it's France for you!"  But after all, I think it was less the fire itself, than the story about the tub and the steam that did Mr. Peyton in.  That and the great apartment.
     It all sounds rather grim, but I like to think that maybe it didn’t turn so bad for Mr. Peyton.  France, after all.  Rather than New Jersey.  Mr. Peyton used to hang out at the Dunkin Donuts on Eight Ave., one of the few in the city that had outdoor seating.  He told me once that when he sat there he would often find his mind wandering, and he would catch himself thinking, just for a moment, that he was back in Paris, sipping his coffee, at a cafe on the Boulevard St. Germain. (Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006)