And Luce too, by consensus the weakest of the musicians, the most impulsive, least disciplined and least reliable, yet the most devoted to the little quartet, is being buffeted by the music as by waves that rush at her to drown her; yet she will not be drowned, she will persevere, chin lifted, heart beating calm with a wave of adrenaline, though what risk, she is thinking, what exposure, the terror of mortality that is Death and the Maiden, yet acquiescence to this terror—the acquiescence more appalling than the terror, because more final.
The terror of beauty, Luce thinks. Like the terror of mortality, it is what links us.
Nearing the end of the presto, in a white-water rapids plunging forward, downward, manic intensity, wild flying notes in a tarantella, suddenly it happens that the little quartet is lurching again, someone has missed a beat, missed a crucial note, there is a stumble, a teetering on the brink of collapse—yet no time remains for such mistakes to be registered, hesitation in the viola, or in the cello, for the final bars of Death and the Maiden rush at them, loom before them majestic and intransigent as the closing of steel petals—perfection!
The musicians’ bows are stilled. Schubert’s Quartet #14 in D-minor has been accomplished.
And then—silence. . . .
The little audience is stunned. In the startled hush someone coughs, or laughs—sheer embarrassment, nerves. Scully, Tyler, Heddi, Luce—these mortal beings, familiar faces shining with triumph, having played for the audience as if their very lives were at stake . . . “Bravo!” Andrew Stanton is on his feet leading the applause, with an air of genuine surprise, relief and delight, and in another moment others join in.
Bravo! Bravo! Those guests who can stand easily, who are not discouraged by arthritic joints, or bad knees, rise to their feet in homage to the little quartet. Luce is blinking back tears, Heddi wipes her face on a sleeve of her sleek black shirt. Tyler seizes both the women’s hands in his and kisses them wetly in turn, palm up. Scully’s nostrils pinch in Olympian contempt, Scully is ashen-faced, yet triumphant too. See, you bastards? I am not dead yet.
More cries of Bravo!—by far the most spirited applause the little quartet has ever received for any performance.
Yet: behind the musicians the sky has been steadily darkening. There are flashes of heat lightning like fire. Deafening claps of thunder like the (mock) applause of giant hands.
Within seconds a storm moves in from the northeast. Low rumbling rolls across the sky like a sound of celestial bowling. Vedders Hill itself seems to be shaking.
“Oh Jesus, is it us? Another landslide?”
“Is it us! We would know, if it were.”
14.
Inside the Stantons’ glass-walled house, the long oak refectory table has been set with a colorful Native American tablecloth. Waxless candles have been lit, their flames high and tremulous. Now rain is pelting against the windows. Rain in steely sheets. The thunder continues—then, an earsplitting crack. Flashes like strobe lighting that stun the brain. Guests press hands over their ears. Shield their eyes. They are laughing, though they are also frightened. They are white-faced, stricken. Some of them are not certain where this place is—where they have been brought. But here comes their affable host Andrew Stanton brandishing a wine bottle in each hand—“Chardonnay? White?”—to the rescue.
Overcome by emotion Luce has fled into the kitchen clutching her violin as if to shield it from staring eyes. She has exposed herself, she thinks—her very soul outside her body, but perhaps it is her body as well, unclothed, naked. If Andrew has heard the music clearly, then Andrew knows. Everyone who has heard, must know. And there is Scully close behind her. Scully, daring to follow Luce into the kitchen! He isn’t drinking tonight, he has announced. He wants ice for his God-damned Diet Coke.
Not meeting his eye Luce drops ice cubes into Scully’s glass. “Thank you, Luce”—Scully touches Luce’s wrist lightly.
Luce shrinks away. Doesn’t want to see how the concertmaster’s eyes, tarnished, bloodshot, fix upon her with that look of yearning she remembers from years ago—that look she’d believed she would never again see in any man’s face.
No, no!—never again. Go away.
You are Death, but I am not the Maiden. No.
Still, the man’s touch has burnt her skin. The spark of that touch will long smolder in Luce’s heart.
15.
In bright-blinding sunshine. In the green-gauze face mask, and on her hands newly purchased garden gloves. Digging in the remains of last year’s garden. She has purchased flats of petunias, pansies, black-eyed Susans to plant in the moist earth.
But how vile, the smell! After last night’s heavy rain it is worse than ever, a miasma lifting from the soil like ether.
Brain-eating amoeba, flesh-eating bacteria breeding in warming earth.
But surely Luce is protected by the mask, and certainly she is protected by the gloves which are thick and unwieldy, made not of cloth (which can wear out) but a sort of plasticized rubber.
Except for the smell Luce is actually very happy. Luce is smiling, Luce is thinking—What a triumph! The little quartet surprised everyone the previous night but particularly the little quartet surprised themselves.
Next, they are daring to consider one of Beethoven’s late quartets.
Why not?—as Heddi has reasoned. Time is running out.
“Hel-lo!”—unexpectedly, Andrew calls to Luce from the side door of the house.
It is unusual for Andrew to venture outdoors at this hour of the day. Usually Andrew is at his desk by 8 A.M., in his spectacular study surrounded by three solid walls of books, staring into a computer screen, that stares back at him. And the surprise is—Andrew is wearing a green-gauze face mask of his own!
Must’ve purchased the mask in town, without telling Luce. A joke, unless it’s something more than merely a joke. Luce stares at her husband, smiling uncertainly. Not knowing if Andrew is mocking her or whether, smelling the befouled earth close outside their house, Andrew is acknowledging at last that something is grievously wrong.
Andrew joins Luce in the ravaged garden. Luce sees that Andrew’s mask is askew, giving him a wry, rakish air.
Half their faces hidden, each has become tantalizingly unfamiliar to the other. Their eyes seem different, somehow. Wife, husband? Masked by gauze, their voices are muffled. They begin to behave in antic fashion, like mimes. They begin to laugh together, giddy. Perhaps they are still drunk from the festive night before that did not end, for some of the hardier guests, until after midnight.
“Oh, darling!”
Luce adjusts the mask on Andrew’s face as she often adjusts a twisted shirt collar of his, a strand of sand-colored graying hair out of place. Careful not to be overly familiar with her thin-skinned husband, not to offend; yet, she means to protect him from looking foolish.
Can masks kiss? It is not expected, but of course.
Hospice / Honeymoon
Hospice.”
Once the word is uttered aloud there is a seismic shift. You will feel it.
Like a (very short) thread through the eye of a needle, swiftly in and swiftly out.
The very air becomes thin, steely.
At the periphery of your vision, an immediate dimming. As the penumbra begins to shrink.
In time it will become a tunnel. Ever diminishing, thinning. Until the remaining light is small enough to be cupped in two hands. And then, it will be extinguished.
For when “hospice” is uttered, it is at last acknowledged—There is no hope.
No hope. These words are obscene, unspeakable. To be without hope is to be without a future. Worse, to acknowledge that you are without a future—you have “given up.”
And so when the word hospice is first spoken—carefully, cautiously, by a palliative care physician—probably neither of you will hear it. If you hear, you don’t register that you have heard.
A low-grade buzzing in the ears, a ringing in the ears as of a distant alarm, an alarm in a shuttered room. Th
at is all.
For if you don’t hear perhaps it has not (yet) been uttered.
For if neither of you hears perhaps it will not (ever) be uttered.
Yet somehow it happens, hospice comes to be more frequently spoken as days pass.
And somehow it happens, surprising himself, your husband begins to speak of his final days.
As in I think these might be my final days.
As if shyly. On the phone very early one morning when he calls, as he has been calling, immediately after the oncologist making rounds in the hospital has seen him.
On the phone so that he is spared seeing your face. And you, his.
A new shyness like the first, initial shyness. Finding some way to say I love you.
For some, an impossible statement—I love you.
But your husband managed it, and you’d managed it—somehow:
I love you.
And now years later it is—I think these might be my final days.
These words you hear over the phone distinctly, irrevocably yet (you would claim) you have not heard. No!
But yes, you’ve heard. Must have heard. For the walls of the (bath) room reel giddily around you, blood rushes out of your head leaving you faint, sinking to your knees like a terrified child stammering—What? What are you saying? That’s ridiculous, don’t say such things, what on earth do you mean—“Final days” . . .
Your voice rises wildly. You want to fling the cell phone from you.
For you can’t bear it. You don’t think so. Not knowing, at this time, the vast Sahara that lies ahead of all that you cannot bear that nonetheless will be borne, and by you.
For always, each step of the way, you resist.
It is a steep uphill. It is natural to resist. Or, if you grant the steep-uphill, console yourself by thinking that it is just temporary. The plateau, the flatland to which you’ve been accustomed, that awaits you, both of you, you will return to. Soon.
Until a day, an hour. Always there is a day, an hour.
When you began to speak of hospice yourself.
At first you too are shy, faltering. Your throat feels lacerated as by lethal metal filings.
Gradually you learn to utter the two syllables clearly, bravely—hos pice.
Soon then, you begin to say these (distinct, deliberate) words: our hospice.
Soon, you draw up your vows. Quaintly state to yourself as to God, a formal decree.
It is my hope: I will make of our hospice a honeymoon.
My vow is to make my husband as comfortable as it’s humanly possible.
To make him happy. To make us both happy.
To fulfill whatever he wishes, that is within the range of possibility.
First: a new setting for him. NOT the Cancer Center.
As soon as he is stabilized. Our hospice will be in our home.
He loves our home!—the atrium flooded with morning light.
A foreshortened horizon for the house is surrounded by trees. But always there is the sky—flotillas of sculpted clouds.
Your husband can lie on a sofa staring at the treeline, and at the sky.
Comfortable on the sofa with pillows behind him and feet (in warm socks) uplifted.
Or, what is more likely your husband can lie on a (rented) hospital bed positioned in such a way that he can easily gaze out the window. Some furniture will have to be rearranged but that can be done. And you can lie beside him, as you have done in the hospital.
Holding hands. Of course you will hold hands. His hands are still warm—strong. When squeezed his fingers never fail to squeeze in return.
As his lips, when he is kissed, never fail to kiss in return.
You will sleep beside your husband holding him in your arms which have surprised you recently, not strong arms, in fact rather weak arms, which nonetheless can be made to behave as if they are strong.
Scatter seed on the redwood deck outside the window. Not ordinary seed but the more expensive “wild bird seed” your husband purchases.
Thrilling to watch the birds. Taking time, not distracted, really watching birds for once . . .
And the husband loves music! You will bathe him in the most beautiful music through his waking hours.
Holding hands. Fingers laced together. So long as it is not uncomfortable for him you will lie on the bed beside him holding him listening together to Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy, Rachmaninoff’s Vespers.
Falling asleep together. Even during the day. Your head on the pillow beside his head.
From the bookcases in the house select art-books, his favorite artists, books from his photography shelves—Bruce Davidson, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Eliot Porter. Turn the pages slowly, marvel together.
His favorite foods . . . Well, you will try!
When he is stabilized and at home possibly then his appetite will return. When you are the one to prepare his food for him, his appetite will return.
Of course, family will come to visit. Relatives, friends. Old friends from grammar school, he hasn’t seen in fifty years. Some surprises for him—you will negotiate.
It will not be merely hospice, it will be our hospice. Not sad but joyous, a honeymoon.
You will be happy there, in your own home. For both of you the final days will be a honeymoon. You vow!
IN FACT, nothing remotely like this will happen. How could you have imagined it could happen!
Hospice, yes. Honeymoon, no.
Subaqueous
So densely constructed is the old, urban campus of the state university, so labyrinthine the interiors of the high-rise cinderblock buildings secreting A, B, C levels underground at the foot of Pitt Street South, it is hardly to be wondered that cell phone reception is poor to nonexistent here; and so, on those cheerless Thursdays when you venture into the city, and descend underground to C-level of Building H (Humanities) to teach in a fluorescent-lit windowless classroom containing twenty-five careworn vinyl chairs arranged in a haphazard, asymmetrical, and unpredictable pattern, in effect you step off the grid, or rather you are expelled from the grid, or expunged from the grid, for several hours floating in a subaqueous element like a deep-sea diver dependent upon air supplied by an invisible source that though (surely) oxygen-deficient is yet breathable, life-sustainable. And though at the conclusion of the three-hour class, and before your office hours (C-level), you might make an effort to align your cell phone with the university’s WiFi, or better yet exit Building H, to sprint to a nearby park where your cell phone would spring into life like a reanimated heart, out of inertia you usually remain in Building H, only ascending to a café on A-level where you sit at a table facing a cinderblock wall gaily festooned with glossy reproductions of Parisian-café scenes by Toulouse-Lautrec, spreading papers out before you with the hope not to be interrupted before you are expected in your office two floors below. In the brightly lit café are students at long formica-topped tables, hunched over laptops, with intense eyes, furrowed foreheads, grayish skin like parchment; though you try not to stare at these near-immobile figures you are inclined to think that they rarely leave Building H for each Thursday when you return you see them, or figures who closely resemble them, in the same positions at the long tables, hunched over their laptops; and though your title is Visiting Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, with all that that implies of distinction (and transience), you find yourself gravitating toward the same place also, to the café that is really not a café but (merely) a bright-fluorescent-lit stretch of windowless cinderblock corridor perversely festooned with Parisian scenes of a bygone era and outfitted with humming vending machines, overflowing trash containers, recycled air eking from narrow-pinched vents overhead. Occasionally in the Parisian café (as it is known in Building H, though it is not a café and there is nothing Parisian about its vending machine drinks and food) other patrons seem to recognize you, for indeed it’s likely that they are “your” students, as you are “their” professor, but you and they greet one another cautiously, with awk
ward smiles, for it’s difficult to establish your relationship outside the classroom in which the class meets as if the four walls of the room were a kind of clothing, to hide nakedness; and so like a creature that has grown comfortable inside its underground burrow, even as its eyesight is weakening, even as its lungs are shrinking, even as its heart is beating ever more weakly you return to the same table, the same chair, the same vending machines; pressing your fingertips against your forehead to forestall the onrushing cluster headache; staring at your watch to calculate how many minutes you can remain here on neutral terrain, before you must descend to the windowless office assigned to you on C-level.
And here you are overcome by a sudden need to call your husband with whom you have not spoken in some time. Why this is so, why you have not spoken in some time, is not clear. It seems that you and he are separated, yet, from your perspective at least, you have no idea why. Yearning for the absent husband is constant as a heartbeat but like a heartbeat unnoticed, unremarked, unacknowledged, for only the aberrant defines itself; what is constant can be easily lost; and so with slightly trembling fingers you remove your cell phone from your canvas bag, suddenly eager to hear your husband’s voice, that is like no other voice; it’s bizarre to you, inexplicable, that out of pride perhaps (his or yours?—you don’t know) the two of you have drifted apart, have failed to mend a misunderstanding or a rupture; but even as your fingers grip the cell phone you realize that you’ve forgotten that the Parisian café is underground, and there is no cell phone reception here; when you try to call your husband the device rebukes you immediately—call failed.
Desperate now, unable to grasp why you haven’t made more of an effort to speak to your husband, uncertain where your husband is, or why he is apart from you in another city perhaps, or perhaps he is traveling, in a subaqueous zone too in which there is no cell phone reception, unable to comprehend how you can have allowed this drift to separate the two of you; why you seem to have filled your life with every kind of diversion, and digression, and distraction, and derangement, as if Time were a vast empty windswept space, a cheerless plaza between high-rise cinderblock buildings that has to be filled, in any way possible filled, cluttered with vinyl chairs so lightweight they are blown about in gusts of wind, clattering and rattling, filled with long formica-topped tables at which motionless figures sit hunched over gray-glowering rectangular screens; you are suffused with the desire to tell him I love you, where are you, I want so desperately to see you, I want to speak with you, I want to hold you, kiss you, comfort you, and I want to be comforted by you but—where are you? And the yearning is so strong, the heartbeat so pronounced, it is revealed to you as the most profound fact of your life, which you have not fully understood until now, and now in your face this revelation must show, no wonder that strangers glance at you in surprise and alarm, and pity; some of them look away quickly, in embarrassment at such raw unfettered yearning, and some of them cannot look away, for it’s as if you are holding a lighted candle before your face, shielded by a hand as the candle’s tremulous flame is borne through a jostling crowd; shielded from drafts of chill air from overhead vents in labyrinthine corridors, that stir unspeakable yearnings, regret, remorse, vivid-red as mercury rising in a thermometer. And so, needing to acknowledge that yes, the man who is your husband has broken you utterly, your deepest and most secret self he has pierced, as one might pierce a melon with a sharp instrument; your limbs he has broken, your neck and your spine he has shattered, your soul he has broken as one might break an egg; the sudden joy in such breakage, the spilt yolk, exhilaration as one might feel at last—finally!—slashing the most precious arteries in the arms with any instrument sharp enough for the task.
The (Other) You Page 16
