Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  “It was the day I had my picture taken for the award. The whole thing sort of sunk in. I was so happy, which was embarrassing, but I wanted to share my happiness with you. I called, but you were too busy to talk.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  I nod.

  “Do you not feel like I’ve been supportive enough?”

  “You’ve been amazing.” I squeeze her hand. “Really. It just would’ve been nice if you’d been excited, too—if you’d wanted to take me out for dinner to celebrate or something—but you were busy. I understand. It’s not a big deal, but that’s why.”

  “That’s why you secretly test-drove a sports car.”

  “I wanted to treat myself, Elizabeth. To acknowledge the moment, in a way.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Yeah, I—”

  “You’ve been incredible.”

  “No, I know.” She twists her mouth into a question mark. “Now I’m confused, though.”

  “Because?”

  “Because it seems to me that the award was the treat. Right? And it didn’t come cheap. Cost us far more than an Aston Martin.”

  Stay sweet. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, they gave you that trophy because of how generous you’d been with the Children’s Hospital Fund all year, right?”

  A zap at my throat. “No.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Are you suggesting we bought the honor?”

  “God, no.” She rubs my back: a pat on the head for a silly boy. “But philanthropy is a significant measure of character for this particular award. Right? Charitable contributions? You know this, Robert.”

  I should get into bed, sleep and start over, but that electric sadness zaps my throat and neck, zaps me under my skin from head to toe, and if I sit down I will feel it all, all too much.

  Elizabeth holds out her hand again. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Come here.”

  “Maybe I should sleep downstairs tonight.”

  Her hand falls back to her lap. She sighs, shakes her head and says, “If that’s what you want.”

  It’s not. What I want is for her to insist I sleep beside her, but she’s called my bluff, so now I’m stuck. Backtracking shows weakness, and weak is worse than lonely, so I gather my pillows and blankets and leave Elizabeth, inviting her heart to grow fonder.

  14.

  It’s four thirty in the morning when nature calls. Takes me a minute to figure out where I am. This isn’t my nightstand. That isn’t my wall. But of course it’s my house (our house), after all. The boxer shorts I dropped on the floor last night are nowhere to be found, and I’m too tired to turn on a light or be bothered with decency, since nobody’s down here anyway, so I head for the hall stark naked, half inclined to use my own bathroom in my own bedroom and crawl into my bed where I belong, but if I’m too tired for lamps, I’m not fit for confrontation. It’ll be time to get up soon enough. An extra hour of solitude won’t break me.

  I’m halfway to the john when light passes through the banister overhead, casting long shadows on the living room floor. Directly under the landing like this, I can’t see my bedroom door opening. Elizabeth can’t see me here as she sneaks away to tap me on the shoulder to say, “It’s almost morning,” so that nothing looks out of place once the sun comes up. I should hurry back to the office, contort myself, and pretend to be sleeping so she’ll feel sorrier when she retrieves me from exile, but I can’t resist the opportunity to let her find me like this: nude, still, waiting in the dark, arms crossed, planted like a Praetorian Guard. I almost laugh out loud at the absurdity of delighting in a childish game of hide-and-seek.

  But she whispers, “Good night,” and the strips of light at my feet narrow, and with the slow click of a doorknob gently turned back into place, her light vanishes altogether.

  Footsteps, but the feet descending our custom-built floating staircase aren’t Elizabeth’s. Jonah? Maybe he’s hungry. Maybe he’s looking for me.

  There’s no time to hide, and so I freeze, calling upon an instinct too readily eclipsed by its overhyped counterparts, fight and flight. Freezing deserves more respect. Possums play dead. Deer vanish under the camouflage of stillness. I ease into this shadow-draped wall and quiet my breath, stunned by this opportunity for insight into my son’s world.

  Through gaps between cedar slats, I watch his bare feet touch down. This is all I see: the wide hem of dark pants falling around my son’s heels, step by silent step.

  Upon reaching the living room floor, however, the figure turns just enough for me to see that everything is wrong, because it isn’t my son’s body. That messy dark hair doesn’t belong to my boy. Wearing nothing but drawstring pants hanging low, Nick Carpenter moves with the ease of someone who knows his way through my house in the dark: heading to the sliding glass door on the other side of the room, letting himself out, closing it behind him. He passes the pool and his naked back glows watery blue, and me, I vanish under the camouflage of stillness. Look at us: a couple of invisible boys. Like the possum that mimics death to save its life, my pulse slows. My fingers and toes grow cold. Only my pupils betray signs of life, and even then, only when Nick flips on the light in my guesthouse and makes himself at home.

  Oh, Lizzie. Why did you have to go and do a thing like that?

  My blood resumes circulation. My pulse quickens. Warmth returns to my hands and feet. I’ve lost touch with the rest of my bodily functions, but I go to the bathroom anyway just to look in the mirror to see for myself that I’m not having a stroke—that a brain hemorrhage isn’t triggering hallucinations. Gripping the sink, I lean into my reflection and stare myself down, flexing and stretching features, hunting for signs of palsy, but it’s just my face staring back. It’s just my naked body and salt-and-pepper chest hair, my ashen skin, so I guess I woke up on the wrong side of the looking glass after all. I count back from fifty and get all the way to twelve before the anxiety lifts. Settling into my body, I piss and leave the seat up and make the decision to say, “Like a baby,” when Elizabeth asks how I slept last night.

  15.

  My head is a hurricane. I sit in my office chair until the sun comes up, trying to reverse engineer a misunderstanding—a chance encounter on the way to the linen closet, an urgent message that couldn’t wait until morning—but I hear a stampede and can’t fool myself, and it doesn’t matter if the hoofbeats belong to horses or zebras or barefoot liars, or whether the violation was born of insecurity or attraction or boredom or spite. Reasons mean little to the creature being trampled underfoot.

  This time, I submit to fury. It envelops but does not overpower me; on the contrary, it empowers me. I see red, yes, but I see so clearly now. Elizabeth’s betrayal is not born of lust, or a mockery of love, but of anger. It is an act of aggression directed toward me. Nick’s body is her weapon in the flesh.

  Vanessa called this sort of thing self-sabotage: the methodical orchestration of an illusion of control. Tactical self-destruction eliminates the risk of being destroyed by outside forces, and the self-saboteur walks away believing she chose the wreckage. If a wife, for example, were to feel overshadowed by her husband, such that she resents him, but fears losing him, too, she might engage in behaviors that let her believe she broke the marriage, not the other way around. Her desperation might be a challenge to the husband’s honor, a test of his allegiance to his vows.

  Elizabeth is daring me to fight for her—handing me her dirty blade with two sharp edges—to prove that my heart is not a pacifist. An irrational man might beat Nick with a titanium driver, break his limbs, throw him in the pool and watch him drown—which is to say, this man might seek acute relief by inflicting acute pain. I am a rational man, capable of seeking sustained relief by inflicting prolonged pain.

  Nick watched his mother’s body decay, her mind and emotions held hostage by a broken machine. He watched her slow demise, her agony, her dehumanization and demoralization and disgrace, and Nick watched his father carry that shame—internalized and mutated int
o its own disease: the bullet hole in a widower’s head—and buckle beneath its weight, violently abandoning his only son, to whom he bequeathed this spectacular shame, thus compounded. Nick inherited secrets and sickness, self-loathing and lies, fears of breaking and being broken, fears of loving someone enough to pass his inheritance along. Surely, in this legacy, there is potential for my sustained relief.

  I fold the bed into a couch, place its cushions in their proper places. I dress in yesterday’s clothes, piled on the floor, and sit at my desk, opening my computer to weed through the internet to build my case: statistics pulled from limited research, testimonials, conspiracy theories, drug trials. I mentally flag words and phrases and obtuse data. The goal: to radiate dizzying authority, too fluent to allow for doubt. For good measure, I read up on New Age quacks who claim to have the cure. Nick might like the clinic in Tijuana. Maybe he’d stay in Tijuana. To assist in Nick’s wallowing, I print a few self-help articles. Psychobabble about coping with bad news. “Managing Emotional Shock.” “The Science of Acceptance.” Good grief.

  The early morning sun is hiding behind a thick fur coat of gray sky. Storm clouds without rain. Soft gray waves. I step outside and hear the wind thrashing trees, and it sounds like the sea, and enveloped by sea sounds and rippling clouds overhead, it feels as though I could be treading on the bottom of the ocean when I cross the yard to visit Nick Carpenter one last time.

  He answers after the first knock. The smell of fresh coffee greets me when Nick does. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and baggy gym shorts. Unlaced sneakers. Wild hair.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay.” He gestures for me to enter, but I shake my head. This will be quick.

  “It’s about yesterday,” I tell him. “It’s serious.”

  He steps outside. Behind him, the bed is neatly made, the nightstand clear. No water glasses, no picture books. He asks, “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it together if you hadn’t come in for a full exam—your foot falling asleep on the boat, or your occasional trips and falls. If I hadn’t read your questionnaire or noticed your muscle spasms yesterday, I wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about early indications of ALS. I’m sure you are all too aware of the very slight risk of genetic transfer.” I pause to let the implication settle, but not long enough for him to process the questions flooding his mind. Muscle spasms would be meaningless even if I’d noticed them, which I didn’t, and deep down he knows that, but I don’t let him dig deep, because I’m already on to facts and statistics gleaned from my very recent research, adding, “I’m so sorry, Nick.”

  He shakes his head. “What indications? I don’t even—”

  “You need to find specialized care. Have these conversations with doctors who see it every day.”

  “This is—” He shakes his head again. “This can’t be happening.”

  “I know this is shocking. There must be a reason it’s happening now. Things like this force people to use their precious time wisely. I want you to go out and spend the summer doing things you’ve always wanted to do. When autumn comes, you’ll make a plan.”

  Nick’s eyes dampen. His act of feeling is too intimate, maybe even manipulative, and I steel myself as warmth flows up my spine, my neck, my brow, branches out inside my forehead—certain that sympathy would distract me, guilt would overshadow my goal—but this warmth on the rise isn’t compassion. It’s victory.

  I hand Nick the articles I printed, saying, “Here. These might help.”

  He folds the papers in half, then fourths. Without glancing at the headlines—without making time for hope—he places them on the small table by the door. “Well,” he finally says. “I guess that’s that.”

  “Actually,” I say, “there is something else.” Despite rehearsing this part in my head, it doesn’t come naturally, as I’d imagined. “It’s tough, but it has to be said.”

  “Jesus,” Nick whispers.

  “The thing is—this conversation needs to stay between us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It needs to stay between us,” I repeat.

  “You want me to keep this a secret?”

  I nod toward the house and say, “For their sakes.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No. I’m dead serious. If you share this with them before having a treatment plan, they will make things very complicated and dramatic.”

  “Jonah wouldn’t do that,” he says.

  I should have rehearsed this out loud, but I’ve already committed, so I say, “Jonah would be devastated. He would add to your stress. He’d shoot the messenger, too.”

  “For doing your job?”

  “Well, you’re not my patient, really. I’m telling you all of this as a courtesy, as a family friend. I’m doing you a solid, but my diagnosis is off-the-record. Worrying everyone and pitting them against me won’t change a thing for you. Bring it up when you have more information.”

  “Fine,” he says, cutting me off, mercifully. “I’m good at secrets.”

  “I imagine so.”

  I’m good at secrets, he dares to say, mocking me on my ground, but I can play with subtext too, and yes, now that I’m all the way off-book, my next move feels inspired: a whisper from a muse. Excessive, but delicious. “There’s another reason to keep quiet,” I say, almost high from how perfect it is. “It concerns Elizabeth.”

  His eyes meet mine. “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes.” My skin tingles, and I’ve come this far, so: “She’s pregnant.”

  He twitches, then fixates on me, and only by engaging so suddenly, with such intensity, do I see how disengaged he’s been until now—as though he’d been a figure in a dream letting news pass through him. A ghost, but now he’s real. “Pregnant?”

  “Yes,” I say, and then the kicker: “Two months along.” Two months ago, Nick was far away from my wife. Two months ago, he was cramming for exams and wondering how to cause trouble. Two months means Nick couldn’t be responsible for this new development. He doesn’t need to know about my vasectomy or the likelihood of Elizabeth conceiving naturally. He only needs to believe that Elizabeth is carrying the wedge that will come between them. “It’s a very high-risk pregnancy, and she’s been warned, gravely, to avoid stress. Do you understand? She’d never forgive you if something happened as a result of distress. Over this.”

  Nick shudders, and he’s a ghost again.

  “Jonah doesn’t even know yet. Do you see why this is so sensitive? He’ll tell you when he sees you in the fall. If he doesn’t, that means something went wrong. In which case: all the more reason to keep your mouth shut.”

  “I won’t tell them,” the ghost says.

  My body feels lighter. “Let me know if you need a ride to the train station later today. Tomorrow at the latest would be best. I’d love to offer advice, but it wouldn’t be responsible.”

  “I understand.” His face is ashen. His eyes are dry. A husk of a man.

  “Now, off the record? You didn’t hear it from me, but there are clinics down in Mexico trying things the FDA won’t approve.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Unconventional methods, but rumored to show promise. I guess people figure: ‘What do I have to lose?’ And really, who can blame them?”

  He musses his hair, straightens his spine, flicks a nod. “I’ll look into it.” This time, he’s the one who says, “You won’t tell them, right?”

  “Of course not, Nick,” I promise. “I’m good at secrets too.”

  16.

  So it’s that simple, and I don’t know if the sky really clears on cue, but beams of sunlight I hadn’t noticed earlier now drop anchor in ground that feels more solid under newly firm feet—and me, I’m light as air. My heart is my friend again, pumping blood to every striation of every muscle in every limb, and I could run a million miles. I ran a marathon onc
e, when I was twenty.

  There’s a folded pile of clean clothes on top of the washing machine, so I change into shorts and a T-shirt and my favorite merino wool socks—workout clothes I’ve been wasting on lazy Sundays, these days—and lace up bright white sneakers, unconcerned about whether or not my gym membership is current, because the gatekeepers at my gym require a handwritten note from God to break a contract. More important, the boy behind me is crackling and dissolving. The space in me that overflowed with rage is now hollow, with mere traces of residual rage. I could save them for Elizabeth, or I could leave them in the backyard to crackle and dissolve. I could hang hate on the scaffolding caging my marriage, or I could build us back up with love.

  From the bottom of the stairs, I call up to Elizabeth to say, “Heading to the gym. Think about where you want to eat tonight. We’re going out.” I grab my keys and wallet and yell, “Just us,” and I’m gone.

  The sun peels off the last cloud in its solar striptease, and the landscape sizzles. On the radio, Johnny Cash and June Carter are singing Bob Dylan’s song, and I turn up the volume and sing along, full voice. Windows down, I laugh out loud, liberated at last from the back-and-forth in my brain, the what-ifs and hauntings. My life is mine again.

  The gym is crowded. A gal name-tagged Claudia checks me in at the front desk. There must be a note in my account indicating my hiatus, because she says, “It’s been a while. So glad to see you back, Dr. Hart.” She hands over clean towels. “Hey. You look really familiar.”

  “A young Daniel Day-Lewis?” I joke. “Afraid not, but I get it all the time.”

  She giggles: a perfectly girly little thing. “Come on.”

  “No? Well, I’m not Harry Connick Jr., either.”

  “I’m being serious. Were you in the paper recently?”

  I shrug, playing bashful.

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s no Oscar, no Grammy, but . . .”

  “You’re doing work with the Children’s Hospital, right?”