by Russ Rymer
“Salaam,” I said, hoisting my champagne flute and making an awful toast. (Peace. Was that so awful?)
He laughed. “Haraam,” he responded.
“Harrumph yourself,” I said after I’d had my gulp and balanced my glass on the blanket and set about slicing up fromage and saucisson and bread. “What’s a haraam?”
“A prohibition,” he answered. “According to the traditions of Islam. For example, prohibited fluids, like champagne. My sister would not approve.”
I told him it wasn’t a news flash that his personal Islamicness was of the secular variety.
“Are you informing me you’re not a virgin?” he asked, and I swung at him (although playfully this time) with the baguette. I have got to quit hitting Emil! I scolded myself, but it was difficult. I found his ruptured lip so devastatingly cute I wasn’t sure what I would have to do about it on the day that it finally healed up.
I said, “No. But you do have a liquor cabinet loaded with Jack Daniel’s. For starters.”
“Permitted,” he protested. “Really! You have a common misconception. And I can eat mangoes. And garlic, as you’ve witnessed.” And he could also drink beer and gin, according to some schools, not necessarily the most restrictive ones. “It’s the fermented grape that’s specifically off-limits,” he said. “Cheers.” He took another sip of prohibited fluid and I handed him a sandwich.
“Anyway, I’m not a secular Muslim,” he said. “I’m a fallen one. There’s a distinction.” One, he made clear, that had nothing to do with the booze.
And so began a thread that would weave through our afternoon’s chatter, alongside the one about Corie’s predicament (“What if she’s devastated by the war? She’s an organizer, you know. That comes with a lot of pressure, and I’m sure she’s got school pressures too”); alongside accounts of his upbringing in two cultures, the first one lapsing Catholic and the second ardently Muhammadan (as I called him only once; though fallen, he considered the term more blasphemous than wine), and mine in a more or less Unitarian clapboard New Jersey two-story house with a carriage lamp on a pole out front to light your way up the flagstones. We feasted until we could ignore the cold no longer and then packed up the picnic and drove on into Reims to take a look at the cathedral (either because I’d never seen it before or because he’d seen it so many times, one or the other), the heat in the Citroën cranked all the way up to broil. The temperature seemed to be plummeting out in the land in the graying afternoon, and it was good to be back in the car, even lost in the highway construction and lost in conversation, searching for a map.
“So,” he said. “Those are your plausibilities? Homework and war.”
Daniel, do you remember old Mr. Samson, your great-uncle, or maybe he wasn’t really family, but he was certifiably great, at least; he gave you a metal clarinet when you were a kid, remember? From Savannah? And remember how we always made him tell us why he moved all the way down there to Savannah, Georgia, when he was a young man, what a funny place to spend the rest of your life and raise a family, we thought, when he could have gone anywhere, to Trenton, or Newark, or Philadelphia. (How very long I’ve loved you, Daniel! Even when I first loved you, I thought: I’ve loved you all of my life.) And he’d look all muddled and mystified and he’d say, Why, Savannah’s so lovely, anyone would want to live there; it has three short a’s and a v, a double n and a silent h. It begins with a secret and ends with a hush. What could be more irresistible? And we laughed, and he laughed because he’d made us laugh, but we knew there was a chance he was serious at heart—that he’d devoted his life to a city because he liked the way its name was spelled.
I’m not unsympathetic—I’ve always thought I’d be happy as a clam in Kyzyl or Samarqand or some other place I’ve only seen on a globe, on account of that self-same sonority. But it isn’t place I’m thinking about, Daniel. It’s vocation. Someone gave you a tin clarinet, and you became a musician, and sometimes I wonder about how these seeds are set, how they can be as infinitesimal as a grain of pollen yet grow to absorb your whole life, and I wonder about who I am and why, why I’m not just an anesthesiologist, but a cardiac anesthesiologist. And then I think of the thrill of it, the heart part.
It’s not really my part, the part that belongs to me. After I put a patient to sleep and before the surgeon opens up his chest, we set up a drape, positioned like the blade of a guillotine across the patient’s neck, except it’s not a blade but a cloth, a low blue fence between our official purviews, the surgical team’s and the anesthesiologist’s. It’s a part of procedure. To one side of it lies the patient’s body; to the other side, my side, his head. His face is masked under another cloth, and all the tubes for probes and the airway cannula and IVs, the whole tangled basket of catheters and wires is there—all that belongs to me. And the name of this fence, this vocational barrier, this cubicle divider, is the ether screen, though some of us amuse ourselves by calling it the “blood-brain barrier,” Willem says, in our case, because I have the brains and he doesn’t mind the blood.
The thing is, I don’t mind the blood either (you can’t, really, and do this, but I promise you you’ve never seen anything like the color of blood in surgery; running through the tubes to the bypass machine, it’s more solid and weighty than any inanimate red). Back when I was a resident, they encouraged us, as part of our training, to slip around the ether screen and get some feel for the other guy’s job, and one day the surgery was a transplant—it was a fairly new procedure then—and the surgeons asked if I’d like to help out.
I scrubbed in and pulled on a fresh set of gloves and when the suturing was done and all that was left was the final settling in, I reached in through the chest spreader and cupped the scared little organ in my hands, clenched up hard like a kitten, and when toward the end it started to beat in my hand, I can’t begin to tell you how that felt. It’s mortality’s orgasm! There’s no sensation even remotely close. I still feel a twinge at the end of any chest surgery when they twist the stainless-steel sutures to clamp the sternum shut; a twinge of loss, saying farewell to that colorful inner kingdom with its bizarre dramas and vivid pageantry and mystery and heroism, seeing all that closed over with the pimply, hairy overcast of a standard-issue stretch of human skin. It’s like pulling a tatty gray trench coat over your party dress when Mardi Gras is done.
I bet you didn’t know this, Daniel, that the heart doesn’t beat on command.
We drop a new one into someone’s empty chest and its nerves aren’t even hooked up to anything, and it will lie there dormant for a while, and then, of its own accord, it will start to beat. As soon as it feels blood (and if it doesn’t get the hint, we give it a shock to nudge it, or a little massage of encouragement). But generally it doesn’t need reminding and as soon as the clamps are released and the first corpuscles spill from the sutured vein, it senses them, as though the heart can taste what the heart has swallowed, and of its own will, or the last life-will of the person whose heart it used to be, it picks up its duty right where its duty left off and goes to work pulsing this stranger’s blood through this stranger’s body. It’s voluntary, so to speak: autonomous. There’s no cable of communication between the body and the organ beyond the message in this offering of blood, this blood-brother pact. I can’t think of it without wonder, the sensation in my hands of the first faint spasm of acknowledgment and acceptance, and then collaboration—this willingness, this ultimate generosity.
But that’s not what I’m trying to get at; I’ve wandered. I was telling you about how I picked my course, and I’d already picked it by then, you see. I suspect my direction depended on something as unsubstantial as the beauty of a word or a phrase, the sound of a name that gripped my imagination the first time I heard it, the way the name Savannah grabbed the life of Mr. Samson. I had no idea what the phrase meant or what it was, but I knew without hesitation that I could rest there the rest of my life, reside inside the splendor of the tetralogy of Fallot.
I have Kathy to thank,
Kathy Brooks. She planted the seed, standing up there in front of the class, Mrs. Cummings’s sixth grade, Verdant Avenue Elementary, and relating for show-and-tell how her infant brother was going to Baltimore to get an operation to save his life because he had a hole in his heart, and Mrs. Cummings jumping in to elaborate that it wasn’t like a bullet hole. It was a hole between his heart’s two halves—one that all newborns have, that’s supposed to heal over as you grow but doesn’t in some individuals—and that this was just one of several problems with Kathy’s brother’s heart, who had a syndrome known as a tetralogy. Mrs. Cummings wrote it on the blackboard, right under Maryland and congenital: tetralogy of Fallot.
And then she went on to tell us, being too excellent a sixth-grade teacher to let the opportunity pass, everything she could about the heart and its workings and its evolution. I sat there murmuring, “Fallot, Fallot, Fallot,” as she said it was part of what made us humans, that the primitive heart was a single chamber, and then, like a frog’s heart, three, but we higher mammals had a four-roomed heart, two ventricles and two atria, the rooms securely separated by valves and walls of muscle, and that’s how the pump worked, and it didn’t work well if any of the walls had holes in them. She was a very good explainer, Mrs. Cummings, Kathy nodding authoritatively in concurrence with everything she said, standing up there in front of us all, proud of her brother for being so complicated and evolutionary. And so, along with a profession, I acquired a conviction that day. The thing that makes our human heart human is its internal divisions; or, as Maasterlich might say, a heart undivided is one that cannot stand, and that’s why, until today, I hadn’t wished to tell Emil anything about Corie, anything at all, or even reveal her existence, just as I never told Corie about Emil, for the two belonged to different chambers, whose breach might somehow be fatal.
And, oh, that I had continued to abide by Mrs. Cummings’s delineations, but I needed a friend in the matter, and I didn’t have to tell Emil everything, only barely enough, and that’s what I did. I never said she was the girl next door, or anything so precise, or anything about the letters. Only about the death that lurked in her eyes like winter on the horizon and that she was a friend, a friend of mine in trouble. He would in that, at least, prove helpful down the line.
“So . . . activist,” Emil said. We were back amid the plausibilities.
“I said organizer.”
I wasn’t sure of the distinction, and Emil ignored it, surging on without pause to render his verdict on activists, a category that, diplomatically speaking, constituted a special case. Their passion on public issues masked a personal stake, he said, and if you were negotiating with them you had to remember to address the hidden personal issue, not the declared public one. “They like to think they’re saving the world, because saving themselves is far too hard in a world that has no values.” They weren’t wrong about the world, Emil said, “but they want its values to be more absolute, because only then will they be safe” from demons closer to home.
“Well, there’s more than one kind of demon,” I said. “It still doesn’t mean she’s in love,” and I suggested Corie’s studies again, or that maybe she was reliving some terrible childhood tragedy, like a deadly disease that felled a dear friend. Or an accident.
“The train wreck,” Emil said.
“The freak train wreck,” I said, accepting the invitation to improvise. “The favorite brother killed in the collision.”
“The trestle washed out by the flash flood. And he ran back into the burning car to rescue the toddler from the mangled mom.”
“Exactly!” I exclaimed; now we were getting somewhere. “Something like that. Or how about her music? She’s a musician, you know. A good one.”
“What sort?” Emil asked.
“Piano. Classical.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t know. Classical music, destroyer of young adults.”
“Too improbable?”
“Not at all,” he said. “In 1830.”
“She cares about it,” I offered, defensive. “Do you know what she practices?” I ran through some of the titles stacked beside the Bösendorfer. “Duets,” I said. “Advanced stuff. Of course she only plays half of—”
“Et voilà!” Emil declared. He practically bounced off the bench seat.
“Oh, come on!” I said before he got the words out; I know when I’ve got myself good and cornered.
“But it’s obvious!” he gloated.
I reminded myself I wasn’t hitting Emil anymore. “So, go on,” I said.
“Well, let’s see. He’s tall, blond, brooding. Concert pianist, international circuit, and he’s run off with another.”
“Why assume he’s a he?”
“Good point. She’s tall, blond, and brooding. And your Little One will never, ever replace her.”
“And she cannot believe the pain,” I said. “And she will spend her life playing over and over her half of all the duets they used to play together.”
“Aïe!” Emil exclaimed, stricken.
“Ouch!” I agreed.
When we’d driven a while longer, he said, “She will, though.”
“What?” I asked. We’d turned a corner, and the shadows had shifted inside the car.
“Find another. Everything that happens, happens over again.”
I agreed with an “Uhn” and dusted off my Marx to suit the premise. “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. That’s in history.”
“Life, just the same,” Emil said. I’d made him laugh. “Except that in life the first time’s a tragedy and the second time is too.”
A ways farther, and he said, “What if she’s facing something worse?”
“Than?” I said.
“A broken heart.” Even more awful than the pain that will never end, he said, was the moment Corie realized that it would end, “when she sees she’ll get over it perfectly well.”
“And that everything worth dying for turns out to be survivable, and life is larger than all the things she thought her life was about, and what did it all mean if the most important thing in the world didn’t mean anything anyway? That sort of thing?”
“Precisely,” he said. “What if she thinks she’s figured it out, that the only way to make love last a lifetime is to cut the lifetime short.”
And I thought, What wishful nonsense—do we really so easily outlast love?—but I thought it to myself.
We’d navigated the detour and were invading the inner city when Emil asked, “So, who is it I should be jealous of?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your tragedy,” he said. “Who was your musician?” I didn’t answer. I was flashing on you while trying to look like I was thinking of no one at all, but he persisted. “Tell me about Willem.”
In general, I never minded our pokes and jabs, Emil’s and mine. I knew that someday our relationship would decline into sweetness and pleasantry, and I was happy that we weren’t there yet, that we maintained our disputation. Ardent is as ardent does. But this—this was beyond the pale, even or especially for us. I felt sucker-punched, after all our speculative Corie silliness, and I made to say so. “Tell me about Willem,” he said, and I burst out, “Oh, now!”
But before I could get my breath in gear, he interjected, “I know, I know.” He knew, he said, that Willem didn’t mean anything to me, and said, “I just wonder what you might mean to Willem.”
“That’s not what’s going on,” I said.
“Ahh, so something is,” Emil said, all pleased and gotcha. “Going on.” And I allowed that I’d been worried about it too, but you had to know Willem; just because he and I were squabbling didn’t make it a romance.
“What would you call it, then?”
“Diplomacy,” I answered. “Can you handle another plausibility?”
“Fire away,” he offered. So I explained how I saw Willem, that he wanted assurance that he was okay in my eyes, because he couldn’t stand the thought that someone out there might di
sagree with how he viewed himself. We used to be a team frequently but hadn’t worked together in years. The last time we had, things hadn’t ended so well. That’s all. “He wants to be sure I still respect him,” I said. “Wants it enough it resembles a passion. But it has nothing to do with affection.” Except for himself, maybe. “Exoneration is more like it.”
“Over the Singleton thing.”
“Oh,” I said. This was getting worse and worse. “You know about that.”
Sahran shrugged: of course. “But Willem won.”
“He did indeed.”
“And you did too.”
“In a way. Yes, we both won. The suit was dismissed.”
“And then Willem kept on going without a blink and became this saint on the medical-mercy front, acclaimed for his humanity. And you quit your profession.”
“I did nothing of the sort!” I protested. I’d left my staff job to teach more, was all. Okay, to teach much more—much, much more and to run a department. I still operated. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Sahran said, “It looks to me like you’re the one who’s needing exoneration.”
“Look,” I said, and now I was irritated. This wasn’t ardent, this was tedious. There was, as he might say, a distinction. “I’m sorry, sorry to disappoint you. It was a terrible thing, a terrible case, and I actually don’t feel good about it, win or lose.” Win or lose, I wanted to say, someone had still died on the table, under the influence of nature or anesthesia or the shock of surgery, the jury deciding in favor of the first, fortunately, but my own internal jury being not so thoroughly convinced. I’d put the patient under and she’d stayed there, was how it looked to me, stayed there where I couldn’t get to her and couldn’t pull her back, no matter what I tried. Such things happen, but it isn’t something you want to relive after a lovely picnic on a leisurely day off. “And if you are really interested, you should probably just get the court transcript and read it for yourself and decide if you want me working on Odile, or anywhere near her.”
