Beauty in the Broken Places

by Allison Pataki

  There was an assignment early that semester in which we had to analyze a piece of furniture, a large wooden armoire, and write an essay on it. Dave and I had several mutual friends, and so we went to the art museum at the same time on a Sunday afternoon to study the armoire. Dave stood there, his face serious as he jotted down some notes, and then he used the word “looming” to describe the wardrobe. I turned to him, head cocked to the side as I thought: Good word.

  It sounds so silly, but that was the moment when I realized two things. The first: Dave was smart; he was not some broad-shouldered beef-head who cared about his sports team but not his studies. The second: I had judged him unfairly. And I had pegged him completely wrong.

  Dave’s brain—not only his brain, his curiosity—took me by surprise. I am an insatiably curious person, and so are the people I love most. I find it to be one of the most irresistible character traits because it carries this promise: continued learning; constant questioning; an antidote to boredom or passivity.

  And the more we got to know each other that fall, the more we talked, the more I saw that Dave possessed this curiosity, this interestedness, this drive to improve his mind. True, Dave was also fun. There was one night on campus, after a party at a New Haven bowling alley, when someone pointed out the fact that Dave bore a resemblance to the Olympic gymnast Paul Hamm. Just then, Dave began to perform a series of cartwheels across the lawn. His ad-libbed routine ended with him diving, headfirst, into a nearby hammock. When I think back to that night, I remember contagious midnight laughter. I remember a lightness around Dave, and my wanting to be near that joy.

  But Dave was more than just fun. I was especially surprised when I found out that Dave was on the premed track. My two roommates were premed, and I knew how hard they worked, how heavy their course loads were. Dave shrugged and told me that physics and chemistry came naturally to him. I knew that he also enjoyed history, since we were in the art history class together. And then I found out that he was taking an advanced course on John Milton—a class that I, an English major, had steered clear of because I found it intimidating. This guy had depth; Dave Levy was definitely not the self-involved, beer-swilling jock I had presumed him to be.

  A couple of weeks later a few of us from the art history class were studying together for the midterm. Because Professor Scully was very much of the old-school way of doing things, he taped physical prints of all of the paintings and structures to a wall in a building on campus rather than digitizing them for easy dorm-room studying. The only way to study, therefore, was to go to this building, stand before the wall, and try your best to memorize each image. It was all very collaborative and old-fashioned, and you can imagine my delight when I found Dave there night after night that week.

  I tried to play it cool. I tried to focus on the sprawling display of temples and churches and statues, scribbling notes and attempting to commit an endless procession of dates to memory. But, naturally, my eyes would slide around the room, aware that Dave was somewhere nearby. Studying for this midterm had gotten very exciting, and it had nothing to do with the temples or statues.

  I found Dave, on the final night of that week, standing in a group before the medieval cathedrals. Someone was stumped as to how to determine the differences between Romanesque and Gothic. Dave explained how to identify the lightness and the height that differentiated later Gothic from its predecessor, Romanesque. He rattled off a few significant dates and locations that marked turning points in the architectural trends. We all looked at him. “Whoa, that guy is smart,” some fellow student muttered under his breath. Yeah, I thought, I guess he is.

  A few of us gathered that Friday night after the midterm in the dorm room of our mutual friend Peter. We played cards and drank beer and celebrated the fact that the big test was behind us. Dave had a lacrosse scrimmage on Sunday, so he was on a forty-eight-hour rule of no alcohol and could not drink that night. He hung around with the rest of us for hours, laughing and joking. At the end of the night, when he asked if he could see me safely back to my dorm building across campus, I did not play it cool. I gladly accepted his escort as well as the accompanying good-night kiss.

  What took me by surprise from the very beginning of our college courtship was just how much I admired and respected Dave. I had never known someone so staunch and unwavering in his commitment to excellence. I had done well in school my whole life; I knew that I was a curious and conscientious person, someone who worked hard and did well, but he made me want to kick it up a notch.

  Not only did I admire Dave, but I really liked him; when I spoke to Dave, I felt that he understood what I was saying. He understood me. It was as if we had always been the best of friends—a feeling of being known and a feeling of comfort that comes from speaking honestly and being heard. We laughed at the same jokes, we played off each other, and we quickly developed that ease of exchange that comes from a natural and mutual understanding.

  By the end of the semester, as Dave and I were each wrapping up the English papers that were due in our respective classes, it was clear to me that he was a better grammarian than I was. “Would you have time to proofread my paper?” I asked him one day toward the end of the term. He agreed, taking the care to provide thoughtful and thorough notes on how he felt I might improve my paper. When he handed it back to me I stared at my paper, his comments, and then at Dave.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Are the edits terrible?”

  “No,” I answered. “They’re really good.”

  “Oh,” he said, sitting up. “Well, good.”

  “I’m supposed to be the English major here, and you are correcting my English paper.”

  “Yeah?” He shrugged.

  What riotously unfair genetic contest did you win to get so good at so many things? I wanted to demand. But instead, I said: “I’m just…impressed. You know, sometimes when people are recruited because they’re really good at a sport, as you are with lacrosse, then that is their priority. And schoolwork is sort of…I don’t know…secondary. You manage to do all of this, and do it well.”

  “You know I wasn’t recruited to play lacrosse, right?” he asked.

  “What? No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I tried out for the lacrosse team,” he said.

  “You’re a walk-on?” I asked. “But…but you’re a starter. As a sophomore. I figured lacrosse was your life. Or, at least, your priority.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I almost didn’t make it at all. I was terrible freshman year. Coming from the Midwest? I had no stick skills, compared to these guys who grew up in the lacrosse cultures of Maryland and Long Island, playing in travel leagues since they were young. I knew nothing. Coach just liked me because of how hard I worked and how fast I could run.”

  “Really?” I asked, my whole idea of Dave Levy shifting before me.

  “Really,” he said. “Freshman fall, Coach had to cut a handful of people. I was surprised every time I made it through a round of cuts. Finally, we’re getting to the final round of cuts, and just a few of us walk-ons are still around, vying for the last spots. One morning we have a timed run out at the fields. The run is going to be no problem.” I nodded as he continued. “So the morning of the run, my roommate turns off my alarm clock without telling me, and I sleep through the run. I wake up, see the time, and panic. All my teammates have already left campus for the fields. I have no ride out to the track. I have no way to make it to the run. I am going to get cut.”

  “But”—I bristled at the unfairness of it all—“couldn’t you explain to your coach that your roommate turned off your alarm?”

  Dave looked at me with an indulgent smirk. “Blame it on my roommate? You really think he’d go for that?”

  “But it was the truth!”

  “No excuses,” Dave said. “You miss something as important as a timed run, you’re out.”

  “Wha
t did you do?” I asked.

  “I hitchhiked, begged a stranger for a ride out to the fields. When I got there, the last group of guys was getting ready to do their run around the track. I hopped the fence and fell in with the second heat of runners when Coach’s back was to me. I smoked the run. Coach never would have known I almost missed the entire thing.”

  “Phew,” I said.

  “But then I decided to tell him,” Dave said. “I told Coach everything. I admitted that I had been late and had missed the start of the run. I figured he would probably cut me, but I didn’t want to lie to him.”

  “So what happened?”

  “A few weeks later, I made the team. Coach told me that he really appreciated my honesty.”

  I let this sink in. The whole story. I felt such a sense of injustice—his roommate had turned off his alarm clock! I probably would have run straight to the coach and tried to plead and explain and talk through it. But Dave had not treated it as some sob story. He hadn’t wrung his hands at the unfairness. Instead he’d just gotten himself out to the field, and he’d put his head down to work hard and overcome the setback. I admired that so much. Not to mention his integrity in how he spoke the truth to his coach, even when there was little to be gained by doing so.

  It all seemed to come into a clearer focus: the bits of Dave that did not quite jibe with the stereotype of the jock—his studiousness, the way he was always just a teensy bit outside the campus lacrosse clique. So many of the things I liked so much about him. It was because Dave Levy was a geek, after all, just like the rest of us! “So, then, you did get in for your grades,” I reasoned.

  “I was actually recruited here for football,” he answered. “But I decided to try out for lacrosse instead. I knew that I had more room to improve in that sport.”

  A part of me wondered if perhaps all of this was a bit too good to be true.

  Chapter 3

  Dave would not wake up, could not be roused from sudden and abrupt unconsciousness. His six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame was laid flat across a row of airplane seats, a doctor and a nurse and an EMT (all passengers traveling on our flight) huddled around him. The Alaska Airlines flight attendants had Dave hooked up to an oxygen tank while the nurse held tight to his wrist, tracking his pulse. The odd thing was that Dave’s vitals remained stable; he had the look of somebody taking a nap, a person at rest and at peace as chaos unfolded around him.

  I sat in the row just in front, watching it all, trying to breathe. I kept hearing concerned, confused whispers from around the cabin.

  What’s going on?

  He just suddenly lost consciousness.

  His wife’s pregnant.

  I put my hand to my belly, reminding myself that I needed to stay calm. And yet, Dave was lying right there, unconscious. Completely unresponsive. My big, strong, healthy husband—an athlete, a man whom I’d never seen puff a cigarette, one of the most disciplined, discriminating eaters I knew, a doctor, for crying out loud!—would not respond to a team of medical professionals trying to rouse him. What was happening?

  As the minutes passed, they tried to get Dave to swallow some orange juice, thinking that perhaps his loss of consciousness was due to low blood sugar. As they trickled the juice down Dave’s throat, he began to choke, his eyes remaining shut as his entire body convulsed and rejected the aspirated beverage.

  “He’s having a seizure!” one of the healthcare professionals declared as his heavy frame heaved and shuddered. I shut my eyes, my body curling in on itself. God, why is this happening? What is going on? Dave, what is happening to you? Will you please just wake up?

  I knew that if I thought too hard about any one of these questions, my mind would begin to spin out of control, hurling me headlong toward all sorts of dark and terrifying places. Places from which I might not be able to pull myself back. So I just tried to focus on breathing. Inhale, exhale. Let the medical professionals do their jobs. Stay calm. I’ll be here for Dave when he wakes up.

  At one point, the EMT tried manual resuscitation, pumping his chest with two hands, but it did not jolt Dave back to consciousness. Half an hour later, when Dave still could not be woken, we decided that we needed to make an emergency landing. A flight attendant used MedLink, an in-cabin service for communicating with the ground in cases of emergency, to find the nearest airport and make sure an ambulance would be waiting on the runway with a team of medical professionals to board the plane and get Dave to a hospital.

  “Where are we? Where is there to land?” I asked, looking out the window at a world of black. The sun had set. What was between Chicago and Seattle, I asked myself—would we go to Idaho? Montana?

  “Fargo, North Dakota,” the flight attendant answered.

  “I don’t know Fargo,” I said. “Are there good medical facilities there?”

  The flight attendant returned my gaze. “It’s our only option.”

  So, Fargo it was.

  They had removed one of Dave’s shoes; I can’t recall why, but perhaps there was a fear of swelling. As I sat there, I clutched Dave’s shoe like I would hang on to a precious relic. Dave’s shoe. A piece of him. How many times had I stared at this shoe and thought nothing of it, or perhaps thought only: I wish he would put his shoes in the closet. I noticed how the shoe felt warm, still warm from his body. Warm from the blood that his heart had pumped through his veins, and I thought back to all the cold mornings when Dave had risen from bed, the night still dark outside the window, to go into work at the hospital. All those times when I had slid over to his vacated side of the bed, the sheets a cozy tangle from where his warm body had just been. And then a question popped into my head: would I ever feel anything that had been warmed by Dave’s body again? If he died, wouldn’t he go cold—wasn’t that what I had always gleaned from the television shows and films? Was this shoe the last time that a part of Dave would feel warm? I held it tighter. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, what is happening?

  We landed in Fargo—a vast swath of black with just a few scattered lights in the distance. In the foreground, the ambulance lights spun, a dizzying strobe of white and orange. The emergency medical team boarded the plane and took Dave off on a makeshift gurney of sheets, his body floppy in their arms. I followed behind, still clutching that one shoe, making sure that all four pieces of our carry-on luggage came with us. I recalled a night just a month earlier when Dave had temporarily lost his keys—how frantic he had been because of the work he stored on a USB plug on that keychain, and I told myself that the least I could do for him now was make sure that none of his valuables got left behind.

  I passed row after row of tight, concerned expressions, fellow Seattle-bound passengers telling me as I passed that they would be praying for my husband and thinking of our family. I nodded, dazed, thinking: Yes, please do. Please pray for Dave. Please pray for me, because right now I am too scared, too confused, too focused on what the hell is happening inside Dave’s body to have time to pray myself. So, yes, please do that.

  These fellow passengers would go on to Seattle. They would tell whoever met them at baggage claim about their eventful flight, about their emergency detour to Fargo. I believed their earnest concern; I believed that many of them would think of us and pray for Dave. But I also knew that, within a few moments of landing, they would go on with their lives, our trauma fading into memory.

  The two of us would not make it to Seattle. For us, this was a horror story very much still unfolding, and our route had changed. Our route had changed forever.

  Chapter 4

  New Haven

  Fall 2004

  A few months after Dave and I started dating, an acquaintance who knew both of us raised a dark specter of doubt with an offhand comment that was not sitting right. “You and your siblings must always wonder if people are dating you for the right reasons or if they are just interested in your last name.”

  Huh. No,
I had not really thought about that. For the most part, I considered myself a fairly good bullshit detector. I had had my whole childhood to learn. It’s generally pretty apparent, easy to sniff out the users—they make their intentions clear with their overemphasis of your last name or the favors they ask for.

  Take my first day of high school. I remember how nervous I was—I was insecure and unsure of what to expect, as are pretty much all freshmen, right? As I was walking into biology class, an attractive senior guy held the door open for me. I paused and smiled my thanks; I was so taken aback by the unsolicited act of kindness that this stranger, a senior boy, was showing me. Maybe high school would not be as intimidating as I had feared. A moment later the guy raised his hand to his mouth and, while still holding the door, shouted to the entire hallway: “Her dad is the governor! I have to hold the door open for her or she’ll have me thrown in jail!”

  Countless eyes turned in my direction, stares of newfound interest and curiosity. Some sniggered, some whispered. I think my wince was noticeable; I’m certain my scorched cheeks were. I wanted to trade places with the canned worms that awaited me in the biology classroom, pickled in formaldehyde and fated for dissection. I was a nervous, skinny fourteen-year-old girl on my first day of freshman year, just trying to find my way from one classroom to the next and maybe make a friend or two. The last thing I wanted was to be singled out in the rush of the packed high school hallway, the target of some jocular senior’s joke, marked so publicly as different. But moments like this happened all the time. So I learned, at a very young age, how to carry and gird myself as the eyes fixed on me with interest and curiosity.