by Ellen Cooney
I cooperated. When I reached the halfway point, I let myself drop, in a slowly sinking way, so it wouldn’t look as if I’d tripped on my own feet and fallen.
I lay very still, my eyes closed. The people in charge of the registration believed I was briefly unconscious, and needed to be taken to a hospital.
My sister talked them out of calling an ambulance. She carried me to the car, but as soon as we were out of sight, she stopped hurrying. She knew exactly what I’d done, but only after she’d reached my side on the field.
She set me down. She didn’t do so roughly. Another type of sister might have.
“You scared me right down to my soul,” she said. “You scared me so bad, I think you almost broke it.”
I forgot she had tricked me into trying out for soccer. I felt a terrible chill go through me, as if I weren’t wearing clothes, as if a cold wind entered me, through my skin.
I will never forget what it was like to find out what I knew I could never unlearn.
A soul can be broken?
Seventeen
“You have to go to your office.”
“I was just there.”
“Go back. Something’s coming.”
I was texting with my boss, the Head. He was up because the strangeness of this night had reached into other places—but really, two wailing, teething babies were making sure no one in his house stayed asleep.
One of his daughters was the mother of those twins. They were visiting. He was trying to balance being a good dad and grandfather with the part of himself that wanted to urge them to stay in a hotel, or go to a hotel himself.
He’s a Unitarian minister and he came to hospital chaplaincy after years on United Nations missions around the world. His own life had been seriously in danger when he became ill with a virus; the damage will never go fully away. He walks with a cane. He’s in his fifties, but already has the beginnings of an old man’s stoop.
The cuts to our department felt to him like a battle he was responsible for losing. He was still amazed he was a peaceable man talking about our jobs in terms of war.
“I heard about the roof,” he texted. “How are you doing?”
“One D,” I answered, in our shorthand. “Not from the roof. Someone from a nursing home.”
“Rough night.”
“Yeah.”
“I ordered you a pizza.”
“You what?”
“From the all-night place.”
“Well great, thanks, how come?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. But it popped into my head you might be hungry, so go to your office for the delivery.”
“What kind of pizza?”
“Sorry to say, just plain, but extra cheese. They claimed they’re out of toppings. That’s hard to believe, but I didn’t argue. Must go. I promise we’ll start rotating shifts soon. Most grateful to you. B says hi. Over and out!”
B is the Head’s daughter. When she married, it was in the chapel, the first thing to go on when the renovations were done. That had been a good day. I hadn’t minded it when everyone kept telling me, “You’re next.”
No one knew the almost-ness of me, married.
I never had the chance to say these words to anyone: “I’d like you to meet the man I’m in love with.”
Don’t think about that.
But there it was, coming over me, like a sort of attack. The hurt of it, all over again. The surprise of it. The Green Man. His smell. His fingernails, crusted inside with plant dirt.
His body, fitting itself against me.
His laugh. His work boots.
What I almost did. What I still felt so ashamed of.
He moved away somewhere unknown, I now knew.
His spacious, airy, light-filled apartment was at the top of an old stone building, four stories high, converted from a long-ago trade school. The roof was flat. The trapdoor in the ceiling of his bedroom had been sealed, but he worked on it, opened it up, bought a stepladder. I had told him I wanted to be up on the roof with him and look at the sky. I had been happy.
He had almost been taken to meet my family. All of them at once.
Just throw him into it, I had thought. For some holiday. Not say ahead of time I’d be bringing someone.
He grew up an only child. His parents were quiet people, polite, their voices always moving along one straight line, as if softly marching. I had met them. I had told him I felt they were very reserved with me. But he said they were like that all the time.
I advised him to wear earplugs whenever I got around to bringing him to the house I grew up in. No one would notice. He wore his hair past his ears, unlike every male I’m related to.
The parking lot next to his building was for residents only. There was a pole for a gate, a card reader to stick a card into.
This was when I was still on the day shift. I had not believed we’d broken up. I had been ready to do something I felt powerless to stop myself from doing. I had been ready to forgive him for something he would not say he was sorry for—and tell him he was right about something I knew was wrong.
It was early in the morning. I had left my own apartment more than an hour ahead of my shift. To go and see him. I knew he’d be home. I knew he’d let me in when I buzzed.
He’d been right that night, and I was in love with him. Something like that. I hadn’t planned the words exactly. I would speak into the speaker.
He had taken back my keys to his building. What I hadn’t known that morning was that my card to get into the parking lot had been invalidated.
I pulled up to the pole, and had to back out into traffic. When someone blared a horn at me, I thought he’d appear in one of his windows, like he’d guessed I was there.
His neighborhood had highly restrictive on-street parking. All the possible places to park were filled. Yet I drove around and around his block, waiting, hoping for a spot to open up. I was nervous about it; I’m terrible at parallel parking.
At a red light, I phoned him, even though he had not responded to any of my other calls. His voice mail box was full. I couldn’t text him. He refused to use a smartphone.
I had to give up and go to work. When I reached my office, I closed the door and sat still for a long time. That was when I knew I was broken.
Because what had I almost done? What if I’d been able to find a parking spot?
No one in Pastoral Care knew anything about him. But of course they had noticed differences in me. The Head had knocked on my door.
“You feel like talking?”
I didn’t. You can be someone broken, I was learning, and still get up and do your job.
I truly had not seen coming what came. Green Man was a fix-up, although I hadn’t known that until after the fixing-up happened.
A cardiologist I’m friends with was leaving the medical center. I had often been invited to dinner with this woman and her wife. They never made me feel like a third wheel at their table; they were a couple who felt completely comfortable sitting around with someone single, so that it wasn’t a couple plus one. We were just three people.
Now and then they’d give me advice. Become gay! You should be gay! I’d apologize.
When the cardiologist called me to come over for a good-bye dinner, because she and her wife were leaving for somewhere far away, I had no reason to think anyone else would be there.
And then the fix was on and that was that.
Green Man had dropped out of medical school so he could study, instead, plants that people a long time ago knew about for their healing properties. He became a medicinal botanist. He founded a lab he got funding for. The lab was in his building, in the apartment next to his own.
Everything about the two of us felt right to me. We fit. That was how I kept putting it. I began to feel at home with him pretty much the moment we met.
“Okay, who’s the guy?”
My family was onto me early. Especially my sister. What did he play? What did he like to watch best? Basketball, or
what? Did he go to a gym? Which one?
I said nothing.
Seven months. That was how long. We made love on his roof. We made love in his lab. The secrecy felt wonderful: a universe of two. I told him that my time with Plummy was practice for keeping something all my own.
We began to talk about the future. I was thinking about neighborhoods, about whether or not to take his name when we married. He wanted me to. It was a source of disagreement. And he didn’t want us having parties and things where the guest list would contain ministers—it wouldn’t be fair to mix his friends with people of mine from such a whole other world, like ministers don’t know how to kick back and relax. Like it would be something like an alien invasion of wet blankets.
One member of the clergy was plenty enough for him. In myself, I was a whole universe of People of the Collar. I had liked the way he’d said that. He made me feel special. He made me feel that any other minister he’d come in contact with would have to be compared to me, and would only be a great disappointment.
I skipped the wedding of a good friend from seminary after declaring I’d be there, and I would not be coming alone. He had admitted he just wouldn’t be able to cope with it. That weekend, he and I camped out on the roof and I fell more in love than ever.
I did not see the warning signs as actual warnings.
He didn’t like coming to my development, where the blocks of units are laid out in rows off a main avenue, all the blocks the same, all tidy and well-maintained, and almost as sterile and business-like, he felt, as the medical center. He didn’t like my apartment either; it made him feel boxed in and sort of trapped.
Sometimes I had the sense he was opening his life to me like it was a big new country for me to come live in, like he wanted me to emigrate from my own. But I would laugh at myself for being silly, for perhaps being someone it was hard to love.
One night, when I stayed late at the medical center, for almost a double shift, I came out of the building to find him in the parking lot, his car neatly, snugly blocking mine. I had called him many hours before to cancel our plans—I was supposed to go to his place as usual.
He followed me home. After everything I’d experienced in those hours at work, I loved coming out from my shower, still wet, to see him stretched out on my bed, the covers thrown off. He had spent the day in his lab. He smelled like plant life, like everything green and rooted, like his soul was green too.
I felt that my roots and his were inching toward each other a little more, were ready to be fully tangled up.
Then my phone beeped. Earlier that day, there was a terrible highway accident. The driver of a crowded bus had braked and swerved toward the breakdown lane to avoid colliding with the car of a driver who cut from the middle lane at the last minute, to make an exit. It was possible the car driver hadn’t looked to see what was coming, and thought only of making his turn-off.
The bus struck that car, which had slowed, as there was a bottleneck of traffic on the exit ramp. The driver of the car behind the bus was not able to avoid crashing into it. There were four fatalities: the two car drivers, and two passengers in the second car.
Just before going off duty, I sat in a waiting room with the bus driver’s family.
He was a longtimer who, it came out, had been in trouble before for highway speeding. No bus passengers required treatment, but he was badly injured, and had been taken into surgery. I left the medical center after hearing the news he was in a recovery room and his surgeon was optimistic about his chances.
I was being summoned back to his side. His family wanted no other chaplain, please, seeing as how I already knew them. He had gone through respiratory failure, and his heart was endangered; he had been placed in the ICU.
The vigil for his surgery gave way to a vigil of hope that his life would not end. He had not been able to communicate, but his family felt sure he was terrified he might be wrongly blamed for the accident. They wanted me to tell him to hang on and have faith, because God had not looked away from the road in the moments the crashes took place—that God would know none of it was his fault.
I had held his wife in my arms as she quivered and wept. I had bowed my head in prayer with the bus driver’s sons, who were close to my own age. I had listened to stories of the man’s life, as if telling the stories would be the one thing to make the surgery successful.
Green Man didn’t want me to go. The medical center, he reminded me, didn’t own me. There were night chaplains who could explain that I wasn’t on duty. Surely the family would understand a chaplain’s need for a private life.
He had already waited for me in the parking lot, as proof that he loved me, he pointed out. He was willing to put aside how much it made him unhappy to spend time in my home.
He patted the space on my bed where he wanted me to be. Don’t go.
I thought that at the end of “Don’t go” there was a “yet.” I thought he might be saying I could postpone rushing back to the medical center, so we could first make love.
And I found myself counting minutes in my head, blocking out time: how long it would take me to get dry, get dressed, drive to the medical center. I was actually doing that arithmetic in my head. Really quick sex, I was thinking.
He meant it literally. You can’t go.
How could he know me and not know that when I took off my collar, it was never really off?
It was strange to walk out of my own apartment when he was inside it. His voice was still loud in my ears as I stepped back out into the night.
The bus driver’s last moments happened when I was next to him.
As his family had asked, I said to him, “God knows it wasn’t your fault.”
Three hours later, when I returned to my apartment, Green Man was gone. I had imagined he would wait for me.
He had taken back his keys. He had gone through my closet and drawers. He took a sweater of his I had borrowed one night, and a scarf I had borrowed too, and a pair of houseplants he had potted for me as a gift. And a dress he had bought me, exactly my size: dark-blue silk, luxurious, never worn.
The next day he did not return my calls.
The same was true the following day.
And the one after that.
And the one after that.
Everyone at work tiptoed around me, being weirdly polite. My parents kept calling me to come over for dinner. My sister sent texts saying things like, “You don’t have to tell me what happened but I’m here for you.” My brothers wanted to know, Who should we go beat up?
I called my friend the cardiologist, who didn’t know anything, but contacted him after we spoke. All he would say was that he’d discovered the two of us were not compatible. She cried and apologized for misdiagnosing his basic character, in the first place.
The day before I drove to his building and couldn’t park, I got home to find that he had mailed me a box of things I had left in his apartment: a toothbrush and my own brand of toothpaste, a pair of extra collars, a hooded sweatshirt, the blanket I’d bought special for going up to his roof. And also the gifts I had given him: a waterproof apron because he was always soaking himself when he watered plants, a rare book of botanical drawings, a bedside reading lamp because he hadn’t had one for my side of his bed, and a polo shirt, because he’d suggested he should wear one when I brought him to meet my family, even though he hated polo shirts.
I saw him again only once, that following winter. I happened upon him in an open area for people waiting to bring home patients who came in for day surgery. He looked startled to see me, as if he’d forgotten where I work.
He was waiting for a guy who lived alone in his building, in for a minor procedure. He was being a good neighbor, but it was certainly taking a long time. He had already asked two different nurses what was happening, and they both said, no problems, we’ll let you know when he’s ready.
I asked him if he’d like me to check on that man.
He shook his head no, looking baffled. What was I talk
ing about? They didn’t let in visitors, or he would have gone himself.
“But I can go anywhere,” I said.
I pointed to my collar, reminding him what it meant around here. I did so with a smile—yet I could see by his expression that I seemed to have made a wrong move.
He was on a cushioned bench with several other people. The waiting area was crowded. He was sitting at one end of the bench, looking up at me. He did not stand up. I’d been watching his face in the moment he heard me saying the words, “I can go anywhere.”
He had never wanted me to be someone who goes anywhere. That was exactly what his face was saying to me.
And oh, by the way, he was planning a move. He’d been offered a big space for his lab. By whom, and where, he didn’t say.
That evening, I went out to a bar with some nurses who were forever trying to get me out to a bar. They made me take off my collar. For the first time since I was in high school, I had too much to drink. I had to be driven home.
And what was it like to show up in Pastoral Care the next morning, bedraggled, wearing sunglasses because light hurt my eyes?
This was just a little while before we knew about the swing of the ax. The Head came over to me at the coffee maker. He didn’t know anything, but he knew everything. He opened the drawer of the coffee table and took out a bottle of Advil, opened it, and handed me two.
The chaplain of the shortbread cookies had just walked in carrying a paper plate containing a huge cinnamon bun, still warm, glazed, multi-coiled. It was obvious he meant to take it to his own office, but after glancing at me, he put the plate in my hand. He apologized for his cookie tin being empty that day. He wanted to know if I’d like him to get me some scrambled eggs.
“You look so hungry,” he had said.
I declined the eggs, but wolfed down the bun. They never asked, “Are you broken?” I will always remember how grateful I’d been, for that.
“Pizza!” called out a voice from my office doorway. “This the right place?”
Eighteen
I only had loose change for a tip.
