Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

half-glasses screwed down on his pug-dog nose, has been reading from Madame Bovary, and I have been dreading how the pages in the oversized large-print edition have built up on the left-hand side, because I know down at the sordid bottom of that book lies Emma’s nauseating deathbed scene.

  I’d much rather be hearing my favorite tale from Flaubert, the one about Saint Julian the Hospitator—though once I start thinking of it, remembering it, I realize it is even more disturbing—and I am glad I was unable to find it at the library or used bookstore.

  At the end of Julian’s prodigal life, when he has finally learned what humility and guilt and grief and all those delightful Christian qualities are really about, he is visited by a truly repulsive beggar, a leper, who asks for shelter in Julian’s riverside hut. The beggar is so very, very cold, he smells foul, he is horribly malnourished, he is probably dying—and it is all Julian can do to ease his discomfort. Take off your clothes, the beggar says to Julian at last, and lie on me to warm me. This Julian does without even a paragraph’s indecision, even though the leper’s skin is loathsome and his hundred sores weep freely as a hundred eyes. And so the beggar goes further: Place your lips to my lips. Hold me closer. Give me all your body’s fire. They embrace, they kiss, and something miraculous happens which cannot be paraphrased or summarized… and that is the wonder of Flaubert’s tale and why Julian becomes a saint in stained-glass.

  Meanwhile, here on the Cape, it is still ripe summer: raspberries I’d left off picking earlier are spilled across the grass like a lost rosary, ragged clematis and trailing ivy drape the stone fence, sailboats and seagulls flock together in the harbor below us, a tugboat sounds a courteous tucket, and we are all of us very much alive. Emma Bovary has taken to her bed, and the good doctor is only now realizing all those years he has lost because of her, for her, to her. My brother, benevolent Simon, myself, unhappy Emma, her husband, and even Saint Julian and King Richard somewhere are all of us alive, together, on this good green earth. For an afternoon, a moment, an eternity, if all are the same to an indifferent universe.

  An Afterword

  Guy on the cross to the right turns to the guy on the cross in the middle and says, Hey, pardner, ain’t we met somewheres before? This is how some long joke must start or end, I’m sure, but nevertheless, it is the actual situation at hand. Unfortunately, the one in the middle doesn’t remember, or else just doesn’t want to carry on a neighborly conversation at this time.

  The one on the left just looks on, apparently not knowing whether or not to act too interested. Yep, I betcha, says the man on the right—you’re the feller what done raised me up from the dead! (I’m not sure where the accent comes from, but nevertheless, it’s part of the story.) Well, howd’ya like that?! he goes on, even if the one in the middle continues to look away, across the sunlit rooftops of the city below, so lovely. Wasn’t for your meddlin’ ’round, I wouldn’t be here, y’know, and you can just imagine the sweat, the lacerations, the filth, the flies, the soldiers eating their lunch in the shade of the tallest crosses, even a weeping whore or two—whatever else with which you might want to decorate the scene. Heck, I ain’t surprised one iota to see you here. I done been a good man afore you raised me up again and left me stark alone, and there my kin all around asking me this and that and treating me like I’d gone all funny in the noggin. This one just won’t shut up, and so the one in the middle sighs, whispers something, and drops chin to spindly chest. Don’tcher remember? Gone to blazes, leaving me high and dry, you did, and me all newly born like and with a mean rumblin’ in my guts. So’s I leave home, got to steal every crusta bread I eat, and never larnin’ nothin useful but how to kick in a door or kick in a haid. So I’m doin’ this and doin’ that, just achin’ to fill my belly, though I’d been better off kept dead, dad blame it! Then ’long comes these bastards up and arrest me, so here I am again, but you gotta say I make one dandy sidekick… The merest breeze fondles his spittled beard, a fly lights on his nose, and he realizes just how quiet the place is, quiet as a marketplace after the last stall has closed, quiet as a house just after it’s been robbed. Leave well enough alone, my ol’ ma used to always… Hey, you all right? Cat got your tongue? Ah, chin up, feller, can’t be all that bad… Still, ’spose I can’t blame you, how’s even a preacher-man gonna know when things get right out of hand, eh?

  Game Over

  There Siddhârtha stood gazing at his beautiful loved ones, and his heart grieved. The pain of parting overcame him powerfully. Although his mind was determined that nothing, be it good or evil, could shake his resolution, the tears came freely from his eyes…

  Look about you and contemplate life! Everything is transient and nothing endures.

  —from The Gospel of Buddha

  “Three to four weeks, a month at best.”

  Too late for chemo, and surgery would, at this stage, be too invasive. “We’d like to say eight weeks, but that would be lying to you.” Such a proposal was so ridiculous he almost laughed out loud. Later, crossing back over the Charles River to Cambridge, he did just that, though at the time he had listened solemnly to the doctors, the way one is supposed to, and looked at their tedious readouts and cloudy X-ray sheets and nodded and thanked them. Thanked them for what?

  He told no one. Once he and his sister had been close, but that was quite a while ago, before their falling-out over Kai or young men like Kai, and she was back in Nebraska now with her own family and cares. The parents had been gone for more than a decade; something similar had taken them just as quickly, if not so early in life, so what the doctors said wasn’t quite the surprise it might have been. The same with two of his grandparents—obviously, it ran in their family. In a way he almost felt relieved, having this chronic pain in his stomach explained, and his medicine cabinet was well-stocked now with palliatives and painkillers to make the next three or four weeks, a month at best, tolerable, even pleasant in a perverse kind of way. When he needed them, the hospice workers would assume control; he’d been promised a morphine drip and round-the-clock attendance. All the wonders of a good health plan. He knew it needn’t be like dying at all, but more like being laid in your cradle and rocked gently to sleep. That was the way it had been for his parents, and later he and his sister had honestly felt that they’d done a good deed—like helping a dog or cat which had been struck by a car out of its misery.

  As with the doctors, he’d listened patiently to the nurses’ aides and terminal care volunteers at the hospital and the clinic. They were kind, they meant well; their cool fingers clutched his fingertips whenever they met. But, all the same, whenever they talked about him— about his body—it was as if they were talking about someone or something else, just out of earshot. Maybe that was why they tended to talk so low, almost whispering at times. So as not to rouse or worry the other—the real cause for all their concern. He took their brochures and books by nurse-practitioners, promised to see clergy if he needed to (he never felt more like an atheist!), left them the way a concerned parent might leave a teacher after discussing a particularly problematic yet promising student. How could he ever let them know how much he wanted to laugh about it all?

  This detachment he felt from others, even from his own body, was nothing new; it only seemed to have accelerated since Tsu-Chi had gone back to Guangzhou to teach. That had been late last summer, over three months ago, and their email had already dwindled to cursory updates, sometimes just jokes or Flash animations forwarded from others, once or twice a week. Habitually signing off with “Love” seemed superfluous. Of course, teachers were worked very hard in China, but that wasn’t the entire excuse. By July they’d already been going for as much as three or four days without really talking—Tsu-Chi so busy with wrapping up his studies, himself with overtime, as usual, at Bits and Bytes. When they lay in bed beside the other, it was as if they’d already parted company. That, he hadn’t been surprised by; it had happened often enough with other lovers in the past�
�but there had been a new kind of poignancy in the stale summer air with the days so rapidly shortening and half of Tsu-Chi’s baggage already packed, sitting there in the hall like visitors who’d overstayed their welcome.

  Regardless, Tsu-Chi was the one person he could imagine telling now. Distance, both geographic and emotional, would make it easier. Everyone at the magazine thought he was taking a month off because he hadn’t taken a vacation in almost three years, and if he didn’t take it soon, he might lose all the weeks the magazine owed him, with new management taking over. A few times he’d even dropped hints to Tsu-Chi; he told him that he was “dying to leave” this place, that the pain in his stomach was promised to be gone soon for good. After all, it was Tsu-Chi who had forced him to schedule a doctor’s appointment for the first time in five years. In a way, he could even blame Tsu-Chi for any anxiety he was feeling now. Had he not received a diagnosis, he could have just dropped dead some day soon without having wasted any time worrying.

  A year previous, when he and Tsu-Chi had both still been like just-unwrapped presents