Frank insisted that he didn’t care about the scars—and he seemed to find her desirable. But her own revulsion had him reminding her: if she wanted it, plastic surgery was an option.
As if she wanted any more surgery, any more prodding at her breasts—even if the intent was to rebuild her body.
No, she told him. There was no way she was going under the knife again.
She was post-trauma, she told herself. What she needed was time. The cancer was behind them—both it and the memories that had haunted her during treatment. The untroubled future spread out ahead of them. Everything would—eventually—be fine.
But despite her resolve, her body was her enemy. There was, just for instance, a night only recently, maybe just a few nights ago. She hadn’t been fully awake; she hadn’t known what had overcome her, but in the middle of sleep she had turned to her husband and readily aroused him. It had been so easy. Both of them were blinded by sleep; it was no time for conversation, and although intimacy had lately been lacking, there in the middle of the night familiarity and sheer desire had been enough.
It was only afterward that Maddie had fully awakened, and then it was in a post-coital exhaustion, slipping from the slender continent of his body to the bed sheets. It was in that brief awareness, as she turned onto her side and away from her husband, that she realized it was Vincent’s body she had loved in her mind, and she wondered if it always was.
21
Maddie tried lying: she was unbothered by her mind’s interposing Vincent in their bed. From a practical perspective, she told herself, it wasn’t altogether unnatural. Vincent’s body had been, in its way, her first male body. It had been the solid image of “male” against a backdrop of the concept of “maleness”: the straightness of the male form and its general solidity. Prior to Vincent, she had known “male” as father, grandfather, uncle, a teeming mass of boys that filled roughly half her experience in the school-day world and the world at large.
After Vincent, it was his frame that became the point of reference for Maddie. So another boy or man was shorter or taller than Vincent, more or less muscular, more or less fat. The eyes of this one were bluer or less so; that one’s eyes were brown and so also, somehow, wrong. Length of limb, jut of chin, even posture—all of this was determined by the plumb-line Vincent had set. Unwitting, she would interpret the male population by this standard. Even now the comparison was something she knew and could reflexively describe: when she met him, Frank was slightly shorter than Vincent and a touch more lean.
So it might be that her mind, returning to itself after trauma as if waking from a nightmare, would first recall Vincent.
But Maddie knew there was more to it than that. Vincent’s body had not only taught her about the male body, it had taught her about her own. By Vincent, Maddie had come to know the defining edges of herself: the skin of her upper arm and the shock of its meaningful brush with another. His hands taught her the curve of her back and his fingers the span of her waist. Even the contours of her own hand had been relatively unknown to her until he held it.
That recent dream of Vincent—was it a dream? She had been, at the very least, half-awake—felt almost like infidelity to Maddie.
She told herself that this was absurd: she hadn’t been unfaithful to Frank. It was Frank in the bed the whole time.
R
Frank continued to wait, ready for when Maddie wanted to communicate. But this readiness was empty if Maddie wasn’t interested, and she certainly didn’t seem to be. As the months rolled past them, Frank’s patience devolved into mute—he wouldn’t call it despair, exactly, but it was bordering somewhere near that.
Meanwhile their daily lives proceeded as demand required, and Maddie seemed fine on every front but for the talking part, that whole intimacy thing that had seemed to him the reason he got married in the first place. No, not the sex per se, but that and, yes, everything that comes with it: the knowing that Maddie loved him in a permanent kind of way; the sense of knowing Maddie and being known by Maddie, which included knowing each other’s faults. The kind of thing alluded to but never quite captured in books and movies. The kind of thing he had absolutely believed in and still did.
Which sometimes made him feel foolish.
And sometimes confounded him because they had been through the cancer together—and wasn’t that kind of suffering supposed to strengthen their relationship? Weren’t they supposed to emerge stronger from this?
Frank considered calling Father Tim, who had first engendered this vision of marriage within him. But he knew what Tim would say, and Frank was already covering the bases his friend would remind him to cover: that about staying committed and being loyal and simply continuing to try.
Moreover, a conversation with Tim or any good friend might inevitably result in Frank’s admitting something he never wanted to say: his needs weren’t being met.
No, Frank definitely could not talk with Tim about this. Years ago Tim had willingly determined with his priestly oath that his own needs would not be met—or would be met, mysteriously, by God. How could Frank look for sympathy from Tim here?
And what, in all honesty, did Tim really know about marriage?
Anyway, Frank wasn’t convinced that his sexual needs—or any of his needs at all—mattered. The last thing he wanted to be, especially after all they had been through—after all Maddie had been through—was needy.
So he resolved there was nothing for it but to press on and continue to wait it out. Maybe things wouldn’t return to exactly normal, and that would have to be okay. Meanwhile there was plenty to distract him. For example, he was coaching Jake’s Little League team, which meant two evenings a week and a game every Saturday. Maddie would bring Eli and Garrett to the games, and without turning around Frank would know they had arrived because of Eli’s cheering, which began as soon as he was in sight of the field.
Eli loved baseball; he loved it even more than Jake did, and he cheered from the stands like a player would: “Batter batter batter batter batter!” He made the calls on the pitches before the umpire did, and he pressed his belly against the fence, his fingers curled into the chain link. Frank loved seeing Eli stand there in his baseball hat. The boy was scarcely aware that his dad was a coach because he was lost in his dreams, envisioning himself in the major leagues.
Garrett was a little bit young to pay attention, and Frank admired how Maddie anticipated this, bringing along a small cooler of snacks and a bag of toys just to get him through the six innings. She wasn’t much of a cheer-aloud kind of mom, but she planted herself on one of the lower seats in the bleachers (so she could get after Garrett if he were to wander away) and paid close attention to the game. When Frank turned to look at her, she would meet his gaze and smile.
It reminded him of that time she unexpectedly showed up at his tennis match. He had been playing poorly, and it was the beginning of the second set when he happened to look up and see her sitting in an upper corner of the stands. This was in college; they were barely dating at the time, but already Frank really liked her, so seeing her there was a pleasant surprise. She had smiled and waved, just the slightest lift of her hand—which made him tease her later that it looked as though she didn’t want to be noticed.
This little taunt had embarrassed her. She said it was true—she didn’t really want to be noticed. Frank hadn’t exactly invited her to the match, she pointed out; he had only mentioned it. And she didn’t know if maybe tennis was like golf and the players needed silence for focus? Maybe fans weren’t supposed to be cheering from the stands?
Frank had chuckled to himself, delighted: Maddie took everything seriously, even attendance at a tennis match, and he told her that she hadn’t broken his focus at all. Instead she had motivated him to play better, he said. In a flood of transparency, Frank told her that her presence had actually colored the rest of his game. From the moment he saw her, he had been conscious of her sitting there, and more than winning he had wanted to impress her and make h
er believe that he was a great tennis player.
Frank said all of this as they stood together by the tennis court. They had only been on one or two dates, and for a moment after he’d said it, he blanched at this torrent of truth-telling and attendant exposure. But Frank was banking on honesty. After dating Francesca, he had decided that honesty in relationships would be a requirement.
Happily, Maddie had responded well. She smiled, blushing, and asked him to give her tennis lessons.
They played tennis often that spring, and Maddie moved quickly from Frank’s few lessons to their actually being able to play—she always apologizing for not being very good, believing that her game was nothing like a challenge to Frank and deciding that his praise was mere flattery. But it wasn’t, he told her, time and again. She was good.
He would tell her the same thing years later, even when they hadn’t played together in a long time. He would tell her that now with no intent to flatter her—because it was true. Maddie was an excellent tennis player—or had potential to be. She was naturally athletic. He had seen it and he knew it and he was glad to see—so far, anyway—that they had passed this athleticism down to their sons.
Other than Maddie, the only person he had tried to teach to play tennis had been Francesca, and maybe it was Francesca and not Maddie who had—by blunt comparison—made his wife’s natural abilities obvious. Because somehow the former lover always informs one’s expectations of the next. And Francesca had been miserable at tennis. She had been miserable when it came to athletic effort of any kind. How had he ever been able to cajole her onto the court in the first place?
It had been some conversation about tennis as an ancient game, a classic. Something about Wimbledon or tennis in Europe, he recalled, that impressed her. Because Francesca was never one to move outside her comfort zone with something like this (and tennis was definitely outside of Francesca’s comfort zone: he could see her now, surprising in her shorts and tennis shoes, she who was forever clad in long skirts and sandals and jingling ankle bracelets, her soft skin pale in the sunlight), and yet somehow he convinced her that she should learn to play. And so she met him down on the courts with her long curly hair piled up in some kind of elastic band behind her head, and the lessons he tried to give were a sorry failure.
It was a lack of coordination, nothing that practice couldn’t overcome. Frank had been earnestly trying to teach her, but Francesca couldn’t seem to take it seriously. After an hour or so of what appeared to be half-hearted effort, Francesca proceeded, in an amused and mocking tone, to criticize it all: sports, the game of tennis that Frank loved, and then, ever so gently, Frank himself.
Frank was accustomed to this criticism—not necessarily at things so close to himself, but to the ridicule in general. He didn’t actually perceive it as ridicule at the time, but rather as evidence of Francesca’s intellect and honed tastes. Taken in by her beauty, he had been a ready convert to her genius—or what Francesca implied as her genius. From the vantage point of superior intellect, Francesca derided all kinds of things, and as they climbed the hill together from the tennis court, it was American sport that fell under her critique. No, she declared, American sports weren’t worth her time or anyone else’s. If you wanted to find a real game to play, she told Frank, then you’d be better off with something uncorrupted by American assimilation, something completely British, like rugby or polo. Yes, polo really was the game to play. Anything, she said, involving horses.
Frank couldn’t help but mark the development in her argument from culture of origin to equine inclusion, as if she were making this up as she went along. But he hadn’t mounted a defense. At that point in their relationship, at that point in his life, he didn’t wish to mount any defense against Francesca. Instead, “Why horses?” he had asked. And then she produced a theory so fully crafted and, at the time, believable that he wondered where she had gotten it—perhaps some ancient Greek philosopher, some long-lost disciple of Aristotle? She argued that true athleticism ought to require the harmony of movement between man and beast, that athleticism within an athlete alone wasn’t enough, that it was true triumph over nature if one could combine one’s efforts with that of a dumb animal. Such harmony, exerted in joint competitive endeavor, she said, was true sport.
It was vintage Francesca: opinionated, virulently critical, and passionately self-assured, all done up with impressive vocabulary. At the time, Frank found the critique disheartening—and also somewhat suspicious. Could she possibly be right about it? Far too many people enjoyed sports with nary an animal in sight. And was the meaning of sport somehow bound up in a quest for triumph over nature? But Francesca was so sure of herself. She spoke with such confidence. And she was erudite; he would give her that. At the time, Francesca was the most well-read person he had ever known.
Years later Frank still considered her words. Watching the Kentucky Derby, he seriously weighed the united skills of man and horse; he attended a polo match or two. And then he had dismissed it as ridiculous. Of course it had been ridiculous. She had been ridiculous. Why had he put up with that nonsense, Frank wondered to himself. Because he had been in love with Francesca—or had imagined he was in love with her, anyway. But what had been so captivating? Was it merely the look of her? Her flowing clothes; her white, dazzling teeth; the natural ringlets of her hair and the way it fell over his hands. He could grasp it in fistfuls, pressing it up against the back of her head as he kissed her, and even so her hair would fall out of his hands and extend past her shoulders. There was something luxurious about it, abundant and fragrant.
Her skin, too. Fair and soft, like it had never seen the sun, like she had never done any kind of hard labor, had never scrubbed a sink or toilet, never possibly helped stack firewood or even ridden a bike—despite the fact she had grown up in a suburb on the east side of Cleveland. No, there was something impossibly exotic about Francesca. She was different: smarter, more profoundly perceptive than anyone else—and she had chosen him as her lover.
That was it. Francesca had chosen him and had made him reconsider himself, even to the point (for a time) of giving up tennis. Due to Francesca, Frank had begun to think that he might become someone significant. He might leave behind him what he had never—until Francesca—considered leaving behind: a middle-America upbringing; a quotidian, middle-class career; a life of mediocrity. Francesca had exposed him to possibility and had made him feel worthy of it. There, in the first semester of his freshman year, in a small college in the rolling farmland of Pennsylvania, Frank had broadened his horizons. He considered learning to read Hindu poetry, or trying to master French so he could read in its mother tongue what Francesca declared was the world’s best political philosophy. He could—and should—do great, brilliant things.
All of it had been foolishness—classic college foolishness. Not the poetry or the French, but the notion that living in the Midwest was somehow inadequate, or that tennis, bereft of horse, wasn’t a worthwhile game.
Then came the memory—unbidden, detached—of a time he had awakened from napping next to her in her bed. She was reading something, holding the book above her naked body, and although this was one of perhaps a dozen times he fell asleep in her dorm room, he remembered that afternoon clearly, and the way the sunlight fell across the blond hairs of her forearm.
He didn’t need to be thinking about this right now.
Right now it was Maddie—and it had always been Maddie and would always be Maddie. When he met her during the fall of his junior year, thoughts of Francesca had fractured and drifted separately away, like an ice floe gone to pieces. Their recent return, ambushing him now that they were beyond the breast cancer ordeal, was an unnecessary complication in his waiting process, this hopeful time when he and Maddie were trying to get their life back.
And they would do it. Frank knew this. He claimed its reality with renewed faith. He heard the doctor’s low tones and read the concise paragraphs in the guidebooks and knew that, despite the warnings, he and Mad
die would be restored to one another in what had always been the best friendship of his life: a union and intimacy that Francesca never could have given him.
He offered himself what evidence he could: it wasn’t much, but only a few nights ago Maddie had awakened him in the dead of night. There were no words, but she had aroused him and then taken all he had to give her. Afterward, Frank had drifted back to sleep in a kind of intoxicated joy.
Everything was going to be all right.
22
Maddie had been Catholic for more than a decade, but lately she was obsessively aware that her church building seemed riddled with—how else to say it?—bodies. At the ends of hallways, in quiet alcoves, statues dotted the building: physical, three-dimensional portrayals of that saint praying and this one saying a blessing.
This had been new and slightly strange to her when she first started at church with Frank, as the Protestant churches of her experience had a statue-free aesthetic, but she had grown accustomed to it. Now she could reflexively identify this saint or that both in her own church building and in others. She had become mindless of their presence.
Yet since her cancer ordeal, the statuary had become almost oppressive to her. She knew it was irrational, but seeing the statues now felt like forced confrontation with the physical reality of the saints—as if their memory wasn’t enough, as if recalling their lives, deeds, and deaths was inadequate to encourage the soul. Popular culture glorified the body for its sex appeal, and must the church also venerate the corporeal form? Wasn’t it the stuff of the soul that mattered?
It was a strange collusion, Maddie thought, and she knew her perception was faulty, as was her accompanying sense that this confrontation was aimed specifically at her and not the general population. Again, she realized and told herself, it was the cancer that did this to her. It was that isolation, continued.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 24
