The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  “And Joe felt the same way?” Jim asked.

  “Even more so,” she said. She waved her hand. “He had this spiel about the marriage being a baby. About how we were lucky because everybody else was just distracted from the important thing, which was making something together that would last and last and last. What do regular babies do, anyway, but use you, and grow up, and move away, and stop calling? Then it’s just the two of you again, and you’ve wasted all your time and love on these terrible creatures who are always going to love somebody else more than you. Ugh! He thought we were lucky because we got to skip that part.”

  “You were lucky,” Jim said. “You had each other.”

  “Well, I could take or leave the metaphor stuff,” she said. “ ‘Stop hurting the baby!’ he said sometimes, meaning ‘Don’t make me want to divorce you!’ Joe was the big-idea man in the business. He came up with the slogans and the business plans—I just cut the hair and recognized the bullshit. The part I liked was the idea that if we just tried hard enough, the baby would grow up one day, and unlike a horrible, selfish child, eventually the marriage would take care of us. And I suppose it did.”

  “But that’s beautiful,” Jim said.

  “It did the job,” she said flatly, “until now.” And then they were quiet until dinner.

  Jane edged past the lady in the aisle seat, her phone in one hand and her bag in the other, turning and half-falling into her seat by the window.

  “How do you do?” the woman asked, bobbing her head and smiling. Her yellow hair sat stiffly on her head, and curled on either side of her chin into two sturdy-looking handles.

  “Good,” Jane said, trying to make it sound like It’s good to be alone on the plane or How good it is that we’ve decided not to talk to each other today. Jim was the one who liked to talk to strangers. Still, she smiled at the woman, because she wasn’t exactly trying to be rude. The flight attendant came over to ask if they’d like something to drink before the plane took off. Jane shook her head, but the woman ordered du champagne. Jane called her husband.

  “You again!” he said when she answered.

  “Haha,” she said. “I have a couple minutes before they shut the door.”

  “How have you been since the last time we talked?”

  “Would you stop that, please?” She had spent the whole taxi ride from Paris to the airport on the phone with him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Safe flight. I love you.”

  “You, too,” she said. “Are you at work?”

  “Leaving in a minute,” he said. “I’m just sitting here.”

  “What time will you be home?”

  “Not sure. I might spend the night if it’s busy.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” she said. “Please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Jim.” The flight attendant brought Jane champagne as well, leaving it on her armrest and backing away with a smile. If she drank it, she would have to pee in an hour, defeating the purpose of dehydrating herself all day for the sake of her window seat. Her seatmate raised her own glass. “Today is the twenty-eighth, you know,” Jane said.

  “Is it?” he said, and then added, theatrically, “Is it?” Jane sighed. “I’m just kidding. I got us dinner reservations,” he said.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “You always forget this one.”

  “Yes, I did. And anyway, you always forget the other one.”

  “I don’t care about the other one,” she said. “You were asleep for that one. I was being crazy for that one.”

  “Well, I care about them both. And I did too make reservations.”

  “Okay,” she said, deciding not to challenge him by asking where they were eating. “They’re about to close the door.”

  “All right,” he said. “I love you. Safe flight.”

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  “I’m so glad I married you. Both times.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.” She hung up and turned her phone off, then picked up her champagne glass and leaned toward the window

  “Is it your anniversary?” her seatmate asked breathlessly.

  “Yes, it is,” Jane said.

  “Oh, how nice. How long?”

  “Eight years,” Jane said, though in fact it was eight only for the one anniversary, and nine for the other.

  “Oh, what’s that one? Macramé? Jute? Some kind of woven plant, I think. I can never keep track.”

  “Neither can my husband,” Jane said.

  “Or my husband,” the lady said. “But he’s very good with birthdays.” Jane did something not totally friendly with her lips and looked away, thinking that ought to signal the end of the conversation without being rude. But the woman said, “You must love him very much.”

  “Sometimes,” Jane said automatically, finishing her champagne in one long draw, and closing her eyes after putting the glass back on the armrest. The lady didn’t ask for details, and Jane was much happier anyway continuing this conversation with herself: Sometimes I love him so much I can hardly stand it. Sometimes it felt like the only purpose of her life was to hurry toward him, and sometimes it felt like the only purpose of her life was to hurry away. And wasn’t it like that for everyone? she asked.

  When Jim asked her to marry him—with a ring baked into some buttery naan at the Indian restaurant near her old Upper West Side apartment where they ate once a week during their long courtship—Jane might just have said No or Not right now or even Can I have some time to think about this? There were a hundred other options besides flight and silence.

  She could have said, I need to be alone for a few days. Or I’m just going to go to the bathroom for a moment to cry. Instead, she stared at him for a strange, timeless instant, panicked and still. Her field of vision seemed to crumble away from the periphery. Jim was making a very hopeful face—she couldn’t hear anything he was saying, but the way his mouth was moving and the way his eyebrows were reaching sincerely toward the ceiling made him look like he was singing barbershop quartet at her. Then she understood that he actually was singing to her, and the reason that the three waiters on duty that night had clustered so close around him was that they were singing too. She couldn’t really hear the song (it was “Heart of My Heart”) in the restaurant, but it would keep her up at night and become the theme song of Jim’s icu stay.

  She felt caught, as if Jim and these three nice Indian gentlemen had opened their mouths and poured not music but accusation out upon her, casting a spotlight on her hypocrisy, her insufficient affection, her cowardice and naïveté. The music finally stopped. Everyone in the restaurant was watching, gleeful with anticipation. Without saying a word, Jane stood, carefully folded her napkin upon her seat, and left the restaurant. She walked home and got straight into the tub. She was still hiding in the lukewarm water a half hour later when Jim, after he had settled the bill and explained to all his new Indian and non-Indian friends at Indus Valley that everything was perfectly all right, was hit by a taxi turning left off Broadway onto Ninety-Ninth Street.

  On the way up to the hospital she kept wondering, hysterically, if the taxi she was in was the one that had hit him, and she alternated, in her shouting at the driver, between telling him to slow down and be careful and to hurry up. She rushed up there only to find she couldn’t even see him—the trauma surgeon threw her out of the or. She had to stay in the waiting room, like a civilian. “But they have to let me help fix him,” she said calmly to the scrub nurse who hustled her out and stayed with her all during the first surgery, who didn’t leave her side until Jim was recovering in the surgical icu. She sat Jane down in a chair by Jim’s bed, and that’s where Jane stayed.

  That’s where her mother and Millicent found her when they arrived. Jane held Jim’s hand and glared at the monitors for week after week, he never emerging from his coma, she never emerging from her quiet hysteria, until she finally understood what she had to do.

  “I want us to get married
,” Jane said, standing up.

  “That’s wonderful,” said Millicent. “Do you hear that, buddy?” she said to Jim, leaning down to shout in his ear. “I told you she’d come around.”

  “Good, dear,” said her mother, giving Jane a hug. “That’s very good.”

  “Right now,” Jane said, not hugging her back. Her mother stiffened. Millicent frowned.

  “But Jim’s not awake yet,” her mother said.

  “And he won’t be,” Jane said. “Not until we’re married.”

  “Darling,” her mother said. “That’s just trauma and superstition talking.” She held Jane at arm’s length.

  “It’s not superstition,” Jane said. “It’s what I feel.”

  “Exactly,” her mother said. “And even if we could find someone to do the ceremony, how could Jim say yes?”

  “He already did,” Jane said. “Do you think I don’t know what he said? And you can do the ceremony.”

  “Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not being rational about this.”

  “You are going to do this for me!” Jane shouted, clutching at her mother’s shoulders and squeezing them until she could feel her bones.

  “Let’s just have a confab,” Millicent said gently, untangling the two of them and taking Jane’s mother outside. They came back pretty shortly. “First things first,” Millicent said. “We need to see about a dress for you.”

  It was easy enough to arrange. Jim wasn’t brain dead, but nobody on the icu team thought he was ever going to wake up. His poor brain had completed its heaving sigh, swelling up and then down, and now he was just lying there. Collegiality made Jane’s fellow physicians a little brutal with her (I’m going to tell it like it is, Jane, they’d say, because I know you can take it) but it also afforded her some autonomy.

  They did it as soon as Jane could change her clothes—Millicent found her a white tracksuit in the gift shop. Jim’s nurse was Jane’s witness, Millicent was Jim’s. Not that they needed witnesses. It didn’t have to be official in that way. The room was already full of flowers, but the only music they could get was a music thanatologist who had just finished harping somebody into the next life in the palliative care suite down the hall, but she could play “Heart of My Heart” after Jane hummed a few bars.

  “Dear friends,” her mother began, and then launched into an extemporaneous sermon about the nature of divine surprise. Jane wasn’t listening. She had too much to say to Jim, and she knew that time was running out. I’m so sorry, she told him. I didn’t know what I felt, but now I know what I feel. “Do you, Jane Julia Cotton,” her mother was asking her, “take this man to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health, to love, cherish, and worship, until death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Hurry up!”

  Her mother asked the corresponding question of Jim, and Millicent leaned down next to him as if to listen for his whispered reply. “He does,” she said. Jane’s mother told her she could kiss the groom, so she bent down to do it. “Careful!” the nurse whispered, anxious for his ventilator tube, but Jane was exquisitely gentle. With the tube in the way she couldn’t press both her lips to his, but she caught his lower lip in a sort of dry hug with her mouth. She thought it would be enough.

  Then everybody but the bride and groom wept gently, and the music thanatologist played the wedding march, as if Jane was going to pull up the cuffs of her sweatpants and rush in merry ecstasy out of the icu and the hospital. “Now wake up,” she said to him in tears, “so I can tell you how happy I am,” but really she was afraid he might just roll over and die.

  He didn’t die, but he didn’t wake up either. He just lay there, same as ever, for another two months, at which point he opened one eye and peered around the room, then closed it again. He did that for a couple of weeks, that single open eye like the periscope of his consciousness taking the lay of the world above to decide if it was safe to come up yet.

  The first thing he noticed, when he woke up fully, was how weak he was. He could barely lift his hands to look at them, and he noticed how much heavier the left was than the right before he saw his wedding ring. “Look at that,” he croaked, and Jane turned around from where she was digging through a bag. Then, in an instant, he knew he was in the icu, and could guess that he had had an accident. For some reason he thought it would be funny to play a joke on Jane, so he said, “Who are you?”

  That was a terrible idea. He’d never seen her cry so hard, or so despondently. Thirty seconds into my second chance, and I’m already fucking up! he thought, and then he was asleep again, exhausted by the effort of raising his hands to embrace his wife, which was what Jane kept calling herself.

  “But we’ll get married again,” she said, “so it’s real.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We’ll get married every day.”

  “Well,” she said. “It was pretty emotional. I don’t think I can handle it more than once a week.”

  “That’ll do,” Jim said. He pulled so weakly at her, he didn’t even know if she would feel it, but she came closer. “This is going to be totally awesome,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  But Jim still had months of rehab to get through, and it would be just over a year before they finally got married again. “We’ve become citizens of the icu,” he said to Jane over and over in the last week of his stay in the hospital.

  “You’re not in the icu anymore.”

  “You never really leave a place like that,” Jim said, sniffing his arm. “I’m going to smell like a hospital forever. I never smelled like a hospital when I just worked here. I’ve become one of those sad stories.”

  “No, you’re not,” Jane said.

  “Yes, I am,” Jim said. “I’m a sad story, but not a sad person. I’m a very happy person. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Jane said, leaning down to kiss him. “I’m happy too.” There was a knock on the door, and a man came in smiling.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m one of the chaplains. Would you like to chat?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” said Jim, with a little salute.

  The chaplain bowed and returned the salute, then withdrew from the room. Jane watched him go, eyes wide.

  “Don’t worry,” Jim said. “He told me I could say that. He comes by every day, and I tell him to fuck off. We have an understanding.” Which was true. Jim had told the man he could come see him every day, and in return the man had told Jim he could dismiss him any way he liked. “You can’t really tell the doctor or the nurse to fuck off,” he had said, laying a warm palm on Jim’s arm. “But you can tell me to fuck off anytime you like.”

  Jim couldn’t remember the chaplain’s name, but he liked to think it had been Dick, way back in his intern years. Dick said it couldn’t have been him because it was never his style to let someone tell him to fuck off every day. “You don’t understand,” Jim said. “We had an understanding!” And he imagined sometimes, a little wistfully, the conversation he and Dick might have had during those weeks in rehab when Jim was getting ready for his wedding—though it would be another whole year before he was well enough, and then another year after that before it was all arranged—learning to walk down the aisle, and button a tuxedo shirt, and speak his vows in a clear, strong voice. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had to wait five years to figure out I wanted to be a chaplain. And I think if I had been a chaplain sooner it would have made me a better husband.”

  “You always get everything backwards,” said Dick. “It’s being a better husband that makes you a better chaplain.” They were in the pastoral care office, alone since it was a Saturday afternoon and they were the only two chaplains on duty. Jim was looking for a car service to go fetch Jane from the airport that night and bring her to the restaurant.

  Jim was about to argue with Dick some more, but then his pager went off. Dick held out his ha
nd. “I’ll take that. Go get your wife some flowers. And not from the gift shop, either.” They left the office together, then split off, Dick heading left toward the main hospital and the icus, and Jim walking down the long hall toward the Broadway exit. He thought he should go home, since he suddenly felt too full of his own story, too eager to tell some stranger about his fragile and unbreakable marriage, to minister properly to anybody.

  By the time he reached the end of the hall, he had regained some of his confidence. He said to himself, I am going to bring my love for my wife into every room I visit today. He waved to the guard at the door and passed through, into the foyer. He stopped at the second set of double doors, almost into the afternoon sunshine. A lady was walking through the doors in the opposite direction, but she paused when she saw his face.

  “Whoa,” Jim said, putting a hand to his chest, feeling a strange poke at the heart. “What’s that?”

  “Come here much?” Jim whispered to Millicent, while they were waiting at the altar for Jane and her mother. He was trying not to look at all the people in the church. He couldn’t tell his side from Jane’s side all of a sudden, or remember if they had decided to segregate the guests like that.

  “Stop talking,” Millicent said through her smile. “People will think you’re having second thoughts.” When he had asked Jane’s mother a week before if it might not be bad luck to have a second wedding, she had replied that it was perfectly normal to want to cancel the wedding. It was perfectly normal to want to run away. Ponderously, she gave him permission to have those feelings, and after that Millicent started telling him, whenever she could lean in discreetly at his ear, how all sorts of things were perfectly normal to feel in the run up to the ceremony. It was perfectly normal, she said, to want to make a murder plan for each guest, or to wish the cake could be full of beetles, and it was perfectly normal to wish you could be married by a big red dildo instead of a priest.