“No thanks,” he calls in from his study. His voice is not playful, and after a moment I hear his door close quietly. I know he finds all this repugnant, and why should he not? Why should he have to share it with me?
He’s not the only one. My friend Sarah came over one morning, and when she saw my syringes in their bags on the counter she jumped nervously behind my back. “I don’t want to look at them,” she explained.
I begin to wonder if I should wear a bell, to warn normal people of my approach. I feel frightened and isolated. I can see I am alone here.
Last night in bed, when Mark was ready to go to sleep, he closed his Kierkegaard and set it on his bedside table beside the clock.
“That’s it for me,” he said. He took off his glasses and rubbed fiercely at the bridge of his nose. He put his glasses on top of his book and turned off his light.
When he turned over on his side, toward me, I was waiting for him.
“Put your arms around me,” I said, and my husband did this at once, gathering me wholly against him. My face pressed close into his chest, surrounded by his comfort, his healthy body. I said, “Tell me I’m going to get well.”
I needed to hear the words.
I felt Mark’s hand on the back of my head, stroking my hair. “You’re going to get well,” he said.
“Say it again,” I said, pressing my face against his chest.
Tonight I’m alone. Mark’s away at a conference, but a visiting nurse, Ginger, is coming. It’s her second visit, she came once before, early on, to change the bandages. Now she’s going to change the tubes. I’m uneasy about this, as I don’t know what it means. Will she pull out the whole long snake that has burrowed its way so deep into my interior? Drag it from its secret nest above my heart? It’s frightening to have it in there, but it would be frightening, too, to have it moved.
Still, I’m looking forward to seeing Ginger: I know I’ve done well, and I’m proud of myself. I’m looking forward to her praise: I’m a good patient. The pains are mostly gone, and both their arrival and their departure are proof of my prowess. The opening where the line enters my skin is pale and healthy, not inflamed. Each morning I have performed the infusion successfully, sending the golden tide deep into my interior. Each day, connecting the tiny spiral chambers, screwing them into the closed valves, unlocking the entrance to my veins, plugging myself into the heavy golden globe, I feel the elixir rush silently into my bloodstream and I feel charged with victory. I feel the spirochetes failing against this magnificent onslaught: they are overwhelmed, undone. I know we’ll be victorious, and my nurse knows it too. She is the agent of my healing. Her presence plays a part, it will make this real. She’ll infuse me with hope and conviction.
Around eight o’clock, Ginger arrives. She opens the back door and bustles cheerfully into the kitchen. “Hi there,” she says, boisterously good-natured. The dogs sniff her, wagging their tails politely. “Good dog,” she says crooningly, leaning unctuously over them and patting their heads too hard, “good dog.” Ginger is in her early thirties, thickset, with bushy brown hair in a wild shoulder-length aura. She’s wearing a knitted wool dress, a heavy sweater, and dark clunky shoes. She’s somehow powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull.
Ginger sets down her bag and takes off her padded jacket, already talking. “I just came from an auction in Poughkeepsie,” she says chattily. “It was so fun.”
“Great,” I say. “Did you get anything?”
“A rocker,” she says emphatically, pausing to look up at me, delighted I’ve asked. “A porch rocker. It’s real old and funky. I really love it.”
“Great,” I say again.
I don’t care what she bought, I’m so pleased to see her that she could read aloud from the telephone book. I listen happily as she gabs, watching her take out a big plastic packet, sealed and sterile. She spreads it open on the kitchen table—it is full of small intricate objects. I sit down. Outside it is turning dark, and we lean together under the hanging lamp. I lay my arm out on the table and roll up my sleeve. Ginger now takes off her big sweater and tosses back her heavy mass of hair. There is a lot of her at that table, breathy, fleshy, bulky. I wish her hair were in a bun. I wish she were lean and smooth, clipped and sterile, in a white uniform.
“So, how have you been?” she asks bumptiously.
“Fine,” I say with pride. “Some aches and pains in my joints, but that doesn’t bother me.”
Ginger shakes her head fondly. “My patients who have this love feeling achy,” she says, as though this were an endearingly foolish trait. “They think it means they’re getting better.”
I smile with her: I know they’re right.
Ginger opens her sterile packets, ripping back adhesive strips, putting on thin gloves. I am nervous about this procedure, anxious about the hidden snake, fearful of what she is about to do. Ginger yanks off the bandage over the plastic shunt where it enters my skin. As her hands near the opening, I turn rigid. She stops.
“Where does it hurt?” she asks.
“It doesn’t,” I say. “I’m just wary.” In fact I am terrified.
“You think I’m going to pull the adhesive back against the tube,” she says indulgently. “We’re taught as rookies always to pull with the tube. You pull against it”—she makes a sudden ripping gesture, as though she is about to jerk the unprotected tube from where it snakes into my skin—“and you’d pull the shunt right out of your arm. Like, that is not therapeutic.”
I say nothing, trying to calm my heartbeat. My whole system is running on alarm, my heart is pounding. That dangerous gesture, the perilous mimicking of violence, has shocked me. She now begins to do delicate things to the tube. I don’t want to watch, and to distract myself I look at her face.
“Do you do this a lot?” I ask.
She told me before how grateful her patients are, and I want to hear stories of her successes. I want to hear how this disease is vanquished, how good she is at her task, how powerful and inexorable this treatment is. I am greedy for these stories, I want to count myself among this healing crowd.
Ginger looks up. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I do chemotherapy all day long.”
I frown: this isn’t a word I want to hear. This is not a group I want to belong to.
“No,” I say. “I mean do you do this, treatment for my disease, often?”
“Oh, yes,” Ginger says again. She bends over the tube again. Her heavy hair falls over her shoulder, hanging in a bristly thicket over the instruments. I can smell it. “In fact I have one patient who lives right near you. He’s been on intravenous treatment for two years.”
“Two years?” I say. I’ve been told my treatment will last six weeks.
“Yes,” she says, shaking her head. “He’s in terrible shape. He’s had your disease for years and it wasn’t treated right away. He’s nearly paralyzed. He’s trying oxygen chamber treatments now. Nothing really seems to help him.”
I say nothing. I wish she weren’t bending so closely over my arm, which lies bare and vulnerable beneath her fleshy face. The transparent tube doubles down beneath my skin and disappears. The whole region of my arm twitches with alarm, with the extremity of its exposure. If she were to do anything now, just jostle the tube accidentally, the possibilities of pain are horrifying. The possibilities are ones I cannot permit myself to think of: infection, the lethal transmission of things directly to my heart, my poor vulnerable heart, with the snake dangling its toxic head directly over its chambers. I feel as though everything now is dangerous, that our passage together through this process has become perilous. Each step is crucial.
Ginger shakes her head again. “No, this is really a terrible disease,” she says.
I cannot bear to hear what she is saying, it is dangerous for me to hear this. I say rudely, “Don’t you have any better stories?” My arm, in her hands, feels exposed and frightened.
She looks up. “About this disease? No. If it isn’t treated right away it’s really
terrible. You see, it mutates in your system.”
I stare at her, appalled, willing her to stop telling me these things.
She looks earnestly at me, her huge bristling hair surrounding her face. “What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren’t treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease. Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different. The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system. This man has it in his spinal cord, and it’s gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms. Now he’s going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they’re treating their own diseases.”
I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror.
As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defense-less system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain. Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.
All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished. I hate the words she is saying, I hate what she is doing to me. I want to rip the tubing out of my arm, I want to take everything she has touched and throw it from me and order her from my house. She is casting a spell, she is cursing my body, she is destroying the health and vigor of my flesh, she is shattering my hope. She is declaring the futility of everything I am struggling to achieve, she is showing me a future of misery and despair. She is deriding my belief in the golden tide. I hate her more than I could have imagined possible.
Looking down at my arm, I say in a strained voice, “I don’t think you should talk this way to your patients.”
Alarmed, she looks up. “What does your doctor tell you?”
“He doesn’t talk to me like this,” I say, my voice choking. “And you should never talk like this to a patient.”
“I’m sorry,” Ginger says. She is clearly upset. “I’m a very sensitive person. I wouldn’t have upset you if I had known.”
“I’ve had this disease for ten years and it hasn’t been treated,” I say. I am struggling, I am desperate to keep from crying. “I don’t want to hear about this.”
Shaken, Ginger bends again over the tubing. She is not touching the long snake, as it turns out. She’s replacing only the outer section of it, the bit that goes from the clave to the junction, but I now hate having her touch me. She is contaminating me, her touch is dangerous, poison to my body. Her touch is a curse on me. I imagine tearing everything out of my arm, flinging the transparent coils away from me onto the floor.
She works for a few seconds in silence, then starts up again. “Last time I came,” she says carefully, “we talked about your daughter, remember? Who has this too, right? And was treated for it?”
How can she not have understood me? Does she imagine I want to hear this about my daughter?
“I said I don’t want to talk about this,” I say again.
I am now swollen, huge with wrath and despair and grief. I am outraged that she should choose to use her power over me in this way, that she should have come to me disguised as a healer and have revealed herself instead as a black curse, an agent of doom and anguish. I want her to get out of my kitchen, out of my house, off my property. I want to sic the dogs on her. I sit in raging silence while she finishes. She pads heavily back and forth, finishing up, throwing things away. Her head is down, her face averted, she is clearly upset. I think she’s crying. I don’t care.
I want only to control my tears, to keep from breaking down in her presence, to achieve merely that, and in that one small thing I am victorious.
Assez
That summer we rented a house in France, with friends.
It was Steven who found the real estate agent. She sent us photographs, and Steven and I spent an evening in Westchester, looking at bright glimmering images of Provence. We sat at the kitchen table, shuffling the pictures back and forth, and finally Steven slid one over to me.
“This looks nice,” he said.
I held the photograph up to study: it was a long farmhouse of golden stone, with a faded orange tile roof. In front of it was a flat stretch of pale gravel, shaded by wide trees. The swimming pool was shimmering turquoise, surrounded by high green hedges; along the garden paths were cypress trees—cool dark sentinels against a light-filled landscape.
I nodded: it looked like paradise. Also, I would have agreed with anything Steven said then.
We were the first to arrive. We took the overnight flight to Nice, and then rented a car at the airport. Dizzy with sleep lack and jet lag, we set out across the bottom of Provence to the village of Saint-Emilion, between Aix and Avignon. It was a three-hour trip on the crowded highway at eighty miles an hour, German cars surging terrifyingly past us, the hot glare of the Midi sun in our eyes. Along the highway were enigmatic messages in lowercase letters. BASTIDE ANCIENNE, one sign announced austerely, and we searched among the hillsides until we made out, for a moment, a distant stone silhouette. At Salon, we turned off the highway, and drove more slowly across a strange flat landscape: dusty fields, slightly ragged, empty in the sun. In the distance was a range of steep miniature mountains with bare jagged peaks: the Alpilles.
When we finally drove into the little stone courtyard of our house, it was early afternoon, and we were dazed with speed and heat and fatigue. Steven turned off the car and we sat still for a moment. Everything was silent in the afternoon heat, and the air shimmered. On two sides of the courtyard were the rough stone walls of the rambling house; beyond the other walls we could see the narrow silvery leaves of olive trees. All around us we heard a weird high insect shrill.
The front door was unlocked, and we stepped into the cool stone darkness of the hall. The shutters were closed against the sun, and the whitewashed walls were muted and mysterious after the bright light outside. The house was quiet, the air dry and sweet and aromatic. Steven was beside me, and he leaned over to set down a suitcase. As he straightened, his face moved into a soft shaft of light from a crack in the shutters.
Steven is tall and rangy, with dark hair and eyes, and thick beetling eyebrows. He is an intense man, with a dark and forceful manner, and there are times when his darkness and forceful-ness are frightening. But just then, the beam illuminated a small intimate portion of his face: the tender hollow of darkened skin around his eye, damp with the heat. Below the clustered lashes was the liquid brown gleam of the eye itself, innocent and steady. I could smell his skin, the dense delicious musk my husband gave off when he was tired and sweaty. The sense of his presence, so vivid and so deeply known, gave me a surge of happiness, and I nearly reached out to touch him.
“Bonjour!” A woman called from inside the house, and we heard light clopping footsteps. Madame Garcin, the real estate agent, was in her fifties, with dark narrow eyes and a thick waist. She wore gold-rimmed glasses, a wrinkled linen dress, and high-heeled mules.
“Bonjour, madame,” Steven said carefully, in his terrible French. He gave a courteous nod. “Nous sommes les Winstons.”
I can’t speak French. I can read it and understand it, but I can’t speak it, and I don’t. Steven can’t really speak it either, but he does. He’ll say anything, he has no fear. Right then he was rumpled and travel-stained: a dark beard was starting to thicken on his cheeks, and his sweaty shirtsleeves were rolled up. But still he looked easy and confident, and I was proud of him for speaking so freely, with that terrible accent, without embarrassment or hesitation. I was proud of him for being so steady and American, for being so sure of himself, and of who we were: Nous sommes les Winstons.
Madame Garcin showed us through the house. The downstairs rooms were cool and dim, with dark Provençal furniture set against rough whitewashed stone walls. The bedrooms upstairs were airy and pleasant, with high ceilings and faded toile curtains. The place felt clean and polished, and the red tile floors gave off a muted sheen.
Downstairs, Steven gav
e Madame Garcin the rental money, and she stood at the hall table to count it. She shifted the bills rapidly through her fingers and whispered French numbers under her breath. When she finished she straightened.
“Merci, monsieur,” she said. She held out her hand, standing very straight. “Au revoir, monsieur, madame. Que vous soyez contents ici.”
May you be happy here: I liked the way the French word joins the loose exuberance of happiness with the meeker and more domestic notion of contentment. And I felt graced by her wish. There is something charged and magical about a stranger wishing you well, like a traveler on the road in a fairy tale. It was a good omen, I thought, to have the first person we met wishing us happiness. We thanked Madame Garcin, and she clopped briskly to the front door, and then Steven and I were alone.
We had chosen the bedroom overlooking the garden, the pale blurred rows of santolina, the purple masses of lavender, the enigmatic cypresses. I hoped we’d chosen not just the view but the bed: it was the only double in the house.
It had been months since Steven and I had actually needed a double bed, months since we had actually “slept together.” What we did was sleep apart, in the same bed. We did not touch. Even if Steven were asleep, if my leg brushed against his he flinched away from it, instantly. It was a muscular reflex. His flesh couldn’t bear the touch of my flesh. It was like an electric shock to him.
We began unpacking. I opened the big shadowy armoire, smelling of lavender. There was lavender in the wide stiffdrawered bureau too; there were sachets of it everywhere, made of bright Provençal fabrics, tucked into corners. The smell was sharp and heavy, almost medicinal.
When I was finished, Steven was still unpacking, and his back was to me. I moved quickly, because I didn’t want him to see me undressed. It’s painful to show your body to someone who doesn’t want it. I stripped to my underpants and slid into bed. There was no headboard, and the wide mattress was low and hammocky. The sheets felt rough and clean, and I leaned back and closed my eyes, and thought about the Chambertins, who owned the house.
A Perfect Stranger Page 12
