McKain's Dilemma

by Williamson, Chet

  My misery was all my own, as I had no roommate, thanks to an all-inclusive hospitalization package I had had the pessimistic foresight to enroll in several years before.

  Ev was a martyr, and that bothered me most. It wasn't that she was acting as though it was an effort to be with me as often as she was. I know now—and I guess I really knew then—that she was with me because she wanted to be, not out of any sense of duty. I would have done the same for her, and driven her just as crazy as she did me.

  No. Maybe not. It was that male ego, I admit it. It did something to me to have her see me there, totally wasted, heaving up my guts twenty hours every bad day. And, too, there was the possibility that I would be sterile when the treatment was finished. Although I had never before equated potency with masculinity—indeed, had always felt such a linkage absurd, and had even considered getting a vasectomy—now the loss of fertile sperm seemed sad to me. We had spoken of having a second child, and now I felt we never would. It made me feel less of a man, and the fear of that led me to be less demonstrative with Ev, less affectionate, until, by the time I was ready to leave the hospital, we barely touched at all.

  I've written enough about this. I didn't intend to write even this much. I could probably write a book full of pain and misery and puking in a hospital toilet, my bare ass hanging out of those goddamned humiliating gowns, while my wife cries in the other room. I would, if I thought it would do any good, but it won't. Thinking that it will is stupid. You don't ease pain and erase lousy memories by talking them through or writing them out. Nothing you do has any effect on it. Time has an effect. That's all. Time.

  Remission came, blessed and unexpected, by me at least. The doctors began to smile when they told me my blood counts, as if to say, look how clever we are. We made you well.

  Yeah, I thought. They made me well. For a while. Until I came in next time to die. Actually, I think I'd have been happier if the remission hadn't come, if I'd died right away. Because, right then, the way I felt was that I didn't want to go home with Ev and Carlie. It was going to be too damn hard to be with them and know that this was the last year, and I'd never see Carlie go to her first prom, or graduate from college, or have a husband and a child of her own. And I'd never see Ev turn into a beautiful old lady with gorgeous snow-white hair and a wrinkle for every kiss I gave her.

  It wasn't self-pity—it was sadness, a solipsistic grieving for the things that would never be, would never happen because I would not be there to see them happen. It all pissed me off, and made me want to die so I wouldn't be so pissed off anymore. I was pissed off at everything, especially God for doing this to me.

  Oh, God was my special adversary, and when our minister came to visit me, I tried to smile and be polite and make the man feel less uncomfortable than he looked. But what I really thought was that he was the enemy, he and the doctors and God, all of them doing everything they could to keep me alive when I didn't want to be.

  It wasn't easy for Ev to live with such a pissed-off guy that summer. If I'd been her, I might have finished what the cancer started. Maybe I'd have slipped some arsenic in my soup.

  No. I wouldn't have done that. I suppose I would have endured, like she did. And I suppose I might have taken a lover too.

  I don't blame her. In a way I guess I asked for it. At first I refused to go out at all until my hair grew back, because the wig they had fitted me with at the hospital looked, I thought, like a monk's cap, like the kind of rug Bugs Bunny kept fooling Elmer Fudd with. Although it matched my original hair color, the lines of demarcation were so obvious that they could have been plotted on a graph.

  At last I let Ev talk me into an outdoor party at one of her fellow teacher's houses, a sparkling bon vivant English teacher and local little theatre actor with the ungodly surname of Chip and a personality to match.

  "Listen," said Ev as she tried to talk me into going, "it's outdoors first of all—we don't have to go until nine or so—by that time it'll be pretty dark . . ."

  "So they won't be able to see me."

  "Mac . . ." There were tears and anger in her voice. "You can't do this, you know. You've got to get out and . . . and act alive."

  I don't know why I went. Maybe I was just tired of arguing. Except for the wig, I looked all right. I'd gained back most of the weight I'd lost during the chemotherapy, and my color was fine. I didn't look like I was dying, and I didn't feel like it either, at least not physically.

  Ev was right. It was dark in good old Chip's backyard, and I didn't feel nearly as much like Elmer Fudd as I thought I would. I even talked to some people about inconsequential subjects like baseball and television, while trying to stay as close to Ev as I could. The beer was plentiful—good old Chip had gotten a good old keg for the occasion—and I kept myself well tanked up, which helped. Everything was going fine, much to my surprise. I was laughing, actually laughing, at one of Chip's stories about a friend of his who'd worked in a Passion Play in South Dakota, when Jeff Saunderson arrived. Then things changed.

  Saunderson was a science teacher in the junior high who had lost a wife to cancer several years before. I had completely forgotten about him and his wife, and about Ev's sympathy for him at the time. It had been a long and merciless illness, made even harder by the wife's attitude. She had lost the will to live, but was also extremely demanding of everyone who was kind enough to help her. From all reports, Saunderson was greatly relieved when she went into the hospital for the last time.

  When I saw him, I looked away quickly, but not quickly enough to miss the sympathy in his eyes, a sympathy that became even deeper when he saw Ev standing beside me.

  Chip's tale of how Jesus' ascension cables had tangled ceased when Saunderson entered the circle. Everyone said hello, and my blood ran cold as I saw that look of Christian charity on his face. I wanted to hit him just as hard and as long as Carlton Runnells had hit Christopher Townes. I wanted to hit him for pitying me, and most of all for pitying Ev. But I didn't. I was still civilized. I smiled and nodded and shook the man's hand, and listened and laughed when Chip finished his story of Jesus' sandals plopping down onto the stage as the curtain desperately fell. I didn't want to laugh, but I laughed. That's how you know you're civilized.

  My mug was empty, so I went to the keg to fill it. When I returned, Ev was talking in hushed tones to Jeff Saunderson. She stopped and smiled when she saw me. Again he gave me that look, and it made my balls crawl right up into my guts. The look condemned me, made me less than human, turned me into the shell I often felt like. Oh, of course I felt it in the gazes of the others as well, but from Saunderson it was different. It was the sure, knowing look of one who had been tried in the furnace, who knew how much harm a walking dead man could do, and I knew then that he not only wanted to save Ev from harm, but that he also wanted her for himself.

  "Are you ready to go?" I asked her.

  "Already?"

  "I think it's time."

  Saunderson looked at her. It was a look that said worlds, that said, I know it's hard, but it'll be over soon. Ev knew better than to argue with me. We left. In the car she asked me what was wrong, but I didn't tell her.

  "I thought you were having a good time," she said.

  "I'm tired," I told her, and let it go at that. She didn't push it. She knew.

  By September my hair had grown back enough for me to stop wearing the wig. I went into the hospital every week for what they called maintenance therapy. It took only an hour or two and it seemed to work. My symptoms had disappeared, and I felt well enough to resume my business, if not my marriage. Although Ev and I slept in the same bed, we had not made love since the start of my illness. One night, a week after I had come home from the hospital, we had made the attempt, at Ev's silent urging. It had been a fiasco. I had been unable to maintain an erection for any length of time, and had gotten out of bed and gone into the living room. She followed me, told me that it was all right when I knew damned well it wasn't, and asked me to come back to bed. I went,
and lay on my side with my back to her, as though it were her fault. I suppose I thought it was, trying to resume our relations before I was physically ready. She was easy to blame. We hadn't tried to make love since.

  I got my first job from an attorney friend of mine who specializes in divorces. It looked like a classic domestic case. A wife suspected her husband of seeing a younger woman. It turned out, however, much to my friend's disappointment, that the wife didn't want a divorce as much as she just wanted to have her husband back again.

  Her name was Phyllis Brubaker. When she sat across the desk from me in my home office, I guessed her to be in her early thirties. She dressed well, had a good figure, with very nice legs, and had a pleasant personality. I liked her right away. I also liked the fact that I had a job again. Already my mind was drifting away from my illness. She gave me the name and address of the woman she thought was seeing her husband, and I asked her if she had confronted him with her suspicions.

  "No," she answered. "I . . . I couldn't do that."

  I was curious. "Why not?"

  "I don't like . . . confrontations, Mr. McKain."

  "You know, it's very possible that if you did confront him with the idea that you know what's going on, he might stop of his own accord. To save the marriage."

  "But I don't know for sure. And if I said I did and it wasn't true, well, I think that would change our relationship permanently. He'd think that I would never trust him again."

  "And if it's true. Will you?"

  "If he decides to stay with me, yes. I think that if he didn't love me anymore, he'd just leave me. I think . . . I hope that this may be just a fling."

  "You want me to follow him then."

  "Actually I'd rather you follow her."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't want him to know he's being followed."

  "I really don't think he'll see me."

  She shook her head. "No, I'm sorry, I don't want to take that chance. I don't give a damn if she sees you, but I don't want him to." She handed me a picture of her husband. I looked at it and handed it back. "Don't you want to keep it?"

  I smiled. "I don't follow all that many people in one week. I think I can remember. I'll follow the woman. And really, don't worry. She'll never see me. And neither will your husband."

  She thanked me and gave me a cash retainer for the first three days, no doubt to keep her husband from noticing any strange checks in the checkbook.

  That afternoon at three o'clock I drove out to the girl's place. It was an apartment complex north of Lancaster, on the Fruitville Pike. I pulled into the spacious parking lot, found the girl's apartment, and parked far enough away so that she wouldn't notice me, but close enough to see her or anyone else come in. At five o'clock an '81 Camaro pulled up in front of the girl's door, and the woman's husband climbed out. He rang the bell, but no one answered, so he took a key and let himself in.

  I waited some more, and soon the girl herself drove up in an anonymous Volkswagen beetle, and walked in. In less than ten minutes, the husband came through the door fast and got back in the Camaro. The girl came outside just as he started his car, and stood in the doorway, shouting something I couldn't make out. She didn't look particularly happy. For that matter, neither did he.

  Had I, I wondered, arrived just in time to see the breakup of the affair? For Phyllis Brubaker's sake, I hoped so. Of course, it was possible that what I had witnessed was only a lovers' quarrel, and that in the next few days, or even the next hour, Brubaker would come buzzing into the parking lot with his arms full of roses, be welcomed with open arms and legs, and make the bed bounce once again. Sometimes fucking was a fucking shame. I comforted myself with the idea that my condition would no longer lead me down such adulterous paths, and then quickly remembered that I had never been down those paths to start with.

  I waited in the lot until ten that evening, with one quick break to cross the road to the Pensupreme Minute-Mart to use their john and buy a radar-burger. Brubaker didn't return, so I went home.

  Ev and I had a fight that night. It was one of those nice domestic fights that cause thousands of people every year to go into the hospital with bread-knife wounds. All respect to Chandler, hot winds have nothing to do with it. That's an excuse. In fact, the things that people talk about when they fight have nothing to do with it either. It's the things they don't talk about that make them kill each other, hate each other. Leave each other. So to say what we fought about, to repeat our angry words, would serve no purpose, would clarify nothing. We didn't fight about what we fought about. We fought with each other because we couldn't fight time and death. I remember that I wanted to fight. I felt alive when we fought. It was the strangest thing—even when I was shouting at her, when she was shouting back, I wanted to hold her. I loved her no less for fighting me. In truth, I loved her more. Had she not stood up to me, had she accepted my irrationalities for the sheer sake of not wanting to upset her dying husband, I might have hated her. Then it might have been easier.

  The next morning at seven I drove back to the girl's apartment. Her car was there and she didn't come out until nine, dressed casually and carrying a large straw handbag. I followed her into downtown Lancaster, where she parked in the Prince Street garage. Clever me. I knew something was wrong. The girl didn't work in downtown Lancaster, she worked in a bank in Ephrata five days a week, and this was Wednesday, most definitely not her day off. I followed her, taking the stairs while she grabbed the elevator, and watched as she parked herself on a bench in the agglomeration they call Lancaster Square, an open concrete area of spindly trees and hardy benches, surrounded by office buildings, with Queen Street running right down the center of it all.

  The girl had no book, no newspaper, no radio, no handicrafts, nothing to pass the time, and that should have given me a clue. But my ratiocination level was minimal at best that morning, and I only watched, not observing at all. She sat on a bench parallel to the building in which Brubaker worked, sat and looked straight ahead, turning from time to time to watch the double door of the building. I sat sixty yards away in shadow, buried in a newspaper. Since it was morning, the square was still free of the street people and retirees who made it their second home. The girl and I were alone.

  At ten-thirty Brubaker came out of his building and began to walk toward Queen Street. He didn't see the girl. She got up, walked the few yards to the sidewalk down which he was strolling, and stood for a moment, watching him move away from her, still un-aware of her presence. I saw her mouth move, but couldn't hear the words, for at that moment a huge truck roared down Queen Street through the square. Evidently Brubaker didn't hear her either, for he kept walking.

  Then she reached into her straw handbag and brought out a pistol. She was too far away for me to make out what kind it was, but it looked big enough to kill. Any pistol is, at the distance she was from Brubaker. She lifted it, her arm locked straight, and aimed it directly toward him.

  If I had yelled, neither one would have heard me, and the distance was too great to even begin to try and stop her from pulling the trigger. I had no gun, and I don't know if I would've shot her if I had. So I could only stand and watch.

  So did she.

  She had plenty of time to fire. From when she lifted the gun to when Brubaker disappeared around the corner of the building must have been a good ten seconds. But she didn't fire. She watched him go, dropped her hand and her head, stood like that for a moment, and then, realizing where she was, she looked up and around, spotting me where I sat leaning forward in an attitude of threatened intercession. Our eyes locked, and I could tell that she knew who I was, why I was there.

  Very slowly, I shook my head back and forth, and, just as slowly, she nodded once, twice, then put the pistol back into her purse, and started to walk briskly, then run, back to the dark hole that led to the parking garage. When she went into it, I could see that she was crying.

  Brubaker would live, and go back to his wife, unaware of how close death had come
to him that morning when he went around the corner to get a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper, a lottery ticket.

  I followed the girl for two more days. She didn't go near Brubaker again. The second evening she went to a singles bar, and left several hours later with a tall, ruggedly built young man. They went to what I suppose was his place. I really didn't care. She seemed all right, and that was what mattered. Everything was all right now. I had earned my money.

  Chapter 9

  Evelyn McKain loved her husband very much, had in fact loved him since she'd met him in the late sixties at Penn State, when she was still Evelyn Richards and Mac was Bob McKain, a journalism major who wrote innumerable essays for the campus underground papers about Vietnam and horseshit.

  What she hated now, worse than knowing that he was going to die, was the fact that they didn't touch anymore. She knew what he felt, or she thought she did, and she knew that his sense of distance was due to sorrow at leaving them. But though she could understand it, she could not accept it. She wanted this last year, if it was the last year, to be special, to be close and warm and loving, to be a year that both she and Carlie would remember as the epitome of everything fine and good about their husband and father. She wanted to create a memory. That she was placing her and her daughter's needs first she realized, but Mac's needs were altogether alien to her. She was not dying.

  School, when it began, came as a great relief. It took her away from him, away from the house that she associated with gloomy arguments, grim sniping. Often between classes in the afternoon, when she started to think about going home, she pictured him there alone, sitting on the couch in the basement rec room, watching the Three Stooges, or the old Warner Brothers cartoons, never laughing now, just sitting and watching, his face a mask. In August, when Carlie had still been home, she had watched with him, and had laughed and looked at her father. He would smile, but never laugh, and in time she stopped laughing too, then stopped watching altogether, instead playing outside or in her room. Ev hadn't told her of the seriousness of Mac's illness. Carlie knew only that her daddy had been very sick, but was much better now, although he might get sick again.