by Lewis Shiner
*
He wore his new suit to the funeral the next day, the third time he’d worn it, and his third funeral of the year. Jesús in the spring, Susan’s mother in September, now his father two weeks later. Whether the suit itself was bad luck or it had accumulated too many bad associations, Cole had come to hate the sight of it.
As he stood outside the Restland chapel, waiting for the service to begin, a stretch limo pulled up and disgorged the entire Montoya family, father and mother, Susan, Alex, and Jimmy, and then, to Cole’s amazement, Madelyn and Ethan and Ava.
“This has got to be so weird for you,” Madelyn said as she hugged him.
“I can’t believe you came.”
“Ava wanted to meet her other grandmother. And I wanted to see my father, and… other stuff. We’ll talk.”
Ava hugged him too. “Sorry,” she said. She was in a long black dress and low heels, the first time Cole had seen her in anything other than jeans. She looked like she was playing dress-up.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Cole said.
Madelyn introduced him to Ethan, who was beautiful, with long, dark hair framing Madelyn’s eyes, and who regarded him with frank curiosity. Cole then introduced Ava to his mother, who teared up for the first time since Cole had been back. She touched Ava’s face and said, “Oh, Ava, how lovely you are. Thank you.”
Ava, embarrassed and speechless, looked at her shoes.
Cole’s mother seemed prepared to stand there and stare at Ava for the next hour. Madelyn stepped in smoothly and said, “We’re going to be here for a week. We’ll spend some time together, I promise.”
The ceremony would have been annoying if Cole had let himself get emotionally invested. A chaplain who’d never met his father and kept referring to him as “Stephen.” Two hymns, which would have been two too many for his father. A canned sermon about an afterlife that his father had little faith in.
Through the ordeal, Cole tried to focus on his mother and to not keep wondering what Madelyn had meant by “other stuff.”
The burial, at least, was quick, and this time Cole did get to wield a shovel. He had thrown three angry shovels full of dirt into the grave when he realized he was making a spectacle of himself and stepped aside. The chaplain tried to lighten the moment by saying, “That’s okay, less work for the hired help.” Cole was alarmed by the way his feelings had snuck up on him.
The wake was at his mother’s house. The brass from the oil company made a good showing and Cole put up with their homilies for his mother’s sake.
Around four, Susan came to him and said, “I think my family’s getting ready to leave.”
“Let’s talk,” Cole said.
They went out the glass doors to the back yard, which was mostly patio that gave way to a small stand of oak and sycamore trees. Cole led the way to a marble bench near the back fence and shook out his handkerchief for Susan to sit on.
“I’m moving back to Texas,” Cole said.
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“To be with your mother?” She sounded incredulous.
“Mostly, yeah. To get a real job, buy a house, settle down, grow up.”
“Where did that come from?” Suddenly she nodded. “Oh, I get it. Ava.”
“It changed me, being with her.”
“You’re going to live in Dallas?”
“Austin. But I’ll be coming up most weekends for a while. Mom’s going to need a lot of help. She’s going to sell the house, move into one of those retirement places.”
She lit a cigarette, her hands shaking. “And me? What happens to me?”
“I hope something wonderful happens to you.”
“I thought something wonderful had.”
“We fight all the time.”
“We do not.”
The sliding glass door opened and Alex stuck his head out. “We’re leaving. Are you coming?”
“Yes,” she said. “Give me a minute.” When the door closed, she said, “So you’re dumping me, is that it? No warning, no discussion, no second chances, not even a reason why?”
“Do you remember when you used my credit card a month ago to buy a new dress without telling me? And I told you I couldn’t live with somebody who was not honest and open with me? Do you remember what you said?”
“No, but I suppose you do.”
“You said, ‘I will always lie to you.’ I’ve been trying ever since to figure out how I can live with that. And I realized that I can’t.”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette and said, “Your father’s death has upset you way more than you realize. You’re taking all the anger you never expressed to your father out on me. You should know better than to try to make a decision like this when you’re under so much emotional stress.” She stood up, took a last hit off the cigarette, and ground it into the dirt.
“You told me I was the love of your life,” she said. “You told me you would always love me. So that makes you a liar too. I’ll be at my father’s house when you come to your senses.”
Cole watched her walk away. Then he sat for a long time and stared up into the bare branches of the oak.
1993
“You’re probably wondering why I gathered you all here today,” Madelyn said, trying for a lightness she didn’t feel. Her nervousness annoyed her; she hated the bad news she had to deliver; she resented having to ask Cole for anything. She’d picked Harthomp and Moran, a North Dallas health food store with a café, as the scene of their confrontation, hoping it might appeal to Cole’s granola side.
Cole looked fit and tanned. His hair was fairly short, his jeans new. He glanced around, as if to make sure that it really was just the two of them. “I take it I’m a murder suspect in a bad play? That would explain a lot.”
A waiter brought their sandwiches and Cole asked him, “Didn’t this place use to be further down Greenville?”
“Yep. Whole Foods bought us out and we moved up here.”
“I thought I remembered it. Everything’s changing.”
“Life in the retail food biz.”
“Eat or get eaten, right?”
The waiter laughed. “You got it. Let me know if you need anything else.”
The charm thing, Madelyn thought. Still working.
Cole bit into his sandwich and closed his eyes. He chewed and swallowed and said, “Real tomatoes. Nothing like it.”
“You’re growing your own, I hear.”
“Tomatoes, corn, peppers, squash, onions. I’ve got half an acre under cultivation.” He waved his hand. “It’s been small talk for fifteen minutes. You were about to reveal the reason for this mysterious rendezvous.”
She hadn’t seen Cole since before she and Alex had gotten married. The last time had been in February, when he took Ava to see Groundhog Day. It had been awkward beyond words; Alex hadn’t even come out of his study to say hello. She’d sent him an invitation to their wedding in April, and he had politely declined. As of August, Ava was in Austin, living in the Castle, starting her freshman year at ut. Cole still came to Dallas to visit his mother, though with Ava gone, he had no excuse to visit Alex and Madelyn. Thus she had called him at his mother’s on this Saturday in early November, and invited him to lunch.
“Ava said you’ve gone to dinner a couple of times.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “It’s pretty weird picking her up at the Castle, I have to tell you. At least she’s in Alex’s old room. It would be too much if she was sleeping in the same bed that…” He let it trail off and now they were both unwilling to look at each other. “That’s not what this is about, is it?” he asked. “Me seeing Ava is not news.”
“No, I’m just…”
“Afraid to tell me?”
“Yes.” She still hadn’t touched her food. “Susan’s dying.”
“Oh, Christ.” Cole set his sandwich down and stared at the table.
“Sorry,” Madelyn said. “I could have eased up on it better.”
“What happened?”
“Cervical cancer. By the time they diagnosed it, it had spread to her bladder and, uh, rectum.”
“When did they diagnose it?”
“Two weeks ago. They felt like it was too late for surgery. They tried chemo to slow it down and it was too hard on her.”
“How long has she got?”
“Weeks at most. Maybe days.”
“Do you think she’ll see me?”
“Well, that’s what this is about. Alex doesn’t know I’m here. I want you guys to fix whatever it was that went wrong between you.”
“Don’t look at me.”
“I am looking at you, Jeff Cole. What started it?”
“Susan,” Cole said. “Alex didn’t want us to get involved.”
“And he was right, wasn’t he? Both of you got hurt.”
How had she forgotten how intense Cole’s stare could be? “You don’t refuse to do something,” he said, “because you’re afraid of getting hurt. That’s the first thing. The second is, I fell in love with Susan Montoya when I was 15. I imprinted on her, like I was a duckling. There was no way I was not going to get involved. Then Alex was pissed off at my leaving her, when it was clear that the situation was impossible.”
“He wasn’t pissed off. Just conflicted. Susan wanted him to be loyal to her, though he knew it was all her fault.”
“He said that?”
“Don’t you dare let on that I told you.”
Madelyn watched his brain churn. “Then,” he said, “there’s you.”
“I thought we’d put that behind us. When I came down there with Ava…”
“I was in love with Susan and so I didn’t care about the past. Now I’m alone again and the past is this Bengal tiger trap I keep falling into. Logically, it shouldn’t be an issue, you and Alex. I should be happy for both of you. But it feels weird. It feels like… a betrayal.” He held up his hand and Madelyn caught herself staring at his scarred middle finger. “I know it’s wrong to feel that way. I’m working on it.”
“I have to ask this. Are you drinking again? Are you using? If you are, I need to know.”
“No, I’m clean. It’s still hard sometimes, but I’m not going to screw that up now. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“I don’t give a damn about contracting. I haven’t written a complete song in twenty years. I play once or twice a month, to smaller crowds than I played to in high school. I can look objectively at my life and say, okay, I blew it. Part of it was bad luck, part of it was just me. I wasn’t cut out to be a star, obviously. But how do I live with that, day after day?”
Before Madelyn could say anything, Cole went on, “No, I’m not thinking of harming myself. I wouldn’t do that to Ava, if nothing else.”
The waiter materialized, looking concerned. “Is the food okay?”
“The food is great,” Cole said. “We’re practicing for a slow eating contest.”
“Let us know,” Madelyn said, “when you need the table.”
Cole took a drink of his Snapple and said, “What about you? You’re commuting from Houston on the weekends?”
Madelyn nodded. Parts of her story felt safe to talk about, others less so. Cole didn’t need to hear that it had been Alex’s intellectual curiosity that had won her over, or how Alex had called her in Idaho to talk about what he’d been reading, Alvin Toffler and Stewart Brand and Ivan Illich and Jane Jacobs. The night of Steve Cole’s funeral they’d made love for the first time, and then argued about artificial intelligence and nafta and Vaclav Havel until four am.
She told Cole how the closest open job to Dallas had been at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, a long four-hour drive away and a considerable drop in prestige. The campus was in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, where the sodden brown air smelled of oil refineries. She drove to Dallas most weekends. Now that Ava was at ut, it was just her and Ethan.
She kept to herself that she and Alex did not have the grand passion she’d had with Cole. In retrospect, those highs had been worse than the lows. Instead it surprised her to find how smoothly things went when there was no assumption of hostile intent if the dishes piled up in the sink or somebody caught an inconvenient cold or they couldn’t juggle their schedules to be together.
“The other part of it,” Madelyn said, “is trying to spend as much time as I can with my father. Like I was with Julia.”
“With Julia?”
“Oh, Lord. Nobody told you.”
Julia had come home for Christmas the year before, looking pale and thin. She said she had trouble swallowing because of a persistent sore throat. She hadn’t been to a doctor, had no insurance. When the aids test came back positive, she fell apart.
Madelyn had to fly to New York to pack her meager belongings and terminate her lease. Julia stayed on in Dallas in her old bedroom, penniless and hopeless. Alex, out of sheer kindness, had paid for the obscenely expensive azt that her parents couldn’t afford.
“How did this happen?” she’d asked Madelyn. “How can it be that making love can now kill you?” She’d been having a bad day, her recurrent yeast infections having given way to pelvic inflammatory disease, with alternating high fever and chills.
“I don’t know,” Madelyn said. She’d been visiting every time she was in Dallas, at least a couple of times a month, at least an hour at a time, month after month.
“It’s like the world turned upside down. Art is now a dirty word, soldiers are heroes just by putting on a uniform, government is evil, greed is good, ignorance is bliss. How did this happen to us?”
“I don’t know, sweetie,” Madelyn had said. “I don’t know.”
Among the many ironies was the fact that for the last three years Julia had been more discriminating in her sexual partners and unfailing in her use of condoms—too late, as it turned out.
A yeast infection killed her, Candida albicans; she was in hospice at that point, too weak to fight one more opportunistic disease. Madelyn had been holding one hand, her mother the other, her father standing at the foot of the bed.
If she and Julia had been close, Madelyn thought, her grief would have been less compromised, easier to work through. If Julia had been courageous and witty like in Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment, closure might have been nearer to hand. Instead Julia had faced the ordeal with terror and bitterness and a need to apportion blame that had left Madelyn as relieved as she was sorry when it finally ended.
Julia died in September and Susan was diagnosed in October, a mere 19 days later; Madelyn had not had time to learn to get through a Sunday without the nagging sense that she was late for something. Meanwhile, her father’s increasing forgetfulness and disorientation were almost certainly the first signs of Alzheimer’s.
She tried to stick to the high points, but she couldn’t keep her exhaustion from showing.
Cole took her hands in both of his. “I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
“Fix this thing with Alex. He’s going to need you.”
“I would love to be friends with Alex again. I would like to see Susan before she dies. If you can make either of those things happen, I would be more grateful than I can say.”
*
Cole got the call from Madelyn that night. “That was quick,” he said.
They had Susan in the Texas Oncology facility at Medical City, only a few blocks west on Forest Lane from Harthomp and Moran. “Can you be there at nine tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” he said.
He got there early. He sat in the truck for a couple of minutes listening to kegl, remembering when it would have been out of the question to get up this early on a Sunday morning. The slick, deliberately offensive dj finally drove him out into the cold drizzle.
The moment the hospital doors closed behind him, he smelled it. Bedpans and rubbing alcohol and the hot-ironing-board odor of carbolic acid. It took him back to hospitals in Oakland and Tyler, to Demerol and the slow, sleepy warmth spreading through hi
s chest and neck and fingertips, and suddenly he wanted a shot so badly that his legs gave out. He sat in a blue plastic chair and folded his arms and closed his eyes.
He’d been clean for 13 years now and he hardly ever thought about smack, except for now and then when the loneliness wore him down, or he heard a few bars of “Achilles Last Stand” on the radio, or he saw Valentina’s photo staring out at him from a magazine rack, or he got a Pavlovian high from a tetanus shot, or he came home from work with an ache in his back and his hands too sore to touch a guitar. Always something that blindsided him the way this hospital smell had.
Sometimes he let the fantasy play out in his head, all the way to the place where he was strung out again. Mostly he didn’t have to. He knew by now that the craving would eventually pass. In five minutes he was under control again, if still shaky.
Alex and his father were waiting outside Susan’s room. Cole flinched internally at the sight of them but toughed it out, extending his hand to Alex first. Alex wrapped him in an embrace, and they held each other a long time in silence.
Eventually they stepped away. “What did Madelyn say to you?” Cole asked.
“Let’s just say I pity any of her students who ‘squander the potential they were entrusted with.’”
Cole was startled by how far Alex’s shaggy black hair had receded, how deeply the lines had sunken into his forehead in the last three years. His father looked even worse for wear, his head nearly shaved, white hairs outnumbering the black, with a couple of days of grizzled beard to match. His shoulders hunched forward and liver spots dotted his hands. Cole hugged him too, and said, “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too, son.”
“Can I go in?” he asked Alex.
“She’s waiting for you.”
The bed was cranked into right angles, her head barely higher than her knees. She wore a green knit turban and had attempted eyeliner. Slack skin hung from the bones of her arms. He reminded himself that what looked like irritation on her face was probably no more than insecurity. cnn blared from the wall tv. She muted it and left her hand lying on the sheet where Cole could reach it, so he picked it up.
