Travels in Vermeer

by Michael White

  And when, just a few weeks before her death, I was able to tell her that my first poetry book, The Island, had been accepted by one of our most distinguished presses, I believe she was even more deeply thrilled than I—clasping my hand, pulling off her oxygen mask to tell me, “Of course.” By then we were in each other’s skin and felt each other’s pain and joy as one.

  All that year, we had beaten back dozens of tumors in her brain, her liver, everywhere. But the one that ended her life was the size of a pea, so small it barely showed up on the x-ray. It perforated her lung lining, and wasn’t discovered until her lungs were nearly filled with fluid. Once, twice—out of her mind with oxygen deprivation—Jackie’s lungs were drained through an outsized needle inserted between her ribs. She said this was the most excruciating procedure of all. But when her lungs began to fill for the third time, she didn’t have the strength or will to continue. She said no. The doctor agreed: her lungs were not “viable.” We made her comfortable in the master suite of her mother’s house, a hospice nurse on duty round the clock, as she drifted into a deep, Ativan-and-morphine-managed coma. The countertops were full of covered dishes; her mother and sister kept busy tending to lavish bouquets left on the porch.

  Jackie was only forty-one. She’d lost more than fifty pounds, but still had the heart of a lion. So dying wasn’t easy. She was in the deepest sort of coma for nearly two weeks—all her vital functions dramatically suppressed, only three or four reflex breaths per minute—though it seemed unimaginable that she could hang on at all. It’s easy to tell when someone’s lungs are full: anyone with a stethoscope can hear it. It’s a hard thing to say, but when someone you love spends a week or two in a coma without being able to draw air into her lungs, you don’t want her to wake up. When all you can hope for is to spare her some pain and terror, that’s what you try to do.

  A new, elderly hospice nurse showed up one day and introduced herself, projecting confidence and experience as she assumed her place beside the bed and took up her knitting. Within the first hour, I had a talk with her about meds, the timed schedule of supplementary boluses we’d been administering through Jackie’s catheter. She riled at this, in what seemed an old-fashioned, common sense way: shaking her head, telling me that at the levels Jackie was receiving, they were unnecessary, she couldn’t feel any pain. She declared, “I won’t snow a patient.” I reminded her that Jackie had been on morphine for over a year, and had built up extraordinary tolerances. “We’ll see,” was the answer. I bit my lip.

  Within a few hours, Jackie’s hands, then her entire frame began to tremble, and her temperature crept up to 104. Her pulse, too, began to rise, eventually holding at 120 beats per minute. Jackie’s parents, Jack and Neila, seemed inclined to respect the nurse’s judgment. I tried to do the same, but kept shooting nervous glances toward her. She merely nodded kindly. These symptoms were normal at “end stage,” she said. An hour passed, an anxious, fluttery hour when some of us—Neila and I—might have wondered whether the nurse was right. Then, almost unfathomably, Jackie’s right hand rose to her mouth; she seemed to be trying to feel her lips. I moved in quickly beside her, half sitting on the bed, and began dampening her lips with a washcloth. The nurse, in those moments, smiled: she seemed to expect a comeback. Looking up from her knitting, she said, “Well, hello there. How are you?”

  Jackie’s jaw sawed this way and that, attempting to speak; I kept dampening her parched lips again and again, then her forehead and cheeks. Finally, clearing her throat and gathering herself, she said: “I feel terrible. I really need a shot.”

  “It’s coming, love,” I said. “It’s on the way.”I glared at the nurse, who had roused to action and was already breaking the wrapper of a syringe.

  I could see Jackie’s eyes moving this way and that beneath her eyelids. Her hand came up to try to clear her eyes of some imagined obstruction. I said, “Wait,” and held the washcloth gently but directly on her eyes, for I could see that she was struggling to open them to look at me one last time. But her eyelids were stuck fast and would not open. “Don’t worry about it, sweetie, it’s okay,” I said, as I watched the nurse’s thumb push down the plunger. “It’s okay, it doesn’t make any difference, just relax.” Then, on the bed with her, clasping and stroking her hand, I watched as her eyes seemed to calm; at least, they weren’t flicking back and forth so much. She held my hand very tightly in her own, and her grip was not the grip of an emaciated, dying woman. It was the grip of the dazzling star I’d seen on the stage at the Kennedy Center; the grip of the woman who believed in me more than I’d ever thought to believe in myself, who’d always taken such joy in my writing, she made me feel—because she felt it herself—it was Christmas when I wrote. Then, knowing that she was slipping under fast, very fast, she pronounced clearly, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I answered, and then, “But you don’t have to say it. You don’t have to say anything. I know.”

  What I don’t know, and can’t imagine, is how she’d done it. Perhaps in the recesses of one last bronchiole, she was still able to take infinitesimal sips of air, or imaginary sips of air; or perhaps in the underworld where she had gone, no oxygen was required. Maybe, I thought, her metabolism was so depressed, that the slightest traces of oxygen and water—absorbed through the skin or nostrils—could suffice for a while. I took it as pure will, though, her soul ceding nothing except on its own terms.

  Some might think it was simply pain that woke her. But I didn’t think so then, and I don’t think so now. She was aware of everything in that room, what we felt and thought, exactly what had been happening. She came back to take her leave—and, satisfied with what she’d found, she let go. There was a slim passageway, just wide enough for her to slip through. I held her hand as a lifetime of minutes slid by, like all those nights in graduate school—looking up in the fullness of all we had, as we’d drift away on the afterglow, the ceiling fan spinning slowly toward oblivion—long after her hand went soft, and I tucked it in at her side again.

  At five a.m. on November 18, 1991, her body still trying to do its job—still trying, blindly, to take a breath—she passed.

  Jackie had many friends, and hers was an elite, pillar-of-the-community Boone County family, so the funeral was swamped. I met well-wishers by the hundreds, many for the first time. Amidst tearful hugs and condolences, I think I startled some (though of course they were inclined to a charitable view) by often remarking how blessed I was, how our love had come “just in time.” And of course I would go through a process of grieving over the next couple of years. But the overwhelming emotion of the moment, of that entire period of my life, was gratitude.

  For the warmth, the silken feel, of her hand in my hand—it was still softly burning there. There was a hallowed silence in the townhouse, which I simply wouldn’t disturb. For two months I worked in her study, polishing The Island for publication. I looked out the window of the study, over the tops of the once-so-lovely hills, where I had wandered as a child—now landscaped, sub-divided, crowned with sodden golf courses. But I always felt her presence: in the next room perhaps, or out on an errand, and I felt the sense of a shared mission, the ongoing work that was neither mine, nor hers, but ours.

  Her light step somewhere; her unselfconscious hum somewhere; the ornamental birches brushing the window.

  2. Afterward

  Still, by spring, I wondered if I should seek some other sort of help. I wasn’t sure which world I was living in. Finally deciding it was a spiritual matter, I dialed Sacred Heart Church one afternoon. It couldn’t hurt, I thought. I had gone there myself as a child for a couple of years, at my recently divorced mother’s somewhat puzzling insistence (no one in my family was Catholic, or had even been baptized). It was still the only church where I’d even remotely felt at home. Sister Margaret answered. I said I was recently widowed and needed to talk with someone. She said, “Yes, of course,” asked no questions and, two days later, I walked into the diocese offices behind the chur
ch on Walnut Street.

  She insisted I call her Maggie, and sat me down in her office cluttered with wire baskets piled with forms and folders, space heater on the floor. “Excuse the mess,” she said. “Part of my job is to run the Sunday school.” I found a perch on a metal stacking chair. Nothing was as I’d expected: instead of the beatific matron in habit, here was a woman in camel cardigan, braids pinned neatly above her ears.

  “Michael, how did you meet your wife?”

  And so I told her the story about the cabin in Steamboat Springs, about the plumbing. It was almost like living it all again. I suddenly remembered leaning into the crumbling earthen bank beneath the floor, trying to get a grip on the old iron couplings with a ten-pound pipe wrench clanking in my hands, dirt and sweat in my eyes. The pipes in those cabins always ice-burst in the dead of winter, though I wouldn’t discover it until I tried to turn on the water at the beginning of summer. The image of Jackie’s face, staring incredulously down at me through a hole in a bathroom floor. “Hullo?” she’d said.

  “Oh hi … I’ll be done in a minute.”

  Maggie giggled, schoolgirl-style.

  “Where did you go for your first date?”

  I recalled driving the battered flatbed up the canyon road to Fish Creek Falls—the sense that this lady, this elegant, olive-skinned lady in slacks didn’t belong in such a vehicle, in such a place, with such a driver (I spent those summers in straw hat, jeans, torn-off sleeves). But here she was: smiling, her dark eyes shining, smoking a Virginia Slims extravagantly out the passenger window. She was having the time of her life. Standing on the cantilever footbridge at the base of the falls, she marveled at the height of it, the boulder-broken roar of it, cool veil of spray directly in our faces. I kept wondering if being here, being with me was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks thing for her. I recited Bishop’s twenty-line poem, “Sandpiper.” This was everything, she was everything I had never dared to want, and when we kissed in the mist of the falls, we already knew how lucky we were.

  “How long before you got married?”

  I told her about “living in sin,” about the idyllic years in grad school—poetry readings, parties, black box theatre—and tried to summarize year by year. How proud I was of her, the sense of self-containment: all we really needed was each other. Jackie’s brilliance, the way she excelled at almost everything. The whole while I talked, I gazed out over the low roofs of Walnut Street, the stark Missouri sky above. It was my life I was looking at, scenes from my childhood mixed in with scenes with Jackie. I tried to explain. When I was thirteen, the six of us—my recently separated mom and all five kids—would ride our bikes, in single file, here on Sunday morning … three boys in blazers with clip-on ties or dickies, the girls in their summer dresses. A “mother hen with five little chicks,” as someone at Mass described it. As reward, on the way home, our mother would buy us all cherry phosphates at Glenview Drug. We were never more a family than on those Sunday mornings. I hadn’t stepped foot in Sacred Heart since then.

  “I’m starting to wonder about myself,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Well, I won’t touch Jackie’s things. And I hear her in the house. She’s with me,” I said. “One day, as I was working in the study, I saw a beautiful red fox loping straight toward me, across the golf course, tongue lolling to one side, and I cried out: ‘Jackie! Look!’”

  “Yes, she is with you,” said Maggie.

  “Michael,” she added, “Nothing we do for each other is in vain. I believe love is eternal.” Then she said, “And she’ll always be with you.” And there was no trace of striving in her tone: it was casual, matter-of-fact.

  After a moment, she asked about my “spiritual quest”; she mentioned that, besides the school, she ran the RCIA program—the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults—at Sacred Heart, and invited me to attend an “inquiry session.” In case I was curious.

  I didn’t mind that she asked me this; I could see no reason to mind.

  I went to the meetings for a few weeks, and enjoyed them. Two days before my lease ran out, I emptied Jackie’s dressers and closets, piled the mink coats in the bed of my truck, and poured the contents of jewelry boxes into a bushel basket. Real pearls, braids of gold and diamonds mixed in with handfuls of the baroque costume jewelry she’d collected for the stage. I drove to the Salvation Army, dumped it all in the center of the concrete floor—much to the astonishment of the volunteers—and walked away. That afternoon, I packed a U-Haul trailer, and before sunrise, I hit the on-ramp back toward Utah.

  All that year, it felt like I had the strength of two—almost an unearthly strength. I’d hike back into the desert wilderness for weeks, sometimes. I could draw unemployment in the city without a trace of shame, and did. In springtime, 1992, I finished RCIA at the Newman Center in Salt Lake, was baptized, and found joy in the process. By fall, when the academic year began again, I was back at the University, wrapping up my doctorate. Then the book was out, and I started interviewing for jobs. More importantly, I was free— at least for the time being—free of self-doubts, of second-guessing my personal worth or what I could do for others. And the truth is, Maggie was right; Jackie has always been with me.

  3. Sara

  I first met Sara in 1991, before Jackie died. I was teaching that fall semester at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. I’d taken the job, a simple sabbatical replacement, because Jackie had urged me to take it. She saw it as a first step toward my profession; she was probably right about that. Her one and only goal in those weeks, as the cancer rapidly overtook her, was to make it to Christmas. She didn’t make it to Thanksgiving. Each day, I drove sixty miles to teach my courses in Fulton, and then back to Columbia to take my place at Jackie’s side. When Jackie passed, I took only three days off, and then finished out the semester. I felt I needed the human contact, the normalcy.

  Sara was a Freshman Composition student of mine that semester. Here is virtually everything I remember of her then. She had gorgeous, liquid-brown eyes. She set up three required conferences with me to discuss her work, but each time, when I took the precious hour or two away from Jackie to meet, Sara didn’t show up. This didn’t go over well with me, and besides, I’d told the class that I’d count missed conferences as absences. I gave her a B+ for a final grade. I considered the B+ generous; she was very young, after all.

  In April 1998, a five-page letter arrived from Sara, addressed to “Professor Mike White, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.” Somehow, it found me at UNC-Wilmington. I’d nearly forgotten her. She was finishing a master’s degree in voice at the University of Missouri, and attending a summer residency at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On the last page, she wondered if we could meet. And because, that spring, I happened to be passing through Greensboro for a reading in Asheville, we did meet. I had a strangely awkward lunch on that rather prim campus with an anxious and long-limbed beauty. I was confused, but went to my reading, came back on Sunday as I passed through again, and we had another awkward lunch, club sandwiches at a nearby restaurant. I sent a salad back that came with the wrong dressing, and for some reason, this action made Sara seem very anxious. She later told me it made me seem demanding. By the end of that lunch I thought I probably shouldn’t see her again. The age difference seemed too pronounced. It was a mistake, I thought.

  But when I was dropping her off at her dorm, she suggested we go for a walk by a nearby pond. We ambled into a sheltered grove, and she stopped and turned toward me, smiling. I asked if I could kiss her, and she—amused that I had asked—said yes. I kissed her, passionately but respectfully, and there she showed me such strength of desire I wouldn’t have suspected.

  On her first visit to Wilmington, we spent a whole weekend on the beach. I sat, half delirious, watching her dash in and out of the jade-green waves in a tiny, black string-bikini. We made out for hours in the moonlit dunes, but didn’t yet sleep together. On her second visit, that October, we did—
going at it for three straight days and nights, dressing only once, very briefly, to go out for a bite at a nearby Thai restaurant. I can almost excuse myself for marrying her that December. The sex was narcotic. I’d flip over onto my back— heart in my throat, my lungs heaving—and realize that half a day had passed. Also, she was a Missouri girl, a comforting detail that probably carried more weight with me than it ought.

  When the lovely little wedding was over, along with the truncated but lovely honeymoon on Bald Head Island, off the coast of Wilmington, and when all the rooms had been repainted and the bride installed, it seemed as if bliss had arrived for good. It seemed as if my lonely childhood, battle with alcoholism, the tragic first marriage, and all the rest of my travails were well behind me now. Karma and perseverance had finally paid off.

  I’d gotten tenure, and was teaching, writing, getting back to my normal work. My material life was organized for the first (and last) time: towels neatly stacked away, socks matched, hedges cut off at their knees. Sara was an outgoing hit with everyone, was gardening enthusiastically, and had begun working part-time jobs. She was even starting to get along with my dog, a hyper black lab named Elizabeth. And if there was still more lust than love, that was fine for now.

  The odd thing is, although my first marriage taught me everything I knew about love, and would seem therefore to have prepared me for my second marriage, in fact it did the opposite. I was far too confident with Sara, partly because I’d built up my confidence sky-high with Jackie.

  Everything I wrote, for many years, I wrote for Jackie. I’d stay up all night drafting a poem, and leave a clean copy out on the kitchen table when I turned in at dawn, and it would thrill Jackie to the bone when she read it over her morning coffee. My knowing that a poem I wrote could do that for her kept me going. Not only my poetry, but almost everything else about me—my jokes, my wanderlust, even my crooked and dented nose—delighted Jackie. She fell in love with the idea of the A. A. fellowship (although she wasn’t an alcoholic), and enjoyed going to open meetings at my home group in Salt Lake City every week. She found them comforting. And in the last few years, no matter what Jackie and I went through—surgery after surgery, grief and rage and madness with no end in sight—we kept discovering that, together, we were able to face it. Never had I imagined I could matter so much to another human being.