by Alison Lurie
Time would continue to pass, but Alan would not get well. He no longer expected to get well, and Jane—though she constantly assured him otherwise—no longer expected it either. His illness would continue to wind itself around them greedily, choking their marriage just as the bindweed was choking her strawberries. They would never get rid of it.
TWO
Some days were better, Alan Mackenzie thought as he lay on the sofa. Some days were worse. All were bad. None were good. Always the pain was there. Alan imagined it as a lizard about ten inches long, its sharp scales mottled red and brown as if with blood and shit. It was there inside his back, gripping his spine with its dry twisted legs and claws, moving its jaw to bite and flicking its forked tongue. He knew what the lizard looked like because he had seen it sixteen months ago in New Mexico. It was spring vacation and he was viewing churches for his current project, a history of religious architecture in America. He was alone: after twenty minutes at the church, Jane had gone to sit in a nearby coffee shop and read the paper.
Alan was around the far side of the building, taking photographs with a heavy camera especially designed for architectural photography. It was a bright but slightly overcast day, ideal for this purpose, and he was happy with the way things were going and with the last set of prints he had collected. He snapped a couple of pictures; then he climbed onto a pile of stones to get a better view, and stepped on something that hissed and shifted. He shouted and leaped back, thinking Snake, stumbled, and dropped his camera with a crack that broke the lens.
But what he had stepped on wasn’t a snake, only a big ugly reddish brown lizard with twisted claws. Strangely, it did not scuttle off, but stood and looked at him. Its bulgy black eyes were hard, and its long jaw moved, as if it were saying something. What? Alan couldn’t tell then, but he knew now: I see you, the lizard was saying. I know you. And you will know me.
As it turned out, that church in Santa Fe was the last one Alan successfully photographed. He had had other trips planned for the summer, and in June he’d actually set out to look at a monastery on the Hudson; but after half an hour he had to stop the car. For the rest of the way Jane drove, while he lay crumpled on the back seat, moaning under his breath from time to time and half sitting up to drink lukewarm bottled water and swallow painkillers. Compared to him Jane was a slow and timid driver, and by the time they got to their destination he was in such agony that he could hardly hold his new and even heavier camera. It was no surprise that those pictures came out blurred and useless.
After that disastrous trip Alan had canceled the others. Jane was visibly relieved. She hated distance driving, and couldn’t bear to see him suffer, she often said. And besides, he knew, though she politely did not say, she couldn’t bear how difficult and impossible he was when he was suffering.
Alan knew he was difficult and impossible, and was becoming more and more so. He also knew that as time went on his pain and self-absorption, his depression and anxiety, were driving his wife further and further from him. She never said this, never even hinted it, but he assumed that she was angry and full of despair, just as he was angry and full of despair. And the fact that she would not admit this somehow made him even angrier, at her dishonesty.
He was almost sure that Jane didn’t love him as he was now, how could she, how could anyone? But month after month she had remained kind and patient and helpful, assuring him that she still cared for him, that they had a wonderful marriage, and this was, as she put it, “just a rough spot.” Alan knew he should feel gratitude; he did feel gratitude. But he felt this gratitude as a weight, increasing every day, tipping the balance further
If she did really still love him it was worse, because he wasn’t sure he loved her. This was now even literally true; it was more than a month since they had last gone through the awkward, self-conscious, often painful process that had taken the place of what used to be one of their happiest and most carefree activities.
Often he woke in the middle of the night and lay moaning and shifting, trying not to wake Jane. At the same time, like a nasty child, he hated her for being asleep and not in pain, and sometimes, meanly and shamelessly, he would moan louder and toss about, trying to wake her, so that she could be aware of how miserable he was. Sometimes he would succeed; more often, ashamed, he would get up, take another pill, and move to the guest room downstairs.
There, as he drifted in and out of an ugly sort of half sleep, he would think of the lizard behind the church, and say to himself that it had been a demon. Not the Devil himself, of course, but a minor member of his company, like those little monsters that appear in the corners of paintings by Bosch, sometimes carrying a pitchfork or a butcher knife. It would be natural that such creatures should hang about outside large old churches, seeking someone to tempt and torture and destroy.
It had taken the demon lizard over a month to follow Alan across the country from Santa Fe to Corinth, but it had not come alone. It had been accompanied or trailed by a gaggle of smaller demons; or, in medical language, complications and side effects. The primary and almost unbearable pain in his lower back was now from time to time accompanied by migratory pains in his left hip, groin, leg, and foot. The strain of trying to find a comfortable position to lie in produced lesser aches in his upper back, neck, and shoulder. The opiates and analgesics he took caused insomnia, headaches, and constipation, which could only be relieved by further drugs with their own side effects—among them indigestion, cramps, and mental confusion. The electronic contraption that blocked maybe twenty percent of the pain produced patches of ugly red rash where the electrodes were attached with a glue to which he was apparently allergic.
Of course, Alan didn’t believe in demons. He had lost his faith years ago, and anyhow the faith he had lost, or maybe only misplaced, the Scotch Presbyterian faith he had been brought up in, didn’t include demons. But sometimes as he lay awake in the spare room, he visualized the lizard and the little accompanying evil creatures that were causing the side effects. The constipation, for instance, he saw as a mud turtle that had taken up residence in his bowels, and the rash was an invasion of invisible red ants.
Meanwhile, he was falling apart both physically and professionally. Because he was no longer able to play tennis or squash or swim or go to the gym, he had gained weight and lost muscle tone. And because it was agonizing for him to sit in a chair for more than five minutes, he had been unable to work on his book—and in any case, he hadn’t visited and photographed more than half the buildings he wanted to include. In his current depressed condition, he felt revulsion from the book, because even if it were completed and published, so few would know or care. Most people now had no interest in the architecture of the past: they liked or at least were used to the featureless or pretentious modern buildings, slabs and rectangles of plaster and glass and metal, that were everywhere now. Alan had grown up among constructions like that in California. But when he was twelve his father, a professor of engineering, had taken the family on a summer vacation to New England. The houses and churches and public buildings he saw there, with their classical beauty, simplicity, order, and harmony of design, had been a revelation to Alan—had in the end determined his life’s work.
His love of Colonial architecture had even played a part in his marriage. When he met Jane, it was not only her good looks and lively charm that attracted him, but her intelligent and sympathetic appreciation of his plans for the building in which she worked, and her honesty and straightforwardness. Compared to her, most of the women he had known in California seemed noisy, frantic, self-centered, and overdecorated. Like the architecture he admired, she suggested order, harmony, and tradition. She was also, he discovered with joy, quietly passionate in private, and a thoughtful reader and critic of his writing.
Alan had already published four books on architecture, though the only one that anyone ever seemed to have read, the only one that was still in print, was a short guide to architectural follies in Great Britain. Small royalty chec
ks for this title continued to arrive regularly, and according to his publisher, it was popular with tourists. But it had done little to add to his scholarly reputation; most of his colleagues, he knew, considered it amusing but trivial.
In his opinion, they were wrong. The study of architectural follies—those imitation Greek temples, artificial ruins, shell grottoes, miniature pyramids, and prospect towers that rich landowners had constructed on their estates from the seventeenth century to the present day—was fascinating and rewarding. In some ways, these follies gave him more aesthetic pleasure and said more about architectural and social history than most conventional structures. When he was in college, majoring in art and thinking of becoming a landscape artist, Alan had often included such constructions in his drawings and paintings. More recently, before he became ill, he had erected two such follies on his own property in Corinth: first a small triumphal arch based on the one in Washington Square, and then a former henhouse partly converted into a ruined late-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic chapel. Even with the help of his graduate students, building these follies had not been easy, but it had been deeply satisfying.
Now Alan could hardly bear to look at these constructions: he was far too aware of the irony involved. Building them himself had been folly, and worse than folly, a kind of hubris—a refusal to accept that he was over fifty years old and unable any longer to move heavy stones and raise roof beams without strain. It was related to the folly and hubris of his insisting on playing volleyball on a hot day, and then reaching for an impressive long shot, when his back already ached from carrying a pile of slates for the roof of his chapel earlier in the day. Building a ruin, he himself had become a ruin, and one that received no respect. In the past, aging men, like aging buildings, were admired as rare and marvelous survivors of time and weather: they appeared often in romantic painting and poetry. But since the twentieth century, which produced so many human and architectural ruins, they have not been seen as picturesque, but rather as ugly and even frightening.
Alan had never revealed any of these thoughts to Jane or anyone. As much as possible, he concealed his anxiety and depression. If Jane wanted to know how he was feeling, he would tell her, but mostly he said nothing. When other people asked how he was, he was noncommittal. He had memorized several banal phrases for this purpose. “Oh, I’m getting along,” he would say. “Hanging in there.” Such phrases made most of them think he wasn’t as badly off as he really was and probably made others think he was malingering. Even on the rare occasions when he admitted the truth, most people didn’t listen. Nobody wants to hear bad news, he had discovered, except for certain ghouls who feed on the misery of others. He hadn’t known who these people were before, because they operated under disguise, pretending to be normal human beings. But once you were ill, they came out of the woodwork, like woodworms, white and flabby and rapacious. “You must be very discouraged,” they said. Or, “Of course, most back trouble never really goes away.” Or “You look awful. I guess you’re not getting much sleep, huh?”
When he heard remarks like this Alan was consumed with rage, and it wasn’t just their authors he was angry at, but everyone who was well, including Jane. In fact, the only people he felt comfortable with now or really enjoyed talking to were other semi-invalids, especially those with back trouble. It had been amazing for him to discover how many such people there were. It was almost like a secret society: non-members might know of its existence, but only members understood its power and importance, and only they knew what went on at meetings. They didn’t keep their illness a secret, but among outsiders they mentioned it only rarely, and spoke of it carelessly and dismissively. Only in private did they admit the extent of their suffering, compare symptoms and diagnoses and treatments and side effects, rate doctors and hospitals, and sometimes exchange prescription drugs.
Alan had become particularly close to two local members of the society of back-pain sufferers, both of them people who would have been of little interest to him in the past. Both had been ill longer than he had: he therefore looked up to them and listened to them with respect, just as those who had joined later looked up to him. One was a semi-retired veterinarian called Bernie Kotelchuck, a big, hearty, red-faced elderly man who wore loud plaid shirts. Bernie was the veteran of nearly a decade of back trouble and of three operations—two diskectomies and a fusion—the last of which had been about sixty percent successful. Because of these experiences, and his medical knowledge, he was respected by everyone in the back-pain society. In Bernie’s opinion, Alan might profit from surgical intervention, but the longer he could wait, the better his chances. Right now, any operation was risky, but progress was being made, and in a hundred years there was sure to be a cure. Whereas a hundred years ago the kindest thing would have been to shoot both him and Alan to put them out of their misery, as Bernie had once shot a beloved Labrador retriever that had been hit by a car.
According to Bernie, what Alan should do now was get a recliner. He had one himself at home: a huge, hideously vulgar gray pebbled leather object that Bernie’s wife had christened The Hippopotamus and banished to his study. Maybe one day, when he had given up all hope of recovery and all aesthetic sense, Alan would have to buy something like this, but as yet he had refused to do so.
Alan’s other new back-pain friend was a shy, wispy, forty-five-year-old teacher of freshman writing for foreign students at Corinth named Gilly Murphy. Gilly was a Buddhist and a vegetarian; she had long pale hair and wore long trailing flowery skirts and had had back trouble for over two years. When she was at her worst, she couldn’t even walk. So far, she had treated her pain with chiropractics, meditation, exercise, acupuncture and acupressure, and a kind of hands-off massage technique called Reiki. She also consumed large quantities of herbs and seaweed, which she was eager to share with Alan. As a result of all this, she claimed, she had experienced brief periods of complete relief. Probably it was mostly nonsense, but he had to admit that meditation sometimes did reduce the pain temporarily, and that Gilly’s fragrantly flowery but subtly bitter herbal tea sometimes helped him to sleep.
In Bernie’s view, there was no reason for him or Alan to feel specially afflicted by fate. “We’ve had it too good all our lives, so when something like this happens we feel insulted and injured. In most other parts of the world, they’d think we were damn lucky to have survived.” Both he and Gilly believed that in fact there were many more sick people than well people anywhere, even in a relatively healthy environment like Hopkins County. “The thing is,” Bernie had explained, “people who are sick are in the hospital, or at home, where you can’t see them. And those who don’t stay home, the ones you might meet in the course of a day, even if they admit to a cold or a headache, a lot of them don’t let on if they’re chronically ill. Course, it’s different for me. Because I’m a vet, a lot of people want to tell me all about it, and they want me to suggest a treatment. I tell them, unless you’re a horse or a cow or a dog, nothing doing. I don’t want to lose my license.”
Gilly, though from a different perspective, concurred in this view of a world mostly composed of the ill. A lot of the people she met, especially her students, she said, were victims of an imbalance between body and mind. Her classes at Corinth University were largely remedial, and her students tended to be either athletes, recruited for their physical rather than their intellectual prowess, or those for whom English was a second or third language, who had had to study night and day to pass their courses. The former group suffered from overemphasis on the body, the latter from mental strain and lack of sleep and exercise.
Levering himself painfully off the sofa, Alan shuffled into the downstairs bathroom, where he peed and took half of another pill. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves to inspect his latest symptom, a red, itchy rash on his forearms. Either Gilly or Bernie, he seemed to remember, had once complained of something like this. Maybe whichever one it was could recommend some kind of cream, or a good dermatologist. He returned to the kitchen, pou
red himself a glass of orange juice, and tore open a virgin bag of potato chips. If Jane were there she would give him her silent better-watch-your-weight look, but (he glanced out the kitchen window to check) she was still in the garden. And anyhow, so what? Eating, as Bernie had once remarked, was one of the few pleasures left when you had back trouble, and (unlike alcohol) wasn’t dangerous in combination with drugs.
Trailing crumbs,Alan passed through the dining room, taking the portable phone off its base, returned to the sofa, and began to dial. When neither of his new friends answered, he uttered a curse that was almost a sob. Hearing this unpleasant, shameful noise, a kind of darkness of self-disgust came over him. How had he gotten to this place in his life, where he was consumed with rage and despair because he couldn’t whine about his rash to other invalids, people he wouldn’t have even cared to know two years ago?
Alan had always had many friends, maybe he still did, but he didn’t want to see any of them. Once it became clear that his back wasn’t going to get better soon, they had begun to treat him in an awkward uneasy manner, as if he had joined a cult or been convicted of some embarrassing felony. It reminded him of a book he had read in college, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, set in an anti-utopia where illness was a crime. Back then, Alan had assumed that was either a joke or a bid for more understanding of criminal offenders. Now he knew it was no more than the truth. To be briefly ill was merely a misdemeanor, like exceeding the speed limit or lifting a monogrammed towel from a hotel. People didn’t approve, but the slip was soon forgiven if not forgotten. Chronic illness made you into a chronic offender: even your best friends didn’t treat you the same as they once had. They were solicitous, but formal and uneasy, glad to see you but gladder to leave. Eventually even your own family was affected. “Danielle and the kids are bored with the whole thing of my back,” Bernie had once said. “They don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
