Nicky raised his hand, but no one saw him. I ordered two more. Nicky spoke up. He said, “You know, if we make poetry really simple, really accessible, like you say, even our pets will be able to understand it. Thank you.” His pronouncement was followed by silence and knitted brows. Then he said, “In fact, we could just make endearing noises.” I told Nicky he was upsetting my comrades.
June McClary announced that she and her friends were going to a gay bar and did anyone else want to join them. Scott and Liz were quarreling quietly, decorously. Nicky and I switched to beers.
41.
I Looked Up and Saw the Two of Us Reflected in the Mirror on Judi’s Bedroom Ceiling
WE SPELLED IS. I WAS OUT STRAIGHT AND APPROPRIATELY FIRST PERSON SINGUlar. Judi lay curled like an s. She was dead asleep and talking in what could have been Bulgarian, I suppose, or Klingon. Whatever it was she was saying, she was excited about it. I heard the painting crew arrive at Mr. Lesperence’s and heard Spot bark twice at them. I closed my eyes and looked ahead at my day, saw marriage counseling at two. I hadn’t spoken with Martha since our surprising assignation of last week, and I had no idea what she was thinking. Maybe everything will be all right between us. Maybe I should take a shower. Judi stopped her chattering. Next door, someone extended an aluminum ladder, resting it against the house.
So why had Martha and I made love? Does it signal that intimacy has returned? I opened one eye. Judi straightened her legs, extended an arm. Now we spelled If. Was I reading too much into sleeping positions? So while I lay pondering my inexplicable infidelity with my wife—an interesting concept, for sure—Judi was facing a second round of chemo or trying not to face it. Stoni would be taking her to Memorial later this morning. They’d be home before I got off work. I was hoping her treatment would go better this time. Judi didn’t even want to talk about it. She had told me the night before not to wake her up. All she wanted to do, she said, was sleep. Sleep until she was healthy again.
When I was in the first grade at St. Stephen’s, Sister Mary Timothy explained sin to our class by drawing three milk bottles on the chalkboard. Then she produced a stick of brown chalk from her desk drawer. She explained to us that the bottles were like our souls. See how nice? she said. And then she smiled. The first bottle she left as it was and said, That is your soul in the state of grace. Grace is green, I thought. Got it so far. In the second bottle, Sister shaded in a blotch of brown with the side of her chalk right where I figured the heart of my soul was. That’s a venial sin, she said. And here’s another—she browned in another area and then another. Then she embrowned the third bottle completely and stepped back away from the board. Did anyone know what this third bottle was called? Roy Desaulniers yelled out, Chocolate milk! Sister ignored him, probably forgave him, might even have said a prayer for him. Mortal sin, she said, and she let that sink in. And you will be going straight to hell if you die with a soul in this condition. She tapped the soiled milk bottle with the point of her chalk. We’ve talked about hell, she reminded us. You do remember? How could we forget? Fires, body sores, darkness, melting eyeballs, no Mom, no Dad, no candy, monsters with ice picks, buried to our necks in dung. Lasts longer than school does. Yes, we remember, Sister. I was terrified. Well, Sister said, there is a cure. Hallelujah! Tell me now. She held up an eraser. Confession, she said. Confession, I’ll have to remember that and get me some. I committed the word to memory. Then Sister erased the mortal sin and the venial sins. Why was I thinking of all this now? Because that’s how I imagined cancer, a spreading brownness, a corruption in the milk bottle of your body. And chemo is the eraser.
Terry sensed the tension as soon as Martha and I walked in and sat on opposite ends of the couch. She smiled and nodded hello. She waited. Martha fussed in her seat. I imagined myself far away, in a stone house with the fireplace going and a view down the hill of a quiet lake. Martha spoke:
Why did I throw him out of the house? Because I wanted him to love me. He says love is not something you control. He doesn’t know what love is if he can say that. Love is not a condition; it’s a behavior, a desire. My problem is I love a man who does not love me. I’ve parked for hours outside her house. I’ve seen him walk by the window running his hand through his hair. I’ve seen the lights go out in the house, seen the lights come back on. I’ve heard Spot’s barking.
I said, “Yes, Terry, I heard what she said. I don’t know where to start.” I took a deep breath and puffed.
“He seduced me,” Martha said.
I said, “What the hell are you talking about, Martha?”
Martha reached for a tissue and pulled one from the box on the coffee table. She shook her head and cried.
Terry sat up, leaned forward. “Go with it,” she said to Martha.
Terry said, “Why don’t we listen to what Martha has to say.”
Martha caught her breath. “We had lunch and drinks, and we went to my place, and he talked so sweetly and everything.”
I couldn’t believe it. “How is that seduction, Martha?”
Terry raised her brow to a supercilious level, assured me I’d get my chance to talk. “Right now,” she said, “Martha is in a lot of pain.”
Martha said, “And now I’ve probably got AIDS or something from that whore he’s fucking.”
I looked at Terry for some acknowledgment of the lunacy loose in the room. Terry, though, was holding Martha’s hand, telling her to breathe, to release the pain. “What was it like making love to your husband?” she said.
Martha finally got hold of herself. “I wouldn’t call it that,” she said. “It was just sex. That’s all.”
A breeze is coming off my lake. I’m through writing for the day. I pour myselfa snifter of cognac and sit by the fire and read The Magic Mountain. I read until I hear the scrunch of tires on the gravel driveway.
“And how did it feel?” Terry said.
“It felt cheap and humiliating. I was disgusted. The only way I could endure it was to think of something else.” She said, “It was like I wasn’t even there.”
I said, “I could tell.”
Martha wheeled around and swung at me, caught me right on the temporary crown with the back of her hand or her wrist or something and screamed that I was a bastard. When I looked up, Terry was holding Martha’s shoulders. I held my hand to my bleeding lip. Martha cried. The crown was loose. I decided just to bleed on Terry’s shag carpet. She could afford the steam cleaning.
Terry patted Martha’s back. Martha nodded and sat down. Terry asked me if I would like to sit back on the couch and continue. I stayed where I was. I said, “What’s going on here?”
Terry said, “What do you think is going on?”
I said, “I think I’m getting beat up.” I ran my tongue over my swollen lip. “Is this what you call appropriate therapeutic behavior, Terry?”
She said, “Well, do you think it is?”
I said, “You’re getting on my fucking nerves.”
She said, “You sound angry.”
I said, “You’re a genius, Ms. Freud.”
She said, “Why don’t you get up and sit down.”
“I am sitting.”
“And deal with your hostility.”
Martha said to me, “Why are you here?”
I tried to talk without moving my lip or disturbing the loosened crown. I still don’t know if I meant what I told her. “Because I want this marriage to be over.”
“Why don’t you just leave?” Martha said.
“I did leave.”
Martha said, “Why don’t you get off your ass and walk out that door?”
I considered and discarded the nasty answers in my head. I thought about it. I said, “I do care about you, you know.” Martha began to pound her fists on her knees. I closed my eyes. I said, “I just don’t think I can live with you.” I could hear Martha sobbing. Terry shifted in her chair. I could hear the blood coursing through my body.
I imagined Martha and I together again in the future.
Maybe that’s her slamming the car door, walking across the driveway with lobsters for tonight. But I knew I wouldn’t be seeing Martha, not in a significant way, for the rest of my life. What would happen, then, to all our private jokes, our domestic rituals, our secret language of gesture and nuance, our silly terms of endearment? This was a death, Martha’s death as my wife. I had taken away our future. I didn’t want to think I was capable of this. At that second every sweet moment we’d ever shared washed over me, every embrace, every laugh, every dream we dreamed. I knew that I would always hear her voice, that my skin would always crave her touch, that my body would always lean into her arms. I felt like I was drowning.
Martha said, “Why are you torturing me? I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
Terry filled the ensuing silence. “Martha asked you a question, Laf. Were you able to hear what she said?”
I stood, took a tissue out of the box and applied it to my lip. I knew if I opened the door, nothing would ever be the same again. I would never be the Lafayette proulx Martha had married. I didn’t know if I was being courageous or foolish, cowardly or sane. I turned the knob.
Martha said, “You’re just going to leave?”
I held the door.
“Just like that you’re going to leave?” she said.
42.
Illness as Metaphor
A. “PAUL AND SILAS”
When I was in eighth grade at St. Stephen’s School, Paul McDonald, my close friend and the inventor of Elephant Street Basketball (a full-contact sport played, if possible, on slush and ice and featuring optional dribbling, Indian rubber, and body checks) spoke up in civics class and told us all that the godless Communists in North Vietnam had to be stopped. North Vietnam, he explained, was an infectious and pernicious tumor, and it would have to be cut out of the body politic lest the cancer spread to the rest of the Free World. Sister Dominic Marie fingered her beads. Her lips trembled in silent prayer. I sat up in my seat. Paul’s speech was remarkable for its passion (civics class was normally a time for dozing or staring at Rosemary Walsh’s alabaster neck), for its alarming certitude, and for its stunning use of metaphor. I could see that Brian Foody was puzzled. But I was certain of it—cancer was evil.
I knew about cancer. For nearly a year or so of my childhood, around third and fourth grades, I watched my uncle Silas, my father’s youngest brother, wither away with what my mother called cancer run amuck, which always sounded like a summer camp to me. (It was, in fact, adenocarcinoma of the pancreas and it metastasized throughout his body.) Uncle Silas’s bedroom was off the kitchen in my grandparents’ apartment. Every Sunday the family—aunts, uncles, cousins—showed up at my grandparents’ after Mass, and one by one we were led into Silas’s room to say hello. Mostly, he was too weak to speak or even to smile. The bedsheets were held above his body with some kind of tubular frame because the weight of the sheet was painful.
Uncle Silas grew smaller and more sallow over the months until he looked like a wren. In my world, sickness was a miserable but temporary condition, so I kept expecting that one of these Sundays Silas would be playing his guitar again. He’d be in the parlor doing Hendrix and driving all the old folks crazy.
I remember the fluorescent ceiling light humming over the kitchen table and bulkies, cream cheese, coffee, Zarex. I remember the sticky linoleum, the black cat clock, always eleven minutes fast, whose tail and eyes moved. I remember my cousin Danny saying to my grandmother, When Uncle Silas dies, will we bury him in the garden? I remember standing on a chair by the fridge and poking my finger between the bars of the parakeet’s cage and letting Mr. Peteydink peck at my fingertip. (I can’t believe I remembered his name.) I remember eating Post Toasties and milk right out of the little box and hating the entire experience. I remember the mumble and drone of the television coming from the parlor and the closed door of Silas’s room, the scrolled brass door plate, the two rubber bands slipped over the brass door knob, the keyhole like an exclamation point or a tiny mouth. My uncle Silas was twenty-three when he died. Later, Silas’s dad, my grandfather Henry, would die of prostate cancer in the same room, in the same bed. He’d go fast. Over that bed hung a wooden crucifix, and tucked between it and the cabbage rose wallpaper was a holy card of the Blessed Virgin. Mary accepts the veneration of two kneeling children by the seashore. The card reads, “O Marie, conçue sans pêché, priez pour nous, qui avons recours á vous.”
B. “THE NEIGHBORHOOD”
The first time Judi and I really discussed the cancer was several days after she had recovered from the first cycle of chemo. We’d gone out to celebrate. First to a movie, Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, which I just love and which Judi found interesting, and then over to the Boynton for dinner. The film examines the inability of science to understand the mystery at the heart of our existence. My old buddy Biscuit was loitering out front of the Boynton. These were hard times for Biscuit. I gave him a couple of dollars and introduced him to Judi. That’s not your old lady, he said. I explained. Why don’t you ever call? he said. I’m still at my mother’s. He gave me his number. I repeated it. The same number I called a million times when we were kids. Too good for your old friends? he said. Hardly, I said. I asked him if he’d gone to Woodstock II or III, or whatever it was, rock festivals being Biscuit’s passion. He told me how the security guards searched ticket holders. He called them all corporate fascists, meaning any artist who played there. He said that without sex and drugs and booze, rock ’n’ ’roll wasn’t all that interesting. I said, Well, we’ve got to go. I shook his hand, told him to take care of himself. His eyes followed a passing car. You won’t call me, he said.
Judi picked at her Greek salad, let me steal the feta cheese. I told her I could live on feta cheese, Toll House cookies, and cognac. I felt uneasy eating steamers in front of her. Was I making her sick? When I finished, I ordered myself another beer. Judi said, sure, why not, she’d have a glass of Chardonnay. I saw Biscuit walk in, bum a smoke off a guy in a booth, and take a stool at the bar. Judi tasted the wine and sent it back. She never does that. I thought Biscuit’s liver must be the size of a walnut by now. Judi said the new glass of wine was fine.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said.
“Do you?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“I’m frightened, Laf. About more chemo. I don’t want to go through that again.”
I took Judi’s hand. “Listen, don’t get all worked up about this. The anxiety will only make it worse, you know that.” I squeezed.
“You can’t just dismiss me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m dying . . . ”
“No, you’re not.”
“And you don’t want to be agitated, don’t want to deal with me.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I let go of her hand. What did I do that for?
“You’re going to hear me out whether you like it or not.” She sipped her wine. Considered it. “Tastes like nails.”
I said, “I know you’re afraid of dying. Who wouldn’t be, but . . . ”
“I’m afraid of suffering, of being disabled, out of it. But I’m not afraid of dying. Dying’s the least of it.”
What was I going to do, argue with her? Tell her she’s in denial? Persuade her to get in touch with the fear and the trembling, let me see the weeping and the gnashing of teeth?
She said, “I’ll die if I want to.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Is it bad genes, do you think,” she said, “or bad luck? Or what? Fuckola. Does my body have the cancer or do I?” Judi rested her chin on her hand. She stared at the paper-whites in the bud vase.
How many springs, I wondered, had she put narcissus bulbs on stones in a bowl of water, set the bowl on the windowsill, and watched the miracle of the first green shoots?
“Have I become cancer?” She looked over to me, sat up, crossed her hands on the table. “Who is it that says ‘I’? I feel betrayed.
Oh, Laf, this is the fucking shits.”
I told her that I knew things looked bleak, but she’d only begun to fight. If anybody could, she could beat this thing.
She put her hands on her belly. She didn’t tell me how much I sounded like some high school football coach. She said, “I can’t trust my own body. It humiliates me with pain, you know?” She cried for a moment, wiped her eyes, and apologized. Then she made me laugh. Referring to her insides, she said that the old neighborhood’s not what it used to be. Bad crowd moving in. Real estate values down the toilet.
I told her she still had her sense of humor. I finished my beer and we paid the bill.
Judi said, “Laf, what would you relinquish to be healthy? to have a future free of suffering? Not pain. Suffering. Give up your job? friends? family? stories?”
How intense the pain? I thought. How dire the suffering?
43.
Bad Gets Worse
AS HER SECOND ROUND OF CHEMOTHERAPY APPROACHED, JUDI WAS FEELING more energetic, less anxious, and seemed resolved to battle this thing. She was back to work a few hours a day. She was sleeping through the night and was able to eat a full meal without any gastric distress. Her hair was already starting to grow back, though it felt more like down than hair. Three times a day she did these visualization exercises that she had read about in one of Josh’s books. She saw herself at sixty-something playing doubles with some yachty types out at the Webster Thayer Country Club. I said, Swell, but where was I? She said, In the clubhouse lounge drinking vodka martinis and telling stories to impressionable matrons. Well, I said, at least I wasn’t golfing.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 18
