Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  69.

  Purgatory

  FOR A WEEK IN EARLY MAY, JUDI HAD BEEN AWARE OF A CONSTANT FEELING OF nausea, just a touch, nothing serious, not pain so much as a reminder. She never did throw up. She ate a little, worked, but always felt uncomfortable and enervated. She could close her eyes whatever she was doing, wherever she was, and just drop off to sleep, or, if not actually to sleep, to a kind of foggy dreamland. I told her she had spring fever and what she needed was a cross-country drive. Those amber waves of grain will perk you right up. She agreed to a picnic in Purgatory

  Purgatory Chasm is this curious geologic fissure a quarter mile long and fifty feet wide down in Sutton. The vertical walls of the chasm are as high as seventy feet. The feature was formed, geologists think, when a deep glacial lake drained all at once and poured out of this single rocky outlet. What remains are canyons, caves, and overhanging rocks, all out here in the middle of the woods. I came here as a kid on a family outing and got sick in the playground riding around and around on this—I don’t know what you call it—this spinning disk. Martha and I came here early one spring to hike and pick mushrooms. I remember how the place seemed cold, gray, disappointing that day.

  On the drive down, I asked Judi if we come back, if we’re reincarnated, is it always to this planet? this universe? She raised her eyebrows. Are you making fun of me? I said, No. She said she thought we did. That’s been her own experience anyway. I guess I was just trying to make conversation, trying to get her to relax. I said, Do all the ants come back, too? She said, Yes, all living things. Well, then, how do we recognize each other when we come back? We usually don’t, she said.

  Judi and I walked to the grove, found a picnic table we liked. We were alone, this being a work day. We walked to the chasm. Judi wasn’t up for exploring, said she’d watch me climb. We just sat on a rock, looked up at the graffiti. On June 14, 1952, someone named Leo stood on a narrow ledge sixty feet over the chasm floor and wrote his girlfriend’s name on the rock: “Joyce,” then signed and dated the inscription. They’d be old now, Leo and Joyce. I wondered were they married and did they live nearby, like in Douglas, and did they drive over here and look up at Leo’s declaration? Or maybe Joyce married someone else and it didn’t work out, but she’ll come here sometimes, look up, and find solace and also regret. The deFusco Gang signed the chasm wall in 1935; Barney on July 27, 1941. Did Barney make it through the war?

  It’s interesting, this impulse to leave your name in public places, to say I was here, I was alive. Is it the name or is it the deed that compels? Will future anthropology students write papers about spray paint and rock, compare graffiti to petroglyphs? Would the reincarnated Barney recognize his old handwriting?

  Back at the table Judi looked at her potato salad and said she just couldn’t eat. She felt bloated, unsteady. She pushed the plate away from her. The smells, she said. And then she vomited on the bench, on her shoes. She cried, apologized. She put her head on my shoulder, punched the bench, and screamed. Fuck it all, she said. I think of that moment in the mottled light of the pine grove as the beginning of the end.

  When we got home, I called Stoni. For the next several hours, Judi vomited bile and fecal matter. We drove her to Memorial, admitted her. They suspected and subsequently confirmed a bowel obstruction caused by an encroaching tumor. She had a mercury-filled tube inserted in her nose and down her throat into her intestines. Later, an operation, an anastomosis, attached the small intestine to the colon above the obstruction.

  When she came home, Judi was at first too weak to sit up. We got her a hospital bed. Stoni moved in, set up a cot in Judi’s room. I moved Judi’s bed into the spare room and slept there. Stoni said our job now was to make Judi as comfortable as possible. She had a morphine drip in the back of her hand that administered a dose every hour or so. She slept a lot. When she was awake, she vacillated between hope and despair, between alertness and confusion, between comfort and pain. She told me that sometimes nothing stopped moving until she closed her eyes, and she felt like she was lying on a bed of needles. I asked her what her pain was like. She said, Like someone is slicing me up with a razor. Judi knew that something more important than anything else that had ever happened in her life was happening.

  Those weeks of May and June blur together for me. I’d help Stoni with Judi, bathe her, feed her, sit with her. We had hospice nurses come in daily to help. I’d go to work and stay away longer than I needed to. Nicky and I would stop for beers or I’d go to Tatnuck Booksellers and browse, drink coffee. The smells of the house were getting to me. I was always wanting to open the windows, but Judi was always cold. People would visit regularly. Dorie always hugged me when she left. Trixie pretended everything was going to be all right. She’d keep talking about the future even when Judi told her she’d used all her future up. Hervey always brought a bottle and always made me share it with him. Every visit he’d resurrect some old pal of his who was dead, tell funny stories about what the old pal and he had done. Layla wore a nose ring now and had pierced both her eyebrows. I thought she looked cute. She told me Pozzo was reading again and talking to strangers finally, and was going to enroll at Quinsigamond Community College as a history major in the fall. Once he got his associate’s degree, they’d be getting married. She told me about their married friends, Joe and Debbie, who have a baby and they’re not even on welfare. Too proud for that. They’re making it and are kind of a model for Layla and Pozzo. Joe sells crack is how they do it. They get by He doesn’t use himself. Albert, Ron, and Mark dropped in on Saturdays. I hadn’t seen them since Josh’s memorial service. And, of course, I was trying to write every day, but all I could write about was dying and illness. Even Theresa was sounding cynical.

  There are a few moments during those weeks that I remember clearly One morning Judi said she wanted to see Spot. I said, Are you sure? I could picture him now, chewing on the morphine tube. Well, Spot the Omnivorous waddled into the house and became immediately sedate. He stood in the kitchen a minute, and then, with his head lowered, he clicked his way across the kitchen and followed me to Judi’s room. He put his head on the bed and let himself be patted, his tail wagging like crazy. They have no control over that, do they? He did try to step up on the bed. Judi cried in pain and that kind of spooked old Spot. I got his front paws down. He never tried it again. Judi said she wanted him to stay. I told him to lie down. He sniffed a scatter rug, circled it, and plopped down. So then every morning I would let Spot in and he would trot to the bedroom, lick Judi’s face, and lie on the rug.

  Another day she grieved over her loss of mobility, energy, stamina, sexual appeal, sense of self. She said, A year ago I played golf and tennis and made love all night long. Not with me, I thought. I remembered Puusepp. She said, What have I given to the world? to you? to my family? to my love? to myself? She asked me has anyone reached Ronnie yet. Not yet, but we’re looking. She said, No habits, Laf. Think about everything you do. She asked me to take a letter.

  Dear Richard:

  I dreamed about you when I was delirious with morphine and blinding pain. I always knew you loved me, but in the dream I felt your love. You kissed the palm of my hand, remember. Now my heart understands what my mind already knew. I am always thinking of you.

  Love, Judi

  She told me to mail the letter to Richard. Richard who? Richard You-know-who, she said. I let it drop for now. The next day I asked her about Richard. She said, Who? I guessed: an accordion player. Judi looked at me. Richard is dead.

  One morning she felt fine, she said, felt terrific. She said she knew she’d never be cured, never be back to normal or anything, but maybe soon she’d get back to work. The next day she was fevered and delirious. Stoni told me what to do. I gave Judi a tepid sponge bath and covered her with a light blanket. She was so out of it, she thought we were out at the El Morocco having dinner. I went along with her. She ordered lamb and pilaf. I had shish kebab and salad. All the time we’re doing this, Judi’s eyes are open and she’s
looking right at me. She didn’t pretend to eat or anything and neither did I. We were like actors reading through the script. She looked at the window. Is that your ex-wife with the Pope? I turned and looked. I said, I can’t tell from here. She said, Don’t be coy, Laf. She ordered dessert. She said, You can tell from his hat he’s the Pope. I looked at her and thought, This isn’t Judi. This is her brain refusing to admit that it’s in mortal danger. I wanted Judi back. Spot lay on his rug, his front legs twitching. I heard the tick-tick of Puusepp’s watch. I opened the night table drawer and took it out, put it on.

  70.

  A Place of Cool Repose, the Blessedness of Quiet, the Brightness of Light

  JUDI WAS SHAKEN OUT OF SLEEP BY HER DEATH, RATTLED AWAKE BY A TREMBLING cough into a final, brief consciousness. Spot heard her, woofed thinly without raising his muzzle from his rug. He lifted his eyes to me—I closed my book, lowered the music. I wished Stoni were back already from the pharmacy.

  Judi was sweating, crying, gasping for air. I wiped her brow, her cheeks, her neck with the damp washcloth. “I’m here, Judi. I’m here. Spot’s here. It’s all right.” Her skin was pucky and blotched. Something at the surface had started its work. I remembered her telling me once how the chemo made her skin feel like it was covered with electric ants. Her body jerked in its effort to breathe. Her eyes pleaded with me to carry her back from this precipice. She sucked the air, every breath a gurgle of laryngeal juices, every exhalation a moan. I held her hand. She squeezed mine. Even if death is a release from misery, even if death is a passage to another life, a better life, we have such a difficult time in the letting go, life being the devil we know.

  Judi’s legs began to kick. I looked around, expecting, I think, to apprehend death’s visage, feel his chilly presence. I saw that it was 4:37 P.M. I listened for the back door to creak open. I wished Judi could have someone other than me here with her. Someone she deserved. Someone wild with love, love unadulterated and ferocious, who would whisper to her now, “Your death will take my life.” Someone whose grief would fissure into madness, whose keening would pierce the stillness of this hollow house, whose screams would crack the vaults of heaven. Someone who would hold his god accountable for this abomination. Instead she has this stranger here who just wants her to stop this struggling.

  Judi thrashed, tossed her head to the left, the right. I told her, “Judi, you can let go.” And she did. She let go of my hand. I touched her face. Judi stretched her neck. I thought maybe she wanted to say something. She closed her eyes. The only sound in the room was the long hiss of her last breath. And I thought, So this is how it comes, this is how light ripens to darkness, how complexity shutters to simplicity This is how knowledge is stilled, how fear is quenched. This is how rest becomes the long and dreamless sleep. This is how love becomes irrelevant. I sat there. I didn’t know what to do. I waited.

  “Death’s a hard job, Laf,” she had told me that morning. “This is taking an eternity.” Then she told me about her pain, how it had changed, or how her perception of it, at least, had changed. She said that now she knew the pain was the presence of God passing through her body. And I thought, Where did this enlightenment come from? And I knew, well, I didn’t know, but I guessed that today, the summer solstice, the longest day, would be Judi’s last.

  She said the Lord had pierced her soul with the fire of his love—as with a sword—drawing his heart into hers. I said, You sound like Gertrude of Helfta. She smiled, nodded. It’s the same all over again, she said. It was Gertrude, I thought, some of it was. And some of it was the morphine, and some of it was fear. This is what we do with what frightens us and what we can’t understand. We fashion it into something we can live with.

  She said, It’s not the Lord’s blood flowing in my veins, mixing with my blood, that hurts so much, but it’s the pain of not being with Him, not being a part of Him, that does. She told me her ears were ringing, and there was an echo to every sound, even to her own words. She smiled, seemed amused by this, distracted. Sometimes the pitch changes, she said. I wonder if this is the music of my body, she said.

  She talked about her dad. “Take care of Ronnie at the funeral,” she said. “I don’t want people laughing at him.”

  “I will.”

  “So, tell me what you’re going to do, Laf. Tell me about your future.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I shrugged, looked at the Indian cloth sheets riffling on the ceiling. “I’ll write. That’s all I know.”

  Judi closed her eyes, may have been asleep. What I realized at that moment was that Judi and I had never had the chance to imagine a future together, to see ourselves in another time and another place, to consider our lives as intimate friends do. We lacked a shared past. How did all of this affect our continuous present?

  Judi opened her eyes. She said, “The air will be full of space where my body used to be, where it was going to be.” She wet her lips with her tongue. “What’s air?”

  I said, “You should get some rest now”

  Judi smirked. “Rest for what?”

  “Want some water?”

  She shook her head. “I’m totally useless.”

  I understood this as a statement of truth, as Judi felt it, not as an indulgence in self-pity. I said, “Judi, a person’s worth isn’t measured by her utility We’re not tools. We’re here to think. To feel. To be good to each other.”

  She told me how the ringing in her ears was now a song of God and that now He was speaking to her in Latin, and she understood Him. And then she said, “Am I making sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so tired. I’m at the point where I’m seeing faces. Everywhere. In the wallpaper. The front of the radio. The wrinkles in the sheets. In the lamp with the hat on. In the vase and the shaggy-haired flowers. Everyone’s watching me. How do I look?”

  “You look lovely and tired.”

  “We had fun,” she said. “Maybe we’ll do it again.” And she smiled.

  I smiled.

  She closed her eyes. “I got what I came for,” she said. She fell asleep. Those were Judi’s last words.

  There’s a form of energy that seems to leave the body at death. Some might call it the soul or the mind or consciousness or the life force. Whatever it is, it takes the body’s warmth with it and its personality. Judi was gone; something unique had passed, and I sat with what remained. Judi would have it that her soul is somewhere waiting for another body to enter. I hope she’s right about all this, but I believe she’s wrong. Our being here is a fortunate accident of chemistry, I think, one we’ve exploited about as much as we can, and one unlikely to reoccur. I hope I’m wrong. Nicky told me what he thinks is that whatever you believe in comes to pass. But I’ll stick with Job: “So man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, not be raised out of their sleep.”

  I heard the back door. Stoni came into the bedroom. She nodded. “I knew it,” she said. She cried. “I was at the red light at Heard Street, and I felt it.” I tied up Spot outside, came back in to do whatever we had to do. We must have to call someone.

  Stoni scooped up Judi in her arms, asked me to strip the bed. I did. We put on new sheets. Stoni brought in a basin of water, soap, a washcloth. She bathed her sister and then covered the body with a sheet. I drew all the shades to darken and cool the room. Stoni took an identifying tag from the mortuary pack and filled it out. She fastened it to the great toe on Judi’s right foot with a twist tie. We went to the kitchen and sat.

  “I’d like a drink, Laf.”

  “Me, too.” I got a bottle of vodka out of the freezer, two glasses. Yes, I drink too much.

  We drank to Judi.

  I said, “What do we do now?”

  “Wait.”

  “For?”

  “About an hour and a half.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t want any eager paramedics trying to revive her.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

&nb
sp; Stoni nodded. “When they get here in a couple of hours, liver mortis will have set in. They’ll see this, the red fruit of her death. They’ll leave her alone.”

  Stoni made phone calls to relatives and friends. I puttered about the kitchen. I remembered Judi putting out her cigarette in the sink. I smiled. I took all the appointment cards off the refrigerator door. Then I emptied the medicines and vitamins out of the fridge, dropped them into a plastic grocery bag, and tossed the bag into the trash can under the sink. I dried the dishes and glasses on the drainer and put them away. I cleaned the counter and stove top. I dry-mopped the floor. When the washer stopped, I put the sheets into the dryer. I couldn’t remember if I had used soap or not. I sat. I heard Stoni thanking someone. I poured myself another drink. I looked at the clock that has always been five minutes fast, daylight and standard time. I looked at the silver canisters lined up on the counter between the cookbooks and the bread box. I am the only one, I realize, who knows that inside FLOUR are red kidney beans, and inside SUGAR is rice, and inside COFFEE are coupons, most of them probably expired, and inside TEA, M&M’s.

  Every day of my life I think about dying, have since I was ten years old or so. Maybe this started with bedtime prayers, I don’t know. And every time I think of dying I become frightened and depressed. I think about how I’ll die—in a plane crash, with none of my faculties intact, of a cerebral hemorrhage; I think of where I’ll die—in a rooming house, in Skowhegan, Maine, in a nur-nursing home, ba-babbling to myself; I think about when I’ll die—in my sleep, at seventy-two, or before I finish this sentence. And wonder what will happen after I die. What I mean is, what will I be missing? The existence of existence and the existence of nonexistence. When I think about this at night, I can’t sleep.