“Well?” she said, turning to him.
The lines of her underwear and bra strained against the fabric, clumping it, while the nightgown compressed her body into constricted, lumpy sections.
“It’s not what you had in mind,” she said.
“It’s not…bad.”
“I look like a tied-up chicken.”
He tried to caress her shoulder but ended up stroking the thick bra strap.
“A fatty, tied-up chicken.” She sucked in her breath.
“It was just a thought,” he said. “It was just for fun.”
She was putting her clothes back on. “But I’m working,” she said.
Something in his gut stiffened, and a corresponding muscle on the back of his neck did the same. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Not when there are feelings between us.”
She shook her head. “I can’t anymore.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It was a mistake. We shouldn’t have.” Her face was slack, empty of possibility. “Excuse me,” she said. She stepped around him and plugged the vacuum into the outlet.
The switch must have already been in the On position; it roared to life.
“Adele,” he said.
She cupped a hand to her ear.
“You were never a mistake,” he said.
She shook her head to indicate she couldn’t hear him above the noise.
Very calmly then, as if this was their purpose, Gene picked up the shears from the top of the dresser and clamped them around the vacuum’s cord and closed his hand. The heavy steel bit through the cord. Sparks shot out from the stubby ends of the wires. Oddly, the machine didn’t go quiet instantly; it rumbled on for a moment.
Adele was aghast. “Are you a complete idiot?” she said.
“I’m falling in love.”
“You’re mixed up, that’s all,” she said. “Your wife is dead, but I can’t help that.”
“This has nothing to do with my wife,” he said.
Adele gazed at him with gloomy indifference. But a moment later, the gloom was gone and she looked like the woman he had interviewed months ago, the one who was accommodating and plain, with no long fingernails, no hair doodads, no mounds of necklaces. She looked the same, only more tired, and she left the room without saying anything more. After a while the house was very quiet. When he went downstairs her rubber sandals were gone. She had left behind the key.
In the days that followed he found himself in a perpetual state of unrest. His calls to her went unreturned, but he still hoped to hear his own phone ring. He checked his email incessantly. Adele didn’t have his email address, but that didn’t stop him from hoping that if he happened to check his email on the right day at the right time, she might have figured out how to send him a message through the computer.
He clicked on all the stories on his AOL home page, and when the stories didn’t refresh quickly enough, he clicked on the ads. He hadn’t realized that if he kept clicking, eventually there would be links to what looked like news stories on the same pages as the ads, making it impossible to figure out what relationship, if any, either had to fact. The deeper he went into the layers of content the weirder they became, and he needed them to be weird if they were going to keep his mind off his loneliness. But whatever had been weird the day before would seem a bit ordinary the next day, so every day the stakes became a little higher, each search creating demand for accelerated weirdness. He clicked on gruesome photographs of a whale struck and killed by a Russian torpedo. He read about a service that would make a pornographic video of a pet, and he found himself purchasing a vitamin series that promised to strengthen the fibers of his penis. Among all of this he searched for Adele, half-expecting the internet to produce her for him.
He realized he didn’t know the most basic things about her. He didn’t know if she had grown up in Colton, or how long she had been in the area. He didn’t know where she lived. He had an idea about the kind of neighborhood, probably one of the shabbier parts of town where houses with metal siding were divided into front and back units and there were old shoes hanging over telephone lines. It amazed him that you could search in this manner—you could enter the name of the searched-for person plus shoes hanging over telephone wires—and the internet would send you something. But the found-something was rarely the lost-something.
Once he typed into the oracle field lost woman New Hampshire and the search engine sent him an article about a woman who had lost so much weight so quickly her skin hung off her body in folds that could be gripped by several large plastic clips of the sort used for sealing opened potato-chip bags. The image disgusted him and saddened him and he felt as if it was causing real damage to a part of him he couldn’t name, yet he couldn’t look away. He went back to it every day, each time fearful it might have disappeared in the interval since he had last attended to it. In some bizarre way the image became a part of his grief for Adele.
Often he had the feeling of another sensibility behind the computer screen, an entity that knew he was there and what he liked, and on the basis of this, decided what content to send him next. He was calm as long as he was clicking through this reality. And immediately afterward, if he had been on the computer for several hours, his brain moved indolently, without any focus. But eventually the effect wore off, and his loneliness returned.
He spent many fruitless hours wondering why Adele had left him. After he had cycled through the preliminary explanations—she was not thinking clearly, she had made a mistake, already she regretted her actions but was too proud to admit it—he arrived in a darker state where certain words she had spoken early in their relationship took on new meaning. As when he recalled her affinity for depressed people. When she had first come to him he was depressed and she had been fond of him, but later, when he couldn’t hide how happy she made him, she had left him. She had left him because he was too happy, that was it. Or because of the heart monitor. Everything between them had been fine before that, which suggested she had left him because she knew there was something inherently wrong with him.
Sometimes, in a bitter, desperate mood, he would drive slowly through neighborhoods looking at the women who happened to be on the sidewalk. They would often have a baby in one arm and a teetering grocery bag in another, and maybe a second or third child they were trying to persuade to get out of the car. Sometimes the children would be fighting each other over a scruffy stuffed animal or a cell phone. If the women noticed him they scoured him with wary eyes and as he drove away he felt his own mistrust of them.
He felt completely lost. For fifty years, he had belonged to someone else. First Maida, then, briefly, Adele. And now if Adele wouldn’t listen to him, he wouldn’t be understood. And if Adele wouldn’t touch him, his body would go untouched. He was afraid he was witnessing the final defection of love from his life.
20.
HE’D DONE SOMETHING stupid. Sending the heart monitor back to Dr. Fornier—he hadn’t thought it through. It hadn’t occurred to him that some information about his heart was already recorded and the doctors might easily extract it. This or some version of it was what had happened, and now he was scheduled with a thoracic surgeon on Monday. Dr. Fornier called him personally Sunday night to explain why it was important to keep the appointment.
When he woke up Monday morning it was snowing heavily. A vast smothering whiteness extended between the houses. The asphalt had disappeared under a broad avenue of snow. He recalled a promise he’d made to Dary about not driving when the roads were bad. It seemed the most harmless kind of promise to break for a doctor’s appointment, but he found himself indecisive about it, afflicted by the peculiar logic of superstitious fear. This fear told him that inevitably because he had remembered his promise and considered ignoring it, this would be the day he would get into a terrible accident. He hated asking anyone for a favor, but his discomfort was lessened by knowing Gayle would think nothing of giving him the ride.
Half an hour before the appoint
ment, Ed came to the house to collect him. Gene felt a jab of annoyance at Gayle’s assumption that she and Ed were interchangeable. Maybe if he were accustomed to the idea of his body as irreparably fragile, it wouldn’t have mattered, but he wasn’t yet prepared to acknowledge this to himself, and he certainly wasn’t ready to talk about it with another man. When Ed asked him about the appointment, Gene told him it was a routine mole check with a dermatologist.
In her office, the thoracic surgeon showed him on her computer several grainy images, fields of black interrupted by upside-down fans of light. On one of these she pointed to a mottled black-and-white oval protruding into the surrounding darkness. It was a small growth on the left side of his heart. She called it a mass at first and then, after assuring him it was almost certainly not cancer, switched to calling it a tumor, which was its rightful name, though Gene preferred to continue thinking of it as a mass. It was, the surgeon explained, the potential cause of his disorganized heartbeat. Leaving it there introduced the possibility of several bad outcomes: the tumor could eventually block the flow of blood to his heart; or a piece of it could break off and block the blood flow to other parts of his body, including his brain; or the broken-off bits could insinuate themselves into other parts—his brain, his limbs, his eyes. She recommended taking it out right away.
“It’s a fairly straightforward procedure,” she said. “Resection of the left atrium wall, maybe with a little pericardial reconstruction and repair of the mitral valve.”
It occurred to him these words would mean something to Ed, but to him they simply sounded frightening. He asked if his heartbeat would go back to normal after the surgery.
“We won’t really know until we get inside and take a look around,” she said.
He attempted to clarify. Was she saying that she could cut something out of him, and after all of that, he might still be left with the same problems he had now?
“As you’d expect,” she said, “we see a stratification of favorable and unfavorable outcomes based on the presence or absence of certain clinical markers. We also have to take into account baseline prognostic factors.”
“What’s that?”
“The factors that might affect the success of the treatment. Age, for instance. Advanced age creates a bit more of a challenge, but the majority of my patients are like you.”
“Old,” he said.
“Advanced.”
After the appointment, Ed suggested they drive out to the coast and find a place to have lunch. They drove east and then north into Maine, blasting out of the tree line into a landscape assaulted by the storm. The shrubs, wiry and stunted, looked as if they had been screwed into the earth with brute force. Dirt mingled with the snow at the side of the road, forming a deep brown slush. The sluice got picked up by the tires and splattered the car’s windows with dirty water.
Gene didn’t much feel like talking. Inwardly he was still going over everything the doctor had told him. But every time he tried to recall her specific phrases, his mind leaped ahead and summed it up as “You’re going to die.”
They stopped for lunch at the Pomonock Resort and Club. The Pom was an odd establishment because it aspired to be more exclusive than it was, enticing members with the prestige of perks ostensibly just for them, while remaining accessible to anyone willing to pay its steep fees. In the 1970s, when Ed was vigorously building up his practice, he had joined with the encouragement of an older colleague. Then it seemed there were two Eds, the one who openly deprecated the club and its kind, maintaining that his membership was a pragmatic but disagreeable necessity for his business, and the other Ed, a man of rarefied talents who from time to time deserved to enjoy a voluptuous meal in an elite setting. Some internal concession allowed him to remain untroubled by this division, and he appeared to participate in this genteel world without considering himself of it. By the time he no longer needed the club for his medical practice, he had integrated it into his life without causing himself any distress.
The dining room was filled with large things: large tables of burled wood, large chairs with the elongated profiles of thrones, a large, vaguely medieval stone fireplace that was missing only a whole roasted pig to complete the tableau. The room always felt empty and drafty no matter how many people were in it, or how big the fire was.
Ed ordered the prime rib and Gene ordered a hamburger. The food arrived on white square plates that resembled orthodontically perfected teeth. After the waiter made a formal presentation of the pepper mill and the pepper was deemed acceptable, the waiter said, “I’ll be right back with some share plates for you, Mr. Donnelly.”
Whenever Gene was at the Pom, he thought of Brian Donnelly’s wedding reception, which had taken place in this exact room. Halfway through the evening the DJ had handed out blow-up musical instruments, inflatable electric guitars and trumpets and saxophones, and the guests were invited to wail on them on the small stage in front of the DJ’s stand. Michael, by then amiably wasted, had decided that everyone in the wedding party should be bonked on the head with a purple saxophone. Colin made an effort to restrain him, cordially at first and then more insistently, but Michael had forty pounds on him and pushed him away forcefully enough that Colin fell backward over a chair. Then—rather heroically, Gene recalled—Brian escorted his bride off the dance floor and returned to dump a pitcher of ice water over Michael’s head. It had all ended in laughter, after a second cousin was recruited to whisk Michael away from the party.
Gene said, “Remember the time Brian dumped water over Michael’s head, and the DJ played ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’ and everyone danced on the wet floor with bare feet?”
“I hate that song,” Ed said. “I never liked it, even when it was popular.”
“We had fun,” Gene said. “You’re forgetting that part.”
“Brian said to me, ‘How could you? How could you let him do this?’ As if I was responsible for his brother’s drinking.”
“It was his wedding,” Gene said. “You can’t blame him.”
Ed’s lips curled in a slight sneer. “He seems to have no problem blaming me for things.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up,” Gene said.
“Now what exactly did the dermatologist say?”
“A growth. No—a mass.”
“But what did she say about cancer?” Ed said. He had eaten most of his prime rib and was using the table bread to sop up the juices.
“It isn’t.”
“You know what? Ninety-nine percent of our conversations from here on out will be about our health—health or death, it’s all the same. It’s completely stupid to get old.”
“But your health is fine,” Gene said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“Who knows what’s coming? Even if I’m fine, I’m not looking forward to watching my friends die.”
“If I died—would that really be so awful?”
Ed scowled. “Are you honestly asking me that?”
“Maybe some part of you would be a little—relieved?”
“You’re crazy.”
“But the Ashes never really made it up to your standards.”
“Did the doctor say the mass was in your brain?”
“Remember how we used to talk in college? About having an important life and doing important things? Maida and I—we didn’t succeed, did we?”
“You can’t think that’s what I think.”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you know what Gayle does when she wants to drive me crazy? She’ll say, ‘Do you really love me?’”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You tell me.”
They sat there for a moment in silence. Then Ed said softly, “You know, right after Maida died I cried every time I saw my boys.” He paused, giving the impression he might have more to say, but he didn’t go on.
Gene asked him why.
“I don’t know, it just happened. It was embarrassing. Not just for me, but for the boys. They
love to tease me about getting infirm, but if I actually admit to feeling old—if I suggest mortality isn’t just an abstract concept for me anymore—they totally freak out.”
“We’re not the same person, you know,” Gene said.
“Who said we were?”
“I mean me and Maida. You tell a story about her death like it could just as easily be about me, but we’re not the same.”
“I know that,” Ed said. “I know that better than anyone. Don’t forget I’m the one who put the two of you together.”
In that moment Gene hated Ed for his arrogant belief that other people were only bit players in the fascinating drama of his life. He wanted to tell Ed that he had an entire life Ed knew nothing about, a lover with whom the sex was still surprising and the intimacy unobligated. Just thinking of his secret made him feel powerful. But then, of course—the affair was already over. The power he’d imagined himself having was already gone.
Ed paid for lunch and they walked outside without talking and got into the car.
“Should I take you home now?” Ed said.
“Do what you like,” Gene said.
“I’m asking.”
“You do what you like.”
Ed drove a little farther north. They got out of the car at the small park on the tip of the point. A lighthouse, white with an iron collar, stood across the sea channel on a barren island of rock. The wind diced the waves on all sides and the water charged over the snow-covered rocks at the base of the lighthouse. A plaque, bronze and substantial, described the practices of the former keepers who had lived there, men who in times of stormy weather had tied their wives to the lighthouse ladder to keep them from drowning.
Ed turned his back to the sea and leaned against the rail. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier at the club.” There was a brief silence in which he seemed to weigh how to press forward. “Can I buy you a drink? Will you let me do that?”
The Dependents Page 19
