One 10’o’clock night, Cordo was alone at home reading some book he didn’t care about. He threw it down on the couch and rubbed his 60-year-old eyes.
He thought, thought about his life, about life, about the past and the present and the future. He thought about the day and the night. All of it.
He got up and left the house before he could cry.
He listened to “I’ll Shoot the Moon” as he drove into Seattle and parked in the unlighted parking lot behind Camille’s apartment. He went up and knocked.
It was only 11. Camille was in her pajamas and showed no sign she’d been asleep, only the strange heightened awareness that comes with long hours spent reading, a look Cordo had long ago become well acquainted with.
She acknowledged his presence before her and asked what he was doing here. He scanned her, asked if he could come in.
Hortense’s bedroom door was closed, though lighted beyond. He and Camille sat at the kitchen table, Cordo pulling up his chair in front of her, looking at her hands as though at snakes he was thinking of touching. He looked back up and her brow was knitted.
“What? What is it?”
Cordo’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his throat expanded, his tongue thickened. He took both her hands.
“Is it…I know…I know it’s you, Lourdes.”
Camille’s face reared up like a perturbed cat’s back. She tried to pull away but he held her hands tighter and she stopped struggling when she saw there were tears in his old crow’s feeted eyes.
“Tell me…Is it…?”
Camille was stiff. Then her face softened, she breathed out harshly, nodded. He cupped her cheek, sneaking past her ear to feel the back of her neck, the warmth, the pumping of her carotid artery. Then he kissed her, pulled her forward as she leaned in, as did he.
It was true that a man and a woman feel no different to kiss. But kissing Lourdes felt different than either.
It was her.
And Cordo carried her into her bedroom and they made love. They made love and cried and laughed and listened to each other’s heartbeat and felt each other’s skin, felt the other’s reality.
She asked him if Tom knew and he said no. She asked him not to tell.
Six birthdays, anniversaries, publishings, a transition into a professor emeritus position, an undergraduate summa cum laude graduation, and subsequent admission into graduate school at UW went uncelebrated. Cordo and Camille regularly slept together. Tom likely knew, as Cordo just didn’t come home some nights, never giving reasons and Tom never asked.
Hortense likely knew also, as their lovemaking once caused a box of oatmeal to fall off the fridge. And Cordo was there in the mornings sometimes for breakfast besides. The resentment that Cordo had only known from Amelia and Camille vanished. In its place was the excitement, the thrill that comes with new love, the kind that makes you cum fast. Such feelings and intimacy are mutually exclusive.
But eventually intimacy took over, that old familiar intimacy Cordo had only shared with Lourdes—and Tom, if he was honest with himself.
He told Camille about Lila and Tom, how he’d only been looking for her in them. They spent more time together than ever, listening to Tom Waits and watching movies, whether at his house or her apartment, and if either Tom or Hortense noticed a change in their relationship—blatant as it was—neither said a word.
He asked her about the work and she told him everything, how all the secrets had weighed on her but he had been working for The Times back then, how would his reporter instincts have reckoned with such knowledge if she had told him?
“I was your husband. I would have violated every journalistic ethic for you.”
She smiled at him as they lay in her bed in the dark.
“Are you not my husband anymore?”
His face grew heavy.
“I will be your husband to the end of eternity.”
She asked him then what was going to happen with him and Tom.
“I don’t know. I don’t wanna hurt him and I don’t know how to explain it to him.”
She nodded.
“This work of yours,” he said, “how’s it gonna end?”
“End? That’s the very opposite of my work. Once I get done with everything, nothing ever has to end.”
“How many more times will you have to die?”
“As many as it takes so that no one else has to go through it.
“It isn’t right.”
“It gave us more time together, didn’t it?”
“It’s ill gotten, it’s not natural.”
“Anything the human body is capable of is natural.”
“But it’s not. You perverted it with nature.”
She was silenced.
“What you’re planning to do…the computer and the consciousness transfer and silicon robots and growing babies in test tubes or whatever…”
“If this can happen, anything is possible.”
“But is it right?”
“Maybe there are no such things as right and wrong.”
They stared hard at each other.
“If anything is possible,” Cordo said, “then God can exist.”
“If He does we never have to meet Him.”
They had numerous such arguments in those six years.
By 25, when Cordo noticed a bruise on Camille’s leg that persisted for longer than it should have, Camille already had stage IV breast cancer with brain, liver, and lung metastases, which made surgery redundant. The doctor recommended chemo and radiation.
As Cordo drove them back to her apartment, they argued.
“The chemo and radiation will turn me into a fucking zombie, I won’t be able to work.”
“They’ll help you live longer.”
“Your goddamn harm-reduction approaches, I’m going to die, I’d rather get it over with sooner.”
“There’s no point not to—before when you were pregnant—but not now.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t wanna suffer more, I’m born in misery, I live in misery, I die in it, I don’t want it made worse!”
“What about me? You think I haven’t suffered? Maybe I’d like a little more time with you.”
“You don’t wanna take care of some mush-minded invalid, you did it once, you shouldn’t have to do it—”
“I’d do it a million times for you, Lourdes!”
“Well I don’t want it! I hate being like that! I hate going back to the start and having to do it all over again the same fucking way every time but the sooner we get everything done, the sooner I can stop going through all of this, we don’t have time to deal with all this shit—”
“Why?”
“Because what if you die? We have nothing for you, no way to regenerate you.”
“I don’t care if I die, I just—”
“I do. Why do you think I’m doing all of this? For money, for fame, for a Nobel? If you die…everything goes to shit.”
Both silent, their yelling still echoing in the air of the car.
“If you do chemo and radiation, won’t it fuck up your DNA?” Cordo asked.
Camille thought about this.
“Yes, it’ll damage various sequences.”
“So Titus won’t be able to get anything from you.”
She thought more.
“No.”
“So would you rather burn to death a third time?”
So that settled it. Camille started chemo and radiation three days later. Cordo kept her diagnosis from Tom, whom he had not seen in person, only talked to via text message, in two weeks, as Cordo had been at Camille’s. The communiqués consisted of Tom asking, “Are you all right?” and Cordo replying, “Yeah,” and vise-versa.
They likewise kept the news from Hortense, who like as not was anticipating it. Cordo accompanied Camille to her chemo sessions, sitting with her throughout, both reading their respective reading materials, and he waited in the waiting room while her breasts and brain and lungs and liver were radiated.
She started going downhill after the first week of treatment. She had hallucinations, at first in bed, screaming and crying, and Cordo, who slept on the couch in the living room now, rushed in to calm her, no doubt memories of her night terrors and Lourdes’ gradual plunge into death flashing through his mind. She could not be roused from these horrible hallucinations, which most often gave her the sensation that she was on fire, and she cried and screamed so much the police were once called but after examining her and seeing her hospital paperwork, they left without incident.
Then the hallucinations caused her to be ambulatory, wandering around her room, Hortense’s room, the living room, the kitchen, and Cordo caught her and reeled her back inside before she could make it out the door into the hallway. She mumbled sometimes about people who were supposed to be coming over to stay here at the apartment and she had to get everything cleaned up for them. Other times she talked about her mother—to her mother—the doctor says the chemo and the radiation can help, Momma, there’s a good chance you can live a lot longer, I need you to be around, Daddy needs you, he won’t…
“What are you…” she asked the air over Cordo’s shoulder as they stood in the middle of the living room, she naked and unbalanced, Cordo holding her steady. “How long?”
Cordo watched her, listening to the response come from some other world to which she alone was privy.
“Why haven’t you said anything to him?” she asked. “Why haven’t you left him?”
She looked at Cordo with her dilated pupils but he knew she wasn’t seeing him.
“He’s a sonofabitch. Let’s just…you and me, let’s leave, Momma, and you’ll get the treatment and he can go fuck himself, we’ll…”
She started crying, causing Cordo to also.
“I don’t wanna lose you…”
Cordo hugged her and she hugged him back, squeezing, clinging to someone in the past.
Other times she ran her hands all over her stomach, which skin clung tighter and tighter to her ribs and pelvis as the treatment went on, as though she were applying cocoa butter to her flesh.
“I have to cut it out. Can’t go to the hospital…They’re watching, all the time…”
Still other times she talked about pain and darkness unfathomable, not oblivion, oblivion is bliss, memory is pain, memory in the void is misery, oblivion in the void is sleep, memory in the dark is anesthesia awareness, is longing, regret, guilt, anguish, memory, goddamn memory, floating, ethereal, unkillable, inerasable, immortal, pain and darkness, pain and light, again and again and again and again and again and again and aga…
Her hair soon fell out, she lost 60 pounds from her already underweight frame. She vomited or gagged hourly. She started losing teeth. She’d take a sip of water and feel the teeth being washed out of their sockets and backwashing into the glass, blood trickling down the side from the rim.
Eight months after she’d begun, Camille developed lymphedemas—buildups of fluid resulting in extreme swelling—in one arm and one leg. The doctor tried draining these but they refilled so quickly, it was only practical for Camille herself to start doing the lancing and perhaps because of her erratic trembling, perhaps because of her ephemeral memory, she must have forgotten to sterilize the needle, for the afflicted arm became infected, turning red and swelling even worse. Her doctor prescribed low-dose antibiotics, which he hoped would be able to attack the infection without being destroyed by the crazed blood cells and the chemo and radiation.
They didn’t work. She developed sores on the arm, circular sores the color of tub scum. At this point the doctor gave her high-power penicillin and shortly after taking her first dose, Camille told Cordo it burned when she breathed and then, amazingly sudden, her body broke out in hives and her eyes swelled pink and shut and Cordo rushed her out to his car and sped to the emergency room, where she was injected with epinephrine and diagnosed with an acute penicillin allergy.
She was given more low-dose antibiotics, which never did anything to prevent the worsening of the infection. Eleven months after she’d begun treatment, she had to have the afflicted arm amputated.
Taking Camille back home from the hospital, everything was laid bare for Hortense if she didn’t already know. Tom knew nothing, only that Cordo hadn’t been home in a month. And Cordo didn’t go home at all that week either, staying at Camille’s to help her adjust. Her chemo and radiation would resume next week if she was strong enough. For now she took painkillers that served to give her peaceful sleep. On the third night Cordo stayed at the apartment, sleeping on the couch in the desolate living room, he was wakened by Hortense, naked and moving herself up and down on his erect penis poking through the fly of his plaid pajama pants.
He groaned, moving from the lazily rolling river of sleep to the ecstasy of waking life, and he saw her in the scant moonlight coming through the blinds and he pulled his arms up beside his head, a horizontal surrender to police or a referee saying the touchdown was good, and before he could do anything else, Hortense draped herself over him and whispered into his ear, “It’s me—it’s always me.”
“How?” he gasped out.
She didn’t say anything more, slid up and down on him harder, faster, and he wrapped both arms around her back, held his hand over her butt to push her down harder, and a dozen thrusts later, he gasped, silenced himself, and came inside her, going dizzy.
In the ensuing fatigue, he dreamily registered Hortense standing up, throwing the blanket back over him, and proceeding back into her room.
Cordo was wakened in the morning light—made coarse and angry by the lackluster apartment—by a knocking at the door. When he moved his head ached as though he were hungover and when he whipped off the blanket, his flaccid penis felt the chill air and he knew all at once that it had not been a dream.
But he couldn’t think about that now, for the continued knocking at the door. He stood, tucked himself in, and answered: some man, 30s, he didn’t know him. “Cordorubias Tendler?”
“Yes.”
The man handed him a yellow-orange packet.
“You’ve been served.”
He left, leaving Cordo frozen in the doorway. He looked at the packet, opened it: divorce papers. He staggered back into the apartment, looking over the legal jargon with a light head, as Camille came wobbling down the hallway, bandages over the stump of her amputated arm, which had had to be removed at the shoulder socket, along with a portion of her breast and side.
He looked up and she locked onto him with her purple-rimmed sunken eyes. She was bald and pale and skeletal. The longer she glared at him, the more Cordo’s guilt came to the forefront.
“So you fucked her,” she said.
Cordo didn’t know what to say, mind split between the divorce papers in his hand and the ghoulish thing before him. He might have thought to ask how she could know but some shred of memory must have informed him.
She smirked at his silence. What teeth she had remaining—mostly the front—were rotted green and her lips were chapped.
“I guess it’s OK.”
She chuckled, staggered past him into the kitchen to get some water.
Cordo went back home and waited on the couch all day with the papers in his lap and when Tom came home that night at nine, there was neither horrible sadness nor anger between them, only a sense of fulfilled expectation.
Tom dropped his computer bag and sat on the far end of the couch, miles away from Cordo on the other end. There were no tears as they looked down at their feet, the only light coming from the kitchen.
“What’ll you do?” Cordo asked, throat dry.
Tom took a deep breath.
“Retire completely. Move to New England. Vermont maybe.”
“I always wanted to go there.”
A pause.
“What’ll you do?” Tom asked.
Cordo laughed.
“I have no idea.”
They were quiet again, not fidgety. When Cordo looked up, so did Tom.
“
Was there ever anything we could’ve done…?” Cordo asked.
Tom thought, shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
After more silence Tom stood and headed into the bedroom. He left the door open and Cordo heard him shower, then brush his teeth, then come out of the bathroom and get into his pajamas. Cordo remained on the couch the whole time, never letting go of the divorce papers, fingers sweating, dampening the documents.
“You comin’ to bed?” Tom asked him through the doorway.
Cordo looked over his shoulder, then stood. He turned off the kitchen light and entered the bedroom, closing the door behind him. They got into bed and with no preamble, no hesitant pondering, but with all the naturalness they had done so before these past chaste six years, they made love for the final time.
The next morning Cordo was wakened by his phone ringing. It was Hortense and the way she said his name sent an icicle through his gut.
“Camille’s dead.”
It’s a strange sensation when someone dies expectedly. Perhaps it’s the lack of surprise, of spontaneity. Being told you’re going to receive an award and actually getting it three months later at a dinner-gala are widely different sensations, so disparate they are neither special nor significant, only numbing.
Cordo sat up against the headboard, his movement stirring Tom. Cordo saw it was nine a.m.
“Did you call 911?”
Tom sat up now, glasses on.
“No.”
“OK, do that now, I’ll be right over.”
“Are you with Tom?”
“…Yes.”
“Bring him. Camille had something for him.”
Cordo cringed but didn’t think about this too much.
“All right, we’ll be there soon.”
They hung up. Cordo told Tom everything as they got dressed. There was no
sadness. They drove into Seattle.
When they got to the apartment, there were no ambulances, no rescue team. Tom and Cordo speculated as to where they could be, if Hortense had called them, how could Cordo and Tom have beaten them here?
Most Unnatural Page 19
