Caitlin drinks her coffee, propped up against some pillows and with her shoulder set against Michael’s arm. Everything feels magnified, including emotions, and it will take very little now to make her cry. A word about loss, a look of sadness in Michael’s eyes. He drinks from his cup in long pulls, despite the heat. He has abandoned the saucer onto his lap, which frees up his right hand. For a minute or more it lies at his side, then it reaches out and settles awkwardly, palm-outwards against her stomach, just above her navel. Seconds later, it slips beneath the blanket’s hem and nestles into place at her crotch. He doesn’t look at her but gazes straight ahead, and she does not look at him but concentrates on keeping her breath even and on finishing what is in her cup. She moves only once, almost imperceptibly shifting her hips to resettle herself against his touch. He parts her legs but only barely, and his hand continues to move, an inch up, an inch back down, over and over, slowly, in a kind of hypnosis. This too, comes with time’s passing, this level of knowledge.
She kisses his shoulder and collarbone, presses her face to his neck. He removes his hand only to relieve them both of their cups, then closes his eyes and takes her mouth against his own. ‘I’m yours,’ she tells him, simply, as if it is nothing but the truth. He tells her that he loves her and she nods and says that she knows, which she does. He turns in to her and this time, freed of burden, his left hand moves for her. It moves slowly and, again, settles, and this time it is perfect in its place and full of understanding in its touch. But this is a coda, shutting things down for now, in nice, pleasant fashion. And with nothing more ambitious about it than that, it can be fully enjoyed, for exactly what it is. Tasting the bitterness of the coffee on his tongue, she lets her own hand roam and explore. Even as pieces change, even as details bloat or sink, thicken or turn to mud, there is a comfort to be had in their familiarity.
‘I love you, Caitie,’ he says again, as if it is a thing that constantly needs repeating, and she smiles against his mouth in acknowledgement and nods a thank-you even without breaking from him. ‘I love you too,’ she says, and she twists her body for him, sets her left leg between both of his, raises it until there is nowhere left for it to go and gives utterly and completely of herself, to be taken into his embrace.
VII
Icebergs
Having brought the bad news home with them, Barbara had spent her first hour back in the house drifting in and out of rooms, moving like long grass in a strong breeze, with all the soundless grace of a dance. At first, Michael followed along behind, holding far enough back so as not to encroach but stubbornly filling the spaces she’d vacated, ready to catch her should she fall. She kept laying her hands on surfaces or picking up small objects to hold for just a moment before setting them down again, back in their rightful place, but their details hardly registered.
Noon lay smothered in rain. A cold heavy fur of mist muted everything, weather made for whispers. At every window, the dim light seemed to penetrate her body. It was clear that Michael had missed a lot of the signs. And in this light, everything blurred, the way it does when tears come. But he was not yet ready to cry.
Once she’d worked through the downstairs rooms, she slipped out into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind her so that he could not follow. She hadn’t spoken a word since their return, but the closing of the door was a clear statement. In the living room, he held his breath and listened as her slow footsteps carried up the stairs. He could feel himself beginning to break. So much needed saying but the words would not come. Even in his mind, they refused any semblance of order.
Within a minute, she was overhead, her heels like finger-snaps on their bedroom’s laminated floor, loping to the world’s slowest waltz. Then a radio came on, Sinatra as a murmur, with a melody he’d always loved: ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. The dancing stopped, and he knew that she was sitting on the edge of their bed. He stared at the living room’s shut door and, in his mind, could see her, perched on a corner of the mattress, stooped forward, elbows digging into knees. All angles, transfixed by dread.
The specialist had said that weight loss should have been an indication of something awry. A thick-featured, slightly piggish man, with flesh the pulpy, fat-freckled paleness of raw sausage and eyebrows like spools of copper wire. He’d shaved carelessly and had nicked the flesh of his upper lip just above his mouth’s left corner. When Michael cleared his throat and muttered that Barbara had always been slim and that there’d been so little excess weight to lose, the man’s eyes hardened and held to Michael’s for a heartbeat at least longer than was comfortable. He could have gone on and explained that, with Barb, right from the very beginning, changes had never been obvious, that apart from a certain piecemeal tightening of the skin around her eyes and mouth, her body remained much as it had been when she’d first unfurled herself for him all those years before. But the doctor’s stare held, until it became clear to them all that this was about needing somebody to blame.
They’d expected something like this. Doctors had prepared them, in an offhand sort of way, with particular phrases dropped in passing during the straggle of tests and scans. But even with the worst in mind, the sheer finality of the confirmation still threw them headlong into this state of matching shock. A punch in the mouth still hurts, whether you see it coming or not.
When she reappeared, evening had already fallen. She stood in the kitchen’s doorway with the hall to her back, reduced to silhouette by the rancid amber cast of the street’s sodium lamp. Michael, perched against the red slate counter and buried in his own thoughts, didn’t realise she was even there until some minute disturbance caused the room’s equilibrium to shift. He looked up, stunned at how much of the day he’d lost. Full darkness had fallen. And outside, the rain was still coming down.
‘Hi.’
She nodded, from somewhere else. ‘Yes.’
Forgetting it had lain before him for hours, he lifted the cup that he’d been hunched over and sipped some coffee. It washed cold and rancid over his teeth and tongue. But, rather than spit it out, he held it in his mouth, then swallowed.
‘Did you sleep?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I dreamed, but I can’t say for certain that there was sleep involved. Christ, Michael, how can I hope to deal with this?’
‘You will. We will.’
Her hand reached for the switch. In a violent instant, the light flared and with a small popping sound was lost, and for several seconds a searing afterglow bled through into their vision, giving the darkness a more pervasive heft. That instant of the light, though, had chiselled for him a shocking image of her face, pallid, elongated, with her hair tousled and askew and her mouth slack with awe.
Now, even beneath the weight of darkness, all the cracks lay fully exposed. He drew a quivering breath.
‘Can we talk about this?’
‘Can we, or will we?’
‘I’m serious, Barb. I really think—’
‘What good will talking do? Apart from putting a bit of noise into the air.’
She stepped from the doorway into the kitchen, and vanished, and there was a moment when the world fell, softened to perfect stillness. The rain, which had been whispering against the window, pressed tightly to the glass and lost its sound. Everything felt caught between beats, and Michael wondered if this might be how death would feel, this same sort of deep-tissue inertia. But then a sob broke the surface, a dislocated thing but vital, and enough to return some semblance of balance to the night.
‘Sometimes, the things that break us apart seem less if we keep them hidden. If we talked now, what could we say that’d be any good?’ Her voice, disembodied in the blackness, felt new and strange.
‘It’s okay to be afraid. Cancer is frightening.’
‘There are worse things than being afraid, Michael. There’s being alone.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not alone.’
‘Bullshit. I’ve
been alone for years. We both have. That’s who we are. That’s what we are.’
He wanted to argue, but hadn’t the strength. ‘We need to eat,’ he said, his voice low because of the darkness. ‘Should I make us something, or would you prefer to go out?’
‘Out. Of course. Always out.’ Because silence in a public place could be far more easily masked.
Without discussion, they decided on Chinese. Something about the bulk and heat of that cuisine appealed, especially tonight, something about the physical aspect of the food, the portioned variety of the bowls, the textures, the colours. And Chinese to them always meant Wong’s, a snug lamplit eight-table restaurant on the East Side, the area’s best-kept secret. Rarely ever more than half full, Wong’s liked to prioritise taste and quality of product above all else. They’d discovered the place quite by accident, some ten or twelve years earlier. Michael had been recommended a then-new Lebanese restaurant on the same block, but the night of their cold-call coincided with a birthday or an anniversary party and the noise and revelry sent them reeling back out into the street, unfed and unfulfilled. It was a decent break, one of the few in their married life, and it quickly became their place, whenever they felt in need of a night out.
Tonight, even though they hadn’t called ahead to reserve a table, Mrs Wong stood waiting to greet them on entry. A small, fat-bodied woman in her late sixties or seventies, she lowered her eyes, curtsied and let Michael take her hand, then turned, her face lighting up with love and worry, and embraced Barbara, the way dear friends do. Wishing them repeated welcome, she led the way to a table near the back, theirs by favour and habit, and once they’d settled, began pouring tiny slender welcoming glassfuls of a pale plum liquor. Ten minutes later, she came back through from the kitchen with a platter of shredded-duck spring rolls, simple fired shrimp, jiaozi dumplings and a ginger soy dipping sauce.
The decor, which belied the splendour of the food, was basic, the walls around them kept to an unobtrusive lily-white shade that reflected the subtle lamplight and kept the focus on the few traditional two- and three-colour prints, delicate empty-space paintings of vague mountain peaks, low-hanging cloud islands and intruding trees, skeletal apart from the small pink hearts of blossom and contorted for the sake of balance.
They ate in a distracted way, their attention mostly fixed on the few other diners, their minds open to the occasional draughts of caught conversation. Two middle-aged men in suits sat at a table near the fireplace wall, doing more drinking than eating, and over by the large blinded window, a young mixed-race family. As Barbara watched, the family erupted in bleats of shared laughter. The man was American, probably mid-twenties, with a very serious expression except when he laughed; the woman, slightly younger, Chinese and pretty, with dark eyes and shining black waist-length hair draped over her shoulder in a single woven rope of ponytail; and two small children, a boy and a girl of about an age with one another. As a unit, they looked mismatched, yet perfect. The man set down his chopsticks every few bites in order to hold his wife’s hand or even to kiss her, in a most gentle and adoring way. And with every kiss, the children, who could not have been more than four or five, the boy with a short heavy bowl of hair fringed low above his eyes and the girl with her hair long like her mother and in braids, squealed and made teasing sounds of happiness. Being kissed in so public a manner embarrassed the woman, but it also evidently thrilled her, and after parting she bowed her head shyly for a few seconds in an effort to conceal her smile.
Michael considered them in a vague way, then focused on the shrimp. Barb, though, continued to watch. Something about witnessing the kiss caused her eyes to narrow and grow small.
‘I always assumed I’d see old age,’ she murmured. ‘Funny how we delude ourselves.’
‘So. You’re giving up, is that it?’
Her expression was stone, possessed of a hardness that told its story in cracks. Her shoulders hitched, then fell.
‘Call it that if you must call it something. Anyway, maybe it’s for the best.’
‘What is?’
‘Well, you must admit, it does simplify things.’
He glared at her. She felt it, but didn’t bother to meet his eyes. She’d seen enough of him, and this other family seemed much more interesting.
Across the room, the little girl climbed down from her chair, stood beside her father and began an adorable recitation of ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’, her voice demure, with a sweet, brittle lilt. Feeling some sense of duty, the two men in suits stopped drinking so that they could give the show their fullest attention, and Mrs Wong came through again from the kitchen. The soft way that the girl pronounced her R’s lent the song an added poignancy. When she slowed into the final notes, everyone applauded, and one of the men in suits pinched forefinger and thumb into his mouth to the first knuckle and whistled in a long, shrill catcall. Blushing hard, the girl slipped back into her place at the table, but the applause went on and at her mother’s urging she stood again and issued a quick, reluctant bow.
‘Cute as a puppy,’ Barbara declared. ‘Isn’t she just the sweetest thing?’
Michael lifted the last of the dumplings and sank it into the ginger soy. He ate it in three bites, taking his time. Barb picked at the remnants of a spring roll that she’d torn open, fishing out morsels of meat and shredded vegetables with a kind of surgical precision, her chopsticks clacking like a reprisal of the just-dead applause.
‘What do you mean, “It simplifies things”?’
She looked up. Her lips were clenched shut but her front teeth worked a sliver of duck.
‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it.’
‘It does matter. Come on, Barb. If you have something to say, then say it.’
‘Why? So that we can get it all out in the open? No, thanks. I feel bad enough about myself already. Let’s just eat, okay?’
They ordered. Michael opted for skewers of beef with a special spicy satay marinade, and a side of jasmine rice. Barbara, after professing a vague interest in something fishy, let herself be guided by Mrs Wong and ended up with king prawns in a deliciously light sweet chilli sauce. A basket of steamed dumplings arrived unordered, compliments of the house, a selection of oyster, chicken and vegetable. Michael asked for beer, even though he had no particular appetite for drinking. Barb took another glass of the plum liqueur. The food tasted wonderful, but there was too much of everything.
‘No one is talking about an end, Barb. You need to get your mind right. I understand that you’re afraid, but you do yourself no good by jumping to conclusions. It’s serious. Of course it is. All cancer is serious. But nobody has mentioned terminal, have they? If that was the prognosis then they wouldn’t even bother with treatment. We have to take the positives from that.’
Barb chewed slowly, resignation making glass of her eyes. And her voice, when it came, was soft and empty, almost contrite.
‘Sounds nice,’ she said. ‘But you don’t believe it, so why expect me to? I know how these things work. We both do. We’ve been down this road before, and I recognise the scenery. And doctors always tell the best side of the story.’
He shook his head. ‘That was a long time ago, and a different situation.’
‘You heard what they said.’
‘What? That the treatment will be fairly intensive?’
‘Invasive was the word they used. And there’s no fairly about it.’
‘Intensive, invasive. At least they’re doing it. And I also heard them say that they’re hopeful of a positive outcome.’
‘Or they’ll start carving.’
‘They said it might be necessary to consider surgery. But that’s only might, and it’s not today or tomorrow. They’ll give the chemotherapy a chance first. That’ll break it down to a manageable size. I know how it sounds, and anyone would be terrified, hearing it, but the news could have been a lot worse. So try to have a little faith.’
‘What does “hopeful” mean, anyway? It’s a nothing word, really. When you
think about it. Hopes are much the same as wishes. We don’t get to decide whether they come true or not.’
Barb took another bite and smiled.
‘Forty-eight isn’t really much of an age. Not any more. In parts of Africa, maybe, but not here. These days, it’s barely the halfway line. And plenty have had it worse than me. A lot worse. And yet, I feel old, and I’ve been feeling old a long, long time. Remember when we first started going together? We couldn’t keep apart. And you were as bad as I was. Worse, even. After we bought the car, you used to drive down from Maine or New Hampshire or wherever you were selling, clean through the night sometimes, just so we could have breakfast in bed together. That was love. Or so I thought at the time. Why did we stop doing things like that?’
My Coney Island Baby Page 17
