“Wait, wait!” Murmur held up her hand in a gesture that looked as if she were about to bless us. “I have a question. Would you mind if I brought a guest next week?”
“Fine with me,” I said, “as long as she pays.”
“Lucy, it’s her house. She can invite anyone she wants.” Z stretched his left arm over his head, then his right. His jersey drifted above his navel. I thought, Jesus, Doc, I don’t want to see your fucking hairy pot belly.
Edith arched one very nicely penciled brow. “I don’t believe the intended guest is a she.”
Z, who can go from a good humor to a flat-out sulk in under one second, cut his eyes at Murmur, who was beaming like a fourteen-year-old who’d just discovered sex and weed.
“Yes, Edith,” she said, “you are absolutely right.” She stroked that hollow spot at her throat. “My new friend is a he.”
Z planted his hands on his pink-shod hips and asked, “He?”
Murmur danced her fingers coyly along her jaw. “Yes. I have met a man. A very nice man. And I thought if it was okay with all of you, I might invite him to yoga.”
“There’s not enough room.” Z’s protest was immediate.
“Oh! Mon amie! We’ll make room!” Edith glided over to Murmur, held her by the shoulders, and, with tears in her old gray eyes, exclaimed, “Finally, romance in our midst!”
Z flopped down on the couch and glared at the Atlantic.
Pussies, one and all, making me sick to my stomach. “Fuck it.” I stretched my arms over my head. “We can talk about this later. We need to get started, or we’ll never get out of here. Murmur, go put on your damned music.”
“We certainly are in a mood today, Lucy,” Murmur said as she bolted over to the stereo and cranked up the CD. We fell into our respective places: me in front of the sliding glass doors and Edith, Murmur, and Z strung out behind me in a ragged line. We began with sun salutations, repeating the movements, breathing, slowly increasing our speed and heat. Why was I so fucking cursed? Who in the world has ever heard of doing yoga with the Allman Brothers blasting in the background? But Murmur wouldn’t allow me to play my soothing om om om music. She said she didn’t trust it, whatever that means. And when I suggested we skip the tunes all together, she pouted.
So there we were, the four of us, battered all to hell by this fucking weirdness called life, attempting to get in touch with our chakras to the gut-thudding strains of “Statesboro Blues.” Ommmm and Duane Allman’s rock ’n’ roll blues riffs didn’t exactly make for unruffled mind/body/spirit partners. Although I have to admit that meditating to “Stormy Monday” is not a totally unpleasant experience.
“Breathe in through your nose and hold it,” I instructed, cigarette clenched tighty in my molars as we stood in the urdhva hastasana position. I took in as much air as my smoke-cured lungs could bear—but not enough, sometimes, is too much—and then started coughing and could not stop. My eyes watered and my face turned red. Just before I doubled over, my cigarette shot out of my mouth like a flaming arrow, hit Murmur in the chest, landed on the floor, rolled, and came to a rest at my toes. We all collapsed, fucking laughing our asses off, except for Z, who just glumly looked on, heartbroken.
When we recovered, I lit another cig and we began again. Vinyasa. Corpse pose (we were all pretty good at that one). Child’s pose. Downward-facing dog. Whatever! Edith, actually, was the most limber of the bunch. Murmur had too much Cracker blood ever to be an accomplished yogi. And Z? Well, I will give him credit for trying, even if every time we attempted a standing forward bend he would, first, fart and then, second, try to explain why such a position was physically dangerous, saying that none of us should ever try it again.
Now, I might not be the calmest yoga instructor in the world, but I am pretty damned perceptive. In the four years I knew Murmur, I thought that one of the many things we had in common was an uncanny awareness of the undercurrents we all swim and drown in daily. But on that Saturday morning in July, love had blinded Murmur.
Here was Z, a man who was crazier than hell, but loyal and good. A widower once over, whose affection for Murmur was as true as any I’ve ever fucking seen. A few times I thought she might even want to jump in the sack with him. Hell, I’ve seen stranger things. But she always insisted, “Me and Dr. Z? Not!”
Still, she was gentle with his feelings, never flaunting any of the men who drifted in and out of her life like smoke. Until that day anyway. At the end of the session, as always, I had my motley crew lie down, close their eyes, and drift into relaxation while their bodies cooled down. I wanted them to maintain the positive energy they had built up over the last fucking weird-assed hour and to release any tension they might be holding. I rang my singing bowl. It sent currents of ancient song through the room.
“Let yourself go. Feel the energy. Become aware of what your mind is doing. We are calm. We are at one with the universe.” “Stormy Monday” washed over us. Edith’s head scarf fluttered in the breeze. I lit two incense sticks. “No more tension,” I said. “Only light. Let yourself accept this sense of well-being.”
“God, I haven’t felt this good since yesterday afternoon when Billy fucked my brains out right there on the kitchen floor.”
I stopped waving around the incense and took in the reactions. Edith was in la-la land. Murmur the sex elf was oblivious to the razor she’d just swiped through the air. Z kept his eyes closed, but his body tensed.
“Just shut the fuck up, Murmur,” I said, jamming the incense into its balsam holder.
“Oops, sorry!”
Before “Stormy Monday” and our relaxation period were over, Z gathered up his tacky towel with the image of a fat lady in a bikini emblazoned on it. He tried to tiptoe out.
“Where the hell you going?”
“I’ve got tons to do. I’ve got to drive into town and get some paint for the sleeping porch, and I promised Katrina’s mother I’d stop by and help her around the house.” He kept moving, heading straight out the door.
“See you later,” Murmur called breezily.
“Au revoir!” Edith warbled.
As soon as I heard the Roadmaster crank, I marched over to the stereo and flicked it off. “I swear to God, Murmur, why don’t you just stab Z and get it over with? It would be less painful.”
“Uh-oh,” Edith said, stretching like a cat, pushing her fake boobs skyward.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Murmur rolled onto her stomach, propped herself up on an elbow, and rested her chin in her palm.
“Z! You ’bout killed him with that ‘fucked my brains out’ business. It’s one thing to invite someone to yoga. It’s entirely different to talk about fucking him.”
Murmur batted her lashes at me. “Why, I did not hurt Dr. Z’s feelings. There is absolutely nothing between us. Never has been. Never will be. Besides, who could be mad at me for being in lust! You could not believe what we did last night.”
“Jesus!” I shook my head and reached for my cigs. “Sex has turned you into one selfish bitch.”
Now Edith was all ears. She sat up and tucked her legs together, anglewise, like a proper lady. “Oh, do tell!”
“Y’all make me sick. I’m leaving. Just think about what I said, Murmur.” And with that, I grabbed my cigs, mat, singing bowl, and incense and headed out, pissed to hell and back that not only was Murmur getting fucked but that she was doing so with no grace whatsoever.
That’s it, the beginning of Murmur’s end. She fell hard for a jerk. A badass boy writer who thought he was a gift from God. Fell so hard, she turned her back on her friends. And when he dumped her (I just feel he did, even though he’ll never own up to it, but I know it the same way I know seagulls are nothing more than evil, no-good, fat bastards), she could not live with the consequences of her actions.
I would have done anything for her. Nut-twat Edith would have, too. And as for Z, his heart was so thoroughly on his sleeve, his shirt bled. He would have welcomed her back in faster than he could check
his fly. I wouldn’t have minded if those two had gotten together—I’m a big-enough person to admit that—because even though I loved her (platonic, of course; I gave up sex when I quit pork), I know that Z could never have screwed her over so bad that she wanted to die.
But Billy Speare did. He screwed her in every way possible. And Murmur lost her goddess spirit in the process. Bang, bang, bang. Fuck, fuck, fuck. So she drowned herself.
Motherfucker. To hell with my Mennonite ways. I will never forgive Murmur for leaving me.
Dr. Zachary Klein
Katrina and I were high school sweethearts. Met in biology class. She and I were assigned the same dissection frog. That’s right: We fell in love amid the stench of formaldehyde and the sorry sight of frog guts.
She was frail and blond and shorter than I. The height, that was a big plus. The vertically challenged Napoléon in me couldn’t do tall girls. Physically speaking, Katrina was barely more than a dewdrop. Even her bones were tiny. I always teased her that her parents should have named her Willow.
We went to the University of Florida together. She got her degree in education. Me, biology. When we graduated, she returned home to St. Augustine and landed a job teaching first graders how to make block letters and count to ten on the stiff fingers of stick men. I wandered off to med school.
Truth is, I was not faithful. Couldn’t be. I was sex-addicted. Aren’t all young men? Testosterone is a mighty drug. But I remained true in other ways. Never tumbled into a moral dilemma or made a decision about my future without asking myself, What would Katrina do? She was my heart’s compass early on.
And I didn’t dillydally in Cambridge. As soon as I got my degree, I came back here, started a family practice, bought an old house within earshot of the ocean at Iris Haven, and asked Katrina to marry me. Talk about pins and needles: She didn’t give me her answer for three days.
Turns out that her parents did not want her marrying a Jew. But their delight over the idea that their daughter would be a physician’s wife outweighed their bigotry. Too bad for them that they didn’t realize I’d never be in the game for money. Treating Medicare and Medicaid patients—most of whom are migrant workers—doesn’t put you on the pathway to six figures, a fat stock portfolio, a manse in the burbs, a Jag, a flop-top Mercedes, and membership in the country club. I don’t know what it puts you on a pathway for, except out of the social circle of other physicians.
But that’s okay. Listen, what we got was a simple, happy life. Katrina loved her students. I felt I was doing God’s work out there in the camps, tooling around in my Roadmaster. Three years. Plenty of laughs. Lots of sex. No children. And then, six months of a deathwatch.
When the diagnosis came down, everybody assumed I’d take care of her. Her parents, her sister, her friends, her colleagues. Oh yeah, Katrina is married to a doctor. He’ll make sure she gets the best care. He’ll stay home and nurse her through the worst of it.
I let everybody down. I’m not a man. I’m a coward. I don’t know what we would have done without Murmur Lee.
In high school, Murmur Lee and I ran in different circles. She was one of the wild girls: keg parties on the beach, lots of dope, most likely plenty of sex. Me, I was a dweeb one hair short of a pocket protector. When I moved out to Iris Haven, though, things changed between us. Especially after I married. She, Katrina, and I ate dinner at each other’s houses. Edith would often join us. Sometimes Lucinda. We became buddies, a circle. Polite, loose, kind, easy.
I discovered the lump in Katrina’s breast. We were making love and I felt the malignancy—hard, like a cherry—beneath my fingers. I knew the second I touched the tumor that if it were not death I was feeling, then it was something damn close to it.
Sure. I’ve read my Kübler-Ross. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Yes, Katrina and I went through all the stages of grieving. Except I stopped at depression. I’ll never accept that she is gone. And as for Murmur, perhaps I’m still stuck in denial.
No one can ever accuse Katrina and me of not trying. We did everything in our power to kill the beast. I believed in science. Chemo. Radiation. Double mastectomy. Bone-marrow transplant. T-cell therapy. Science will save us. Science will save us. Oh yeah, science will save us. That’s what I kept telling her. Instead, I should have shouted, No! Enough! Stop! Science is a religion as iffy as voodoo! Bring in the rabbi! Bring in the priest! Bring in the goddamned faith healer!
Katrina knew it wasn’t working. But she stuck with every form of torture I threw at her. She let herself be dehumanized, experimented on, all in order to appease me. Hers was an act of love, mine the ultimate selfishness. I put her through hell because I couldn’t face the prospect of life without her. Coward.
After all the traditional treatment modalities failed, we traveled to Durham, North Carolina, to seek absolution and healing from the physicians at Duke. Thirty days of hell and isolation as we thundered through a botched T-cell transplant. Our doctor sat with us in the sunroom, its walls a sickening bile yellow. He spoke to me, not Katrina. I wanted to bust his ass. You know what? He couldn’t even look at me straight on. Only pretended to. He stared at a spot below my eye. A cheek doesn’t give away much, doesn’t expect much. His voice was smooth. How else do you deliver a death sentence?
“The cancer has metastasized to Katrina’s brain. We can go in and—”
Katrina lifted her twig hand, a hand full of IV holes, and said, “No.” Then she turned and looked at me with those sea green eyes that bulged from her crumbling face and said softly, as if she were trying to ease my pain, “Sweetheart, I can’t do this anymore.”
I wanted to say, No, no. Hope is not lost. Don’t give up. Don’t do this to me. Hang in there. Let them cut on you. Just one more time! I reached for that twig hand and held it gently, hoping to find strength there. She was the strong one. Always. But there was nothing left—just clammy skin, heartache, resignation. And without finding in the parched lines of her palm some slight sign of a stubborn insistence to live, I couldn’t utter one more hollow promise carved from the cruel inexactitude of science.
So I brought her home to die.
And it was there, in our house, on the banks of the Iris Haven River, that I abandoned her. I hired twenty-four-hour hospice care. I left early every morning and worked well past sundown. Sometimes I drove the Roadmaster through the two-lane farm roads around Elkton until midnight. She was always asleep by the time I returned. I wanted it to remain that way, with me never seeing her when she was lucid. I was angry, bitter, lost. And, oh yeah, a coward. All that I had ever believed in—the empirical world of logic and proofs and clinical fact—turned out to be useless against invisible sharp-edged cells so glutinous, they ate my wife from the inside out.
I made it her fault. Damn you for giving up, Katrina. Damn you. I’m sorry I ever fell in love with you: Those words became my cancer, eating away at my brain, my heart, my gut, endlessly. Day in, day out. If I could remain angry, I could stave off facing the inevitability of her death. Maybe I could even stop loving her.
Into this void stepped Murmur Lee. I didn’t ask her. She just decided. Every morning, I slipped out of the house before sunrise, did my work, and didn’t look back. I didn’t say to myself, Take the day off. Spend it with your wife. Feed her some warm broth.
Murmur Lee, on the other hand, informed her crew at Salty’s that she wouldn’t be around much. She let the bar—her livelihood—operate under its own goodwill and that of its patrons. She exhibited saintlike compassion, and I hated her. All that goodness shone like a spotlight, making it impossible for me to hide my flawed nature—lousy husband, ineffectual physician, profoundly disgusting excuse of a human being.
One morning, I overslept. That was a fatal error. I stood in the kitchen, downing my coffee, while the nurse dealt with Katrina on the sleeping porch. Murmur Lee slipped in through the back door, not bothering to knock, dressed in too-tight blue jeans and a Harley T-shirt.
“And how are you today, Zach
ary?” she asked, all business, unloading groceries, books, CDs, herbs, and lotions from the willow basket she carted about as if it were a child.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I stood there, cup in hand, fuming, watching her move through my kitchen. My space. She straightened a photograph of Katrina and me that hung on the wall above the wine rack. She wiped spilled pepper off my dinner table and slapped it from her hands into the wastebasket. She threw open the refrigerator door and began rearranging its contents. As fast as a match to gas, anger flew all over me. I was angry enough to do something rash, like throw my coffee cup across the room. She was all bent over, fanny in the air. She had a nice ass.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, not bothering to conceal the nails in my voice.
“Well, the orange juice needs to be kept cold. And if I can get some of this yogurt down her today, we’ll be doing really well.”
“Stop it, Murmur Lee. You know what I’m talking about.”
I turned away, tossed the rest of my coffee in the sink, tried to steady myself by rinsing the cup.
She walked over to where I stood, leaned against the counter, wiped her chin on her shoulder as if she’d spit on herself, and said in a near whisper, “Look. The hospice nurse is great. It’s not that. She can handle all this by herself. But maybe . . . maybe I just need to be here. I’ve got my own reasons. Okay?”
I stared down at the stained white porcelain and at the coffee pooled near the drain. I wanted to smash everything. Anything. Something. Without looking up, pushing my fingers through my hair, I said, “Fuck you.”
And I didn’t so much as glance at Murmur Lee. Nor did I kiss my wife good-bye. I gave that up once she made the decision to die. I simply walked outside, got in my Roadmaster, cranked the engine, and tried to drive into a different day.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 11
