Karen stared in disbelief. She was not naive about the existence of pornography online and she would not have been especially shocked to find a link to a site showing posed and naked women that her husband had been looking at. She would not have been pleased exactly but she would not have been surprised; in fact, she would not have cared about it very much at all. She might have closed the window feeling mild annoyance or disappointment; she might have forgotten it by the time David came home later that evening.
But this was different. This she would not be able to forget, not only because the images were appalling in and of themselves but because there was nothing that she knew about the man she lived with that could help her understand what she was seeing. In all the years she’d known him, David had never shown any propensity for physical violence toward himself or others; the most forceful thing he’d ever done in her presence was to slam a heavy book down on a table once when they were arguing; he’d certainly never raised his hand to her. He did not like grisly films, did not play video games involving gruesome violence or slaughter. He even found piercings and tattoos distasteful because of the association that they had with pain.
Karen sat at the computer with the mutilated bodies and ecstatic-looking faces illuminated in front of her and for several minutes she had no idea what to do. She could not unsee what she had seen. She stood up and walked around the apartment in a circle then decided to go out for a walk to try to clear her head. She shut off the computer and picked up her purse and took the elevator down to the street and walked in a daze in the direction of the park. She was so distracted that she didn’t look carefully where she was going and, crossing Amsterdam Avenue, she stepped off the curb and into the path of a taxi that was racing through a yellow light. The driver swerved trying to avoid her, but he did not change course fast enough and the left side of his fender collided with her legs.
She felt the initial impact of the car as something personal, malicious, a giant force that seemed to come out of the air and shove her whole body angrily up and forward. Then she felt the pain of impact as she hit the ground. Her consciousness seemed to splinter and after that she remembered only fragments of what happened, flashbulb instants: the paramedics cutting off her clothes, people shouting, the stretcher she was lying on being loaded into the ambulance, the siren starting up as they began to move. Later she learned that she had broken her jaw and one side of her collarbone when she hit the ground. In the ambulance she lost consciousness altogether.
When she woke up, David was there. He was sitting beside her bed, holding her hand. He saw she was awake and stood up so that she didn’t have to move her head to look into his face. He was staring at her with an expression of anxiety and tenderness more intense than any she had seen before, and for a moment she was flooded with simple relief at seeing him and gratitude that he was there. Then she remembered the events that had led up to her accident, and the bruised and bloodied faces from the screen came into her mind as vividly as though she had seen them only a moment before.
She looked up at her husband, his gentle, rapt expression and her stomach turned. Was he looking at her or at the damage she had suffered? She could picture how she looked right now: her face swollen up and lacerated where she had fallen on the pavement. She closed her eyes and tried to swallow but the muscles in her throat ached when she tried to move them and her mouth was as dry as paper. Her head was throbbing and her jaw ached and her whole body felt like one gigantic bruise. She closed her eyes wanting the world to go away.
“Sweetheart,” David was saying somewhere above her. “I’m so sorry.” But she knew he did not mean that he was sorry for anything he had done, only that he regretted what had happened. Then he bent to kiss her on the forehead. She saw his face lowering toward her, his eyes sorrowful and his lips pressed together and she tried to tell him not to touch her but found it hurt too much to speak. She made a noise in the back of her throat that sounded to her like the shapeless noise a drowning person might make.
“The doctors said you shouldn’t try to speak until your jaw has had time to heal some,” David said as he looked at her and bent again to kiss her. She shrank away from him to the far side of the narrow bed but she couldn’t move far enough away to avoid him. When he kissed her she felt his lips linger on her skin. She found that her left arm moved pretty well and she raised it even though it hurt and pushed him away. He looked bewildered and she knew he didn’t understand. When he tried to kiss her again, she managed to roll over so that she was facing away from him toward the wall.
“What?” she heard him say. “What’s wrong?” But of course she couldn’t tell him.
Through the weeks of her recovery, whenever he would try to touch her she would pull away. Even when she was well enough to speak and walk around, as her bruises began to heal and turned from red to purple to black to green and yellow, as her cuts began to heal, she still found that each time he came near her she would think of the pictures she had seen and wonder: does he find me more beautiful now than he did when I was well? She would shy away from him, upset and revolted by this possibility. David for his part responded to her coldness with solicitude and careful, gentle attentiveness, which might have been caused by simple pity for her condition but which seemed to Karen to show that in fact he actually cherished her more in her damaged state than he had before and made her avoid his touch more assiduously than ever. Each gesture he made to demonstrate his affection had the effect of putting more distance between them, more strangeness and silence until she could hardly stand his presence anywhere near her; she would flinch when he touched her, she could not look into his face without crying. She felt too upset and ashamed to tell him what she’d seen on the day before her accident. Too much time had passed, she thought, and she’d caused him too much anxiety by her behavior to tell him now what had occurred; it seemed both too small and too vast to have been the seed of their estrangement.
Even a patient husband could endure only so much of this treatment. By the time Karen’s face and body were entirely healed they were barely speaking to each other. While she was recovering, he’d moved into the spare room so she’d be more comfortable at night and he remained there, moving more and more of his belongings out of their old room. He worked longer hours and so they didn’t have to dine together. Soon this became normal for them, an established routine. They inhabited the same house but moved around each other like flotsam caught in opposing currents. At a certain point it seemed that at any moment one of them would say out loud what they both knew and then they would separate.
But then, sometimes, Karen would come across David unexpectedly in a room where she had not known he would be. She would remember what it had been like between them before. She wondered if that feeling could ever come back and she would imagine it returning as if it had always existed and had only been away on a long journey. Or David would arrive home at night to find Karen fallen asleep with her book still open on her chest and the bedside lamp still on and, coming in to switch it off, he’d notice the dark storm of her hair on the pillow and think how beautiful it was. And so they would each put off for another day saying that they thought that one of them should leave. And another day. And another. And another.
3.
Cynthia met Kris online during her second year of residency after medical school.
She had decided to apply for a residency in surgery, even though this meant a longer training period and even more lengthy hours and greater stress, because she didn’t want to settle for one of the specializations that she considered “mommy track” like dermatology or pediatrics; she wanted to attain the highest level of prestige and skill in her field. When she was accepted to surgery she had felt both thrilled and terrified. She moved to Madison, Wisconsin, after she finished her exams and started her internship at the university hospital there in July.
Of course, she had very little time to socialize or date or to pursue any interests outside work—she’d loved cycling during college
and she’d taken several long bicycle trips, including one around the coast of Ireland; she’d played the piano well enough that she’d considered going to a conservatory to study composition and performance; she liked to garden and to cook; but all those things went by the wayside now. She had expected this. She had no time for anything that first year except work and it was thrilling and exhausting. Sometimes she envied the interns who were going into general practice and would be done in a year or two, but other times she pitied them: how could you ever want to leave the intensity of the hospital, a place where you knew the things you did and the decisions you made were of the greatest importance, where you were changing and saving lives every day?
But the body has its own cravings quite apart from the intellect, and sometimes she would feel the absence of a lover in her life as clearly as a hunger pang and then she would wonder if she’d made the right decision. It was not the same for women, she understood; even now, the expectations for a wife were different from those for a husband, and although of course many individual men and women did not conform to traditional roles and found a way to love each other anyway, still when a man she was on a date with learned she was going to be a surgeon or when after a few meetings he found he had to see her only when her work allowed, which was not often, she felt him detach, retrench, withdraw. Sometimes she could tell the exact moment when this happened. Something in the man’s posture or in his facial expression changed. The duration of time in which he’d look at her would shorten until at last he didn’t look at her at all and then she would get the call or, worse, the email or once even, to her horror, a text message, telling her that he didn’t think it was working out between them and he liked her but was sorry, etc.
All the other interns in her track were men and she tried dating a couple of them but they were too much like her: ambitious, focused and competitive.
Then her elderly parents split up, to Cynthia and her siblings’ great surprise, at the end of her first year of residency. She had thought that they were happy together or, if not happy, at least content, at least comfortable with each other. Their separation really shook her up; what other model of relationship did she have? Her brother Harry was on his second divorce. Her sister Karen occupied a marriage that seemed great at the beginning but then lost all the air inside it; Karen and her husband David seemed more like ghosts haunting each other than like spouses. Was that the point of all this effort, to end up trapped with someone in a set of small rooms, unable to either leave or truly inhabit your own life?
So Cynthia stopped trying. She focused on her work and when she was working she was happy. There was so much to learn, so much to take in; sometimes she thought she could feel the new pathways of understanding being driven through her brain like roads. She was coming to see the body in ways that she could not have imagined before, to understand how well it could recover from damage and disruption, how adroitly it could compensate when it encountered some unexpected obstacle to the fulfillment of its functions and desires. It seemed to her that this capacity to adapt was its particular gift, its magic. Sometimes she thought she could see through the people around her, through their seemingly inert flesh and into the fizzing, busy miracle of blood and bones and cells remaking and renewing themselves.
She finished her shifts exhausted and most nights or mornings she would come home and crawl into bed and drop into sleep like a stone into a pool of water. But sometimes she was still full of the feverish energy, the adrenaline that had sustained her through the many hours on her feet and then she could not sleep.
On these insomniac nights she poured herself a drink and sat down at her computer and clicked through pages of brightly colored ephemera: news stories about the latest film star to be stopped for reckless driving and ordered into rehab, pictures of children in faraway countries rescued after floods and earthquakes, quizzes that told her which Beatle she would be if she ever had been or ever could be a Beatle. And sometimes she chatted with people whom she’d never met and never thought she would.
In the different chat rooms she would visit, she introduced herself to whoever was already there and described herself a little. She told who she was and what she did, though never exactly where she lived. She talked for a while with the mostly male interlocutors who came her way, and they were variously dull or interesting, intelligent or stupid, charming or crass; she liked each of these qualities or not depending on her mood. Some evenings she was pleased to find herself communicating with someone erudite and cultured about the works of art they both loved and the books they’d read. Other times she was glad when the person typed some blunt obscenity about her breasts or cunt. She replied in kind or closed the window on her screen immediately depending on whether the explicitness turned her on or bored her. Eventually, she started to get sleepy and could go to bed and rest.
This was how she first encountered Kris. The name came up in a chat room for classical music enthusiasts that Cynthia had been to on previous occasions, but she had never seen this user before. Hello, she typed. After a moment, the mild reply came: Hello.
Who are you? she typed.
My name is Kris, said the screen after a pause. I live in Norway in a little town north of the capital. Who are you?
I’m Cynthia. I’m training to be a doctor. I grew up in Chicago.
There was another delay and then: Chicago? I have been to Chicago several times to perform. I used to play the violin in the symphony in Oslo and we went on a number of tours in the United States.
What do you do now? Cynthia asked.
A few years ago, I left musical performance so that I could develop and run an organic farm. I thought: how hard can that be after learning to play Shostakovich? Serves me right! Farming is so much harder than I could ever have imagined when I started out. It took all my time! Finally, though, it is beginning to turn a profit and I have hired a manager to help me run it so that I can go back to the city almost every weekend. Which is good because I can see my kids more often.
You have children?
Two. A boy and a girl. They live with my ex.
That must be difficult . . .
Well, we are relatively lucky. She’s a wonderful parent and we get on well as friends, we just weren’t so good at living together in the end. We were too different. Perhaps you know how that can be . . . There was a blank on the screen, the cursor pulsing as it waited. Then Kris typed: But I’m sorry, I’ve talked a lot about myself. Please, tell me about you and your work. Being a doctor must be fascinating . . .
They continued chatting and when Cynthia finally glanced at the clock she had to excuse herself and go to bed because several hours had passed in what felt like much less time. She had been enjoying their conversation so much that she had not noticed. This pleasure was not only because they had so many interests in common, although that seemed to her remarkable enough: Cynthia felt like she was talking to someone who had taken up all the discarded threads of her own life—music, gardening, Kris even liked cycling—and made another life out of them. But there was also an ease between them, a shared sense of humor. When Kris made jokes, which were mostly gently self-mocking, she found herself laughing in spite of her exhaustion. She liked the slight formality of the way Kris wrote, the sign of someone who had learned English as a second language and knew its grammar too well to be a native speaker. Kris seemed to like her too, and before they signed off at last asked if they could meet again the following evening. Cynthia checked her schedule and agreed and they set a time and said goodnight.
Away from the screen, she felt light and graceful as she got ready for bed that night as though someone she could not see was observing her benignly and approvingly.
The next night they met again and the conversation was just as interesting. She wrote about her decision not to pursue music and her work at the hospital. She told Kris things that she had told to no one else: how upset she’d been by her parents’ late divorce, how she felt she had to work twice as hard as other people
to compensate for being shy and serious and awkward. Again the time flew by. For the next week they chatted every night, even when Cynthia got home very late, and their rapport grew flirtatious. They swapped photographs (she spent some time and effort choosing which one to send) and she was pleased with what she saw: a picture of a blond man with high cheekbones and a prominent nose and slightly craggy brows that she thought looked dignified and that kept his face from being too pretty, which she would not have liked. His skin was creased around the eyes and mouth; he looked in the picture both capable of laughter and capable of great seriousness and concentration. She printed out a small copy of the picture and put it in her wallet in the space with the clear plastic window where other people put pictures of their spouses or their kids. She would take it out and look at it whenever she wanted to feel a little burst of energy and pleasure.
All week she flew around as though the force of gravity had been temporarily diminished and she was lighter than she’d been the week before. Her work went particularly well and she was praised by the attending physician, who commended her in front of the other residents. She felt the two things must be connected: her late-night chats with Kris and her good performance at work. She thought she must work up the courage to ask whether a visit would be possible: she could go to Norway or Kris could come to Wisconsin. That night, on screen, she read: I would like to invite you to come and visit me here. Whenever it is convenient for you, I would love to meet you in person. You can come for as long as you like.
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