A Little Love Story (6 page)

9

I
T HAS ALWAYS SEEMED
to me that all the trouble between people, all the differences that cause trouble, go away with sleep. When you wake up there’s a little stretch of time, a few blurry seconds, when you’re separated by almost nothing. I fell asleep as soon as we’d finished making love. I woke up after a short while and Janet was on her back and I was on my side, half-leaning against her, and there was no trouble between us.

“You awake, Joe Date?” she asked quietly.

I said that I was. I said, “This is nice. But I have a perfectly good queen-sized bed in the other room and there’s not so much bad air from the paint and thinner.”

She seemed to have stopped coughing. “I don’t want to go in and disturb your exes.”

“No exes,” I said. “No ghosts in there.”

In the small bedroom, under the covers in the dark she said, “I miss the drop cloth, kind of. Propositioned in midriver. Sex under a drop cloth. It’s been different.”

She started coughing and it went on for more than a minute. I didn’t think she was going to stop. She got up and went into the bathroom. I heard her spit, and run the water, and spit again, and I could tell she was trying not to let me hear. When she was back under the sheet she lay quiet for a while. And then she said: “Attractive, isn’t it, the spitting girl.”

“I don’t care. There’s a plastic bucket in the kitchen. I’ll bring it in here so you don’t have to keep getting up all night.”

I brought the bucket in, with a dishtowel, and set it next to her side of the bed, wide awake now. She seemed wide awake, too. The clock beside her read 2:11.

We were lying side by side on our backs, a siren wailing blocks away. I put my left hand on the top of her hip bone, trying to signal, not necessarily that I wanted to make love again, but that I wanted to stay down there where we had gone, in that lost nation beyond the reach of words.

But then something came over me and I asked, “What’s making you cough like that?” because I believed, by then, that it wouldn’t spoil anything for me to ask it. Bad allergies, I thought. Or the tail end of pneumonia. Or some new flu from Thailand or Bali or central Australia.

She waited so long before answering that I thought she’d fallen back to sleep. I would have been perfectly happy not to know. She’d already told me I couldn’t catch it, and I trusted her, and I believe people should have their private places if they want them. But at last she said. “You get the prize, then.”

“Which?”

“The record for going the longest without asking. Also the record for kissing without asking, and not seeming like you were afraid.”

“My mother was a doctor. She dealt with sick people all day and caught a cold about once every twenty years and I’m the same way. Don’t answer about the cough if you don’t want to.”

But after another short silence, she told me the name of the disease she had. The sound of the two words sent a little terrifying thrill down my neck and across the skin of my arms, and I felt two reflexes, almost at the same time. I felt myself recoil away from her, and heard some interior voice trying to convince me there hadn’t been anything special about the night, that I didn’t really know her, or want to know her. There was a part of me that wanted no more sadness for a while. I didn’t know much about the disease but I knew it wasn’t good, and I understood then that the coughing and the pills weren’t just part of some passing inconvenience. Something inside me pulled away from that. And then something else washed me back. As a boy I had run away from things, from fights, from sadness. When my dad told me my favorite grandfather had passed away unexpectedly, my response was to sprint out the front door of our house and all the way up the street, trying to get away from that truth. When I broke off with my college girlfriend I did it from California, by mail, and only went to see her later, face to face, because she made me. But all that running had left me ashamed of myself, so ashamed that, as an adult, I cultivated the opposite reflex. When Gerard lost his mind for a while in college, I went to the psych ward every other day to visit him. When my father died, I was holding his hand. I helped break up a bad fight in downtown Boston late one night. When things went sour and then tragic with Giselle, I tried, in the most secret part of me, not to run from it but to stand there and face it and deal with it. And so, in the bed with Janet, I could feel the old urge to back away. And then something better, holding me.

She said, “Do you know anything about it?”

“Not much. I’ve heard the words. My mother would know, I’m sure. Tell me.”

So she spent ten minutes telling me. Which is not that easy a thing to do, talk about your terminal disease with someone you barely know, in bed, on your first night together. When she was finishing up, she felt awkward, I could tell from her voice, a little bit worried again that I might hurt her somehow. She rolled over and kissed me, and said she was sorry for running on like that, she had to go to sleep, we could talk about it in the morning if I wanted.

In a minute or two I felt her body relax. I lay awake with the side of my arm against her warm skin, trying to take in what she had told me, to make it more than just words, trying to stay there with the feelings in me. Not to pity, not to run, not to rescue just for the sake of convincing myself I was a good person. Not to lie to myself or to her in any way.

There had been something wonderful and unusual about that night. I tried, for a while, to understand it. Janet didn’t have a lot of the ordinary defenses, I said that already. I don’t mean she was totally unprotected. No one that smart is totally unprotected after about age four. But, in spite of what she had whispered in my ear, I believed she wasn’t really worried about being hurt. I thought then that what I felt in her, what was different about her, was some kind of monumental courage, a courage I could feel as clearly as if another creature lay breathing there between us in the bed. I lay awake for a while, just admiring it. In the middle of the first part of the lovemaking, she had taken my fingers pretty forcefully and run them across the wide, slightly depressed scars on her upper belly. And so while she was sleeping, I put my hand there again, and traced the taut skin, and then I fell asleep, too.

10

I
N THE MORNING
I woke up with no one beside me. I listened for Janet in the bathroom or in the kitchen but after a few seconds I knew the apartment was empty. I do not particularly enjoy the smell of day-old river water on my skin, so I got up. The plastic bucket was not where I had set it, and the dishtowel lay neatly folded on the side table as if it had not been used.

I do not like to stand in the shower a long time. I do not really like to shave, but I have been told I don’t look my best with a one- or two-day growth of beard. So I showered and shaved and put on a clean pair of jeans, a clean T-shirt from a road race in which I’d finished eighty-ninth that summer, and sneakers with no socks, and I went and stood in the sunlight in the painting room. The drop cloth had been neatly folded up, and the old green couch looked the way it always looked, as if nothing important had happened there. Light was pouring in through the tall windows, catching a glass jar of brushes just so. On the easel was a canvas I had been working, and though I don’t paint perfectly clear and representational paintings, it was easy enough to see that it was a portrait of a pretty blond woman, twenty-five or so, sitting at a table with a vase of lilies beside her left elbow, and a look of ease on her face, as if she had already accomplished the most important part of what she had been put on earth to accomplish, and was proud of that in a quiet way, and at peace with herself. As if she had learned not to run away from things. As if she believed those things held, within them, the answers to all the huge questions about how best to live out a human life. On that canvas I was trying to show that I loved this blond woman, and admired her, and I think I had accomplished that, or was beginning to accomplish it.

What probably did not show was that the woman was my mother.

I studied the canvas for some time, then went into the kitchen intending to clean up the spilled cereal. Janet had cleaned up the cereal and washed the bucket and leaned it in the sink to dry, and, behind the faucet, left a note in a precise printed hand.

Dear Joe Date. I’m sleeping with the governor. Safest sex only. My insistence on that makes him angry. I’ll stop if you ask me out again. If not, then thanks for a kind of weird but nice night. Janet. P.S. The painting is nice. The woman is beautiful
.

11

I
DON’T HAVE ANY
Greek blood that I know of, but I seem to have some mysterious connection to Greek Americans. I don’t know why this is. The ones I’m friendly with have a real appreciation for food and friendship and loyalty, which strikes me as a healthy set of appreciations. Gerard was Greek. And Carmine Asalapolous, my doughnut-making friend. And half a block from my apartment was a loud little breakfast place I liked, Flash-in-the-Pan, which was run by Maria and Aristotle Reginidis, who probably had a few drops of Greek blood in them somewhere.

I went there that morning, with Janet’s note folded in my back pocket next to my still-damp wallet. For $3.99 you could get two sunny-side eggs with real home fries—the kind with a patchy soft frosting of paprika and oil and browned potato flesh—link sausages you could cut through with the edge of your fork, rye toast with butter, and with marmalade that came, not in plastic packets, but in a glass jar. Good coffee in heavy, thick-lipped cups. The silverware was also heavy, scarred with a million silvery scratches, and if you wanted, you could order a grilled bran muffin on the side, for your health … with a quarter-cup of whipped butter on top of it.

I liked the cheap framed photos of Greek temples on the walls, and the clean bathroom with un-painted-over graffiti (“U.S. Out of North America Now!” was my all-time favorite) and the fact that Maria and Ari’s beautiful green-eyed nine-year-old girl, Giana, sat at the cash register on days when she didn’t have school, making change with a serious face, like an adult. I liked, too, that Maria and Ari weren’t afraid to have the occasional little marital spat there behind the counter, as if they didn’t need to prove to each other that they had a good thing going on between them. It was the kind of marriage, and the kind of child, I’d hoped to have someday, when I had been planning for a marriage and children.

“The eggshill bucket is full! But why why why can’t you tik out the eggshill bucket when is full? Why?”

“See this!” Maria would yell back, decaf pot in one hand, regular in the other. “This is why. What’s more important, eggshell bucket or they get their coffee hot when the cup is empty?”

“My other wife could do both!”

Ari had not had any other wife, except in his imagination. They’d shake their heads, mutter in some ancient Kalamata dialect, fuss and fume for a while. Sometimes, rather than sitting there in polite embarrassment, one of the regular customers at the counter would take sides and say something like, “My wife can do both, you know, Maria.”

“Good,” Maria would say. “Send her in.”

Half an hour later she’d squeeze past Aristotle at the grill and lay a hand on his aproned ass.

It was not the kind of food, or the kind of show, you could get in the hotel restaurants, or the chains, where the first commandment was never to seem actually human. Thou shalt not offend the customer’s sensibilities under any circumstances. Thou shalt not laugh or shout.

The country was going that way, it seemed to me. Political figures got hundred-dollar haircuts and e-mailed their spin doctors to find out how to say good morning to their children. Our governor, for example, was a clean-faced millionaire with a plastic smile who was trying, that month, to get back the authority to execute criminals because he wanted more than anything to be reelected, and his opponent talked tough on crime, so he had to appear tough on crime, too. He had done some good things, as Janet said, getting poor kids access to better health care, for example, and fixing up some schools. He knew he had the vote of the more compassionate types, and he was trying to steal a few percentage points from his opponent, who would have executed people without benefit of trial if he’d been allowed to. Four years earlier this same man, our governor, had been photographed—by a newspaper reporter—having a nasty argument over fried clams on Lynn Beach with a young woman not his wife, and had made up an absurd story, told a few plastic jokes, posed repeatedly with his two teenage daughters, given blood, gone to church with the cameras on him, and been reelected two months before his wife filed for divorce. His picture was always in the newspaper and on the TV, his voice was everywhere. I had never liked the man.

When I had eaten half my eggs and potatoes and finished my first cup of coffee, I took Janet’s note out of my pocket. I unfolded it, smoothed out the wrinkles, and set it on the counter-top beside my coffee cup, where I could study the handwriting and the words.

12

T
HAT AFTERNOON
I put on a summer sport coat over my T-shirt and drove half an hour west to visit my mother. She was living then in one of the leafier suburbs, not far from where I had grown up, in a place called Apple Meadow. People cooked her meals and cleaned her room, and there was a garden with white metal chairs set around a fountain, and manicured lawns, and an activity room with a television and a card table. Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, cleaning women, receptionists—everyone I’d ever spoken with at Apple Meadow seemed competent and caring, and you couldn’t find a surface with dust on it if you were paid to, and there was really no other place my mother could have been as happy and safe, or treated as well. But every time I drove up to the guardhouse and gave my name I felt like some kind of traitor, a good enough son wearing a thin suit of selfishness.

She was sitting in an armchair in the sunny visitors’ room, gold and diamond earrings my father had given her sparkling at the sides of her face, hands resting in her lap. She might have been waiting for me or she might not have been. At sixty-seven, she was the youngest person there. Probably the healthiest, too, except for the fact that her mind—which had been a wonderful mind—had started to travel down roads that were closed off to most other minds. She recognized me when I came through the door, though; her neatly trimmed eyebrows lifted a quarter of an inch and she flashed her small, pretty smile, one corner of one top front tooth chipped away from when she had tried to bite the flip top off a can of Pepsi. “Ellory!” she said, holding out her arms. “Doctor Entwhistle!”

A year before, just about the time when everything had changed for me, she had started calling me by my brother’s name. She had also started talking to me as though I were a physician—which is what she had been, which is what I’d been expected to be. It was as if she somehow understood that my happy enough little world had just been blown up, and her response to that was to make me into someone else, as if that might let me slip free of the pain. After trying various other strategies, I had finally decided to play along. As a pretend-doctor, I could at least accompany her a short way down some of the roads she traveled. I could do a better job of bringing that light to her face when I walked into the visitors’ room. Somehow, by some interior mechanism I did not understand, my being a doctor partly rebuilt the connection that had been broken by her illness. I could sit again in a skewed version of the warmth and generosity I’d grown up with, and once you’ve had that kind of affection in your life, you are marked by it forever. What my mother had given me, given us, was exactly what Gerard had not been given enough of as a boy. He and I talked about that sometimes.

That day, Mum and I walked the neat grounds of Apple Meadow, around and around, back and forth. It was the new pattern: sometimes she held my arm and was quiet. Other times she said things like this: “It’s not a question of money, Ellory. Money just represents something else, an agreement to value one thing over another. Only children don’t have this value put on them because children have one foot in the ocean and pay no attention. It terrifies us, this ocean. But the fear of drowning is absurd. We already
are
drowned.”

“Exactly,” I’d say, and we’d stroll along like intellectuals on holiday in Baden-Baden.

And then, at some point after it had circled and circled and spun off in a series of nonsensical eddies, the conversation would drift back to her old world, the world of medicine, the world of being paid to care about other people’s pain and fear. It was very strange because, in that world, whole sectors of my mother’s memory and thought processes had been left undamaged, and it always sent a happy jolt through me when the conversation went there and we were actually almost making sense again.

“How is your practice?” she would ask, with so much pride in her voice that it made me wish I’d stayed in med school. “What interesting cases have you seen recently, Doctor Entwhistle?”

Sometimes, before visiting her, I’d go on Gerard’s computer and spend an hour researching exotic illnesses. One Saturday we’d talked at length about intestinal parasites in children, and the strange variety of symptoms they could cause. The Ebola virus fascinated her, and had led us to leeching and leukemia. Her mind was a library in which certain floors and sections of stacks had no electricity, and others were still well lighted enough for reading.

“I have a patient with cystic fibrosis now,” I told her on that day, because I had not been able to stop hearing Janet’s voice as she lay in the darkness.

“Horrible,” my mother said. “A ghastly disease. A torturer. A killer of children.”

“Young adults now, mostly,” I said. “They’ve made some advances.”

“You’re more in touch with these things than I am.”

“She’s twenty-seven, my patient. Almost the statistical mean age of death now.”

“Ah,” my mother said, sounding surprised. She spent a little while searching around in her interior darkness.
“Pseudomonas bacterium
?”

“Yes.”

“Constant coughing? Digestive troubles?”

“Pancreatic enzymes,” I said, and with that, I came to the end of what I knew.

“Horrible, horrible.”

We walked another few paces. “What causes it, Mum?”

She turned her stone-blue eyes up at me. “What causes it? You must have slept through the lecture that day, Ellory. Are you asking seriously?”

I nodded.

“A gene. A defective gene.”

“I know
that
,” I said, and gave a little fake chuckle. “But at the cellular level. What is the exact … what is going on?”

“Salt and water don’t pass between the cells easily enough, the mucus is thick, the skin is salty, haven’t you noticed? It’s one tiny mistake. A glitch.”

“There are new drugs being developed,” I ad-libbed. “There’s talk of a cure in the not-too-distant future. I wanted to ask you what you’d recommend in the way of treatment.”

“Not my area of expertise.” She swung her hands out, palms up, her ring finger wobbling slightly as I had seen it do a thousand times. “But they have identified the gene, as you know.”

“Yes.”

“Done some work with new antibiotics.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What I would suggest is that you go and speak with Doctor … at the Beth Israel. With Doctor … Doctor …”

I could feel the change sweeping through her. It was as if she’d managed to escape from a great heavy demon and run a few steps back toward sanity, and then the demon had caught her from behind, wrapped itself around her, and was now in the process of dragging her back into the darkness. Her muscles stiffened. Her face puckered, turning up the fine light hair on her cheeks. Four, five, six times she tried for the doctor’s name: “You really must consult with Doctor … Doctor … Ellory, it’s Doctor …” At last she surrendered and let herself be dragged back. When she spoke again we were miles apart. “Gwendolyn Mitchell and her brood of six went to the minister’s house for Sunday dinner, you know, and once the squash was served you couldn’t find a place to sit at the table, can you imagine?”

There was a connection somewhere, I knew that. I had some understanding of the ways her mind worked now. Maybe one of the Mitchells had suffered from cystic fibrosis. Maybe the doctor’s name at Beth Israel was Mitchell or his wife or assistant was Gwendolyn. Sometimes the word my mother was searching for would pop up again an hour later, in the midst of another conversation, or as we were saying good-bye, or when I spoke with her on the phone in the middle of the week.

“Nothing is harder to imagine, Mum,” I said.

“They weren’t always that way, the Mitchells.”

“No.”

“In fact, we liked them. Out of pity, I sometimes thought, but we liked them.”

“Never a good motivation,” I said.

I turned her back toward the main building and when we were inside I spent a little time with her in front of the communal TV, watching football—her latest passion. When I was ready to say good-bye she kissed me and held me in her strong arms as if she were still living in the two-hundred-year-old blue saltbox in Concord, and my father was still alive, beside her, smiling and puffing on his pipe, and my brother Ellory was still a hell-raiser who had not yet shocked the neighborhood by turning Catholic and becoming a monk, and my sister Lizbeth was just a pretty teenager who had not yet made her life into a constant search for drugs and the money to buy drugs. For those few seconds my mother squeezed the guilt and sorrow out of me and we traveled back to a place where we had been happy, unusually happy, unscarred, suburban, American, bubbling over with health and brains and energy, convinced the future would be kind and good. Our embrace was a kind of code. “I’m still me,” she was signaling. And I was answering, “I know. I know.”

But I left Apple Meadow wondering how many years she would live like that, and what it felt like inside, and whether it really made any difference at all to her if I visited or stayed away.