I see you everywhere (25 page)

By the time I ring Esteban’s bell, my hair is slick with sweat, my boots choked with snow. I listen to the medieval clankings of half a dozen locks, hear him call out “Coming, coming, coming!” (in his Caribbean singsong,
Combing combing combing!
). The gate clatters up, and Esteban, wearing a pressed saffron shirt and black jeans, opens his long arms to welcome me. I have met him only once before; his presence is something to bask in. He stands well over six feet, and his skin is the warm indigo Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 167
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brown of wet seals lazing in the sun. He gestures incessantly and has a habit of giggling every so often, a habit endearing in someone so large. If my life were not so tangled already, I’d have to fall in love. Esteban is Haitian, forty years old, and has driven a taxi for the last twelve. Hard to think of him as a hatchling.

“
Salut! Salut!
My secrets are now to be bared!”

Another thing I love: his unfashionable zeal.

“Enter, enter.” He touches my back, steering me gently into a huge windowless space—an acre of garage transformed into an equatorial refuge. The ceiling is high, and in the center a cluster of thrift-shop sofas and armchairs are draped in African fabrics. Bright rugs are strewn like flags across the concrete, a woodstove roars softly, and four rubber trees, taller than Esteban, stretch toward blue lamps. In a cage, two lovebirds twitter and fuss.

“What a sanctuary.”

“Muriel,” he says with feeling as he pours hot water into a teapot. In French,
Mooreeyell,
it sounds like the name of a tropical storm. “My wife,
she
is the talent of the house. Talent at life, at how to
be.
”

He holds out a plate of chocolate cookies. When I reach to take one, a cunning pain flees from my left shoulder toward my heart. They come and go quickly, these jolts; I’m down to four or five a day. My surgeon says they’re a natural part of the healing—nerves recharging under the scar—but each time, it feels like a piano wire has snapped in my chest. I bite into the cookie with exaggerated relish. “Just what the doctor ordered,” I say.

I sit on one of the soft, happy sofas and take a tape recorder and a pair of shoes out of my bag. When I pull off my boots, there’s a high-water mark midway up my shins. Esteban insists I borrow a pair of Muriel’s socks, that I take off my tights and hang them near the stove to dry. He puts my coat on a hanger and smooths away creases in the dampened wool.

He takes me through a door into another wide space, this one under skylights. His constructions fill the room, upstaging even Esteban. Some sculptors forge and weld steel. Others find their alchemy in oil Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 168 168

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drums, feathers, rubber gloves, eviscerated computers. Whenever I think I’ve seen everything, someone surprises me. Like Esteban, who knits. With a pair of large wooden needles, he knits rope, baling twine, phone cord, fishing line, even vines of red sinewy licorice, into garments for some Leviathan race. In his studio, several are pinned to the wall or slump like drunks in a corner. I stand for a long time in front of
Emperor
—

the first piece of Esteban’s I saw. A coat as long as a bus, short in front, swallow-tailed in back, lies on the floor between two sheets of Plexiglas. Made of woven Mylar tape, the coat emits a crystalline sparkle, like a chandelier, and even without buttons or pockets or medals, it’s as crisp and commanding as a uniform. It reminds me of the saintly effigies, in glass coffins, carried in Catholic processions.

I turn on my recorder. Why does Esteban knit?

He shrugs. “I just do. You write, I knit. People talk of domestic things, women’s things. . . . What am I saying about their world? Am I not an impostor, a man stealing from a woman’s language? But”—he giggles—

“I like using my hands this way. I just do.” His long legs wound through the rungs of a stool, he works while we talk, his speed unnerving. The needles ticker away, his pink fingernails like flashing petals. “In the taxi, I knit at the stoplights. I carry what I work on in a big garbage bag next to me in front. I knit in line at the airport. I knit for characters of history, I knit for imaginary characters I knew as a boy. I knit, Muriel says, to draft a private army.”
Neet. Beeg. Eemageenary.
His accent has a sweet keening quality. As he talks, his hands never pause in their dance. Blue needs cool. Blue needs space.

I think of hospitals as wasteful yet frugal places, disgorging monadnocks of garbage yet guarding every inch of floor space from frivolous use. But the room I visit each day is large: surrounding Blue is a respectful stretch of linoleum. And it’s cold. If it were summer, perhaps I wouldn’t mind, but I do. The first time, I told Patrice, the technician who helps me into my mummyish mold, that I was afraid I couldn’t hold still Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 169
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because I might shiver. She patted the arm on my good side (her hand, like the room, pristine and chilly). “Sorry, hon, computers love that cool. Goosebump City, I know, but we get you through fast as we can.” Patrice is slim and blond with a boy’s haircut: Mary Martin as Peter Pan. If Patrice is the handmaiden here, Juan is the high priest. After she positions me and leaves the room, Juan punches the buttons and twists the dials, inches from my face. I know the pores of his clammy, razornicked throat all too well. I know that though his hair is honestly black, his beard would emerge the color of scuffed ice, a bald patch along his left jaw. I know that the crucifix which sometimes brushes my cheek was made in the Czech Republic. It feels indecent, almost adulterous, to see all these details, but that’s how it is.

Once Juan gets things just right, “Gantry’s sixty-four!” he calls out, to no one I can see. Whatever this gantry is, it never wavers: it’s always sixty-four. Each time I hear this curious mantra, an irrelevant Elmer Gantry swims across my inner screen (Burt Lancaster’s face, about as handsome to me as a pot roast). Music seeps through the walls—murky retakes of Frank Sinatra, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner. One day, it dawns on me that I am hearing the Talking Heads as Muzak. To hold still, I have to resist laughter.

Nine,
I say to my sober consort,
now I’ve heard everything.
Above me, the ceiling’s been cheerfully muralized. No slapdash job, no pizza-parlor view of Amalfi. Someone paid for a painter quite skilled at fooling the eye. Someone imagined that this view—a robin’s-egg sky teeming with clouds, a sky that trills,
Life is a show tune! Dance and
rejoice!
—will take your mind off the sensation that, laid out on this cold steel slab, you’re already in the morgue.

Though sometimes, strapped down as I am, laser crosshairs tattooing my chest, I feel strangely secure. Secure, perhaps, the way an astronaut feels once she’s readied for flight.

Count me down, Lucky, then blast me off hard.
My slot is at four o’clock, when the real sky, a frail yellow, still clings to light. By the time I leave the hospital, the sky is dark (that crisp porcelain Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 170 170

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violet of winter), and the subway overflows with people and impatience. I rarely find a seat, and if I do, there’s no room to read; puffy coats and shopping bags lurch across laps whenever the train hits a curve. On the way home today, I try to think only of Esteban. Before I left his studio, he told me he’s finishing his first masterpiece. A perfectly serious joke. He wouldn’t let me see it because it was so new, still in need of protection. It stood in a corner, a ten-foot cone cloaked in tarps. “But soon,” he assured me.

Standing, pressed between two trench coats, I remember his hands, so huge, so agile. I imagine riding behind a knitting cabdriver in a traffic jam on the way to LaGuardia. The strangest things console me. Ray reclines on our bed, where he’s crushed all four pillows into a throne. His T-shirt is speckled with beer. The soles of his red socks are black as hot tar. He lowers the sports section. “Spring training, would you believe, and these jokers have yet to buy one decent pitcher.”

“When they shine, you ignore them completely,” I say. “You’re only a fan when they’re losing their shirts.” I weasel myself between his legs. Gently, he maneuvers the newspaper over my head and reads across my right shoulder. This is a new ritual, one of many. We’ve lived together for two years, but my invisible disease has forced us back to a courtship (minus the breathless suspense).

As Ray turns the pages, I feel his rib cage shift, rolling me like a gentle tide. “Today go all right?”

“I went out to Queens and saw the guy who knits. The man is a mystic.”

“I meant the hospital.” He continues to scan the paper: hockey, basketball, Davis Cup tennis.

“I’m beginning to burn. I look a little bit like pepperoni.”

“But it went all right. You feel okay,” he persists, speaking slowly.

“Ray, I
feel
fine. I
feel
like there’s nothing wrong.”

My doctors caught the tumor early and small—so early that they caught it as a concept, not a symptom, the only evidence a fuzzy blip on Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 171
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film. (
Nipped in the bud,
they love to repeat, as if it were some renegade pansy.) But since I didn’t know it was there to begin with, how can I believe it’s gone? Around Ray, though, I try not to complain. I want him to admire and stroke my strength, like the gleam of a new car; then the strength will have to be real.
Something
will be real. From behind, he rests his chin on my collarbone. He still holds the paper before me, but he’s listening. To him, silence is never a threat. I’m not like that; I want to be asked and told, praised, cajoled, or bellowed at. Where there are words, there are definitions. Definitions help contain the chaos. Ray once said that the way I lean on language makes me fascinating but also makes me uptight, ties me in knots. I take people too literally, he says. At work, I have a reputation for getting my way. It’s no big deal; I’m not approving Third World loans at Bankers Trust. But I manage to do it, most of the time, without getting shrill or losing my temper. This morning, after a meeting in which I saved two sculptors from the editorial ax, Preston whispered, “What a little shark you are.” Most days, I’d have taken this as the only sort of compliment my boss knows how to give. Today, I keep seeing myself as a bloated white beast with beady, unblinking eyes and fist-size teeth. A creature that never sleeps, never has dreams. And never, according to a book recently shoved in my face, gets cancer.

“Ray, do I ever remind you of a shark?”

“When your mother calls. When all the plates are in the sink and it’s my fault. Which it always is. But right now? I wouldn’t blame you if you felt like mauling nearly everyone around you.” He does a typically bad imitation of the music from
Jaws.

“A ruthless predator, that’s me all right.” I sigh. I’m remembering that when I was little, maybe eight, I obsessed about how everything ends up on the planet in its particular shape. Why wasn’t I a dogwood tree, a flagstone, a squid? I’d never heard of karma; I was just this juvenile agnostic philosopher. I had no desire to be anything else, not at all. I felt lucky and safe being human. Suddenly I don’t like it so much.

“Sometimes I wish we were animals,” I say. “All we’d have to do is play Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 172 172

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and sleep, hunt and eat. Have lots of sex. Roll in the grass. No plans for the future. No existential fears. No arguments. No fateful decisions.”

“Animals decide things. Sure they do.”

“What—hope? Calculate? Weigh options and risks? No.” I twist around to see Ray’s face. “So, what would we be?”

“Be?”

“Animals, what kind of animals?”

“Skunks,” he says decisively.

“Thanks, Ray.”

“What would you prefer—giraffes? Gazelles? Girls always want to be thought of as graceful. But I like earthy. Skunks are the essence of earthy.”

“Maybe skunks don’t stink all the time,” I say. “Maybe when they’re alone together, they smell exotic, like incense. Like those bong shops on Bleecker.”

Ray squints his features into a rooting grimace and digs his face in my neck, snorting until I’m laughing out of control. He pulls away but keeps me helplessly pinned. “Since when have you, Miss Priscilla Mullins, ever so much as peeked through the door of a headshop?”

We
are
animals. And I think that’s a problem for Ray. I’m thirty-six and have always wanted children, though not fanatically—

not until Ray. But Ray doesn’t share my certainty. “I’m no different from anyone else,” he said two months ago, back in simpler times. “I’m sure I’d be marching around telling the world it’s the experience of a lifetime. The thing is, I don’t
need
the experience of a lifetime. I like my life the way it is.”

“You’re talking like someone who’s afraid of risks,” I said. “But you take risks—huge risks—for a living.”

“Yes, and like a lot of people, I leave my work at work.”

Those were the days when we had easy, abstract debates. Now, making a family is my second obsession, what I fear most I could lose—other Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 173
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than my life. When I bring it up, Ray is clever or silent, no middle ground. I’m beginning to wish we could just fight it out: you can’t have a truce without war.

In the evenings now, we rarely go out. I read like an addict, and Ray watches TV or listens to jazz or tackles projects: building shelves, rearranging furniture. The more restless he feels, the noisier the project. He always has something going, something physical, because he’s happiest when exerting himself. His latest plan is to build a kayak. A friend in Brooklyn offered his garage, about which I am not thrilled. Ray is absent often enough.