Lit Riffs (31 page)

When Ray passed by her, she’d been trying to decide how many to buy—one was sufficient, but it would be lonely; three was beautiful, but too many; two, two seemed too manand-wife. Ray’s back was stooped and he was walking slowly. His tousle of dark hair was cropped short and was now ashy gray. She didn’t recognize Ray, so much as feel him. She turned, almost afraid, and there he was. He looked terrible. He had dark circles around his eyes, his skin was the color of chicken fat, and he had a paunch. Her heart was racing, and her mouth was dry. She stood frozen in place. She dropped the flowers back into the bucket. Her hands were shaking. She didn’t dare take her eyes off him. It was like a movie.

Should she say hello? Then she thought:
You might never get another chance
. She caught up to him easily, reached out and touched his sleeve, held on to it, tugged it, the way she had a million times before. In the time it took him to turn and fix her with his eyes, she had become the girl she once was, a lifetime ago.

“Ray,” she said, “is it really you?”

“Tracy,” he said in a low, raspy croak. Her eyes glanced at his hand for a wedding band, there was none, but might Ray not be the kind of man who’d choose marital anonymity? Even his hands looked drawn to the bone and yellow. She had to stop herself from blurting out, what has happened to you?

“I feel like I am in a dream,” she said. “It’s you, right? How are you?”

“What can I say,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Nice voice, huh? Sounds pretty scary, don’t it?”

“No,” she said, “not scary”—she wiped the tears from her cheeks—“but telemarketing is probably out of the question.

“You look….”

“I look like shit,” he said, and smiled.

She said nothing. He wasn’t moving.

“I see your stuff in the paper sometimes,” he said, and took a deep breath. “I don’t usually read the stories, but….”

“Please, please you don’t have to explain.” She felt herself blushing.

“I mean,” he said, pausing, “I have trouble focusing, my eyes. … It’s good though …”

“Thanks,” she said. Here he was in front of her, he looked so awful. She wanted to ask him—what had happened? Still, she was so happy, so terribly happy.

“Well,” he said. “I better go. I get tired real easy these days.”

“I’m sure,” she said, smiling dumbly at him, she didn’t know what else to do with her face. She couldn’t stop smiling at him or crying.

“Are you still at … ?”

“No, I moved,” she said, her hands shaking. “Here, let me give you the address.” She fumbled in her bag for a pen. She thought she’d have to sit down, right there on the sidewalk.

“Here.” He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. She saw him palm a crystal. Was he into crystals now?

She pointed to the pencil. “Ah, some things never change,” she said. She wrote her address and phone number in a faint jagged script that looked the way she imagined her pulse would look if it were graphed.

She sniffled. “So …”

“It’s my heart,” he whispered, “it’s enlarged and pressing on my windpipe.”

“Your heart?”

He nodded. “Makes it a little hard to communicate.”

His heart? Of course, she thought, it’s your heart. His heart was making it hard to talk.

“Jesus,” she said, “but you’re going to be okay?”

“I’m dying,” he said. She wondered how many times he’d said that, and to whom. “Well, I’m on the donor list,” he said, “but you never know.”

“Right, you never know,” she said, then smiling like Pollyanna, she heard herself chirp, “It’ll happen. I know it will.”

He shrugged. They looked at each other and stood there awkwardly, but neither seemed to want to move; it felt to Tracy like everyone was watching them, it felt illicit, they shouldn’t be talking, but they were.

“So, call me sometime,” she said, “or write me.”

“I will,” he croaked.

There was a moment when they might have hugged, but didn’t. So they waved.

The list
. That phrase rang in her head.
He was on the list
. People in hospital dramas on television were always on the list, and they always got a heart/a brain/some courage right at the last moment. In her experience that didn’t happen here, not in real life.

Had he ever thought about calling her? Writing her? Was he going to wait until he died to reach out to her? Everyone knows that when someone is dying, they reconcile with estranged family members, they reel in lost and forgotten loved ones. She felt slighted. The sick are supposed to make latenight phone calls to old lovers, but she hadn’t heard from him.

“It’ll happen,” she had said, wanting it, at that moment, to be so. “I know it will.”

How grisly it all sounded, the optimism punched up with fear that somebody matching your blood and body type wouldn’t die soon enough to save you. Scanning the daily papers for news of gang shoot-outs, a stabbing right through the temple of some healthy young guy who’d pledged his organs to science. They would fall back into love and have one last tempestuous fling. Then she could marry Tad; or no, then she would finally be free; or no, she would forever mourn him. How poignant!

Until Tracy saw Ray, she had considered her novel dead. Then she didn’t. It wasn’t until she started walking home that it dawned on her—she had the end of her book. Ray is going to die. Ray is going to die, she thought, her heart pounding hard, Ray is going to die, and I will finally be able to write our story.

What happens when the love of your life dies?
For certainly he was the love of her life, not Tad, he wasn’t, or couldn’t be, the love of her life. No, it was Ray, always had been, and always would be. She was filled with such purpose! This wouldn’t be one of those sappy
boyfriend dies and the girl goes crazy, believing his soul has been reborn in her cat
stories. No, this would be different. She rushed home and turned on the computer, she would start all over. There they were in his hospital room. She’d even give him a private room. He would be lying in bed, back against the pillows, and she would be holding his hand. There would be paint under his nails, scars on his hands—there was the cut from punching out the window in her bedroom when she said she didn’t believe he loved her; there was the half-moon bite from the parrot in that bar in Oaxaca—he’d stuck his finger into the cage after the bartender told him it bit. They’d be playing hearts or backgammon on the bed like they did on the beach, a ladder of sunshine reaching down through his hospital window, a ladder like up to heaven, and a breeze barely moving the curtains.
Do you remember our bedroom in Mexico?
he’d ask, lifting his head, his dry lips straining to kiss her. “
How poor we were?
”

No, that was too mawkish. And anyway, windows in hospitals don’t open, someone would pick up on that.

No, maybe she could begin with his mother calling her—having found letters from her in his belongings—or perhaps an envelope addressed to her by him in black pen, written in big block-letter capitals (TO BE SENT IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH, it would say across the top), would just arrive one afternoon and proclaim that he had died and tell her that he had always loved her, and that he was sorry. Surely he’d be prepared for his tragic early death. After all, he had always said that his genius would not be appreciated in his lifetime, that he like his idols would die young and tortured.

Or the novel could be one of those experimental ones! Ha, wouldn’t her old professor like that. It could be told through letters, and drawings, and found objects. That might be good. In the story she would reflect back on this box of letters—it would be raining outside, or just stopped raining, or she’d seen his face in a cloud—and muse about how they’d come together at the end, their chance meeting on the street—it was kismet, was it not? How they’d wept and made peace, how they had confessed their love for each other, and life would come full circle. When Ray died, life would come full circle.

What about the heart? Could one even use the heart in a story like this? In a screenplay, a Julia Roberts vehicle sure, but a real novel? The heart! Come on. No. She’d have to make his illness cancer, or some rare blood disease, a particularly virulent and rampant strain of ringworm. Wouldn’t that be revenge? Ray had always wanted to go out with a shotgun blast, and she would have him lie and waste slowly away, driven mad, driven mad with longing for her—no, that was too Edgar Allan Poe.

The heart. What could she attribute to her changed heart?

That evening she wrote Ray a letter, telling him how much she had loved him, would always love him, how he’d hurt her in ways she still wasn’t over. It was the sort she figured a person could only write once, maybe twice in a lifetime, the sort that feels like you’ve broken off one of your own ribs to write it.

She expected to get her letter back or get no response at all. When she saw the envelope in her mailbox, her name written in Ray’s trademark heavy capital letters, she felt her book was blessed.

“Why did it end?” he wrote. “I don’t know. It was just one of those things. I fucked up, and I am sorry.”

It was just one of those things
. She read this line over and over again, a dull surprise at how every time it shocked her, and hurt her, like stepping on a sprain.

“I was in a bad place, in myself, my work. I freaked out, I ran away from everybody.” She wouldn’t ask what that meant, she should have, and who was everybody?

Still, she’d never known Ray to apologize ever. This new Ray, this sick Ray, maybe he deserved to be let off the hook. The rules were different then. They’d never promised themselves to each other, not really. Still.

“You broke my heart,” she wrote, period. She loved Tad, she did, but he didn’t know her, they weren’t connected like she and Ray had been. She couldn’t see herself growing old with Tad the way she had once imagined growing old and white-haired with Ray. She saw them in matching white fisherman sweaters, she saw them living in a small town in Mexico, sitting on a crumbling wall that overlooked the sea, posing for the photographer that had been sent by
Art Forum
for an article they were running on Ray’s newest masterworks.

Now, though, her book aside, Ray was going to die. Nothing would ever be the same, nothing was the same now. Every cup of coffee was the best coffee she’d ever had, the salsa music coming from a car that was being washed below her window was the liveliest. The pink in the evening sky so gorgeous it stopped you in your tracks. It reminded her of how with Ray everything was better, he insisted on it.

She was sad, of course, that was easy. What was harder, and ugly, was the indescribable excitement she felt, not just the shiver of having him back in her life, not the exquisite sensation of a new kind of pain, but the fact that Ray would die, and she would have something.

“I like this writing letters,” Ray wrote her after their first few exchanges. “Someday these will be collected, you’ll see….

They began emailing. Every time she saw a new message from him, she felt the exhilaration of cheating on Tad. Although perhaps
cheating
was too strong a word—likewise, she was also sort of cheating on Ray. After all, when he’d asked, so casually, if she was seeing anybody, she’d been oblique, she didn’t want to scare him off, and it didn’t feel like a lie, or a sin of omission, saying she was in a relationship, but she didn’t know what the future of it was. That was true.

Tracy’s fingers trembled on the keys. While writing allowed her the space to think, to control and compose her thoughts, she wanted to hear his voice, even though she knew it was hard for him, that he couldn’t breathe and got tired easily. He talked to people all day long in the hospital, didn’t he? She was sure he wasn’t writing everything down on a little pad. He had no patience for that sort of thing. She wanted to hear his voice. How could she write his character if she didn’t hear his voice?

When he wrote her that he was checked into Mercy hospital because the infection in his heart had worsened, she called him.

“Hey,” he rasped, and she was suddenly sorry she’d done it. Her heart beat in her mouth.

“Hey,” she said. “Just calling to see how you are.”

She flicked on her computer.

“Same,” he said slowly. “Hey, you want to come and save me from the Sisters of Mercy?” he croaked. “The food sucks but…”

“Of course,” she said, her heart beating fast, “just as soon as I can.”

She imagined lying down in Ray’s bed with him. How many other people were visiting him? How many other women had he been with? Why did that idea make her want him again? Perhaps in the novel he would die while love-making to her, or right afterward. Maybe, in the book, she’d even get pregnant.

She typed
Sisters of Mercy
.

“I can’t talk,” Ray said. “Can we email? Snail mail is bullshit. Anyway, I haven’t got that kind of time.” He laughed, then started coughing, right on cue.

She typed
I haven’t got that kind of time
as he spoke.

“Are you typing?” he said.

“No, of course not,” she said.

Tracy liked the physicalness of the letters. Like they were skin, they could be chopped off, or lost through fire—and she thought about keeping them in the refrigerator the way Robert Lowell had for fear of passing out in bed with a cigarette and burning his house down. She wanted the evidence. Anyone could type an email. No, she wanted his hand.