Lit Riffs (32 page)

He began writing her every day, sometimes twice a day, and late at night.
Come hang out—I want you to come. When I get sprung
… She read that line again and again:
When I get sprung I want you to come see the paintings I did since the last time I saw you
. Poor Ray, she thought, poor Ray thought he was going to live. He fought valiantly, she would write. Right up to the end!

She was curious about the work. Had Ray fulfilled his promise? Perhaps one day he would be famous? She wondered, too, might the sale of his letters be enough for a down payment on an apartment, a country house? A country house with a barn?

I miss you
, he wrote,
I don’t believe there is any such thing as an accident
.

And nor did she. Never let it be said that she denied a man his dying wish.

She imagined it would be easy to visit him. He was so sweet now, so soft. She had dreams of lying in his arms in his hospital bed, and him dying, and some part of her knowing it, but not getting up. Just lying there, making herself stay until someone else came in and discovered them there.

No, the way she figured it, the worst part of all this would be the bad coffee in the styrofoam cup, and the smell of industrial cleaner. Ray would be weak, in bed, pale and sucking ice chips. Feeling perhaps lucky to be alive, lucky to have her back in his life, and he’d be kind and warm. There wouldn’t be any uncomfortable silences to fill as they would have something to distract them, something to talk about—his dying, all the time they squandered. She’d go a few times, rack up the points.
The old girlfriend
, the nurses would say, and nod their heads solemnly, appreciatively. She could just see the romance snowballing in their minds, taking on speed and shape, becoming as the days progressed more and more dangerous, a thing to admire, but not a thing to endure.

She comes, and they get back together, how perfect!
It might make the local papers. It was like an opera. All that was missing was that great death scene.

She went to see him. She stood at the nurses’ station in her blue miniskirt and a black turtleneck sweater, white patterned tights, and high-heeled Mary Jane shoes. Ray liked it when she dressed like this. She hadn’t worn these clothes in ages. The nurses barely looked up to point the way for her; she wondered if she looked upset or resigned; did they think she wasn’t his girlfriend, but maybe his sister?

“Knock knock,” she said as she stuck her head in the door. Why did she say that? She hated it when people said that, why not knock? It was like people who said
Xmas
instead of
Christmas
.

“Hey,” he said, muting the TV—a commercial of a pork chop slow-dancing with a box of Shake ’n Bake flitted across the screen. Was that one of Tad’s? “Welcome to the good ship
Lollipop
.”

She kissed his cheek. Where could he go?

A large, square-headed nurse came in and plumped up his pillow with affectionate roughness. “This is my first mate, Esther,” he said hoarsely.

Esther rolled her eyes like this was part of some routine.

“Hello, Esther,” she said. She’d have to remember to write this all down. Esther nodded. She felt a pang; she had always loved Ray’s kindness to the waitresses and store clerks. Maybe she was still in love with him. He looked small in bed. He had an IV in his arm. In his lap she saw a book about healing the body with light. She liked this idea that Ray had become vulnerable to such nonsense as holistic healing. It would be good for the book, too. Maybe he would actually be saved by the healing power of an amethyst crystal the size of a Volkswagen, and then go on to become some rock-hound shaman.

He put the book facedown on the bedside table.

“How are you? Are you okay?” she said. She was trembling, she wanted to take his hand, but was afraid. Her mouth felt dry and pasty.

“Hey, as good as I can be with tubes sticking out of me.”

“Really?” she said.

“No, I’m scared as shit,” he said.

She froze. He wasn’t supposed to say that.

“Who are these bastards in the white coats?”

She looked around the room collecting details for later. She was shocked that she could do this—after all, here was Ray, brave Ray saying he was scared.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

He pursed his lips and looked down into his lap.

“Listen, I’ll stay with you,” she said, taking his hand; it fit into hers perfectly. She’d never realized that the grasp of a hand could be as distinctive as someone’s kiss. “I won’t leave your side.”

“You look good,” he said to her; he stroked her forearm. “Really.”

Her heart turned over against its better judgment, like a dog aware that it is losing all its dignity but must have its belly scratched.

Esther stuck her head inside the room. “Visiting hours is over,” she said.

“But, I just got here …,” Tracy said, relieved.

Ray smiled at her. “It’s cool. I am tired,” he said weakly. “Thanks for coming. It’s good to see you.”

She smiled like Florence Nightingale and kissed his temple, his skin was so cool.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, taking his hand, “better than okay.”

“Don’t be such a stranger,” he said, and then, “thank you.”

She walked out into the hall, each step faster until she was nearly jogging. She passed up the elevator and took the stairs. The racketing echo of her heels striking the steps was glorious. It was like gunfire.

Outside the hospital, leaning against the wall, she caught her breath, her side ached. One day Ray would be gone and she would be glad, grateful that she got to spend this time with him. She’d have done the right thing. Even though it would take the last of her money, she hailed a cab to take her home.

The next day they exchanged email. The time on his said 6 a.m. “Did I tell you I finally made it to Paris? It was gorgeous, amazing. I can’t believe we never made it there. That is a crime. There is so much we should have done. I love you.”

I love you. “I love you,” she could hear him saying it as she read it over and over again.
I love you?
That was the drugs talking, or maybe the crystals.

At twelve o’clock she took a break from the book and checked her email again.

“Fuck, I am bored here,” he wrote, and she wondered if he regretted writing
I love you
to her, if he was covering his ass now, “but at least I can read. Would you bring me some books, whatever is turning you on these days—”

Turning you on?

Did he love her, really love her? She felt a pang in her chest, how could she do this to him? It was a gift, she told herself. I am keeping Ray alive on the page. She wondered what he would think about what she was writing. Here he was on one screen, virtually back-to-back with his own story. Not intentionally, she didn’t write him back until the next day. Instead she worked feverishly on her story, she felt like there was a train bearing down on her, gaining on her hour by hour. As she wrote, she could hear the crash of the sea outside their cottage window, smell the lime on Ray’s fingers and sea salt, she could taste the fish soup she’d made with mussels they’d cut off the rocks, and feel the needle prick of fish bones in her mouth. She wrote for hours and hours, finally standing up stiff and bowlegged, the inside of her legs aching.

“Hey,” Ray wrote her the next day, “I’m afraid my last letter got lost in the ether. Can’t even pee this morning. It is clear now that even if I get a heart, if I live, it will never be the same. I will always be an old man.”

She wrote back guiltily, “Don’t say that. I’m going to come visit soon. I promise. My love always.” She wrote, “T”

How many more times would they exchange emails? She had to be better about corresponding, if only for the material. They had so little time.

At night she watched TV shows where smart, good-looking people made foolish choices, then at the last minute saved themselves. She didn’t think about Ray, except when she was thinking about him.

She canceled a date with Tad to write. He sounded hurt. “I miss you,” he said, “but I understand.” Two hours later he showed up at her door with take-out Thai food. “You’ve got to eat,” he said, and climbed into her bed with a raft of papers from work.

“Just ignore me,” he called from the bedroom. “I’ll just be in here waiting for you.”

It didn’t occur to her that she hadn’t heard from Ray for two days, until she was lying in bed beside Tad trying to sync her breath to his deep and regular inhalations and exhalations so she could fall asleep. She sat upright. “My God,” she thought, “Ray is dead.”

Tad slept beside her, smiling in his sleep.

She lay there for hours in the dark, too tired to get up, and too afraid to sleep. She tried to tune her mind into some cosmic wavelength—was Ray gone? Had he died? Had he been thinking of her? Was he maybe thinking of her right now in that dark and narrow hospital bed? There should be some way to know this.

The next morning she found a postcard in her mailbox with the image of a dolphin jumping through a ring of fire. Written in dark ink, it said,
I got a heart
.

What a trick. Walking back up the steps to her apartment, she read it over and over again,
I got a heart. I got a heart. I got a heart
. She went and sat at her computer, not turning it on. What did this mean? She was relieved, she supposed. “Thank God,” she said out loud, as though she thought someone, say God, might be listening.

“I didn’t want Ray to die,” she said. Or, I don’t think I did, she thought. She just wanted to be able to write her book, was that so bad? Was that so wrong? Anyway, what did this really meant exactly? She was ashamed of her ambivalence.

“Congratulations!” she emailed him. “I knew it all along!”

“Its excellent timing, the surgery is in two days,” he wrote back later that day, “and they have to keep me all summer, which is awesome as I don’t have air-conditioning in my place.”

In the perfect world, the sick make peace and die swiftly. The healthy remain to weep and pat themselves on the back for staring down death—there is blessed catharsis. There are no awkward
We said our farewells and you told me you were always in love with me, but you haven’t yet died
moments—no tapering off of phone calls because people have already said their good-byes—no disappointment in the voice of the caller when the sick pick up, like the pregnant woman everyone is waiting for to deliver—You haven’t had the baby yet?

Aren’t you dead yet?

She told herself, just because Ray got a heart
didn’t mean
he was going to
live
, of course. She meant, she
wanted
him to live, novel or not. She just didn’t know what she wanted from him now. They could still be friends, right? The only thing that was certain was that she had to finish the novel now—right now before anything else changed.

“When can you come?” Ray wrote her. “Like now. It’s been too long, a hundred hours, forty-five minutes, and twelve seconds to be exact.”

“How about Tuesday?”

“Tuesday’s no good,” he wrote. “Come tomorrow,” he said.

“I’ll try,” she said, a little annoyed at how he’d assumed the center of her world, forgetting or not caring that he wasn’t the only man in her life. Then she thought of her book. She needed him to make this book with her. So, she thought, who could refuse the possibly-dying man?

“Tomorrow then,” she said.

“Cool,” he said, then before he hung up, casual as could be, he said, “love you.”

From
I love you
, to
love you
. How long before he’d be signing his letters
Luv ya?
How long before he was sending her Mylar balloons and teddy bears in TV shirts that read Stay Cute, or a dozen chocolate roses on long satin stems? She sat down at her desk and stared at the screen. She was close, almost done, but the ending was impossible; she wrote and erased, wrote and erased. Whose story was it? Was it her story, or his story? She paced and chewed at her cuticles.

That night, Ray called while she was in the kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich and drinking ginger ale; she heard the phone ring, and just knowing it was him, she let it ring and ring, standing at a safe distance, willing it to stop. “Hey, where be you?” he said, his voice hoarse on the machine. “Why aren’t you home?”

She thought about picking it up. She’d have grabbed it if Tad was there and not away at a ten-day conference in Florida. Tad might appreciate her kindness toward her old boyfriend, but surely he’d draw the line at late-night phone calls.

“Just thought you’d want to know I’m going under the knife tomorrow,” he said, pausing to let this sink in, or maybe trying to guilt her, if she was listening, into picking up.

“Okay,” Ray said, “later.”

There was no denying it, Ray was beginning to sound stronger, more like his old self. She wondered if he hated himself for needing her.