The Narrow Door (20 page)

2008 | 
Denise’s apartment is a little like a tree house. The living room overlooks a garden where you can hear the fountain splashing from three stories above. You wouldn’t even know you were in a city unless you took in the brick walls, the jagged backs of row houses to the south. No delivery truck idling, no voices up from the sidewalk, no speeding motorcycles: we are far from New York, which I left early this morning. I think you go to a city for animation and sound; tree-tops are beside the point. But the apartment couldn’t be a more tranquil space, and as a result Denise seems calmer to me than I’ve ever known her, in spite of the shoulder-length wig she takes off and on and off. She shakes it around with a teenage girl’s giggle, in imitation of Mario Thomas in the opening credits of
That Girl.
Maybe her face is thinner, her skin a lighter shade, but she’s still there to pour me a cup of coffee, to make me a meatloaf and ketchup sandwich, to ask if I want a glass of water, to laugh and laugh and laugh.

Who knows what we talk about? We certainly don’t talk about matters of life or death. Anything but cancer,
C. diff
, ports—any of those words that must be bearing too much on her. Mostly we talk about what we always talk about: books, movies, other writers, the people we know, the people we know who behave irrationally, absurdly, narcissistically—these are our concerns. Human behavior and its foibles. At one point, she says she doesn’t believe in God anymore. It’s not the admission that startles me, but the relief it gives her to say those words to me. Her voice betrays no anger. No spiritual journeys ahead for her, no course of miracles, and while her certainty is uncharacteristic of her, maybe her stance is a bit of a relief. She’s not going to fasten herself to someone else’s language. She’s spent a whole life fastening herself to other people and their agendas, and maybe it’s time to make a new language for herself.

I take out my phone and take a picture of her cat, who swings her head around to look at me just as I make the camera click.

I take a picture of the living room from overhead, from the half-wall of the bedroom balcony down to the white pillows, the white sofa, and the cat curling up like a question mark.

I take pictures of the two of us standing up against the green-gold Rothko print. We’re side by side, Denise fitting into the crook of my arm. I thrust out my arm and snap and snap. Denise beams, her head tilted just slightly back, as if nothing could be more pleasing than sheer documentation. I, on the other hand, look at the camera with what seems to me confused intensity. Maybe my face looks intense because I’m trying to hold too much at bay, trying too hard to keep the space around us rooted and still, when I know she’s already having a problem with the stairs, not just the stairs to the apartment, but the stairs to the bedroom loft. In the past few days, she’s had to use a bucket in the living room because she didn’t have the strength and speed to dash up the stairs to the bathroom. In another week, she won’t even be able to make it up the three flights to her apartment. She’ll stay inside that apartment for fourteen days straight, while others will bring her groceries, or a cheesesteak from the deli around the corner, or carry her up and down the stairs in their arms. And the apartment that had seemed like a tree house just a few days before will seem a little like a punishment, just one more thing that she’d succumbed to.

But today we walk down to the dog park in a dusty grove by the Schuylkill. I’m startled that she’s able to walk. I hold out my arm; she puts her arm through the hook it makes, and we take our time. We cross Twenty-Fifth Street. We open the gate, we sit on a bench, we watch the dogs. We smell the river, part rotten, part fecund, remark on the warm dry breeze on our faces. We point out the schipperke, the dachshund, the Bernese mountain dog. But the dog that really captures Denise’s interest is a surprise to me: an unexpectedly athletic French bulldog, who scatters gravel and clouds of acrid dust each time he dashes for the blue rubber ball that’s thrown to him. Over and over the ball is thrown to him, and each time he catches it, Denise makes a sound of delight, as if his taking it in his mouth, in air, is a wonder. The ball pops against his teeth. It almost hurts to hear it again and again, but the dog’s mouth is fine. Now another dog, another French bulldog, is fighting for the ball. On a day like today, I could say that Denise might just go on making the sounds of delight for a very long time, and I’ll still have my friend to talk to and laugh with. Three years from now? Four? That might just happen.

The next day I email Denise the pictures. The shots don’t look as crisp as I’d like them to be—they’re cell phone shots, after all. But I like the way they soften edges, soften the lines underneath our eyes, the lines in the room. I think of that softness in contrast to all the tables and machines she’d been told to lie on in the past three weeks. In that way, nothing could be better than blur, lines without a blade in them.

An hour later, these words, this email:

2010 | 
The faces look animated and bright on my walk down Seventh Avenue tonight.

Manhattan can affect your perception, especially when you’re feeling angry, hurt, disappointed, depressed. At those times, the cheerful faces at the outdoor cafés can oppose aloneness. Their laughter can blot you out, rub it in: you are not of our happy ranks. This is the circus of pleasure and play. Where did you go wrong? But every face looks beautiful to me tonight. Maybe because I am tired of being sad, maybe because I’ve been reading a little Walt Whitman, who suddenly makes sense in a whole new way. This listing, this habit of naming what he sees, high and low, monumental and minuscule, raw and cooked—isn’t he in fact inscribing boundaries in language? Isn’t he saying
you’re not me, and you’re not me
, and finding delight in that? The exquisite loneliness of the poet striding down the sidewalk. How else could intimacy happen if we didn’t carve boundaries between us? It is the great paradox of love, and I am making love begin as I say,
bearded young skateboarder zigzagging in and out through cars.
I am making love begin as I say,
old woman pushing shopping cart outside Duane Reade.
These were never figments of the One Holy Self, but real people, moving in time, cherished by someone, hated by someone, morphing, active, irreplaceable.

A prayer:

You who I don’t know how to talk to anymore. You whose body comes to me in a dream only to be gone as soon as I say your face, your mouth, your arms, your breasts, your feet. What happens when you die? The broken light switch in the kitchen, the doorknob glistening in the saucer by the window. How can you get in? This solitude, no match for your solitude, which must want to be sung again in the clear strong throats of the living. You who must want to be useful again, now that the two of us can see the myths we made of ourselves. What use is this skin now that you no longer have it? Would you have lived differently, read other books, loved other men, spent more time in the woods, the mountains, the sea? What happens when you die? Teach me to listen so that I might know what you know now.

2010 | 
There is a person in my house. In the passenger seat, at my chair at the dining room table. In my refrigerator, on the toilet seat, feet on the bathtub, hands on the sink. On my sofa, where his eyes fix on the TV screen. On my walk past the bookstore, the gallery. Between the rows of spinach and radish that I picked just weeks back, when the sun warmed the back of my neck. The person is a good cook. The person makes the rich food of the poor, delicious and caloric, high in oil, fat, and salt. The person takes the walk I just walked to the bay beach, where he meets the people I would have met, provoking wonder (and confusion, I’m sure) when he’s leaning back into the arms of my Beloved.

Meanwhile, I am back in church, where I am singing the hymns with clear, powerful notes, in spite of the sore throat I’ve been nursing for a week. I sing without the least bit of fear. I sing without any tightness in the lower half of my face. I sing not louder than any of the others but with them, inside them.

And here I thought singing was hard. And here I thought singing was work, asking us to use parts of the body (lungs, throat, tongue, lips) that would so much rather be at rest than pouring out sound. I leave the church, having sung twenty songs and acclamations, and for a little while on my walk down West Sixteenth Street, I can swallow without any discomfort around the roof of my mouth, around the back of my uvula. All of that will change in a little while, but it’s still a way off. I’ll find out, days later, when I go to the doctor, that I have strep throat. I’ve been singing entire songs through strep throat, and it doesn’t even hurt.

A day later S insists on showing the Beloved multiple DVDs of his acting and singing roles. Not just one performance, but a second and a third and a fourth and so on. Every male lead from every musical penned, from Lerner and Loewe through Sondheim. This goes on for an evening. So many performances that the poor Beloved is smothered in need—there is nothing less attractive than need, raw need, a desperate artist—and the Beloved drifts far away from the sofa, out the window, through the woods up to the clouds, and the cold dome of space, as lonely as he’d ever been.

As if this should foretell the end of the story? Well, perhaps. But the story is never linear, and this might only be another beginning.

One day the woman inside the apartment on the first floor hears crying, crying from the second-floor landing. She sits still for a minute. She listens, then cracks her door, just to make sure she hasn’t imagined it. Maybe it’s just a cat, sound from a neighbor’s TV. She walks up the stairs. There Denise is curled against the wall, unable to get up the last flight. Most likely Denise cries harder once she’s been seen like this. Somehow the woman leads-carries-leads her up the stairs. She sits Denise down, she asks her if she wants a drink: coffee, water, a glass of lemonade. She’s so moved by the plight of her neighbor that an idea comes to her on the spot—she’ll trade her apartment for Denise’s sometime in the coming week. She’s always wanted to live at the top, while Denise has always wanted to be near the leaves and water in the garden. The woman, after all, is a life coach, and she couldn’t call herself a life coach if she weren’t willing to make this sacrifice on her neighbor’s behalf. Denise beams at the woman’s offer; maybe she even weeps. How could human beings, so frequently unreliable, be capable of such goodness, such selflessness? The woman leaves after Denise is settled, and that is the last Denise will ever hear from her.

2010 | 
I don’t leave my therapist’s office without remarking that the process ahead isn’t going to be chronological. J nods with relief as if I’ve said the gold star thing. Though human beings condition one another to want order, peace, and resolution, we also don’t want too much of that, and just when it seems all is comprehensible, the world bewilders us again. But before it bewilders me again, I grieve my old life with M, as I grieve my old life with Denise. I see Denise’s body, her arms, her legs, walking toward me. To take care of me? The life that thought it was a given, the life that thought safety and routine were never up for question. Perhaps they should have always been up for question. Two writers together: what on earth were we thinking? Suddenly I see Denise’s lost body all over again, as I talk to my therapist about making the link between her death and M’s crisis. He was the first to see a possible link between the two crises; the image of Denise’s approach in the daydream reinscribes that. “Smart man,” I tell J.