The Narrow Door (27 page)

I decide to sleep on the love seat instead of my usual left side of the bed. The love seat is torn, plaid, infested with fleas—at least two feet shorter than the length of my body, but that’s where I’d rather spend the night. I curl up on my side, closing my eyes against the porch light coming in through the window, yellow light, which we used to call “bug light” when I was a kid. And the rain, which is noisy in its force, turning all surfaces—air conditioners, car hoods, pavements—into drum kits.

“You don’t have to sleep there,” M says, calmer now, from a few feet away on the bed.

“I’ll be all right,” I say.

A car door slams in the parking lot. It opens up, then slams again, with more emphasis.

“I don’t think you know how to break up,” M says, quieter now, after a silence. “It doesn’t have to be like high school. Fifteen years does not end in one night.”

I let myself sink into that thought. I’m scratching into my forearms and ankles. I smell the faintest hint of blood beneath my nails. And a man and a dog fall asleep without another sound as it rains and rains and rains.

Anne Carson: “It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, / when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.”

2009 | 
Nancy writes to ask if I will deliver the eulogy. I don’t hesitate to say yes. Of course I’ll speak for Denise. But words—what words could I say to make Denise, all the Denise’s, real to those people in the church? And how to speak of her in church when she’d already told me she’d stopped believing in God? What she believed in were stories, stories in which the cruelest things happened between people. In her last months, she couldn’t stop talking about the stories of A. M. Homes, in which the parents smoke crack and a teenage girl attacks a Barbie doll with a razor blade, and good deeds are never rewarded.

Maybe she saw those plotlines as figures for what cancer does to the body. I never got to ask.

2010 | 
I awake the next morning to the terrible sound of a dog wailing in the parking lot. The door opens, the rain is sheeting, and M is at the door with Ned. It is Ned crying, Ned who had sat down upon a hill of ants, flushed out of their colony by the downpour. M puts Ned on the bed—yes, I have made my way to the bed by now—and the three of us are in it together for the first time since the previous night. My hand is on Ned, whose short wet fur I’m stroking. He stops yipping in a bit, and in a little while, he’s back to himself again, head down between two paws. He looks toward the headboard as if he’s thinking. When I stop stroking, I put down my hand, palm up. I smell like dog. M reaches for my hand, holds it. I try to hold it back, but I can’t give over my full grip to him. No, I’m doing the best I can. I’m crying soundlessly. My feelings are too dire for hysterics, then M cries soundlessly, too. He walks into the bathroom, blows his nose into a piece of torn-off toilet paper. Ned looks at me as if he senses we’re about to move again. He starts panting, standing up, the sand falling off his coat, onto the bedspread, the pillows. Then I’m standing up, walking about the room. I turn on the TV news, I’m opening drawers, doing what I can to clean up for the housekeeper. In an hour we have a ferry to catch, and the wind will just not stop.

2009 | Bags in hand, M and I are walking along the Montauk Highway to the jitney stop in Amagansett. Funeral at nine tomorrow; we’re leaving for Philadelphia the night before. Thick trees, trimmed limbs, waxy glowing shrubs: it is the kind of world where you might think nothing brutal could ever happen. The grass blues in the twilight, the sprinkler hoses seep. Tiny flies go round and round beneath the eaves. Then just past the farm market, a young guy yells out the open window of his pickup:
Hey fags
, with the biggest smile. It is more brutal for the smile attached to these words, but I simply lift my hand in greeting. Let him think it’s a wave. He wants us to be pierced. He wants us to remember this night as violent, sadistic, but he will not get that satisfaction from me.

“Nice,” says M to the back of the truck, which is already ahead of us, on the edge of town.

I really don’t feel it: what that fuckhead tries to do to us.

2010 | 
The fast-ferry waiting room is packed. As we are in New England, and not just any New England but Nantucket, people are cheerful, distant, cool, controlled. At least people are trying to be those things, which might account for the fogged-up windows. The nervous breaths exhaled but hidden from sound and view. We’ve already heard that the slow ferry has been canceled due to wind; all flights from the island also canceled. But the workers at the desk say the 10:35 is still on schedule. I sit on the edge of a bench, pretending to give my complete attention to the messages on my phone, while M sits down the aisle from me, Ned curled up beneath his chair.

A woman announces that the fast ferries are being canceled for the day, and the whole crowd rises, at once, without a huff or complaint. M and I stare straight ahead, too tired to be distraught. If this were an Ingmar Bergman film, which would it be—
Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Persona
? I play this game in my head, while the rain comes down harder outside the window. Everyone seems to have a place to go to: a house, a relative, a friend. I need to be by myself. If there were ever a day for lying in bed, this would be the kind of day for it.

M makes a call. Help comes in the form of Amy, one of our hosts at the reading the other night. Amy has had a conversation with Maggie Conroy, the wife of Frank, my late teacher. M, Ned, and I will be staying at Maggie’s for the day and night, which sounds like a wonderful thing—but to be civil in front of others again! To perform as if we haven’t just hefted our weapons through battlefields. Haven’t we already given enough blood? Apparently not, think the powers that be. They want us to go out on the field just one more time, just to make sure we’re not going to draw guns or knives or swords. I am not yet ready to be a man of peace.

Minutes later, we are on the east side of Nantucket, off Polpis Road, where Maggie welcomes us at the front door of a contemporary house with sloping roof. It looks like the kind of house that might have wandered over the Sound from upstate Vermont—say the Goddard campus or a very pleasant commune. Vaulted ceiling, floorboards and beams retrieved from a tobacco barn in Pennsylvania. A pleasant smell, a little tea, wet raincoat, moist dog. I am not quite present to myself, and believe I am all the worst things: inward, distracted, exhausted, incapable of complete sentences without stops. Plus, I am wearing the same wet clothes I’ve been wearing for the past three days. The houseguest you’ve always dreamed of. But Ned and Neville, Maggie’s ten-month-old puppy, are already going at it on the Oriental rug beneath the grand piano. They’re doing what they can to distract us. Lunges and leaps, watching games. It is hard not to keep focused on the two dogs to see who might be the winner.

2009 | 
I don’t know any other way to start. Cause and effect, verbs, action—all of that seems completely foreign to me right now. Shapely paragraphs, consoling thoughts—no. None of that belongs in this space. But I don’t want to be all over the place. I’m not even sure the eulogy is about Denise, though I’m talking about her capacity for joy, the apotheosis of her work. Allan, the wounded son in
Good Deeds
, dancing with his sister in the final scene, singing “Sympathy for the Devil.” Irv, their father, walking into the room, flapping the sleeves of his kimono. “What the hell?” in a voice three-quarters exasperation, one-quarter affection. But his son and his daughter ask him to join their dance, in spite of their mother’s death, and all the pain in the household. Joy is what we want to inhabit after so much pain.

Her eyes: playful, wry, soulful.

Her charisma, her wattage. A movie star.

Her old plea, the old accusation: “Nobody loves me.” Or worse: “You don’t love me.” And her joy when I shut my eyes, or gave her that look that said, I’ve had all I can take of you.

Her quickness to laugh, the laugh that came from deep in the body. Part silly, part womanly.

Her cup of scalding hot coffee, held with both hands, close to the collarbone and throat, even if it was ninety-seven degrees outside.

Her toned olive arms.

Her monkey feet.

Her ability to walk into any room and warm the atmosphere. A ray of energy moving right into you …

I’m getting through the eulogy. It’s embarrassing to admit it; I like being up there with the priest, the cantor, the Eucharistic ministers. I like the height of the ceiling, the depth of the building, the quiet of the people in the pews. Their attention toward the front of things. I know how to speak in front of a congregation, and I’m practically listening to myself form the words. I am just a conduit. I’m wondering where that calm voice is coming from until I look out and see Mary, Denise’s younger sister. I am talking about that night of the election, Denise getting up from the table to dance. I don’t know why, of all moments, my eyes drift to Mary, but then I do. We understand—there’s no other way to put it. It’s an awareness of how long we’ve been known to each other through Denise as much as it is about Denise. And I don’t break down—that’s the last thing I want to do right now. I don’t want the delivery to be about me. I breathe and I pause. I let my eyes drift down and my brain go blank. I slip down through the surface of a tank, fall, arms raised, all the way to the bottom. Then breathe and go on with the rest of the words.

It’s not till I leave the church, walking down the aisle after the priest and family that I lose my composure, at least in my face. I can’t keep holding it anymore, but I am trying not to make a scene of it. Maybe it’s seeing so many people who were once in my life in those pews. They’re back again, my old professors, grayer, more fragile versions of what they once were.

2010 | 
We watch the dogs tangle and roll and pull. We cry Stop! when they get too rough. The wind sleeks through the cracks in the house, the rain soaks the wood. There is a mellow sweetness inside, made sweeter by the lamps on in the middle of the day, the presence of Frank’s grand piano in the center of the living room, the view through the window of the harbor, where the boats pull at their moorings. I wonder when the piano had last been played. If I were feeling better, I might go over and play a chord or two, but instead I imagine the ghost notes filling the barn-like space. Happy house, a summer night, Frank playing Charlie Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” to a room full of close friends, with drinks in hand, who nod, lean into the sound of his playing.

M and I drive to Sconset. We drive to Tom Nevers, where cars snake down the beach road for a demolition derby. It is still pouring, three-layer weather, but it is no longer the kind of rain that one can’t spend some time in. Later Joy comes over for dinner, and she makes two martinis for me, and my neck, shoulders, and lower back relax. The light in the room gets softer. The voices get slower. We talk and laugh and play with the dogs. We talk a little bit more about animals and politics and books until Joy says good night, and in a while the two of us walk upstairs to our bedrooms. It is a relief that M and I are given separate bedrooms with single beds, on opposite ends of a hall. For a while we are not two people who have shared the same bed for almost sixteen years, but two brothers staying in our favorite sister’s house. And in that way I don’t have to think about him at all. Should the house fall in, he will be there. Should he miss one of the steps, I will be there.

Then he sticks his head in the room for a moment. “Sleep tight,” he says with a smile. And is gone down the hall to his room.

If this house were a person, it would be a mother. The mother is forgiveness. The mother rocks peaceably in the wind, but stands up to the wind, too, even when a huge branch falls down on the roof. The wind is no match for the mother. Why mother? Maybe it is Maggie, who seems happy to have us around. Maybe it is the great open space of the house, which might also be a ship, the mother ship taking the passengers back and forth across the cold, clear Sound. Maybe it is the accumulation of all the people who have passed through this space, leaving their gladness behind. The house could almost convince you that there was never an ugly moment inside it. But we can guess that fights have happened here, certain words darker than they were ever meant to be. That is the story of any house, though we’d rather think otherwise. See that bright window across the street? Someone is leaning on the edge of the kitchen counter with both hands, looking away from the person he thinks he hates right now, that hate so close to love he can’t even tell them apart.

The next morning the trees in Maggie’s yard are almost still. A rush of wind pushes off some leaves and then it’s still again. I stay in bed as long as I can, reading Frank’s
Time and Tide
, flipping back to the map of Nantucket inside, before I sense it would be impolite to hang back any longer.

Downstairs M and Maggie are laughing as if there has never been anything but light in the world.

Then Neville leaps onto the bed and climbs onto me, barely disturbing me. How could a dog be so light and have such presence, such solidity? Actuality? He pulls himself up over to me, looks at me with an expression that says:
I’m glad you’re in the house. You’re going to be all right.
There is nothing inflated about the moment, nothing visionary. It’s even funny. Neville is the Frank I remember from the workshop table, exactly twenty years ago. And just as that thought passes through my head, Neville jumps off the bed, walks down the hall without ceremony. He goes down to do what dogs do, nails clicking down the open planks of the staircase.

In the hour before the ferry leaves the three of us take a dog walk along the harbor. Ned and Neville have calmed down considerably. They’re actually running, racing up and down the beach stairs of a cedar-shake compound atop an eroding dune. They repeat this process several times. We make jokes about the dogs alerting private security forces. We talk of soldiers cocking their guns, shooting the dogs quickly and efficiently as if they’re rabbits. Earlier M had said that Ned looked sad that he’d never get along with Neville, but he’d take that back now. Their steps are already in sync.