“Let me get this straight. This is a man’s suit you’re talking about?”
“Well, sure. You don’t think I’d wear one of those boxy skirted things they make for women. I’d look like a gabardine tank.”
Her frankness was disarming—he had made pretty much the same observation to himself, after all. But there were larger considerations. “Men’s clothes are cut for men, women’s clothes for women.”
“Myth,” she said. “I’m as broad in the shoulders as you, and if it comes to that, not much wider in the hips. Anyway, every man should be required to go out in serious drag at least once in his life. Society would transform itself overnight.”
The notion scandalized Joe Ray into silence.
They might have ended up in bed—the thought crept up on Joe Ray in the mornings after Catherine had left for work and he was horny (weeks, now, since they’d so much as touched) and Catherine had left him not so much as a blouse to hang up or a cereal bowl to wash.
While they were still in college Catherine thrust money in his hand and asked him to do her shopping. Even now, after years of living with him, she’d pull on a plaid blouse with a flowered skirt, then drop them both in a clashing heap on the floor at the end of the day. But since the accident she hung her blouses on hooks, clipped her skirts to hangers, matched her dark skirt with black pumps. The toothbrushes were in their holders. The floors were swept and mopped. When was she doing this? Joe Ray wondered. The why he could not bring himself to question.
An afternoon came when Flora talked about her own nightmares. “I dreamed last night of the three agonies,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. All I remember is that phrase. I thought you might know—it sounds so Catholic.” Flora had been raised in one of those social circle Protestant churches and now was an atheist—something else she’d picked up in New York.
“There are the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary,” Joe Ray said. “But three agonies—nothing I can remember.”
They set about figuring what these might be. Flora decided they’d each choose one agony and then agree on the third. “Like ordering in a Chinese restaurant. Except no death—it can’t include death. For all the grief at least death is final. Agony implies something ongoing, a situation you can’t do anything about but just have to endure.”
“Like unhappy marriage.”
“I’ll buy that,” Flora said. “See? We’ve already found the one we agree on. Two more to go.”
“You name yours first.”
“Failure,” she said promptly.
He wasn’t so certain about that. “We learn from our mistakes. You can always find a second chance. Or if you don’t get one, you can make one.”
“That might be true for men. Not for women.”
“Well, it’s your choice. Why should you care what I think?”
“Sure I care. Anyway, it’s your turn.”
“I can’t think of anything,” Joe Ray said, though what that meant was that he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t involve Michael dead or disabled. Which of those would be worse? He gave his head a sharp shake to dislodge that fear. “Time to go,” he said, and pulled his wallet out to pay their bill.
“Money,” she said. “Or lack of it.”
“Pretty hard to bear,” he said. “Though you can always get out of that one.”
“Men,” she said, and there was that helpless tone in her voice that appealed to him. He pulled a couple of twenties from his wallet and pressed them on her. “I won’t refuse,” she said, tucking them in her purse. “I saw through that one long ago.”
At home or at the hospital, Catherine spoke only of her hopes for Michael’s improvement, never of the accident. Joe Ray had handed her the weapon to destroy their marriage, maybe to destroy him, and she was being civilized, she was choosing not to use it, but it rested in her hands all the same, real as a dagger. A part of him wanted her to go ahead and use it, get it over with; because even if Michael lived, even if everything turned out fine it would still sit in her hands, the ultimate weapon, there for use at the time of her choosing. And if that time came, when it came, he had only one defense: She did not know, she had no proof that he’d been drinking.
Michael stabilized but wasn’t much improving. “He’s holding,” was how the doctor put it. “This happens a lot. The body cures itself a little, then takes a breather.”
“What happens after the breather?” Joe Ray asked.
“You’ve asked a very important question,” the doctor said.
That afternoon, sitting at the side of his sleeping son. Except comatose, not sleeping, but he looked as if he were sleeping, excepting the wide shaved patch on the left side of his head. Joe Ray chose to sit on the right, as did everyone who came in except Rose Ella.
How long had it been, a few weeks only, since his son had seemed as indestructible as any eleven-year-old? Now everything about him seemed fragile, his flesh thin as voile, his eyelids all but transparent and behind them his father’s eyes, Joe Ray’s own eyes. Joe Ray reached to touch his son’s right hand, flung outward and open like a baby’s, as if waiting for a finger around which to curl.
At that moment Michael began to hum, a clear tuneless hum that rose and fell without form or direction. The song of delirium, and as it babbled on, Joe Ray’s hand trembled above his son’s, big over small, and his heart was breaking, breaking and there was nothing he might do, no atonement under the sky, no possible absolution for a sin so great, nothing to do but sit, weep, endure.
The next day he called Flora MacKenzie and asked her to meet him for a walk—the first time they’d met outside a bar. She proposed the riverfront but he was afraid Catherine might wander from her law office job to lunch on the Belvedere. They met instead in Cherokee Park.
He waited for her at the main entrance, below the statue of Daniel Boone, sculpted here as an adventurer, conqueror in full bold stride of certain purpose. The statue offered no hint of Boone’s later fate—bankruptcy, exile from the lands he’d opened up for others to make their fortunes, and then after death the final indignity of being dug up (assuming they got the right corpse) and transported to a hero’s burial in a fancy mausoleum overlooking the land they’d taken from him when he was alive. Joe Ray knew this story—had committed it to heart—the story of a brave man, a man among men unable to find words to claim and defend what was rightfully his; a man of action, out of place in what had become a world where a man needed to know not how to act but how to obfuscate, postpone, equivocate, lie.
For a week it had been cloudy, until the night before when a storm had rumbled through, one of those late, late summer storms mostly flash and dazzle and not much rain, but the air today was crystalline and with an edge. How could autumn have crept up without his realizing it? Joe Ray wondered, and then realized that during these weeks of clouds and hospital rooms the sun had dropped lower in the sky, the light had taken on a sharper slant.
When Flora arrived they walked down paths, past a playground where razor-sharp children’s screams rent the still fall air. Flurries of leaves whirled around them. “Remembering,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The third agony, that you can’t do anything about but just have to endure. You can’t make yourself forget things. That just has to come on its own time. If it comes at all.”
“But there are good memories.”
“Even with those it hurts to know they’re gone, they’re in the past. Name me a memory that doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t exist.”
“You’re just torn up about your son,” she said. “He’ll be OK, and then you’ll get over it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He took her arm. “You’re really sweet to see me through all this. My wife—” he stopped for a second. “It’s not her fault. I’d be the same way to her if she’d been driving. No, worse. But she can’t forgive me, and it’s hanging there all the time, like she’s accusing
me.”
“It could have happened to anyone,” Flora said.
A cloud moved over the sun—a single dark cloud filled with rain, a stray from the storms of the night before, that came along with the express purpose of driving them back to the shelter of the car, where she removed her hat to blot at the raindrops with a tissue and Joe Ray put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her, a brief kiss with more intent than passion.
She broke away, but left her hand in his. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression.”
“Oh, no,” Joe Ray said, and he was certain that he had her, she was his to do with as he wished, as surely as if they were lying in her bed at her apartment. From there it would be a short step to asking after the details of her clunker car; to a concession that, yes, perhaps she shared some responsibility for Michael’s fate. She would do this for him.
He searched his heart for triumph, security, peace. He felt only a rage not much shy of murderous, that once again he, a man with reasonable expectations, had been reduced to some kind of emotional dependency on a woman—this woman, who in this slanting, aging, autumnal light seemed less attractive than ever.
He started the car and drove aimlessly through the park. As yellow leaves from the shedding gingkos fluttered across the windshield he thought this: Women. He was surrounded these days by women, except for his sons, and one of those he’d come close to killing. Women, with whom everything boiled down to emotion, whose love and forgiveness and vengeance operated on terms too simple to accommodate the duck-and-cover, sleight of hand of men’s logic.
He drove them back to her car, parked below Daniel Boone. “Even his damn doctor is a woman,” he said.
“You’re a good, kind man,” she said. “Go easy on yourself. Forgive yourself.”
“No.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “I’m not a good man. Anyway, how can anybody forgive himself? What difference would it make? Forgiveness has to come from outside. Otherwise we’d forgive ourselves for anything and everything we did, no matter how terrible.”
“Well, then, I forgive you. Does that make things any better?”
“You sound like you think I did something that needs forgiving.”
She held her tongue until he turned to look at her. “Has it ever occurred to you that someone might love you without conditions—for no reason other than who you are?”
He pulled out his wallet then, and held out a hundred-dollar bill that he’d brought along in case things got to this point. “We have to go awhile without seeing each other,” he said.
“Ah,” she said. “I see.”
“We can stay friends,” he said. “I’d like that. I like your company. But you have to understand. I’m married.”
The bill stayed poised in the air, a small but adequate barrier. “To a wife who loves you.”
“How do you know she loves me?”
“Well, she’s stuck with you through this.”
“She’s only waiting to lower the boom.”
“How do you know? Maybe she loves you for who you are. That’s what’s so mysterious about love. The way it brings you to embrace even the weaknesses of the other person. Like your drinking.”
“Who said anything about drinking,” Joe Ray said, but the color rose to his face and he turned away.
She lifted the bill from his fingers. “Who needed to say anything? It takes one to know one.”
At that moment he felt gathered in the delicate bones and blood of his right hand all his fear and rage and resentment of the past days, months, years. His hand knew the answer for this, an answer beyond his heart and head, and it gathered itself into a fist and flew of its own accord into her face. Then he found himself staring at it, wondering at first what it was that caused this woman to clutch at her head (now bare—he’d knocked her hat into the backseat) and moan with such sharp cries. “Are you all right,” he said, though at bottom he dwelt still in the hot glow of triumph at this indisputable victory.
And then the wave of remorse, as the facts of what he had done penetrated. He turned then to apologize, to comfort her in earnest—my God, what had he sunk to? But she was gone, she had opened the door and was running to her car and then she was in her car and gone, and he sat frozen, afraid to comprehend what he had done.
He reached over, closed her door, started the car. He took comfort in its mechanical precision. Men had conceived, designed, engineered, and produced this vehicle—trace its history from where he sat driving it now back to its inception and Joe Ray would bet on this, there’d been hardly a woman at any stage of the process. Either it worked or it didn’t, and if it didn’t work there was an answer to its problem that a man could identify, puzzle through, and solve. He could drive—he could keep driving until he wore this car out. And then he would get another, and another after that. Computers, he thought. A man could make a living in computers.
In front of her office he picked up Catherine, then slid across the seat to let her drive to the hospital (since the accident she insisted on driving when they were together). They were on the road and stopped at a traffic light before she glanced back. He saw her head turn, then turn back, then glance back one more time. The light changed. She accelerated. “Who does that belong to?”
“What?”
“The hat.”
He’d forgotten it was there—if such a thing could be forgotten. “Oh, that woman. The woman who hit me in her car.”
A long silence. “And I suppose her hat flew into your hands that day and you’ve kept it lying around until you can return it to her.”
“She left it in the car by accident.” A silent moment, then the plunge. “We’ve been getting together every once in a while, just to talk.”
“How wonderful that you’ve found a friend. And does she have a regular job? No? That’s great. I’ve been so concerned at the thought of you sitting at home alone all day and nothing to do but brood about all this until it’s time to go to the hospital. We should have her over for dinner. After Michael is out of the hospital, of course. The thought of having some kind of real life outside that place—hard to imagine, isn’t it.”
They were approaching a traffic light. Catherine braked with a great show of care, then let the car edge forward a few inches at a time until they sat almost in the intersection. An approaching car blared its horn. “Catherine, for God’s sake,” Joe Ray said.
She threw the car in reverse and backed up. “I asked for it, marrying a redneck for whom booze is more important than love.”
They arrived at the intensive care unit to find Michael’s bed empty. For a moment Joe Ray felt the world drop away—Catherine, the hospital walls, the floor itself fell away and he was drowning in an infinite ocean of fear, grief, despair—the fate he deserved except too kind. Then a doctor rounded a curtain. “Oh, no one told you?” he said nonchalantly. “Your son’s out of ICU.”
In that moment he understood this, that he had appeased his fate, that he had brought down on himself enough pain and suffering; that he had begun, perhaps, to approach the possibility of atonement. On the walk to the new ward, up two flights of stairs and to a room in a different wing, he took Catherine’s hand. She did not pull away.
Back at home: he climbed the stairs to the bedroom on some trivial errand. When he came down Catherine was sitting at the kitchen counter, where she’d poured an inch of Bushmills in each of two glasses. “We might as well celebrate,” she said. She raised her glass. “To Michael’s health.”
“Thanks, but I’m not up to drinking. Not right now.”
This, he thought as he watched her sip, was love’s place: to seduce the lover into supporting the beloved’s obsessions. And all the women who loved him allowed themselves to be drawn in, in the hope (he supposed) that by participating they might earn his love in return. And this much was true: In Catherine’s hopeful, hungry eyes he felt, for the moment anyway, overwhelmed with love, or something like it: because he had brought her to this sacrifice; because she was wi
lling to make it.
That night, lying next to Catherine—for the first time since the accident she slept soundly—Joe Ray spoke aloud in a thick voice not at all his own, that might have belonged to some inhabiting spirit. “What terrifies me,” he said, “is the way love works at cross purposes with itself.” This was not the language he normally spoke. “Good intentions are not enough,” he said.
He glanced at Catherine—she slept on. In sleep, her face relaxed, she shed years. Except for some puffiness around her chin she might be the woman he’d lusted after in college: a well-to-do, white-collar pedigree; thick, waving black hair (cut short now—a married woman’s prerogative); full lips that dimpled in the middle. Michael’s hair; Michael’s full, sensuous lips—“girlie lips,” the other boys called them. “It’s OK,” Joe Ray remembered telling Michael two or three years before. It had been early summer, he saw as if he stood there now the green brilliance of the tree under which they’d been talking. “You’ll be a great kisser, when that time comes.”
Their marriage was woven not from respect but from blind need: She cared for him; he gave her something to care for. Sleeping and waking and going or not going to work, drinking or not drinking—it was all one smooth, boundless, neutral, tightly woven bolt of some functional material suitable for tablecloths or dish towels or aprons or traveling clothes, until this accident (if it could be called that) came along and the tangled threads of their lives were revealed to them. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive,” the voice of some nun with a downy lip and white tennis shoes came to him across time. Was it possible to negotiate one’s way, backward or forward, through this tangle of memories and desires, lies and consequences?
How big love is, how immense and powerful its weapons! That love might exist without conditions—that Catherine might love him for who he was, rather than who he might become—before the accident he could never have accepted this; he had too many layers of pride between himself and such love. Now he had the strongest evidence of its existence in hand, and the immensity of its challenge daunted him. Being worthy of her love required nothing less than acceptance of his complicity in his fate, of the way things really had been: Michael lying on the pavement; his fist striking Flora MacKenzie; Catherine with her glass raised in a toast.
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