And then her father’s death, and Raphael’s, both dying in the intensive-care ward of the Jessup County Hospital. Elizabeth had known they were sick, but she’d known this in the way that she knew the names of most of the state capitals or the number of ounces in a cup. She’d known that they were sick with diseases that allowed for no recovery and yet she said nothing.
Until she’d called Raphael and invited him for a drive, the first and last journey they’d take together; unless, of course, she counted the plane trip with his ashes. Thin as winter light, his dark eyes spectral and round like twin moons, his skin all but translucent, parched and spotted—when she saw him Elizabeth thought of gentian violet, the medicine that Rose Ella had painted on their summer scratches. For the duration of their childhood summers they’d carried spots like those on Raphael’s arms and neck, big blotches of purple.
She drove him along the coast north of San Francisco, in what they knew without acknowledgment was his last journey in this world. Highway 1: plunging, bucking, twisting road of postcard dreams, nothing between them and that other world but the flimsiest of guardrails. One miscalculation, a slip of the steering wheel or a failure of brakes and they’d be floating through blue space to the lovely jagged rocks below and the vast, seductive Pacific; a better end for him, no doubt, than that which was waiting.
And she drove caught up in the busyness of living, she drove to get somewhere, she was caught up in that number—miles ticked off, highways covered, scenery seen—in shame she remembers this now, watching the crew prepare the boat that is to take them out on the bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge for the scattering of the ashes. She remembers approaching an intersection, Raphael’s last-minute direction to turn here, her slamming the brakes, her small sense of triumph at managing the turn without having to pass up the intersection, turn around, backtrack. A few seconds saved; but what could that have meant to him?
She busied herself with chatter—avoiding names for what he was approaching, searching for cheerful talk. When his silence grew too large to ignore she asked the only words she could bring herself to say that didn’t beg that void, question that hole. “Are you in pain?”
He reached across the seat and held a finger to her lips. “I’m happy being quiet here with you,” he said.
They finished their drive in silence. Under pungent eucalyptus, past fleecy sheep scattered over sheer golden hillsides, the sun staining the cliffs burnt-orange and still no words. Her head filled with words, none adequate to the cause and so she said nothing but drove on.
At a high cliff overlook they stopped and she saw on his right arm a dark bruise, where in swerving to make the turn she’d thrown him against the car door—he bruised so easily these days! She was racked with shame and terror and rage. How could he do this to her? He was her younger brother, the baby of the family. How could he bring upon her this sadness and pain, how could he leave her alone in California?
Back on the road she’d thought this: they could continue driving, in her heart she longed to continue north on Highway 1 through Jenner and Salt Point and Mendocino, north past Fort Bragg and Crescent City into Oregon and beyond, through Washington and into Canada, far enough north and the sun might never set, this day might never end. They would present a moving target, ten steps, two steps, one step but always ahead of this thing, this death. Ever her father’s daughter, she could not bring herself to say this and so she said nothing but drove on.
And now not much more than a few months later and he is dead, and there is no more saying to be said. She should be grateful for the memory of that Highway 1 journey—she is old enough and familiar enough with the workings of time to know that in a few years she will be grateful. But now, waiting to board the chartered boat that will carry her and Andrew and some of Raphael’s friends under the Golden Gate Bridge to scatter his ashes—now she can remember only with humility and shame her unswerving fixation with the world to come, the scenery down the road and around the bend and on the other side of the mountain; even as Raphael himself was living in the here and now, past and future fallen away. I’m happy being quiet here with you. The necessity, the sufficiency of that state of being . . .
She steps to Andrew’s side and makes this pact with herself: when they return to L.A. she will live more fully in the here and now. She will ease herself out of real estate and back into acting. She will love Andrew as he deserves. She will risk her heart in a way that she has never allowed herself to do.
She looks about: Raphael’s friends are arriving in small groups, men and women exchanging kisses and hugs. The tourists with whom she has been sharing her bench stand and gather their belongings. “You won’t see that in Dallas,” one says as they walk away.
“Family,” Raphael had called his friends on their journey up Highway 1, and again as he lay dying in the Jessup County Hospital. He had far too many friends for the boat—not knowing who among them was closer, who was more distant, Elizabeth had taken Raphael’s address book and telephoned the names from A through P, explaining that there wasn’t enough room and asking them to stay home (she hopes no one will notice that the mourners’ last names all begin with letters after Q). A few faces Elizabeth recognizes—the two men upstairs who’d fixed him meals and did his laundry and enabled him to stay in San Francisco where he’d wanted to stay, where he’d wanted to die until his trip to Kentucky for Tom Hardin’s funeral, during which Raphael became too ill to return. She recognizes the woman who’d adopted his cat, and an ex-boyfriend with whom she will sit down tomorrow to sort through belongings.
His friends spoke so matter-of-factly of it all—the IVs, the medications, the names of obscure infections, death. It was as if they spoke a resurrected tongue, the language of dying and death whose grammar and syntax and vocabulary she’d learned as a child but had forgotten. They took her in as a foreigner, a well-meaning anthropologist exploring their culture. The night before, several of Raphael’s friends stopped by his apartment, where she and Andrew were staying. “Take our word for it. You don’t want to sit around here,” they’d said. “We know that number.” Over her mild protests they’d taken the two of them to a bar where men wearing Stetsons and cowboy boots danced two-steps and waltzes and the Cotton-eyed Joe. From some childhood county fair her feet remembered the San Antonio Stroll, and she found herself out on the floor doing its funny little kickstep, and, yes, enjoying herself. Elizabeth thought of the times in her childhood when she’d accompanied Rose Ella to a house where someone had recently died; of the excuses Rose Ella concocted to get the mourners out and about. Raphael’s friends were speaking that language—they’d rediscovered it, or maybe reinvented it on their own here in San Francisco; a language that she recognized and remembered and welcomed in the way of returning to any foreign tongue once learned, then neglected and forgotten. We know that number.
Unlike her own friends in Los Angeles. They’d been sympathetic at the news of her father’s death and then, so soon on its heels, her brother’s death. But in their voices she detected a suspicion that she was somehow responsible for so much death in such quick succession. “Right now you’re into loss. You’ll work through it, and then things will turn around.”
“Give us a call if you need us,” her friends said. “Stop by any time,” leaving to her the burden of calling. There were plenty of times when she had needed them, had gone to the phone only to argue with herself: They’ll be busy. I’ll interrupt their work, their dinner, their plans for a pleasant evening. Once when Andrew was out of town and she was desperate she’d made that call, to hear “no” in her friends’ voices even as they said “yes.” She’d stopped by their house, to sit amid strained conversation (have I caught them in the middle of a fight? Of making love?) until after an awkward pause the host cleared his throat. A contract deadline—an entirely new software package due yesterday—he was sure she understood, and of course she did.
Was this distanced sympathy better, or worse, or just different from the scene at Tom Hardin
’s death, when such a stream of relatives and friends stopped by bearing food and flowers and condolences that she hid herself in the bathroom when the doorbell rang? It had been her choice, finally, to live in the city, the place where people go to be alone.
The crew lowers the gangplank. She and Andrew and Raphael’s friends crowd aboard. Someone has brought a feast of the delicacies that Raphael once told her were the real reason to live in northern California: tarts from La Nouvelle Pâtisserie, melons and berries from the Mission District Farmer’s Market, bread from Fran Gage. Someone else has brought bottles of Veuve Clicquot, a linen tablecloth, crystal champagne flutes. These they lay out in the boat’s small cabin—a California version of the corn puddings and country ham, green beans and mashed potatoes and Kentucky bourbon that fed and watered the crowd at Tom Hardin’s funeral.
Around her she hears small talk, a little strained, but different from Raphael’s memorial mass at Our Lady of the Hills, back under Strang Knob. There she’d seen the dark side of the warm womb of rural affection: Much of the town, some of the family had refused to attend, from fear (she supposed) that their names might be associated with AIDS; or maybe (she tried to think generously) from simple uncertainty as to how to name this unspeakable death. Because Raphael was to be cremated and returned to San Francisco, the pastor at first refused to conduct the mass that Raphael probably hadn’t wanted in any case—when the priest brought last rites to Raphael’s hospital room he’d mustered the strength to turn his back. Of Raphael’s high school friends, only Nick Handley came; when she’d approached him to say thanks, he all but turned and ran. None of her high school friends attended except Dennis, her old boyfriend, who hung around afterward long enough to give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He hadn’t mentioned Raphael.
The boat heads into the open bay. The current grows stronger; a cold, damp, penetrating wind picks up. The boat bucks and rocks, people clutch at each other and the railings. No one eats. A heavy fog hangs over the water—within minutes the shore is no more than a dark gray mass against the paler gray fog, and it is as if they are riding some roller coaster through a cold, wet, featureless hell. Scattering his ashes outside the Golden Gate—it seems like another of those romantic but hideously misguided ideas of which Raphael was so fond. Why did he want this done here, thousands of miles from the place both of them still called home? “They’re my family.”
Only they are her family now, for the duration of this brief journey anyway. Families come in two kinds—she had talked about this with Raphael, on that drive north: families given by chance, and families taken on by choice. She has her blood family that she can never escape, because it’s in her blood (in every sense of the word, she thinks). Then there’s adopted family. The first chose her, and binds her to it—no small part of its comfort and meaning comes from the involuntary nature of that binding. The second family she’d chosen and might hold to herself, if she was strong enough to accept all that would come with it. Because sooner or later both families placed the same demands—sometime or another somebody got jealous, somebody wanted more than she might comfortably give, somebody got sick, somebody died.
Andrew is at her side, not touching but close at hand, and in the comfort of his presence she understands that in the end family must come down to who is close: close in that they knew Raphael and loved him and helped when he was sick; but close as well in the simple proximity of their living selves, down the block or up a hill. She could only do so much—she was fooling herself if she thought it was very much—from four hundred miles away. “A phone call is fine, but it’s no substitute for chicken soup”—she recalls Joe Ray saying this at the last gathering, maybe the last ever gathering, of her blood family.
Standing amid Raphael’s adopted family, Elizabeth realizes that her own family has no fixed boundaries but is eternally changing, a river whose banks are formed by all those to whom she chooses to bind herself with the joys and burdens of love. Raphael had found some kind of family in San Francisco, she thinks. Have I found a family? And who are they?
The boat lurches. Andrew, who has visited the buffet, returns clutching two tartes aux framboises and a flute of champagne. She frowns, shakes her head. “Somebody’s got to eat this stuff,” he mutters. With a guilty sideways glance he wolfs it down.
The boat stops, as much as stopping is possible, just past the graceful arc of the bridge. She overhears the captain murmur to a passenger. A friend has brought flowers—another detail that happens without Elizabeth’s having lifted a finger. She takes a rose—someone has carefully clipped its thorns. A friend (has she met him before? she has met so many people) rises to speak.
“I will not talk of sadness here,” he says in a voice strong enough to overcome the rush of the wind and the slap of water against the boat. “To die loved, amid relatives and friends—this is no small miracle. This is a gift that we cannot question but can only accept, in gratefulness and humility.”
Very lovely, very moving—around Elizabeth people are wiping their eyes. But this is what Elizabeth thinks, as she lifts the top of the ceramic urn and pours his ashes into the sea: I will continue growing old, while my memory preserves him ever more perfect.
One dies, the other lives and ages, she thinks, dry-eyed, numbed from herself. If there is a heaven, will he recognize me in it?
They toss the flowers after the ashes. This is the scattering of my family, she thinks as she watches the surging palette of colors disburse and sink into the gray-green water. This is the scattering of my blood.
Mercifully they turn to head back. The boat still pitches but as they pass under the bridge the morning fog lifts, and they are granted a vision of the city’s towers and spires rising from the mica-flecked bay and silhouetted against a pearling sky. The houses stack themselves up the hills, their windows mirror the sun. Pelicans wheel and turn and slice the waters; one emerges with a fish flapping in its bill. The foghorns moan (alto, basso profundo, soprano), their chorus evoking Raphael’s passion for this city of dreams.
She searches for Andrew’s hand, but he has left her side to hang his head over the stern. A horde of gulls gathers, spoiling his attempt at discretion. With each buck and heave of his broad shoulders they drop greedily to the water. At first Elizabeth feels a disrespectful urge to laugh; instead she finds herself weeping.
Back on shore Raphael’s friends store the leftover food and champagne in the trunk of her rented car, and she is too distracted and polite to refuse. Andrew is too green about the gills to drive, so she takes the wheel and heads into unfamiliar streets. She drives up and over some ridiculously steep hill—at one point she comes to a stop sign on an incline so sharp she cannot see over the hood of the car; she must accept on faith that the street continues over and down the other side of the intersection.
She is lost. She is driving aimlessly, with no notion of where she is going or why, when she finds herself on a flatter street lined with flirty-eyed young men—boys, really—wearing T-shirts sliced across their midriff to reveal flat, shaved stomachs. They chat and mingle with women of all ages and races, dressed on this chilly morning in net stockings and miniskirts and sequined tops with plunging necklines. Here and there a man or a woman pushes a rusting shopping cart filled with rags and recyclable bottles.
Elizabeth pulls into a bus zone in front of a porn video palace (LIVE SEX ACTS! BONDAGE ON STAGE!). Before Andrew can ask questions she opens the trunk and carries the food and champagne to the curb. A small crowd clusters about. “Wedding reception leftovers,” she explains, blushing at her small lie, but it makes the food seem more festive.
The children of paradise do not ask questions. Within minutes the food and drink are gone, all that lovely, expensive gourmet fare. She climbs back in the car. Andrew rests his hand on her leg. “I liked you for that,” he says, but her mind and heart are still out on the bay, sinking with Raphael’s ashes and the nine family flowers: Rose Ella, Tom Hardin, her brothers, her sister, herself. Life, she thinks. Is
there no end to it?
Where Do We Come From,
What Are We,
Where Are We Going?
[1990]
His choices are these: breathe and cough, or don’t breathe. So he breathes, and coughs, and with each cough catapults himself into an altered state of being. The pain transports him beyond pain, into some parallel universe where the knowledge of pain is impossible because pain itself forms the substance and being of existence. His consciousness shrinks to a white dwarf of a star, concentrate of pain, brilliant pointed star turning in the darkness of his chest. The clarity and purity of this feeling he has never before known—it is the closest he has come to ecstasy.
Only anger is keeping him alive. In his family’s faces he sees his agony, reflected as their wholly comprehensible wish that he hang it up, turn it in, kick the bucket, call it quits. What they don’t understand is that he hangs on so as to see their pain. Partly from love—how can he let go this dearness, earned so dearly?—partly from sheer orneriness. They are distressed, sorrowful, they pity his incontinence and pain, but they are not here, they are in that other world, the world of the not-sick, whose horizons extend beyond the here and now.
He is hanging on, and hanging on, and then he sees Miss Camilla, who totters in one afternoon. She is dressed in white, and at first he mistakes her for Frances Handley, who visits him on her every shift at the hospital. He is barely conscious as she goes through the routine (“It’s Camilla, Camilla Perkins—can you hear me—squeeze my hand”). He retreats into his private universe of pain.
He drifts there until he hears her voice from some far and cavernous place. “Forgive,” he hears her saying, more than once, a pesky breathing at his ear. He would raise his hand to brush it away—forgive what? what can it matter now?—but he cannot control his hand, it drifts off the bed and he is following it to where it is going until he is called back to consciousness by her sour old breath. Smell! His nose is as sharp, maybe sharper than ever.
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