“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I say, talking into his chest. My own breathing is quickening. I don’t want to be alone with him. I don’t know what to do. I try to remember my health-class CPR lessons. I stare at his sternum, that’s where I press my hands if he starts to die. Pray I don’t break the rest of his ribs. When my mother comes back she looks relieved, as though my father has been overacting all along. Like he’s been faking the whole thing. “It’s okay, honey,” she says, and adjusts the pillows behind his head. “It’s normal.”
“What?” he says a little too loudly, like he can’t hear her over his panting. “Normal!”
“Lie back,” she says gently. “It’s just a little asthma, probably from the cat hair. I vacuumed, but…” She hands him the Primatene mist inhaler they sent along with the medication. “Here,” she says. “It will pass.”
My father glowers at us. “You don’t understand.”
We don’t. We won’t. For the first time ever I think my father is afraid. He tries to roll over so we can’t see his eyes, but he can’t, so he closes them. I want to touch him, but I don’t dare. My mother sits in a chair by the side of his bed; her hands clasp and unclasp the silver bedrail. She smooths the sheets with her hand, rubs her mouth with the back of her hand, then clasps the bedrail again.
Before my mother leaves to go run errands—wine, morphine, ice cream—she changes the dressing on my father’s back. It’s like a science project, or a horror movie. I’m curious. How bad is it? I have to see what they’ve done to him.
“Damn it,” he says as she pulls off the gauze, streaked with yellow and red. Not pus and blood, yellow and red. Mondrian colors.
“Ooh, that’s really nice, Dad,” I say, and look away.
“What?” I am surprised at how alarmed he sounds.
“Don’t move,” my mother says.
“Oh, it’s just a really great tattoo. Betty Boop, I’d never have figured.”
He kind of laughs, but stops. It hurts.
There’s a deep red C-shaped incision on the tender skin between his shoulder blades. It looks like they’ve split his skin with the ragged edge of an aluminum can, his skin puckering thick and pink against the stitches. It could make you sick if you were weak.
My mother lays new gauze over the incision, then tapes it down, in a really big square.
“There, that’s going to make it all better,” she says, patting it. “Just like new.”
I’m sitting on the couch in the living room staring into the greenhouse. At some point he’ll come in here, and it won’t be like I’m following him, right? He’ll just appear. I was here first.
“Evie,” I hear him call from the kitchen. “I need a little help here,” he says, sounding frustrated, like I should have offered to do whatever it was he wanted, I shouldn’t have to be asked.
“Sure,” I say. “Of course, anything.” I’m jumpy, we are all jumpy. Everything is going to be fine, but still. He hurts.
“It’s this freaking hair,” he says. “It’s itching like a sonofabitch.”
Oh God, anything but that.
“Okay,” I say, “you need a towel, shampoo, what else? Anything else from upstairs I can get you?”
“No. I need you to do it.” He points to the sink. He leans with his arms apart against the counter, wincing. He has only taken half of his morphine, for fear of getting addicted.
“Sure,” I say, “of course.” I can never refuse him; this is a reward after all. He chose me. My mother would be too rough. I understand. I can scarcely breathe.
He tries to fold his collar inside his shirt, but his hands are shaking. So I do it, I can’t remember the last time I touched my father’s neck. His hair is dirty, waxy. Falling into locks, it exudes an animal muskiness. I can see bloody holes in his scalp where he’s dug in his nails.
I turn on the taps and test the water on the inside of my wrist. He nods. I make sure it is lukewarm, baby-bathing water.
“Did you get the stuff?” he asks.
“Yeah man, I got the good shit,” I say in this corny Cheech Marin stoner voice. “Herbal Essence, your favorite.” He doesn’t smile. I reach for his arm and try to lead him to the sink.
“I can do it myself,” he says, sounding tired and embarrassed. He bends slowly at the waist and leans toward the sink, then grabs at his side. He hovers, bent over, inches from the spigot, in pain. Without asking, I put my hand on the back of his head, and guide him under the water. My hand is shaking.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Slow down,” he says. “For Christ’s sake, there’s no rush,” he says. “Take it easy.”
I don’t wait for his entire head to get wet. I pour shampoo into my hand and rub it into his scalp, gently, but quickly. I don’t like having my hands on his skull like that. It’s too close. I am scared of hurting him. I keep checking to make sure the lather doesn’t run down his cheek and into his eyes. How long do I have to do this? It is good not to see his face, to have his head covered in white lather. I want to forget what I’m doing. I should have put on the radio. I hate this.
I let the water pour over the back of his head. As soon as it runs clear I turn off the water. He lets me guide him backward, his eyes shut, his hair dripping wet.
I wrap his head up in a clean white towel. I don’t look at his face when he straightens up. He takes off the towel and mops the water from his face, then shakes his head, the way he does when he comes out of the ocean.
I think he might say thank you, or anything, but he doesn’t. He holds the towel over his face.
“Is that better?” I ask. Never again. Never again.
“Mmm,” he says. “When did your mother say she’d be back?”
Dad is in bed before my mother gets back. I’d brought him water, watching as he took his morphine, this time the full dose.
I am out on the back deck, which my father built two summers ago, every board and every nail his. It’s getting cold out. I am spying on him through the French doors. It isn’t like I expect him, now that he’s alone, to do a soft-shoe, but I did think it possible to catch him getting out of bed, or turning over, or smiling. But all he does is lie there, so still it’s scary. I hear Mom pull into the driveway, hear the side door slam. Then she tiptoes into the living room. She stands there for a second, then, still in her coat, she curls up beside my father in her little bed on the love seat, and closes her eyes. Neither of them is sleeping, but it’s a nice picture if you don’t look too hard.
Outside it’s dusk, the sky low and gray, descending on us, like the top of a box being pushed shut. Everything green seems nearly black. The air feels thick. The earth is folding up around us. It’s brighter here than it used to be. It never gets as dark as it once did. North Star used to be the only development out here; overnight, it seems everything has changed, new developments have spread out all around us, on all sides. The lights from the new houses killing the stars. Inside, I watch my father’s chest rising and falling, rising and falling; he is trying to breathe very carefully. Trying to breathe without disturbing the stitches. I think he’s counting his breaths, like he could save them up, as if at any minute they might stop. I try to breathe in rhythm with my father, matching his breath with mine, like this will reveal some mystery of feeling. Get up, I think, but he doesn’t. He won’t. I tap a cigarette out of the pack and strike a match.
I remember feeling that first tumor under my father’s arm. How it moved under the skin, under my finger, like something alive.
I inhale deeply. It doesn’t hurt. I exhale. I watch my breath turn silver.
My father, he isn’t coming out here.
USE ME
His wife had ice-cream-cone breasts and was given to fits of crying, which she did alone and in the shower. He would stand in the hallway smoking and listening to her sob, waiting for a pause. Then he’d go in and piss, flush the toilet, and send a surge of hot water raining down onto her naked body. She’d scream and curse him, hurl soap and maybe
a back scrubber at him. He’d strip, step into the shower, pull her down on the porcelain, and hold her, then fuck her. Then they’d sleep hard, and when they woke, he’d dress her. He would forbid her to wear panties. Then he’d take her out for a rare steak and eat her potatoes.
Michael Morris didn’t tell me this; I knew this because I read it in his books, and his books were the truth, not even thinly veiled. He’d admitted as much. He said, “I write the truth.” I read his stories with greedy fascination. In fact, I think he was the only writer who I could truthfully say I’d read everything he’d ever written. Okay, I didn’t get to read as much as I wanted to or should. And it wasn’t just that he was our college’s one star. It was the way he described the senseless brutality he had inflicted on women, especially his wife, Janice. The deep indifference seemed nearly inhuman, and it fascinated me. I read his books because I was hungry for the ugly details of human nature, his nature, my nature, so skillfully rendered it seemed almost poetic. And yet even as I was thinking he was a bastard, I felt deeply attracted to this loathsome man, who seemed to be saying, See how you are exactly like me. You won’t admit it, but you are.
Perhaps in some ways he was right, but he was offering his life as art. I wasn’t taking anything he didn’t mean for me to have, so I seized his stories, combing them for his violence. It wasn’t only a voyeuristic thrill or a vicarious pleasure, but absolution from my own small crimes of deceit. I had to admire the way he depicted himself as a creep. He wasn’t making any apologies for his behavior; he was just telling the truth, and I respected that. How many people really tell the truth?
Michael Morris said, “My wife is beautiful, and smart, and a better human being than I am.” And no one doubted that, except maybe the bit about her being so smart. I heard him say on a talk show, “My life is full of real-life pain and drama. Why should I, if I don’t need to, make anything up? After all, I own my life.” Because he believed he owned his wife, he plucked out her soul and used it as paint. He dragged her onto the page and shackled her spread-eagle with precise iron-clad punctuation and clear piercing description, right down to the dark hair that curled around her nipples. She was the harping, myopic wife who couldn’t intuit the way her husband needed her to be, and thus couldn’t understand the sensitive-husband character. She was the wife who woke up in the middle of the night, alone, choking and unable to breathe. Her husband was gone—either out drinking with his “buddies” or, as the case was this time, hunched over his typewriter. “Copying my body, my face, my everything onto the page while I slept,” her character laments in one story. “He was robbing me of my self.”
He and Janice lived on the far outskirts of town in a large modern house that was mostly glass, in stark contrast to the old gingerbread-style Victorians that dominate our small university town. He used to teach the occasional Honors English class at the university, where I was finishing my senior year, majoring in art history and painting. Now he just did one reading a year, but his presence lingered in the air like the funny, nearly infinitesimal burning smell of electricity after a lightning strike. One of the girls in my off-campus house worked in the English department; she came home full of delicious rumors and innuendo about the intense, dark-eyed man who had sex in cars with various young coeds. It was legend that he was involved with a beautiful Lebanese freedom fighter who wore a bullet that had passed through her body on a chain around her neck, and that his wife had once tried to kill herself in the brand-new Mercedes he’d bought with the advance money for a screenplay he’d sold. She tried to asphyxiate herself in their garage, with the radio on some country-and-western station. That’s why he said he didn’t believe she meant to kill herself, because she put the radio on a station that she didn’t even listen to. The music, he said, was for cheap dramatic effect.
Now the rumor was that he and Janice were divorcing. The split was almost devoid of drama—that must have killed him. He would have to pay her alimony. It would be a lot. She would make him pay that way. Still, the only possessions she wanted were the Oriental rugs. He owed her the rugs. They had bought them on their honeymoon, the last time he was decent to her. Now, he was so sorry, he was crying in restaurants. Torn apart, that’s how he was supposed to be feeling. I liked imagining him crying. Ruining perfectly good meals all over town. His head in his hands, weeping into cold soup.
He was throwing himself into touring and promoting his new book to take his mind off it. His first stop was the university. I wanted to see him, I wanted to get a real look at him. I wanted permission to stare. I wanted to hear his words from his mouth, instead of in my own head. I wanted to watch him be Michael Morris. That was why I was in the amphitheater that night for his reading. I’d asked Mary Beth to come with me, then I changed my mind. I lied and told her I was going to the library instead, it wasn’t like she’d ever check. Mary Beth was a voluptuous brunette. She’d had the same haircut since high school, long with bangs that hung just over large cool grayish blue eyes, and a quick laugh. She had the confident air of a girl who had brothers. Older brothers, but she hadn’t. It was embarrassing, but I didn’t want the competition, and I didn’t want anyone to see me getting all tongue-tied if I got a chance to meet him. I snagged a seat in the middle near the front so I could see, and so I was also in his line of vision. Perhaps he would notice the way I was sitting: both legs tucked under me, my arms hugging my body, head tilted, and eyes fixed on him like a scope.
I would nod. I understood.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined appearing in one of his books. Michael Morris noticed small things about people they never noticed about themselves. He saw everything—every nuance. What could he tell me about me? I thought about my boyfriend, a political-science major, who was now at his fraternity house getting stoned and listening to the Grateful Dead or watching baseball with the brothers. He was sweet, but I knew he didn’t know my dress size, and probably couldn’t remember what my favorite color was. Not that it really mattered. I’d asked him to join me tonight, fully confident that he’d politely decline. Readings bored him, and anyway, he hated Michael Morris. “He’s a jerk,” he said. “He’s a jerk who says he’s a jerk and that is supposed to make everything okay. I don’t buy it. Frankly, I don’t see how you can like him.”
Maybe that was the problem.
In the fluorescent light of the auditorium I was surprised to see how old Michael Morris looked. He was old enough to be my father. Hell, my father looked younger and better than Michael Morris. Maybe it was the unflattering light, but the lines in his face looked drawn as though with Magic Marker, and wiry, steel-colored strands of gray ran rampant through his black hair. He wasn’t unattractive. He was attractive in a coarse, slightly scary way. He was taller than I had imagined. That was nice. His body was long, the muscle compacted on the bone. His hands looked meaty and enormous. I imagined his palms damp from clutching what I thought was probably a flask of Irish whiskey in his coat pocket.
He was much more handsome than his jacket photos, which seemed to present him either looking dark and guilty, as though he’d been caught in the act of masturbation, or intense, gaunt, and unshaven, suggesting imprisonment in the jail of his own mind. He was pacing back and forth in front of the stage as though he was psyching himself into being the great author, Michael Morris. He mounted the stage deliberately, and strode to the podium as though it was magnetized. He put on his reading glasses, and without saying a word of greeting or introduction, he began to read a story concerning a professor’s fear that his student lover, who in his presence couldn’t help chewing her lips until they bled, would kill herself for him. The second story was about a man who quarrels bitterly with his brother and then tries to rape his brother’s wife to get back at him. He read slowly, deliberately shaping each word. Then he finished and stalked off the stage. No question-and-answer period. No “Thank you for coming.” Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
Afterward there was a reception; half the audience, apparently repulse
d, lit out. The other half were mostly students, like me, and some artsy-looking middle-aged people from town. After tossing back a glass of cheap white wine, I decided to go home. This was crazy. There was no need to meet him. I’d seen him. Heard him. That was what mattered. I wished I’d eaten something before the reading. I was starting to feel a little buzzed. Why shouldn’t I meet Michael Morris? After all, I knew all about him. He didn’t know anything about me. I could be anybody.
With this in mind, I walked right up to him and introduced myself.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Evelyn Wakefield.”
His hand was large and cool, and he held on to mine for a beat too long. Holding it firmly, not limply or by the fingers the way some men shake your hand, as though they were shaking the hand of a child’s stuffed animal; he pressed my hand between his palms.
“Evelyn,” he said, savoring my name wetly, chewing on it. “Ev-el-lyn.” He held it in his mouth like a piece of meat he wasn’t ready to swallow. “Evelyn.” He offered it like a prize on his tongue.
“It’s Evie, actually,” I said. So much for my cool and detached Evelyn persona. God, I hated it when I was such an Evie.
“Eh-vee,” he said. “Not Eve-ee?”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
“No hard E?”
“No hard E.”
“Better still.”
“People mispronounce it all the time,” I said, like I was apologizing.
“I’m pleased to know you, Evie.” He was the first person in a long time who seemed to truly mean it. There was this pause. God, but I hate a pause.
“Your books are…well, just amazing,” I stammered. In one instant I’d gone from how-do-you-do to slobbering dope.
“Really? Well, thank you, Evie,” he said, sounding a little surprised, but pleased. Certainly pleased. A little bit of wine splashed on my shoe. A brief half smile pulled up his lips, like he could tell I was nervous. He enjoyed having this effect on women.
Use Me Page 9