by Orna Ross
I recall Donal's sarcasm at the funeral and realise as she is talking that I don't know the guy at all, that he has never seemed quite real to me, just Maeve's husband, slotting into his allotted place in her ordered life.
"He never made it easy for me, if I wanted her to come on holiday with us or to go down to Mucknamore for Christmas."
"You went down every year, didn't you?"
"We could hardly have left her on her own for it."
Why not? I ask myself and she catches my face. "You think he was right!" she accuses.
"I haven't a clue, Maeve. It doesn't matter, does it, what I think? I'm hardly an expert on marriage."
"You know more than you pretend to know," she says, blowing her nose. "Well, you and Donal might be happy to pretend you never had a mother, but most people appreciate their parents and look after them when they get on a bit. I was happy to do it; it was the right thing to do." Red-faced, she shrugs. "It's not like we had her with us day and night. She would have liked a lot more attention than she got."
"You were pulled between the two of them."
"I could never see why he had to make such a big deal about it. We always had at least one other family holiday, without her, each year. And as for Christmas...well, it's what you do, isn't it, at Christmas? The family thing."
I grimace, recognising my part in this. "It all fell on you," I say.
"Well, yes. We were the only family she had left after Auntie Norah and Gran were gone. She used to say that, often."
I bet she did. I take a sip of coffee to stop my retort.
"And it's not like I didn't put her off. I did, many times. For him. And felt awful about it. None of that ever counted for anything with him."
"But, Maeve, I don't understand. If Mrs D. was the problem between you, then surely things should be better now that she's...gone?"
Her face closes over like a fist. "This is why I went down to Mucknamore, to you, that day two weeks ago...to tell you...And I should have, I know I should, I felt so wretched driving away. But I was so overcome by your news...Are you really okay, by the way? Have you seen a doctor yet?"
"Maeve, never mind all that. We can discuss that later."
She nods. "You're right, I should have talked that day. Having gone all the way down, to drive back up without...But, Jo, I'm finding it very hard to talk about this. None of my friends know, not one. I can't seem to get it out."
I know that feeling.
"And...our friends...I don't know how I've done it but...none of them...I don't seem to have anybody I can confide in." She screws the rumpled tissue into her eye sockets. "Also, saying it somehow makes it more real, less likely to..." She lets her hopes trail away into silence.
"Where's he staying?" I ask.
"He's rented an apartment. And..." She falters.
"And there's somebody else?"
Two wide eyes expand wider. "How did you know?"
"I was just asking," I say gently.
"She's only twenty-five."
Is she indeed? I didn't think Donal had it in him.
She starts to cry then, weakly, like she's cried so much that she's tired of it, but it's all she knows how to do. With a grimace she says, "Jo, I want to ask you something."
I nod.
"I wanted to ask if you..."
I wait.
"If you would come...and stay with us for a while?"
I turn from her wet eyes, their entreating heat. The stained glass here in Bewley's turns the light blue, making its close, shabby warmth seem cooler, airier than it would otherwise. Above us, four wooden gargoyles, magnificently ugly, jut out from the wall, and all around, at other tables, Irish and continental and American voices talk and laugh and cups clink against their saucers.
"I wouldn't ask, only...Having you there would be a distraction for Ria...She's such a good kid and I...at the moment, I'm...I can't seem to..." She takes a steadying breath, starts again in a stronger voice. "Jo, it's for Ria, really, that I'm asking. It's so awful...She and I...each trying not to crack..."
At the word, tears break in her again. "Ria's heartbroken, you see...She doesn't understand. How can she? I don't understand myself..."
I think lovingly of my beige hotel room, my solitude. Inside me, I am constricting, like somebody is shrink-wrapping my neck in cling film, working their way up towards my face.
"I'm sorry, Jo," she says into her tissue. "I don't know what your plans are. I shouldn't...I don't want to be a..." The bag clicks open again. She takes out a fresh tissue. I find I'm putting my hand on hers. She cries a little longer, sniffles to recovery.
"It's okay," she says then. "I can see you'd rather not."
"No," I say. "It's not that. I —"
"It's okay, Jo, I understand. I know how you value your privacy."
"Maeve, I'm —"
"You don't have to explain, honestly. Really...I shouldn't have asked..."
"Christ, Maeve! Will you stop for a second?"
She stops, looks at me through the dampness of long lashes that I have always envied. I squeeze the hand that is under mine and it feels like I'm squeezing my own heart.
"Of course I'll come," I say. "Of course I will. Of course."
1989
Richard dies on the evening of October 17th, 1989, a date known to every San Franciscan. And when he dies, though I have been told in time to know, I'm not there. Gary has called me. Susan has called me and for days I've known his time is getting close. But that last afternoon, after hanging up the phone on Gary, instead of making my way there immediately, I sit back down to finish the article I was writing when he called.
An article entitled, somewhat ironically, 'Urgency Addiction: Why You're Not As Busy As You Think'.
It is a perfect October afternoon, blue and balmy. I have an orange juice — freshly squeezed — before me. I am wearing my favourite, most comfortable T-shirt, my fastest pen is between my finger and thumb, filling my page with the words and phrases that will keep my editor happy. All is as it should be, except for the awareness of my failure underlying every thought and act.
I haven't been to the hospital for weeks. Weeks. In August, the disease started in on his brain. For the longest time before that, he had seemed to us too fragile to last. Just skin on a shrunken skeleton, everything that made him Richard, including his sense of humour, gone. Just a sick man, full of sickness's self-pity. And after that came the dementia.
I push on with my work. "The stress addict has the same troublesome dependence as any other addict," I write. "Just because your mood-altering drug of choice is the physiological responses of your own body doesn't mean you are safe. Surging epinephrine or glucocorticoids won't get you in trouble with the law or leave you bankrupt, but like any addictive substances they trigger side effects that can wreak havoc with your health and happiness..."
Though I am getting proficient at this writing, learning just the right tone of certitude, part of me despises it, especially magazine-land's breezy conviction that life is eminently fixable, just a matter of tweaking the right buttons. I won't be able to do this forever, I say to myself, not for the first time. As I write, the table begins to vibrate beneath my notebook and I feel — or is it hear? — a subterranean growl, like a deeply buried tummy rumble. The windows rattle, making me look up. Quake?
I set to sit the tremor out, as I always do, but then the earth growls and everything is wobbling, violently. The floor jerks and screams rise from the street outside, flying in through my open window. Could this be the long awaited "Big One"?
So, I think, it may not just be Richard. We may all go together.
The thought leaves me strangely comforted. At the same time, all the facts I have heard about old concrete, new concrete, stress levels, earthquake procedures are flashing through me. There is a low-roaring snarl underfoot, then the world bucks. Books come crashing down off my shelves. A second newsflash from my mind asserts that I don't, in fact, want to die and for the first time since I came to Sa
n Francisco, I go to stand in the doorway. The steel L-shape shelving unit that lines one corner of my living room is flapping back and forth violently, trying to tear apart. Crockery is falling, smashing against tiles and more books are tumbling down in heaps. Oddly, my television, atop another shelving unit, doesn't budge.
It goes on for what seems like a long time, though it can only really be seconds, then the world slowly settles to stillness. I wait. Yes, it is still.
It seems to be over.
It seems I am to live.
Now I have a good excuse for not being at the hospital. Crossing the city becomes an impossibility, I give up even pretending that I might go. I stay home, listening to the news reports coming in on my battery-operated radio. A building has collapsed here, a gas-main has flared into fire there. The upper deck of Bay Bridge has collapsed onto the lower, squashing hundreds of cars. Of the inhabited areas, the reclaimed land in the Marina district and parts of the inner Mission are worst hit. Liquification, they call it, when earthquake dissolves reclaimed soil, so that it temporarily acts like quicksand. Those with power still up get to see it all on TV — history's first real-time disaster movie — available on three major networks, thanks to the World Series football game that was in progress when it struck.
Sixty-seven San Franciscans died that day from being in the wrong place, at the flash-points of the quake. In the weeks that follow, the whole city is in mourning, which feels fitting for Richard. But I am not good at grief. I cannot cry and I don't want to. I go about my days, aghast. Stunned by what it is to know that he is dead. His mouth was covered in ulcers and his body, inside and out, in excruciating KS lesions. He was blind in one eye, only barely sighted in the other. He couldn't hold his own coffee cup, his own medicine, his own shit. A time ago, I heard him writhing through the night, pleading with no one: "Please...please..." And it got worse after that. That last day I arrived to the hospital and he screamed at me from the bed about stealing his food, I looked at his face disfigured by KS and rage and thought: you are not Richard.
But who, then, was he, this crazed stranger in Richard's bed and body?
I couldn't bear it. By the end, Susan was going into the hospital more often than me. There: that is how loathsome I am.
Death was a release. That's what I tell others, at the funeral. Not at his family's Episcopalian cremation, but at the memorial held by our friends. Mozart's Requiem. Judy singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'. Gary reading Thom Gunn and Oscar Wilde. Me reading my own poem: "...We thought the laughter would roll on and on / But we were young and we were wrong."
The horror of scanning the room, seeing those who were going to die next and all the other missing faces, those gone already. And afterwards, everybody talking about Richard's enthusiasm for life, his humour, his irrepressibility.
He would have had none of this, I found myself thinking, even as I clung to the compliments. He would have taken pleasure in bursting our burbles of comfort, with his particular brand of starkly honest humour. He would never have let me get away with it the sentence I dole out to all — that his death was a release. It's true, but also so completely insufficient to the truth of his final macabre months and minutes, that it's no consolation at all.
His dying and his death were an offence to nature. An insult to all that is most human. An affront to everything I had come to hold dear. I am outraged, outraged, outraged, by his loss.
Sometimes I dream about him, dreams where he is fleshed out again, his old self. These dreams are usually silent, but once I dreamed that I answered my buzzer and his voice said, "Hello."
When I opened the door, there he was, standing on my step, looking sheepish. "Hi! I'm back!"
"But you're dead," I said to him. He turned his eyes away from me, evasive. "Richard, you're supposed to be dead."
"I went to Ireland."
"No, you didn't. You died. I was at your funeral. You were cremated."
"Hmmm," he said, ambivalently, smiling a maddening, unanswerable smile.
Everyone tries to be kind. Susan goes into motherly mode and I have to pull out of her grasp. Maeve sends a surprisingly thoughtful letter. Dee, too, tries to help, but she's at a loss; Richard was sick before she arrived out here and she never knew him in his heyday. She is getting impatient with me, can't understand why I'm taking it so hard.
I don't fully understand myself. He was my friend. I loved him and I miss him, but why do I feel like it is my own life that has ended?
What Gary finds hardest is that he wasn't there for the end. He rang Richard's mother in Telport to let her know and she thanked him by making him leave when she arrived so that it was she, not Gary, who saw Richard out of this world. The hospital let that happen because she was next of kin. This rule has since been changed, permitting the patient to nominate their own person.
Richard would have wanted the man who had loved him most from the moment they met. Gary wanted — needed — to be there. But, instead, his last sighting of his beloved boy was his face muzzled by the ventilator, and Mrs Burke standing guard over him, arms folded across her chest, an empty fortress of righteousness.
Gary can't shake that image — of Richard's eyes rotating wildly over the plastic cup, unable to see, unable to speak — out of his head.
The two of us spend a lot of time together, sitting in slumped silence or in front of the TV. Is it worse for him? Everybody says it is, and I suppose it must be, but I cannot imagine how.
I am offered a new job, as an agony aunt. A "sexpert", as Lauren, my new editor likes to call it. She knows just how she wants it to be: my name will be Sue Denim and I'll do four letters per page, one Problem of the Month and three others. The advice will be responsible but worldly, the approach caring but daring.
"Women love the truth," she says. "It's men who are the prudes."
Lauren is evangelical about women's magazines. It incenses her that they are disparaged, not taken seriously by the world. "It's because they're for women," she says. "Baseball and automobiles are important, you know, but what we wear and eat and who and how we love — that's trivial girl's stuff? Yeah, right."
She offers me a sum of money that sounds ludicrous and when, unsure whether I want the job or not, I seem hesitant, she offers me half as much again. I take this offer; I can't afford not to. The aerobics boom is dying off and numbers in the Rí Rá classes are beginning to drop. Aerobics is now an activity like any other, with its own adherents, rather than a craze igniting everyone.
Hearing word of my new job, Dee turns up at my door with a bottle of champagne. "I know you're Miss Healthy America and never let alcohol cross your lips any more, but this is a celebration."
She takes down two champagne glasses from a high cupboard, places them side by side on the table, holds the bottle at arms' length, pops the cork. As the fizzy liquid flows up and out of the glasses, spilling out over the table, she laughs. I take the glass she hands me: it's wet on the outside from the overflow. I put damp fingers to my mouth and lick. The alcohol tastes sharp, but sweet too.
Dee is lifting her glass, smiling across at me. "Sláinte," she says, the Irish salutation.
"Chin-chin," I reply.
We both tilt our heads back and drink.
The column is a success. It's because it's so different, Lauren says. So refreshing. I don't know why it works or what happens when I "become" Sue. That is how I think of it. I even have a ritual for the transformation: I dress in an old loose trousers and smock top, no bra and bare feet; I burn joss sticks and put Mozart on the stereo. That way, it is her perspective, not mine, that pops onto the page. This sounds silly, but left to me, as me, I'd never come up with any answers. Sue believes in sexual liberation, that the heart of freedom lies there, in what we are prepared to do and think and be, sexually. And in part, I agree with her.
In part.
But...
Who is this "I"? What is this "but..."?
* * *
Dear Sue,
For most of my li
fe I've lived monogamously with one man after another. At the same time, I've always been bothered by the world's obsession with couples and longed for love of a different kind. I dreamed of a sexual energy that could flow free between me and a variety of people at once, without guilt or shame, games or betrayal, free of the insecurity that demands ownership.
I turned thirty this year and realized that it wasn't going to happen if I didn't make it happen. So I decided to launch an experiment. I had been living with a man for almost a year as part of a two-couple household. One night, after the four of us had consumed a lot of alcohol, I made the suggestion that we should extend our sexual intimacy beyond our two complacent couples. Everybody was willing and excited by the prospect, so I got together with the other guy and agreed to share "my" man with the other woman (none of us was interested in a same-sex encounter).
All seemed to go well for a while. I thought the four of us were growing, setting ourselves free of societal constraints, having the courage of our desires. But now I've found out that while the other man and I were just expanding our relationship, breaking out of nuclear bondage, etc., our respective mates were falling seriously in love with each other.
He told me last week. He loves her and wants to live with her exclusively. Sue, it hurts so much. I have never in my life been so full of rage and jealousy: I fantasize about killing them both in their sleep. The other man is devastated and spends his time either crying on my shoulder or berating me for starting the whole thing. What should I do?
Chastened
* * *
Dear Sexual Adventurer,
What should you do, you ask? What can you do, except carry on living through the fruits of your experiment?
Freedom is not safe. But you already know that.
You cannot control how other people will respond. But you already know that.
Emotions pass. In time, when the rage and hurt have subsided, you may recognise your urge to push out your boundaries as something bigger than the transient pain it caused. Or you may come to think of it as a lesson you needed to learn about faith and faithfulness.