The Wide Circumference of Love

by Marita Golden

  In the kitchen, Diane retrieved a package of lasagna from the freezer and slid it into the oven. Gregory sat at the marble island behind her, and she risked leaving him alone to go upstairs and change clothes.

  When Diane returned to the kitchen, she said, “Cecelia told me you saw Randall today.”

  “I did?” Gregory asked, clearly surprised, his face a map of bewilderment.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Mercer and I have that meeting with the mayor in the morning, so wake me up early. I have to go to bed early tonight.”

  “I’ll make sure I do. Bruce and your mother are going to lunch with us tomorrow.”

  “All right, but not until after that meeting.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  AUGUST 2014

  As the months passed, Diane discovered new forms of agitation, as new types of bewildering, nonsensical actions committed by Gregory crept into their lives.

  One night, one of her dress pumps went missing. An empty hanger bore no trace of a sheer, silk white blouse. Sean’s graduation photo was gone from its conspicuous space on the mantel above the fireplace. Her favorite umbrella. An autographed copy of Song of Solomon that she stood in line for half an hour for Toni Morrison to sign, all missing. For only a fleeting moment did she suspect Cecelia. Looking in the most unlikely places, she found her blouse stuffed behind the dryer; the photograph of them with Sean beneath the sofa cushion; Song of Solomon protruding from a plastic bag of trash, grease stained and half the pages torn out.

  Now, she couldn’t find the topaz and silver necklace and matching earrings she’d bought in New Mexico. All weekend she had searched the house, her fury rising.

  “Gregory, I don’t have much anymore. So little. Why can’t you leave me at least some things that I cherish?”

  Feverish with paranoia, she was convinced the actions were not random. Gregory’s mind, she was sure, was brimming with malevolence. Stealing like this took cunning, planning, forethought. Diane stood before her husband, herself a kind of wreckage. She had not washed in two days, brushed her teeth, or changed clothes all weekend. All she wanted was to find the jewelry. All she wanted, in the midst of this, was to hold on to one little thing. Even if it was material, tied to vanity and pride. It was her little thing, and he had stolen it.

  “Just tell me where you put them. I won’t be angry. Gregory, this isn’t a game. The necklace and earrings, where are they?”

  Gregory stood, like a shabby edifice, unmoved in a winter sweater and corduroy pants he had somehow found although it was August and the house was sweltering because the air conditioning was faulty. His answer was to lope away from her nonchalantly, another thing she’d come to hate, casting one last look at her that promised he would never reveal what she wanted so desperately to know.

  Talking to Gregory like this set her on edge, made her hypersensitive. There is no past. No future. Only now, this eternal moment. Now lived in the extreme, a neon present tense. Each word, whether from him or from her, a possible precipice.

  She knew not to touch him from behind because if she did, the inability to see her, to prepare a response often set Gregory howling and running from her. But she grabbed his arm anyway, shouting, “What did you do with them?”

  Pulling out of her grasp, Gregory clamped his hands over his ears and stomped in circles around the dining room table.

  “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,” he said, head bowed forward, hands squeezing his ears.

  “You did and you know it.”

  “No. No.”

  Trailing him around the table, Diane heard her voice, careening, mad: “You did, you know you did.”

  The doorbell startled them, and she thought it must be the air conditioning repairman. But when she opened the door and saw Lauren instead, Diane covered her mouth with her hands and reached for her, holding her so tightly, Lauren nearly clawed her way out of her mother’s arms. They stood in the portal while Gregory raged in the living room:

  “No. No. It wasn’t me.”

  Freed from her mother’s afflicted embrace, Lauren led Diane back into the house.

  “He took my topaz and silver necklace. He hid them and won’t tell me where they are. He’s taken everything. Everything I had. I can’t even have one thing of my own,” her mother announced, her voice bruised with complaint and outrage.

  Lauren took a deep breath, quickly deciding to care for her mother first.

  “Come on, you need to lay down, Mom,” she said, leading her up the stairs.

  “Will you make him tell you what he did with them? You know the topaz necklace and earring set I mean; you borrowed it last year.”

  “Yes, Mom, I know, I know,” Lauren assured her, gently guiding her mother to her bed. A bed that was unmade, stacked with clothes and a tray holding what looked like the remains of last night’s dinner. Lauren removed the clothing and set the tray on the nightstand and sat on the side of the bed, rubbing her mother’s shoulders. Weariness was a pall draining her mother’s face.

  “I can’t believe it. Before you arrived I was chasing him around the living room, shouting at him, screaming in fact.” Her mother stared at the ceiling, her eyes widened by disbelief.

  “Mom, just rest now. Just rest for a while.”

  “How can I?” She grabbed Lauren’s hand and said, “Go. Please check on your father. Make sure he’s all right.”

  Lauren had packed an overnight bag and left it in the trunk of her car in case this turned into a long night’s journey where she could not imagine leaving her mother alone with her father. Increasingly, she’d become referee between her parents as they sparred—one coherent, overwhelmed, and growing more and more bitter, the other locked in a netherworld.

  “She’s mean to me. Why won’t she let me go? I have places to be,” her father shouted as Lauren walked toward him downstairs.

  “Did you hide Mom’s jewelry, Dad?”

  “No. No,” he shouted and folded his arms across his chest as he furiously circled the sofa.

  At that moment, Lauren heard a knock at the door.

  “Hi. I just stopped by to see how everyone was,” Sean said when she opened the door. He stood staring at Lauren with a sheepish grin, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Well, halle-fuckin’-lujah!” Lauren fumed, suddenly near tears. She wanted to slam the door in Sean’s face but instead turned away and walked back to her father.

  “What’s going on?” Sean asked innocently, entering the house with careful, measured footsteps. The sight of his father, arms folded, mumbling angrily and circling the sofa stopped him in the hallway.

  “Come on in. He’s your father. He won’t hurt you.”

  “Is he always like this?”

  “If you were around more, you’d know the answer to that question.”

  The innocent confusion on her brother’s face, the perplexity she heard in his voice enraged her. As their father had fallen deeper into the grasp of the disease, she had watched Sean’s unease in their father’s presence blossom. He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t visit or stop by to give her or Diane a break. And when he did come by, the sight of their father shocked him so that he seemed to be saying good-bye before he had finished saying hello.

  She was shocked, too. There was no getting used to it. But for her, there was no other choice. This was her task to perform, one that was onerous and yet, she had come to think, sacred as well. She wanted to ask Sean if he loved their father at all. As angry as she was, she could never go that low.

  “I came by to help. You’re always saying I never pitch in, but what can I possibly do here?”

  “Talk to him. Take him for a walk.”

  “Talk to him how?”

  Closing the distance between them, Lauren said, “Brother, I have to figure that out every day.”

  “You always had a special bond with him. Your own language, your own code. You’re cut out for this.”

 
; “He’s our father,” she screamed. “Our. Father. Mom’s upstairs trying to rest. I’m going to leave now and let you figure out how to do your share.”

  She grabbed her bag and stormed out of the house. Not until Lauren was three blocks away, having ordered a pizza from a corner take-out restaurant, did it dawn on her what she had done. Nonetheless, she forced herself to sit at one of the plastic tables outside and slowly eat, willing herself to believe that when she returned to the house, Sean would have found a way.

  They all thought he avoided his father because he was irresponsible. He had been absent, but his father was not forgotten. Only Sean knew how it felt to look at his father now and see him as a mirror. Without language to bind them, without coherent thoughts, what was there to say? The disease had stripped Sean of the ease and comfort they had begun to rebuild after his father had visited him that day, which now seemed so long ago, when he first knew something was wrong.

  “Come on. Let’s watch TV,” Sean said and slumped onto the sofa.

  He heard his father padding toward him and sit down at the other end of the sofa. Sean picked up the remote control and saw that his mother had taped a list of the channels and corresponding numbers in large black letters on the back. Clearly this was meant to help his father, but he’d lost his memory and no matter how large the letters and numbers were, just as the shapes had once meant nothing to Sean because of his dyslexia, they probably meant little to his father now.

  “Let’s watch the Nationals, Dad. There’s a game on, I think. You know the Nationals are your favorite team.”

  Gregory shook his head adamantly. “My team is the Orioles.”

  “But, the Nats are our hometown team.”

  Making a fist with his right hand and punching his left palm, like a boxer, Gregory insisted, “Orioles, always the Orioles for me.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Sean flipped between channels as Gregory watched him quizzically and said, “The Orioles will beat the Redskins next time.”

  “You know, I think you’re probably right.”

  Sean watched at his father at the other end of the sofa, staring raptly at the screen. What, he wondered, did he see through those still alert eyes? Within minutes, his father nodded into a deep slumber. Sean went upstairs to see Diane and found her asleep as well. Coming back down, he saw Lauren enter the house.

  “I’ll do better. I will,” he told her.

  “Sean, you have to. That’s our father. I need your help. Mom needs your help.”

  “I’ll be here. I’ll do more.” He had said the words before. This time he meant them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  OCTOBER 2014

  The bookstore was packed for a reading from the memoir of a prominent veteran of the civil rights movement, Eunice Benjamin. Benjamin, who had gone on to a career as a journalist and photographer, regaled the crowd with her reading and anecdotes about well-known political and cultural figures who had been major players in the black activism of the late sixties and early seventies.

  Gregory sat in the third row of the audience with Diane clutching his hand and Mercer’s arm thrown protectively around the shoulders of his friend. Gregory’s attention span had been growing shorter and shorter and Diane counted it a minor miracle that he had sat for nearly twenty minutes listening or appearing to listen to the speaker. She was determined not to exile Gregory from life, from other people. Maybe during tonight’s reading he would hear a word, a phrase, a question, that would give him a moment of joy, spark a brain cell into resilience. Life. She didn’t want to go into hiding. She wasn’t ashamed of her husband or his disease.

  The audience sat hushed and rapt as Eunice Benjamin read a passage describing her days canvassing the backwoods of Mississippi for blacks willing to attempt to register to vote. She had just read a riveting account of a midnight ride down a darkened Alabama road with a carful of SNCC workers being followed by the police when Gregory released Diane’s hand and moved to stand up. Mercer quickly pulled him back into his seat and Gregory said loudly, breaking the spell Eunice Benjamin had cast over them, “Bathroom, I have to go.” Heads turned and Diane answered the quizzical looks with a humble, forbearing half-smile. Mercer guided Gregory out of the row.

  She watched Mercer lead Gregory through the maze of tables stacked with books, past the shelves marked by category and genre, over Oriental throw rugs, and to the downstairs restroom. She turned back to face Eunice Benjamin, rearranging her body, sitting staunch and straight-backed in the folding chair, trying, with her show of resolve and indifference, to erase Gregory’s outburst.

  When the question and answer period ended, Mercer and Diane stood watching Eunice sign books as the staff collected the folding chairs. Friends who had entered after they’d arrived, or who had not greeted them earlier warily assessed Gregory, as though he were an unruly toddler whose behavior they had heard rumors of.

  “How are you, Gregory?” Sadika Grey asked. She leaned in to hug Gregory and clutched his hand. “Gregory, it’s Sadika. Diane will have to bring you to my shop one day. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Sadika was a sculptor and jewelry designer. Gregory had often visited her gallery and boutique in Adams Morgan for a unique birthday or Mother’s Day gift for Diane. Diane had never seen her in any attire that was not African in origin. Tonight, she was dressed in a dramatic Senegalese-inspired flowing dress called a bouba and a starched galae of matching cloth reigned on her head.

  “How is he?” she asked Diane as her smile collapsed.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “I mean it, Diane. Bring him to the gallery one day. It would cheer him up.”

  Diane wanted to ask, How do you know? But wouldn’t she be just as verbally incompetent and unsure if the roles were reversed and it was she clumsily trying to talk to a longtime friend who had this disease?

  Otis Shepherd, a loan officer at the city’s only African American–owned bank, spotted them. He first shook hands with Mercer and then easily launched into a conversation with Gregory.

  “Man, we haven’t done anything since that Wizards’ game a couple of years ago. You know, the one where they actually beat the Cavaliers when LeBron was on the team?” Otis smiled broadly. In response, Gregory lifted his hand and pointed his index finger at Otis. Otis told Gregory jovially about his grandchildren and his recent retirement. The ease with which he spoke to Gregory, the way he held Gregory’s furtive shaky glance and would not let it go, burst Diane’s heart with gratitude.

  When Otis stood up to go back to his seat, Diane hugged him and he patted her on the back whispering, “Call me and Miriam anytime, for anything you need.”

  At home, Gregory turned to Mercer and said, “In the morning. The office,” and shuffled into his study.

  Diane prepared two cups of tea.

  “Whoever thought I’d be drinking goddamn herbal tea,” Mercer said. “Remember back in the day when you could just eat any damn thing you wanted to, when eating wasn’t something you needed a doctor’s prescription to do, when food wasn’t something you took pictures of in a restaurant and sent to friends on their phones?”

  Diane laughed as they heard Gregory rustling through papers in the next room.

  “Is he gonna be okay by himself?”

  “For a while anyway.”

  “I still can’t get used to it.”

  “There is no getting used to it.”

  “Scares me to death, Diane. I’ll be retiring from the firm in a year or two. I want to hang around long enough to mentor Lauren and the new leadership team. But all this has me thinking about my legacy, about having had three wives and no children. Who’ll care for me like you and Lauren care for Gregory?”

  “Some days, Mercer, when I’m really brave, I ask myself what he’s feeling. What he’s thinking?”

  “What can life be like for him now?”

  “I can’t convince myself that the life he’s living, that he’s trapped in, means nothing. That it
’s only emptiness and torture. Please, Mercer, I have to believe there’s more than we can see. More than we can know. Maybe more than we need to know.”

  “Is he all gone?”

  “I still see flashes of who he used to be sometimes. But I feel caught in a permanent state of grieving. I’ve suffered a loss. It’s like a hurricane every day. I’ve lost my husband, and I still don’t know what that will mean for me going forward. It can’t go on much longer like this. It’s too much. I came in from an evening meeting last week and found Lauren sitting in the dark right here where I’m sitting. In the dark crying. Gregory had trashed the study, and she had finally gotten him to sleep. She told me ‘Mom, I can’t do this. I love him, but I want my life back. I want the life you both prepared me to have. This isn’t it.’ What could I say? I want my life back, too? I’ve started investigating alternatives.”

  “You mean like one of those places …”

  “Yes.”

  A heavy, solemn calm mushroomed between them. Sipping their tea, only the sound of Gregory in the room with his papers crackled the silence.

  Then Diane said, “Mercer, I love that man. With everything the last couple of years have demanded of me and of him, I love him. I feel no relief thinking about putting him in an assisted living facility. I feel guilt. I feel remorse. I feel like I have failed. Gregory forced me to reconcile with a father I never wanted to forgive. He never believed I would remain as small and as afraid as, for a long time, I was comfortable being. I owe him too much. Especially for that.”

  1994

  “Are you ready to make the call?”

  The question was generous and long-suffering, asked regularly. It spoke to Diane of an unfulfilled promise Gregory assumed, perhaps imposed, but that she had never made. Asked quietly, without a hint of judgment, the inquiry was founded on his unshakable belief that one day Diane would reach out to her father. Gregory believed what she could not. He believed for her. His belief became an element in their marriage that she resented yet relied on to alter the DNA of her thinking. Each time he asked, she was consumed by shame and the fear that he would conclude that the mother of his children, the woman he had married, the woman he loved, was a coward. What else could he think when she reflexively reached out to him with an embrace, a hug, a kiss, as she whispered, “No, not yet.” Gregory had his beliefs and she had hers. She was cynical, bitter, and terrified, subscribing to a relentless faith in the power of lies and secrets. She had found herself several times edging toward the brink of calling her father, but the thought of the length of the potential drop, or a bloodied fall, always propelled her back from the edge.