The Wide Circumference of Love

by Marita Golden

  Chapter Fifteen

  MARCH 2015

  The moment Diane opened the door to her study, Gregory pushed her aside, his face a mask of unreasoning fury. Her frightened gasp was swallowed up by the barrage of his hands grabbing her, his fists thudding and leaden, random yet precise.

  Help me, thundered in her mind yet lay yoked, denied an exit by her throat.

  If I hurt you … If I hurt you … Diane remembered as she sank to the floor, feeling her cheeks begin to swell.

  Gregory, now spent, breathless and leaning against her desk, shouted, “My memories? Where are they? I want them back.”

  “Help, help me,” Diane called, hoping Lauren was still downstairs. She burst in the room a moment later.

  “Daddy, Daddy, stop, please stop,” Lauren said, hugging Gregory, before carefully, almost gently, leading him from the room.

  Diane rose from the floor, crawled to her office chair, and hauled her body upright.

  “I made him lie down in the bedroom,” Lauren said, entering the room again and firmly closing the door. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “Yes.” That was the only word she could say.

  “My memories, where are they?” he had asked, demanded.

  It had been weeks since Gregory had spoken a full, declarative sentence. More and more, he broke through the simmering silence with a grab, push, or pull to express physically what he could not verbally. He would stand behind her and pinch her arm or bump into her on purpose. This, his doctor told Diane, was an expression of frustration and a language all its own. Yet periodically, coherence returned full blast.

  “Are you okay?” Lauren asked again.

  “No, Lauren, I’m not.”

  The bathroom mirror reflected the tender blush of a bruise beginning to form under her right eye, and Diane wondered how she would explain it at work.

  Nightfall invited Gregory to rise from bed and roam the house, pacing from room to room. Their house, normally placid, slumbering at night, was now restless and alive. It was during these weeks that Diane allowed herself to wonder how long she, how long they, could live like this. Gregory had hit her. Given her a black eye. The lock and chain she’d installed on the bedroom door offered a fragile illusion of safety. They were both incarcerated in different prisons. He no longer knew her as his wife. She refused to accept that this man was not her husband, for if he was not her husband now, he never had been.

  Days passed before Diane allowed herself to think and then speak the words. As caretaker, she was the closest and easiest target. The thought that they would not go on like this, that there would inevitably be an alternative, a separation, was never voiced. Speaking it to Lauren, to Sean, would turn her into stone.

  “If I ever hurt you …” he had said. Put me away.

  But back then, that was conjecture, hypothesis. Now, the if was real, and it rubbed her raw.

  When Gregory gazed dismissively at the bowl of soup and pushed it onto the floor, Diane cracked as rudely, as instantly, as the ceramic. “Clean it up right now, you bastard. All that I’ve done and this is what I get.”

  Her pulse splashed bitterness into her bloodstream. Tears blazed down her cheeks. The sound of the profane words filled her with an edgy pride.

  “Look at me,” she screamed, marching around the table to face Gregory. Then it was as though her arm was not her arm, but she felt it rising, felt the full force of the slap trickling up, then the feel of Gregory’s stubble against her fingers, the ripple of the slap in her fingertips. The slap that turned his face away. The slap that brought him to tears.

  The tears no longer moved her, and she didn’t care if he struck back. Maybe it would be better if they fought it out, she thought, fought it out … till the end … whenever that might be.

  The slap transported her into an unfamiliar, virgin zone of new misery and guilt. She had slapped her demented, mentally confused husband. Yet the slap was the most intimate act between them in years because of the passion it unleashed in them both.

  With an orgasmic radiance, the slap tingled in her fingers, pulsed throughout her body. She sank into the chair and watched as more tears filled Gregory’s eyes, his stunned, bright, and knowing eyes. He knew that he had been slapped, hurt, and abused. There were more tears trickling down his cheeks than she had seen him shed since this all began. She sat stony, hardened, and too brittle to cry. Too ashamed to cry. Too stubborn in this moment even to lean forward and kiss the red and tender spot where her anguish left damning evidence. Gregory, wobbly and quietly weeping, pushed himself up with his hand on the edge of the kitchen table and walked away.

  He could walk away from her. Find a hiding place where he would be safe from his crazed wife. But she could not walk away from him.

  Could not grab her purse and keys. Could not go.

  She could not, she could never leave him alone.

  Diane cleaned up the broken bowl and wiped up the soup from the floor, then stood at the counter and finally released her furtive tears. Through that veil, she looked at her hand, her fingers, and began furiously washing them. Drying them, she stifled a final sob and went to find her husband wherever he was in the house.

  There was only one person who she could tell what she had done. Later that evening, when Gregory had sunk into a deep and abiding sleep, she called Paula.

  “How do I find grace in this?”

  “You’re both walled off against each other. The only thing I can suggest, Diane, is that you climb over that wall. You’re the only one who can. Maybe grace is on the other side.”

  Diane was now a family court judge who had been both a victim and a perpetrator of domestic violence. An officer of the court who could be arrested. Gregory’s blows, her act of violence, each had pushed them across lines never before crossed. Made the unthinkable easy, even necessary. If Gregory could punch her, she could slap him. Husband and wife teetered on and then plunged over tipping points both dangerous and seductive. Seductive, because on the other side of the slippery demarcation lay the promise of relief, unreasoning, but entirely deserved.

  Despite what Diane thought she had decided, the prospect of placing Gregory in a memory care unit in an assisted living facility remained so toxic she thought of it as a kind of radiation that she could only approach timidly and with care. Weeks passed during which Diane shared her decision only with Paula, whom she asked to help her find suitable facilities to visit and assess. Octavia Sanders, the social worker who facilitated the support group she irregularly attended, guided Diane through the maze of the new world she was entering. She gave Diane a stack of booklets and brochures that Diane and Paula spent an afternoon looking through while Bruce and his son Aaron took Gregory out for a ride and to a steakhouse.

  Diane and Paula sat at Paula’s dining room table, passing the colorful booklets between them.

  “Listen to the names,” Paula said, “Lighthouse. Morningside House. Golden Pond. Heartlands. They sound like synonyms for heaven.”

  “I had no idea that a whole industry had sprung up to care for every aspect of growing old. Caregivers relief, life management, someone to come to your house and pay your bills when you can’t do it anymore.”

  “There but for the grace of God, my sister.”

  Week after week, she and Paula toured the upscale, attractive, and inviting facilities. Facilities that were beautifully decorated, colorful, serene, where everything about the décor and the atmosphere, and the competence of the directors they talked to, promised calm in the midst of a family’s storm. Home away from home.

  Paula had a friend whose mother was a resident of Somersby and who recommended it, so they toured Somersby’s memory care unit, guided by a certified nursing assistant. What they saw were mostly black men and women who had been middle-class professionals—airline pilots, lawyers, social workers. They looked healthy and prosperous, like life had been good to them—until now. When they looked closer, they saw the tall pecan-colored woman pacing the halls and ho
vering around the exit, her eyes as large as saucers, distant and suspicious; the man leaving his room in a business suit, newspaper folded under his arm, umbrella in hand, carrying a briefcase; and the woman sitting in a rocking chair, holding a doll in her arms in an ironclad embrace.

  The decision, in the end, was Diane’s alone to make. There would be no family meeting. She would just tell them—Sean, Lauren, Mercer, and Bruce—what she had decided and she would do it on the phone to avoid a scene. But Diane knew that she had to tell Margaret in person.

  In Margaret’s apartment Diane watched her water a four-foot-tall philodendron she had named Oprah. Through the window, Diane could see the spires of the National Cathedral. Margaret valued her independence and had refused to move in with Bruce or into a senior citizens’ retirement community. A half-finished crossword puzzle from the day’s paper lay folded on the table beside Margaret’s laptop computer. A CD of classical standards played in the background.

  Margaret placed the plastic watering container in the sink and then joined Diane in the living room. In gray velour pants and a black sweater, Margaret possessed the air of a dowager: her gray hair in a style that was braided, complicated, and regal; massive hoop earrings dangling from her ears; various rings on her fingers; and her reddened lips full and plump.

  “I know why you’ve come to see me, Diane. Lauren called and told me.”

  “I wanted to tell you in person.”

  “You have to think about yourself,” Margaret said, reaching for a crystal bowl of nuts on the table beside her. “Believe me, my dear, no one else will.” Margaret gently scooped a handful of the nuts, offered some to Diane, who politely declined. “I was fifty-five when Ramsey died. Fifty-five,” she said as though she did not believe it. “We were supposed to be entering our golden years.”

  “How did you cope, Margaret?”

  “You were there for the last of it. You saw what I went through.”

  “Yes, but I look back and remember now that I never asked you how you were doing, how you were holding up.”

  “If you had asked me, I’m not sure I would have known what to say or how to say it. But there was someone.” Margaret took a tissue from the box on the coffee table and wiped her hands.

  “Someone?”

  “Yes, a friend. A former colleague from Howard.”

  “Was it meaningful?” Diane asked, choosing the word specifically for the multitude of definitions it possessed.

  “Very much so.” Margaret smiled proudly. “He was a wonderful man. I needed someone who wasn’t family. Someone who wouldn’t ask me anything but would listen to what I said or even what I didn’t say. My husband was wasting away before my eyes. That man and I spent precious time together. No matter what kind of day it was, he helped me carry it, he helped me bear it.”

  “So you were … friends?”

  “And after a while we were much more. He made it possible for me to have the strength to love Ramsey the way he needed and not be angry because there was so little he could give me. You look surprised.”

  “It’s not every day that a woman hears her mother-in-law say she had an affair.”

  “I don’t think of it as an affair now and I didn’t then. My son is gone. The husband you once had isn’t there anymore. He’s not coming back to us. If you feel it’s time to place him in one of those homes, do it. I trust you, and I know you’ll find the very best one you can.”

  “Back when all this first started, the day we got the formal diagnosis, he told me that as we went through this together, to do what I felt was best, and especially if he ever hurt me. But back then, that’s the kind of thing I would expect him to say.”

  “Diane, he meant it. I know he did. He loved you too much not to.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

  The broad-limbed, sheltering trees were cloaked in early autumn dusk. Small mountains of leaves coated the sidewalks and lawns. The streetlights felt more eerie than illuminating as Diane sat in her car, hesitating to enter her house.

  Across the street, she watched Tim and Sandy Neilson heading toward her, arm in arm, walking their golden retriever, Sonny. Tim and Sandy were among the first on the street willing to talk to Diane about the changes they noticed in Gregory, and Sandy, a justice department lawyer, had told Diane that her own mother suffered from dementia.

  Wind rattled and blustered, swirling the piles of leaves, and she knew she had to go inside. When she opened the front door, she stepped into a pile of mail that had been slipped through the door drop and stooped to retrieve it from the floor. She tossed her briefcase and cashmere coat onto the sofa and turned on all the lights. Then she went upstairs to the bedroom and changed into a pair of fleece pants and a turtleneck.

  In the good times, dinners had often been casual, just the two of them: Gregory entering the house laden with bags from the Ethiopian place on Colorado Avenue. The bags of food on the counter. The smells humid, hot, fragrant, irresistible. That first look, that quick yet all-consuming gaze between them that affirmed he had come home. That look, so small and so much in it; Hello, his look said. Welcome home, she would beam at him. He often came home exhausted but wired, all of that at once.

  Upstairs he would go, the heavy-yet-light footsteps. She would open the Styrofoam plates of food, a startling slash of more vivid color than she had seen all day: the split peas, a muted tender green; the lentils yellow as the sun; the tomatoes, tiny seeded hearts; peppers so hot their heat sprang forth. Above her, Gregory’s feet padded across the bedroom floor as he removed the day’s uniform, neatly, carefully hanging up the slacks, the jacket, tossing the shirt in the hamper.

  Downstairs he would come, the steps lighter in slippered feet. The kitchen table now laden with food, the lamb and vegetables no longer in white Styrofoam cartons but on plates. Was this a night for paper plates, or had she lovingly spooned the meal onto fine china because they rarely used those dishes and they could make Tuesday night a celebration? There would be his beer, Sam Adams, and her glass of wine, chardonnay. They rarely said grace—they were grace. Eight, ten hours after walking out of the house, they had returned to it and to each other.

  How was your day? The question might as well have been Once upon a time, for all that it inspired. The stories of that day would be told seeking sustenance, agreement, support—for it really was them against that stupid, bigoted, idiotic world.

  But in the first week after Gregory’s move to Somersby, Diane had slowly wriggled into the skin of an unalterably new life. She had given notice that in the spring she would retire from the family court, a decision a long time coming but that felt finally right. Howard University’s law school had offered her a professorship that would begin in a year. A position that she had accepted. Howard University, where Ramsey Tate had attended medical school before heading the department of surgery at Freedman’s Hospital, where Margaret had also attended before teaching social work for many years, and where Gregory had attended the school of architecture.

  There was so much to look forward to, but the present she feared would never be past. There had been a call from Somersby about Gregory hitting one of the nursing assistants and his refusal to eat. These were common patterns of adjustment she was told, but she worried nonetheless about the decision she had made with so much guilt, anguish, and care. That call made it clear: her husband was institutionalized—no matter the charming name of the place or the lovely décor. She had left him in the care of strangers who she trusted would do for him only what was best.

  On this night, after eating a quick, improvised meal of leftovers, Diane looked at the mail, mostly junk, bills, and an update about Medicare. She washed her plate and cutlery, and then went upstairs to her bedroom.

  The day after Gregory had beaten her, she’d bought a chain lock and installed it on her bedroom door. It was a symbolic, second tier of defense in case Gregory dislodged the lock built into the doorknob. Diane stood in the doorway to her bedroom, quaking with me
mories of the fear she’d felt. If Gregory could hit her once, would he do it again? If he hit her again, what would she do to defend herself? The chain lock was modest and possibly inadequate, but both locks had withstood Gregory’s occasional attempts to enter the bedroom at night.

  Dismantling the lock was even easier and faster than installing it. As her hands rubbed the rugged spot bearing the imprint of the lock that had defaced the door and her union with Gregory, Diane opened the door wide, its creaking a kind of song.

  “Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?” the server asked, breaking into Sean’s thoughts.

  “No, no, I’ll wait. My sister’s always late.” He smiled then reached for his glass of water and took a sip.

  He looked across the street and saw the city’s main library branch. The ceiling-high windows of the restaurant showcased his father’s signature building. Because of its electric exterior design and the exuberant play of light and weather on the five levels of glass windows that formed the basic structure, Sean had always thought of the building as a book cathedral. The way the building arched toward the sky lifted anyone observing it and elevated everything that took place within its walls. Inside, the colorful, carpeted floors and soothing, sky-blue walls were totally surprising, as were the plush, comfortable chairs, and wide, solemn, burnished wood tables that made the building flush with a composure that honored what libraries were for, foremost, the work of the mind. Whenever he drove or walked past the library, he was honored to be his father’s son.

  He had finally attended one of the support group sessions his mother had told him about. While Diane chose not to attend, she had nonetheless urged that he and Lauren go. Near the end, he had raised his hand and asked the social worker, Ms. Sanders, “How can I make my father remember me?”

  “He hasn’t forgotten you,” she said. “But he doesn’t know you as an adult. He doesn’t recognize you, but I’ll bet he knows your voice. Talk with him about the childhood you’ve left behind. When you visit him, bring a photo of yourself when you were much younger. Talk about yourself in the third person, point to the photo and tell him about the person in the picture using your name.”