The Wide Circumference of Love

by Marita Golden

  Diane was trembling. Enraged, confused, she felt assaulted, like the victim of a theft. Rare were the moments when they could replicate what it felt like to be a family again, when celebration was easy and heartfelt.

  All evening, through dinner at the steak house and on the drive back to Somersby, she had been watchful, waiting, expecting disaster to derail her intricately planned evening. Would Gregory become suddenly disoriented in the restaurant and demand to leave? Would he stare in stoic, blank indifference at Cameron and reduce the boy to tears when he refused to or could not respond to the boy’s frightened inquiries?

  Neither had happened. And she had foolishly congratulated herself too soon, beaming when Gregory opened the briefcase, certain that her concerns this time were unjustified. This evening would be the special and love-filled gathering she had planned. Who was this woman, Wallis, to Gregory, she wondered. She didn’t know but Gregory did, she was now certain of that. That woman, as lost as Gregory, had ripped out her heart. She had no idea how she would rise from her chair.

  Sean now sat beside Gregory, his hand on his shoulder, whispering into his ear.

  Mercer shook his head and said, “I wonder what she was like back in the day.”

  Summoning a composure from the scattered threads of her emotional tailspin, Diane turned to Lauren. “It’s been a long night. I’m sure your father’s tired.”

  Lauren and Sean gathered the paper plates and sodas. Mercer leaned over and kissed Diane on her cheek good-bye.

  Diane helped Gregory stand up and they headed to his room, Diane carrying all the birthday gifts except the gift from Wallis, which Gregory clutched tightly under his arm. When they entered Gregory’s room, Diane calmed herself by concentrating on placing the photographs in the briefcase carefully and strategically like sentries on Gregory’s desk and bookshelf.

  She had tried to ignore the woman, had convinced herself that she was a mere annoyance. Foolish. Vain. That’s what she’d been. Seething with anger at herself, at Gregory, and at a woman she could not believe was a threat to her relationship with her husband, Diane crossed her arms against her chest to calm her rampaging nerves. “Gregory, why did Wallis give you a birthday gift? Is she your friend? Your special friend?”

  “Wallis is my wife,” he said adamantly, pushing her away for emphasis.

  As nausea roiled in her stomach, Diane watched Gregory place the boxes on his desk and sit so still on the bed that he seemed to be meditating.

  “It’s your birthday, and you’re sixty-nine years old today,” she whispered, determined that at least one thing between them would be true before she left.

  Outside, the snowflakes resembled falling stars. Diane longed to float upward into the billowing darkness overhead. Sean reached for her as a spasm forced her to lean over a few feet from the car and expel the evening’s hearty meal.

  “What happened back there?” he shouted, rubbing her back while Lauren opened the trunk and retrieved a wad of paper towels that she thrust in her mother’s hands.

  Inside Sean’s car, Diane sat in the passenger seat wiping her face and taking small sips from a bottle of water Lauren had given her.

  “What happened?” Sean insisted.

  “I asked him why Wallis gave him a gift. I asked him if she was his friend. He told me she was his wife.”

  “Mom, he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Lauren said, comforting her.

  Diane looked at her children beneath the ceiling light Sean had turned on. She saw their faces mapped in concern and disbelief. Looking from Sean to Lauren and back again she asked, “How did we lose him? How did we lose him so completely, so fast?”

  Wallis steps into a hallway that is as quiet as she imagines the beginning of time must have been and pads to Gregory’s room. His moan welcomes her as she unbuttons her nightgown and lets it fall to the floor in the room’s patient, somber darkness. He cannot see her still tear-stained face. Wallis still seethes with the humiliation of being forced from the birthday party. She had never found a man worth her love. Now she has and they want to keep them apart. Sliding beneath the covers, beside Gregory, Wallis eases into his waiting arms as her sobs erupt like a howl. Gregory whispers “shh, shh” and holds her close, Wallis’s body a bulwark in the night.

  Chapter Twenty

  DECEMBER 2015

  Half a dozen prescriptions huddled around the lamp on the nightstand beside Alan’s bed. He’d warned Diane away from his left knee, worn from years of running. She suffered from sporadic back pain only partially relieved by yoga and walking. Performing this dance, their bodies were aging, yet eager and sure-footed. Diane’s kiss was fierce and anguished, all tongue, thrusting and impatient. Alan’s longing was unvanquished and so the slick, moist, hide-and-seek of the first moments soon gave way to Diane mounting his solid fullness. The ecstatic shudder melted into a satisfaction sprung from the soil of tenderness, gratitude, and desire.

  After, Diane lay swathed in the sheets resting on Alan’s chest, washed up on the shore of him, stretching her arms around his girth. Gregory was all angles and length and muscle. Only the second man she’d had sex with in over thirty years, Alan was round and soft, his flesh sheer, grand invitation. Thirty years ago, she was sure he would not have moved her. Now he had consumed and resurrected her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You’re more than welcome.” Alan laughed, his chest rumbling in delight.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” she told him.

  “I’ve wanted to do this since that night at Westminster, but you were a married woman so I went home that evening and had a stiff drink and told myself such is life.”

  Their laughter mingled, glowing in the dark. Diane closed her eyes and listened to the sound of Alan’s breathing and her own shallow, contented breaths. They both slipped into a sated slumber, shifting positions so that Diane lay on her side.

  When they woke a half hour later, Alan turned on the halogen lamp on the nightstand. He kissed her earlobe, squeezed her, and told Diane, “You’re still a married woman.”

  “Is this going to be too complicated for you?” she asked.

  “It’ll probably get complicated for us both. I kind of hope it does.”

  Alan released her and sat up, plumping the pillows behind him. Diane turned on her back, her head resting on his groin. She lay gazing at the bedroom walls where, like the walls in so many of the rooms of his house, Alan had hung moody, artistic black-and-white photographs of musicians. B. B. King sat in his dressing room cradling his guitar, Lucille, in his lap. Billy Strayhorn played a baby grand. Sarah Vaughn gripped a microphone in a close-up, her eyes closed, her face mapped with sweat as she sang on stage at the Apollo.

  “Gregory told me that some woman at Somersby was his wife. In his mind and in the life that he’s living, I’ve had to conclude that’s the truth.”

  “What was he like before?”

  “He wanted so much and felt he had a right to everything. He wanted all that and more for me and our children. He was brash, impatient, loyal.”

  “I like you. I more than like you,” Alan said, “and I’d like to feel I knew where we were headed. Where we could go? I need to know that.”

  Need, such a small word that sprawled over everything they were or dreamed of. Need, the thing that defined them when they entered the world dependent on others for everything, and when they left the world hoping only to be let go with grace and acceptance. Didn’t Gregory need someone, something he had found in Somersby with Wallis? Didn’t she need what Alan was offering?

  “One, we’ve been seeing each other for less than two months.”

  “You know that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”

  “And the kind of clarity you want evaporated for me four years ago.”

  “Wouldn’t you like a new kind of clarity?”

  “Alan, I can’t just impose it. It has to rise from the muck and mire, from the chaos of everything. And it will. In ti
me.”

  “Are we arguing or bickering?” he asked

  “I guess we’re being a couple.”

  “You still looking forward to stepping down from the bench, your honor?”

  “Yes, and with less and less trepidation every day. In the early period of our battle with Alzheimer’s I used to look forward to going to work, because there I was in charge, I set the rules. But as the disease progressed, I began to feel my work was a reflection of my other life, not an antidote to it.”

  “Whatever happened in that case a while back with the little boy whose mom was high on PCP and—”

  “Her trial starts in a few weeks and we finally found him a stable foster home.”

  “Isn’t that one for your team?”

  “I just hope it’s a win for that little boy.”

  The following night, plucking her earrings and watch from her jewelry box as she prepared to go to the Kennedy Center with Alan, for the first time Diane did not instinctively reach for her wedding band. Two gold bands melded together in a basket weave. She and Gregory had not wanted diamonds, supporting the growing international push to boycott diamonds from Apartheid South Africa, and they had wanted to use the money a diamond ring would cost for a down payment on a house. Gold bands had been enough.

  When she finally removed it from its resting place in the velour-lined top drawer of the jewelry box, the ring seemed so minuscule. The gleam of the gold was dulled and bore nicks and scratches. It was now a perfect symbol of all they had weathered. She wore the ring now out of habit and because, as Alan had reminded her, she was still a married woman. But now the ring felt false. In all the ways that being a married woman, a wife counted, she was not. The ring represented her and Gregory, but she was the only one with memories of what it meant.

  Her children, her family, her friends all asked her what she felt for Alan, where were they headed. Alan had reintroduced her to joy, but she was careening, falling toward and into a new version of herself. She was beginning to love herself all over, love herself anew. This love was a country to which she was ready to pledge allegiance.

  There had not been a Christmas tree in the house in years. But the upheaval of this year, moving Gregory into Somersby, the fact that she had actual plans for her future, the bitter sweetness of it all increased Diane’s longing for a tree.

  Alan drove her to a pop-up Christmas tree stand next to a gas station on Georgia Avenue. The evening air was moist, cold, the lot fragrant with the scent of pine. The trees had been picked over, manhandled, for Diane had waited until December 23 to act on her desire. They searched through the limp, leftover trees, bundled in cord, and the few standing upright on display, and managed to find a fresh, hardy-limbed tree. Alan tied it to the top of his car and they went to a nearby big-box hardware store and bought lights. The rest of the evening was spent putting up the tree and decorating it. When Diane tossed the last handful of silver icicles onto the tree’s branches, she burst into girlish laughter and for no reason hugged Alan.

  She made grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad and they sat together for the rest of the evening assessing the tree and sharing stories of their own Christmases past.

  And now, on Christmas Day, her family was all here for Christmas dinner. Alan was one of the hosts for a holiday dinner for the formerly imprisoned men that he mentored, a celebration at a northeast recreation center.

  Bruce and his son Aaron, Sean, Gregory, and Cameron sat in the living room watching the football game and Diane was in the kitchen. Margaret sat at the table slicing tomatoes and cutting lettuce for a salad. Lauren, two months pregnant but still not showing much, smoothing a bed of marshmallows over the top of sweet potatoes, said, “The more things change the more they stay the same. Just look who’s in the kitchen.”

  “Thank God.” Margaret laughed. “The men would just be in the way.”

  Standing next to Diane, who was placing kale into a pot, Valerie brushed melted butter over a pan of rolls.

  “You’ve been so good for Sean, Valerie. Please tell me he’s been good for you.”

  “He has. Sean has grounded me. He’s got his demons, but he’s easy to love.”

  “For years, we thought we’d lost him.”

  “He feels terrible about that time. And he’s mad at himself for those years. He’s still trying to figure out how and why he let that happen.”

  “Maybe he’ll never know, but asking at least proves my son has a conscience.”

  When Diane recalled this day, she would remember looking around the dinner table at Margaret beside Gregory, helping him eat; at Lauren, easy, comfortable with Cameron, her arm finding its way over his shoulder, again and again. Sean, proud and confident beside the woman he loved.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  MARCH 2016

  Diane and Gregory had been together all day. Diane had picked Gregory up from Somersby to spend the day with her and all morning, she had enlisted his aid with small cleaning tasks around the house. She watched as he washed dishes, wiped the stove and counter. He helped her make the bed. Now, he stood at the kitchen counter stacking knives and forks.

  After a lunch of tomato soup and chicken sandwiches, she helped Gregory into his jacket, slipped into hers, and they walked the length of their block. Back home, they napped. As Gregory slept, Diane watched a dribble of saliva stain his chin. There was no more desire. She no longer wore his ring. Another man was her lover. Alzheimer’s had sacked and looted their relationship, stripped it to the bone, yet they were mated, soldered to one another beyond rings, ceremonies, and contracts.

  Diane’s mentor, William Larson, a respected judge, had died recently of a stroke. At Somersby last month, Trent Simpson had succumbed to a heart attack in his sleep. A friend of Alan’s from high school died of diabetes-related complications. The son of a fellow judge hung himself in his garage after years of battling with clinical depression, and Randall Cullen, Gregory’s longtime friend, had just died of prostate cancer.

  Diane found herself suddenly entrenched in a season of relentless death and dying.

  But more terrible than anything she had ever seen or known this closely, this intimately, was Gregory’s suffering. According to his doctors, what she read, everything she knew and saw, Gregory was in stage three, or stage six, of Alzheimer’s, depending on how the horror of the disease was calculated. He could live, declining in increments, for two years, a decade, or more.

  And there was more suffering to come. His immune system would gasp for breath, impossible to retrieve. That mind, devious and cruel, would disrupt his body’s desire to move, his yearning to eat. Lethal blood clots and infections sown by the steady shutdown would ultimately stop the intricate and elegant biological system from working. This was not just Gregory’s fate to bear but hers to bear with him. A fate that could be distant and encroaching, drawing nearer every day. Her husband was dying. But no matter what, she would not turn away from the awful sight.

  Later, Bruce came by to take Gregory back to Somersby and Diane sat with Margaret and Lauren in the living room, drinking lemonade, and watching a movie on television.

  As a commercial came on, Lauren said, “Daddy won’t know he’s a grandfather.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Margaret said. “I don’t care what those doctors say. All the studies and research. Gregory will know he’s a grandfather.”

  “How?”

  “That’s between God and Gregory. When he holds that child the first time, believe me he’ll know.”

  “How are you and Gerald?” Diane asked.

  “We’re not dating anymore. It felt too weird to me. We’re waiting to become parents. That’s all I can say.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re together in the way that matters most now,” Diane said.

  “I thought your generation didn’t believe in marriage anyway,” Margaret said.

  “Grandma, you have to stop reading the Internet. I’m not ‘my generation.’ I’m me. Look at Sean and Valerie. They’re engaged.”
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  “Life is long, Lauren, and you have no idea how much of it still awaits you,” Margaret said.

  “In one of our talks right after he got the official diagnosis, Dad was rushing to tell me things, things he hadn’t said and was afraid he wouldn’t get to. He told me to have a life beyond my work.”

  “Well, dear, you now have a life, a real one.” Diane laughed.

  “And you aren’t alone in it,” Margaret said. “You aren’t alone.”

  Sean had begun to “steal” afternoons like this one, to drive to Somersby and tell Gregory, “Come with me, Dad. Let’s go for a ride.”

  This was a day of excessive, inordinate spring charm. The sky, flecked by speckles of sun lighting the mosaic of frothy blue and white, hovered confidently over the city. The playful winds and the hint of humidity promised a perpetual reign of days like this.

  Gregory sat beside Sean in the front seat, stylish in a thick, heavy cardigan, the curls of his white hair peeking up at the edges of a Washington Nationals cap. Sean allowed him to play with the radio dial. When the sound of rap music with its jittery belligerence blared through the speakers, Gregory nodded in satisfaction and Sean laughed. Sitting with his father at Somersby or going over on Sundays to join Gregory as he watched football or basketball, Sean thought of the inadequacy of words, how they mangled meanings and were just as often roadblocks as they were passageways. At Somersby, he watched his father sit with Wallis in the sunroom, in the library, in the den. The two of them now flagrantly joined. Her chatter, endless, easy, soothed his father as much as it boggled Sean’s mind.

  Today, Sean wanted his father to see the city’s frenzy of construction. The skyline was now permanently bejeweled by cranes; the equipment mammoth in strength could be humbled by a strong wind. The staid, mannerly city of Sean’s youth was now brash and cocksure. New buildings arched upright and edgy. Downtown now had its own version of Park Avenue, lined with glitzy glass emporiums and temples to glamour.