“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked abruptly. “Don’t you miss being close to someone that way?”
“Sure.” Ellory got up to put his dish in the sink, and toss the waxed paper in the wastebasket. He washed the oil from his fingers, dried his hands, and looked at the cigarettes again, then came back and sat in his chair. “When I first started living here I used to masturbate every Monday night, right on schedule, once a week. It was something to look forward to.”
It did not sound like he was talking about sex. All the dirtiness and sweet spark had been taken out of it.
“I miss women,” he went on. “I miss that kind of intimacy. But I think whatever people do, they do in search of pleasure. Or trying to get rid of pain or fear, which is the same thing, basically. Everything, everything is really about that. Everything is about bringing your mind to a place where it’s at peace. There are just different routes. Some of them seem to lead there, and lead there for a while, and then don’t. Some things work for one person and don’t work at all for another person. Our sister takes a lot of drugs. Jake told you that, I’m sure. She just wants to put her mind in a pleasurable place or she just wants to get rid of the pain that’s there. It’s not a sin. It’s not something God despises her for. It doesn’t work, that’s all. And it just leads to her doing things, to herself and other people, that drive her farther away from the peace she’s looking for. That’s hell.”
Janet was staring at him. I was looking at the bookcase on the wall, measuring everything Ellory said against the photograph there.
“Bro,” I said, when he stopped for a breath.
“What?”
“You’re, you know, preaching a little.”
Janet said, “No he isn’t, Jake.” Then, to Ellory, “And this works for you, living like this?”
“It’s a good setup for someone like me, it wasn’t always.”
“Jake said you were wild.”
“I was afraid of dying, that’s all.”
“And now you’re not.”
“I might be, when the time comes. I imagine I will be, but maybe less than I would have been if I hadn’t come here. I’m curious about it some days.”
“Me, too,” Janet said.
I got up off the bed a little too suddenly, stepped out through the front door, and closed it most of the way. I went just far enough to be out of the window light, partway around the corner of Ellory’s little house. I looked across the dark fields. By then the moon was well up in the sky and the night was clear and we were far out in the countryside so that, even with the moon, there were about three times as many stars as I was used to seeing. You could feel the first bite of winter in the air. And in the darkness the monastery grounds and the dark shapes of buildings on a little rise half a mile away seemed to be giving off the scent of desolation.
My hand and my rib and one side of my face throbbed every time a pulse of blood went through them. I knew we weren’t going to New York then. I suspected I had never really been planning to take Janet to New York on that trip. Something moved up through me when I admitted that to myself, a twist of old anguish twirling up the bones of my back. Riding along with the anguish, or right behind the anguish, came a beautiful sense of relief, something like what I had felt at Diem Bo on our first date. It was a kind of fearlessness, I understood that then, a way of just standing in the moment of time I was standing in and knowing I could probably survive whatever was going to follow that moment. I understood, too, that, in their own ways, Janet and Ellory had both learned to do that, live in the present like that, gobbling up their fears.
After a time I went back into the cabin and they were looking at me. “Thought I’d pee outside,” I told them, and when Janet pursed her lips again, I said, “The neighborhood has gotten lousy here, I thought I heard somebody stealing the golf clubs out of my truck.” And when she kept her eyes on me and that expression on her mouth, I said, “I just needed a few seconds. All is well.”
But she kept looking.
We stayed another ten minutes. We talked about plans to bring my mother there for the January visiting day, and about the season the Red Sox were having, and a little bit about Janet’s mother, a devout Catholic herself. Over the course of the time we’d been dating, Janet had told me how her mother had taken care of her as a girl and as a young woman, doing her chest PT every night, taking her to doctors, sleeping on a cot beside her hospital bed, cooking special meals. A little overprotective at times, Janet said, but kind and tough and fond of men who worked with their hands. Janet kept saying how much I’d like her and how much she’d like me. I’d seen pictures of the woman. But, though she lived only ten minutes from Boston, I noticed that Janet made no move to actually introduce us.
My brother gets up at 4:15 every morning to pray, and Janet and I were supposedly on our way to New York City, so we said our good-byes, exchanging embraces like explorers getting ready to set off across different oceans. Janet and I stepped out into the night. When we were a few dozen steps from the cabin, I looked back and saw that the light was still on, the door still open, Ellory standing there in his bathrobe, watching us. Just before we crossed the rise, I looked back again and saw that the door was closed and the light still showing in the window and I knew he was praying for us then, asking whatever saints and spirits might be out there to watch over us, help us not to turn bitter and hard, not to be afraid.
I did not feel any of those things as we made our way across the monastery hayfield in the moonlight-not bitter, not afraid. I felt then, for some reason, that life was larger and more complicated than I’d ever thought. You couldn’t always be sure where bad luck ended and good luck began. You had to just endure certain things, and let time pass, and try to keep the gates open at the edges of your mind.
5
JANET AND I didn’t say a word as we made our way across the field and onto the logging road. We didn’t say anything walking back along the two-lane highway toward where the truck was parked, either. No cars passed, and the moon had swung behind the trees, but there were small breaths of cool October wind against the skin of our faces, and the woods were black and trembling on both sides of us, and we walked through a feeling you can’t find in the city. The whole human drama seemed like just a crazy sideshow, a circus ring of glitter and anger set against some enormous dark background, little wisps of hope here and there.
When we were sitting in the truck with the heater on, I said to her, “New York or by bus?” because I couldn’t yet bring myself to tell her where I was actually planning to go.
And she said, “A decent motel. New York tomorrow, okay?”
There was something strained and unfigurable in her voice. I thought maybe she was in a hurry then, or tired out, that she wanted to get to a motel room with enough time and energy to make love. But when we found a place, and checked in, and had gone into the room and closed the door without turning on the lights-which had become a little ritual for us-she said, “I want to do something different tonight, will you, Jake?”
I said that I would be happy to, depending on what kind of different she had in mind, but probably I’d be happy to.
“I want us to take off all our clothes and sleep next to each other and not make love.”
“Not make love, or not make love and not indulge in any variations on the same theme?”
“Nothing. I just want to talk a little, and then sleep. We’ll make love when we get to New York.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve never done that before.”
“I have,” I said. “I did it lots of times when I was fifteen and sixteen, except the girl wasn’t completely naked and neither was I and it didn’t go on all night.”
“And you remember it fondly,” she said.
“Vividly.”
“It’s one night, Jake. I’d like to try it.”
We tried it. We took off every particle of clothing and climbed into the motel bed where so many other souls had made love and had sex and
been angry and hopeful and afraid and alone. We just lay there in the darkness holding hands. It wasn’t too bad until she hooked her left ankle over my right ankle, and I could feel her thigh against my thigh, and the heat of her all down the length of my leg.
“Is this supposed to be in sympathy with Ellory or something?”
“He’s a kind man. I liked him. I liked what he said about pleasure and dying.”
“Are you paying me back for being a gorilla with the governor?”
She pushed me with her elbow, not too gently. “It’s not a punishment, it’s an experiment. It’s just something I want to do. I want to feel what there is between us if we don’t have sex.”
“You can feel what there is between us. Let me turn on my side.”
Another strong elbow. “Stop,” she said. “I mean it. If you can’t handle it I’ll just crawl into the other bed. It’s one night.”
“Alright.”
“I have something important to tell you.”
“Alright,” I said, but in the course of three seconds the air in the room had changed. I breathed in and out. I said, “Is this because of what happened in your office?”
“It has nothing to do with that, and it has nothing to do with meeting your brother. I had already made up my mind before those things.”
“You’re going to become a nun,” I said, because I was nervous then. Memento mori. I was worrying about what Ellory might have said to her when I went outside. I was thinking there are all kinds of deaths and you’d have to be half-machine in order not to remember that.
“Jake. Stop.”
“I’m stopped. I’m ready,” I said, but naturally I wasn’t. All my beautiful thoughts about being in the moment and not being afraid just lifted up and flew out through the cheap drapes and I was left lying there in the body of my actual self.
“I’m going to put my name on the list for a double lung transplant,” Janet said, up into the darkness of the room. “I thought, before, that I’d never want to do that, but now I’m going to.”
6
WHEN SHE WAS ASLEEP I tried to time her breaths against my own. Three to one-quick short inhales and slower exhales, as if her body didn’t quite have the strength to push all the old air out. I wondered how she could even sleep, breathing that way, and why it didn’t exhaust her by about eleven o’clock in the morning.
I heard trucks going by on the highway next to the motel, and I thought constantly about what she had said. From the hours I’d spent in front of Gerard’s computer I knew what it meant to sign up for a double lung transplant: it was the last miracle a CF person reached for before giving up. Even if she made it to the top of the list of people waiting for new lungs, and even if the operation worked, she’d be condemning herself to a life of even more medication and even more side effects. Tremors, bone loss, sleep problems, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, muscle cramps, increased susceptibility to diabetes and to opportunistic infection. She’d still have cystic fibrosis, but for a year or five years or eighteen years, she’d breathe, and for a while at least the breaths would come easy.
I took her left hand and lay it palm-down on top of my thigh, and put my own hand over it. I tried to calm myself by breathing with her, concentrating hard on that awkward rhythm and the feeling of her hand and nothing else.
But it is hard to keep the mind still like that. I went from the rhythm of our breathing to thinking about what Ellory had said about his wild years. From there I tried to imagine, for the ten thousandth time, what Giselle must have gone through in the hour before she died, and then what dying really was.
Air stopped going into and out of a pair of lungs, that was all. Your heart stopped squeezing and relaxing. Millions of cells stopped doing the kinds of things they had been doing for ten or twenty-seven or ninety years. Clear enough. But if you tried to ask what happened to the part of the person you couldn’t see or measure, the part you envied or argued with or loved, then you sounded like a ninth-grader on marijuana.
It seemed to me, lying there with Janet, skin against skin, that Ellory had come to understand something I didn’t understand-not about death or God as much as about minute-to-minute living. In the sterile room, with the whine of tires and truck engines beyond the windows, I felt that some absolutely essential fact was right there for me to take hold of, right there. I went to sleep reaching for it.
7
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning I told Janet I had changed my mind about where we were going. “I’ll take you to New York next time it’s my turn to pick,” I said, and she nodded and said that was fine. But there was a strain in my voice, a weight, a bad nervousness. And I knew her well enough by then to see in her eyes that she wanted to talk about it.
When we were in the truck again, I asked if she could deal with four more hours of riding.
“I love riding,” she said. “It’s moving without having to get out of breath.”
“We’re going to Pennsylvania.”
“Fine, Jake. Just go,” she said, but there was something unspoken between us, wisps of warm smoky fear in the air of the cab.
She sat with her bare feet up on the dashboard, one arm dangling out the window, the wind blowing strands of hair around her face. To make it so we didn’t have to talk, I put good music on the CD-John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Springsteen, Chopin, Saw Doctors, Dave Matthews, a little-known Cajun outfit called Doctor Romo.
To someone used to the Rhode Islands and New Hampshires of this world, Pennsylvania seems like an enormous state, the Montana of the east. I remember Gerard saying, after his cross-country bike trip the summer of his divorce, that Wyoming and Idaho were nothing compared to Pennsylvania, where, instead of one long climb and one long descent, you had an endless series of exertions and exhilarations, pain and freedom, pain and freedom, sweat and pain and then wind in your face and pure effortless speed.
From time to time I would feel Janet looking at me in a way she had not looked at me before our monastery visit. But we said almost nothing and did not touch. We drove and drove.
The place where we finally stopped was a humble little city in the middle of the Alleghenies. A few months earlier, nine miners had been trapped in a coal shaft there for three days before being pulled out. They had gone through something unforgettable, horrible. And the people who rescued them had been smart and brave, and all kinds of other people had given food and help. But something about it sickened me: the news anchors with their manufactured earnestness, the way the reporters seemed almost to enjoy it, locals enjoying the attention, too; the way, after a certain critical point, you could smell the book deals and movie deals, as if all of it had been nothing more than food for a ravenous entertainment machine. Not long after the miners’ ordeal, I gave my television set away to one of the local homeless shelters. I did not know how you were supposed to tell about that kind of terror, that kind of worry that someone you loved might slowly suffocate underground while you wanted to help them and couldn’t. But I knew a sour note when I heard it, and the TV, it seemed to me, had been full of sour notes all that year.
The pickings were a bit slim thereabouts, but I found the nicest hotel I could. We walked the streets for a while to work off the dullness of the drive, then ate at a steak house, went back to the room, and left the lights out.
“Are we there yet?” Janet asked. We were on the fourth floor and she was standing at a half-open window looking down at the lazy traffic.
“Almost.”
The day had been warm for October-low seventies-and at lunch she’d changed into the other dress she’d brought, a summery dress with small yellow flowers everywhere on a sky-blue background. I stood behind her, unzipping it. When I had unzipped it as far as her hips, I tugged it down off her shoulders, and when she took her arms away from the windowsill, the dress fell around her feet. Carefully, as if we had all of time in front of us, I picked up the dress and lay it on one of the beds. I put my hands on her bare shoulders and we stood that way, front to
back, looking out. “The kids are asleep,” I said. “I checked.”
“You’re nervous again. I could feel it at dinner.”
“Calm is my middle name.”
“You’re going goofy.”
“Highway hypnosis,” I said. “Hydroplaning. Driver’s side air bags. My other truck is a Cadillac.”
“Jake.”
“What.”
“Take off the rest of my clothes.”
I did that. Still, she did not turn around. Our breathing was more similar now.
“Is there something here you want me to see?”
“Tomorrow there is.”
“Alright. Are your clothes off?”
“No.”
“Is my body exciting to you? I’m not fishing for… my hips seem wide to me, my feet seem large. I don’t think that would be exciting. This body doesn’t work right in so many ways I just want it to be right in one way.”
Instead of answering I lifted up her hair and kissed the back of her neck. Which was saltier than any normal back of the neck should have been. Which was the whole problem. I kissed the back of her neck and then I kissed the back of where her lungs were, and then kissed down bit by bit to her heels. She turned around and I kissed slowly back up, not touching the usual sex places but spending time on the bones at the top of her hips, the insides of her elbows, her collarbone, her throat. She stood still and didn’t touch me, but the tightness came out of her muscles almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep against me the night before.
“Cells singing,” she said, at one point.
I kissed her mouth, and because she could go a fairly long time that week without coughing, it was a long kiss, something new for us.
For some reason then, I bent down and licked the surgery scars on her belly, which she’d thought were so ugly that she’d stopped ever wearing a two-piece bathing suit, thirteen years old. I kissed the soft fleshiness of her breasts as if I could heal what lay beneath them, as if the pure force of my wanting pleasure for her could pass through skin and flesh and blood and cauterize the colonies of bacteria. Cells singing. In fact, the bad bacteria communicated with each other-researchers had just discovered that-and different ones had different assignments, like bees in a hive, like terrorists on an airliner. The tiny tubes through which her life ran were being choked off in minuscule increments every day, every instant. I kissed and licked her and I believed I could feel all that going on inside her and I wanted to burn down into her with what was in the middle of me, with the good in me, the good-wanting. I did not want any more death and suffering now, in my little world, not for years and years. Sometimes I could feel the force of that not-wanting as it scraped up against something larger. My own power, my own small will, against the huge merciless spinning-out of time. I had made a year of trying to yield to that something larger, and be understanding, mellow, resilient. But I wasn’t in a mood to do that anymore.
A Little Love Story Page 9