by Rich Terfry
“Well, right off the bat, ‘authenticity’ is bullshit,” she said.
Then she reminded me—the supposed science student—of the first law of thermodynamics: that energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed. The same can be said about art, she said. She went on to argue that art is a migrant, or like a virus—its dispersion and mutation can’t be stopped. She talked about modernity and the Renaissance, about the printing press coming to the West from the East, and about Native Americans and Africans teaching Europeans their metal-working practices. Then, taking a book of her collected paintings from the shelf and flipping through the pages, she spoke about Frida Kahlo.
“Frida was declared a surrealist by André Breton even though she was working in Mexico, a world away from Paris, where the movement started. She rejected the label and distanced herself from it, even though people continued to associate her with it. She couldn’t relate to the other artists working in that style. She hated them. She called them a bunch of crazy sonsabitches or something like that. She wasn’t concerned with what was going on in Europe. I really don’t think she gave a shit what anybody else thought. She just wanted her work to be an honest reflection of her experience.”
I let Rose’s words sink in as we studied Frida’s self-portraits, one after another. I saw blood and tears and ugliness and brutal honesty and vulnerability and anguish and beauty. I was incredibly inspired, but also overwhelmed and traumatized. I succumbed to an emotional monsoon and cried all over Frida’s Without Hope.
•
Two nights later, my mother died.
She had been in palliative care the previous three weeks. Near the end, she and I no longer recognized each other. The machines she was hooked up to dilated her. She was polluted. I watched her drown and die of thirst at the same time. With seasick eyes she looked back at me—her failed attempt of a son.
Her last Saturday was a bad day. She lost consciousness and her vitals were very weak. The doctor told us that she could go at any moment. In the preceding days when anyone in her room started crying, she’d kick us all out. Her pain filled the room; there wasn’t space for anyone else’s. But now everyone gave in to weeping and resignation and last goodbyes. My mother seemed to have exited her body already and was hiding between worlds.
She hung on late into the night. I hadn’t slept in days and was exhausted. My father suggested I go home and said that he would call if anything changed. My apartment was a five-minute walk away. It was tough to leave knowing she wasn’t expected to make it through the night, but I finally did.
When I woke the next morning, I was angry. I had slept late and no one had called. My father had promised he would summon me when things changed. Maybe he had wanted to spare me some grief. I got dressed and jogged to the hospital.
As I got off the elevator in the palliative care unit, I saw my little sister at the end of the corridor. She was dancing. Of course this struck me as very odd. Then my aunt Maria was running down the hall toward me. She had tears in her eyes.
“Buck! Come quick! It’s a miracle!”
I raced to my mother’s room, where I saw a sight that was hard to comprehend. My mother was out of bed. She was sitting in a chair and cracking jokes. She was radiant. She looked more alive than she had in months.
“Good morning, Buck. How did you sleep?”
She held court in the middle of the room, telling stories and making everyone laugh. I even heard her say to her friend Donna that she wanted to go outside for a smoke.
Later a doctor pulled my father and me aside to say he couldn’t understand what was going on.
“That’s not a sick woman. All her vital signs indicate she’s as healthy as a horse. If she’s still like this tomorrow, I’ll have no choice but to send her home!”
The doctor couldn’t explain what was happening, but I have a theory. My mother had been very aware of what was going on in the room the night before. She had been resting, but she’d heard us singing our sorrows. And as it always had, this bothered her. She came back around to restore some levity to the room. She didn’t want her last hours to be depressing. She wanted joy and laughter.
After a great day of stories and laughter, my mother went to sleep with a smile on her face and never woke up again.
As a kid, I had become a quiet and sensitive person in response to my mother’s fragility. I had become an introvert in response to my mother’s fury. And I’d become a secretive person by following my mother’s example. So when she lay on her deathbed, cancer swarming her body, I didn’t dare ask the one question I longed to pose: did I have a secret brother? But the question had burned in my throat and tormented my sleep. My childhood had been so confusing. In my mother’s last days her room was dark, yet she covered her face with her hands. I could see that a flame still lit her heart. All she had to do was open her mouth and it might have leaped out. For weeks I had watched her slowly turn to dust. Before she had a chance to sing her song, a wind stole through the window, blowing out the flame and carrying her away. Her secrets were safe and her silence became my only inheritance.
The person who had frightened me most in the world was now gone. But there was no relief for me in that knowledge, no sense of liberation. Gone too was the fulcrum of my existence. The fear she instilled in me was essential to my life’s drive. “I’ll show her” was my maxim. I had endured, lived, fought, worked—all to make her love me. Without her acceptance and approval to seek, where would my momentum come from? As much as I wanted to, I didn’t really believe the mumbo-jumbo that she was “watching from above.” The only thing that had stuck with me from my childhood Catholic-church-going days was an unremitting feeling of guilt. The fact is, I was more devoted to my mother than I had ever been to Jesus or Babe Ruth or anyone or anything else. My silent service to her had been my religion—and now my god was dead. I felt deep down as though I were damned to oblivion.
•
Rose suggested that an escape was in order. She talked me into dipping into my baseball fund for a trip to New York City. Neither of us had ever set foot outside Nova Scotia, and the idea of travel daunted me. But I was in need of a break and I didn’t want to disappoint Rose. She was so excited by the prospect. I wanted to give her the world.
We didn’t make a plan. We just left. We packed a bag and walked across town to the train station. When I opened my eyes again, we were caught in the riptide of Penn Station. It dragged us under and soon we were in over our heads. Neither of us had a credit card. No hotel would take us. We weren’t ready for the speed of the sidewalks, the glare in people’s voices, the throb in the air. We were like a couple of soft indoor cats allowed outside by mistake. After we spent a few hours of hissing and low crawling, sheer blind panic guided us to a tenderhearted old front-desk clerk at the Washington Square Hotel in Greenwich Village. Maybe he took pity on us, maybe he was frightened by the desperate menace in my eyes or maybe he was bewitched by Rose’s cleavage—whatever the reason, he gave us a room despite our lack of a credit card and without asking for a cash deposit.
The old hotel had weathered ups and downs. It had catered to some famous guests through the years (Ernest Hemingway, Dylans Thomas and Bob), but now it was a bona fide shithole: the rooms had a faint whiff of man piss, the carpets and wallpaper were stained and peeling, the bedding was polka-dotted with cigarette-burn holes. The air itself had a yellow tinge and was haunted by the ghosts of overdoses. The room Rose and I occupied was not equipped with its own bathroom. Judging by the condition of the one we shared with the fuddled and tormented ladies and gentlemen of our corridor, this may or may not have been a blessing.
We spent as little time as possible in that room over the next couple of days, but its taint was so powerful it contaminated our perception of New York City. All we could see was filth and vermin, gaudiness instead of glitz and glamour. Rose went from bitter to taciturn. I tried to revive her with gifts, but it was hopeless. She was soon unable to cope, and interred herself in the tomb of
the hotel room. She asked to be left alone, so I wandered the streets of Lower Manhattan, cursing myself for not being a better man. This was not the getaway my psyche had been craving. We should never have left Penn Station that first day; we should have turned tail and gone right back home. But we were bound by the constraints of our return tickets.
The budgetary restrictions of our trip should have been strict. But on the last day of our stay, I discovered during a negotiation with an ATM that my bank account was not only empty, it was overdrawn. I had monitored our spending poorly and failed to take into account the Canadian-to-American exchange rate, which was horrendous at the time. The ten dollars in my pocket was all I had left in the world. My anxiety spiked so high and fast that my knees buckled. To the passersby I must have looked like a financial heretic kneeling in deference before his vindictive god.
I couldn’t tell Rose about our situation. I didn’t want to scare her more than she already was. If she hadn’t already resolved to break up with me, surely this would be the last straw. Getting all the way back home on ten bucks, and without Rose discovering this was all I had left in the world, was going to require great delicacy and creativity.
When I returned to the hotel room, I was surprised to find Rose stretched out on the bed, wearing a lustful expression and nothing else. It was the Rose I remembered from home, the Rose I hadn’t seen in days. Maybe she was relieved that our ordeal was almost over, that we were finally going home. She looked more cartoonishly beautiful than ever. She propped herself up on her elbow and then pointed to her tummy and said, “Why don’t you come on over and put a baby in here?” My earlier dread vaporized in a poof. I pole-vaulted onto the bed. Rose and I devoured each other. We bit promises into each other’s skin. We cursed vows into each other’s mouths. We inhaled each other’s fire.
When the smoke cleared, we collected ourselves and our belongings. It was time to go. Pressure quickly pounded inside my skull. Somehow we had to escape the hotel without paying.
“If the guy at the desk sees us leaving with our bags and asks if we’re checking out, we’ll say we’re just going to do laundry, okay?” I directed Rose.
“Uh, okay. Why?”
“Well, on the off chance anything happens with our train, I want to make sure we can come back. We were pretty lucky to get this place and I don’t want to take any chances.”
“What could happen to the train?”
“Well, probably nothing, but you never know.”
“When are you going to pay for the room?”
“I’ll deal with that later. Don’t worry.”
I didn’t know it then, but in that moment it was over between me and Rose. I used my last ten dollars to buy her sandwiches on the train. She didn’t say another word to me until our train pulled into the station in Halifax.
“I’m going home. To my place. You should go to your place.”
And as she walked away forever, she said, “See you in the movies.” I never saw her face again.
•
Ten years later, out of the blue, I was contacted by Fiona, Rose’s naked roommate. She helped fill in a few of the gaps that had left me more mixed up about love and less able to function in society than I’d been before Rose and I met. Fiona explained that the night Rose got home from our trip to New York she’d been very upset and couldn’t stop crying. That surprised me. Rose had been so cold when we parted ways. And I had never imagined her crying, for as sweet and empathetic and in touch with herself and the world around her as she was, it seemed to me as if she had been born without the ability to cry. Not that she was a hard person. I think she just saw the surrender to sadness as a waste of important energy. She had always been a step ahead of her tears, channelling her sadness in constructive ways. But on this occasion, she’d been overcome. When Fiona asked her what was wrong, Rose replied that she was certain she was pregnant. Her witch’s intuition had kicked in strongly, immediately after our last hurrah in the Washington Square Hotel. She’d taken a test the next morning, and sure enough. Looking back, I think that the isolation she’d experienced in Nova Scotia and her dream worlds of art, baseball and witchcraft had provided Rose with a shelter from realities she saw as ugly and mundane. But the harshness of New York and the sudden realness of having a mouth to feed had brought the roof of her carefully built shelter crashing down.
Fiona went on to explain that Rose had simply run away from the debris. She was scared, and she hated how the world was beginning to look. And while she’d had strong feelings for me, she didn’t want to add to the already huge pile of my burdens as I dealt with the loss of my mother and with the cracks that had been widening across my baseball and music dreams. Fiona had helped arrange and pay for an abortion, and afterwards Rose had fled Halifax altogether. Fiona wasn’t sure where she’d gone but guessed that she went to live with her father in a town called Narrows, a few miles due south of Macon, Georgia. This was easy enough to imagine. Rose’s spirituality seemed like a good fit with Georgia’s culture, and Narrows was the birthplace of the Georgia Peach—baseball immortal Ty Cobb.
There wasn’t much solace for me in Fiona’s story. It was nice that Rose had my best interests in mind, but I resented that she hadn’t been willing to talk about the situation with me. Too many important decisions in my life had been made for me, and this left me with a deep-seated feeling of helplessness. And as utterly foolish as it may have been, I had really wanted to have a baby with Rose at the time. Looking back, I thank goodness it didn’t happen, but she’d meant the world to me then. I believed I could have loved her forever. And maybe I was right—because in a way, I still do.
•
Ten years on, I was a highly anxious, pain-afflicted, sexually paranoid, parsimonious extreme introvert, dependent on the narcotic of despair. My face had frozen into a permanent hangdog expression that prompted people to ask “What’s wrong?” several times a day, even if my mood was fine. I don’t blame all this on Rose, of course. In fact, her walking away motivated me.
First order of business after the trip to New York was to get myself back on my feet financially. I needed to build up the baseball fund again. I found a new job working the graveyard shift in the parking garage of a hotel. My shift was from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. It wasn’t as much fun as working at the Paper Chase, but it paid better. There wasn’t much coming and going between three and five in the morning, so sometimes I’d be asked to lock up and help with assorted odd jobs around the hotel. I’d push a broom, collect room service trays, check rat traps, book call girls.
One night I was asked to slide copies of bills under the doors of guests who were checking out the next morning. I entered the corridor of the top floor of the hotel and eased the door of the fire escape stairwell shut so it wouldn’t slam and wake anyone up. When I turned around, a woman was standing there. I was startled; I rarely encountered another person during those hours. But more startling was the fact that the woman was completely naked except for a pair of high heel shoes, upon which she was having trouble balancing—she was quite drunk. She was in her mid-to-late twenties and she smelled rich. Her hair had been fixed in a fancy do, which was now beginning to fall into disarray. She looked like actress Nina Brosh.
“Do you work here?” she asked me.
“Yeah.”
“I need your help with something.”
She led me to the door of her suite. I was faced with a dilemma. I had been instructed never to enter a guest’s room, but also to do everything possible to help guests with their needs. I followed her inside.
I had never seen the inside of one of the suites and had always wondered what they were like. This one had a fireplace, with a fire blazing inside it. Otherwise, there was no sign that the woman occupied the space at all. There was no suitcase on the floor, no trash in the wastebasket. The room seemed almost untouched.
“I lost my dress,” she said.
“I can see that,” I replied.
Before I go any further, let me expla
in a few things. This was a fancy hotel—at the time, the only five-star hotel in the city. So mostly wealthy people stayed there. And where there are rich people, there are good-looking people. That’s just the way it is—a universal truth. There were beautiful people crawling all over this particular hotel all the time.
By now I had also learned that people often become someone else when they stay in hotels. A lot of people leave their moral compass at home when they travel. It makes sense: They’re strangers. They’re far away from home. Most of them will never see the hotel staff and other guests again, and some of them become animals. Ask anyone who’s worked in the hotel industry and you’ll hear the same thing. I saw wild things every night: people having sex in windows, people pissing all over the place, people getting wasted, people taking their clothes off.
That night, the naked woman proceeded to explain that she had to get something or deliver something to someone she knew who was staying down the hall. He or she was her manager or someone whose respect seemed important to her. She was being counted on to show up on time and take care of an important errand. She needed to make a quick rendezvous with this person but couldn’t find her dress.
“I need to borrow your pants for a sec. And your shirt.”
“Whoa. I don’t know …”
The woman’s voice immediately rose. “If you don’t give me your clothes, I’ll scream and wake up the whole floor! I’ll complain to your manager that you were coming on to me!”
“Okayokayokay!”
I made her promise she would be back in two minutes and went into the bathroom to undress. When I tossed out my pants and sweater, she thanked me and promised to hurry. I heard the door of the room close. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited.
Two minutes passed. Then a third … Then a fourth … I wrung my hands. My mind raced. “Come on!” I whispered, willing her return.
Another minute later, I heard her re-enter the room. Relief washed over me.
“Men are such assholes,” I heard her say in a wounded voice. “If you want your goddamn pants, come out and get them!”