by Ron Irwin
When I let myself in, after calling Carolyn’s name all the way through the agonizingly slow ride up the elevator, I was confronted by carnage. The smell of congealing food, four days old, struck me first. And the god-awful mess; her clothes, pajamas, bills, papers. The detritus of a life scattered across the workstation and the kitchen and the tables and the floor. I felt as if the dust from a million years of grief had settled on the scattered cushions and unevenly pulled shades and crumpled rug. Carolyn was curled in bed, wearing a sweatshirt of mine and my boxers. I went to the bed, lowered myself next to her with the same helpless horror you feel when you find a grievously and senselessly wounded animal. When she awoke she took my hand, brought it to her mouth, and began to gnaw and make sounds that were like crying.
I nursed her as best I could. She was wearing a kind of heavy pad that she continued to bleed into, that had to be changed like a battle dressing. For a week I emptied out the small, stained cotton pillows that piled up in the steel wastepaper basket in the bathroom. I dressed her, undressed her, bathed her. I didn’t leave the apartment. I cleaned up, made food. She ate, she took pills, she cried, she took different pills. I started to forget to clean up, I stopped making meals. I’d move from her bed to the couch, listening always to the way she breathed, to the undulation of her crying, alert for her hysterical rage, terrified I’d fall asleep and she’d hurt herself.
I unplugged the phone, then the computer. We lived like people hiding in a war. We slept. She limped around the apartment. We drank. She kept filling the bandages and I kept throwing them away. I wrapped them in the plastic bags they delivered the food in from Huang’s Real New York Chinese Delivery.
I was the messenger. The messages were not very encouraging.
I called Carolyn’s parents from my cell phone every morning, standing in the hall and whispering my updates while Carolyn slept. I reported their daughter’s progress while sitting on the steel steps leading down to the sweatshop. I called them from the coffee takeout, from the sidewalk standing under the shepherd’s crook streetlamp in the evening.
She’ll pull out of it, I told them.
Things were kind of hard now but she was ‘making progress,’ I assured them.
I thought she was getting stronger by the day, I lied.
She was more like her old self, I fabricated.
In fact, she was listless and she was drugged and also, of course, drinking. We had a pretty considerable stash of valium (thanks to my constant flying), and she was pretty much through it. We also had the painkillers the hospital gave her. And wine. And vodka.
I didn’t mention the saturated pads of blood to her parents. That was her business, I reasoned. Women bleed, I told myself, and Carolyn had been scraped out. The bleeding would stop as it always did. I didn’t need to share that.
Of course, now I have a recurring dream that I switched on the computer during one of those long, listless afternoons and did a search for post-DNC bleeding. Or typed in “bleeding miscarriage” or “miscarriage infection” or “miscarriage care for patient.” I dream that I did a mere half hour of surfing, just to pass the time, just to make certain all this blood was normal.
I have another dream that I pick up the damn phone and call the gynecologist and ask a few hard questions. But I did not. I trusted the woman who slept next to me to know her body. Even my drugged out, drunk, sleeping partner who might have been shedding her own skin in there, who might have been losing her vision or her teeth or her sense of touch or slowly suffocating and was in no state to draw my attention to it. We traveled through those days in a dead funk. Two ghost ships drifting aimlessly on a dead, red sea.
Carolyn and I did not say things to each other that were comforting. We did not say, for instance, we could always have another baby. We could try again. We had time. I did not say I loved her. She and I spoke only about the drugs that were running out and where we could get prescriptions for new ones, especially the painkillers. She slept fifteen hours a day. The same person who for years had worked long, crazy hours weeks at a time, the sleepless life of the Indie filmmaker. We drank the things she had not been permitted two weeks before. Coffee. Wine. Scotch. Vodka. She continued to bleed.
Finally, I put a call in for her doctor, who called back five hours later to listen to me ask for more painkillers and hint about where I could find some more of those supersize bandages. The doctor blew up, demanded I bring her in immediately. The bleeding should have stopped days ago. There could be only one reason for what was happening now: infection. Had I looked at the blood? Was it dark blood or pink blood or was it blood and pus? What did it smell like? How the fuck was I supposed to know? The doctor repeated to me again to bring her in, right now, and slammed the phone down.
So I took Carolyn back to Lennox Hill. And as the taxi negotiated uptown on a busy Monday, she slept in my arms. Then we waited in the green waiting area, Carolyn nodding off, both of us looking like junkies. The doctor took one look at her, kicked me out, examined her, called me into her office, and curtly told us that a massive infection had set in and Carolyn was lucky to be alive. I realized we both smelled of booze as the doctor chewed us out. I was sweating it. Carolyn was running on painkillers, junk food, and wine. If the round of intravenous antibiotics the doctor prescribed for her did not work, there would have to be more surgery. Carolyn was checked in for observation and possibly for a procedure to halt the infection. I could stay during visiting hours but no longer because I was not a relative (live-in partners are really—when it comes down to the brass tacks of life—nothing). The doctor suggested I go home because I looked terrible and there was nothing that I could do for Carolyn now except let her sleep. I could come back tomorrow between two and five. It was more than a suggestion.
Before I agreed to leave, a nurse who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, hooked her up to a drip, refusing to make eye contact with me. Carolyn was asleep in seconds. I watched her drift off, her lips set as if she was stating a categorical refusal to pretty much everything.
Then I left her there.
For the first time in my life I drank completely alone. I drank with no aim in mind but to listen to ice cubes pop and melt in the darkness.
You wicked loser, Carrey.
I’d smile and then the vicious voice would ask me what I was smiling about. Losers don’t smile. Losers take the long way home. Losers give up their shirts. Losers empty trash baskets full of a woman’s blood and sleep on couches, drunk.
What’s she doing with a guy like you?
You.
Wicked loser.
20.
Snow began to fall in earnest and with pure malevolence—almost every day throughout the first weeks of January. The boardwalk drifted over, Route 7 became a frosty tunnel and the mountains behind the school turned white. Huge daggers of ice hung from the gutters of the Schoolhouse. During the occasional thaws there was a distracting cacophony of dripping and the snow turned into sticky rain that glued itself to the trees. When the snow assaulted us once more, the trees transformed into a huge and spectacular menagerie of delicate glass sculptures shimmering in the brief, weak sun.
I got busted throwing snowballs at Ruth’s window one night. The teacher who ran Middle Dorm, Mrs. Horeline, caught me standing out on the backfield launching perfect bull’s-eyes at the third floor, the snowballs exploding satisfyingly against Ruth’s storm window.
Horeline let me off lightly with a warning not to be caught up after lights-out again. And no more throwing snowballs at windows. Ruth blew me off in chemistry the next day, wouldn’t even look at me. Then she beaned me with a perfect head shot at twenty feet when I was walking out of the labs. When I reeled around, swearing, snow and ice drifting down my collar, she was grinning wickedly and I knew I was forgiven.
One afternoon I walked over to Channing’s, trudged behind his house to the shed. I had rehung the door properly just a few weeks before; I’m the only person on earth who can do that job alone. I pushed through t
he door, stood in the sawdust, and switched on the lights—the electric worked fine. I’d done the wiring, chased the wires to the two light sockets under the ceiling. If you closed the door, the room was a refuge from the cold. No dusting of snow lay near the windows or by the doorway’s arch. The tools were carefully lined up where I had left them, the cans of paint removed by me to Channing’s garage. Beside the bags of nails and the coiled extension cord was one of his notes, stiff with cold, Go away, Carrey.
He’d left a lowball in the shed, the amber liquid inside it completely frozen. I stood still in the wooden quiet for a few minutes, grinning. Then I picked up Channing’s glass and brought it outside with me, set it on his small porch. Let him wonder, I thought.
And still the training ground on. As did the testing.
* * *
The last ergometer test before the official selection of the God Four and other Fenton boats pitted Connor against me. We had mostly been avoiding each other since our altercation and we warmed up wordlessly on our machines for five minutes. Ruth stood behind us, waiting, as Channing watched the preliminary sequence. I could have sworn he was trying not to grin. He sat there as if he had been looking forward to this moment all day long.
Fluid rushed through the pipes above our heads. I could tell just by listening to the pulse in my ears that my heart rate was already way up past one hundred and fifty. I stopped rowing, crouched at the start of my slide. Connor did the same. Our two flywheels kept ticking, spinning. Ruth knelt in front of us, tiny supplicant to this communion, and said, “Are you two ready?”
I nodded, Connor cleared his throat.
She slowly examined first Connor, then me, as if she might be thinking of some reason to prevent this from happening. It was then that Connor took his hand off the erg handle and tapped my arm. “Good luck, Carrey.”
I quickly slapped his fingertips.
Ruth zeroed the computers.
I focused on the wall behind Channing. I breathed. I relaxed. Satellites of dust twirled lazily in the weak winter sunbeams that had somehow managed to penetrate the dirty basement windows. Coiled up and ready, only half-listening to Ruth go over the start procedure, I thought about finally beating him today in this little room.
The ceremony began. Ruth counted off each five hundred segment as we completed it. “First five hundred, rowers even. Time: one minute and forty seconds.” Fifty more strokes, then Ruth’s voice rising behind us again, “Second five hundred, rowers still even. Time: three minutes and twenty seconds.” Ruth counted and the sound of the flywheels ground on and on. And all Connor Payne did for two and a half thousand meters was match me stroke for stroke. I set the pace and Connor mirrored it. When I slowed the rating, he did, too. When I sped up, he did, too. Every time I tried to break away and bring the rating up from a thirty-two to a thirty-five, he followed and didn’t miss a stroke.
And then the war inside my own head began. One voice, angry and loud, shouted at me to take control of the duel, jack up the rating. The other, confident and level, insisted that Connor wouldn’t follow then blithely reported that yes, he was indeed following me, better drop the rating.
He’s reading my mind, I thought.
Shut up, I told myself.
I was tempted to stop dead for a moment just to see what he would do but to sacrifice even a second would be suicide. I pulled the rating up to an even thirty-six and he followed.
Thirty-seven now and I could feel my lungs protest, the blood begin to rush to my head. It was an insane rating, especially in the middle of a piece. I forced myself to look straight ahead as I rowed, to follow the long cracks in the wall that looked like roads on a road map, roads that met, crossed, carried on through little white chips in the paint. The chips were imaginary towns. I started thinking up names for the towns just as I dropped the rating abruptly to thirty and held it there. It was like flipping a switch, cutting oxygen off from a gushing heart and feeling the poison back up purple and painful.
Channing shifted in his seat, frowning over the fact that we had made a personal battle out of what was meant to be a formal execution. The others looked on in the same impassive way you might witness a stranger’s burial. I glanced at them and suddenly wanted to laugh through my pain. Then I felt a tiny, hard bulb of pulse fire off in my skull and I didn’t want to laugh anymore.
The numbers on the bottom of the computer screen ticked over to two thousand. I liked the brief look of goose egg perfection in all those zeros. Ruth cleared her throat. “Two thousand, rowers even. Time: six minutes and forty seconds. Five hundred meters to go—now you two rowers show us what you’ve got.”
Only five hundred meters to find a winner. The entire race was down to the last forty-five strokes. Only Connor would try it.
It wasn’t just the exhaustion. It wasn’t just that my lungs were raw and my legs felt like marble or that the black oar handle was just a vague blur off in the distance where my hands were. The pain, the sound, even the little atlas on the wall, those things were floating away from me now. As I pulled the numbers down, as I brought the five hundred split from one minute forty to one minute thirty-eight, then thirty-seven, I knew Connor was doing the same thing. And I hated him. I hated that he had lain in bed last night and planned this, actually strategized this face-off. Ten strokes into the last five hundred meters I felt the air suddenly turn solid in my lungs. I was rowing ragged, choking, ripping the handle from the erg and slamming back up the slide. It was absolutely no consolation that Connor was doing the same thing. I could hear him hammering away, see mad, spasmodic movement in the corner of my eye.
“Payne’s ahead now, one stroke. C’mon Carrey.” Ruth said it in a clipped, quiet voice. Each word punched holes in the membrane of concentration around my mind.
Payne’s ahead.
The numbers dropped. Good.
My lips peeled back from my teeth and the air whistled through, cold. I felt tiny electric shocks behind my eyes. I was Rob Carrey the astronaut, suffering the worst Gs ever recorded, plummeting out of control toward some planet I’d never seen.
The astronaut called back to ground control, asked for more power. Our hero checked the map on the wall again but saw only endless, ancient lunar rivers leading nowhere. Ruth’s voice crackled through the broken radio playing in my mind. “Carrey, he’s only one stroke ahead. Last ten strokes. C’mon. Don’t die.”
Lungs breaking up. Legs and arms on phosphorescent fire, fingers already gone. Eyes going electric.
“Connor has it now, Carrey. Last twenty meters—go. Go.”
Two strokes.
Breathe.
Last one.
Breathe.
* * *
Carolyn could move through digitized film faster than any editor I have ever known, and her concentration was far superior to mine. By the end of the week I was tired of seeing the same sequences of sharks and divers and boats, listening to the same sound-ups, hearing the same ambient noise. A video editor is a special breed of person.
On Friday I started packing up my things. We made it easy on each other, pretended I was packing for just another shoot, but we both knew that this was it. I was boxing up what I owned in the studio, which I discovered wasn’t much. This was her place, and I had always been her visitor.
The studio now had a flat, sad feel. Most of the possessions in there were shared, but I was not in the mood to fight over a cappuccino maker bought in a moment of romantic extravagance three years ago, or the toaster, or the photos on the wall, most of which were from Africa and which I could reproduce anyway. Carolyn was right; I probably did have more personal stuff in Cape Town. Naked unto this loft I came, I thought, and close to naked I shall return hither.
I had no pots and pans of my own, for instance. No plates. The microwave was technically mine, but I wasn’t about to claim it. I had no silverware. True, I had bought some of her chairs—faux antique, colonial dining room chairs that sat, unused, around our narrow dining room table, waiting for parties t
hat were never held; we ate in the kitchen or in front of the edit suite. How was I supposed to take them even if I wanted them? I had bought her the afghan throw under the modular couch but I didn’t want it. There was an old coffeemaker of mine packed away somewhere but I had no idea where, and in any case I couldn’t bring myself to leave carrying only a coffeemaker.
I did want to keep my books. I walked down to the liquor store and begged a few strong boxes. As I neared the freight elevator on my way back to the loft, two kids walked by me, both wearing sweatshirts from New England schools I’d beaten on the water at Fenton. One of them was my height, slight, with wispy blond hair, deep blue eyes, and pale, aristocratic skin. When I saw him I thought, there he is. But Connor Payne would be older now. He’d have gained weight. He wouldn’t be wearing Timberland boots and baggy, gangsta jeans, a torn, rust colored T-shirt, and a Tag Heuer watch. Connor would be an adult, like me. The two kids shouldered by me, agile as ghosts.
There were books that were mine and books that we had bought together, novels we had shared. Poetry books she had bought me that were part of the apartment as well. I put those aside, unwilling to provoke a fight. Then it occurred to me as I was taping the boxes that I did not want her sharing Rilke and Neruda with some other man—the many men she was likely to meet in this business. I confiscated Neruda and Rilke and then Frost and Catullus and Sappho and then an expensive clothbound book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I took back Tropic of Cancer, which had made her laugh while she read it at my insistence.
I packed these books separately. I sealed them in bubble wrap and plastic. Her next lover would not plunder them like a looter stumbling across the archives of a vanished romance. But I would not open them either, not without her. I knew that already. I could seal these books away easily somewhere: in the bottom of a New York closet, in a storage room, in a crawl space. I had half a mind to send them on a slow boat to Cape Town but they would only gather dust there. Their meaning, I knew, lay here in this studio with her. I wanted them nonetheless.