Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  Then she crossed out number seven. All her working life she had tried to alleviate the suffering of others. It was time now to crawl out of the Slough of Martyrdom and confront her own suffering. She had apparently figured out in her sleep that her chronic grief aboard this ship wasn’t entirely about Kat or her parents, or even about that battered Sudanese girl. To accept their deaths meant accepting her own death. Letting go of Kat’s body meant facing the necessity of eventually letting go of her own body.

  She had had many billets-doux from Death lately—varicose veins, knee pain when she jogged, sun damage on her face, extra pounds around her middle, acid reflux when she drank too much alcohol. Little Post-it notes to warn her that her body was like an old jalopy, with fraying tubes and hoses and clogged filters—notes to remind her that one day she, too, would face a blind date with Death.

  How much longer did she have—a day, a month, a year, ten years, twenty years? If you could only know, you could plan your indulgences so that the check your children wrote to pay for your cremation would bounce. As it was, you had to plan to die tonight, and also plan to live to one hundred, both at the same time. Either way, you needed to be ready—if that was possible. She had spent her career helping her patients stay alive. Now she had to help herself learn how to die.

  But death might be like childbirth. While pregnant with Anthony, she had taken a course in Lamaze techniques for a drug-free delivery. But once she was actually in labor, she had begged for every drug on the pharmacy shelves.

  The only options now left on her list were New York, Burlington, or Mona.

  She got up and went to the officers’ lounge. Ben was breakfasting alone. She thanked him for the job offer but declined. “I have to go back to Vermont and deal with some stuff,” she heard herself telling him.

  “I’m sorry, Jess, but if you change your mind, please let me know.”

  Jessie nodded. She noted, as she grabbed a coffee and headed out the door to the clinic, that Mona was sitting alone on the far side of the lounge.

  When Jessie arrived at the clinic, she supplied a few passengers with medications they had forgotten to pack. Then she went into her office and sat down at her desk. Business was slow on this transatlantic crossing because passengers with issues had seen their own physicians before they left, or would see them once they landed in New York.

  Jessie had brought along Kat’s journal. She read the three parts of “Swan Song” as one poem, as Louise had recommended. For the first time, she saw that part one was about the melodrama of young love. Part two was about the comfortable tedium of middle-aged love. And part three was about the loss of love—and of life. Jessie had been deeply narcissistic to believe that it was all about her. Kat had been dealing with something far more urgent.

  Just then, Mona appeared in the doorway in torn jeans and her Broadway Cares T-shirt. “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Hey.”

  When Mona said nothing further, Jessie asked, “Is there something I can do for you?” As though she didn’t know.

  “I just wanted to know where you’re going once we land in Brooklyn.”

  “I’m not sure yet.” She still had three options, and Mona was one of those. Kat would have added a fourth: the unknown.

  “If you’re at loose ends, you’re welcome to stay at my apartment. I don’t have another gig for three weeks. We could explore the five boroughs together.”

  “That’s an interesting idea. Can I get back to you?” She had never before been propositioned with a tour of the five boroughs as a lure.

  “Sure. The offer holds good all the way to the wharves of Brooklyn.”

  “Where’s Ben going while the ship is docked in Brooklyn?”

  “No idea. Probably visiting one of his squadron of ex-wives. I told you he was just a distraction. Luckily, it seems I was one for him, too.”

  Jessie nodded.

  “I just have one question,” said Mona in an unsteady voice.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did you tell me on Malta that you love me?”

  Jessie frowned. Her chickens were coming home to roost. “Because I do.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, I mean that I admire you—your beautiful voice, your courage in pursuing your vocation. I mean that I enjoy talking with you. That I find you intelligent and funny. That I like your looks.” Jessie paused.

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “You know that it could mean a lot more than that.”

  “It could for someone who wasn’t in mourning.”

  “What is this—the nineteenth century or something?”

  “Those Victorians understood some things about human psychology that those of us living in the age of instant gratification have lost sight of.”

  “I’ve always found that the best way to get over one person is to turn to someone new.”

  Jessie bit her tongue to prevent herself from saying that Mona had never been with someone for twenty years, so she didn’t know what she was talking about. Many songs Mona sang concerned love, but Jessie had her doubts about whether Mona had ever really experienced it—and she still didn’t know if she wanted to be her coach.

  “I love you, too,” ventured Mona. “But for me that means that I want to know you in every way possible.”

  Jessie sighed. “So you mind that we haven’t made love?”

  “I just don’t understand what it is that you want from me.”

  “I’m happy with what we’ve got.”

  Mona shook her head in disbelief. “Well, let me know if you want to come stay with me and discuss this further.”

  “Okay, I will. Thanks.”

  Mona waved and then turned around and left.

  Jessie heaved another sigh. God, it was so tempting just to anesthetize herself with lust and get lost in the delirium of exploring a new body and an unfamiliar psyche.

  Shaking her head at her hopeless self, she returned to Kat’s journal and discovered this quote: “I vowed to love him in the right way, to love even his love for another. Admittedly, I never thought I would have to face this so soon.” Jessie recognized these lines. A few months before Kat’s death, they had gone to the Plaza 9 movie theater in Burlington to watch the Met’s live transmission of Der Rosenkavalier, Kat’s favorite opera. The line in question had been sung by Renée Fleming, playing an aristocratic woman who was trying to accept the fact that her younger lover was falling in love with a woman his own age. As Renée sang these lines, Kat had reached over in the darkened theater and taken Jessie’s hand in her own and squeezed it tightly.

  It amused Jessie to think that Kat had been identifying with Fleming’s role, because in her prime she would have identified with the androgynous alto playing the frisky young man, as opposed to the wise and generous older woman. Kat would have hated the idea that she herself had become wise and generous as she faced her own death. But she had. Jessie thought about Kat’s final words to her: “Don’t mourn for me too long, Jess. Find someone new and be happy again.”

  Kat had accepted the fact that Jessie would move on. She had wanted that for her. And who was Jessie to disobey the wishes of a dying woman?

  Once her shift ended, Jessie returned to the eleventh deck. Pausing at her own door, she turned and walked slowly over to Mona’s door. She would do as Kat had instructed. She would accept Mona’s invitation and see where it might lead. She could always call it off if it turned out to be a bad idea. She paused for a long time with her fist raised. Finally, she knocked. Mona didn’t answer. She knocked again. Still no answer. Mona was probably rehearsing at the theater.

  Jessie returned to her own door and unlocked it. As she entered her cabin, she spotted a figure at the far end of the corridor. Even at such a distance Jessie could tell that it was Mona. But
she looked so much like Kat at the same age that it was uncanny—tall and shapely, with a mop of naturally curly auburn hair. Not only did they own identical emerald collars; they both loved almost every style of music. The only difference was that Mona could carry a tune.

  Jessie shut her door and leaned back against it, heaving a sigh of relief that Mona had been out when she had knocked. If she went home with Mona, she would crawl ashore in a few months, after their tsunami of hormones had receded, and find Death still waiting for her, patiently pasting yellow Post-it notes all over her aging flesh. She had to negotiate a truce with this enemy combatant before she could even consider touring the five boroughs with Mona.

  Mona would never be able to understand this. The young and the aging lived in parallel universes that never intersected. The young hadn’t yet experienced the slow torture of losing friends and family members, one after another, some in great pain, until your own heart felt as hollowed out as a Halloween pumpkin. Sadly, she now saw that it wasn’t that she was too old for Mona. It was, rather, that Mona was too young for her. This confrontation with the reality of mortality was something Jessie had to face—and had to face alone.

  Jessie ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Michelob from room service and changed into her happy-face pajamas. Then she climbed into bed with Kat’s journal. The next page read: “Sexuality, creativity, and spiritual experience are all different manifestations of the same energy. Metaphors work only because matter already possesses an underlying unity that allows you to compare one fragment of it to another. E=mc2. Energy is speeded-up matter. Matter is slowed-down energy. Is it possible to identify with that energy itself, without needing to manifest it as matter? Is it possible to become that energy?”

  Next she had written out a story called “The Tale of the Sands.” She had spent an exchange year in London in college, during which she had met some Afghans who had introduced her to their tradition of teaching stories. She had read books of these stories ever since, but she rarely talked about them. Once she gave a collection to Jessie. Jessie had read a couple, but they hadn’t meant anything to her. Besides, when she had time to read, she needed to catch up on JAMA articles.

  “The Tale of the Sands” concerned a stream that was trying to reach the sea. It arrived at a desert and could go no farther without drying up. The sands of the desert advised the stream to rise up as a mist and allow the wind to carry it across the wasteland. The stream did this. On the far side of the desert, the mist turned back into water and fell into the ocean as drops of rain.

  There was a knock at her door. For a moment Jessie wondered if it was Mona and if she should pretend not to be there. It seemed there were definite limits to her willpower. But when she finally opened the door, a waiter carried in a tray containing her burger. He set it down on her desk and departed.

  As she munched her fries and sipped her beer, Jessie understood what she had to do: She had to go back to Burlington, get her and Kat’s pontoon boat out of storage, and float around Lake Champlain with a thermos of coffee, a sandwich, and some sunscreen. She had to watch the final patches of April snow on the peaks of the Adirondacks as they melted into rivulets that cascaded off the rocky cliffs into a lake that had so recently been ice. She had to watch the warm spring air creep across the frigid water until steam rose up, steam that would thicken into fog, fog that would burn off in the heat of the noonday sun. She had to watch the vapor suspended in the towering wine-dark thunderheads as it condensed into raindrops, raindrops that would crystallize into hail, hail that would pelt back down into the waiting water. She had truly to accept the fact that, as Kat had written about the archaeological torte that was Alexandria, the only constant in life is change.

  * * *

  —

  Looking out her cabin window the next afternoon, Jessie spotted the Statue of Liberty, lichen green on her pedestal of gray concrete. She felt a surge of pleasure to be back in her terrible and magnificent homeland.

  As the ship docked, she exited from her cabin for the last time. Mona was coming out her own door.

  “Mona!” she called.

  Mona turned and looked at her with a blank expression. She was upset. Jessie couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help her. She couldn’t help anyone else anymore. She had to help herself first, the way stewardesses warned airplane passengers to put on their own oxygen masks before attempting to assist their seatmates.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. I’m afraid I can’t visit you right now. I’ve got some things I need to take care of in Burlington.”

  Mona nodded, clearly disappointed and a little annoyed. And Jessie had to admit that she had led her on.

  Jessie opened her arms. Reluctantly, Mona moved into them. They hugged for a long time. Jessie had to marshal the full force of her self-restraint in order to lower her arms and step back. But she needed to face the future, rather than trying to re-create the past, with Mona standing in as a body double for Kat.

  “Let’s keep in touch?” suggested Jessie.

  “Whatever,” muttered Mona as she turned away. “No worries, Jessie. It’s all good.”

  Jessie let her leave and watched her go, pulling her battered blue suitcase down the long carpeted corridor. Jessie would collect her own bags in the arrivals hall, take an Uber to La Guardia, and hop a plane to Burlington.

  * * *

  —

  The pontoon boat, driven by Anthony, headed toward the middle of Lake Champlain. Martin, Malcolm, and Cady sat on the green vinyl benches with Kat’s and Jessie’s six grandchildren, ages four to fifteen. The children’s spouses, as well as Kat’s and Jessie’s friends and siblings, ex-husbands and ex-girlfriends and their current partners, had volunteered to stay at the condo and drink, since there wasn’t enough room on the boat for everyone. Martin’s restaurant was catering a feast there once the boaters returned.

  Louise sat up front beside Jessie, the ebony jewelry box containing Kat’s ashes in her lap. It was a sunny May afternoon with a mother-of-pearl sky overhead. But the breeze was chilly, so everyone was wearing jeans, fleece or down jackets or vests, and running shoes or hiking boots. Malcolm had managed to access Kat’s playlist on her iPhone and hook it up to a tiny speaker that was now broadcasting an eclectic array of songs. At the moment, Otis Redding was singing “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).”

  Anthony cut the engine, and the pontoon boat drifted slowly to a halt as ripples lapped its battered metal sides. At this spot, the lake was completely surrounded by mountains, the blue-gray Adirondacks on the New York side and the darker Green Mountains in Vermont.

  Malcolm clicked off the music, and Jessie stood up. “Thank you for coming with me today to say our final farewell to Kat. I’m sure you all know how much she loved you, because she was never shy about telling us so. And I know you all miss her as much as I do. But she wanted us to be happy remembering the fun we had with her while she was here, rather than being sad that she’s no longer with us.”

  She nodded to Malcolm, and he switched on Renée Fleming singing the “Recordare” from Verdi’s Requiem. Jessie took the ebony box from Louise and removed the plastic bag containing Kat’s ashes. She leaned out over the railing and slowly broadcast the pale gray remains of Kat’s body across the shimmering water.

  Then Cady gave a burgundy peony, Kat’s favorite flower, to every grandchild. Each came forward and tossed his or her flower into the water and recounted a favorite memory of Kat. One remembered flying kites out over the lake with her. Another recalled Kat’s tossing bread crumbs onto the beach and calling down flocks of screeching seagulls. They talked of Kat’s having taught them to swim and water-ski and fish, to drive motorboats and Jet Skis, to paddle canoes and kayaks. They laughed about her strumming her baritone uke and singing “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ ” to them as toddlers, with special voices for the various animals.

  After the grandchildr
en had finished, Jessie stood up again and said, “Kat kept a journal for each of her books. At the end of her final one she wrote down what she wanted me to tell you: She was very proud of all of you, and she asked me to remind you that since you have had so many advantages—enough food, warm clothing, nice houses, good schools, parents and grandparents who love you—you have an obligation to defend those who don’t have these things.”

  The children and grandchildren nodded impatiently, having heard this exhortation from Kat all their lives.

  “She also asked me to read you a quote. It’s from Julian of Norwich, a woman who was a religious hermit. She lived in fourteenth-century England. The fourteenth century was a terrible time. A famine and a plague killed half the people in England. Also, a war with France raged on for a hundred years. But here are the words that Julian heard in a mystical vision concerning this horror: ‘And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

  “Kat wanted you to know that no matter how difficult your lives may become, everything will be okay in the end. Your job is to be brave and always to fight for what you know is right.”

  Jessie studied her and Kat’s grandchildren, some resembling Kat, others herself. Their hearts were full of so many unrealistic hopes and dreams. Whatever else life might hold in store for her, it was her responsibility to ease their paths through this darkening world. They were the future—if this tortured planet were to have a future.

  The boat had drifted away from the patch of cloudy water where Kat’s ashes were now dissolving, studded with the sodden burgundy peonies, like clots of fresh blood. A school of perch rose up from the deep to snap at the tiny shards of white bone still floating there.

  Jessie watched some seagulls sweep out from the Vermont shoreline. They circled overhead with raucous shrieks. One gull plummeted down from the sky to seize an unwary perch in its beak. The gull hurried away, wings beating madly, protecting its plunder from pursuers, the scales of the dying perch flashing silver in the sun.