Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  When Charlie entered the room that time after her return, I watched her stop short a step inside the door. She didn’t look at me, and didn’t say anything. Instead, she gathered herself and went to Haim slowly. In his fitful sleep he had kicked off his blanket, and she started with his leg, the fat beneath bulging out in rolls. She put her hand out as if to gently touch his body, allowing her fingers instead to hover carefully a few millimeters above. It was like she was, piece by piece, retaking his body from the distortion of his sickness, reaffixing the original in the system of vision she seemed to understand would now be required of her. First was the leg, then the sides with the violent stretch marks, then the arm.

  It reminded me of the way she used to do more or less the same thing when he was a newborn, the way she spent hours gently feeling and moving his tiny legs and arms, which had seemed to be almost all fat and no bone then, the way he let her, looking in confusion at her hands. Now, when she got to his face, she stopped.

  If I am to be brutally honest, I admit to taking some pleasure in her difficulty, her struggle in that moment. I wanted him to be foreign to her in the wake of her desertion, unrecognizable. For Charlie, for lack of better words, to understand that he was now more mine than hers.

  I also wanted her to see what was the cruelest bodily insult of all, which was that instead of the wan, ravaged, rail-thin body of the child with cancer nearing death, we had been given the opposite: a robust, bloated, outsized child, an embarrassment of flesh. I wanted her to get that we would not even have the small mercy of watching our own kid live and fade; that, instead, we would only have the queer neutrality of watching this Other, this boy whom some persons else had allowed to grow so fat, to become so lost in his own body. Of not even being able to recognize him, really.

  Because, of course it’s true that you can’t see him within that body. I had to admit that, even then, watching Charlie staring down into his changed face. You can’t see him as he once was, you can’t see and love the passage of the years, not really, if you’re being plainly honest. You see only what’s before you. The foreign body, the sickness. It’s impossible to see what you’ve already lost.

  She stood beside his hospital bed, stooped over him for a long time. Eventually she closed her eyes and put her hand lightly over his face, touching it like a blind person. I understood then that things would not go back to their erratic-but-more-manageable normal with her. That her holiday was not the single act of brinksmanship she needed to enact with herself in order to bring herself back to us. Haim had entered the hospital as one boy, with one body, and she had left that child, not this one. To her, he was simply not there to return to.

  Haim had to have been awake by then, had to have felt her hand there on his face, but he refused to open his eyes until a long time after she was gone.

  Nighttime here, especially on Sundays, has its own kind of timelessness. It’s winter now, so the light goes quickly, and by seven o’clock it is so dark through the windows you can’t even see the outlines of the mast tips at Cadogan Pier needling the sky. Eventually it is so dark that the windows reverse themselves and only show the long corridors they face, giving the shapeless dark beyond them the false depth of the hallway’s lights. It’s late now. Sundays are the hardest nights to get through.

  The day has been quiet—they try to schedule all the kids’ therapies so that they feel like they have a real weekend, can recover a little bit—and the only thing Haim has had to do today is suffer a dressing change for the stretch marks. These re-dressings used to be so traumatic that they couldn’t do them without sedation, but Haim eventually chose to refuse the anesthetic. This amount of pain seems to be interesting to him, even if he is sick from it afterward. Today he watched as he usually does, looking down at where the “wound team” worked: curious, wincing, not really breathing. They’ve had to switch the dressings to non-adhesive foam pads because of “skin breakdown,” meaning they had to stop pulling off the gauzes that were taped to the skin because the skin would come off with them. Nobody says anything, but there is a finality to all this. The nurses with their hyper-focus on Haim’s wound care. Three failed “avenues of therapy” for the pontine glioma and we’re left slathering onto his body something called MediHoney. Two different Phase II clinical cancer trials (one that was supposed to recognize and block the chemical signals that lead to the generation of new blood vessels in the tumor, and one that was supposed to damage DNA at certain guanine locations so as to trigger death of the tumor cells) and months of targeted radiation/chemotherapy later, we are using honey—actual honey—that bees make from a certain tree in New Zealand to hopefully give us a few more weeks.

  I come back to the room from a coffee run in the deserted cafeteria and Haim is gone. I find him a floor down, in the pediatric intensive care unit. The lone nurse at the duty station gives me a sad little smile as I pass, as if to say she’s sorry.

  Haim has been back and forth between here and the pediatric oncology ward so often that everyone knows us. The only real regulars in the PICU are from our ward upstairs; most everyone else on the PICU floor is already close to the end of their story, happy or sad, and, one way or the other, doesn’t return.

  Haim met Ava on his first return from the PICU, when they’d both gotten C. diff after starting chemo. They were each in contact isolation rooms which were situated next to each other at the end of the ward. The bathrooms, which they both occupied a lot, had extremely thin walls, and at some point they realized they could hear each other. Dozing beside Haim’s bed I would hear their tiny voices talking for hours as they each waited out the diarrhea, the tinny laughter echoing strangely, always sounding so surprised. Each time the IV team came to access their ports, the nurses moving back and forth in the lock between the two rooms, Haim and Ava craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of one another when the doors opened, and sometimes waved. Ava got cleared to leave contact isolation first and Haim moved into her room. She’d spent a lot of time writing random phrases and words in dry-board marker on the large windows that looked outside. Her handwriting was rounded and girlish and after she was gone, Haim changed her letters into numbers, solving the complicated equations idly against the furrowed clouds.

  Ava, who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is not doing very well. Haim asks for updates about her every week and I usually tell him whatever the nurses tell me when I pause at their station. He has his own information-gathering services, I guess, because lately I’ve just told him I’m not sure. He’s not really allowed down in the PICU, but he knows this and usually goes at night, when the nurses are too tired or defeated to stop him from wheeling his chair along to Ava’s room. I nod to Ava’s mother as I pass her in the lounge, but she is sitting forward, perfectly still, elbows on her knees and face completely covered with her hands.

  I don’t disturb Haim. I lean against the wall in the hallway and watch through the doorframe. The only light on is a long, tubular fluorescent one above Ava’s bed. She is lying flat on her back, beset by the Lilliputian tubes, wires, and monitors. Her mouth is taken up by the breathing tube, but she is looking up into Haim’s face with her sharp, clear blue eyes, her small brow rising, steepled in what seems like fear. I don’t know if she recognizes him. It probably won’t be long now.

  A man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence—I can never remember who wrote that.

  Haim strokes the girl’s white-blond hair, so light a color that when it miraculously remained through round after round of chemotherapy it seemed providential, a gift. Now, though, I can see it coming off in Haim’s hand like spent animal fur, as he does his best to pretend that it’s not, and continues his smooth stroking in the imperfect quiet.

  •

  There is a time in the beginning of a marriage when your wife’s body is still a discovery, when—at least if you were married young—the changes you notice on certain nights as her flesh begins its shift to th
e denser, solid tone of mid-range adulthood are to you still a delight, something new to learn and take pleasure in. This is almost evolutionary, you might understand later, after the birth of your first child, a graceful biological swing to the kind of ruddy corporeality that can best protect and deliver a pregnancy, but there is a period when her body is not yet on this spectrum, is still only made up of the surprise of a cupped buttock or thigh, a new fullness in your hands in the dark.

  We’d been married for two years when Charlie’s body began to change. Up until that point, she had looked more or less like she had the night we first met; if anything, she’d lost weight, seemed to have become younger somehow. In the eighteen months between our first date and our wedding, she had grown more and more animated, her neural circuits blinking faster and faster, her hair becoming relaxed and silken, her skin smooth and clear, full of color. Most days during our time together in college, I dropped her off in her study room, an abandoned office in the graduate mathematics department (the office where, lost in her depression the year before, she’d spent months of long afternoons lying flat on top of her big desk, asleep), only to return after class to find the big chalkboard that dominated one wall filled with complex systems of numbers, symbols, and signs. By the time we were both graduating, Charlie had won a prestigious mathematics prize from an international science organization for her thesis work, which turned out to be the hypothetical solution to a problem that had stood unsolved for seventy-five years. This award came with a large cash award, but in order for it to be granted the judges’ committee wanted a fuller work, a long paper to be peer-reviewed, a more elaborate proof.

  We moved that fall after graduation to Attica, Missouri, home of Attica State University, which had offered Charlie a fellowship with a large stipend in order for her to complete her work on the proof under their auspices. It was a good university—one of those tiny schools with a handful of highly specialized faculties, largely supported by very specific government or corporate grants for research or innovation. The only catch was that we had to move to Attica, Missouri.

  It was a very small town in the southeast corner of the state, with four restaurants, a mall, and one movie theater whose reels always seemed to be slightly damaged. I was still a little in shock that for all my worrying about what we would do after graduation (what job I could get with my literature major, how we would ever be able to start paying off our student loans in six months, when they began to become due) it was Charlie—Charlie who preferred not to talk about a “careerist future,” Charlie who seemed to just drift forward in her academic life with the fickleness and detachment of a child—who ended up with the good job, the good paycheck.

  Because of the low rent in town, we managed to find a small house with new fixtures and a room in the half-finished basement that Charlie, in a gesture of support, agreed could be my “office.” We took walks to the nearby city park, which had a duck pond. I spent the days staring at my computer during the hours I was supposed to be working on a novel. Charlie called it our “starter town.” If we can learn to be married here, she often said, we can be married anywhere. When I complained about things like the lack of culture in the area or the fact that the nearest bookstore was forty minutes away, she tsked and smiled, shaking her head, not looking at me. “The writer in exile,” she said.

  What does one remember of the collection of selves one must inevitably prove to be to sustain a marriage over the years? The story of our time in Attica, Missouri (and even that of the years afterward, in Iowa) is so tired to me, so oft-repeated and reduced down into the kind of cocktail party summary that proves to be so startlingly effective that you eventually forget that the things which made the experience meaningful are exactly what you now excise, all the details that would most likely matter to no one else but you.

  I remember spending those two years marooned in small-town Missouri learning and relearning Charlie’s body, falling in love over and over with the angularity of her jawline as it drew close to me in the morning just before she left for work, with the pulsing, contracting spasms around my fingers as she orgasmed when I went down on her. There always seemed to be something to learn. I remember leaping, shoeless, from our wooden stoop onto the hood of Charlie’s moving car to keep her from driving away after a particularly bad fight. Our fights were not even saved by being interesting, or original, and Charlie was always leaving. She’d come back a few hours later, never saying anything about where she’d gone, and be silent until she’d slept, after which it would be like it never happened. We thought we were learning how to be married. “Think of us living here,” Charlie said, “as performance art.”

  Then, of course, came the things not so easily protected from the logic of narrative memory, from the construction of theories and psychology. I remember these things helplessly, and with no small amount of reluctance. An awkward visit in the middle of the day from a university administrator. A call from a colleague, urging me to come to Charlie’s office, where she had locked herself inside, and the whispered conversation that followed through the wood of the door, where I could feel her just on the other side, crying softly.

  Then the day before she was to present the first half of her paper at a regional mathematics conference in Kansas City, she didn’t come home from work. At first I assumed that Charlie was punishing me for some perceived slight, perhaps going out for a celebratory dinner with some of her research assistants without telling or inviting me, and then, as it got later into the night, I thought that maybe she’d left early for the conference, gotten the dates messed up. It wasn’t until I pulled into the highway rest stop and saw her sitting there on a bench with a state trooper on either side of her, one of whom must’ve been the voice on the phone a few hours earlier telling me my wife had been found wandering the shoulder “confused,” that I even believed it wasn’t a joke. And I’ll admit that what I thought of on the ride back was the shame, the humiliation of walking toward them, of claiming Charlie, who looked so happy and surprised to see me (looking at me with, unmistakably, the wonder of a child) that it utterly broke my fucking heart.

  The thought of Charlie talking to a therapist—Charlie, who, when I pressed her, often gave a survey-course-in-miniature over Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and nihilism as well as depression psychology, and applicable ontology, not to mention the medical science and epistemological implications of antidepressant, antipsychotic, or mood-stabilizing medication—was so ridiculous that I couldn’t even bring myself to demand it. The next day we got halfway to a local therapy office before I pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked out over all that blank snow and punched the steering wheel over and over again, the ancient horn bleating ridiculously. This was Charlie, whose soft, pale flesh of thigh and gluteus and back pressed into my nuzzling body in bed each night and fell asleep that way, in that hold; Charlie, who stood on Saturday mornings with her back to me in the kitchen, in T-shirt and underwear, with one hip cocked, foot turned out to the side, her legs seeming oddly short and thick in the blue light. This was my wife. I knew her.

  She did not go back to work. When I went to collect her things from the office, I found the room almost completely bare.

  Charlie ended up going to a psychiatrist by herself, of her own accord. In the months we spent holed up in the house, waiting for our savings from the fellowship to run out, we made rules to get through the days.

  Mathematics was the great enemy, it seemed, and one rule was that Charlie was no longer to work with numbers, to do any kind of math at all. Somewhere along the line, Charlie told me during those months, she’d become lost in the world of digits and signs, symbols and systems. She tried, as we took walks down to the duck pond, to explain, to point to a small group of children and talk about the systems of equations that could describe each of their forms and chances, about the algorithms that they—their human selves—made up, the least of which could be found out, could describe simultaneously their fetal development as well as their choices in
the game they played as they ran past us, and how this was essentially the same math that can be used to describe the shape of the universe.

  Sometimes, when neither of us had spoken for a while as we lounged around the house or went for groceries, Charlie would speak differently, trying to reach into my world. “Imagine a forest where all the trees are made up of numbers,” she said. “Imagine you have to build a boat out of their boughs.” There at the end of her work, she’d begun to think of the collections of numbers and symbols as little machines, and in the single box I filled with the contents of her desk’s drawers from the office, there were hundreds of white sheets, each with a small ink drawing of withered, maimed numerals that tangled together to make sinister-looking spiders, tractors, airplanes, landscapes, and cars.

  Charlie seemed embarrassed by the diagnosis of severe manic depression her therapist-psychiatrist team came up with and, as if to show its inaccuracy, she refused to display any of the classic side effects; she did not gain a pound, and if anything her sex drive became more consistent, on the whole more lively, spurred by our boredom. Every third weekend our mothers would visit and I’d talk to them while they sat with Charlie in the living room, both of them eyeing Charlie uneasily, as if something unexpected might happen at any moment.

  Of course, the fellowship dried up and the promise of the cash prize receded, but after a while it seemed to us just a small part of all the money we would never have. I’d made a late application to several creative writing schools, and we agreed to move wherever I got in. That summer, after twenty months in Attica, Missouri, we celebrated our second anniversary, and two weeks later moved to Iowa, for me to go back to school, and us to have an honest restart.