by Paul Lisicky
“Shingles,” I say.
“Shingles? What makes you say that?”
I walk over to the open laptop, where I show him the results of my research. The faces in the images look miserable; it’s as if each of them has been exposed to a chemical blast. In one picture a man’s forehead is scabbed from the middle of his cheek to his hairline. The swelling is so extreme that he can’t open his left eye. We can’t even look without screwing up our faces. I make a loud sound of disgust and close the laptop with a snap.
“You have to go to the doctor,” M says. “I’m calling Dr. Steve.”
I shake my head brusquely. I tell him there’s no reason to go to Dr. Steve when I’ve already made an accurate diagnosis. I don’t want to go to Dr. Steve. He is simply going to tell me to stay home and rest as there is no treatment for shingles, just some medication to prevent it from getting worse, and I’m clearly past the initial stage where it could still be of use.
“If you’re sick,” he says, minutes later, “I don’t think I’m going to be strong enough to take care of you.”
M’s voice is quiet now, thick with suppressed tears in his throat. Then he starts to cry. By sick, he means HIV-sick. It hadn’t even occurred to me that shingles could be a sign of HIV. In three months I’ll find out from Dr. Steve that I’ve tested negative, but right now I want to say, you could take care of me, I promise. I wouldn’t be that much work.
I just want to be held. That is the one and only thing I need right now. But I don’t know how to ask for his arms around me, even though we’ve been together fifteen years. I might just be afraid that he’ll hug me for two minutes out of obligation and get on with his day.
Later that afternoon, I turn on the Weather Channel to see Washington’s Mount Rainier practically filling up the screen. Then another view of the mountain from the street of a featureless subdivision, another from the waters of Puget Sound, then one more from a tourist town with a coffee shop, a fruit stand, a gas pump, an organic food store. Boys skateboard through the haze of an unseasonably hot day. Haze against snow: it’s all a little nauseating. The voice-over says, Not if It Will Happen, but When. Then footage of a young couple walking briskly to a hillside to avoid the onslaught. Then a chart graphing the buildup of roiling matter beneath the poised, boreal mountain.
I get a kick out of the visual dramatizations, which is probably the unspoken wish of the producers and directors: they don’t really want to scare us. Pieces of rock belt the air, the atmosphere is impenetrable. But I’m especially mesmerized by the sluice of melted snow, lava swamping the streets to the eaves of the houses. You could say it’s the color of chocolate milk or mocha, but it’s not so appealing as that.
Bury it, I think. The whole fucking lot of it. Ugly houses and their vain yearnings.
I walk back to the bathroom, pull up my shirt, and study myself again. Shingles. What am I, old now? For the next month I’ll check myself every few minutes just to make sure I’m not leaking lava.
Sometimes Relationships That Didn’t Happen Are Worse Than the Ones That Did
1985 | It must be nearly eleven when Denise calls me one Tuesday night, in spring. “I’ll take it in the den,” I say to my father after he’s already answered the phone. My father’s voice always turns gruff once he figures out Denise is calling. The truth is she calls a lot, two times a day, sometimes for two or three hours at a time. Calls to our house are met with a busy signal, a harsh warning sound. Do I like being on the phone so much? The question doesn’t occur to me. Denise is in my life, and this is part of the pact. And what must my father think when he walks into his den to see me lying on the bare floor, drawing air pictures with my finger? My face might seem to be a little blissed, as if Joni is singing her newest song only for me. I’m not speaking at all. There isn’t space for me to speak, which must prompt my father to think: what could this divorced woman, this single mother, want with my son? He’s seen her picture on the inner flap of her book. A glamour shot: half-parted mouth, a smart, but plainly sexual look in her eyes. She looks a little wounded, sexually wounded, actually, but there’s hauteur there, too: she is not someone to be messed with. She’s been places, if not literal places. She has the face of an actress, and perhaps that’s why he steps right over me, without apology or acknowledgment, to retrieve some file about the proposed condo project he’s been fighting across the lagoon from our summerhouse.
I’m not sure why I’m not fazed by his gruffness. Maybe it’s simply because I like his den, the no-nonsense masculinity of it: the hard edges, the solid desk, the metal lamp with its dark bronze hood. No pictures on the walls but a serene-spooky Jesus, with a dog-like face, and a band of thorns twisting into a sore, liver-colored heart. I dreamed of this Jesus as a child. I was sitting before him, listening to his mellifluous voice, when a man sprang out of the crowd and shot him in that holy heart. I woke up panting with two hands covering my own heart, and minutes must have gone by before I was back to myself again.
Not long before she dies, Denise mentions that she was always afraid to stay on the line whenever my father picked up the phone. And she laughs when she tells me that. She was afraid he’d be harsh with her, interrogate her. The deadly seriousness of that voice. And I’m amazed to think she had the nerve to keep calling.
Tonight she’s reading to me from the New Novel. She’s been working on the New Novel since not long after the Good Deeds pub party. This book is a lot different from that book: longer, more elaborate sentences. The central character is a writer of children’s books named Emily. Emily has a very young daughter named Lizzie. The husband, Peter, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. And most important, there’s a playwright. This playwright, Gene, rents the second floor of Emily’s house, on a beach block in a beach town based on Ocean City, after coming upon an ad she’d put up in the supermarket. The playwright takes an interest in Emily’s work. The playwright gets to know Emily; he takes an interest in Lizzie. You know where this leads.
The book pivots on one line: “sometimes relationships that didn’t happen are worse than the ones that did.”
I listen to a new page of the book every night. I try to get as many freshman comp papers graded as I can before Denise calls, but if I’m not done by the time she calls, I don’t mind. So I’ll wake up an hour earlier in the morning, so what? Listening to Denise is my real education. And besides, Denise is much more interesting than writing EXAMPLE? or CLARITY? in the margin of some comparison-contrast essay.
At first I am startled by what a terrible listener I am. It isn’t like watching a movie. And it is certainly not like reading. When I read, I’m so prone to stopping midsentence; my attention pools in empty space, and the floaters in my eyes drift down the wall until the next sentence pulls me back in. Denise doesn’t know it, but it can sometimes take me five minutes to get through a single page. Over the phone, her sentences speed past me like meteors, and I can feel Denise listening to me as I’m listening to her. By that I mean she is listening for laughs, pauses, silences after lines that are supposed to be jokes. She is listening for changes in my breathing. The enormity of this responsibility wipes me out sometimes. I stare fixedly at the paperweight on my father’s desk so I won’t get distracted, to anchor my attention.
The book starts, stalls, starts again, as all books do. Should it be in first person? Third? How many points of view? Denise seems determined to develop the language. She wants multifaceted sentences, rich with description and sound, that echo the books she loves: Tender Is the Night, The Stranger, Madame Bovary, Ghost Dance.
I see how a book becomes your house. But soon you are just a function of your house. The house tells you what you want, how you should live. At the same time, everything that comes into your life goes into the house. The house transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, and without it, you’d never even know yourself, never even know that all those choices and consequences mattered. Your life has purpose inside that house, in its moldings and floorboards, in the way
the light falls on the windowsill, and you pass on that house to others.
One day we take the hour drive to Ocean City, the Buick too wide for the lanes of the causeway. Austen, Denise’s six-year-old daughter, sits up in the backseat, studying the whitecaps on the bay, the blue power plant at Beesley’s Point. We’re here to find Emily’s house. For Denise, the task is not so much about finding the house that would be right for Emily as it is an act of attention, finding the house that’s always existed. But before we find that house, we park. We walk the boardwalk, scrubbed and bright on this cold spring day. Waves boom against the shoreline. They retreat and break once again, this time with the sound of a whip crack. We smell the ions in the air. There is a triumph about the three of us moving as one, the sights ahead of us—the Music Pier, Wonderland, Gillian’s Fun Deck—calling up old stories. A woman walks by, mystified, alarmed by us. Ocean City is comfortable. Looking at it the way we’re looking at it? Well, that would be like looking at your aunt Barbara as if she were the most wondrous creature on the planet, when in fact she’s just Aunt Barbara, with her loose cardigans and her wide hips. But we’re liked here, too. Others smile at us; they seem to want to be taken in by our laughter. They want to play along. I’m positive they’re mistaking Denise and me for a happy couple with their daughter—the wonders that await the happy heterosexual couple with their daughter! Don’t I feel it, a new stature accorded to me? I feel the swagger in my walk and talk. When we step inside Litterer’s, for instance, we’re directed to a table close to the boardwalk, as if we’re some centerpiece of fertility.
We drive up and down the streets. One three-story is almost right for Emily but is immediately discarded for its vinyl siding. Another fails to make the grade because it is too close to busy West Avenue: bad for Lizzie, who likes to push her toys about the yard. We drive past the houses of the Gardens, with their suburban landscaping and surgically edged driveways. We drive past the Port-O-Call, near where Grace Kelly and her family once summered, but that’s not right either: Emily values trees, charm, wood shingles, and tradition—a smart, studied mess. Everything we’ve come across is blocky and practical. More than once we think Emily would never get any writing done in such a place, even though Nan and Gay Talese spend summers here. Maybe Emily would find Ocean Gate—the city based on Ocean City—deadening, stultifying. Maybe the Ocean City that Denise wants to exist doesn’t exist. She wants a perfected version of the perfected imagination of her childhood, just as Emily is a perfected version of Denise, even if she doesn’t think of Emily as having come from her. She doesn’t claim ownership of Emily, Lizzy, or Gene; that would be wrong. It’s as if they’ve already been fully formed, birth to death, outside of time. And that is as close to religion as Denise gets.
We’re headed down Atlantic Avenue now, drifty, overheated, probably a little exhausted from having spent so much time with each other. We’re already talking about coming back another day, when there’s no school prep waiting for us, no front on the horizon—see the swollen blue clouds coming in from the bay side? We’ve left our heavy coats at home. We’re probably wearing sneakers and our feet are numb. Then, when we’re not trying, we see it. On the ocean side, at Fourth Street. An old lifesaving station? Yes, from the late nineteenth century, without a hint of Cape May twee. It’s sided in a pale butter color, with barn-red trim. It suggests rigor, understatement; it can already foresee the Arts and Crafts movement. The house is beloved but not fussed with. There are bare patches on the lawn, bushes withered from the salt air. (Can’t we also imagine Lizzie’s toys strewn about the yard? Soggy bathing suits and towels hanging on the line?) It is the house of someone who has been places, who has lived in New York or San Francisco or London and come back home, not because it was Aunt Barbara, but because there was an extraordinary house here, a house that still pulses with the looking of everyone who’s passed by it, who’s dreamed through its red front door.
We park the car. We walk toward the ocean. We step across Corinthian Avenue, take in the view of the beach, Emily’s beach, where Lizzie digs with her hands through clean gray sand. We turn back. We listen to what she’d hear from her front porch: a talk show on the TV, KYW Radio: All News All the Time. A high school kid tossing newspapers onto yards. We don’t say very much. We look up at the house where Gene will betray Emily. We stand there long enough until a face appears at the second-floor window of the house next door. If we could translate that expression into a sentence, it would say, who are these aliens and what do they want? Then we get back in the car.
2010 | I sit closer to the stereo speakers, as if by leaning into them I’ll hear better. I click past the first track to the second. It is a winter day. I wait for the lyrics as the song builds, grows into itself. The song is a tree now; it shakes when birds pass through it. The song gets a little calmer when the wind stops blowing its branches. The song is for Denise—or at least about Denise, according to DyAnne, Denise’s other best friend. DyAnne has sent me the CD, and I stare at the guts of the padded envelope I’ve torn apart, hastily. Not so many years ago, the writer and singer of the song—DyAnne’s fellow band member, and is it brother?—dated Denise. A rock musician dating Denise? Why didn’t she ever tell me? Did she think I might not have been supportive of that, her taking up with a fellow artist? I had been privy to so much, to the details of sexual encounters and fallings out with close friends, and she’s an enigma all over again. I never knew her. Do I feel just a flash of betrayal? Well, yes.
M walks into the living room carrying an armful of cut willows. “Listen,” I say, gesturing at the stereo speaker. “Hear that?”
“What’s that?” M says.
I tell him the band is Smash Palace. I tell him it’s the song that was written for Denise, about Denise.
M stops his hunt for the suitable vase: pale green or gray? He’s looking into the room, eyes fixed on nothing, as entranced as I am. He’s taking the song in, or perhaps he’s been thinking about that poem he’s been meaning to write. He’s been as drifty as I am lately, and I can’t seem to pin him down.
“Sit,” I say, patting the empty spot beside me on the sofa. “You have to hear it from the beginning, the whole song.”
He puts the willow branches down, sits. He stretches out his long legs on the coffee table. “How are the shingles?” he says, pulling up my T-shirt.
“They say hello,” I say. “Thank you for thinking of us.” And I pull my shirt back down.
We listen. We press our knees into each other’s knees. I feel the warmth of his skin coming into my skin. The tree of the song is shaking again. We both look at each other, brows tightening, mouths loose. “He loved her,” we both say in the same voice.
1985 | B, the English professor, asks Denise out on a date. B takes her out on another. He takes her to nice restaurants, he buys her beautiful things. He talks of taking her to Paris, which he’s sure she’ll fall in love with. Now that she’s no longer his student, he can tell her everything, what it’s like to see that face, that shining face, not only beaming out toward the others in the seminar room, but toward him, whenever he tried to challenge her in class. She wouldn’t back down, unlike the others, who were too afraid or polite, and that was beautiful to him. The ferocity of intelligence that deepened the brown in her eyes! Not to mention the sweet and sexy husk in her voice.
But his face turned toward her? She’s not quite having it, not quite. The lavishness of attention is all a little much. She thinks it wants her essence, even though he tells her he wants nothing but to be with her, to talk about books with her. She’d prefer some mystery, some elusiveness, and—does she admit it to herself?—some hardness and indifference. A prize she has to win. She is not anyone’s prize, no gilded starling high on a shelf. Over and over she tells me, he’s not the one, he’s not the one. She is waving her hands around; we are walking down Walnut Street, heading toward Rittenhouse Square. I’m trying to nod, I’m trying to listen, to be of support to my friend. Maybe if I point out that baby in
her father’s arms, she’ll be shaken out of herself and her blood pressure will go back down again. But on and on she goes, as if by resistance she becomes stronger, larger. Resistance straightens her back; resistance lifts up her chin, brings a smolder to her mouth and chin and eyes.
Months later, on a peaceful Wednesday night in spring, Denise tells me she is marrying B.
She tells it to me again, as if by doing so, she’ll vaporize the hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to her saying no, no, no.
My face might color. Certainly the space just above my nose is so hot that it must be the color of raw meat. How could she not have betrayed a hint of their relationship during all those three-hour phone calls? I’d understand it better if she’d wandered away from me. The secrecy of it feels a little like lying. And this has been going on for, what—six months? I thought she wanted to be single.
She structures her explanation with the logic of a trial lawyer, but she’s not working too hard. She doesn’t expect me to be a hostile judge. After all, I haven’t yet lost my temper or grimaced or frowned. Would I ever lose my temper with her? Probably not, and maybe this frustrates her. This is what she wants of me, though she can’t quite say it. How would she tell a friend to get mad at her? I know she’s not getting married simply to raise my hackles, that would be flat-out absurd, but maybe my calm, accepting face is not the face she wants right now. If a friend is simply someone who says yes, everything you do is all right, well, maybe that’s not really a friend.
But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I could also say that a real friend loves his friend enough to let her wander. He lets her drive off the road, down into the muck, if she has to. He does not push or possess. He is not bossy or parental. He waits for that friend to come back to herself, to him. He’s standing at the top of the stairs for her, with a neutral, expectant face. He takes her hand when she extends it up to him.