The Narrow Door

by Paul Lisicky

  Denise writes to me on my birthday in July 2005. The note is straightforward, without specifics. She doesn’t acknowledge that we haven’t exchanged notes in eight months, but that would be ridiculous. No real friend would try to stir things up on another friend’s birthday, especially if that friend was estranged.

  Denise writes again on Thanksgiving afternoon, over four months later. Again, her message is cheery and fast and she doesn’t say much, other than she’s too busy to write. I write back instantly, as I wrote back last time, but in the writing of it, I’m shocked by what I’ve kept to myself.

  Hello, dear,

  It was great to hear from you—it’s been too, too long! I’ve thought about you a lot lately, and have wanted to sit down and write, but there’s been too much to tell. We’ll have to talk on the phone soon one of these days. In the meantime, here are the headlines in no particular order. I hope this doesn’t sound like an irritating form Christmas letter!

  —We sold the Provincetown house last month and must move everything out by the end of December.

  —We just had our kitchen redone in our apartment—a seven-month project that was really disruptive and full of drama after drama.

  —I finished my new novel in September—and the last few months have been preoccupied with the disgustingly stressful project of trying to find a new agent. I just want to get this shit over with—too damn slow.

  —The saddest news of all is that my mom isn’t doing well health-wise. She’s been losing her memory very rapidly all year—it turns out that she’s been diagnosed with dementia—and she often doesn’t know who any of us are. She’s occasionally confused me with her dead twin. She often doesn’t recognize my father, who’s been her caretaker. The last few months have been awful, actually.

  —Bobby, God bless him, has been able to help out with my parents. I don’t think it’s been an easy fall for him either. He took care of both of them after Hurricane Wilma when they lost power for a week.

  —And there it is: life in sound-byte form. I’d love to see you sometime in person, so let me know the next time you’re in the city. Is Austen still living in Park Slope? I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving—Let me know what’s been up when you get the chance.

  2010 | On June 12, oil-laced sargassum gets into Florida’s Perdido Pass, over and through the 312,000-foot boom designed to keep out such things. Once inside, it smothers the sea grass beds and marshes, the nursery grounds for marine creatures. According to today’s Sarasota Herald Tribune, “Rocks, grass, hermit crabs, and all manner of debris [are] coated in the big patch of rust-colored crude.” We shouldn’t be surprised that the boom doesn’t work. They’re designed for a situation with little if any current, and here the current is coming in at seven miles per hour. The materials available aren’t enough to contain a spill of this magnitude. We’ve already moved past the initial shock; we’ve developed the hardness and skepticism of those whose country is at war. We are at war, anyway, an oilcentric war, which we do everything possible to forget. The lists of the dead are buried in the newspapers. When I am at the Detroit airport a few years back, a flag-draped casket of a dead soldier is carried ceremonially across the tarmac. The passengers inside the terminal gather at the windows, chastened by what’s been kept from them, by what they’ve kept from themselves. Some practically put their hands to the glass as if they’re trying to put a hand to the casket.

  What is it, day fifty-six of the oil disaster? That sounds about right to me.

  Some towns are resorting to their own methods of dealing with a particular plume. Some simply engage bulldozers to push sand around, to plug the openings between Gulf and bay. But in Orange Springs, they have their own particular solution, a plastic pipe from which a thirty-six-inch curtain holds back the flood.

  “It will be contained,” says President Obama. “It may take some time, and it’s going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be damage done to the Gulf Coast.” And this washed-out rhetoric from the president whom we expected so much from twenty-seven months ago. The deliverer of our people into a new age.

  Over and over, reporters talk about the hardest things to capture on video and in print: the smell of the crude, which burns the eyes and the insides of the nose. It upsets the stomach until food simply doesn’t taste good. It’s not a substance you’d want in you.

  February 17, 2006, 9:49 a.m.

  Hi You,

  Paul, I cannot believe how long it’s been since we’ve spoken. Awful. How is your mom? I had a dream about you and M the other night. Can’t remember any details except a large white marble spiral staircase and the two of you at the top of it. The three of us were talking but I was seeing you between the marble posts.

  There’ve been a slew of family health problems here since November (not me, I’m fine as is Aus) but as you know they take up whatever remaining available time is left.

  Okay, gotta run, but be in touch just to let me know you’re both all right. Send a current phone number too. I’ll be in NYC tomorrow to visit with Austen and go to MOMA.

  Love,

  Nubia

  February 17, 2006, 2:12 p.m.

  Hi back,

  It’s so astonishing to hear from you today. I just got a call from Michael who said that my dad was admitted to the hospital this morning. Apparently he’s in serious pain, he’s been peeing blood, they put him on morphine, and now they’re running tests. The irony is that I was just down to Florida a few days ago. My mom’s in pretty bad shape mentally. She seemed to think I was an old boyfriend from high school, but in truth her reality is constantly shifting. Sometimes she’s really agitated. They’ve had to put a lock on the door, because she was wandering off, walking down six flights of stairs to the parking lot, looking for “Mother.” She’s convinced that Mother lives just across the street, and that everyone’s trying to keep her from her. My dad has been taking care of her, with Bobby helping out some, so, God, if he goes …

  The sad thing is that the poor guy just fell flat on his face two weeks ago while he was taking a walk. A cop driving by found him and took him to the hospital.

  But M and I are fine and I’m glad to hear that you and Austen are fine.

  I should be writing you in a saner frame of mind. SOON.

  My dear, I must run out and do a few things to get my mind off this waiting, but it was so good to hear from you, and I do hope we get to talk to each other on the phone soon.

  Love,

  B xxxxx

  Beneath sense lay other realities, mysteries. We don’t know the half of it, and we cling to our systems and classifications as if in dread of what we can’t measure. I never knew what to make of Denise’s longtime infatuation with the unseen (psychics, tarot cards, the Ouija board, the portents of a dream), but I am a little more open to that today. Denise listened to whatever it was she heard: a pulse, some heat, a buzzing turned toward her. She did what she had to do, and twenty-plus months of cold war go down in a letter.

  We are inside our friendship again. And her dream—of course Denise would always know when I was in trouble. I email her the next day, and then the next. In three days my father’s health is better, and Denise is with me through it all, in letters, for the day in and day out of it, as I am for her. There is a sentence in my novel The Burning House that goes: I couldn’t unhook myself from you if I tried. It’s nothing as unlovely as all that, though. There’s no other way to say it: my friend, my friend is back.

  Windstorm

  1966 | Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell look a little stagey in the video. A merry-go-round rotates behind them. Their breaths gust; it looks cold out. Tammi is in a sky-blue jacket and beret; Marvin’s sport coat doesn’t look heavy enough for the weather. They’re singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” a duet that’s been climbing the charts, but the performance isn’t quite right yet. The voices don’t actually mesh with the movements of their mouths, their arms. They’re trying. They’re working. They’re giving the best smiles th
ey can muster, but the two of them must know they’re outside the dream of the song.

  Then they seem to forget all about lip-syncing. The song swells. They’re climbing higher, up the winding path into Alpine trees. Wind, rain, cold—they’re leaving the elements behind. Civilizations spread out beneath them. Tammi has more swing in her gestures. Every so often she rolls her eyes, as if all this romanticism is just too much, even though she wants the dream to go on. She taps Marvin’s square chin with her finger. He grins. It’s too much to look at her face for long. He’s glancing off to the left, not with indifference, but at a future beyond the facts. Who would want to know the facts right now? (Tammi’s death of a brain tumor at twenty-four. Marvin murdered by his own father, at home. Depression, two suicide attempts, cocaine …) For now, Marvin’s body relaxes into Tammi’s, and it is just joy for the remaining seconds of the song. Not even seconds, because we’re outside time. We’re free-floating inside the wild sphere of what two people might be for each another.

  2010 | I’m in the backyard in the house in Springs. The day has an odd turbulence about it, ever since I’ve picked up M from the train station the night before. Maybe I am angry with him for sleeping through his alarm clock and missing the 9 a.m. jitney. We were supposed to have lunch together, and I’d been looking forward to that lunch after a couple of intense days of writing. Instead, he will come in at five today on the busiest train of the season, the Fourth of July train, people practically standing on one another’s feet, all the things people do when good manners break down. And he will be battered from it.

  We walk into the house. Texts come into his phone with a frequency I find unnerving, because he never says what they are, who they’re from. I wish he’d turn off the sound. Not that I expect him to tell me who it is. One thing we’ve tried to do in our fifteen years together is to give each other space, but the combination of secrecy and right-in-my-faceness is enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end. I constrict from inside. His freneticism is making me frenetic, and to center myself, I go to the side yard to clean out the birdbath. There’s a scum inside the dish. It’s the color of raisins, but it’s ugly and foul, and I don’t like to think of the birds dipping their wings in that water. The week has been hot, brutally so. The air is still. It hasn’t rained in so long and the birds really need to drink and clean themselves. There are no pools or puddles of standing water anywhere.

  Then M comes up to me from behind. He puts his arm around me. It’s part loving, part holding me in place, as if by executing that gesture, he’s holding himself in place. I feel a little locked down, as if I’m being gently punished for some infraction. I wonder what I’ve done. “What?” he says.

  “What do you mean, what?” I say. I look out at the garden. Though it’s the height of summer, the plants look brown to me.

  “What?” he says again, this time with more emphasis.

  “Honey?” I want to turn around. It seems to me that if I could see his face just now, I wouldn’t feel like falling down into his arms.

  “I think you’re mad at me,” he says. And just the sound of those words. Oh, deep chasm: I feel the grass underneath my feet about to open up a trapdoor.

  “I don’t know. You’re acting—you’re not acting like yourself. I don’t—” Full sentences are impossible. They are houses I don’t have it in me to build. “What’s going on? Are you seeing someone?”

  It’s a relief to say it, as hard as it is to say it. But it’s also standing inside someone else’s narrative, a TV narrative, a politician’s narrative. Our relationship has always been open, but open has meant a couple of hours—and anonymity. Not an overnight stay and certainly not a boyfriend.

  Some boundary is being kicked down here.

  The tears burst the dam, though the tears aren’t mine. They’re M’s. Is that what happens in any relationship, healthy or not? One cries the tears of the two. One stands ground for the both of them, but it is odd for me to be playing the tearless one. The last time I played the tearless role was at our wedding, in a salt marsh on Cape Cod, two years ago, when I read him a passage from “Song of Myself.” I was astonished to see him cry in front of the minister. I’d been expecting to break down myself—that’s the way I’d been imagining it in my head for months. But I spoke those words calmly as if Walt Whitman had entered me, and there I was, grateful to be released from my old role for that little while.

  M continues to cry. I’m aware of the odd magnetizing force of baritone weeping—how often do we ever hear it? It has an animal pull. I imagine ears turning toward it in all the houses around us. I look over toward our neighbors’ fence and instinctively pull him by the hand toward the back door.

  The two of us are seated in the living room. The story is this: He has met someone. His thing with the someone has been going on, what—three meetings? They have met in the apartment in the city. They have spent the night in the city. M needs to tell me all this, because it is too much to hold it back. By coming clean about it he can begin again.

  There are no plans to get rid of the someone.

  And, if I’m to understand it correctly, there are no plans to get rid of me.

  He says that some joy has been lost in our relationship over the past two years, though this comes as news to me. I have been relatively okay. In spite of my mother’s illness and death, in spite of Denise’s illness and death, I’ve been going forward, doing my work, teaching, getting better ever since that outbreak of shingles. What have I not been seeing? What have I not been doing? Has my own grief—the gauzy thickness of it—kept me from seeing him? Has my darkness poisoned him? The other person is forty-two. He lives in another part of Long Island. He is someone with whom he needs to have sex right now. New sex, he says, versus married sex. I get that, at least in theory. The energizing touch of another creature, a new face, a different body, a bigger chest, a furrier body, thicker hard legs, another smell, eyes of a different color. Just for that moment, I can see past myself, my own disappointment, hurt, jealousy, and rage, to the man ahead of me, the man who isn’t my husband just this minute, but someone in trouble.

  Maybe this guy will help him. Will take care of him in ways I can’t take care of him.

  Maybe this guy will help us. I have never thought we needed help, but maybe we do. I don’t know anything.

  And besides, we’re talking about one overnight a week, right? I can do that.

  I think?

  Somewhere in the ghost of my imagination I think of all the figures in books and movies to whom I attach the word “accommodator.” Oh, how we loathe those people, so attuned to what they think is right, to misguided notions of loyalty and attachment, that they can’t even see how they’re complicit. Let’s think of them, let’s make a list.

  Am I overemphasizing my role in this so I don’t have to feel the wound of it?

  Is this overemphasis just another defense?

  “He’s such a gift to me,” he says, crying and crying again as he looks at my face. “I don’t know why it hurts to say that to you.”

  Maybe because you want it to hurt, I think. You want to slide that knife into my side with kindness on your face. But I’m in a place beyond hurting right now—the defenses are at attention. Did he think I’d crumble and shrivel? Can’t he see me past the movie he’s projected onto me?

  “This wasn’t a choice,” M says, after he’s recovered himself. And the conviction behind that, the openness of his face, is enough to scare me like I’ve never been scared before.

  “You can write about this,” he adds.

  But I don’t want this in my book! I want to cry.

  2006 | Halloween has usually been a time to batten down the hatches in our New York apartment. The sidewalks crowd with people from out of town, the police barricade the streets, and for a little while, West Sixteenth Street is Bourbon Street. I suppose it is fun to have Bourbon Street out your window, but yelling and clamor are no fun unless you’re with someone. M is away this year, which makes me
miss last year, when we walked down the streets with black horns affixed to our heads. The night was warm, October sliding back into summertime. It was the year in which I had a long pointy beard and a photographer from the Post seemed to think we’d make a most interesting picture.

  So no better time to get out of town, to propose a weekend with Denise. She hasn’t yet seen our new second house on Fire Island, and I’m eager to have her come visit. Just the two of us.

  Denise loves this idea, loves it. She writes me about the visit for days. She asks what to bring; she must have her coffee, she says. She must have her beans; she must have her coffee pot. Of course, I say, of course. Bring your whole wardrobe. Bring anything you want to bring.

  I stand among the small crowd at the foot of the ferry dock in the October chill, watching the men in their coats—these men are older than the men of summer, homeowners rather than renters—streaming toward us. Men look past us toward other men, and they perform their greetings. It’s true of us, whoever we are: we want to look popular, we want to seem loved, and we want to love back. Then there’s Denise who catches sight of me as she steps off the boat. She has high heels on. (High heels on those boardwalks: Denise!) And her big grin, which she hides a bit by dipping her head, a characteristic gesture, as if she knows from experience that it could be dangerous to beam out that grin too freely.

  We hug. We laugh. Suddenly no one else exists but us, and we walk down the boardwalk, past the pines, past deer, past bamboo, past the puddles in the sand of Fire Island Boulevard, as if there had never been that night in that North Carolina beach house, as if there had never been anything to get in the way of our affection and ease.

  She loves the house. She loves the windows open to the holly trees and birches, the white walls, the spare furniture, the clerestories facing west. There’s an extra poignancy to this time of year, just as the leaves color, the season drawing to a close. Soon the ferry schedule will dwindle to two boats a day, then only on weekends, provided Great South Bay doesn’t freeze over. The water will be shut off, and if we do come out, say, on the third weekend of December, we’ll have to cart the water in jugs and pee outside.