The Narrow Door

by Paul Lisicky

  Two days after my mother’s death, M and I hike the Seal Haulout Trail in Montauk State Park, following a path that’s sometimes marked, sometimes not, sometimes dwindling off into bog and stream. Stones and roots make walking a challenge. Our arches already hurt in our shoes. Beech, vernal pool, muck, skunk cabbage, daylily, lichen, boulder. Splash. A frog? Maybe a frog, or a turtle going under. But later we definitely see a living creature, from a few hundred feet away: a seal out in the rocks in Block Island Sound. She holds us in her attention, with a whiskered, beagle-like face. I wave back. She keeps looking, then plunges her head beneath the surface. She comes up again, surprised we’re still there, but more interested finally in the boat idling nearby. She must be thinking of the dangers of the boat, the possibility of it running over her, the importance of staying away. She appears to be the last of her kind around. The water is already too warm for the likes of her here. They’re already up in Maine, the Bay of Fundy, Newfoundland. I watch her for as long as I can before we turn and head back up the mown path beside the woods.

  The woods. Fly sounds, bird sounds, leaf flutter. The droning of bees in a shadbush grove. Violet butterfly, no wider than my thumbnail, flying leaf to leaf to leaf. And just around the corner, a hairy creature in the water: bronze, substantial, pointing its face away from us. A beaver? Dam in the making? I know beavers are out here—the local paper says there’s a lone one in Scoy Pond a few miles away. Last summer one was run over by a car on the North Fork. But a sighting is too good to be true. I try for a picture, but the creature goes under and stays under, and I never get a look at her tail, the deciding factor. Maybe the creature is simply a muskrat; muskrats are much more common in these parts. In any case, the creature is the third wild animal I’ve seen in forty-eight hours, and I haven’t said one word about the two randy iguanas racing along the seawall behind my father’s building last week. “It’s my mother again,” I say to M, and just as I hear myself say those words, a blue jay squawks over our heads and we laugh at ourselves again.

  The Freedom of Failure

  2009 | A few months before her death, Denise and I develop a plan for her to see the new house in Springs. I want her to walk through the gardens, to stare down into the fish pond, to look at the spring light pooling in through the skylights. And maybe I think the visit would be a boon to her, to keep her going forward through rough times.

  So, the train. Too many steps up and down into stations. Not enough bathrooms; she needs to be near a bathroom. The jitney isn’t much better. Philadelphia to Amagansett: even in the best travel conditions we’re talking five hours and that’s not counting waiting time or layovers. We decide finally that she’ll take the train from Philadelphia to Metropark. An hour ride. I’ll meet her at Metropark and we’ll drive over the Goethals Bridge, across Staten Island, over the Verrazano Bridge, the Belt Parkway, the Southern Parkway, the Sunrise Highway, the Montauk Highway, and take as much time as we want to get there. I’ll map out possible stops along the way. For some reason, the thought of driving past the Parachute Ride and Deno’s Wonder Wheel with her strikes me as especially appealing, though it will be unlikely she’ll notice what I’m pointing out. She’ll be talking fervently, with concentration on her face, looking a little above the brake lights of the car in front of us.

  In the weeks ahead, we talk about the trip every few days, where Denise will sleep, what she might need to bring along. All the things she brought to the Pines and more. And every time I drive through the tunnel of trees toward our house, I imagine her making the small Denise sounds of approval.

  2010 | One day, many months after her death, Denise’s sister-in-law, Nancy, mentions reading an essay in which I make an appearance. As soon as Nancy tells me about the essay, I tell her excitedly, oh, please, send it right now. I have not known this essay existed and I’m greedy to see it. I keep checking my inbox waiting for it to appear, and when it doesn’t appear, I try to busy myself with a hundred other things. I cannot help but wonder if Nancy has reservations after her initial decision to tell me about the piece. Maybe she sees an aspect about the portrait of me that I might not find too sweet. The title, “The Freedom of Failure,” certainly rivets my attention. If I make an appearance in it, then, well, maybe I’ll learn about the tension between camaraderie and competition and how she saw those things playing out between us. At least I didn’t imagine it, and on that level I feel an unexpected comfort. Every time I think of the essay, I feel my heart rate slow. The aperture of my attention widens.

  And if I don’t want to hear it? Shock is better than silence; shock makes us feel awake. What a thing, to be spoken to, anew, by someone whose voice you never thought you’d hear again, except for her walking toward you one day, in a dream.

  Twenty-four hours pass and still no essay in my box. There are many ways to fend off disappointment, and I spend the day being more productive than usual: writing a long letter to a student, writing a blog post, writing emails to friends I haven’t answered in a long time, boring business emails that require a certain amount of cheer I have to pull up from down in me. I don’t even need my usual cup of coffee at five o’clock: look at my energy, concentration, my refusal to sit still for a single second. I chew the flavor out of all twelve sticks of cinnamon gum, and I’d probably start chewing some more if there were another pack within reach. I’d chew and chew until I spit it out in the trash, until the taste is pure chemical, until I’d never want another stick of gum again. And I wonder how many days I should wait before I say, hey, Nancy. Did you forget that essay?

  2009 | M and I get in the car one day and set out for Camden, New Jersey. Camden would seem like an unlikely destination for a hot summer weekend in August, but it is the site of Walt Whitman’s house, the only house he owned in his lifetime. We’ve been here before, thirteen years before, but we’re coming back as M has been commissioned to write an article about the house, which would require a refreshed eye. Who knows? Maybe the house has changed in thirteen years. We drive down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. We take in a grassy park, a marina, and an outdoor concert hall on the same spot from which Whitman took the ferry to Philadelphia. We see acres and acres of empty lots, simultaneously rural and desolate, as if an entire community had decided to pack up and go. But Whitman’s house stands firm in gray-beige clapboard. And maybe that’s why I’m not disappointed when we find out, by way of a sign, that the house is closed for vacation. “We should have called,” we probably moan at once, and there’s an almost comic acceptance to our predicament. This is what you get when you choose not to plan out the next hour ahead. On the steps next door sits a young man with a kind, curious face. We get to talking. He seems to know the house, love the house, and I like knowing that he knows that Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde were visitors. He has watched the outsiders come to his neighborhood, he has met people who wouldn’t have visited this block otherwise, and he has taken them in, thought about their funny shoes, considered the looks of awe and focus on their faces. Just as Whitman’s book takes us all in, from the distance of a hundred years ago.

  We turn down Haddon Avenue toward Harleigh Cemetery on the eastern edge of town. The grave would not be closed for vacation; graves are always open for business. At least on a hot Saturday in summer. But the grave is not so easy to find. Its location is eclipsed by signs marking the final resting place of another Camden poet, the haiku poet Nick Virgilio, who in his life must have made sure that visitors looking for Walt’s grave would see his first. (In life, one of Nick’s projects was the city’s Walt Whitman Center, and after all that work in another poet’s memory, who could not have been a little competitive?) Only after making a few wrong turns, past phragmites and a lake filled with blond water do we find the often-photographed mausoleum in a dense glen of ivy and trees. It might be tangential to mention that I was born in the hospital on the hill overlooking the grave, but it’s true: a mere two hundred feet away. It makes me wonder whether my hospital room was pointed toward that grave, or at least tu
rned in that direction. From birth to death—and my mother holds the moist infant me in her arms.

  We park. We get out and slam the doors. We walk up to the gate to the Whitman family crypt, where Walt’s mother, father, and brother lie stacked together inside the dank, moldy space, messy with spiderwebs. But if the whole family is side by side, then why is the name Walt Whitman etched into the arch above? A totalizing vision. He designed the building, after all; why not simply: Whitman? The two of us are confused by the hubris of it, and our discomfort is only heightened by the chiggers making a feast of our bare ankles. The smell of the Cooper River wafts over the weeds. Part pea soup, part rotting bone pulled up from a wetland, part sick. It is not a healthy-water smell. The smell sends us back to the car, where we roll up the windows, turn on the manufactured air full blast, and dedicate ourselves to scratching our bare arms and legs until they’re speckled with little red dots.

  We drive up Haddon Avenue past boarded-up blocks and clusters of men hanging outside the few storefronts we see. The day has been big. We’ve been shaken by what we’ve seen; we just can’t put a name to that feeling yet. Should we need to? In truth, our hopes for this visit haven’t actually panned out—we can already see that now. But that kind of vague disappointment seems to be true of all things we long for too much. There’s a physical quality to the aftermath, like the letdown that comes after having eaten too much sugar.

  I send an email to Denise once we’re back in the hotel, across the Delaware in Philadelphia. It’s not a long email—simply, Hey, we’re in your town. Yes, on the other side of the city. Philadelphia. Sorry I haven’t given you more warning but it was a spontaneous trip. Are you up for brunch tomorrow? Someplace close to you? Someplace easy? We’re only here for the day, but if it doesn’t work out, I’ll come down and see you very soon. I love you.

  I don’t hear from Denise until the next morning. I can feel the labor in her note: a mix of capital letters, lowercase letters, misspellings, and unnecessary spaces. I can feel the supreme concentration behind each word, the effort and failure to get each word right. I give her a call, the connection is bad—or maybe that’s her voice. It’s quieter, shakier, and more tenatative than I would have expected, but then again that is probably the cell phone connection.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” I say to her. “We don’t have to. I know I should have called you before.”

  “No,” she says. “We must. I’m fine.” And we agreet to meet at Parc, her new favorite place, on Rittenhouse Square at eleven o’clock.

  M and I are seated at a table in the raised section of the restaurant. We’re trying to relax, we’re tearing off too much bread from the basket on the table. We watch the waiters move across the black-and-white checked floor, smell the hard mineral smell of poached egg from someone else’s plate. I tell M, this isn’t going to be easy. You haven’t seen her in a long time. And he assures me he’ll be fine. He is used to illness. He does well, he says, in the company of those who are sick. Someone throws a Frisbee across the street, in the park, and a Bernese mountain dog jumps, lifts, catches the Frisbee in her mouth with a snap, and takes it away, head lowered, as if she’s privy to a funny thing only she knows about. She lies down and gnaws on its red rim, lying in wait for other dogs to notice her good fortune.

  And just then Denise’s ex is standing at the table. I’m not sure he even says hello to us. He sits down with us, as if it would always be clear that he’d be joining us. I have no problem with him joining us; he’s been so involved in Denise’s day-to-day care; he’s helped to find her a good living space and he’s paying her rent. He tells us that the two of them meet at Parc every Sunday, just at this time. I try to push back the sensation that there’s trouble in the air. Perhaps they have an announcement to make. Maybe they’re getting married again after having lived apart so long. B has proposed getting married again to Denise as a way to make sure she’d have the best health insurance coverage, the best care. And though Denise was initially confused by this, maybe she has since settled into the idea.

  But my questions are shut off once M’s hand covers his mouth. Tears brim. A look of distress, genuine distress, creases his forehead. Denise is trying her best to creep out of the cab outside. B springs up from his seat. He walks out the front door to assist her, but where is the Denise I know? She isn’t the Denise of months ago, with her vigor and sass, her determination to look fine, go forth, in spite of murderous treatments. Of course she’s impeccably dressed: camouflage tank top, taupe scarf tied around her neck, lots of bare skin. The only concession to comfort is her sneakers, blocky white sneakers that must give her more traction than any other shoe. And there’s her port, just above her collarbone, the bruised square of skin around it exposed for all to see. It is her bit of a fuck-you to a world that would like to say disease doesn’t exist, disease happens to people I shouldn’t have to see. She is still beautiful, but her particular kind of beautiful cannot conceal how much weight she’s lost or the slowness of her walk. Each step takes such effort, and I can tell that the people near her are trying their best not to look. If we’re lucky, one or two might know exactly what’s going on, and they might be urging her forward, in silence. Or else they want her to go away. Maybe both.

  And yet that smile on her face! A smile that could turn diamonds to black powder, which sounds more like her description than mine. The two of us sit side by side, B and M across the table, and the four of us do our best to demonstrate, through casual conversation, that disaster is not upon us. What do we talk about? The old points of reference don’t matter so much these days, though Denise is still wondering how she’s going to teach next month, and M is telling her, you don’t want to teach, why would you want to teach? Just take the semester off and rejuvenate. Use that time to get massages and read novels, don’t you think? And Denise slides over to another topic, not exactly ignoring the advice, but giving herself the freedom to bring up just what she wants to bring up. If illness doesn’t give us freedom, then what does it give us? Maybe we’re not talking so much about freedom, but her tact monitor. What could tact be when it takes so much to get from one second to the next? And whoever said that the mind must move in a straight line? One minute she’s funny, one minute she’s sarcastic. My God, her mind is all over the place. Each thought is another roll of the dice, and there’s no better demonstration that human personality is as reliable as chemicals and chance. All of this happens with a big goofy grin on her face. It would be a mistake if I didn’t say there wasn’t some fun in all this—see me put my arm around her shoulder as B aims the camera at us again and again. Hear the popping sounds? And if she knew how much she was sounding like my mother, my dead mother—the abrupt shifts in tone, the jokes with no context—she would stop it right now. So this is what happens to all things, I think, as two girls in the tallest possible high heels clomp and laugh down the sidewalk, bare arm in bare arm.

  2010 | The email from Nancy comes in late one evening amid a cluster of other emails. She apologizes for the misunderstanding. I don’t appear in any essay—or she’s never had a copy of such an essay. She doesn’t even know if the piece even exists; it is likely yet another essay dreamed of, or in a half-finished state. But if there’s no record of an essay, there’s certainly an email about the essay, a letter she sends to me.

  I read Denise’s email once, stop, then read it all over again. It takes me a second to figure out that this is a tough-love letter to Nancy, a letter in response to some misunderstanding between Nancy and Denise—or between Nancy and someone else in the family. The gist is this: since Denise has failed at everything, her work, her friendships, her relationships, she’s grown up and Nancy should, too.

  There were dozens of Denise’s—a Denise for this friend, a Denise for that friend. That could be said of all people who have a genius for friendship. But—I shake my head. The email is composed in a tone Denise wouldn’t have wanted me to hear. It is a tone that identifies her role in her family, the expressi
ve big sister who also happens to be the advice giver. It’s not a side I’m eager to know right now. I want my Denise, selfishly. I want her to speak to me, only to me right now.

  I come upon one passage in the email: When Paul stopped talking to me, he was simply too busy for me. I could accept that. I didn’t take it personally.

  My hands are flat against the laptop keys. For a second they look distant to me, like another person’s hands, then they come in closer, clearer, and all I see are lines, bones, and veins, the fine light hairs curling over the knuckles.

  Clearly this letter was written during the year and a half of our great distance.

  Is that dust inside my nostrils, or is there an oil leak on the street nearby?

  I stuff a wet bedspread into the clothes dryer. Yes, you had nothing to do with it. Me. All me. Take no responsibility for anything.

  “And what about North Carolina?” I say aloud.

  Then I stuff a second wet bedspread into the dryer. I press the button, taxing the efficient machine with too much sodden weight.

  I walk back and forth around what little there is of the apartment. If I had a bigger place, I’d walk from room to room, looking for a dirty floor to clean. What am I feeling? If I were in the mood to be a proper patient I could say, interest, betrayal, annoyance, excitement. I could probably keep on filling the rest of this page, but words fail in the face of strong emotion. They hold too little; they don’t pour into one another the way I want them to. There are solid walls between each word, and even if I named every abstraction, the list would never tell the complete story. There would always be another word to follow the last word.