The Narrow Door

by Paul Lisicky

  I sit in the living room chair, looking at the jar that holds our late dog’s ashes. An apartment full of urns: our dog’s urn, our cat’s urn, M’s late lover’s urn.

  I stay up till one, two hours past my bedtime. I’m feeling, I tell myself, which is better than feeling nothing. To be pissed at the dead—this is where these days have taken me. For God’s sake. It makes as much sense as being mad at the sidewalk, the cracks in the surface, the pieces of chewing gum blackened and crushed by so many feet. But I am not just mad, truly. It would be easier to sit with these feelings if I were simply mad.

  A thought leans into me like a shoulder I can’t see: my life would be larger if I could hold the dark side of Denise alongside the bright.

  The Narrow Door

  2009 | Another note comes in from Nancy. It is Wednesday, the middle of August. Denise has taken a turn, and she thinks I should come right away.

  I look out at the Springs backyard, the late-sumer heap of vine, rose, bamboo, and leaf. The brevity of the note makes me sluggish. Philadelphia. I do not want to go to Philadelphia, especially at this point in the summer when so many people are traveling, irritable. Especially with it being—what, two trains away. Six long hours. I just want to be still. I just want to sit on the living room couch until Denise gets better again. She will get better again. And I am surprised that Nancy doesn’t have the wherewithal to see that right now.

  Maybe this is why Denise hasn’t answered my emails since our visit last week.

  I walk to the window again. The view outside the window grows smaller, the edges less distinct.

  Denise will get better tomorrow. I know she’ll get better.

  An hour later I write to Nancy to tell her I will be leaving tomorrow on the 5:57 a.m. train.

  I’m standing over Denise’s bed, then sitting beside her. She doesn’t look any different from how she looked at our brunch, but her eyes have been closed a full twenty-four hours, and she hasn’t talked in that long. The speed with which I’ve gotten to the hospice is already a memory: Nancy picking me up at Thirtieth Street Station, elevator lifting to a high floor. Hugging Denise’s mother, hugging Austen, hugging relatives, shaking hands. There is a surreal quality to the combination of orderliness and intensity in the air, the serene waiting room overlooking Center City, William Penn’s statue atop City Hall, the sleek modernism of the PSFS building. The sky over Center City looks troublesome, as if it’s about to darken and break and express itself.

  I am alone with my friend. I am surprised to be given this private time with her. There are at least a dozen relatives out in the waiting room, each of whom would like to do what I’m doing right now. Only yesterday she was awake and present, still telling the workers that the hospice stay was temporary, a place she’d be leaving after she felt better in a few days. That changed when Austen’s best friend from New York arrived. She cried then as I’m told she cried when she heard I was coming. “Paul’s coming?” she said, and her eyes went wide. As if a visit from me should be a surprise. Denise.

  But I have come too late. She’s not even the person I knew. I look at her sleeping face, grab her big warm toe poking out from beneath the sheet: monkey feet. It’s not even Denise’s face anymore: it’s impersonal, a mask. She’s breathing, head turned to the right, but her eyes are closed for good now. As awkward as it is to admit it, I’m relieved that we don’t have to say the usual final things. Too much pressure, and how could human language ever carry us to whatever is coming next? Better to hold on to her toe. Better to think of peace. Better to wish her out and away, as her mind and body are already wanting two different things, and the fight isn’t going to be pretty. But should I be surprised by that?

  Then I change my mind. It is hard not to say all the deathbed things one has absorbed from books. It is hard to find the right phrase that might be carried off, beyond consciousness. She moistens her lips and coughs from deep in her throat. I sit down beside her and tell her I’ve been rereading her work all week. I tell her I’ve gone back to Good Deeds. I tell her I’ve read her essays, tell her about coming upon “Woman of Heart and Mind,” her piece about motherhood and her brief relationship with Sam. I want her to hear what I’m saying. My feelings about her work should not be a surprise; she shouldn’t have to be reassured just hours from the end. It’s as if I’m still confronting the old accusation, at least implicitly: I don’t love her work enough. Would it ever be possible to love her work enough? But I don’t know what else to give her right now.

  This room feels lonely. This room seems to need other people in it. I know there’s a script, and even though I don’t want the script, I feel as if I’m required to perform its parts.

  I don’t remember whether Denise’s mother comes to get me at the door, or whether I’ve just decided to walk down the hall. In the waiting room, Nancy and Joey hand me a large envelope of Denise’s work, and I read everything inside, from pieces she wrote as a teenager to newer stories, a few drafts short of finished. The lights are too bright for my eyes. I know the sky is glowering outside, but I do not raise my head to watch it change. I read and I read, as if reading is the only thing I can think of to keep me in the chair. On the other side of the room, Denise’s family looks at the Food Channel with interest, where the baker in question prepares a cake with one too many layers of icing.

  2010 | I’d already suspected the trip would be significant weeks before our departure, and now M and I are walking up the plank to the ferry. It would be impossible for the trip not to be significant, on an island we’d never been to, thirty miles out from the mainland. We’re not here for a vacation, but for a reading we’re giving together, and since the island is an effort to get to, we long ago decided to stay an extra day. It helps that Ned is much appreciated in Nantucket—no more agreeable creature to bring to Nantucket than a golden retriever. As it is, Ned is already exhausted from greeting even before he’s trotted off the ferry. A handful of children surround him on the upper deck, rubbing him and playing tug-of-war with his chewy, while he rolls over on his back and shows everyone his belly, overstimulated by all those small hands in his fur.

  Are we nervous? Of course we are. But the reading goes well. Our friends Joy, Maggie, Linda, and Laura are in the audience, happy to see us. We’re happy to see them. And the landscape beyond town couldn’t be darker, more mysterious. Moors, Japanese black pines, and other stunted vegetation. Part Scotland, part Florida Keys, part Pine Barrens of my youth. The landscape already feels like a representation of a mind-state, and I’m already looking forward to the day when I will come back, in less stressful moments.

  The next morning, we take a dog walk high on a cliff along Nantucket Harbor with Len, one of the hosts of the reading, and his dog, Swearengen. The two dogs wrestle and rush, running in circles that get wider and wider. Ned is almost running at a forty-five-degree angle, mouth open, eyes wild, he’s going that fast. At one point they are so close to the edge of the cliff that I tell them to stop, but they just keep on running. Ned slops into a mudpit. We are walking higher and higher into a heavy sky, too wintery for August. I am weighed down by three layers of clothes. Len points to a grassland and says, that might be the most endangered landscape in America. And they once wanted to build a Marriott here.

  We head back to the car. The wet dogs soak their shapes into the upholstery.

  Only an hour ago, at nine o’clock mass, the priest uttered these words as part of the intercessions, the only words I remember from those fifty minutes: You lead us to salvation through the narrow door.

  2009 | We try very hard to keep busy in the overlit waiting room, though it is hard to keep busy when we haven’t brought anything to occupy us. It would have seemed wrong to bring anything—a book, a notebook, a laptop—disrespectful to the dying. I suspect this waiting is killing us, but no one can admit to such a thing. And no one can go outside for a walk, for coffee or a sandwich, for who knows when we might be called in? The truth is we’re lost without Denise. If she weren’t
down the hall, she’d have had an activity planned for us. She’d be telling stories, she’d be distracting us from all this death at hand. But all we have right now is time, achingly slow time, which has nothing to do with the time outside, where people rush to meetings, or drop off the kids at summer school. How many tasks does one not get done in a single day? That’s how most of us live our lives, but that’s not our problem right now. Denise’s family and I are holding ourselves still in the room of light. We’re waiting for the hand on the forearm, the shoulder, the hand that will bring us back to ourselves.

  The hospice nurses seem to know this about us and they ask, kindly, but not too kindly, if they could bring us anything. Coffee? Water? A cup of tea?

  Someone comes by and turns on the lamp.

  2010 | At the motel in Nantucket, M talks of taking Ned for a walk into town. It is a long walk to town, a good mile along a busy road without a sidewalk. I’m not so sure any puppy could be strong enough to walk a mile and back, and I say it. I have to say it.

  “Ned will be fine,” he says, leaning over, tying his sneaker.

  I look over at Ned, who’s already excited by the jingle bell sound of his leash. A humid wind pours through the slats of the jalousies. “Are you sure? Puppies need sleep. It doesn’t make sense,” I say, and rub my arms from the cold.

  The truth is, nothing makes sense these days. No emotional logic, no context, no explanation for fiery moods. More and more M is as touchy as Denise, at least the Denise I remember from that night in North Carolina.

  “Sense?” he says. Sense? And looks at me as I’ve said the foulest word in the notebook. He leaves the room, biting into his lip. Ned follows behind him, jumping and leaping.

  I do not move from my place on the bed. It doesn’t help matters that the night before, a blogger has decided to praise a story of mine on his blog. The same blogger has said harsh things about M’s work in the past. I’m not so naive as to think that the blogger doesn’t have subterranean motivations, but that doesn’t stop me from posting a link to his good review on my blog. I feel crummy about this. I feel as if I’ve chosen my own work over my loyalty to M’s work, and it just doesn’t taste good. It tastes worse—I feel it souring my stomach—with each passing hour. Should I take it down? I truly consider this. Even if I did take it down, I’m not sure that would stop the agitated feelings between us now.

  I stand at the window. The sky is so much darker than it should be at four in the afternoon. Maybe Len was right about the three inches of rain in the forecast. On the parking lot, two boys play catch with their father. They throw the softball with a steadiness and freneticism that suggest they’re going to be inside for a long time. They know more about the weather than I do, so I turn on the forecast.

  Beyond the parking lot, the phragmites rattle as the wind pushes them back and forth. It’s the sound of my childhood summers. A little anxious, vaguely tropical, the wind pushing weeds as a storm came up. Wavelets slapping the bulkhead along the lagoon, the docks. Blue sky, charcoal sky, and wigeons and buffleheads flying off in all directions, looking for a place to take cover.

  An hour later M walks back through the door with Ned. His mood is not better. If anything, it is worse. He has thought about sense. Sense, he says, stands in the way of so much. Sense stands in the way of spontaneity, expression. Sense stands in the way of risk. Since when have I become the avatar of sense? I never expected to be taken literally; I was only concerned about Ned, who admittedly looks just fine as he pushes his black nose into my leg. But this fight is about a problem I can’t put my finger on. It goes on and goes on. It shakes the rafters of the room, though neither of us is yelling. The people in the next room are laughing—or is that a show on TV? “I can’t go on like this” meets “That’s it, it’s over.” And I say the latter. I think this means I’ve done the nasty deed I’ve been expected to execute all along. I am astonished I could say such a thing. Could I imagine having said such a thing two months ago? Well, no. I was so innocent then, though I thought I’d seen everything. I can hardly lift myself from the bed, and we promised to go to a dinner party in less than a half hour.

  There are tears shed. “I don’t think I can go,” M says.

  “We have to go,” I say, standing up. I wipe my nose on the back of my fist. “You’ll feel a lot better.”

  I’m not even sure why I say this. There would be no harm in saying that one or both of us just fell ill. That wouldn’t be lying. At this moment we are both ill, even if our illness can’t be pinned down to a fever or sore throats.

  And somehow we manage to dry our eyes and say hello to Joy, who’s walking toward us, grinning her big grin, by the motel pool. And somehow we manage to be pleasant dinner companions at the dinner party in the big house on the beach. I sit next to Joy at dinner, and aside from talking about dogs and other animals, we talk about books. I ask her questions about her stories, about her use of imagery and plot. I take a sip from my wine and then another. I am enthralled, so happy. To sit beside my favorite writer: how can my happiest night also be my saddest? I look over at M, who’s talking to Seward, across the table. More red wine is poured. I wonder if anyone else can tell what’s going on between us. Maybe. Joyce, Seward’s wife, wonders why everyone is laughing when no one at the table really knows the others that well. She says she feels separate from it, talks of hearing that laughter a few minutes back from the kitchen. We are uncomfortable to hear her interpretation, though the exchange it triggers entrances us. We all admit that laughter has very little to do with happiness. It is about release. Nervousness about the trap of composure. Then conversation of any sort is difficult for some minutes. We step outside to the porch. Spotlights shine on a dinghy hitched up in the beach grass. And just before we head back inside, the ferry glides into the harbor, deadly silent. The harbor is black. What is it about a lit boat headed toward shore at night? one of us asks. It’s like a scene from Amarcord, Joy says. An unexpected gust of wind shivers the beach grass. I smell rain, fresh rain, on the air. It’s getting ready to pour. I can already imagine it pounding the dunes. And we wonder about the people in the boat, if they’re looking forward to seeing who’s meeting them at the dock.

  2010 | To think you can love someone so well that he’d forget the dead, forget his pain. To think of love as a laser beam of attention. To think you could beam that attention toward him in such a way that he wouldn’t even know you were doing it. To learn that your attention is doomed. Unwelcome, better having been put to other uses: helping the poor, working for the environment, for animals. To learn that you are only a pale winter sun, when you once thought you could have made the hillsides green.

  2009 | Everyone who’s here for Denise is gathered inside this little room, little oven. There must be a dozen of us. Now we have a job to do, now we’re helping to write the old story: she died surrounded by family and friends. Austen closest to her mother’s face, hand on her brow; Denise’s mother on the other side. Her ex-husband beside Austen, me by her feet. All the lights and lamps are off. Flames shudder in the votives. Joni sings from Joey’s laptop, the bare-bones demo of “Good Friends,” from the CD I made for her many months back. No one in the room knows that Denise once called it our song when it first came out in 1985, and the timing of it feels as if we’re passing a secret back and forth. In a minute, Joni’s cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” comes on. And this is the moment where Denise would guffaw. Talk about timing. Irreverent Denise: no narratives of grace and consolation for her.

  We’re watching her face. It’s a little like waiting for a movie to start, and it’s unbearable, this watching, this waiting. What group of human beings could ever be in practice for such a thing? We probably realize this, in our separate ways, at about the same time. Along with the shock that we wish the movie would get to the heartbreaking part. This is time without boundaries. Time without boundaries is a little like, well—we’re in a boat, think of that, a little rocking boat, a hundred miles out, no trees or shorel
ines in sight. But we don’t want to hurry this on either. We want Denise to be aware of us in her bones and blood. This is why we’re here. We’re all, in a sense, going out with her.

  A nurse comes in. The nurses, the calming presence of the nurses. Their neutrality, never too concerned, never too near. I can’t imagine what it might be like to be them, to live inside such intensity day after day. Are they clear-glass houses? Or do they shut all their doors and windows once they’re off duty? I don’t know how else they could buy food, pay bills, wait to be called at the DMV without thinking of the ways, all the ludicrous ways, we go about distancing ourselves from the fact that we’re all on the way to dying. Maybe they are simply in better practice than we are. Maybe it isn’t too hard to get where they are. You get a summons for jury duty on the day of a best friend’s graduation: so what? You think of that beautiful writer down the hall, the one who made you laugh as you slid that gigantic needle into her arm, and you think, well, if she could do that …

  The room gets warmer. It is six o’clock. The storm that has been building all day is finally letting loose. Thunder rolls through the city, lightning flashing against the walls, but there’s a kindness about the storm sounds. A bit of comedy, too. “She’s not going out easy,” an uncle says. “Just listen to that.” And some of us laugh, a relief to laugh in the middle of such intensity.

  Waiting. Is Denise aware that we’re waiting? It must be hard enough to die, to slip out of your body without worrying about the people you’re leaving behind. There is a story of a man out on Long Island, a former neighbor. He found a good woods, mashed down the weeds the way a deer would, then lay down and went to sleep on the ground. He covered himself with leaves. The story is passed around as neighborhood legend: the saddest story in the world. Such a gentle man. Meticulous gardener, good friend, frozen in snow for days on end, and this is how creation watches out for him? Yet it doesn’t sound so bad to me. Would I want so many faces, even if they are loving faces, trained on me when it’s my time to go? No, not me.