“But he doesn’t scratch them,” I told the fourth dermatologist, who wasn’t a dermatologist but a physician’s assistant, but looked like he could play a dermatologist on a soap opera. “They just erupt that way. Spontaneously.”
“I understand. A lot of people scratch them in their sleep.”
“But his skin doesn’t itch. It hurts.”
“Well,” he said, not unkindly, “you have to understand. Ninety percent of patients with this disease deny itching and scratching.”
“Deny itching,” I said, “or scratching?”
“Both,” he said, and turned to write down something on a chart. Then he turned back. “I see. Scratching,” he said. “That’s true. Most patients don’t deny that they itch.”
As we left, he told Aaron, “You gotta relax. Enjoy life!”
Some doctors looked at his skin and dismissed it as scratching. Some looked at his skin and dismissed it as drug use.
“These almost look like track marks.”
“I have to ask. Have you used intravenous drugs?”
One GP looked at a nasty rash on the inside of Aaron’s elbow. It looked like he’d been burned with a blowtorch. But over the head of one of our children who sat in Aaron’s lap, she whispered: “Needles?”
He closed his eyes. I wanted to hold his pain for him, like a purse.
THEORY 1
Needles are the only thing he didn’t use. He did do drugs, of one kind or another, for a very long time. He medicated his feelings. Then he stopped doing drugs, and his feelings burned through his skin.
THEORY 2
A few months after the rash broke out, after the visits to the GP and the dermatologists, we went to an acupuncturist and herbalist, Dr. Chang, who counted Aaron’s pulse, examined his sores, and asked him to stick out his tongue. She concluded, “Too much fire.”
I made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. Too much fire! Were there three truer words to describe my husband?
IXORA CIRCLE
1997
He was the guy behind the counter at CD Warehouse. I had bought Sweet Relief from him, and Stop Making Sense, and on my break from my job at the movie theater, Physical Graffiti. He was older and so fearsomely good-looking that it was painful for me to behold him. He had full lips and dark brows and warm smart eyes with brown and green in them, ringed with a thread of violet. He had this way of aligning a stack of CD cases together before he bagged them—neat, competent, comfortable in his world—tapping it against the desk like a deck of cards. Sometimes he would flirt with me and I would think, There is no way he’s flirting with me. Once I bought a Temple of the Dog album from him and he teased me for it, even when I told him it was for my brother. “But you are wearing a fuchsia shirt with cows on it,” he said, “so I guess it’s okay.”
It was the spring of 1997, my senior year. I’d spent high school getting straight A’s, avoiding parties in favor of concerts. I was the editor of my school newspaper, but by senior year all I really wanted to write were album reviews, on Hole and Tori Amos and Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I’d started smoking pot. I’d stopped shaving my legs. One day at lunch, while I sat in my overalls with my ankles crossed on the courtyard table (my calculus teacher was always telling me to sit like a lady), Jason Murphy, who had beaten me for class president in the sixth grade, told me I’d never get a boyfriend with hairy legs. I gave him the finger as he walked away. “Yell for Nell!” he called. It had been my presidential campaign slogan. My mother had hand-stenciled the fliers with me, and after I handed them out to kids before school, Jason had collected them, one by one.
I was counting the days to college, when I could get the fuck away from Florida, from all its Jason Murphys, from its unimaginative weather and poor taste in music, and start my life and fall in love with a dark-haired guy who played guitar. For three years, I’d had a Middlebury College brochure by my bed. On the cover, a girl with a tote bag stood at an intersection of sidewalks on the quad, talking casually to a guy paused on his bike. I imagined my way onto that campus, hologrammed myself into an Adirondack chair. Every day after school, I checked the mailbox for a letter from Middlebury.
The summer before, I’d had my heart broken. He was a boy who worked at the movie theater, a poet on the cross-country team who loved Led Zeppelin. I’d watch him stand at the podium where he tore tickets while I nibbled on popcorn behind the concession stand as irresistibly as I could, until finally he asked me out. In the months between his seventeenth birthday and mine, we went on dates to the thrift store and Clueless and the Pink Floyd laser light show, both of us in our cardigans and Converse and delicate metal-framed glasses. With our matching chin-length hair, we had successfully fashioned ourselves into the androgynous versions of each other, Kurt Cobain on MTV Unplugged. Maybe our twinning should have sounded an alarm. Instead, I felt that we were made for each other.
Then I left for a trip to my family’s cabin in Vermont, a tour of college campuses on the way. I lay in a canoe on the lake in my forest-green bikini, seeing my future form above me in the clouds. We’d lose our virginity to each other, go to the same college, take the same poetry workshops, and be madly in love forever.
When I got home, he broke up with me over the phone. I took the call in my father’s office, on the corded phone, standing at the desk. I stared at the buttons of the fax machine, dusty and stupid.
* * *
Nine months later, I was looking for the heartbroken voice of Vic Chesnutt and nothing more when I walked into a record store downtown and the guy in the giant shorts flashed me a smile. The shorts were more like pants. His calves were hairy and tanned and tattooed. He did not look like Kurt Cobain, or me. He looked like someone I hadn’t thought to imagine. I was wearing thrift-store bell-bottoms, Birkenstocks, and a white tank top with no bra.
Sweet Relief II had just come out, a collection of Vic Chesnutt covers by bands like R.E.M. and Indigo Girls and Garbage, and I’d had it on repeat. There’d been no Vic Chesnutt albums at CD Warehouse, where the other guy who worked there, Derek, was talking on the cordless phone with his long-distance girlfriend. There were definitely no Vic Chesnutt albums at Record Town or Sam Goody at the mall. So I’d driven down to Okeechobee Boulevard, to a West Palm Beach record store called Sound Splash.
It was a real record store—with records, and patchouli. The cute guy from CD Warehouse was chatting with the gray-bearded guy who stood behind the counter. I went over to the C’s and assessed them. No Vic Chesnutt.
Then there he was, crossing the store to me, smiling with recognition. “Hey!” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
We’d had conversations before, but here we were in a new store, a new space; this required an introduction, we seemed to agree.
He extended a hand to me. “I’m Aaron.”
“I’m Nell.”
We shook. The one and only time, it is odd to think, we ever shook hands.
His teeth were as white as his T-shirt. Around his neck, a string of wooden Krishna beads was wound three times, tight as a choker. “What are you doing down here?” he said.
“Looking for Vic Chesnutt.”
“Who?”
“Vic Chesnutt. They just put out that new album with his songs? He’s in a wheelchair. They raise money for musicians with health problems. But the money isn’t for him. It’s just his songs.” I was babbling.
“Can’t find anything here?”
I shook my head.
“Well, come into the store later tonight. I’ll be working. I’ll order you whatever you need.”
That evening, I went to CD Warehouse and Aaron hauled out a phonebook-sized catalog, which in 1997 was how you ordered an obscure album. He ordered me every Vic Chesnutt album listed. A week later, he called to tell me they were in. A CD and two cassettes—that was the only way he could get them. “Come on in and pick them up.”
It was just Aaron working that night, but another customer was in the store, an older guy i
n a shirt and tie, and Aaron was chatting with him. (So much chatting! How friendly he was! How capable of good customer service.) Aaron nodded and smiled hello at me but kept on chatting. It was a small store, neat and minimal and fluorescently lit, less warehouse and more your nerdy dad’s garage. I pretended to browse. I picked up a used copy of Staring at the Sea and popped it in the CD player at the listening station, popped on the headphones. Who was this guy and when would he stop talking? Any longer and I couldn’t hang around without looking like I was hanging around. So I took off the headphones and brought the Cure case to the counter, where Aaron had gathered the Vic Chesnutt albums.
“Thank you so much,” I said as he rang me up.
Halfway home, at a red light, I leaned over and opened the Cure case. No CD. I turned the car around. When I got back to the store, the guy was gone. It was just Aaron, smiling.
“Forgot my CD in the player,” I said, going over to retrieve it. Aaron still says I left it there on purpose.
“Hey,” he said as I turned to leave. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I bit my lips to hide my smile. “No. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He wrote his phone number on the back of a CD Warehouse business card. Capital N. AaroN.
A few days later, in the mailbox, a letter waited for me from Middlebury, fat and full, promising a scholarship. I sat in the living room with my parents and cried with joy. Then I went to my room. Beside my bed was the well-worn Middlebury brochure. I’d wanted to escape into that future, and it was close enough to touch. Now, another future, even closer, was presenting itself. This was not in the brochure.
I dialed Aaron’s number for the first time and told him the news.
“Wow! Congratulations,” he said, but I could hear the disappointment in his voice. How did you start to date someone when she was going away to start her life?
* * *
Our first date was the mini-golf course and Chili’s and Dunkin’ Donuts and the beach. I knew what it meant when a boy said, “Let’s go to the beach.” We stood in the dark parking lot and leaned against the dirty grill of his Pathfinder, both of us in white T-shirts, the ocean wind whipping toward us. “Your shirt’s getting messed up,” he apologized, and I said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got more.” He laughed. I waited for him to kiss me. I asked him what he liked to read, and when he said Arthur Rimbaud, I pretended to know who that was. He asked me what I liked to read, and when I said Toni Morrison, he admitted he hadn’t read her. Then he said, “I have to feed my cats. Want to come with me?” I thought, I know what it means when a boy says, “I have to feed my cats.”
But I didn’t, actually. When I’d made out with boys in high school, it was at the beach, or in cars, or in the stolen minutes before our parents came home. Aaron wasn’t like other boys. He wasn’t even a boy! He was a man! We drove from Juno Beach south to Lake Worth and he let us into the quiet house on Ixora Circle. His dad owned it, and he lived there with his friend Derek, who wasn’t home. In the darkened living room, I could see an electric guitar, mahogany, handsome, alert on its stand. “Is that yours?” I asked, my heart speeding up, and he nodded. There were no roommates, no parents, nothing hanging over us but a distant and halfhearted curfew.
He introduced me to the cats. Ratboy, the girl, a springy little white one. Human Furnace, the boy, tiger-striped, grumpy, and fat. Aaron had this hand gesture, pulsing his fist open and closed, as he called to them: Pssht pssht pssht. They came. He kissed at them then petted them and they wound their tails around his ankles. Their food bowls were full of kibble, but he set out two cans of wet food, and they ate happily.
“Well,” he said. “I better get you home.”
On the half-hour drive back to my parents’ house in North Palm Beach, a police car began to follow us. “What the fuck,” he said. The cop idled at the corner while he pulled into my driveway. My mother was peeking out the living room blinds. Aaron didn’t kiss me good night.
Did he like me? I had wanted, expected to be kissed. I liked him so much. I liked his Krishna beads. I liked his Swatch watch and his silver hoop earrings and even his giant pants. I liked the way he seemed not to be able to stop smiling. I liked the way he seemed to know everything about everything. I liked the way he opened doors for me, gave me a hard time, and ordered vegetable soup for dinner.
But we already had a date for the next day, at a craft show we’d seen advertised on our first date. Tomorrow I’d wear a blue tank top and no bra, and afterward Aaron would insist that we play pool, and I’d spend the whole time shooting pool while standing perfectly straight, so as not to expose my A-cup cleavage. He didn’t see my cleavage and he didn’t kiss me on that date, either. But it was, I would recognize later, the nicest thing a boy could do, to tell a girl he liked her: make a second date before the first one was over.
I went home and looked up Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” A record of all the beauty and heartache glimpsed on ocean journeys. All the romance! All the melancholy!
I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors …
I thought, I want to see what this guy has seen.
* * *
When he was seven years old, my future husband thought to himself: my future wife could be a baby right now. She could be being born. That’s what he told me later.
But we didn’t know how extreme our age difference was, not at first. It was the first of our willful denials. It was kind of like this: I didn’t know what his last name was. He hadn’t written it on the business card he gave me. I didn’t ask him on our first date, and I forgot to ask him on the second. By the third date—the date he finally kissed me—it would have been strange. Hey, what’s your last name? And how old are you, anyway?
On the phone he told me that he’d graduated high school the same year my brother had. Later, he revised this story. Well, he hadn’t actually graduated. But if he had graduated, it would have been the same year. It wasn’t until a month into our dating, on his birthday, that I finally learned his age: he was turning twenty-five.
My mother met him when he came to pick me up for my second date. She was blowing her nose as she answered the door. “Hi, Aaron! I’m Ann.” I was a little embarrassed, but not much. Aaron came in and looked around the living room, which was crowded with books and art and newspapers, my father’s drafting table in the corner covered with sketches, markers, bills, pipe tobacco. He told me later about the shock of familiarity he’d felt—my dad’s space was as messy as his dad’s.
Our parents, our dads in particular, had a good deal in common. Each set of parents was twelve years apart. Both of our fathers had been in accidents as teenagers. My father, Bill, was fifteen when he flew through the windshield of a car that he was driving around a curve in a country road in Georgia. His hip was broken, his ears were torn down to the lobes, and his body was sliced down each side like a paper doll. The other passengers didn’t have a scratch. Aaron’s father, Morris, was nineteen, a radio operator in France during World War II, when his Jeep went over a landmine and his body was thrown straight up into a tree. The driver was killed instantly. Morris was in a full-body cast for a year. He received two Purple Hearts, one for the shrapnel in his back, one for the shrapnel in his arm, but it was his legs that were the most damaged. Aaron’s dad had raised him alone from the time he was six, first in a mansion on Long Island, then in a retirement condo in Florida.
Aaron was eleven when they moved. He’d had to leave behind his mom, his best friend, Ashmat, his beloved streets of the Lower East Side, where he’d spent weekends. No children under twelve were allowed in his father’s building in Florida, so his father had lied about Aaron’s age. No pets were allowed, either. He’d lied about that, too.
Morris still lived in the condo. Aaron drove me over one day. “I have to pick up some mail,” he said. It had been a fancy building when they’d arrived in the early eighties, but now it was outdated and sun-bleached, the sidewalks paved with AstroTurf. At the mailboxes, an old woman with
a walker eyed us warily. When Aaron produced a key for the elevator, her expression softened. “Hello,” he said to her, not warmly.
In the elevator, he shook his head. “Every time,” he said. “What do they think I am? A cat burglar?”
“Why would they think that?”
“Because I’m under eighty years old.”
As the elevator rose, he cheered up. “I once brought a burning mattress down this elevator,” he told me. When he was a teenager, he’d fallen asleep with a cigarette and his bed caught on fire. He’d dragged the mattress out the front door and tried to access the fire hose, but it was broken. Now the elevator opened on the seventh floor, and he pointed to the little box with the hose. In case of fire, break glass. “It’s probably still busted,” he said.
“What happened to the mattress?” I wondered, following him to the apartment door.
“I put it out eventually.” He fit his key in the lock. “The elevator kept stopping so people could get on.”
“Maybe that’s why they give you looks,” I suggested.
He waved his hand. “This fucking place.”
His father’s apartment was the bachelor pad of a seventy-three-year-old Jewish war veteran. “Eccentric” is how Aaron had described him. The place smelled powerfully of cats. Everywhere were dusty history books and cardboard boxes and little figurines and too much furniture, as though a mansion had been downsized into a two-bedroom apartment, which it had. Aaron found a stack of mail among the many stacks of mail on the glass dining table. His bedroom was pretty much as he’d left it. The dresser and shag carpet and the vanity in his bathroom were all the same faded piss-yellow and had all been there since 1983. But out the sliding glass door was a narrow balcony with a view of the swimming pool, the marina, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond it, water as far as the eye could see.
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