They have not made love since they started the cruise. A week ago. And she was too rushed and tense the week before, getting ready.
Not that frequency matters, so long as they care about each other; and making love helps them care about each other, although, since they started having to schedule it in, it has become a little like brushing and flossing, something almost hygienic, good for you. Yet there is passion in it, too, it erupts right out of the schedule. You do it with regularity to show you are a human being, that you are alive and civilized and can still become ecstatic. You can still do it. You still want to do it. And it is, after all, a sign of love; and the repetition of it, the making of it into a weekly habit, like phoning their children and speaking to the grandchildren—they have an enormous number of grandchildren (she has three, twin boys, age five, and a two-year-old girl, and he has four older ones and three little ones and she is on good terms with them all, although of course her own are her own)—those phone calls solidify her, connect her to other human beings, to the human world. On this ever-moving boat on this German river she receives on her smartphone twelve-second videos entitled “Abe turns over,” “Lucas ‘reads,’” “Sara takes bath with new labradoodle puppy named Sherbert” (well, the last is a little much for her sense of sanitary boundaries, but she emails back to her daughter, simply, “Wunderbar!”); these e-mails root them, her and her husband, stake them in life, into the rich dirt of it. And the lovemaking grafts them to one another, commingles them, despite their having no children together, and besides, after ten years of doing it, it is a reliable pleasure. Eleven years. It is not as though they met yesterday, and are trying to figure out, will this work. He is a permanent part of her, of her life.
But it is the daily familiarity with her husband’s body she is missing, the handling of his old knobby flesh. Aged flesh is so fertile, grows excrescences: papules, papillomas, skin tags, moles that have to be checked yearly; yet the hair thins out, underarm and pubic, as if the soil had changed to one that no longer supports that verdant shrubbery, but instead nourishes an astonishing variety of wild mushrooms—beautiful, if you have an eye. It is the feeling every part of him she misses, she has the longing to swallow him up, to own him, it is like owning one’s babies. The baby is first of all a body, a mouth really. She loved feeding her babies. She’d squirt milk from her breasts halfway across the room in a great creamy arc, her husband running happily to intercept it with open mouth, get it in his hair, even one time in his eye, their three-year-old daughter standing by awed. Showing off, she was. Fanfarronear: to brag. And she loved carrying those babies … outside, in-side, especially carrying them inside. Walking down a street, you were never alone—you had a secret, even when you were showing, the turnings, somersaults, flutter kicks. Even the giving birth was a secret. Oh, the husband was there and the obstetrician—but it was between her and the baby, all twisted together pushing and retreating and banging and molding and tearing and then the thrusting out, the astonishing bloody bursting forth! And she is handed over, all hers, the little girl’s body with her sweet lips, and she is able to examine every part of her, she is not really separate, they aren’t separate until years later when those girls wrench themselves away … pushing and retreating and banging and tearing all over again, only over years instead of hours. Have to, they had to, to live their own lives, although she felt a terrible sadness that they had to. Over … gone, those lovely girls …
What was over? What was gone? The girls weren’t really gone, gone, gone, vide “Sara takes a bath with Sherbert the labradoodle.” Whence the sadness? “Vacation”—was it from the same root as “vacate,” “vacant”? She feels so empty.
A vacant apartment is what she feels like: after “deportation” of its Jewish occupants. Looted. By the shamefaced neighbors. Or the grinning neighbors.
Why has she brought him here? Why have they come?
Cradle of culture, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Dürer, Goethe …
Let bygones be bygones.
Why has she dragged them here, of all places, here, into the heart of darkness? Has she some need to see in the dark? Some need to see what was best not seen? Were there things that were best not seen?
Nothing human is alien to me.
Really?
“You know, if you’re really getting up three, four times a night to pee—” She is practically yelling to be heard over the machine. Suddenly she is worried that it is only the machine she is hearing. Is his chest moving? Is he breathing? She elbows him, and he groans, and she is grateful. “That’s what you said, you just told me that—three, four times a night—well, maybe you ought to see Dr. Bela. You could have cancer or something.”
“Huh?”
“Cancer. Maybe you have cancer.”
“What are you talking about? It’s the middle of the night!” He does not remove the clear-plastic mask from his face, although he knows his words are muffled. He expects to return to sleep.
“Well,” she laughs a little. “Cancer doesn’t stop in the middle of the night. Better call Dr. Bela when we get back.”
“Cancer? Cancer from what? From not washing my hands? Let me sleep, will you.” But he feels more awake now, unfortunately.
“From peeing. I mean, because you pee so much. That could be a sign of—some kind of—male cancer.”
“Male cancer? What? What?”
“You sound like you’re underwater. You know how you say ‘women’s cancer’ or ‘female problems’ instead of calling it uterine cancer or ovarian cancer, you call it one of those cancers ‘in there.”’
She points to where she imagines his genitals are, although she knows that even if his eyes are open, he cannot see these gestures of hers. She has the impulse to give his penis an affectionate pat, or maybe a nudge (or a light slap? odd thought), his sleeping penis. “Well,” she goes on, “you have an ‘in there,’ too, not just an ‘out there,’ and you have lots of things ‘out there’ and ‘in there.’ Vulnerable things. Like the prostate. It’s about the size of a kiwi fruit. Frequent peeing can be a sign of prostate cancer. Or difficulty peeing. Your PSA is okay. I don’t think you can have prostate cancer without an elevated PSA, but I could be wrong.
“Or you could have testicular cancer, though peeing wouldn’t have anything to do with that. You’d feel lumps and bumps.” It’s been weeks, probably more than two, since she’s felt his balls, held that saggy bag of fruit in her hand, taken him in her mouth. She feels that dull ache again, low down in her.
It is not even that he can come very often that way, from her sucking him, he usually can’t. Has some inhibition she doesn’t understand, although she has asked him about it. Does he worry about making a mess in her mouth, dirtying her? Maybe he thinks the taste is offensive to her, despite her reassurances that it is just a little sour, and half-sour pickles are a favorite of hers. He doesn’t talk enough, this husband; in many ways, for all she knows him, she doesn’t know him; he doesn’t know himself, doesn’t need to know, he just does things, some of them admirable. Goes about his business. Anyway, she has reassured him and reassured him, but what gets through? Her first husband loved it, although the sounds he made coming are fading a little from her memory. Again she feels a sadness start in her, and she doesn’t resist it, although she tells herself, well, at least he died a natural death with his family all around him in the apartment, way he wanted. (Lung cancer, though he never smoked a cigarette.) Tombstone (perpetual care). Yearly pediatrics forum in his memory at NYU.
“Or you could have something common, like diabetes. Although Bela checks for that. With all that peeing. Common. But serious.”
He twists the mask to the side so his mouth is free. “Why are you doing a medical workup in the middle of the night? Or at the crack of dawn, it’s probably dawn by now. We’re on vacation! I’ve been getting up a bunch of times all my life. Since my thirties. The same as now. You’re just usually asleep. I have a small bladder. You know that. You had me get it tested years ago. It’s
small compared to the average man’s. Go to sleep. Let’s just go back to sleep.”
“I can’t. You woke me up. I’d like some company, I don’t want to lie here by myself. I’d hold your hand if you’d washed it.”
“I’m not getting up to wash my hands. Take a pill if you can’t sleep.”
“That’s a nice husband.” She shakes her head. “It’s too close to morning to take a pill. I’ll be hungover.”
“Then read a book or something. You brought a ton of books. We paid overweight for them at the airport, we’ll pay overweight on the trip back. Every one of those books will cost fifty bucks by the time we get home, and they’re all paperbacks. Get a Kindle, use my iPad, you’re Neanderthal woman lugging those books around.”
“I paid for those books, I pay for my own overweight. What’s it got to do with you?”
“What do you need all those grim books for?”
The Kindly Ones, The Third Reich at War, Slaughterhouse-Five, On the Natural History of Destruction. All of them about World War II. Maybe she’ll find something in them, she doesn’t know what.
Not touching him, she is lying next to him flat on her back, unmoving, although she has no expectation of sleep. She is keeping away from him. Why? She is keeping him up. Why? “History’s a cesspool we drown in,” she says.
“Where’d you get that?”
“I don’t know.” She raises her shoulders questioningly. “Read it somewhere. Seemed apt.”
Now he wriggles out of the mask and lets it fall overboard, overbed, that is, what’s the point, she has murdered sleep, although the machine keeps heaving out air. The whishing sound is there in the background as if someone is vacuuming.
She goes on: “What do you mean, ‘It interrupts the flow’? That’s what you said, right? You said you don’t wash your hands in the middle of the night because it interrupts the flow. Are you stopping and starting? I mean, the urine, the stream?”
“No, no,” he tells her. “It’s like Niagara Falls. Fine, unfettered, and free is my pee. No, getting up a bunch of times during the night I try to maintain a certain rhythm, like I’m dancing, like I’m doing laps at the Columbia pool: I flow out of bed, do my thing, and flow back. Washing my hands would stop the flow.”
“But you swore—”
“I doubt I said I’d do it during the night. Look, I wash my hands enough for a normal person. Most people say they wash their hands, but if monitors stand in public bathrooms, unobtrusively, they find that a small percentage of people actually do. I read an article that in Minnesota maybe thirty-three or thirty-four percent of people actually wash their hands.”
“I didn’t marry a Minnesotan. You promised! I should have put it in the prenup.”
He laughs.
She doesn’t. “You think I like toilet training an old geezer? I wash my hands twenty times a day.”
“‘It’s your job. I don’t work for the Health and Hospitals Corporation. You talk like the hand-washing police. I should make you a badge …” He sits up in the dark bed. “Look, it goes against my grain to do something senseless. I’m a rational being. I’m a scientist.”
“A rational being? A scientist? Maybe you know about quarks and neutrinos but when it comes to germs, you don’t know shit from Shinola.”
She turns on the light at the bed table. She can see his large body; he is sitting up, and she suddenly feels he is obese and filthy. What is she doing with this man?
“Turn that off!” he yells.
“We’re both up! Nobody’s going to sleep anymore tonight!”
“Says who? Since when are you in charge here? Where’s your whip?”
She looks around the room, dimly lit now by her bedside lamp. There is a print of bright yellow chrysanthemums above the desk. On the wall behind her—she twists her neck, hears that rustling sound again, turns her whole body—there is a print of geraniums, red in a clay pot. They’re pleasant, sort of. And very red. She is in a cabin, on vacation. With her husband. Whom she loves.
“I wash my hands,” he says tight teethed, “when they feel dirty, that’s when I wash them.”
“When they feel dirty? What kind of scientist are you?”
“Physics starts with feelings. With intuition—”
“But it doesn’t stop there! You develop a theory, you test it. You, of all people, to go by feelings! You don’t even know when you’ve left streaks of shit on the toilet seat. You leave shit in your underpants for Pearl to clean up! You’re losing sphincter control. It happens as you get old. The gastroenterologist told you to do Kegel exercises. Do you do them? Un-uh.”
“The maid’s supposed to clean. That’s her job!”
“Not your shit! Clean your own shit! It’s the twenty-first century.” She feels a jolt! Has he Tasered her? The cabin, the whole ship, recoils. “What’s going on?” She cowers against the pillow.
“It’s a lock.” He laughs. “We’re going through a lock. Canals. They’re all over Germany. There are a hundred twenty-two locks. I told you that. We’re going through eight of them tonight. You just don’t know anything about terrain.”
She straightens up. Waits through the ship’s jumping several times more. Tries to get the shake out of her voice. “You disgust me!”
“Really? Shouldn’t you consult with someone about that? Maybe the psychiatrist you want me to see? Because all I touch during the night is my dick and the doorknob. Only you touch my dick—well, not lately—and only you and the maid touch the doorknob. She wears gloves. And you, of course, are immaculate.”
“I am not immaculate. You know that box of latex gloves I pack in my suitcase? They’re not just for sex. I disimpact myself with them. I pull the shit out of me when the Metamucil doesn’t work. And sometimes even when it does! I can’t stand the feeling of bits of crap left behind. Little pellets, soft smooth globules …”
“Why do you have to tell me this? You think it’s a turn-on?”
“Because it’s true. You’re so squeamish. We can’t try anal intercourse because you think I’m filled with shit to the brim. You have no sense of anatomy. I can take an enema! You can use a condom! We can’t lick each others’ asses although I’ve got dental dams in the house. ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ You ever heard of that? No, you’re not a doctor.”
“‘Nothing human is alien to you.’ Except for me! You ever hear of privacy, gentleness, respect for the soul?”
“Soul? Schmole! Since when do physicists talk about the soul! I should have married another doctor. Someone who’s not afraid of shit. Who believes in the germ theory.”
“Like your late sainted husband, I suppose. Did he bathe in Clorox?”
“Don’t you even mention my husband! Your wife was a fat pig, you were married to an aggressive fat pig. People tell me she walked all over you, blasted you in public.”
“What? Who said that? People are prejudiced against wom-en who speak their mind! You know that! And against women who are overweight! She had a very low metabolism. If she ate nothing, she gained weight. Anyway, I like a little cushion. When I lie on top of you, I feel like Brer Rabbit done landed in the briar patch.”
“Well, keep out of my briar patch! Go find yourself another blubber patch!” She tries to lower her voice. “Brer Rabbit! You’re more like a giant shmoo! Bela told you to take off ten pounds. Did you do it? Nah. You know more than Bela. Didn’t your father have heart disease?”
“Healthy as an ox—”
“What did he die of? Health?”
“Kidney failure …”
“Secondary to what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh come on … caused by what?”
“They said high blood pressure.”
“Well, high blood pressure leads to heart disease. And it also blows out your kidneys. He snored, didn’t he?”
He reluctantly nods.
“You told me you have a mild case of sleep apnea and you only have to use the machine when you feel like it. You have a
severe case! You stop breathing sixty times an hour! You’re even Cheyne-Stoking when you sleep! Your brain doesn’t talk to your lungs! Dying people do Cheyne-Stokes breathing! You need to use that goddamn machine every minute. Use it when you’re awake!”
“Tell me, tell me.” With his hands, he beckons her to him belligerently. “Nag away! Your daughter says you’re the worst nag outside of a barn.”
“I can imagine which daughter. So dear of you to repeat that! Real emotional intelligence! Weren’t you valedictorian—of your high school class? A straight-A idiot! You don’t know anything, except maybe outer space. You don’t even know that you’re going to die!”
“Of course, I’ll die! Everyone dies! You’re going to die, too!”
“And the worst of it is, you might not get the big bang, Mr. Einstein. You could have a series of small bangs—one stroke and then another and another—tiny, tiny, hardly detectable; and you won’t be Mr. Know-it-all anymore! Or you could have multiple, minuscule infarcts slowly, over time. To your heart. Silent infarcts. You could be having one right now! And then you won’t be moving around very much, let alone playing tennis. You’ll be in bed, on oxygen. And you don’t have adequate long-term nursing care because you never thought to buy it when you were in good enough health to qualify. You figure I want to hang around the apartment taking care of you twenty-four seven? Why don’t you just drop dead already, like right now?”
At six forty-five, they sit at breakfast, the first people in the dining hall, sunlight pouring through the portholes onto the rows and rows of unoccupied tables. Tables covered with starched white cloths laid with shiny silver-plated flatware, fresh yellow daisy centerpieces—the whole place is ablaze. He eats his granola, sips his caffe latte with three sugars and reads intensely an article in the Scientific American he has brought from home—a piece about fracking practices around the world. Some German music is coming over the loudspeaker, but he blocks it out. Tries to concentrate on fracking: fracturing the earth’s surface, polluting the water supply with chemicals, causing earthquakes.
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