Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  I realized with the detached part of myself that the group of social workers who had just seated themselves at the next table recognized me. They murmured to themselves and I heard my name. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, or how I knew they were social workers. I filed that away to mull over another time.

  I didn’t want to reply to Lawrence’s remark. It was too terrible. I remembered suddenly him turning from me, crying in that awful way men used to cry, as if crying were like giving birth, saying, “It seems to me that everything I’ve ever wanted …” And what did I feel, because I had refused him something and caused him finally to cry? I think I felt somewhat pleased with myself, and astonished, not being acquainted yet with a world where you expected to get what you want.

  But then he’d been angry, scathing over my dogged virginity. It was no use though, I was still too attached to my parents, my mother in particular, to recognize any man’s claims on me, even one I genuinely loved. Looking back, I felt only shame, shame and wonder at the stupidity of that young girl I once was. It made me wonder if I ever knew what love was, or what it was for.

  Lawrence was still not looking at me and I wondered if he remembered how much we’d once loved each other, after we’d gotten over that hurdle, and whatever others there were that I’d forgotten. Is escaping the past his reason for going to Africa? But that would be out of a romance novel and I could see he hadn’t a romantic notion left in him, any more than I have. We are long past that sort of thing, the two of us.

  “Why did you come?” Lawrence asked, and I thought, Now that is a question I wouldn’t have thought of if I’d been writing this scene. I almost told him that, but one of my failings is my desire to be charmingly shocking, and something powerful was taking over between us. It was in the air, making it thick and hard to breathe, the darkness was deepening, and in the shadows his face grew more beautiful; perhaps what I thought was sadness was instead a kind of wisdom. I resisted my shallowness, knowing I am capable of more. It took me a minute to frame my answer.

  “Because I still love you,” and rage boiled up in me again and I wanted to hit him. But pity for him hushed me. At least I didn’t have to go to Africa.

  I wanted to pay attention then, to how I felt: I held still and concentrated on what was going on inside me. For too many years I was in too big a hurry, I sped through my feelings, I hadn’t time to absorb one when I was off in another one. No wonder I never knew what I thought; I didn’t even know what I felt. And the world, when I was young, was such a mystery to me. I never anticipated anything; it seemed to me that life had no form or pattern that I could discern, no clear spots, only darkness and shadow and unexpectedness. I stumbled from place to place doing pratfalls like a clown, tripping over things that weren’t there, bumping into invisible walls I might have walked through, hiding in terror from the trivial and courting wide-eyed the dangerous.

  I am no longer afraid, and if I still don’t understand, at least experience has made me better at prediction.

  And surprisingly, he didn’t say anything. He only blinked and, I thought, resisted the urge to look away. I saw I had wounded him. Why should I care about his suffering? I asked myself.

  It was on the day he phoned me and asked me to meet him for a drink that I realized that it is an invariable law of the universe that whatever one wants the most is always the one thing that one cannot, not ever, have. That this is the nature of desire, it seems to me a good thing to finally realize. Looking at Lawrence, I thought this must be something he knows too, that this must be the reason he is going to Africa.

  But then, before I felt fully arrived, we were parting. Lawrence butted out his cigarette, and I saw by the gesture, a certain finality to the movement of his wrist, that he had just again renounced smoking. He leaned back, coughed, gave me a funny, wavering smile. Did I smile back?

  We rose, walked single file out the door, Lawrence first, then me, because my purse strap had caught on the table’s corner and I stopped to free it. We stepped outside into the deserted hall and faced each other. Lawrence moved toward me as if to hug me, but a mean part of me resisted. The thought that I would probably never see him again freed me from my own unyielding nature and I allowed him to hug me, even hugged him back a little.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll write.” I didn’t say anything, though I wished he wouldn’t, but then I thought, He probably won’t anyway. We said something more, maybe it was goodbye, and he turned and walked away. I watched him cross the cavernous mall. I was thinking about postmodernism.

  Although I suppose you could say that as a writer I’ve sometimes achieved postmodernism, and though I can explain it fairly clearly, I’ve never really understood its nature. I thought, Maybe this, in the end, is really all it is about, that hoping to find in others a reflection of ourselves that will at last make everything clear, we discover instead that, like trying to understand love, we find there is only a bottomless spiral into blackness.

  But I noticed, even while I was standing there watching Lawrence walk away and disappear through the revolving doors, and even longer, as if they might suddenly reverse and push him back to me, that while I needed to see every second of his leaving, he did not, not even once, lookback at me.

  Light

  The sign reads, “If you’ve been waiting more than forty-five minutes, report to staff.” Lucia and Elaine have been waiting an hour when finally Lucia rises, walks down the hall to the desk, and points this out to the uniformed woman there. The woman replies briskly, not looking at Lucia, “We know you’re waiting.” Then less harshly, “It won’t be long now.” Lucia says, “I’m only telling you because of the sign.”

  “Mmmmm,” the woman says, snapping shut a drawer, and Lucia realizes she has once again entered can’t-win-land. As she reseats herself beside Elaine she tells herself that this is quite possibly funny, that some day she may laugh about it.

  She reaches over and takes Elaine’s small, slightly polio-deformed, very white hand in hers. Elaine grasps hers tightly, although otherwise she doesn’t move or change her expression. She sits in her wheelchair, the clear plastic of her oxygen nose-piece glistening on her upper lip, ignoring even the television, normally her favourite source of entertainment, that blats away next to her.

  Every chair in the waiting area is occupied by patients or their companions. Nobody speaks, except for the occasional hurried whisper, nobody laughs, nobody watches the tele- vision, though nobody turns it off either, nobody stretches and yawns and shifts position, or paces up and down. Nobody moves. They sit quietly, hands in lap, looking at nothing. All of them, both the men and women, look faded to Lucia, blurred at the edges, as if they’ve been out in the damp too long. Soon, after their trials here at the cancer clinic, Lucia thinks, they’ll dissolve into the Great Beyond, which now, after too many hours spent waiting here, appears to Lucia to be, instead of the sunshine-dappled, flower-dotted meadow of her childhood belief, a kind of Buddhistic nothing.

  She can always tell the new patients. They talk too much, they talk incessantly, a bright jabbering that disturbs the whole waiting room and which they themselves, gazing around helplessly, their eyes flitting from patient to patient and back again, seem powerless to stop. Whenever it has happened, Lucia has been annoyed by it, refusing to meet the prattlers’ eyes in order to avoid responding. Now it occurs to her that these women—she’s never seen a man act this way—are simply afraid, they’re driven by terror, that they’ll stop when the system has slowly transmuted it into the numb acquiescence of everybody else here. Since she began looking after Elaine, she finds such moments of illumination gratifying.

  Weeks ago, on a weekend trip home, she’d told George about the babbling women. They were lying side by side in bed, the blinds closed against the stars and moon, the world shrunk down to this darkened intimacy.

  “I miss you,” he said.

  “You can’t imagine how they look,” she said. “Aren’t you getting lots of work done? It isn’t forever,
after all. I’ll be home soon.”

  “How’s that?” he asked, surprised. “Have you found a facility for her?” This silenced her. At this stage, no facility would take Elaine, she isn’t sick enough or helpless enough yet, and if one would, Elaine would refuse to go. Lucia knew very well she’d never force her sister to go.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. She didn’t want to tell George that so far it had all been pretty interesting. Or that she was avoiding looking into the future, except to pray silently for something to happen that would rescue her from this task before things got too bad, although she doesn’t really know what too bad might be.

  Eventually, Elaine’s name is called and Lucia wheels her to a treatment room, helps the nurse transfer her to an easy chair so large it dwarfs Elaine’s small, twisted body. They cover her with a red mohair throw Lucia has brought from the apartment—the clinic provides only flannel sheets for warmth—and the treatment commences.

  Waiting, while Elaine lies with closed eyes in the easy chair, an alarming, if also rather pretty, red fluid flowing down tubing into a needle planted in her arm, Lucia notices a tall thin man in a hospital dressing gown walk slowly past the open door. For a second he seems merely familiar, and then she realizes he’s the husband of one of George’s colleagues, someone she’s known for years. It’s so unusual to see somebody she knows here that, without reflection, she gets up and hurries after him.

  She finds him around a corner in a niche. He’s seated on a hard wooden lab chair, his arm is extended on the chair’s wide shelf-like projection, a nurse is pushing up the sleeve of his dressing gown, about to apply the tourniquet, when Lucia bends over him, grinning, and says softly, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  He glances at her, slowly, his irises are a pale, flat blue, the pupils shrunk to the tiniest points of darkness. His mouth is fixed in a half-smile, and he says nothing, nor does his expression change. She thinks he hasn’t heard what she’s said, more, that although only two weeks earlier on a weekend at home she’d had dinner at his house, he doesn’t know who she is. She touches his shoulder lightly with her palm, an apology, a commiseration, then turns and hurries back to Elaine. She feels oddly elated, if puzzled, and when finally she recognizes that absent half-smile as another manifestation of the fear that lurks in every corner and shadow in this bright new facility, she’s ashamed, as if to joke—although isn’t that what everyone says you’re supposed to do?—were immoral, or at the very least, a glaring faux pas.

  More, she’s astonished. Elaine was born with moderate mental retardation, then felled further by childhood polio, she can’t read, she has no formal education and only the narrowest of life experience, while her friend is a well-travelled, much-honoured professor. Mulling this over as she waits for the bag of bright fluid to empty into Elaine’s arm, she can’t get over how here in the cancer clinic everything is instructive.

  Back in Elaine’s apartment, with Elaine sleeping from the anti-nausea medication, her oxygen concentrator running noisily at her bedside, Lucia does housework. The few dishes washed, the few square feet of vinyl in the walk-through kitchen swept, she decides against dusting. She ought to be resting while Elaine sleeps, the first post-chemo night can be harrowing, but the more tired she is, the harder she finds it to sleep. She tells herself that the moment will come when she’s so tired she’ll sleep like a baby.

  The muted roar of the oxygen concentrator in the bedroom on the other side of the wall disturbs her rest too. It can’t be turned off, Elaine’s lips would turn blue and she’d gasp for breath, her lung cancer is well advanced now, nor can it be muffled by putting it in a closet because its electrical cord is too short and the oxygen-supply people, who come periodically to exchange the portable tanks Elaine uses whenever she leaves the apartment, are adamantly against extension cords. Wherever Elaine is in the apartment, the concentrator is never more than a few feet away. Lucia often thinks that its drone would do nicely as background to the torturing of the wicked in hell.

  She should phone George. Talking with him reminds her that she won’t be here in Elaine’s apartment in this city five hours from her own forever, that she hasn’t yet joined the ranks of the condemned. Otherwise, as the weeks pass, she finds this easier and easier to forget.

  But George won’t be home yet, so she puts the phone down, picks up her book from the stack she keeps behind the kitchen door—the apartment is so small that with two occupying it there’s no place left to put them—stretches out on the sofa, and opens her book. George, an English professor, has just finished a stint on a non-fiction literary jury. He’s been keeping her supplied with reading material from the more than two hundred new books he’s had to read. But on her last trip home she’d found herself rejecting a highly praised memoir by a poet, a biography of a movie star, a humorous book about small-town life, everything that George had already selected for her.

  “What’s the matter with these?” he’d asked her in surprise.

  “It’s just that … they just don’t look very interesting.” They’d stared at the wall of books in front of them. Tentatively, Lucia reached out, took a thin volume from the shelf, and flipped through its pages.

  “That’s about the Holocaust,” he told her briskly, reaching to take it from her.

  “I know it,” she’d said, evading his reach to put it aside on the table between them. In the end she’d collected a half-dozen books about the Holocaust from his shelves.

  “They’re pretty depressing reading,” he warned her. “Especially now.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I just … want to.”

  But once she’d put the books in a bag and was setting it by her suitcase, he’d handed her a paper on which he’d scribbled the titles and authors of a half-dozen more.

  “Those books will tell you the story,” he explained, nodding down at the bookbag. “But none of them are works of art, and they have in common a failure to express the full scope of what happened.” She watched him, as always, half irritated, half admiring of this professorial mode he often fell into with her. “The books on this list will help you …” he hesitated, “come to terms,” he added finally, shrugging, as if such a thing were hardly possible. Then he’d looked hard into her eyes, as if she were one of his students about whose talents he was slightly dubious.

  She’d begun with a memoir by a Canadian woman, a Jew born in Poland of a many-branched, tightly knit, prosperous family, nearly all of whom were killed in concentration camps. In it, the memoirist tells of her return in late adulthood to seek out the old family home, to find any remaining living relatives, to visit family graves if they can be found, and, most of all, to revisit the sites of her blissful early childhood, all of this in an attempt to sort out these happy memories from what she knows only by hearsay to be, for most of her family, their tragic outcome. It is an interesting enough narrative, although Lucia doesn’t really understand the memoirist’s impulse to make such a journey and then, especially, to write a book about it.

  But she hasn’t much left to read, and as she makes her way through to the end, and the full realization of what happened to the writer’s grandparents, her aunts and uncles, her cousins, to the beautiful house in the countryside where her happiest memories reside, comes crashing over the author, Lucia thinks, What a fool the writer was to want to know. She sets the book down on the sofa beside her and stares out the double-glass doors onto the small balcony that overlooks the parking lot, then a service station, and beyond that, one of the busiest of the city’s downtown streets. She knows she’s being mean-spirited, even childish. Of course the woman needed to know. She wonders about the word “needed,” but in the other room, over the concentrator’s loud hum, Elaine has begun to cough and Lucia drops the book and hurries in to her.

  In the absence of a hospital bed, which Elaine becomes nearly hysterical at the mere mention of, Lucia has bought an item the home care people call a “wedge” because of its shape, a huge piece of foam ru
bber, textured so it will stay where it’s placed in the bed, and on which Lucia then arranges another half-dozen pillows, so that Elaine can sleep comfortably, sitting up. If in her sleep she moves, dislodges the pillows, and begins, over the hours, slowly to sink to a flatter position in the bed, it’s only a matter of minutes before she wakes, unable to breathe, coughing, gasping for breath, but too weak to sit up without help. Some nights this happens three or four times, when Lucia, hearing the first cough, on her feet before she’s even awake, rushes into the bedroom, calling, “It’s all right, I’m coming, it’s okay,” during the seconds it takes her to reach Elaine’s bedside.

  She puts one arm behind Elaine’s back and another in the crook of her knees while Elaine pushes against the bed with her hands to assist Lucia in dragging her back up to a sitting position. All this done in semi-darkness—the city lights never allow absolute darkness in the apartment no matter what Lucia tries—and fast, before Elaine loses consciousness.

  Often Lucia can’t get a proper grip, can’t seem to make any difference, and then she climbs onto the bed, kneels beside Elaine, and struggles until she’s managed to drag her upright. Then she goes back to the cot she sets up nightly in the living room, picks up her book, and reads until her heart stops its rapid pounding in her ears and throat and wrists.

  Elaine is awake and, once she and Lucia have managed to pull her to a sitting position, she wants her wheelchair so she can go into the living room and watch television. With the toiletting, medicating, and various other kinds of necessary care, none of which Elaine can do for herself any more, and now the inane racket of the television set—Elaine’s taste in programming is the same as a twelve-year-old’s, although her dignity won’t allow her to watch cartoons if Lucia is there—it will be late tonight before Lucia gets another chance to read.

  Still, as she goes about her routine, she finds herself thinking about the book she’s just finished. She tries to imagine herself in the author’s shoes, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all dead—murdered, in fact—reduced from flesh to shadowy images in worn snapshots. But every time she feels herself getting close, the phone rings, or it’s time for Elaine’s medication, or the wash is ready for the dryer, or it’s time to cook supper, and before long she’s forgotten about the book.