“Hey,” Ray wrote her the next day, “I’m afraid my last letter got lost in the ether. Can’t even pee this morning. It is clear now that even if I get a heart, if I live, it will never be the same. I will always be an old man.”
She wrote back guiltily, “Don’t say that. I’m going to come visit soon. I promise. My love always.” She wrote, “T”
How many more times would they exchange emails? She had to be better about corresponding, if only for the material. They had so little time.
At night she watched TV shows where smart, good-looking people made foolish choices, then at the last minute saved themselves. She didn’t think about Ray, except when she was thinking about him.
She canceled a date with Tad to write. He sounded hurt. “I miss you,” he said, “but I understand.” Two hours later he showed up at her door with take-out Thai food. “You’ve got to eat,” he said, and climbed into her bed with a raft of papers from work.
“Just ignore me,” he called from the bedroom. “I’ll just be in here waiting for you.”
It didn’t occur to her that she hadn’t heard from Ray for two days, until she was lying in bed beside Tad trying to sync her breath to his deep and regular inhalations and exhalations so she could fall asleep. She sat upright. “My God,” she thought, “Ray is dead.”
Tad slept beside her, smiling in his sleep.
She lay there for hours in the dark, too tired to get up, and too afraid to sleep. She tried to tune her mind into some cosmic wavelength—was Ray gone? Had he died? Had he been thinking of her? Was he maybe thinking of her right now in that dark and narrow hospital bed? There should be some way to know this.
The next morning she found a postcard in her mailbox with the image of a dolphin jumping through a ring of fire. Written in dark ink, it said, I got a heart.
What a trick. Walking back up the steps to her apartment, she read it over and over again, I got a heart. I got a heart. I got a heart. She went and sat at her computer, not turning it on. What did this mean? She was relieved, she supposed. “Thank God,” she said out loud, as though she thought someone, say God, might be listening.
“I didn’t want Ray to die,” she said. Or, I don’t think I did, she thought. She just wanted to be able to write her book, was that so bad? Was that so wrong? Anyway, what did this really meant exactly? She was ashamed of her ambivalence.
“Congratulations!” she emailed him. “I knew it all along!”
“Its excellent timing, the surgery is in two days,” he wrote back later that day, “and they have to keep me all summer, which is awesome as I don’t have air-conditioning in my place.”
In the perfect world, the sick make peace and die swiftly. The healthy remain to weep and pat themselves on the back for staring down death—there is blessed catharsis. There are no awkward We said our farewells and you told me you were always in love with me, but you haven’t yet died moments—no tapering off of phone calls because people have already said their good-byes—no disappointment in the voice of the caller when the sick pick up, like the pregnant woman everyone is waiting for to deliver—You haven’t had the baby yet?
Aren’t you dead yet?
She told herself, just because Ray got a heart didn’t mean he was going to live, of course. She meant, she wanted him to live, novel or not. She just didn’t know what she wanted from him now. They could still be friends, right? The only thing that was certain was that she had to finish the novel now—right now before anything else changed.
“When can you come?” Ray wrote her. “Like now. It’s been too long, a hundred hours, forty-five minutes, and twelve seconds to be exact.”
“How about Tuesday?”
“Tuesday’s no good,” he wrote. “Come tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll try,” she said, a little annoyed at how he’d assumed the center of her world, forgetting or not caring that he wasn’t the only man in her life. Then she thought of her book. She needed him to make this book with her. So, she thought, who could refuse the possibly-dying man?
“Tomorrow then,” she said.
“Cool,” he said, then before he hung up, casual as could be, he said, “love you.”
From I love you, to love you. How long before he’d be signing his letters Luv ya? How long before he was sending her Mylar balloons and teddy bears in TV shirts that read Stay Cute, or a dozen chocolate roses on long satin stems? She sat down at her desk and stared at the screen. She was close, almost done, but the ending was impossible; she wrote and erased, wrote and erased. Whose story was it? Was it her story, or his story? She paced and chewed at her cuticles.
That night, Ray called while she was in the kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich and drinking ginger ale; she heard the phone ring, and just knowing it was him, she let it ring and ring, standing at a safe distance, willing it to stop. “Hey, where be you?” he said, his voice hoarse on the machine. “Why aren’t you home?”
She thought about picking it up. She’d have grabbed it if Tad was there and not away at a ten-day conference in Florida. Tad might appreciate her kindness toward her old boyfriend, but surely he’d draw the line at late-night phone calls.
“Just thought you’d want to know I’m going under the knife tomorrow,” he said, pausing to let this sink in, or maybe trying to guilt her, if she was listening, into picking up.
“Okay,” Ray said, “later.”
There was no denying it, Ray was beginning to sound stronger, more like his old self. She wondered if he hated himself for needing her.
The next morning a postcard with a cup of coffee filled with stars stood alone in her mail slot. She almost didn’t pick it up. “Walk with me, talk with me,” he wrote.
He was writing, he was calling. He was everywhere. She locked up her apartment and left, walking up and down the Village, staring into windows. How many years had passed since she stopped seeing gifts that made her think of Ray? Things she thought he’d love? She didn’t want to call Ray. She’d didn’t want to write Ray. She wondered, what did those nurses think if they thought anything at all?
She went to the hospital three days after his surgery; she was taken aback by how groggy he was, how hooded his eyes were. She hoped he wasn’t aware of how much time had passed.
“I’m here,” she said to him. “Can you see me?” She looked around the room, anywhere but at him. He held her hand, and she understood how a fox would chew off its own leg to escape a trap.
Two days later he called her; his voice sounded thick. “They’re kicking at me next week,” he said, breathing heavily. “Goddamn insurance company … ,” his voice trailed off. Could the story not have a thread that was some indictment of corrupt insurance practices? Wouldn’t that make it of social value?
“Next week?” she said frowning. “So soon?”
It was all happening so fast now.
She didn’t pick him up at the hospital. She told herself that Tad wouldn’t have liked that; he was out of town and it would be like sneaking around in his absence. It was one thing to see Ray when Tad was in town, but this seemed to be taking advantage of his absence. It was cheap. Tad wouldn’t understand that a man like Ray had few close friends, and those that he had were as unpredictable and irresponsible as Ray himself had once been.
Tracy didn’t pick up Ray and she didn’t take him home, but when she got to this point in the book—the end—she would. She’d talk about how long it took him to make it up the stairs, how he’d rested leaning on her shoulder, how a Jamaican home-care worker named Betty came by several times a day to take blood and give him meds and weeks later would accompany him on slow walks around the block. She’d joke that he shouldn’t get any ideas about her becoming his girlfriend, because she was already taken, and her husband was a minister.
“I want to see you,” he wrote her, “but I’m not ready to come to you.” She didn’t know if he meant the traveling or her. Did he not want to revisit the landscape of their past? A red woven blanket from Oaxaca thrown over t
he back of the old leather sofa they’d found on the street, a piece of amber carved into a swan that they’d discovered in a thrift shop in Montana, the odd assortment of coffee cups they’d collected on their drives cross-country, an ivory hand mirror inlaid with gilt that he’d once painted her holding.
She’d waited almost three weeks to visit. For a week she’d nursed along what she’d told Tad and Ray was a cold (she couldn’t go see Ray and risk infecting him) but was surely depression. She sat around in pajamas, her hair dirty, working sporadically on the book, picking out words and rejecting them. She thought about taking up smoking. She was ashamed; sure she’d visited Ray in the hospital, twice even, but still. Wasn’t it possible she could say that she’d been there right when he came out of surgery? He wouldn’t remember. And anyway, wouldn’t he want to believe it?
“Hey,” he said when he opened the door.
His voice sounded tired, but it was his voice now. The hoarseness was gone. His hair was growing out, the curl was back. He’d lost some of the paunch, his chest seemed wider, less sunken in. He even had some color in his cheeks. He wasn’t dying. Still, he wasn’t himself. There was no tape on his fingertips like there’d always been, from working on motors or using X-Actos, no paint stained his clothing. His shirt, buttoned up, looked ironed. On the walls hung a few old paintings she’d seen before. There was a picture of her in the dress of a Moorish woman, which now seemed quite silly, and she noticed, her heart nearly stopping, something she’d never seen before, a painting of a church identical to one in their little town.
“This,” she said, drawing closer so she could see the brushstrokes.
“That is my favorite painting ever,” he said.
She smiled at him. “I know this church.”
“I did it when I was a kid,” he said, “from a picture.”
She stopped and stared into the painting; she could see now it was crude, and unrealistic, the light was all wrong, it was sloppy, she hoped he didn’t know what she’d been thinking.
“It’s a piece of shit,” he said, “but I love it.”
“So,” she said, turning toward him, “are you going to have a great scar?”
“It’s pretty great.”
“Can I see it?” She wanted to see it. She needed to see it.
“Well,” he said after a long moment. He fingered the hem of his shirt, like this was too personal a question.
“Later, maybe,” he said.
“You don’t have to or anything,” she said.
“I can’t drink coffee anymore—imagine—but I have some juice, some water …”
They drank iced green tea and ate cheese puffs, the kind that leave your finger pads bright orange, and he told her where he’d traveled in the past years, Russia, Italy, and Costa Rica. He’d gone back to Mexico, not to their town. His Spanish was really great now, he told her.
“But it was the best with you,” he said, his voice getting soft. “That was the best time of my life.”
“I know,” she said. “So,” she said, this was it.
“So,” he said, smiling at her. He sat back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head. It would be so easy to shoot an arrow right there into his heart.
“I should go,” she said, brushing the orange powder on her pants. “Look at this stuff,” she said. “What is this orange stuff anyway? Agent Orange … ?”
“Ah shit, do you have to?” he asked. “Already?”
“I’m on deadline.” She couldn’t believe it was over just like that. That was it. It was over. She felt slightly sick.
“Sure, but you’ve got to come again.” He looked a little confused, and flustered.
“Of course,” she said. She couldn’t get her breath.
“Look, it’s not like I’m doing anything. They come and take my blood, and I hang out. I sleep a lot, eat lots of steak. Cash my disability check.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s the life.”
“I miss you,” he said, and she believed him. He did. She felt sick.
“I’ll come back,” she said, “don’t worry. You’ll get sick of me.”
“Sick of you? Not possible.”
How had this happened? It was because he was sick, she told herself. That’s all.
“Is this driving you crazy?”
He shrugged. “What can I do? I can’t work.” He didn’t seem bothered by this. “I am taking hundreds of dollars’ worth of pills every day just to keep my body from rejecting the heart.”
Rejecting the heart.
“Do you know whose heart is it?” She couldn’t help herself, and who knew about the etiquette of transplants?
The whole way over on the subway she had wondered what he had done with his heart. Had he asked for it back? How could he not? How could he let it go?
“I don’t want to think about it,” Ray answered.
“Right,” she said, but she didn’t understand.
“All I know is, it was from an eighteen-year-old kid, from the Midwest.”
“A boy,” she said, thinking how untested and undamaged that heart would be. How she wished she’d known Ray when he had that heart.
In the silence that followed, though neither of them said it, she knew they were both imagining that the kid had died in a car accident, or a motorcycle crash, some way Ray might have once died, or should have died—a moment stolen. So rarely in life do people get the death they deserve when they deserve it. Didn’t he deserve that?
“That makes sense,” she said.
“It does,” he said.
“Better than like a giant beaver …”
He gave her a funny half-smile.
“At one point, you know like the time of the dinosaurs, beavers were twelve feet tall.” He stared at her. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“So you’ve got to come back soon,” he said, leaving his hand on her shoulder. She knew he was about to kiss her, so she turned her head and kissed his cheek, letting her lips linger there for a long moment. She couldn’t take the kiss.
“I’ll be back,” she said, but as she opened the door to the outside, the sun coming in, she knew that she’d never come back here. He would call her, and he would write her, and she would return calls late, she would forget emails he had sent. She’d wouldn’t kill this thing between them, but she’d slowly let it die. She’d disappear, just the way he had. She would finish the book about her and Ray, and in the death scene, for Ray would die in her book, she would cry, she would cry and mourn, but then, like that, it would be over. Maybe she wouldn’t understand it any better, but it would be over.
author inspiration
This song was written the year I had my nervous breakdown. While I didn’t hear it until years later, when I saw the date of composition, I felt like it was my story. I listened to it compulsively for a very long time.
RIO
zev borow
It means so much to me
Like a birthday or a pretty view
“Rio”
Duran Duran
Diego Guiterrez stares into the mirror and can’t help but wonder if another Central American strongman would have gotten a better suite. Even worse is the quick thought that one of his contemporaries, deposed or otherwise, could be decamped in New York at this very moment at another, decidedly better hotel altogether, staring into a larger mirror, with a more decorous frame, set off by more flattering lighting, a man even more mercifully alone with nothing except his own reflection. Where, he wonders, does Chávez stay? Chinaco, he knows, is usually at the Grand Hyatt. Who else? Perez, Salzar? No, no, no. He’d know if it were even a possibility. It might not make the papers—though Lord knows he reads enough newspapers these days not to miss it if it did—but still … It isn’t as if he no longer knew things. And was there even a comparison between the Waldorf and the Grand Hyatt? What about The Peninsula? Had someone recently mentioned a new Four Seasons? Perhaps.
Guiterrez has a nickname. El Pollito. The little chicke
n. His mother gave it to him, and even though he has always hated it, it has, as they say, stuck. It is midafternoon and El Pollito is wearing a crisp, pale blue Armani dress shirt fresh out of the box, along with silver cufflinks, a gift from Vicente Fox. The room is cold. The entire building practically thrums with air chilled so powerfully as to be menacing. How American, Guiterrez thinks. Of course, the truth is he loves it, that after all these years it still seduces him. When he first came to New York in the early 1970s, then just a junior member of his predecessor’s security detail, it wasn’t the skyscrapers or the Cadillacs that left him overwhelmed, it was the air-conditioning. That first trip had been during summer. New York was hot and thick, like home, but with even less breeze. They’d driven from the airport directly to the hotel—which one?—and as the baggage was unloaded the doors to the lobby were propped open. Out rushed a wave of air unlike any he could ever have imagined—air so ferociously piercing, so soulless, as dry and chilled as death itself. He was seized entirely. It was all he could do to keep his composure. This was cold that devoured the heat, not like the sickly, dripping coughs that spit out of rusted vents at home. This air was less a feat of engineering than brute will. Marco Polo upon first seeing the gilded court of the Chinese khan could not have been more awed. Guiterrez had turned to the soldier next to him and whispered, “¡Dios mio! How much could this possibly cost?”
The soldier, older, smiled and replied, “Resistance is futile, eh?”
But why resist at all? One thing Guiterrez could attest to was there was nothing better for fucking. Even this trip he’d woken up every morning with a hard-on. It also tended to make him hungry, a sensation he enjoyed almost as much. This made him recall a meal he’d had years ago with an American from the embassy. The man, surely CIA, from Texas or somewhere else in the American South, had actually cooked for him. A chicken dish, something deep-fried. He reveled in the origin of the recipe and the exact manner of its preparation and had called it “comfort food.” Guiterrez hears the phrase again in his mind as he continues to stare into the mirror. Even after eleven days his skin is still tanned. He looks healthy. “The air-conditioning at the Waldorf-Astoria,” he is surprised to hear himself say aloud, “is like comfort food.”
Lit Riffs Page 29