by Dan Noble
With the concentration and restraint of a prima ballerina tuning everything else out, I plug the drain, begin to fill the sink, squeeze out the dish soap. Now. Now. All that needs to happen is for Kennedy to speak. Speak, speak! I charge thee, speak! But this isn’t Hamlet.
I drop the dishes and silverware into the soapy water, one at a time, plunk, plunk, as if drawing out the process will slow the beating in my heart. One. Two. Three. Outside, some matter of feet away, under the earth, is Pinocchio’s box. Yes, I’d been thinking of that when I passed out in the car. The idea of digging it up tonight registers more like a déjà vu than a plan. I shift my view to the sink, waiting, sensing, moving in time toward the inevitable.
Kennedy’s hand emerges from behind. He lowers the bowl from my hands and into the soapy water, turns off the taps, takes the sponge from my grip, and pulls me to our seats at the table. Once I realize the moment’s here, I feel absolutely nothing, like I’m drifting off to sleep. I can’t look at him. Still, I check the clock, watch the tap drip, the condensation fogging the window over the sink.
Mom The Dog jumps up on Kennedy’s lap. His hands slip from mine to Mom’s rump, which she wiggles in closer to his chest, as if she feels the same way I do. He sits up very straight in his chair. Without looking up, Mom shimmies in even closer, then lets out a big breath.
His gaze on a smoke break, my husband inspects the faucet as he speaks. “I was in remission,” he says, letting this clinical, odd word soak in. But it doesn’t. What could it possibly have to do with us? It sounds like a sales word for a second commission. Johnny here did so great with the Albany team, he earned us a remission, I’d probably crack the joke if we’d heard the husband character say the word in a Diane Keaton film. Too slowly the most important word registers: was.
“That time, when we were first together, and I fell off the radar, that was the initial detection—” He gets up, fiddles with the joint where the faucet threads through the countertop.
“What?” It’s not the last time I’ll clamp my hand over my mouth during this conversation. All this time.
Homing in on something loose sounding, he crouches down to look under the sink. “…the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. If it didn’t look better, I was never going to call you again. I was clear on that.”
It’s impossible to picture Kennedy in the scenario he goes on to describe. Scans and partial biopsies, outpatient clinics and noisy scan capsules—all this apparently unfolding as I imagined myself deserted for a wild fuck with Primavera (the name I came up with for the slut he’d left me for) on every surface of his kitchen.
My brain seems unable, unwilling to connect me to this story. I see it the way Mother would—the words pointing me to a line from our favorite (because it was her choice) children’s book, Snugglepot and Cuddliepie. “What strange birds!” we’d sing.
This book and the irresistible bits of Mother are inextricably entwined. The next second a thought flickers: I am doing exactly what Mother always meant for me to do. But just as quickly it’s gone. Replaced by the halos, the incredible illumination of everything around me. I have to grab onto the table edge to keep my breath coming.
I’m sure Kennedy can’t tell what I see: Mom the Dog is technicolor, a laser light show distracting me, pulling me inward, toward other connections. I try to make them out in the chaos of the flashing images. They’re so familiar. Books I’ve read, I know, but there are so many, it’s like an inextricable cluster of traffic noises. I try to concentrate on my breath, what Kennedy is saying, force the images to slow the way I was taught with these anxiety manifestations. They can be there, but don’t attend to them. You can’t concentrate on two things at once.
“I’m sorry, Millie. I’m so sorry.”
It starts to work. The images slow. I pick one out. It’s Robinson Crusoe, definitely. I remember the way I pictured his hair, like a member of Kiss. It’s unclear how I’m him and he’s me, but that’s the way it appears. Perhaps I’m getting there just when I need to. Perhaps I can help Kennedy. Perhaps I should believe. What other option do I have in this situation where I’m completely powerless? Thankfully, Kennedy sits again, lifting Mom onto his lap in a position so perfect, she doesn’t adjust a thing before sighing and lowering her snout onto his thigh. I take it as a sign. I lose the Crusoe image. This is a success, the episode staved off, but it doesn’t feel that way.
Kennedy must feel the reality of it all now that he’s said it out loud. He’s sobbing. My hand hesitates before it goes to him. When it does, he flinches. Something—if I had to guess, guilt—angers this coolest of men enough for him to hurl his mug at the backsplash behind the sink.
Mom jolts, turns her gaze to Kennedy, shocked enough for everyone. Though I didn’t see that coming, I don’t wince. It’s an imaginary cup in an imaginary scene. There really is the feeling of unreality to this scene—like maybe it was Crusoe that was real. In this story David Duchovny barely helps make it digestible. You know there’s something really wrong if even David Duchovny can’t add a spoonful of sugar to a scene. We watch in silence as the milky tea runs down the grout lines. A half-circle of porcelain handle has landed in the soap dish, artfully.
“I’m sorry,” he says again after a moment, looking slightly more like himself, which makes me look away again. “It’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to tell you. When I think about you knowing, I get so angry. I’ve made a terrible mistake. A terrible mistake. I shouldn’t keep things from you.”
Things, plural? I spot shards on the wood floor. I don’t want Rose to get cut on one of them. Suddenly danger is everywhere.
He’s quite for a long moment.
“I’m so sorry, Millie. I lie there on that bed and thought of you when we met—walking every day to Three Guys, your crazy hats, your pretty stockings, that smile plastered to your face because you forced it there. That meeting was your destiny. And I didn’t want to wreck that. I had to give you this life, at any cost.”
At any cost?
“I was struck with how hard you’ve had to work to care for the people you love. I promised myself I would never do that to you. And besides, I think, deep down, you didn’t want to know.” He catches his breath as if he had to get that out all in one go or he wouldn’t. Every word is true. But that’s not all. He’s leaving something out. Something doesn’t add up. Your destiny. Not his? It’s a strange word choice.
My eyes close against the tears. He’s right about one thing: sometimes all the signs are there, but we suspend our sense of observation, self-editing where we want, getting caught up in hope. What I need to know is whether it’s wrong to want things to stay the same when it’s inevitable that the story will change. Our beginning felt right. It felt perfect; can it be that it wasn’t? I can feel its oblivion pulling me even now. If we could just get back there. . . Can it still be wonderful with us, though from here it all looks fucked up? Because that’s how it feels—both doomed and perfect.
Of all the emotions bobbing inside my head, rage wins out. I’m not sure who it’s directed at. “Fuck you, Kennedy. I’m not frail. I’m the opposite of frail. I’m…I’m that glue from that television commercial—the one that holds the construction worker by his hard hat onto a steel beam. And those hats of mine are not crazy. They’re couture. You call yourself a fashionable luggage salesman!”
He rolls his eyes. It’s such a normal reaction, for a second my heart sings.
“Don’t you think I know that—about your strength?” he says. “Can’t I still want to protect you? You’re making jokes and missing the point.”
That’s right. I didn’t work alone in burying my head in the sand. It was a conspiracy. The both of us were in on it. It’s wonderful and terrible. “No, you’re missing the point! You don’t marry someone without telling them you have cancer. No jokes to be made about that.”
He holds his head in his hands and I don’t like the bouncing of his rounded shoulders. I don’t like the idea that a man tells his wife he has cancer a
nd she screams at him and then he cries ugly sobs he will hate himself for. And yet, here we are. To his crotch he says, “Sure, it sounds bad when you put it that way.”
“That’s the way it is, Kennedy!” Why am I forcing this when I know damned well what his point is? I know what I am.
Fact, fiction. Would it have made a lick of difference if I’d known? I’d have married him no matter what. I think, in the silence, of a kinder, more dignified tack I might scramble onto. But the images are picking up a dizzying speed again. The tremors are spreading. I’m nauseous with the motion.
“Kennedy, we’re in this together. You’re a noble man. No one knows that better than me. But you can’t protect me from life. No matter what we convince ourselves of, no one can do that—for anyone.”
His head jerks at that.
He looks at me as if I’m the stranger.
“I am noble,” he says, strangely.
I nod because I can’t quite manage to verbalize my reaction to that. I close my eyes to keep from falling. The image flashes are gaining intensity: Jane Eyre, the unidentified man on the horse, the rock, Robinson Crusoe.
I drop my head between my legs and breathe.
Even ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand, it just looks that way when they’re turning their eggs over, caring for their young. Imagining you can avoid your own fate is madness. I’m so absorbed in all of them—Mother, Rose, Kennedy, do I even know who Millie is anymore? My face burns.
He stands, pours us both glasses of ice water from a pitcher in the fridge. I manage to straighten up as he hands me mine, then backs up against the sink.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You’re shaking like crazy.”
At least I know that part is real. I nod and though he looks skeptical, he continues on.
“I can tell you why I didn’t tell you from the beginning. Do you know what I saw when I went to that doctor’s office?” He takes a sip, looks above the old phone to the photo of the three of us by the beach last summer, my hair blowing so wildly it seems to wrap around both of their heads.
“The men were fine with their diagnoses—this thing, this Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma is something that happens a lot to younger guys—but the wives, they were hysterical. You’ve never seen anything so sad. And the husbands, every one of them just sat there helpless. I wasn’t going to be helpless, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that to you. Be honest with yourself, Millie. What would you have done in my shoes?”
In a way, I’m at a disadvantage. Do I want to give my husband, who has cancer, something more to worry about? Look at what I’ve been keeping from him. Still, it feels important to speak my mind. “Look, I can’t claim to be an expert on men’s roles in the family, but I do know this: I would never keep something like that from you.” I’m lying. Every word is a lie, but I can’t seem to stop. My secrets. They’re the cause of all this. I’m to blame.
“And now?” I ask, though I’m terrified.
“And now it’s back, and the test results look bad. The doctors put me on some drugs while we wait for the re-test. He said in a small percentage of cases there can be a false-positive. He doesn’t want me to get my hopes up, but he has to make sure.”
At some point we have sex, we fight, nearly physically—I throw a pillow, followed by a glass frame containing a picture of Mother pregnant with me that’s always meant a lot to me. We’ve come to the edge of losing it all. It must be the longest day on record. I can see the sun coming up over the trees.
“So how did you know something was wrong?” I ask, suddenly unable to look at him as if he isn’t who I thought he was, but instead this new character who I’ve got to get to know—like it or not.
He looks with mild distaste to the place where the wall and ceiling meet. He continues the story the way he began, as if it’s the only way he can tell it, as if he isn’t ready for critiques. “I was changing after work to come here for dinner. It was when you were doing all those, what did you call them? ‘winter-warmer one-pot dishes.’” He smiles—and there he is, the old him. This is a good memory—our beginning. At least it was. “I think you were doing an Italian white bean and pancetta stew.” Kennedy stops.
“It was a good one,” I say with a shrug that feels as if it’s hijacked my shoulders. We both pretend I’m not sitting on my hand to steady it. “The sage.”
Kennedy strokes my hand. He’s trying to get me to look at him. In truth, I’m dying to. For a moment, I can imagine we’re sitting in these exact seats where three and a half years earlier we were spooning our white bean and fancy bacon stew. The taste was both bright and rich, but the texture was wrong—like congealed pasta. In the muddle of what he was dealing with, Kennedy must have lost this detail. Or he never noticed. Funny, what we take away.
Looking at our hands now, Kennedy continues. “I turned down my collar and bumped my hand against my shoulder blade—ever so slightly. I remember this is what freaked me about it—and pow! It was the worst pain. I felt around and noticed a lump—nothing you could see. I went to a doctor I knew from the store and he sliced a bit off for a biopsy. But he knew right away. It was textbook.”
I think back to that night. How many times I’d replayed and dissected it! The last night I’d seen Kennedy before he disappeared for a whole month. How could I have missed it? There was barely a moment I couldn’t recall even now—the way he’d paced while I did the dishes until I let him dry. And then his sudden exit. His rejection of coffee and Italian pastries, his tender goodbye belly rub for Mom.
“So where did you go?” I ask.
“I was at Sloane Kettering, only as an outpatient, getting radiation treatments.”
“Did you have anyone with you?” I’m unsure which answer would be worse.
Kennedy stands, pacing the way he had on that white bean and pancetta stew night, rubbing at the front of his hair. When he speaks it’s almost theatrical, like the only way he can bring himself to say this is to be someone else. Perhaps he has David Duchovny in mind too. While he inspects a half-melted candle, Kennedy tells me his parents knew, that he’d sworn them to secrecy, and that every time we were at their place he was afraid they’d slip up, that they’d begged him to tell me.
In my mind, the deception grows to elaborate proportions. The horse rider image is suddenly overtaking the moment. I know that rider. It’s…it’s freaking Heathcliffe from Wuthering Heights. And there I am, the rock in my hand. There’s blood on it. No. Not that. I can’t handle that now. Go away intrusive thought.
“Kennedy, I just don’t know what to say. It’s as if everything we were is a lie.” I didn’t know I was going to say it, but after it’s out, I realize I didn’t say the other part, that I want to patch the holes.
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic, Millie. What would you have done? I ask you again.” He doesn’t sound like Kennedy. Kennedy doesn’t say things like that.
I would have had you there with me, but I’m not going to say it because what is the point of arguing about this anymore? I would have done it because that’s what people do, Kennedy.
“I don’t know,” I say finally.
Silent, slowly nodding, he seems satisfied with that.
I switch to practicalities. “But what’s changed? Why are you suddenly in danger?”
“I go in every six months to check things out. And this is the first time something’s been bad.”
Six months. That’s eight times since we’ve been together. Are we even telling the same story?
“It’s really bad, Millie. I’m probably going to die.”
“You’re probably going to die.” Now, I’m as desperate as he must have been. What wouldn’t I do?
He grabs my hands. “Eight times healthy, all clear. Millie, I would do the same thing again. It was the best thing to do. Look at you. Do you even see how you’ve let yourself be you?” He’s controlling the narrative, and maybe I prefer it that way. I like the me he sees.
I’m suddenly weak. The pressure is inc
redible. I drop my head onto the table. We must look like we’ve been beaten by an intruder. Perhaps we have.
“Kennedy.” Without lifting my head, I reach for his hand. Squeeze it. Mine’s shaking terribly. He’s looking at it. There’s Jane/me, and then Heathcliffe on the horse, the rock in my hand. And then everything goes blank.
12
MILLIE
I love him so much is the last thought I have as I give into the black out. It’s Gatsby this time that takes me there.
I’m Daisy, of course, in the early parts of the story, where one can and will still want to be her. I’m in Louisville, in my white coupe, basking in the glowing awe of my line of soldier suitors. To be wanted, desired, without trying.
I could feel Gatsby’s lips, but I recognized this feeling. Kennedy and I had a love like this, passion like this. It might also end in disaster. But I could enjoy it now, couldn’t I? I, Daisy, I feel Gatsby’s/Kennedy’s lips on mine.
It’s like in the beginning, when we believed we could be saved by each other. The sun is bright on my shoulders. I’m wearing white, as I remember from the text—the image of Daisy always this particular one in my mind—but what happens next is unfamiliar. I don’t think it was in the text at all.
I’m writing my own story, a fantasy, I guess. I don’t think they would have taken things this far—at that time and in that culture—but we do. We are on a beautiful woven blanket, beneath a tree, near a stream. There’s no one in sight. We seem to know that no one will come. It is our story, after all.
There is some familiarity to the rhythm of our kisses and grasping hands. Our first time—Kennedy and I—is being played out here, amidst this glorious, iconic backdrop. We are beautiful, Adam and Eve about to fall from grace for everyone to see. It isn’t a memory. It isn’t an illusion. It’s happening. I feel it.
“I’m going to come,” I hear myself whisper in his ear. He groans. And I do as I’d promised, just as he does. We lie in the warmth of the sunlight, his hands on me, completely satisfied. Our best moments, here, alive, to live again. It’s the most amazing gift—the good old days. If it could only be like that again. Well, it fucking can.