by Alison Lurie
It was not the only job she took over. As time passed Alan began to do less and less around the house. He began to put on weight from lack of exercise, and to show signs of what he called “grumpiness.” But of course this was temporary, Jane told herself. In a few weeks more, a month or two at the most, he would be himself again—healthy, handsome, slim, athletic; good-natured, affectionate, and often passionate. He would love her again and make love to her again, instead of apologizing and explaining that he really wanted to, but it just hurt too goddamn much. Now, when they tried to meet, as they called it, it never really worked. Jane could never let herself go: she was always afraid of hurting Alan by a sudden movement, and sometimes she did hurt him, or he hurt himself. Then he would groan, or even cry out in pain. So she held back, and watched herself constantly, and soon their meetings had become tentative and awkwardly self-conscious, as if they were two adolescents on a date. Often Alan would break off halfway. “I’m sorry,” he would say. “I want to go on, but it hurts too goddamn much.”
“Yes, of course, I understand, that’s all right,” Jane always said. But it wasn’t all right, it was all wrong.
Alan hadn’t complained of pain much at first, but as time went on he mentioned or showed it more and more often: he groaned when he got out of bed or lay down, and cursed violently when he dropped anything. Of course, everyone complained when they were ill or injured, Jane told herself at first, and then they got better and stopped. Or, if they didn’t get better, they got medical help. And indeed, when his back didn’t improve after a few weeks, Alan, with the upbeat decisiveness that had for so long been part of his character and had made him such a successful department chairman, sought this help.
According to the experts, his problem was something called a slipped disk, which as Jane understood it meant that a kind of spongy pad between two of his vertebrae had slid out of alignment and was pressing on the spinal nerves, causing continual pain. Sometimes these disks slid back into place after a while, the doctor told them, and sometimes they did not. There were, he was told, many different treatments that might help.
For the next ten months, therefore, Alan consulted a series of health professionals. Each one approached his problem with new suggestions, and each time Alan and Jane hoped for a while that they had found the solution. But every treatment ended in disappointment, and some of them in rage and despair and increased pain. By Christmas Alan had seen what one of his colleagues had described as four physical therapists, three orthopedic surgeons, two neurologists, and an acupuncturist in a pear tree: a peculiar pale woman who worked in a cloud of smoky fruit-flavored incense and had inserted needles into Alan’s back and shoulders and then left him to lie in pain for half an hour listening to oriental music while she spoke on the phone in an unknown language. He had submitted to agonizing injections of cortisone and other substances, and practiced many different sets of exercises. He had sat and bounced on various inflatable devices, including one that looked like a dull black rubber donut and another that resembled a giant shiny electric-blue beach ball.
In April, when nearly a year had passed without any change, Alan and Jane went to stay in a pretentious and unpleasant luxury hotel in a large city four hours’ drive away, so that he could undergo what was called a diskectomy. According to the surgeon, this operation was usually relatively painless and had a ninety-five percent chance of success. In Alan’s case, this turned out not to be so. After the operation, in spite of large doses of narcotic drugs, he was in continual agony, and his pain did not improve; rather it spread and worsened. As one of Jane’s less sympathetic friends said at the time, “Well, somebody has to be in the other five percent.” Before the operation the doctor had announced that usually there was immediate relief. At the follow-up interview afterward, however, he claimed that sometimes it took several months. But by this time, Alan did not believe a word the doctor said.
Since then, he had treated his pain himself. He used heating pads and icepacks, and wore an electronic device called a Tenz Unit that was supposed to block nerve impulses and sometimes did so. He also took a great many prescription and nonprescription drugs. Unfortunately, the drugs all had side effects and led to new complications and ailments. Alan now suffered intermittently from constipation, severe headaches, insomnia, chills, leg pain, groin pain, weakness, and fatigue. The Tenz Unit had caused an ugly raw red rash to appear on both sides of his lower back. He was also eating too much, and not only at meals. Jane would come upon him in the pantry gobbling peanuts out of a can, or cookies from a cellophane package. Late at night she would sometimes hear a noise in the kitchen that could be mice or burglars and would tiptoe down the stairs to find Alan standing in the half dark in front of the fridge, spooning vanilla ice cream from the cardboard carton into his mouth.
“Jane?” called a grating voice from below. “What the hell is going on up there?”
“Just coming.” She snatched three pillows of varying size and consistency off his side of their bed and ran downstairs.
“Sorry I yelled at you.”
“That’s all right,” Jane assured him, thinking at the same time that Alan now yelled at her, or at something else that had irritated him, more and more often. Afterward he always apologized, and seemed to assume that canceled out the yell.
“And the ice,” Alan reminded her. “If you could get me the ice now.”
“Sure, right away.” She headed for the kitchen and opened the freezer, which over the last year had become crowded with refreezable plastic icepacks.
“Here you are.” Jane held out a large white sagging object.
“Not that one, it’s too heavy.” He shoved her hand away with a grimace of irritation. “Jesus Christ. I need the little blue packs. Both of them.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s better,” he said a minute later. “And could you maybe bring me a towel to wrap them in? It keeps them cold longer.”
“Yes, of course.” Jane climbed the stairs again, found a clean hand towel, brought it down, wrapped the icepacks in it, and helped Alan settle them between his back and the back of the sofa. “Is there anything else?”
“Not just now, thanks.” He groaned and closed his eyes.
Though Alan had not said so directly, Jane knew he now suspected that his back would never get better, and in fact would probably get worse. He was in almost constant severe pain, except when he was so full of drugs that he was woozy and unsteady on his feet as he had been this morning. In the late afternoon and evening the pain sometimes became so bad that he would have a shot of vodka, or two, or three, though labels on the pills he took clearly stated that it was dangerous to mix them with alcohol.
Pain, according to the nineteenth-century novels that Jane’s Aunt Nancy had loved as a child and presented to her at Christmas and birthdays, could be ennobling and inspiring. In What Katy Did and Jack and Jill, thoughtless young girls, injured in accidents at play (like Alan) had to lie in bed for months, during which time they matured wonderfully and their characters changed for the better.
But Alan hadn’t needed to change for the better, Jane thought: he had been perfect as he was. So, logically, he had begun to change for the worse. His admirable evenness of temper, optimism, and generosity of spirit had slowly begun to leak away. He had become overweight and unattractive, he had become self-centered and touchy.
Those books were wrong, Jane thought. Pain is bad for the character, just as all misfortunes are: poverty and unemployment and loss of friends and family. It makes you tired and weak; it makes you depressed and anxious and fearful. Nobody says this, nobody is supposed to say it, but it is true. Even Jane herself, who was only forty and healthy and strong and attractive, would one day be old and tired and ugly and probably self-centered and touchy as well.
“Ja-ane.” Alan’s voice was tense.
“Yes?” She stopped washing lettuce and hurried to the sitting room.
“Could you possibly get me the bottle of Valium from my toilet
kit, and some cold grapefruit juice to wash it down?”
“Yes, of course.” Jane ran upstairs and down, filled a glass with grapefruit juice in the kitchen, and added two ice cubes.
“Thank you.” Alan drank. “Yes, that’s good,” he said, smiling at her. But then, as he lifted the glass again, his arm struck the arm of the sofa, and the rest of the grapefruit juice spilled onto the coffee table and the carpet. “Oh, fuck!” he shouted in a sudden rage. “I didn’t need that.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” Jane picked up the glass and ice cubes, ran to the kitchen, and returned carrying a pan of warm water and detergent and a sponge.
“Aw, shit, look at the mess,” Alan growled.
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing,” she assured him.
“It’s the drugs, they interfere with my coordination.”
“Yes, of course,” Jane said as she knelt by the sofa, mopping up the juice, then soaking the carpet with water and detergent, while thinking that she too did not need this, but that at least it hadn’t been grape juice.
“I wish I could help—”
“It’s all right, really. It’s nothing.” She went to the kitchen, dumped the dirty water, rinsed the sponge and brush, and filled the pan again with clean warm water. Back in the sitting room she scrubbed the suds off the carpet and patted it dry with a wad of paper towels, then returned to the kitchen again and washed everything out.
“Ja-ane,” Alan called. “When you’re finished, could you possibly bring me another glass of grapefruit juice?”
“Yes, just a minute.” She put the pan in the drying rack.
“Okay. Here you are,” she said a few moments later, aware of forcing her voice into a pleasant neutrality.
“Thanks. You’re so very good to me, darling.” Alan smiled at her briefly, sighed, and drank.
“You’re so very welcome,” she said. The words sounded flat in her mouth, but he did not appear to notice.
“I’m so lucky to have you here. It makes all the difference.”
Between what and what? Jane thought, but did not say.
“It’s those goddamn stairs in Mahoney Hall. They get me every time.” Alan’s office was on the top floor of the high-ceilinged architecture building, which had no elevator.
“I know. It’ll be easier next month when you move into the Center.” Last term Alan had been appointed as one of the two Faculty Fellows of the Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities, familiarly known as the Much, and sometimes as the Too Much. This was an endowed facility for visiting scholars and artists housed in a handsome Victorian mansion just off campus. Jane, for the last five years, had been its administrative director. The idea that Alan should become a Fellow had not been her idea, and the appointment had made her anxious, in case people should think so. But it had also made her grateful and pleased. For a whole year Alan would be relieved of teaching, which had become harder and harder for him. He would have peace and quiet and no stairs to climb and be able to finish his new book.
“I hope so,” Alan said in the voice of one who doubts this.
“I’m sure it will.”
No answer. “I’m going out to the garden now,” she said. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
“No thanks. Well, if you see the Times around anywhere.”
“Of course. I think it’s in the dining room.”
Back in the kitchen at last, washing the last of the lettuce, Jane waited a couple of minutes to see if any further requests would follow, then took up her basket and almost fled from the house.
It’s not right, it’s not how the story was supposed to turn out, she thought as she knelt in the garden pulling long, sticky, scratchy pale-green strings of bindweed out of the strawberry bed. That was stupid, it was silly and romantic: but Jane had once been romantic, though almost nobody who knew her now would have suspected this. At work she appeared practical, rational, and calm. Nobody would have guessed that twenty years ago, long after she knew the phrase to be foolish, she had clung to the belief that one day her prince would come, and that he would appear at the University. That was partly why she had stayed so long in an entry-level job at what her father always called “the big store at the top of the hill.”
Most of Jane’s many relatives, including those who also worked at the University—running offices and laboratories and lunchrooms, keeping up the grounds, or repairing office machines—had wondered at her decision. They believed that the faculty, on the whole, consisted of incompetent ninnies. Only Jane’s mother, who was also somewhat of a closet romantic and considered a wedding the high point of a woman’s life, saw it differently. “It doesn’t pay much,” she admitted. “But maybe you’ll marry one of those professors.”
Jane did not say so, but it was what she hoped for too. And as it turned out, not in vain. At twenty-four, when many of her friends were already married, she remained single. Because she was lively and pretty, with curly reddish brown hair and the look of a small friendly Welsh terrier, she had many suitors. Though some of them were attractive and likable and ambitious and already becoming successful, none of them, in her view, were princes. Somewhat discouraged, but refusing to compromise, she continued working at Corinth University, now at a more responsible job in the Entomology Department, all of whose unmarried male faculty, according to her fellow staff members, resembled different species of bugs.
Then, miraculously, Jane’s prince appeared. He was an expert on architectural history, called in to consult on the possible preservation or demolition of the Biological Sciences Building. Alan Mackenzie was only thirty-six, but already an associate professor, and he even looked like a prince. According to one of his colleagues whom Jane met later, his friendly but slightly formal manners, his pale-brown wavy hair, and his classical musculature suggested the ideal Renaissance courtier. He came from the romantic state of California, and his attitude toward the world was curious, skeptical, and easygoing. And, unlike a couple of instructors whom Jane had briefly dated, he did not condescend to her because she had gone to a local branch of the state university.
In time, her prince had become a king: a wholly admirable and lovable man, a world-renowned expert on eighteenth-century architecture, and the holder of an endowed chair at Corinth University. Meanwhile, Jane had continued to work at increasingly interesting and well-paid University jobs. For more than sixteen years she had been lucky and happy.
And now all that was over. She sighed heavily and slumped into a crouching position against a bale of straw mulch. Over the last fifteen months, her admired and beloved king had turned into a kind of shabby, whiny beggar. Like the tax inspector, the FBI man, and the hitchhiker that he had reminded her of earlier that morning, he always wanted something, something she didn’t always want to give and he didn’t always need. No, no, I mustn’t think that way, Jane told herself, digging into the earth and pulling up not only bindweed but, by accident, a long pale-red runner of next year’s strawberries. But it was too late—the idea had already appeared in her mind and was sitting there heavily, as if glued in place.
A dirty wave of guilt and self-hatred washed over her. How can I mind doing things for Alan or think such mean, selfish thoughts, when I am well and he is in such pain—when I promised always to love him and cherish him, for better and worse, in sickness and in health?
Maybe the most awful thing about it all was that she wasn’t a good person anymore. All her life, ever since she was a seven-year-old at Sunday school, it had been Jane’s secret plan to be good. Already in second grade she had known that she wasn’t remarkable in any way—not exceptionally intelligent or gifted or strong or beautiful. Well, all right then, she had decided, she would be good. Not heroically good: just reasonably decent, honest, fair, and kind. A good girl, a good woman, a good wife. She had never confided this ambition to anyone—to do so would have been to invite ridicule and possibly retribution. But for most of her life she had managed pretty well, though of course there had been lapses. When s
he went to church with her parents on Christmas and Easter, she usually felt that God (if he existed) understood and pardoned her failings. Now she felt that he was angry with her, even scornful.
Until last May it had mostly been easy to be good—maybe too easy. Occasionally in the past Jane had felt her virtue untested. When Alan first became ill she had almost welcomed it as an opportunity. She had been lucky in life; now she would be the patient and reasonable and loving spouse of an admirable man who had hurt his back and was therefore sometimes impatient and unreasonable and unloving, but would soon be well. It was a test of her virtue, and for many months one that she passed nearly every day. Sometimes people saw her taking and passing this test, and told her that she was wonderful.
And it had been true, for a while. For months Jane had been wonderful to Alan, and Alan had been grateful. But now she was tired of being wonderful, and Alan, she suspected, was tired of being grateful. As time passed, her virtue had failed. Like an old dish towel, it had begun to wear thin, developed holes and creases and stains, and she had begun to turn into a mean, grudging, angry person.
Often in the past, when Jane felt low, she would go out to the garden, and soon her sprits would rise. This year, though, it had been planted too late because of Alan’s operation, and neglected because of all she had to do for him. Though the beans and squash and lettuce were fresh and full and beautiful in the warm sunlight, and the green tomatoes had begun to turn a splendid sunny red, there were bare patches where things had died from lack of water, and weeds everywhere.