by Andre Dubus
She read poems that students wrote; she read poems in books and in the evenings she lived with them, thought of what she would say about them next day in the classroom. She knew that she could not plan everything she would say; she could only plan how she would begin. It was a matter of letting go in front of the students, and waiting for the light to come. The light would come with images and words she must not hold before class. Her holding them could take away the life they drew from revelation, turn them into dead objects she possessed and carried with her to show the students. She knew that teaching a poem was like writing a poem: she could only begin, and reach, and wait. If she tried to impose a design to save herself from failure, there would be no revelation on the page, or with her students. Before each class she was afraid, but it was muted, and she knew it kept her from being dull and removed. She loved all of this until her brother was dying, and drawing her to him. Then she felt separated from her work, and had to will herself into her voice, into her very flesh.
Grief held her. Always: while she was talking with students, eating with friends, its arms encircled her. Alone, she gave in to it, allowed it to hold her while she fed and cleaned her body, and breathed. It held her when she sat at her desk to do the work that was only for herself; it pressed her biceps to her ribs, her back and breast to her heart, and she could not make a poem grow. She sat with paper and pen and wrote words, but she felt as she did when she drank coffee and ate toast, that she was only doing this because she was alive, and awake. On weekends she flew to her brother.
As she drove to the airport on Fridays and rode to it with her father on Sundays, fear scattered her grief: it lay beside her, hovered behind her. Shards of it stayed in her body; she could touch the places they pierced in her brain and heart. But fear was in her blood, her muscles, her breath. She heard herself speak to airline clerks. She did not make up anything; she did not look at the eyes or the posture of other passengers to find the one whose number was up and visible, or the one who wanted to die by explosion in a crowded plane. She did not imagine the plane’s sudden fall, her back to the stars, her face to the earth, the seat belt squeezing her double as she waited for words to utter before the earth she loved tore her apart. She only breathed, and moved onto the plane, always to an aisle seat.
The width and height of the aisle held breath and light, and she gazed at it. On her other side were shadow and two people filling two seats, a bulkhead with a dark glass window, an overhead whose curve sealed her. For two hours she flew to the city where her brother was dying. She drank wine and looked at the aisle.
Her brother was dying from love. At first she had watched her parents’ eyes for shame, but she saw only the lights of grief. Mortality had raised him from his secrets; there was nothing to hide, and he lay whole between clean sheets. It was she who left parts of her behind when she entered the house. Her brother was two years older than she, and he was thin and weak in his bed. She did not see fear in his eyes anymore. For a long time it had been there, a wet brightness she wanted to consume with her body. He looked at her as though death were a face between them, staring back at him. Sitting on the bed, she bent through death and held her thin brother. Her breasts felt strong and vital, and she wanted to absorb his fear and give him life. She held him as if this were possible. She did not know when fear left him, but it had. Now wit and mischief were in his eyes again, and a new and brighter depth. She did not know what it was. She only knew it was good to see. Sometimes she believed it was simply that: goodness itself, as though death were stripping him of all that was dark and base, mean and vain, not only in him but in the world, too, in its parts that touched his life.
So she felt she could tell him now: she was afraid to fly. She was holding his hand. He smiled at her. He said: “Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.” They could have been sitting at her kitchen table, drinking wine. He could have been saying: Read Tolstoy; lie in the sun; make love only with one you love. He had told her that, drinking wine at her table, years ago. She looked at his face on the pillow, wanting to see him as he had seen himself, holding his fear in his arms. She saw her brother dying.
On the plane going home, she folded her arms beneath her breasts. Then she closed her eyes and hugged. She saw herself buckled into the seat, under the tight arc of the plane’s body. She saw the plane in the immense sky, then her brother in bed, poised as she was between the gravity of earth and infinity. She had tried with a poem to know his fear, months ago, when she could still write. But the poem changed, became one about love, and the only fear in it was hers, of loving again, of her heart swelling to be pierced and emptied.
Lightly embracing herself, she saw that, too: the words of the poem coming from her pen, the notebook and her forearms and hands resting on the oak desk her grandmother had used, writing letters. She saw her grandmother, long dead now, writing with a fountain pen. She saw herself sitting in the classroom, at the desk where some afternoons chalk dust lay, and she brushed it off with notepaper so it would not mark the sleeves of her sweater. A trace of someone who had taught before her, who nervously handled chalk. Traces of herself were scattered in the world. She saw the book she had published, held open by hands she would never know. She saw herself holding her last lover, under blankets on a cold night, waking with him to start a day.
She liked starting: a poem, a class, a meal for friends who crowded her kitchen while she cooked. But not starting a day, now that she was alone. She woke from night and dreams to the beginning of nothing. For minutes she lay in bed, gathering her scattered self. Then she rose to work, to be with friends. She liked the touch of leather boots on her calves, soft wool on her arms, snow on her face.
She wondered what her brother saw, now that fear had left his eyes. Her grandmother’s eyes were like his, when she was old but not visibly dying: She seemed to watch from a mirthful distance. Perhaps connected to wherever she was going, she still took pleasure in the sport of mortality. Maybe it was a gift, for those who had lived long, and those who were slowly dying. She wanted it while her body was strong, while she was vibrant and pretty. Hugging herself, her eyes closed, she wanted it now as she breathed in this shuddering plane, speeding through darkness under the stars. She was afraid until the plane stopped on the runway.
The Colonel’s Wife
FOR NICOLE
THE RETIRED MARINE COLONEL HAD TWO broken legs, both in casts from the soles of his feet to the tops of his thighs. His name was Robert Townsend; he was a tall and broad-shouldered man with black hair and a graying mustache. In the hospital in Boston he had five operations; neither leg was healed enough to bear his weight; he had rods in both femurs and his right tibia, and now at home he was downstairs in the living room on a hospital bed whose ends he could raise and lower, to evade pain. The bed was narrow, and his golden-haired wife, Lydia, slept upstairs.
He refused to eat in bed, for this made him feel he was still in the hospital; so at mealtimes Lydia helped him onto the wheelchair. He raised the bed till he was upright, she handed him a short board with beveled ends, and he pushed one end under his rump and rested the other on the chair. Then she held his legs while he worked himself across the board. He wore cotton gym shorts and T-shirts. Before the horse fell on him, he and Lydia had eaten breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table. He could not go there now. He could wheel through the door from the dining room to the kitchen; then his long legs, held by leg rests straight out in front of him, were blocked by a counter, and at his left the refrigerator stopped him. On his first morning at home he tried to turn between the counter and refrigerator by lowering the leg rests; when he pressed the switch to release them, they dropped quickly, and he gasped at the blades of pain in his falling legs. Lydia bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted them while he moaned and began to sweat.
His feet in their casts would not fit under the long rectangular mahogany table in the dining room, so he sat parallel to his end of it, removed the right armre
st of the wheelchair, and ate, as he said, sidesaddle. He looked to his right at his food and Lydia. She had brown eyes and had lately, in the evening, worn her hair in a French braid; she liked candles at dinner, and after her bath in late afternoon she wore a dress or skirt. Her face was tan and pink, her brow and cheek creased, and lines moved outward from her eyes and lips when she smiled. Every morning after breakfast she walked two miles east to a red country store. She did this in all weather except blizzards and lightning storms. At the store she bought the New York Times and a package of British cigarettes, and sat at the counter to drink coffee and read. Then she walked home for lunch, and came in the front door each day as precisely as a clock striking noon. She had not done this since the sunlit morning of January thaw when Robert’s brown mare broke his legs.
To Robert’s left, while he ate, was the living room, and to his rear the kitchen. Behind Lydia was a large window, and the wide and deep back lawn ending at woods. They had four acres with many trees and they could not see their neighbors’ houses; even now, in winter, there were enough evergreens so all the earth they saw from the house was their own. Before dinner Lydia drew the curtains at her back; she felt exposed through the glass. On Robert’s second night at home, he asked her to open the curtains; he said he was sorry, but the covered window reminded him of the hospital. The hospital had been very difficult. He had served in two wars without being injured, and had never been confined to a hospital. Now when he saw the curtains behind Lydia, he felt enclosed by something that would take away his breath.
He could wheel slowly down the carpeted hall that began where the living and dining rooms joined, but the hall was too narrow for him to turn into the rooms it led to; one of these was a bathroom. He longed for a shower, and never felt truly clean. He kept a plastic urinal hooked by its handle over a railing of the bed, and Lydia emptied and cleaned it. For most of his four weeks and five days in the hospital, he had to use a bedpan, and nurses cleaned him. In his last week, the physical therapist and a nurse helped him from his wheelchair onto a hospital commode; they removed the inside arms from the chair and the commode, pushed the transfer board under him, and held his legs as he moved across. Then they propped his legs on pillows on a chair and left him alone. He had to use both hands to push himself up from the seat, so when the two women returned, they held his legs and tilted him and the nurse wiped him. Now he did this in the living room with Lydia. He knew Lydia did not mind wiping him, she was cheerful and told him to stop feeling humiliated because his legs were broken and he had to shit. But his stench and filth, and the intimacy of her hands and voice, slapped his soul with a wet cloth.
Five mornings a week, a home health aid woman helped him wash and shave on the bed. The housekeeper came on three mornings, and worked upstairs while the woman bathed him. A visiting nurse took his blood pressure and temperature and pulse. A phone was on the bedside table, and his son and two daughters called him often; they had flown to Boston to see him during his first week in the hospital. On some nights friends came; they tired him, but he needed these men and women. He felt removed from the earth as he had known it, and they brought parts of it with them: its smell was on their coats and hats and scarves, its color in their cheeks, its motion in their beautiful and miraculous legs.
During his first ten days at home, Lydia left the house only to buy groceries, and she did that while someone was with him. Then on a Friday night, while they were eating dinner, he said: “I’m starting to feel like a cage. I want you to walk to the store tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday. You’d be alone.”
“I’ve got the phone and a urinal.”
“I don’t want you to feel alone.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Next morning she hung a second urinal on the bed railing, put a pitcher of water and a pitcher of orange juice and two glasses on the bedside table, and wrote the phone number of the store on notepaper. She was wearing jeans and boots and a dark blue sweater. She bent over him and looked at his eyes.
“Listen: if you have to shit, you call me. I’ll be through the door in twenty-eight minutes.”
She kissed him and put on a blue parka and black beret, and he watched over his right shoulder as she went out the door. He lay facing the mahogany table and the dining room window and the winter light. He could not see the lawn, but he could see trunks and branches of deciduous trees and the green pines. His wheelchair was beside the bed, the transfer board resting on it, but he could not go to the stove, could not even get far enough into the kitchen to see it, and for breakfast they ate scrambled eggs; Lydia always turned off burners and the oven, but in his career he had learned to check everything, even when he knew it was done. He had not thought of fire till Lydia was gone, and Lydia had not thought of fire, and he saw himself in the wheelchair pushing away from flames. The back door was in the kitchen, so he could leave only through the front; outside was a deck and four steps to the concrete walk that curved to the long driveway. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply into his stomach and told himself: Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Years ago in California, a gunnery sergeant had said that to the company at morning formation; Robert was a second lieutenant, watching from the barracks porch; the gunny had fought in the Pacific, and Robert, unblooded still, looked at the man’s broad, straight back and believed this was a message brought from the dread and chaos of war. I can call the fire department, then get on the wheelchair, take the blanket, go out the front door, and sit on the deck and wait for the firemen; if it gets bad, I’ll tuck my chin and go bass-ackwards down the steps and hope the casts hold and I don’t crack my head; then if I have to, I can drag myself all the way to the fucking road. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. He was still afraid, and for a while he read War and Peace. Then he slept, and he was dreaming of white-trousered soldiers on horses when Lydia opened the door. He was happy to see her, and he said nothing about fire. He said nothing about it when she walked to the store Sunday morning; and when she went Monday, the home health aid woman and housekeeper were with him for all but the last hour.
He had started reading War and Peace a week before his horse slipped and fell on his left leg, scrambled upright, then slipped again and fell on both his legs; then Robert was screaming, and finally the horse got up and watched him. Then he moaned, and breathed in quick rhythm with the pain, and called toward the stables beyond a stand of trees, called “Help,” and knew he had screamed under the horse because he could not move, and such helplessness felt like drowning in sunlit air near the shadows of pines. In the hospital he had morphine and now, in the bedside table Lydia had carried downstairs, he had Demerol and Percodan. When pain cut through his concentration so he could not focus on talking with Lydia, he took Percodan; when pain was all he could feel of his body, and it filled his brain and spirit so he moaned and tried not to yell, he took Demerol. Always there was pain in his legs, but if he kept them elevated and did not move his body, it was bearable for hours at a time, and he read; and, resting from that, he looked out the dining room window, and at the mahogany table.
He had never had any feelings about the things of domestic life. In them he saw Lydia’s choices, and his admiration was not for the objects but for her. If all the furniture in the house were carried off by thieves, his only sorrow would be for Lydia. She had bought the mahogany table early in their marriage. She had money, and when each grandparent and parent died, she accumulated more. The table had traveled in moving vans back and forth across the nation. It had remained unmarked by children, and by officers and their wives from Hawaii to Virginia; it had stood amid family quarrels and silence and laughter, amid boisterous drinking and storytelling and flirtations, and here it was, in this house in the country north of Boston, without a scar. He had lived with it for decades, and now, lying helpless and in pain, he began to feel affection for the table. In the morning he opened his eyes to it; at night in the dark he looked at its shape in the pale light of the window as he wai
ted for one drug to release him from pain and another to give him sleep.
The shock of the horse crushing his bones, then anesthesia, surgery, pain, and drugs had taken his vitality. He could not finish a meal, he could not remain either awake or alert from morning till night, he did not want to smoke a pipe or drink a martini, and he could not feel passion for Lydia. One night in his third week at home, when she bent to kiss him good night, he held her to his chest, his cheek pressing hers, and all his feeling for her was above his loins, filling his breast, and one or two joyful tears moistened his eyes. Then he watched her cross the room to the stairs; she wore dark shades of brown: a sweater and skirt and tights and high-heeled boots. He watched her climb to the hall and disappear into the light she turned on at the top of the stairs. He listened to her footsteps going to the bedroom; then the hall was dark again, and his bedside lamp was the only light in the house; it warmed his cheek.
He had not climbed the stairs for two months, and now he saw that all of the second floor was Lydia’s: the bedroom, the large bathroom with its sweet scents of things for her body, her room where she read and wrote letters and paid bills. Always she had paid the bills, and this had nothing to do with her inheritance; it was common for officers’ wives to manage all elements of the household, so the man could be rushed off to war without pausing to brief his wife on debts, automobile maintenance, and so on. Upstairs were a sunporch, a television room with a wet bar, and two guest bedrooms. For three years he had inhabited that floor. But Lydia had given of herself to those spaces enclosed by wood and glass, colored by paint and light, and he felt they were mysteriously alive and female.