With wicked pleasure and laughter, we talked about the people we hated in high school and by the end of lunch I had almost forgotten Mike was supposed to be so sick.
But I woke the next morning full of questions. Why had we catalogued all our honors and awards to one another and never spoken about our tender early lives? To think Mike was dying (was he dying?) and I never mentioned the comfort of our sexuality to him! And all this, from our lovemaking so long ago in the cold New Hampshire motel to the Caffe Bianco, I crammed into a double sonnet and sent it to him with a letter remembering even more.
No, no, he was not dying, he wrote to me immediately. Yes, he had had melanoma, but now he had been symptom free for more than five years. Now he was thinking and feeling so much more fully and in such good physical shape that I didn’t have to worry about him. He was teaching and writing and lying on a couch twice a week, and running marathons, running for his life.
Slowly life unfolds, if you have time to live it. By the spring after Tilla and I broke up, Mike and I had had several years to develop an adult friendship. Once or twice a year, often when Mike came in to run the marathon, we had lunch or dinner, carefully avoiding romance, or, if romance came up, one of us got soft-eyed while the other pretended not to see. Mike knew everything about Tilla and Polly and Ted and Gail and Ruta and Maggie and Lily. I knew all about his job, his family, the girlfriend who eventually dumped him. In perhaps two phone calls and two get-togethers every year, we made a kind of secret contact, not a sexual secret, a psychological one. Because we were not involved in each other’s lives, we were intimately neutral, and inquisitive in the way that knowing someone a long time can make you feel you have the right to ask nosy questions and get honest answers.
—
I sat in my silk blouse transfixed by the sensuous acrobats of Cirque du Soleil, and Mike Groden sneezed. And I oohed and ahhhed at the colors and the leaps, and Mike Groden sneezed. He sneezed in line for tickets, and he sneezed as he read his program. As we walked to the restaurant along Battery Park with its spring flowers, he coughed. He coughed when he asked for our table. He sneezed through our pasta dinners. He went through his own packet, then my wad of tissues. He worked his way through a stack of napkins the pitying waitress had given him. Then he produced a gift for me, a book about Buffalo high school yearbooks—how specialized could you get? Clearly he had searched for such a book. I hadn’t felt such depth of concentration in a gift since I was in high school when he gave me a long thin scroll of a Chinese painting, with a peacock in it, of course, the first sort of painting like that I’d seen.
Evidently relieved not to be sneezing for a moment, Mike Groden dug into his mile-high chocolate extravaganza cake. He went at it with such gusto that he got chocolate on his nose. On the empty chair next to me lay the soiled beige book bag from which he had produced my gift along with a rain slicker so old I couldn’t imagine what color it had been. When he finished his cake, he looked up at me from his unironed, button-down shirt. He could have worn that shirt in high school.
Somewhere behind the contact lenses and the five o’clock shadow, underneath the enervated responses of a man who had a cold, was the boy I took a bubble bath with almost exactly a quarter of a century before. He had called and wanted to know how I was. I was nervous, that’s how I was, though that only occurred to me when I had changed my clothes top to bottom four times before taking the subway way downtown to meet him. Why I had finally settled on the bluish-greenish silk blouse I understood only when I thought of the Chinese scroll: The blouse was the color of its border.
Borders. We were full of them. Canadian borders. U.S. borders. Borders of time and distance. After dinner we took a silent, groggy walk along the spotlighted Hudson, and when it was time to go, he got on the subway and I hailed a cab, not wanting to take the subway home alone. He was going in the opposite direction. He was not going to see me home. There was a bigger border between us than I thought.
I’d almost adjusted to the fact that he was simply a valuable old friend I’d talk to now and then, when he wrote to me all about his reactions to the circus and our evening, remembering my responses to everything, even to the colors of the tulips we passed on our walk. So there had been something going on beneath the sneezing and coughing….The letter was sweet and sensuous and intelligent and educated. When I read it, a circus image came to my mind: A trapeze artist, practicing her routine, missteps and falls into the net. The language of the letter flowed like a great net.
He was glad to chat with me when I called. He was going to spend the summer in London, Ontario, unusual for him, since ordinarily he traveled. But he had a project with a publisher, and now the project was in trouble, so he had to stay home.
He was asking me for help—no, advice. Advice I might be able to give. He had a contract problem, and he didn’t have a leg to stand on. But when I started to make some calls for him, I was so resentful at having to do one measly thing for yet another person that I stopped. And when I stopped, I had a brand new idea for me, and it was this:
He would have to work this out himself.
Oh, I realized, he had not asked me to make the round of calls I was making. I had volunteered. Well, I better unvolunteer, I said to myself uncharacteristically.
—
“I’m going to Watch him,” I said to Ruta. “I’m just going to watch him solve this problem. I’m not going to involve myself.” Where had my grandiosity gone?
He called again. We talked. I called him back. We talked. He called again. We talked again, and again, and again, over weeks that stretched past a month. I gave him a few people’s names, but didn’t—and, in fact, couldn’t—help him beyond simply listening to him, and watching, fascinated, to see how he would solve his problem.
He did not blow up at anyone. He was stopped at every point by some obstacle. Each time he maneuvered around the obstacle. He talked to colleagues all over the world. He discussed his problem with his therapist. He planned, revised, got stymied. He was pitted against a corporation with whom he had a weak contract and a weak position, and he was going to lose. He was not screaming at how unfair the world was or kicking himself for signing the weak contract. He was saying what a lesson he had learned, he was saying how he would never do that again. His schedule was blown. Part of his professional life was blown. He felt shitty, but he had tried everything, and he really had. But he was out-wiled. And when he recognized that, he stopped and faced the truth of it. What was he going to do now? He wasn’t sure. Take stock, he guessed, then go on, he supposed, but right now he was going to sit around licking his wounds and feeling stymied.
So I became a confidante, not a rescuer. He was a successful man who had survived more than one professional crisis. And he had survived melanoma. Without me. He had lived a whole life without me, and made lots of his own mistakes.
Our calls were closer together, cozier, sexier, always late at night. After the call I’d go to bed and watch the sex channel.
“I have a whole house with a guest room, Mol,” he said one night. “You could write here. Why don’t you come up for a week?”
“A week! Oh God, no, I couldn’t come for a whole week.” Why, we hadn’t spent more than five hours together in person. “How about a weekend?”
“Well, if you came for a weekend, you’d just have to turn around and go home again immediately—the trip’s too long for a weekend, Mol.”
“Oh.”
“Well, think about it.”
“OK, I’ll think about it. Thanks for asking. Really, thank you, part of me would love to come tomorrow, and another part of me is terrified.”
“I can understand that,” he said in breathy sympathy. “I feel the same way.”
—
“He feels the same way,” I said to Ruta.
“Oh,” she said therapeutically.
“But a week, my God, what the hell will we do in London, Ontario, for a week?”
She said nothing.
“R
uta?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going. I mean, after all, I’m going to have to take my clothes off in front of somebody sooner or later.”
“Mmmm.”
—
“Mmmmm,” I said in a totally different context. Two nights later he called and I said yes I would go and he said he was glad and I said I was glad and he said again I could have a whole room to myself and that he had two cats and I said I might be allergic to the cats and he said he’d vacuum really well and then there was a silence. It was the first elongated silence we’d had on the phone. It was an expensive, long distance silence. Of course, he outwaited me. I had the patience of a moth.
“Mmmm,” I said, “Mike?”
“Mmmm?”
“I don’t look like I looked in high school.”
“I don’t either.”
“Yes, but marathon runners don’t have to worry about how they look. They always look fantastic.”
“Yes, but I have scars.”
“Scars?”
“From the cancer surgeries. A big one on my calf, another one on my groin and upper thigh.”
—
“Melanoma?” Ruta repeated from her chair behind me as I lay on the beige couch and looked at the watercolor of the sea on the wall in front of me.
“But he’s off the charts. It’s been ten years. He’s not even a statistic anymore.”
“Mmmm,” I heard behind me.
—
We tried to have sex on the telephone. We verbally undressed each other, tried to masturbate together, then felt stupid and hung up. My video porn lessons from Eve’s Garden didn’t help in the end. It would have to be the real thing. Each of us went to have our AIDS tests and reported to each other our negative results. I’d nearly fainted in the heat on First Avenue outside the lab. (“I always nearly faint when I’m around blood,” he said. “And I had a lot of blood tests when I was sick.”) After I ignored his reference to his illness, he introduced the subject of birth control.
“We don’t need any,” I said.
“We don’t?” he said.
“I’ve had a tubal ligation. I chose not to have children,” I blurted out.
“No condoms? No IUD’s?” he said. He didn’t ask why. He was purely focused on the physical.
“No.”
“Hmm.”
“Does it bother you? I mean, I really decided. I decided in another context, with another man, but really it was my decision. Having children isn’t for me.”
“Well, I haven’t thought about it a lot. I mean, I’ve thought about it, but not really concentrated on it. I’ve had plenty of opportunities, and…I’ve avoided every one. I guess it hasn’t been for me, either. I could have had children with my ex-wife. But I didn’t. And she has a child now.”
“So does my ex-husband.” Jonathan, I’d heard, had remarried and had twins.
“Now that I think of it”—his voice changed slightly, a little lower, a little more hesitant—“I avoided dating women who had children for many years. And that’s some feat in London, Ontario. Everybody has children here.”
“That’s one of the reasons I live in New York!” I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it was.
“One of the reasons I love New York is those small packages of cereal and laundry soap and toothpaste and bread just portioned for one person lined up on the supermarket shelves. You can’t imagine the hugeness of the family-size boxes here.”
We had been born one month apart. We had married and divorced in exactly the same years. We had gone out into the wildernesses of our lives. We had not wanted to express ourselves through children, though we expressed ourselves through scholarship and through art—both of us through writing. We had not defined ourselves through parenthood—we were only the parents of texts. Though plenty of writers have both children and texts, producing books for us was a matter of our gifts being exercised against great odds.
—
I had my tickets and my passport. I wore my purple linen skirt and my coral linen top. I got a new haircut, and I starved myself for a week.
On July 6, 1991, I spied him in the Toronto airport in a yellow T-shirt, running shorts, and flip-flops. You can’t get farther away from the elegance of Tilla Szabo, I thought, from silk shirts to T-shirts….I dragged two huge suitcases full of things I wouldn’t wear and wouldn’t use up a long ramp, and he couldn’t come down to help me because of the customs barrier. Finally I stood in front of him, but he couldn’t bear the tension of looking at me directly, so he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling while he grabbed my shoulders. Then I wound my arms around him and we stood there in the midst of a reunion of several grandmothers and their grandchildren. We did not move. It was hot and humid and his back was drenched in sweat. A turbaned guard told the family to move on. Then he tapped our shoulders. I drank in the smell of Mike’s sweat and his shirt and his neck, so recognizable. He smelled of his man’s odor inside of which was his boy’s odor. “Move on, please,” the guard said and we walked out into the thick, moist air, and drove two hours to London, city of trees with its own little river Thames, to the yellow brick house of the scholar.
Naked and drenched with the exertion of lovemaking on a humid July afternoon, murmuring to each other. How glad I am I found you, how glad I am I found YOU, saying, Let’s not let each other go this time, let’s not be so stupid, let’s, let’s; the pronoun we leapt bloomlike into being from the sandy waste of the past two decades without each other. A loneliness roiled up around us and parted. We made love again, profoundly shy, not like a man and a woman in our forties, but like twenty-year-olds, picking up where we left off weaving our way. How we knew which strands exactly we dropped and recognized their hues was our mystery. But we dropped them when we were shy, and here we were shy again, and passionate. I did not recognize the sounds that came out of me. They must have been the yelps I made twenty years before. Mike said not one word. Tilla, voluble, had narrated nearly every move. Now I had to listen hard for the lightest shifts….His bony kneecaps dug into my kneecaps and I thought, We can’t do it this way for the rest of our lives, and I knew that rest-of-our-lives meant the other shore. The little boat I felt in open water had sighted land. Or a landsman.
I shifted, he shifted, it took us a long time to reach our orgasms. The pattern resumed under our hands on our own bodies as we moved. I felt clumsy, and he fumbled, but we held the strands in our hands and we wove.
“You look like you did in high school,” he said to me, blinkered by love.
“You look better than you did in high school.” I sighed. He did, too. He wasn’t a serious athlete in high school. But there was a big oval chunk taken out of his calf, and a patch on his buttock where the skin was taken to cover the oval on his calf. There was the knotted scar tissue at his groin, so tough and hard he must barely have known I was touching it.
I did stay a whole week. And one afternoon we dressed up for tea on the lawn of a nineteenth-century house on the banks of the Thames. Over our scones he said, “Well, I feel the m-word lingering at the limits of this conversation.”
“What are you talking about, Mikey?” I said.
“The m-word,” he repeated. He was dressed like a Creamsicle: orange sherbet shirt and white slacks. I wore a sundress the color of a lavender Necco wafer.
“Oh,” I said, feeling my face break into tiny cracks all over like the inside of an antique porcelain cup. You can still drink out of those antique cups.
“I’m not ready to say it yet. But I know it’s out there,” said my Creamsicle.
—
It was Christmas morning in London, Ontario. Mike and I had been seeing each other for six months, commuting between the two cities. Icicles the size of pitchfork prongs hung off the cold, cold glass of the sunroom, and our feet were bundled in double wool socks. I had my coffee, and Mike had his tea. He had his Cheerios, and I had my muffin. Before us were two piles of gifts. We each had a stack for the other, bought from Santa’s l
ists we exchanged, fearing we didn’t know one another well enough, but of course we did. And we had ignored the limit we set. My big find for him was a Classics Illustrated Comic Book for his collection, and his big find for me was not on my list: a box of watercolors and paintbrushes.
“Paints!”
“You used to paint in high school, didn’t you?”
“But I haven’t painted in twenty-five years!”
Was it like weaving a pattern or restoring a fabric? I mucked about with the paints all afternoon while I cooked, and the cats, Roma and Fellini, begged for food and it snowed and we never got out for our drive to look at the neighbors’ lights. Instead, we went to bed early and made love under the down comforter for our first noel.
And then it was January 3 and we were taking the tree down at the time trees should come down, not on Christmas Eve as the tree at La Grange had gone, but at Epiphany, and off to a special recycler for bark mulch, too. I had not sneezed once. My allergy, like my grandiosity, seemed to have disappeared. Drifts outside were the size of sand dunes, and inside, there were drifts of tissue paper for repacking the ornaments. In the midst of elaborately layering the ornaments in the paper, I felt a terrible tension from Mike. He sat on the sunroom couch, ice diamonded on the panes behind him, so I sat down next to him, then realized what was going to happen, just the way it happened in novels. He said, “Molly, will you marry me?”
And I, like the other Molly in his life, said, “Yes.”
That afternoon, we called our mothers.
“Not bad, nothing new, really,” Polly said at first when I called and asked how she was.
“Am I interrupting the football game?” (Polly was a dedicated Buffalo Bills fan. I pictured her in her bathrobe in her BarcaLounger with a cup of instant coffee and a box of low-salt crackers.)
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 26