Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  It was not encouraging news—what the doctor said. The tumor had not regressed. The pelvic exams and the ultrasound indicated that it may even have grown a centimeter or so. Dr. Stouder was now in favor of more aggressive therapy. The first step would be a staging laparotomy, next week. Judi said, I’m scared, Laf. I got up and hugged her. I squatted by her chair, moved her bangs away from her eyes. I told her not to worry yet. It could still be nothing, right? Judi shook her head. It would have shrunk by now. This is it. I pulled my chair by hers and held her hand. A staging laparotomy. Sounded like someone was putting on a play or setting up scaffolding. Judi said, Don’t mention anything to Stoni, okay?

  This was a strange moment to feel happy about, but that’s how I felt. I felt at home. I felt calm. Judi’s eyes were closed. What did this feeling mean? Judi said, Let’s eat before this gets any colder. I got the plates and chopsticks and the pitcher. I read the message on the chopsticks’ envelope: Please to try your nice Chinese food with Chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and cultural for swallowing clouds, vegetable dried, Buddha jumping over wall, and others.

  Judi said, “Trixie heard from Noel that Edmund was gang-raped at Walpole. He’s in the infirmary now.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I thought how Edmund had more of the same to look forward to for the rest of his life. And I thought there were probably people who would think he deserved it. I was pissed off at Noel for what he had let happen to his boy. And I was pissed at Layla. I imagined her right then probably cuddled up in a ratty sleeping bag with Mr. Sun himself. I wanted to call her up and explain to her what she had done to Edmund, but what the hell was I thinking? She hadn’t done anything but forget him. Maybe I just wanted her to care. I don’t know

  We heard Stoni say, “Hey, you two sure don’t seem to be having much fun.” She and Richie were coming around the side of the house. “I just love Chink food,” she said. “I’m so hungry, I could eat a cat.”

  Richie Muneyhun was even larger than I could have imagined, biblically large. He was Goliath the Philistine. Six cubits and a span. He was Hoover Dam, a bull mastodon, an armoire, a sequoia, a John Deere harvester, Polyphemus in a sleeveless denim jacket. Richie carried a case of beer under his left arm. He shook my hand, gave Judi a peck on the cheek. He looked at Spot. Spot hid under the deck. Richie had tattooed quotations on each arm. The right one said, Vengeance is mine; I will repay The left: I have created the waster to destroy. I said, Let me get you guys some plates, glasses, and stuff. Stoni said, We’ll just eat out of the boxes. You’ll need forks maybe, or chopsticks, I said. I hoped.

  Richie inhaled the prawns. I suspected he didn’t get a lot of exotic seafood in jail. I asked him how it felt to be a free man. He said, Are any of us free? Uh-oh, I thought, determinism, Divine foreknowledge, the constraints of Fate. Richie’s been reading Aquinas and Descartes in his cell. “Richie,” I said, “what about work?” He said he was mulling over a couple of attractive offers. He wasn’t at liberty to discuss them.

  Stoni had us reach into the bag and pick out our fortune cookies. Stoni read hers first: Possession is the grave of love. Richie’s was Street angel, house devil. Mine: If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry. Now they tell me, I said. That got a laugh. Judi’s I liked: We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

  Judi said it would probably be better if Richie didn’t smoke his joint out here on the deck. He said, That’s cool, and went out front to sit in Stoni’s car. Back in ten, he said. While he was gone, Stoni let us know that poor Arthur Bositis was pining for her. He calls me at work every day I just hope Richie doesn’t find out. Stoni told us about this guy who came into the ward last night complaining of abdominal pains. “First of all, he’s got the logo of The New York Times tattooed across his chest and under it is the headline MARILYN MONROE FOUND DEAD. Then I notice carrot greens sticking out of his asshole. Turns out someone had rammed a couple of carrots up there. But, of course, the guy who brought him in didn’t know anything about it.”

  I said, “Stoni, why do you want to work in Emergency anyway? It must be so gruesome.”

  “I don’t like sick people. We keep them alive too long, and they’re just like babies at the end. It’s pathetic.”

  Richie was back. He thought maybe we should all head out to a club and do some dancing, maybe out to the Blue Plate. The Coyotes are playing. We begged off. Judi said she was exhausted. Stoni thought it was a great idea, but let’s stop at Aris’s for some baklava on the way Richie thought about that. Wow, he said. Let’s go.

  I cleaned up while Judi got ready for bed. I scraped all the sticky rice, sauce, chicken, and beef onto a plate and set it out for Spot. I gave him a box. He got it stuck on his nose. After I did the dishes, I took Spot for a walk. I let him off the leash and he dashed into Mr. Lesperence’s yard. He sniffed around the back door, the garage, the front door. Some of Mr. Lesperence’s volatile molecules are still around his house. Spot shook his tail adamantly. He woofed. I told him Mr. Lesperence was invisible now.

  When I got to bed, Judi was sleeping. I kissed her shoulder, put out the light. I dreamed that I was the Forbidden Boy from Lotus City, and I lived with my Happy Family. In Lotus City you forget about everything as soon as it happens. You could remember facts like the recipe for baklava or carrot cake, but you could not remember sensations or emotions, like how they tasted, or how the fragrance made you feel. In Lotus City, when someone in your family dies, you forget all about them. That’s how you stay happy. But I was the Forbidden Boy because I remembered every blessed detail.

  28.

  Vinegar from Wine

  I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE WITH MY COFFEE, MY NOTES, MY TYPEWRITER. DALE and Theresa had reached a crucial and fragile point in their courtship. Dale sat in his office at school, his door closed. He was holding a stapler in his hands and staring at a poster of White Sands on the wall opposite his chair. He had notes for a Personnel Committee meeting to prepare, but he couldn’t concentrate. He had tests to grade. He had a long weekend ahead of him unless he called Theresa. I wanted Dale to realize that Theresa was his one chance at love. I needed him to understand that the children were not a liability at all, but a bonus. How would I convince him? I wasn’t listening to him tell me what he needed. And that, no doubt, explained why I was presently unable to write about him. Dale’s mind was not where I needed it to be—on Theresa and on his future. His thoughts were cluttered with my own aggravations. It has always been easier for me to pour my energies into my characters’ problems than into my own. They are more intriguing.

  I cleaned the platen, bail rollers, and type guide with alcohol. I sprayed the keys and the type bars with WD-40. I got most of the gunk out of the guts of the thing with a sponge and a damp rag. I oiled the carriage return and wiped down the body with Windex and then lemon Pledge. Nice job. Even got out the Liquid Paper stains. I fed Spot. I poured myself another coffee, sat down, rolled a blank sheet into the typewriter. Dale was still staring at the poster. I called Judi. I said, Let’s have lunch, honey bunch. She said, Let’s. She had two hours today and didn’t want to spend them alone. She thanked me for calling.

  At Mr. Natural’s, I asked Pauline how she was, how Mick and Keith were doing. How’s Marvin? She hesitated. She rubbed her left forearm with her right hand. Marvin’s Marvin, she said. I could push this, I thought, or 1 could let it drop. I said, Nice to see you again. Pauline smiled, but we didn’t seem to have anything else to say. I remembered us in bed.

  Judi and I drove out to Ronnie’s for clams. She was worried about Josh. What’s the matter with Josh? I said. She said, Didn’t I tell you? He’s got AIDS. I didn’t want to hear this. The story on the way to the Cape? The one you wanted me to write? She nodded.

  We drove to the reservoir in Leicester and walked along the trails. Lady’s slippers and laurel everywhere. We sat on an old stone wall that ran through the woods—a Yankee farmer’s handiwork two hundred years ago. Glacial deposit pushed here from
Hudson Bay, buried eons ago, unearthed by a plow, lifted and fitted here with the others. This is what Judi said:

  I see people in this world, like you, and I see people in that world, too, and often at the same time. I know I’m here. I’m not crazy. It’s like I have lucid memories, I guess. I don’t remember so much as I experience what happened, as if it’s happening right now. Every detail comes back and in every sense. I can walk around a room in, you know, France, two hundred and fifty years ago, and I can tell you exactly what’s there. I can open a drawer and pull out all of the contents item by item. I can’t explain this. Sometimes I’ll smell something I’ve never smelled before, like let’s say I smell mold on rye bread—in fact, I’ve done this—and immediately, even though I’m holding the bread and I’m in my kitchen, and I know I am, I’m also back in Helfta and not because of the bread, you see, but because the rye mold smells like dysentery, and I’m working in the convent infirmary, and I’m washing Mechtilde’s body, and I’m praying for her, and I can look back over my shoulder and describe the cast of light entering through the small window and the plane tree out in the garden and the cuckoo on the branch of the tree, and I can hear the cuckoo’s song.

  And voices can do the same thing. I hear a voice, usually it’s one I’m unfamiliar with, and I get a physical sensation that starts at the back of my head and travels to the tops of my feet like a wave, and it goes down my arms to my fingers and around my head to my face. And when that happens I know that one of the recollections is about to present itself. I don’t know, maybe it’s that the person’s voice in this world has the same tone or pitch or resonance or something as someone’s in the past. It’s not a thought, Laf. It’s not imagination or fantasy or anything like that; it’s a pleasurable physical sensation—the wave the voice sets off—like someone you love is breathing on your body, and it remains through the whole episode. The memory or whatever it is is not a hallucination. I can touch things. I once picked up a mango on a table at a wedding reception on Saint Kitts in 1782 and tasted it, and I’ve never eaten one in this life. I even had an allergic reaction to it and had to be rushed to Memorial two hundred years later. You see what I mean?

  And this never happens when I remember my own life, my childhood, say. Those memories are vague in comparison—they are like the idea of memory. They seem so flat—that’s all I can say—like clothes you hang out to dry on the line. Thin and limp. I do remember my dad once lifting me up when I fell off my hike. I remember he kissed me on the knee.

  I can’t explain any of this, but I know it. What I mean is that this knowing has nothing to do with thinking or articulation. I don’t control this knowledge any more than I control the cells in my body. But the cells are there, and so is this other world. It’s undeniable.

  Me, I can remember a dream I had when I was two years and two months old. I know my age because the dream happened on the day they brought Edgar home from the hospital and told me, Here’s your new baby brother. In the dream, Edgar’s asleep in the crib in my parents’ room and there’s a christening party going on in the living room. Out of nowhere these shadowmen—two-dimensional guys with pointy heads and elbows—appear on the wall in the living room, but I’m the only one who notices them, and I’m in my room. Somehow I know they are menacing and intent on evil. Before I can alert any of my aunts or uncles, the intruders have slid along the three walls and have passed through the slit between the door and the jamb and into my parents’ room. Poor Edgar, someone says, no use trying to rescue him now.

  I remember the next morning, telling my mother about the dream, and being reassured that nothing like that had happened. Edgar was asleep on his back and moving his mouth a mile a minute. And then I recall almost nothing of my life for the next four or five years. I don’t remember dot about my first school, Sacred Heart. My earliest memory after the dream was my first day at the new school, St. Stephen’s. I was given Paula Philbin’s seat because she was out with rheumatic fever. It’s like I was born in that classroom and nothing of significance had happened to me before that.

  I know more about Dale’s childhood than I know about my own. His closest friend was Lonnie Wilcoxen, who lived behind Dale on Dal Paso. Lonnie’s daddy was a public health inspector for the county. One time Dale saw Lonnie strangle a cat to death. Why’d you do that for? Dale said. Lonnie said, ’Cause I felt like it. Lonnie drank his daddy’s beer for breakfast and stole his brother Kenneth’s cigarettes. You get one best friend in your childhood, and Dale knew he’d got a rotten one. Lonnie lit a can of Shinola oxblood shoe polish with a match and the explosion covered him with flames. Dale couldn’t put Lonnie out, but his screams brought Mrs. Wilcoxen running from the house with a blanket. Lonnie got taken away to the Shriners’ Hospital in Dallas and came back in a year without a nose and with skin of various colors stretched out like gum on his body. Let Lonnie be a lesson to you, Dale’s father said. And then he said, Put on Channel 4 for me, would you, son.

  While my father is alive, I’m a child. If Blaise dies, then it’s the slow slide to dissolution for me. I’ll be next. Of course, I know the unnatural can happen—Death can enter the wrong room, can carry away the child first. Nothing could be worse than seeing your child die, nothing. Maybe the best thing I’d ever done for my father was just to stay alive. I was glad that Martha and I didn’t have a child for the pain that the little death of divorce might bring.

  When Judi went back to work I walked by the Chancery deliberately. Martha’s car was in the lot. I looked up to her window. I kept seeing her crying in Terry’s office.

  Maybe it wasn’t Dale’s fault at all that the story was stuck. What about love? What about love and marriage? How come we have only one word for love when the ancient Greeks had three? Maybe I’d ask Terry. That would get the next session flying. A pure love is a selfless love, I could say, But can desire ever be selfless?

  29.

  The Harvest Is Past, the Summer Is Ended, and We Are Not Saved

  DR. STOUDER LEANED BACK IN HER CHAIR, STEEPLED HER FINGERS AT HER CHIN, looked at the oncologist’s report on her desk and then at Judi. The problem, she explained, is that epithelial cancers like this one are usually asymptomatic until they’ve metastasized. She leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. Well, that’s one of the problems. So this was it, then, I thought. This was Judi’s sentencing. This was hopeless, wasn’t it? Judi lowered her head and looked at her hands folded on her lap. Dr. Stouder said, As a result of our exploration, we’ve ascertained the progress of your particular carcinoma. It looks like Stage III-A cancer. Three-A, I told myself. I wanted to remember because I didn’t think Judi would. Judi covered her face with her hands. I touched her shoulder. She stiffened. I looked at Dr. Stouder.

  I looked at the egg on my left wrist, my memento mori. I ran my fingers over it—the usual soreness. Didn’t Nicky tell me once that cancer doesn’t hurt? Whatever it is, it had started as a pea, oh, six, seven years ago. Why didn’t I get it taken care of?

  Now that we’ve documented the cancer, our next step is what’s called cytoreductive surgery, where we debulk the disease, Dr. Stouder said. Judi said, What does that mean? It meant, according to Dr. Stouder, a total hysterectomy When do we do this? Judi said. Dr. LeClair will perform the operation. The best surgeon we have. You’re lucky. We’re setting up OR time now, and I’ll let you know this afternoon. And then what? Judi said. I’ll be cured?

  Dr. Stouder took a drawing of the insides of a woman and turned it on her desk to face us. She pointed with a pencil. The disease, she said, we think, is confined to the pelvic viscera and omentum. She made a circle on the paper with her pencil. With the gross tumor removed, you will have a reasonable chance of responding positively to therapy.

  Therapy? Judi said.

  Chemo and, just possibly, radiation. This will be up to the oncologist, as you know, but probably you’ll have about six cycles’ worth of treatments. If there are no traces of the disease at that point, we’ll do a “second-look” oper
ation. And if there’s no clinical evidence of the cancer, then you’re off chemo.

  I’ll lose my hair? Judi said.

  Probably. Let’s take it one step at a time.

  In the car I told Judi, Why don’t you let me drive. She shook her head. I don’t need my brain to drive, she said. I said, Let’s just go home. I’ll call in sick to work. I wished I hadn’t said that. She said, No, you go. I’ll be all right. Rain beat against the roof of the car and washed down the windshield. All you could make out of the doctor’s building was the bluish-white color. Judi started the car, let it idle. She switched on the heater and the defrost. August, I thought, fucking August and fifty degrees. I said, I don’t want you to be alone. Judi looked at me. Well, there’s nothing you can do about that, she said. I am alone. Judi put her head on the steering wheel. Judi, I said. She put her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. No more pussy willows, she said. And she began to cry.

  30.

  The Mystery and Melancholy of Marriage

  EDGAR CALLED TO TELL ME THAT OUR FATHER WAS SLIPPING AWAY. HE TOLD ME I should catch the next plane down there if I ever wanted to see the old man alive again. Look, he said, if it’s money, I’ll send you the goddamn money. I tried to explain to Edgar that leaving Worcester was impossible right now. I told him that I was in marriage counseling with Martha for one thing, and that Judi has cancer for another. Edgar said, You sound like one sick son of a bitch yourself, Laf. Lives get complicated, I said. Edgar asked me to hold on a sec, someone’s at the door. Turns out it was the exterminator, and he needed to let him into the attic. Be right back.