Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  Judi rolled down her window, said it felt so good to breathe fresh air. She closed her eyes, let the wind blow in her face. I said, Where to? She said, The drugstore, I’m afraid. It began to sprinkle. Judi closed the window. She said, I have this feeling like the past is reasserting itself. I said, What do you mean? She said, Like this cancer is an expression of some pattern in my life. I said, You’ve been reading too many psychology books. She said, But I’ve never been sick before. I don’t know.

  I touched Judi’s hand. I said, We’re going to get through this. I had this feeling that elevated me, a feeling of insight, courage, hope, and this unwarranted but insistent confidence. I felt like I was telling the absolute truth for once in my life. And I had said we, not you. Sometimes I surprise myself.

  36.

  The Honey of Poison-Flowers

  THEY STARTED JUDI OUT THAT MORNING WITH A BENADRYL DRIP TO PREPARE HER body for the chemo. She was cheerful, said she was relieved, in a way, to be doing something finally about her recovery. An hour later, a nurse administered cisplatin and Cytoxan. By then I was at Our Lady of the Sea dredging clams in flour. Stoni called and explained how she was prepared to be the home-care nurse for as long as it took. I hadn’t until that moment even thought about the care that Judi might need or how I would have to be involved in her care and recovery.

  I picked Judi up at Memorial in the morning. At first she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. Just stared at the dashboard. I didn’t want to say, Jesus, you look like hell, Judi, which she did. So I stayed quiet. Judi said, “My veins are full of ants.” She scratched her left arm. “Burns and itches.” She took a long breath. I could see that she had more to say, but she was so groggy.

  “You feel like shit, huh?”

  She shook her head. “Not so bad. My scalp’s numb.” She smiled, touched her head. “Just weak.”

  “We’ll be home in a few minutes. I’ve got the couch set up for you.”

  “Are you going to put all this in your novel?”

  “What novel?”

  She gave me a look, the frown and the raised eyebrow. “The one about the aspiring writer and his dying girlfriend.”

  “I’m not writing about this.”

  “You’re taking notes,” she said.

  I told her I had enough problems with Dale and Theresa and with little stories right now. I didn’t need any other lives to mess around with.

  She told me I was full of shit. And then she said, “You’ll end up hating me.”

  “I will not.”

  “My hands feel different,” she said. She flexed them, made fists. “Like cold, numb. Like less sensitive.”

  After a week Judi was just beginning to feel better—like she had the flu, a little nauseated, stiff, and headachy. But she had to admit, the chemo wasn’t as bed as what she had read about. Now, if only the drugs are doing their job. Judi called the office, made plans to get back to work with a reduced caseload. A couple of days later her hair was shedding. Just what I needed, she said, another reason to hate myself. Now I’m ugly, too. I said, You are not. In a way, she looked exotic and vulnerable, and I found that attractive. I kissed her head all over. I went out and bought her a long paisley scarf, a Red Sox cap, and a black beret. She stood in front of the mirror and kept trying them on, adjusting them, trying them on again.

  She told me she missed having sex. She cried. I said we could try. The experience was unnerving because of Judi’s obvious physical discomfort—she couldn’t lie on her side or tolerate my weight. But it was me, too. I felt squeamish about the whole business. Her fresh scars, her wincing. There was too much else there in bed with us for me to get aroused. I tried to just fondle her. She squeezed my hand to stop. It’s okay, she said. I’m sore.

  We lay there in bed. This must be difficult for you, all this celibacy. I figured I’d be noble about it. I said, Not really. I’ve never been, like, obsessed with sex. You could ask Martha. Judi said, I don’t have to. Ouch. I said, What do you mean by that? I like you the way you are. She kissed my nose.

  37.

  The Disassembly Line

  I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, MY EYES CLOSED, MY HANDS OVER MY EYES. STONI was in helping Judi, changing the bedclothes. Richie Muneyhun was out on the deck, drinking his morning beers, listening to the radio, sunning himself.

  I knew what Dale was thinking. He’s thinking that maybe this relationship with Theresa is fine just the way it is. Dale’s finished shaving, and now he’s checking his beard in the mirror. He hates mirrors. He keeps noticing things he doesn’t like—how his hair is even thinner than he thought it was; how his ears are getting as fuzzy as peaches. When did this happen? And what’s the evolutionary point of it, anyway?

  Dale gets out his little scissors and begins to trim his eyebrows and his nose hairs. He can feel a cold sore getting ready to erupt on his upper lip, can feel that first itch. He’ll put a tea bag on it before he leaves for school. Dale thinks, Where was I? What am I so upset about? Maybe I’ve got exactly what I want here. I live in my own house, Theresa in hers. My life is quiet, clean, orderly—the way I like it. Dale combs his hair. He’s not sure he’ll exactly verbalize what he’s thinking to Theresa, but it all seems to make sense, doesn’t it? They have each other, and they have their separate lives as well. In a way, Dale thinks, that’s ideal. That’s what Dale was thinking: ideal. What I was thinking was Theresa’s not going to go for this at all. What I thought I should do was put the two of them in a room alone and have them talk about their futures and then stand back and see what happens. My next scene, then: let’s see, Dale’s living room; Keynes on his chair, Dale and Theresa on the couch, sort of staring at the television; Saturday afternoon. The kids are with their grandmother. Theresa says, Dale, what are your intentions? He makes a face probably, feigns incomprehension. But he knows precisely what she’s talking about.

  A couple more days of this, and then she’ll feel fine, Stoni said. She poured herself a coffee, lit up a smoke. She looked out the door at Richie and said that Judi had fallen asleep. About ten bad days with the chemo, she said, and then ten better days. And then it starts all over again.

  I asked Stoni if she ever thought about dying. Ovarian cancer, I’d read, runs in families. She said that she tried not to, but she was a nurse, after all, saw death all the time. So what do you think about it? I said. It cures all diseases, she said.

  Stoni told me she wasn’t afraid of death, but what came or didn’t come after death. That’s the thing, you know.

  “What do you think follows death?” I said.

  Stoni looked at me, at her hands, at the clock, at the ceiling. “Darkness, lightness, weightlessness, emptiness. I don’t know.” She stood. “I think it’s out there waiting for us.” Out there? Did she mean Richie? Stoni stared out the window over the sink. “Like the edge of a cliff.” Stoni turned to me. She looked toward Judi’s bedroom. “Every minute could be our last,” she said. “How do we live with that?”

  I said, “You mean death’s waiting out there in the future?”

  Stoni sat down at the table and fired up another Winston. “Not just in time,” she said, “but place. That’s where death waits.” Stoni smiled. She said I was a morbid son of a bitch. Maybe so, but evidently I had hit on a melancholy streak in her. She said, “The future is fixed. There’s not a damned thing we can do about it. That’s what Einstein meant. Space and time is a landscape. It’s there.” She pointed out the window. “I’m not going to live one second longer or shorter whether I smoke three packs a day or swim through a shit storm.”

  I said, “You don’t really believe that, Stoni. You’re a nurse, for crying out loud.”

  You can’t think long about dying without getting reckless or depressed unless you’re a religious zealot, I suppose, and I’m not. Anyway, this time I got reckless and manic. I decided that I would tell Martha the truth—that I was living with Judi, had been right along, not in a travel trailer at all. And then it would be Martha’s move.

  I c
alled Martha’s office. I suppose if she had answered, I would have chickened out. But I got her machine. I confessed, apologized, hesitated, said I guessed I’d see her at counseling on Thursday, and hung up. I hoped to God she hadn’t been sitting at her desk, screening her calls.

  In the kitchen, Richie was kissing Stoni good-bye. He was off to see his parole officer. He rubbed his gut, complained about being out of shape. He looked at me, said, Jail is discipline, man. Everyone should do some hard time. Keeps you alert, tough. Like a tiger. Then he asked me if I wanted to get rid of Spot. Of course not, I said. He said, I really like that mutt.

  When Richie left, Stoni told me Judi was her hero. She said, She raised me. Fed me, walked me to school, told me bedtime stories about Dad and how he’d gone off in search of George, and when he found him, they’d come back to us, and we’d all live happily ever after. I loved her for that lie. Every night Sir Ronnie, our dad, would discover another clue and defeat a villain and almost find his son. She told me Arthur Bositis would be stopping by for lunch. I suggested that this could be dangerous, couldn’t it? Stoni said, Not if Richie doesn’t find out. Why don’t you join us? she said. Arthur’s bringing some ground sirloin. We heard Judi call for her sister. Stoni excused herself. I cleared my work off the table so we could eat.

  The phone rang. It was my father. How are the eyes? I said. That’s why I called, he said. The palm trees are red. Your mother’s mole, the one on her forehead? Well, he said, it’s a greenish purple. The ocean’s orange. It’s so amazing. I said, And you’re okay with that? Sure, he said. But you know what it does? It changes the way food tastes. I have to close my eyes when I eat. Your mother’s beginning to suspect that something’s up. I hear her whispering to Edgar over the phone. Do your eyes ever hurt? I said. Not even a little, he said. They’re marvelous little machines, aren’t they?

  I saw Arthur drive by the house once. The next time he parked a few doors down under a maple. When he saw, I guess, that the coast was clear of Muneyhuns, he got out of his car. Arthur smelled like blood. He left his white butcher’s coat on the deck railing. We had beers while Stoni made salad and burgers. I got out a jar of strained peaches from the fridge and went to feed Judi. I kissed her forehead. She opened her eyes, shook her head. You don’t want to eat? Sleep, she said. Okay, I said, we’ll try later.

  Arthur and Stoni mixed up a sauce of mayonnaise, ketchup, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, Tabasco, and a drop of vinegar and put it on their hamburgs. So, I thought, they shared intimate culinary secrets. I wondered what was going on here. Why Richie Muneyhun’s name was not mentioned, why Arthur would put his life in danger, and why Stoni would encourage him to. I listened for the rev of a motorcycle engine.

  I said, “How are things on the kill floor, Arthur?” I expected a joke. “Deadly,” he’d say. “Stunning.” Or maybe, “I can’t beef about it,” or something.

  He said, “Puke heads.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Got us a load of bad cattle this morning. Puke heads. Contaminated. What we call Four-D livestock: dead, dying, diseased, and disabled. Pathetic stuff. That happens once in a while.”

  I looked at our lunch.

  He said, “Not this. Don’t worry. I know where my meat comes from, and it ain’t from no abscessed steer.”

  “It’s so gruesome what goes on over there,” Stoni said.

  Arthur made a face. “It’s not gruesome. We just take them apart so you can eat them.” He explained how the cattle get the bullet in the head and don’t feel a thing. How the meat packers cut them apart piece by piece—head, guts, skin, limbs—hoist them by hooks on an overhead track, and carve away.

  I wanted to ask Arthur what his intentions were. Was he planning to outlast Richie Muneyhun? It seemed to me like a pretty dangerous triangle he was balanced on. Arthur looked at his watch, said he had to be going, had some pus-filled carcasses to air out. He looked at me and smiled.

  Later, when Stoni had gone home on the back of Richie’s Harley I sat beside Judi’s bed and fed her baby food. She ate most of it. Her hair was falling out undramatically but steadily. I took some clumps of it off the pillow. Judi made a disgusted face.

  “I’m so sick of feeling like shit,” she said.

  I held her hand. It felt hollow, cold.

  “I don’t know if it’s worth it,” she said.

  “Stoni says there’s bad days and good days. You’re going to feel better tomorrow and you’ll be on your feet in a couple of days.”

  “And then it starts all over.”

  “But it might not be as bad the next time.”

  She looked at me. “Why don’t you try it.” She said she wanted to sleep and would I come to bed with her and read her a story. I undressed and slid under the covers.

  38.

  What’s Cooking

  SO LET’S TALK ABOUT FOOD. MY OWN CULINARY VISION, YOU UNDERSTAND, IS seriously myopic. Consider that for much of my childhood our family had the identical menu every week. On Mondays we ate American chop suey which, if you are fortunate enough not to know about, is elbow macaroni and hamburg in a tomato soup-based sauce. On Tuesdays we had meat loaf glazed with tomato-soup concentrate, baked potatoes in their jackets, and a vegetable—either canned waxed beans, canned beets, or canned peas. Wednesday was shepherd’s pie, which we called pâté dechinois, for some reason. Thursdays, spaghetti and meatballs. Friday, tuna noodle casserole with a top layer of potato chips. Saturday, frankfurts and beans with brown bread. Sunday, pot roast, brown potatoes, and string beans. The same bill of fare on the same night every week for years. Follow that up with years of eating parochial school cafeteria food—the absolute nadir of American cuisine: sloppy joes; nachos; assorted flash-frozen, deep-fried chicken parts; alleged cheeseburgers, always well-done; instant mashed potatoes; cold creamed corn; elasticized pizza facsimile; and so on. So you can imagine that this would be a great leap of imagination for me—trying to prepare a week’s worth of lunches for Judi and me and our guests. I make delicious hot chili, used to make terrific bacon and eggs until the cholesterol scare (my numbers are in the stratosphere), make beef fondue, which I could eat every day (but see “cholesterol scare”), make a decent salad (“decent” means with olives, scallions, feta, lots of onions, Tuscan peppers). And that’s it. I started out the week with great hope. I consulted Judi’s cookbooks. I couldn’t shake the deeply held belief that the four basic food groups were indeed beef, tomato, starch, and sweet.

  Monday: Eating Our Way to Recovery. Guests: Trixie, Hervey, and Noel. Menu: French onion soup; marinated scallops en brochette served on a bed of rice pilaf; orange Jell-O.

  Judi did feel well enough on the eleventh day after chemo to consider real food, to get out of bed, to get dressed, to fret over her hair, to complain about the intense pain in her upper thighs. She sat in the kitchen while I prepared the brunch. The phone rang, and she told me to let it. She had already disarmed the answering machine. As I put the scallops, bacon, and lime strips on skewers at the sink, Judi sat at the kitchen table and read me a story from page four of the T&G about a million abandoned children roaming the ghost towns and the countryside of Rwanda. Judi said, It’s like the world has gone insane.

  We were eating on the deck if the rain held off. I set the table, put the food on the grill. Sitting outside in the sunshine with sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat, Judi looked ceramic, brittle. Our guests arrived. I brought out a pitcher of beer and a tureen of the soup. Judi drank water and passed on the soup after sipping a spoonful of broth. No one would say anything, but I could tell I had overdone the salt. Judi passed on the entree as well. Trixie kept saying how robust and lovely Judi looked, don’t you think so, Hervey? Hervey would nod. He said in his opinion cancer don’t activate until you open a person up. That’s what gets it going. No doctor is ever getting inside his guts. Guy at work, Polack name of Kazmierczak, Pete Kazmierczak, healthy as a freaking bull, gets his annual checkup. They see a spot on his lung, open him up, in a month he’s eig
hty-five pounds and dead. Noel said Edmund was pressing license plates in Walpole these days. Worked himself right into a good position in the plant. Every time I see a car go by with one of those new red, white, and blue plates I think of my boy. Hervey kept making sour faces. I told him he didn’t have to eat the limes. They’re mostly there for the flavor they give the scallops. Trixie asked me what the marinade was. Orange juice, vermouth, and vodka. Martini kabobs, Noel said. Thought it had a little kick to it. Judi ate the Jell-O. When they left, I cleaned up. Judi said, I don’t know why you’re still here. She paused. But I’m glad you are. Thanks, I said. Are you afraid of what people would think if you left me now? She cried. I held her. Was I? I told her, Don’t be silly. I put her to bed. What people?

  Tuesday: Mexican Fiesta. Guests: Ron, Josh, and Mark Menu: gazpacho; black bean salad; taco tots; chicken burritos; butterscotch-jalapeño pudding.

  Judi ate the gazpacho, had a few bites of salad. She and her colleagues talked about work and clients. I pretended not to listen to their talk about a certain Mr. X, who seemed to be dying from the fear of growing old, or Mrs. Y, who had four children and yet claimed to be a virgin and was fully expecting to ascend into heaven at any moment. That’s why she paid cash. Josh said he was as healthy as a pig, just a little touch of AIDS.

  Josh told Judi that she needed to change her thinking, had to find herself a doctor whom she could hug, not one who holds her away with test results. Honey, he said, you have to think of this cancer as a chronic disease, not a terminal one. How are you going to live with it, he said, not how are you going to die from it. And you, he said to me, you are going to have to be patient and supportive, and once in a while you’re going to have to give her a boot in the ass—whenever she’s feeling sorry for herself. You just call Albert if you have a problem with that. We laughed. Josh left Judi with a shopping list for foods, a bag of vitamin pills, phone numbers, books and recipes, and with hope.