Stoni knocked and entered. She’d been smoking dope—smelled sweet and loud. She kissed her sister and her father. I said, Don’t you kiss the cook? She said, Not until I’ve tasted his food.
Judi scooped ice cream onto our plates. Ronnie lit the sauce on his third match. I poured the flaming sauce over the vanilla mounds. Ronnie said it reminded him of napalm. Thanks, Ronnie. We followed the bananas with apple pie, which Stoni had à la mode. She was so hungry, she said, she could eat her family.
Ronnie can be either very withdrawn—so much so that you wonder if all his senses haven’t closed down or something—or very animated and chatty. Tonight we couldn’t shut him up. And he spilled his wine twice. Once with a sweeping gesture of his arm. The next time he set the glass down on the edge of his plate. He was lecturing us on the apple conspiracy being directed by the Washington State Apple Commission and the Department of Agriculture. He said a hundred years ago there were eight thousand varieties of apples in the country. Eight thousand! Apples used to be a fruit. Now they’re a product. So we’re down to apples that travel, a dozen or so varieties, and all of them insipid. Tasteless, acidless mush. Eventually, if the powers get their way, we’ll have two choices, Delicious and Golden Delicious.
Stoni said, Do you think it’s a good idea, all this sugar? And she glanced over at Ronnie and raised her eyebrows. Now he was talking about soap. I missed the transition. About Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and how the label represented the most profound yet accessible philosophical writing we have in America today. He quoted Dr. Bronner, soap maker and Essene rabbi: “If I’m not for me, who am I?” Judi rolled her eyes. Ronnie, she said, take a breath. He told us that UFOs weren’t vehicles at all. They were intergalactic aerospace macrobacteria. Stoni cut herself a slice of blueberry cheesecake. Ronnie said if we blasted a rocketload of antibiotics into space, we could begin to eliminate the bacteria.
Judi asked Ronnie about the place in Henniker. I gave it up, he said. I’ll be going back to Portsmouth, maybe. Or Nashua. You never know. Why New Hampshire? I said. Live free or die, he said. It’s better you guys don’t know my whereabouts. That way if they interrogate you, you know nothing. He winked.
Stoni put her hand on his, forgot what she was going to say. He looked at his plate, stuck a finger in the pie, licked it. Stoni said, Dad, you’ve been here four days, and you haven’t talked with Judi about her cancer.
Judi said, “Ronnie, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’m just glad you came.”
He said, “I saw a lot of UFO activity in Nam. At My Lai, Calley took his orders from the UFOs hovering over the village.”
I said, “I thought you said UFOs were bacteria.”
“You don’t think bacteria have brains?” Ronnie looked at me, leaned toward me, finished his chewing. “Bacteria run the whole ball of wax.” He held up his fork and made a circular motion.
Stoni poured the Turkish coffee while I served the baklava. We heard Trixie’s car squeal to a stop. I set another plate, cup, saucer, fork, spoon. Ronnie fished a bottle of pills out of his shirt pocket. He swallowed one, washed it down with sherry. He closed his eyes. I answered the knock at the door. Trixie came in with a box of doughnuts tied with string. Her fingernails were as red as litchis. I took her jacket. She stood there and looked Ronnie up and down. This was the first time they’d seen each other in, it must have been, sixteen, seventeen years. “You’re still easy on the eyes, Ronnie,” she said.
He blushed. “How are you, Trix?” He stood, touched her arm with his fingers, kissed her cheek.
“I haven’t had any complaints,” she said. We all laughed. Trixie sat between Ronnie and me, asked Judi how she felt.
For a while the family reminisced. About the time Ronnie tried to repair the toilet with a cold chisel and split the bowl in half, flooded the bathroom. That was on Christmas. Or Thanksgiving. No one was quite sure. The plumber cost a mint, though. About a vacation to Lake Winnipesaukee when their motorboat sank. About another trip, to Ausable Chasm, when they all got carsick from the hole in the exhaust. Especially George. Things became subdued after that. Trixie asked Stoni about Arthur and Richie, how she was handling all that. I wondered why it was some families seemed to attract damage. Stoni said she was still angry at both of them. She opened the box of doughnuts and took out a chocolate raised. She told Ronnie he didn’t have to go to Portsmouth or anywhere. He could stay right here. I knew what was going through her buzzed little mind—the trailer. Poor Hervey.
Ronnie shook his head. “Impossible. It’s dangerous for me here. They already know my whereabouts.”
“They?” I said.
He put his finger over his lips to quiet me. He pointed to the light fixture over the table. He winked.
Judi said, “Why did you leave us in the first place?”
Trixie said, “It was a husband-wife thing.”
Judi said, “Let him answer.”
Ronnie started jabbering about nuclear alienation testing and disposal, about what he called Nosferatu Eyesight TV and the Kryptonite Earphone Transistor Radio and the Worldwide Cyberkinetic Cellular Monitor, all of which I was anxious to hear more about, but Judi cut him off.
She said, “It’s obvious you haven’t cut through your bullshit yet. Save that psychocrap for your social worker. I’m not buying it.”
Nobody said a word. Trixie took out her compact mirror, smiled into it, wiped flaking mascara off her eyelids with a napkin. Ronnie held his hands up in front of his chest as if he were checking for rain. I looked at my hand, at the dry skin where my wedding band had been. Judi said she was tired and was going to bed. She stood. She apologized to Ronnie. I had no right, she said. She excused herself.
Trixie said, “She’s under a lot of stress.”
Stoni checked her watch. Said she’d better get going. She gave me a kiss. I packed a bag for her—baklava and cheesecake. She told Ronnie she’d see him tomorrow, told Trixie not to wait up for her.
When I got back from walking Spot the Wonder Dog, Trixie was gone and Ronnie was at the table, scribbling in his notebook. “I should get a dog,” Ronnie said.
“Well, Ronnie, they can be a royal pain in the ass.”
Ronnie poured another shot. I asked him about his teeth. They hurt, he said, but that means they can’t be tapped. I let that pass. He said, I don’t have any friends.
“You have a family.”
“Don’t you think I want to work at a shop? go out after work for a drink with my pals? Don’t you think I want to join a bowling league? mow the lawn on Saturdays? watch football on Sundays? Don’t you think I want someone to call me on the phone? And don’t you think they would just love to have me do just that? And then where would we be? Civilization, I mean. Without my vigilance, we’d all be slaves tomorrow.”
“Ronnie, don’t get pissed, but this is your paranoia talking.”
“I used to be crazy. I admit that. I used to think that Mussolini was my high school baseball coach.”
I said, “Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much about the world and everything. Take a day off and see what happens.” He said, “You think it’s easy? Look, I’ve got no family life, no love life, no social life, no work life. I have become emotionally independent. No one’s there for me. Sometimes my head hurts so much from the noise, I have to slam it against a wall and then I go into convulsions. I want to believe it’s all in my imagination, what’s going on, but I know it isn’t.” Ronnie closed his eyes, put his head in his hands.
He said, “I want the suffering to stop. All the suffering.”
I finished my beer.
Ronnie said, “I’m just going to sit up and finish my song.”
“Good night.”
“One thing, Laf.”
“What’s that?”
“Judi. I just have the feeling I know her from somewhere. Not my daughter, but this woman. And I keep thinking it was a long time ago and we lived in a small town and traveled with the same crowd. Maybe we spoke French. I wante
d to tell her this as soon as I saw her, but she’s so practical, this one, so down-to-earth, she’d just think I was silly.”
“I don’t think she would. I’ll tell her, though, what you said.”
Ronnie smiled. In the morning he was gone.
56.
When the Deep Purple Falls
WHILE JUDI WAS UNDERGOING HER THIRD BLAST OF CHEMO, I WENT TO PIER I and bought the last six of these Indian print cotton sheets, the kind of thing you might use as a bedspread, tablecloth, curtain, shawl, furniture covering, or whatever. They were purple with black woodcut illustrations. I bought a staple gun, staples, and tacks at Jerry’s Hardware. I went home to cover the mirrored bedroom ceiling. I’d been reading about cancer recovery and self-esteem. Mirrors are taboo. Besides, I’d never liked it in the first place. It was here, Judi told me, when she bought the house from a cop. It made me feel uneasy, like I was being watched while I slept, being graded while I made love. Anyway, I should have examined the sheets a bit closer than I did. Five of them were fine. They all depicted this dancing Hindu god wearing a tiger skin. His third eye was open. The sixth cloth, however, featured this gaunt, five-foot skeletal goddess, I suppose she was, wearing earrings fashioned from corpses. Serpents and skulls adorned her body. Charming. I fastened that sheet on the window side of the room and hoped Judi never noticed.
When I finished with my interior decoration, the canopied room was darker than it had been. I hadn’t counted on that. The sheets billowed down. The room seemed temporary somehow, yet liturgical, the ceiling now a baldachin, the bed an altar. The point was that Judi would not have to look up at her unhealthy self.
I drove to Avant Gardens and bought a potted gardenia plant to brighten the room. I swung by Todd’s Medical Supply and picked up the egg crate mattress pad I’d ordered. I remembered how the last time the room got to smelling like I don’t know what. Like seaweed left out in the sun. Like sweat and cork and must and cider vinegar. And now, with the end of Indian summer, we wouldn’t even be able to crack a window to air out the room. So I stopped by Humboldt’s Gifts and bought incense—sandalwood, myrrh, and lilac. I wondered why no one made sautéed garlic incense. That’s the best smell in the world, isn’t it? Or baking bread. Or pot of simmering chocolate. Or the smell of Pauline’s neck. I could start a business. Commincense. Dollarslncense. Incenseitivity. Incensual Adults.
Stoni came by in the morning to get the house, the sickroom, in order. The plan was for me to pick up Judi at the hospital in Stoni’s Jeep. Nicky was coming along to help. Stoni emptied her plastic bag on the kitchen table. Two plastic bed pans, each initialed with a laundry marker: one V, the other B. I didn’t ask. One bottle of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap. Bar soap harbors bacteria, she said. She unfurled a banner she’d had printed on computer paper. It said, Welcome Home, Judi, and had fireworks before the sentence and a yellow ribbon after it. She handed me the tube of something called Astroglide.
“What’s this?”
“It’s like supersonic K-Y jelly.” She smiled and started to tell me how she once used it at the hospital to extract a—
I stopped her. I said, “Thanks.”
Stoni told me she’d spoken with Judi. “You must be awfully horny.”
I said, “I wish you hadn’t brought it up.”
She said, “Did I?”
I blushed. I set the Astroglide on the table.
“This stuff could slip a camel through the eye of a needle.”
“One hump or two?”
“You are horny.”
“I’ll be on my way,” I said. I put on my jacket, thanked Stoni for her keys.
On my way to Nicky’s I thought about my season of chastity. I mean, I understood it completely, but abstinence does serrate the edges of life. For one thing, I was lately far too aware of my groin. I’d find myself squeezing my thighs together a lot. Celibacy, I figured, was probably not doing my prostate any good either.
The thing of it was this condition wasn’t so different from circumstances of my recent past. Martha and I could go weeks without doing it. Sleeping in the same bed, acting civilly, affectionately, to each other during the day I don’t know why we did that at night, why we behaved like two little magnets that repelled each other.
I read once that Flaubert would become aroused when he wrote a sex scene, would even masturbate at his writing desk. I never went that far. I have gotten up, splashed my face with cold water. I have taken walks. Maybe it’s the Catholic schoolboy in me. We used to call it the “sin of self-abuse.”
As a result of my discomfort, Dale and Theresa were enduring a cool phase in their relationship. They pulled back a bit when I started to get all too familiar with Theresa’s body—the little mole just to the left of her navel, the tiny bump on her hip bone. And then I’d spend long minutes watching the sophomore education major in the front row in Dale’s macroeconomics class. She was a runner. You could tell by her calves. Why does she sit like that? Well, I thought we all needed a cold shower.
Nicky had a box of plain doughnuts. On a health kick, he said. No more honey-dipped, no more chocolate raised, no more jelly. I had one. Nicky told me he hadn’t been to a doctor in his adult life. He said, I got a knee that locks up on me. I got plantar warts, hemorrhoids, allergies. I get wicked leg cramps, but vitamin E usually takes care of that. He scarfed his doughnut. Break out with fever blisters if I get too much sun. Sinus headaches. Sometimes I feel like my whole body’s a bell and I’m ringing with pain. Never been inside a hospital, he said. Until today.
I told him he didn’t need to go in. Wait at the door. They’ll be taking her down in a wheelchair. We’ll help her along from there. Nicky seemed relieved. He offered me another doughnut.
Nicky sat in back with Judi’s overnight bag. Judi wore sunglasses, but kept her eyes closed. I could see that her mouth hurt, the careful way she moved her tongue, the way she kept her jaw open a bit. She swallowed cautiously. Her lips were cracked and scabby. Her skin had broken out in little red dots. Her neck was bruised. She took deep, slow breaths. I watched the traffic and watched her. She told us that every joint and muscle in her body ached like they’d been pounded by a hammer. I could see she was crying.
We pulled into the garage. Nicky and I eased her out of her seat, got her up the couple of stairs and into the house. Stoni took over and led Judi to the bedroom. Nicky and I stood in the kitchen. I leaned against the fridge, Nicky against the stove. We looked at each other. He said, “What are you thinking?”
I shook my head. Shrugged. “She’s got that bewildered look. Jesus.”
And then we heard Stoni call for us.
Judi had thrown up. I took the mattress pad out to the deck to hose it down, let it dry out. Nicky stuck the ball of sheets in the washing machine. Judi sat on the bathroom floor. Stoni said, “Don’t worry, this is all normal.”
I sat on the edge of the tub. Judi was chilled, shaking. She said, “Who am I?”
I said, “You’re Judi.”
I “Who the fuck am I?” Her body spasmed, and with her head locked against the wall and her face to the ceiling, Judi threw up again, the vomit a furious green spray that shot ahead several feet.
I held her. Stoni came in with the bedpan marked V, held it in front of Judi. We’d need to change her again. Nicky watched us from the bedroom door. He asked if he should call a doctor. I told him maybe he could get a mop and pail from the cellar stairs. Judi vomited until everything in her stomach was gone. She threw up bile and then sheets of her own tissue and then clots of blood that looked like globs of gelatin. Nicky brought in plastic sandwich bags filled with ice that Stoni held to Judi’s forehead. Judi was crying; Stoni was crying. I could smell all the crap sweating out of Judi’s pores, all the poisons. And then, when it seemed that all her strength was gone, that her body was too limp to convulse, Judi lost control of her bowels. Watery diarrhea began to seep from her. Judi screamed that she just wanted to fucking die, and all we could do was sit there on the floor with her a
nd tell her it was all right, it will be over soon. Stoni told Nicky, still by the door, to go ahead and call an ambulance. She gave him the number. Judi called me a bastard for making her do this. And then she fainted. We washed her quickly. Washed ourselves. Nicky cleaned up while we helped the paramedics. Stoni rode in the ambulance, said she’d call us from the hospital.
Nicky and I finished the cleaning, then showered. We put on old sweats while we washed our clothes and dried them. I poured us each a glass of Hennessey We sat on the couch with the bottle between us. Jesus, Nicky said, I’ve never seen anything like it. We put on music. Allison Krauss. Steeleye Span. We listened to Stoni’s phone message: Judi’s fine, sleeping like a baby. She’s going to be fine. They’ll run a CBC in the morning. She’s sedated. She’s fine. Hope you two are all right.
I didn’t care how cold it was. I opened the bedroom and bathroom windows. I wanted the smells of chemicals and vomit and fear and death and festering flesh and emptied bowels out of there. The wind blew my ceiling cloths loose. They hung, flapped, fell like parachutes. I didn’t care. I could put them up again.
57.
The World of Dew Is A World of Dew, Yet Even So, Yet Even So . . .
THE JAPANESE POET ISSA WROTE THIS HAIKU AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS ONLY child. Why do we need to die? Why must we suffer? This is what I think about while Judi recovers from the horrible reaction to her chemotherapy, while the oncology team tries to devise a new and less devastating strategy, while I smile at customers, take their money, wish them a good day at Our Lady of the Sea, while I walk home through the cold and quiet city, while I scratch Spot behind his ears, let him clatter through the fallen oak leaves in the park. All I know about death is you don’t live through it and you’re not here anymore. Here is where I am. But I don’t know why this dwindling away. Where is the tenderness in that kind of world? When I visit Judi, she is asleep, and I am relieved. Her vital signs are splendid, they tell me. Encouraging. These things happen. Sleep. Deep and dreamless sleep? Sleep like a little death? I leave a card, a flower. I sign my name and Spot’s to the card. I leave a book. Alice Munro’s stories.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 24