Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  Judi handed me the joint. Primo Chemo, she said; I don’t feel nauseated anymore. I took a hit, went and made three more vodka martinis. Stoni turned on an oldies station. Judi started to laugh. Said she just remembered something she wanted to show us. I got her purse. She fished out a folded paper, an ad she’d torn out of a medical journal at the hospital. The ad was for a machine that looked like a drill press and was called the Polytron. The bold print in the ad said, Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in thirty seconds. Stoni got hysterical. Mouse soup, she kept saying. Great for cat owners. She said, Listen to this: Unique tissue disruption by mechanical shearing and cavitation. Judi shook her head. Pretty sick, she said. I was stuck on the words homogenate and cavitation. I was thinking of milk and teeth and coal mines. What interesting words. I meant to get up and get the dictionary, but I forgot.

  Stoni dialed the 800 number in the ad. She spoke to an answering machine, told it she was a Dr. Maggie Siddiqui from Memorial Hospital and she would like to order a Polytron, but what colors does it come in, and do they have a machine that deep-fries. She hung up and took another hit. She said that today, driving past Chevalier Furniture, she’d seen a sign in their window: WE HAVE YOUR STOOL. YOU see, they must mean bar stools, she explained to us. Then we laughed.

  Judi wondered why furniture stores were always going out of business, but then never really did. Like we’d forget they had a gigantic final close-out total liquidation sale two months ago. And why do all car salesmen put their photographs in their ads? What’s that about? I said, Why are all Chinese restaurants red and yellow?

  We were quiet. Marvin Gaye sang. “I guess you wonder how I knew . . .” Then Judi started to talk about simple, annihilated souls and about living a blind, annihilated life, about those who live without a why and those who expect revenues from love. She said she saw a light brighter than the light that shot from the sun, a light that shadows the light of love. I looked at Stoni. Her eyes were closed. Judi stared at a spot on the ceiling. I looked where she looked, and I noticed that the cracks and dust and shadows had composed a face. It could be a man or a woman. Its eyes were closed, its jaw set, its hair slicked back. It could be a corpse. It could be Dale getting out of the shower.

  When I tuned back in, Stoni was gone and Judi was talking about stars and planets. I heard pots rattle in the kitchen. Stoni was hungry My dope-addled insight was that Judi wasn’t talking about the universe at all, but about her body I smiled and listened attentively. Cancer cells, as I understood her metaphorical rap, were the billions of stars, and the tumor was this galaxy spinning out of control in the darkness. Judi’s afraid of the dark. What is all that darkness in the universe? It couldn’t just be the absence of light, could it? It can’t be nothing. It’s got all these stars in it, all these suns, all these planets, all these creatures in it, with creatures inside them. Darkness must matter. This was fine dope.

  Stoni returned with a bowl of popcorn, the best popcorn, we all agreed, that we’d ever eaten. Popcorn sprinkled with Romano cheese, cayenne pepper, and garlic salt. Magnificent popcorn, Stoni. And then it seemed while I was doing it that it took me an hour at least to mix three more vodka martinis. First, I had to find the vodka, which was camouflaged in the freezer. Then the vermouth. Then I had to read the vermouth label. The Dry you are looking for . . . What did that mean? Did we want our drinks on the rocks or straight up, with olives or with twists? When I got back with the drinks, Judi and Stoni were staring at the bowl of glorious popcorn. For a second, I thought maybe I hadn’t gotten up to make the drinks, but there they were on the tray in my hands.

  Judi said, You can try not to be in love with someone if you want to, but that’s like trying not to be afraid. I just smiled knowingly. I felt some pressure to wax philosophical, but I was having a hard time. I was still smiling. My face hurt.

  Judi said, I don’t want pain or fatigue or doctors or hospital wards or tests. I want sunshine and company, friends, music, my home, my room, my pal. I want a miracle, she said. But I’m not going to hell again for the hope of a chance of one.

  Stoni said she needed to hit the road, but we convinced her she couldn’t find her keys, never mind drive. We were right. She agreed to sleep on the couch. I said I was taking Spot for a walk. Judi said she’d be waiting for me. I needed to clear my head. A starless night. Halo around the moon. Spot visited all his favorite trees and hedges. I could not conceive of my own death, of nonexistence. This is the kind of thinking that leads to religions, I told myself. Be careful.

  I thought about Dale and Theresa and I felt guilty like I always do when I haven’t been working. Dale’s out camping this weekend. Drove out through Weed into the Sacramento mountains. He’s found an old antelope hunter’s campsite, a circle of stones. Something occurs to him while he’s gathering firewood. He knows that when you’re afflicted with love you never recover. I realize that Dale has happened onto the spot I had fantasized going to die.

  Back home, Stoni was snoring on the couch. I covered her with Judi’s pink blanket, turned the heat down to seventy-five. Wasn’t I going to do something with the radiator? I got undressed, took the tube of Astroglide, and slipped under the covers. I snuggled up to Judi’s back, slipped my hand into her pajamas. Judi turned to me, kissed my nose. She was crying. Everything hurts, Laf. I’m sorry. It’s like the vandals are inside demolishing the neighborhood. Soon, she said. Promise. I want my life back. What if I don’t wake up? I said, It’s okay. She said, Tell me a story. I said, What kind of story? About a woman at the end of her rope, a woman who makes a remarkable recovery.

  60.

  Gastroenterology

  JUDI GAINED BACK SOME OF THE WEIGHT SHE HAD LOST IN THE HOSPITAL AND on the chemo. She looked less diminished. Her hair grew back a shade lighter, thinner, and curlier. She said she didn’t feel so old, now that people weren’t doing everything for her and to her. She was back to work, gradually building her client load, and back to her visualization exercises. She was taking vitamin and mineral supplements that she bought at Mr. Natural’s. Pauline had become like Judi’s pharmacist. Judi was also seeing Pamela Bibaud again, back to visiting her past lives.

  We were in the waiting room of Dr. Lankau, a gastroenterologist she’d been referred to. We’d been sitting an hour already. Judi told me that in Poland, in seventeen-something, she was the mistress of an itinerant musician. She was sixteen or so and three months’ along when she was taken in by the nuns at a convent in Czestochowa. Her name was Magda. She learned from the abbess that the convent was to close after three hundred years. One frosty morning, Magda woke up, prayed, went to the kitchen to stoke the hearth fire, and saw the sisters out in the churchyard. She watched them exhume the bones of all the nuns who had ever served God at that convent. They would carry the bones with them to the Mother House in Bohemia.

  Judi told me that none of the deceased nuns had a headstone. They all had names in life, she said, but not in death. Judi said something went wrong with her delivery. She lost the baby—she would have named him Kazimir—and died herself minutes later. I asked her did she remember what it felt like to die. I thought that was the point of this particular regression. She told me no. She could recall the excruciating pain of labor. She remembered biting down on an iron nail until her teeth broke. An hour and a half after we had arrived, Judi was admitted to the doctor’s examining room, where she waited another hour.

  Judi continued to see Dr. Pawlak and to get her blood work, X rays, CAT scans, and what not. You could see, though, that Stouder and the others had emotionally removed themselves from Judi’s case because she wasn’t playing by their rules. They didn’t care as much about her as about her disease, and she was keeping them from it. It seemed curious to me that doctors thought they could win this battle with death anyway. What are they teaching in medical schools these days? A lot of ego goes into cancer treatment, but precious little compassion.

  While we waited for the car to warm up, for the windows
to defrost, I asked Judi if she were ever reborn into the past. Like, is now a long time ago? She hadn’t thought about that. She couldn’t, though, remember living in the future. She told me about the results of Lankau’s tests. There seemed to be some activity in the intestines. Another reason to hate myself, she said.

  61.

  In Full Guimpe and Wimple

  IT WAS INEVITABLE IN THIS TOWN THAT I WOULD RUN INTO MARTHA. IT HAPpened like this. After work I thought I’d grab a beer, sit there, and write. I would have gone to the Boynton, but I was afraid I’d run into Biscuit, and he’d rag me about not calling him, and I’d end up in some long unwelcomed conversation, and I’d get nothing done. So I stopped into the Leitrum Pub. Usually there was enough chatter in there to drown out the television. I got a pint of Bass and took a booth. I wrote.

  My plan was to get back to Theresa, see what she might be up to while Dale’s away camping. I scribbled some notes about them. Dale thinks love is voluntary, none of this fate business for him. You love someone, he thinks, so you can get to know them. I watched a woman at the bar get off her stool, walk to the jukebox, play some Stones. She was smoking, tapping her foot, singing to herself. She pushed the sleeves of her black sweater up to her elbows. She made a phone call. When she hung up, she shook her head, took a deep breath, burped. She went back to the bar, grabbed her glass, sipped, sat up on the stool. I wrote a kind of outline for a story about such a woman as I imagined her to possibly be, a woman with salt stains on her boots, hair that she can’t do anything with, and five, maybe ten, extra pounds at the hips. Like all the women in her family.

  And then I heard someone behind me say, “I’ll just have a sparkling water,” and I knew it was Martha, but I couldn’t prove it because the booth was too high to look over. God, I thought, our backs are up against each other. Whoever she was with returned with the drinks. He said, “Cheers!” She thanked him. Martha, for sure. I wanted to sit there and listen, find out what she was up to. And I wanted to run out of there as fast as I could. I did something unusually forthright. I stood up, stepped to her booth, and said hello. She looked at me. Maybe she’d thought I’d died or moved to the Failed Writers’ Home. I turned to the gentleman, said, I’m himself, the one she’s told you about. He told me his name was Frank. Frank O’Connor. Father Frank O’Connor. Three sentences to get that out. This was good. Martha and the Right Reverend in a tavern. This was dangerous enough to be encouraged.

  “I won’t ask you to join us,” Martha said.

  I told her I was just leaving. I asked if I might come by someday and collect my clothes. She told me she’d gotten rid of them. “My rayon shirts?” I said.

  “Burned them.”

  “Everything?”

  She smiled.

  “Not my books?”

  “Gave them away. And your tapes.”

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  “At first.” She looked into her water.

  I kind of admired her spunk. She would have needed a backhoe to clear the shed of books and magazines.

  I looked at Frank. “Just another reason not to get attached to worldly possessions, Father.”

  “Then it got kind of sad,” she said. “But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to.”

  Father Frank said, “Maybe I’ll leave you two—”

  I said, “No, Father, sit.” It seemed odd calling my wife’s date “Father.” What was I thinking—”wife,” “date”?

  Martha said, “I did save the wedding photos. Sentimental, I guess. Maybe someday I’ll look at them again.”

  I could see she was going to cry.

  “You want them?” she said.

  “No. Well, if you don’t . . . You keep them.”

  On that day I got my story “Splice of Life” back from the New Dixie Review. It arrived with a note from Dr. Knox Hinton, editor, professor, and director of the Center for Southern Culture and Literature at the University of the Deep South.

  Mr. Proulx:

  While some of my esteemed colleagues are mildly amused whenever a misguided Yankee with literary pretensions presumes to write about the South, I am personally furious and highly indignant at your feeble and affected meddling in the lives of people about whom you know less than nothing. This story is drivel, sir. Furthermore, you have no right to invade the South with your arsenal of northern clichés and stereotypes. Why don’t you, instead, ridicule the pathetic souls who inhabit that cold and sooty burg you call home?

  Sincerely,

  J. Knox Hinton, Ph.D.

  I could be flip and say it was Dr. Hinton’s lugubrious adverbs that saddened me most, but, of course, it wasn’t that. It was his contention that I was poking fun at my characters that upset me. Why would I make fun of a person in pain? Why would anyone? I don’t think despair is funny, or divorce is funny, or child abuse is funny, and the idea that someone would think that I did made me almost sick. So what was so mocking in the story? The phone call from the unfaithful husband? The beer-slurping dog? Is living in a motel somehow ridiculous? I tried calling Knox Hinton twice to ask him to explain himself. Twice I got the answering machine. Once I said nothing. Once I said, Good morning, Dr. Hinton, you don’t remember me, but I was in your class one time, and I’d like to speak with you a moment, if I could. Please call me at your convenience. I left Judi’s number.

  I wrote Knox a letter, which I mailed, and in which I told him I had lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, Jackson and Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. I admitted I was not born in Louisiana, but asked if Bradbury were born on Mars? Conrad in England? Shakespeare in Verona? I asked him if he thought André Dubus ever got a letter from the editor of the Brahmin Review telling him to write about Louisiana and leave Massachusetts to the natives? I tried to explain that there is a geography of imagination, that there are many worlds we live in, that art is not life, that my Monroe, Louisiana, is not the actual Monroe, Louisiana. I know because I’ve been there. The Bayou Motel is not on Louisville, for one thing. I’ve stayed there. I told Knox he sounded like a very intelligent man who probably had his life and his literature all figured out, which meant he’d be successful, no doubt. But, and pardon me for lecturing the professor, your attitude could prove a flaw when something comes along that doesn’t fit neatly into your scheme of things. You might ignore the unexpected, castigate that which challenges your notion of the world, and this might keep you from winning the Nobel Prize for Editing. I told him I’d sold—and I use the word loosely—the story in question to one of his amused colleagues. He could read it next fall. I told him how New England was taking on a Southern flavor, how they were building a Wal-Mart in Marlboro, how I could buy Sweet Georgia Brown ale at Mullavey’s Package Store, and Quaker grits at the Stop & Shop. We’ve even got a country music station out of Worcester now. I told him I thought all the important regional differences were spiritual now—except for kudzu. I told him I was a Catholic boy who grew up practically a mystic, but I’d lapsed. Sometimes, though, I still need to explore the spiritual. Problem is people up here don’t take the soul to heart. Transgressions here are crimes, not sins. That’s when I go south. I asked him, What’s the housing situation like there in Hinterland, Alabama?

  That night Judi told me that Josh was in the hospital and he probably wouldn’t come out this time. It turned out that he was dead by the time Judi told me. That’s all we said about it. That night I dreamed I was back at St. Stephen’s in Sister Sylvanus’s class, and we’re all kneeling on our chairs reciting the Angelus when Sister comes up out of nowhere, slaps my face, and pushes me to the floor, kicks me in the side. She screams that I’m the one who will abandon his faith. And it was all eerily like the way it happened in real fifth grade because I refused to watch a holy movie at lunch in the church hall, only in the dream it was not Sister Sylvanus at all, but Martha who was standing over me in full guimpe and wimple, her rosary beads clacking against my desk.

  62.

  To
Cure This Deadly Grief

  THE FIRST THING DORIE MARCELONIS SAID TO US WAS “THERE’S NO SUCH thing as terminal cancer.” She said this and smiled. I held my tongue. I wanted to like her. She was so cute and all. I hoped she wouldn’t keep making ludicrous statements. Dorie wore a long blue plaid jumper over a white T-shirt, turquoise bracelets on both wrists, and dangly silver earrings. Each earring was a dancing man playing a recorder. Her auburn hair was pulled back from her forehead and tied in a pony tail. She was thin as smoke.

  Judi and I sat with Dorie in her parlor. Dorie was the healer Pauline had raved about. Dorie had healed the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard of Sjogren’s syndrome, Pauline told Judi. Judi and Dorie sat on this enormous mohair sofa like people had in the thirties, black with floral cushions and a scrolled walnut frame. I sat across the room in a matching button-backed chair. The springs had lost their tension. I sank into the cushion. I felt tiny. That may be why I was thinking this little cottage was so much like my grandmother’s apartment when I was a kid. That and the dark Persian carpet, the doilies and antimacassars, the potted ferns on the radiator covers, the Swedish ivy in a macrame hanger, the mahogany lamp table. Dorie told me to just shoo the cat off my lap if it was bothering me. She said, “Get down, Na’pi, scoot!” The cat whined, hopped to the floor, and pranced toward the kitchen with his tail straight up.