Drastic

by Maud Casey

  When my mother died, I realized that all her life she was meant to die. That her death was inevitable seemed like a mean trick, something she and I should have talked about more when she was still alive. I worried too that my father, in his old age, didn’t have the mental energy to preserve the details of my mother wholly in his mind. I imagined my mother fading completely from this world and I decided that it was my job to remember her. Do Unto Others is more than simple escape, more than the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. The show is my way of holding my mother to this earth. When I walk out onto the stage, I am grief personified in a mask turned inside out a million times. I’m a reminder to us all.

  Over the years, I’ve learned to jump into grief like a swimming pool. The people I play on Do Unto Others have allowed me to swim through wet, sloppy sadness with a suitable stroke, a stroke that the audience recognizes, one that they can imitate.

  “I know this isn’t anything like being raised by wolves,” a woman in a blue polyester pantsuit says during today’s show, “but sometimes the way my parents raised me felt, well, wild. Uncivilized.”

  The members of the audience crane their necks to get a better look, as if finally this woman might provide them with an answer to all the questions in the world.

  Perry turns to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. “Well, I’m sure that Shirley can sympathize with you. Can’t you, Shirley?” The sound of the audience shifting in their seats is the restless sound of animals about to stampede.

  I’m wearing a wolf-brown wig. Faint tufts of facial hair dot my chin and jowls.

  “Why yes, I can, Perry,” I say. I smile at the woman in the blue polyester pantsuit, and she smiles back. We are lifted momentarily out of that big pool of grief. For a second I suspend her above the child she lost in utero last year, the pending divorce, her daughter who hates her. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, she might be saying. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, I think. We are in this together, and the slope of my mother’s forehead drifts back to me, the way it looked when she pulled her hair back on days she couldn’t be bothered.

  Today I am Tina, a married woman who is addicted to affairs with married men. I’m feeling a little confused because Perry is a married man, and last night I dreamed that he misplaced my nose during surgery, then pretended not to recognize me without it.

  “If I were your husband I’d kill you and then I’d divorce you and then I’d kill the guy you had the affair with,” says one man, jumping up from the audience and screaming before Perry gets to him with the microphone.

  I tuck a piece of my hussy-red wig behind my ear and smile the smile of someone who believes strongly in her infidelity.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Perry says, pacifying the audience. “You’d kill her and then divorce her.” The audience laughs. Perry is on my side. He is here to give my grief away.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Perry says again to focus the audience as he takes his seat next to mine on the stage. “You sleep with married men because this way you have the same amount to lose. It’s an exchange of risk and loss, if you will.”

  “That’s right, Perry,” I say. “It’s a reciprocal relationship.”

  Then Perry does something he’s never done before. He touches me. He puts his hand on my shoulder, letting his fingers slip past where my dress covers my skin. His hand brushes Tina’s jugular, burning with its foreign heat her skin so unfamiliar with touch.

  He doesn’t stop there. He kisses me on the cheek. As it’s happening, I miss the moment already—the soft lips of it, the breath-minty breath of it on my face—already configuring itself in my dream landscape. He kisses me in slow motion and then, bang, back to normal speed, and he’s saying what he usually says.

  “Thank you for sharing with us, Tina,” as if he’s never met Rita. This fresh agony snaps me momentarily out of the constant hum of grieving. Then, when Perry gets into his car to drive home after the show, waving good-bye as if it was just another day at work, the hum returns.

  My cat ran away when I was seven, and there was a shallow dip of grief. It dipped in and touched my little soul. When my mother died, that grief went through me like a bullet, leaving a clean hole, taking parts of me with it. Then there is this new grief that falls somewhere in between a runaway cat and a dead mother, the minty blue wind of a man who kisses you the way no one has kissed you before, sucking the life out of you with his lips. This is the way it is with Perry.

  As I get into my car, I look in the mirror and realize I’ve forgotten to take off the curly red wig. I toss it onto the passenger seat, reminding myself that I never intended to do this forever. I’m just never sure when sadness will brush past me like some rude stranger.

  Years ago, when I still lived with my parents, my mother and I witnessed a car accident. A boy walked away from one of the crumpled cars without a scratch, then the blood came up in staggered waves from his mouth. A police officer who arrived at the scene told us the boy had swallowed part of a windshield. My mother said he would have been better off had he swallowed the whole smooth rectangle of the windshield rather than the tiny splintered shards. That’s how I feel about dressing up as these big griefs, pain so unimaginable that it swallows in one gulp the death of my mother, my runaway cat, the touch of Perry’s fingers on my neck and nothing more.

  I pull into a gas station on the way home, and the attendant studies my face as I tell him to fill it up. On rare occasions, people recognize me from Do Unto Others. “Sally, as a fellow woman, I know just what it’s like to lose all your teeth at such a young age,” a woman once said loudly through loose dentures, down the length of a crowded aisle in a grocery store.

  There was one show where I played a woman who was addicted to sadness. A woman in the audience began to talk about her estranged sister, and suddenly an adolescent boy next to her screamed out the name of his best friend who’d moved all the way across the country. When the older man in the back row brought up the fact that his real parents gave him up for adoption, Perry said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get back to the subject at hand. The topic of today’s show is ‘addiction to sadness.’” He paused and looked out into the audience. For the first time in the show’s history, he didn’t say anything. The sadness was everywhere, floating in midair above us all, cloudy beyond recognition.

  So when the gas station attendant bends down next to my window and says, as if there is a secret between us, “Look, I know it sounds like a cheap line, but I’m serious—haven’t I seen you before? Your face is so familiar—do you work at the Stop and Shop?” I shake my head no. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I know I’ve seen you,” he says, handing me my change. “I’m sure you did,” I say reassuringly, and all of us feel the stroke of a smooth, warm hand of comfort.

  GENEALOGY

  WHEN the phone rang in the middle of the night, Bernard answered it even though he wasn’t in his own apartment or even in his own city. It made him feel needed for once.

  “What?” he said into the receiver, eyes still closed. He was emerging from the deep fog of postcoital sleep. The woman lying next to him, moist and naked, said something about getting the fucking dog off the bed though there was no dog, then rolled over, pulling the tangle of covers with her.

  The person on the other end of the line said nothing. “What?” Bernard asked again, starting to feel a familiar panic—the sensation was one of small birds flying in his chest. For him, middle-of-the-night phone calls meant death (his ex-wife’s) or anguish (his daughter’s). “Is everything okay?” he said. The tiny frantic wings beat against the cage of his heart.

  “Who are you?” a nervous male voice asked.

  “Come on,” Bernard said. What a question. “Can’t you do better than that? Isn’t there anything else you’d like to know?” For the past several weeks since taking a leave of absence from the university, Bernard had lived his life like this: he drove rental cars up and down the East Coast, spending nights with women who found h
is kind of drifting irresistible or else they found him just pathetic enough (finally, a man who needed directions). In the tourist area of rest stops, women asked him if he was lost (And how! he always thought). Once, as he wandered through a roadside plastic dinosaur park on Route 1 in Massachusetts, a woman—a paleontologist who took study breaks there—appeared seemingly out of nowhere and asked him if he wanted a tour.

  The woman lying next to him had said she smelled his sadness. “What does sadness smell like?” he’d asked. “Maple syrup,” she said. He reminded her that he’d been eating pancakes when they first met. “No, you smelled like syrup,” she insisted. It was his scent that drew her to him as he sat alone in the twenty-four-hour Greek coffee shop underneath her apartment on a grim strip of discount tire stores, electonic stores advertising beepers for sale, nail salons, and across the street, the psychiatric hospital the color of dried blood.

  “That fucking dog,” the woman said and flipped over, pulling a pillow over her face.

  “Look,” the nervous voice suddenly burst forth. “I call this number occasionally to get off. Are you happy now? I pick up the phone and dial randomly, and every once in a while I get lucky. This is one of my lucky numbers, pal.”

  “Maybe you dialed the wrong number?” Bernard asked.

  “It’s no wrong number,” the nervous voice said defiantly. “I’ve got it on speed dial.”

  In the hotels where Bernard stayed, when he wasn’t staying with one of these women (they were never looking to take him on permanently—the fact that he was a wanderer was part of his lonely charm), he was treated with the respect due a man in his late fifties with all the nutty professor trappings—shabby tweed coat, unkempt hair and graying beard, the way he smelled of musty, cramped offices piled high with old, decaying books (except when he was having pancakes with maple syrup).

  Bella looked out from under her pillow—she was a beauty not everyone could appreciate, with eyes so close together it made people a little cross-eyed to look at her and a crooked Roman nose. “Is that Ralph? Ralph, fuck off, you fuck.” She took the phone from Bernard and threw it down, then put her hand over Bernard’s, let it linger in a way that made him think of earlier, her soft pubic hair a darker red than her hair, against his face. He reached over to touch her, and she reached just beyond him to pull a condom from the box on the bedside table, handing it to him as she closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

  “I like to pretend I’m asleep,” she said. She was an actress, so Bernard didn’t ask.

  When the phone began its off-the-hook beeping, Bernard thought: Exactly. Sex is an emergency. For Ralph, for Bella, for me. He sometimes thought of his penis as a surgeon’s instrument. Entering somebody else’s body in such a profound way must leave a person changed or more knowledgeable. Here’s the part where you’re full of shit, he heard his ex-wife say. But touching someone else was the only way he kept from floating away these days. Here’s the part where you have an epiphany about your life, his ex-wife would have said. Here’s the part where you look at the wreckage of your life and make something good out of it. She had always hated to watch him wander aimlessly, something she never did. She had been a big narrator of life as it happened. Her life was a movie, and she was the annoying person in the audience who had seen it before.

  The phone rang again, and Bernard pulled out of Bella, still pretending to sleep.

  Bella turned and looked at him incredulously. “That’s my phone, you know.”

  “Yes?” Bernard had heard his ex-wife’s voice so clearly that he expected it to be her on the phone, telling him to leave his daughter’s city if he couldn’t bring himself to visit her. Even though Bernard and his ex-wife could barely be in the same room together when she was alive, he’d always taken comfort in the idea of her out there in the world.

  “Ah, man,” the man said. “Fuck.”

  “Why’d you call back, Ralph?” Usually people wanted to tell him their sad stories. They hurled them at him like stones from the sinking ships of their lives. After less than twenty-four hours with Bella, she had told him about her wicked parents, her almost-marriage, and the miscarriage that kept her in bed with the shades drawn most days, leaving her apartment only to go to the acting class that she hoped would someday change her life.

  “Why don’t you shut up, you big fat asshole. My name’s not even Ralph.”

  Here’s the part of my life where I get divorced, Bernard’s ex-wife had said. Here’s the part where I get remarried. And when she died a month ago in a freak avalanche on a ski vacation with her new husband in Italy, she probably thought: Here’s the part of my life where I die a ridiculous, accidental death.

  “Don’t call me an asshole.” Bernard hung up the phone and walked through the unfamiliar bedroom in the dark, picking up his clothes on his way to the bathroom. He pulled on his underwear until he realized it was not his but Bella’s. He turned on the bathroom light and looked at himself, a grown man stuffed into women’s underpants. He had become the person other people thought he was. It was his chairman who had suggested Bernard take a leave of absence after the so-called series of events. Allegedly Bernard had flown several paper airplanes during a seminar he co-taught with another professor—a tiny man, hunched like a comma and squinty from too much time spent reading in poorly lit rooms. Bernard remembered the discussion of the Oresteia—but he had no recollection of folding or throwing the airplanes. A student told him later that he’d made a crashing sound as the airplanes hit the walls and fell to the floor. Bernard did remember the day he was attempting to teach Saint Augustine’s City of God and he’d fallen out of his chair, unable to keep his balance. He’d excused himself to go lie on the cool tile of the men’s bathroom, where he was discovered half an hour later by the chairman himself.

  The tomato incident occurred soon after. During a meeting with an advisee—another underappreciated beauty with buckteeth and a deliciously raucous laugh—he’d shared fresh tomatoes from his garden. They’d eaten them like apples—the way that he and his once-upon-a-time family had in a house long gone, a house that was still the setting for many of his dreams—the juice dribbling down their chins. There were no napkins handy, and Bernard had started to feel dizzy again, as if he might fall out of yet another chair, so he had leaned over and licked the juice from the student’s face. She seemed flattered by this tender gesture. It was a moment of pure physical connection in a world that had started to feel more and more to Bernard like a place without gravity—but the department secretary had walked in, alarmed. The chairman—a man who had recently been charged with sexual harassment—was happy to ignore Bernard lying on the bathroom floor in the face of something he could understand. He clapped Bernard on the back. “A little R and R will do you good,” he said knowingly. Bernard hadn’t told anyone that his ex-wife had died, that he had only recently become an ex-widower. Not even their daughter knew—why would she? He hadn’t seen her in years.

  Bernard walked back into the bedroom, still in Bella’s underwear. Bella was standing in the middle of the room fully dressed, her red hair tied in a knot.

  “Cute,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  In the coffee shop they sat in a booth next to two men drinking coffee and eating baklava. “I don’t want to talk about the Knicks,” one of them said. “They’re not talking about me.”

  Bernard and Bella ordered coffee and rice pudding.

  “Before it comes,” Bella said, “let’s try something.”

  Out the window Bernard could see the hospital. “Whatever,” he said.

  “Don’t be such a fuck-and-run type,” Bella said. “Humor me a little.”

  “All right, all right,” Bernard said, and he touched her crooked nose. Here’s the part where I marry you, his ex-wife had said. Here’s the part where we have a beautiful child filled with the potential of all children who have not lived long in the world. Here’s the part where our child drops out of college and moves from city to city. Here’s the part where o
ur child presses her tender, pulsing veins against my ear to let me hear the blood swirl and rush, begging to be let out. Here’s the part where I tell her it’s supposed to rush and swirl, but she says no, her blood is filling the rooms of her apartment, sloshing against the walls, rushing to drown her.

  “Imagine the weight of the mug, the smell of the coffee, the bitter taste,” Bella said.

  “But my real coffee is on the way,” Bernard protested. The waitress sloshed two cups of coffee in front of them. “In fact,” Bernard said, “here it is.” He reached for the cream, but Bella swatted his hand away.

  “Use your imagination,” Bella said, retying the knot in her hair.

  “Imagination was never my strong suit.” Bernard lifted his cup into the air between them, as if she wouldn’t be able to see it otherwise.

  “Aren’t you an English professor?”

  “Western Civ,” Bernard said. “Was.”

  “Give a girl a break,” Bella said. She lifted the cup out of his hands and put it on the table. “If you’d just focus.”

  Here’s the part where our child moves from hospital to hospital. Here’s the part of my life where I have to rally alone again, his ex-wife had said. Here’s the part of your life where you have to get off your sorry ass and rally, she told Bernard, but he couldn’t. He’d never set foot in any of the hospitals. Sitting here across the street from the dried-blood building where his daughter was now was as close as he’d ever gotten. There were the middle-of-the-night calls from various cities over the years: Are you really my father? What did you do with my father? Who are you really?

  Was it possible he felt too much, that if he saw his daughter with her swirling, rushing blood in the hospital that the tiny birds would beat their way out of his heart? You’re such an asshole, he heard his ex-wife say. There are parts you are leaving out. There are parts of you in her, your blood rushing and swirling in her veins. It was true, Bernard had longed to press the tender, pulsing veins of his own wrist to someone’s ear, to anyone’s ear; he’d pressed his wrist to Bella’s ear last night, but she didn’t wake up, which seemed to him a good sign, a sign that his blood was not yet clamoring to be let out, because this is what he was most afraid of—the possibility that he’d inherited in reverse this rushing and swirling from his daughter.