But the days following each round of chemo were miserable, and my mother suffered from that poison. It nearly hurts too much to think about it all these years later. I’d always thought her spirit unbreakable. Even with all she’d been through, her massive surgery, all that weight loss, a prognosis of certain death within six months to a year, she took cancer in stride and found bits and pieces of joy within it. But when the chemo really hit her, those four or five days when it was at its worst in her system, the mother I knew disappeared, replaced by someone living an agony so terrible there was no bright side to be found, not even for her. My father and I were forced to watch chemo do the one thing that seemed impossible, which was to break my unbreakable mother. She would eventually bounce back once she began to feel better, but I think he and I came to dread this triweekly ordeal nearly as much as she did.
My mother had lived in my mind as an immortal for so long, and now her mortality, its imminence, was in front of all of us and we were unable to turn away from it.
I didn’t want to see Wit.
I didn’t ever want to see it. Seeing Wit was pretty much at the top of the list of things I had no desire to do. Going to a several-hour play about a woman suffering and dying from ovarian cancer was the last thing I wanted to do, the last way I wanted to spend my precious free time. Why would I want to put myself through the fictional performance of death by ovarian cancer, when I was already living it in reality? When I was forced to witness it happening to my family and my mother?
No. No, I would not go. Not with anyone, but especially not with him.
What I wanted to do in my free time was hang out with Christopher. I wanted to hang out with Dan, too, who by now was my best friend from graduate school. I wanted to spend time with my girlfriends and I wanted to watch Felicity with my RAs, which we loved to do after our weekly meetings because Felicity was also an RA and we delighted in this. I wanted to cook, and I wanted to see disaster movies with ridiculous plots involving volcanoes and asteroids, or watch silly romantic comedies where everyone gets their happy ending. I wanted to go to chain restaurants like the Olive Garden where everything was a known quantity and where even the food was safe because I’d tasted it before. I wanted to drink Coffee Coolattas from Dunkin’ Donuts as often as possible because my mother and I had gotten addicted to them over the summer before her diagnosis, when they were the new “it” drink, and even though now, twenty years later, I think they are disgusting.
The only thing that could top Wit on the list of things I did not want to do was going to see Wit with this man whose attention I had grown to hate with everything in me. I could not think of a more loathsome combination of things I did not want to do. And the only thing that could match my desperation to avoid such an outing with him was his desperation to make that outing happen with me. He wanted to go to see Wit with me as badly as I did not want to go.
As usual, he called and he invited, he showed up in the hallway and he asked. He called again and he pushed. He gave his reasons and made his arguments as he badgered. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it would be cathartic, he thought it would help me understand my mother’s suffering, he thought it would assist me in processing her cancer. He offered a million reasons that I should go, why I needed to go, how it was imperative that I go.
It didn’t seem to occur to him that even if I did want to put myself through this play, maybe I would want to endure this emotionally wrenching experience in the company of someone other than him. Someone with whom I had an intimate relationship, like a best girlfriend, or perhaps Christopher. Someone who would hold my hand, who would feel comfortable putting their arm around me, letting me lean on them, hugging me if I so desired. Someone who would be able to dry my tears, which I would inevitably cry, given the subject matter.
But, was this his plan all along? His hope for the outing?
Did he want to be this person for me? Become him by means of this play? Had he foreseen that there would be a need to console? Did he hope to provoke the need to console, and become my chosen consoler?
I would have no other choice but to lean on him if we went together, because he would be the only person with me. Perhaps this was his fantasy, to escort me to a critically acclaimed play about the tragedy my family was living, knowing full well that it would shake me and dredge up all the fears and emotions over what was happening with my mother, so that he could be the person I turned to, that I leaned on, that I needed to help soothe the pain I would inevitably feel. Perhaps he wanted to be the person to rescue me after my certain collapse by the end of the play.
“Don-na,” he pressed. “You really need to go.”
“Maybe,” I would tell him. “Maybe next week.”
As usual, I hemmed and I hawed. I used my busy schedule as an excuse for why I could not go on this trip or the next one. I used my mother’s cancer, her schedule of doctor’s appointments, taking care of my grandmother, to explain why this weekend wouldn’t work or that weekend either. I used papers that were due, my midterm exams that were coming up. As his invitations continued, I eventually explained that I had no desire to see this particular play, that I felt I couldn’t handle it emotionally. I flat out told him no, that I was not going, that I couldn’t bear to go, that I would see anything else in the world over this particular play, but that this play, my going to it, was just not happening.
He finally gave up on getting me to see Wit.
He had to, because the play had closed.
I was relieved. Once again, I’d avoided a close call, a situation that felt much like the one with the retreat house. But he took my suggestion that I’d rather see anything other than Wit to heart and proposed something other.
“The symphony is playing at the Kennedy Center,” he began.
It was some special performance he was dying to see. Obviously, I should accompany him.
I remember, once again, where I was standing in my apartment when he suggested this latest outing. I was facing the back wall, the cinder blocks shadowed, the light from my kitchen just barely spilling over them. We were on the phone, as usual, because he was calling my house nearly constantly. Avoiding seeing him in person had become a skill of mine, and also a full-time job. But I could not figure out how to dodge his calls. I had to answer my phone because of my mother, because of my job, so answer it I did, but I dreaded its ring. More likely than not, it would be him on the other end.
I wanted to collapse. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, I wanted to throw that clunky old push-button telephone across the room so that it smashed against my shadowy cinder-block wall. Hadn’t I just narrowly avoided seeing Wit with this man? And now I was already facing another situation? Another invitation to avoid, to reject, to outmaneuver, was sitting before me, hovering, pressing into me, threatening me.
I knew, then, that there would be no end to this.
No end to the invitations, no end to the attempts to get me to spend time with him, to go places, to do anything and everything he could possibly think of. If it wasn’t Wit it would be the symphony, and if it wasn’t the symphony it would be some other play, and if it wasn’t a play it would be a musical, and if it wasn’t a musical it would be dinner or coffee or tea or breakfast or lunch or a snack in the afternoon and so on and so forth until the day of my death.
I was so tired. So very tired.
But I told him no. No, I could not go.
The cycle was triggered once again, his pushing me about why I could not go, and my reiterating, for one reason or another, that I was not going. As usual, he told me I was being a bad friend, that friends spent time together, yet I was not spending time with him. I don’t remember the excuse I gave him as to why I could not go, but I now asserted my nos with little remorse or fear.
My will was cracking straight down the middle. My capacity to see a future, my beloved future as a PhD who became a professor, was fading. I was losing my ability to care about anything other than my mother’s survival and making this man sto
p being in my life. If it cost me my future, so be it. What was this future, anyway, if I had to have him in it? Why would I want a future that included him? He was in my field, after all, and always would be, so there was no form of my being a professor that would not involve him.
He refused my no.
Refused to acknowledge it, hear it, accept it. He willed it out of existence. He would only hear my yes, and he would continue to badger me until I gave it to him. Even though I told him no a million times, he bought two tickets for the performance anyway.
The difference between this symphony outing and Wit was that the symphony was playing on a specific date, a date that was marching toward us. He knew that I would not be in Rhode Island on that date. He made sure of this. He would call my mother and check these things, since they were occasionally talking on the phone now in addition to writing letters. He knew I didn’t have classes because he had access to my schedule and was friends with all of my professors. He knew that I didn’t have an RA meeting because he knew what night I held those weekly meetings. He felt I had no excuse but to go, that no excuse I offered was good enough, made sense, was legitimate. But I said no anyway, kept saying it. He asked every single day all the way up until the afternoon of the performance. When that day finally arrived, I was so relieved. I was crossing the finish line of successful avoidance once again.
The phone rang.
I picked up.
It was him.
“I’m at the Kennedy Center,” he said.
He was calling from a pay phone. There was still time for me to change my mind, to come down there and meet him. He still had my ticket, had it with him. He’d gone alone, still hoping I would join him.
No, I told him. I’m sorry, but no.
15
A pear sat on my kitchen counter, rotting.
It was a gift from him, brought back from a trip. I don’t remember where he went, though I feel like it might have been Japan. I no longer cared about his comings and goings. I’d stopped listening closely when he talked. My only desire was to get away, my only thinking about how to make my escape, which began the second he approached, the moment I noticed him out of the corner of my eye.
He’d presented the pear to me like a special offering, a delectable gift. I took it from him because I felt I had to, but when I got home I’d tossed it onto the counter and there it sat for days.
It became an eyesore in my kitchen. I hadn’t even placed it on a dish or in a basket. It sat directly on the counter, a black stain now pooling around it. I don’t like pears, I never have. I don’t eat them. I don’t like their faintly sweet taste, a blander version of the tart, bright apples that I love. I don’t like the pear’s yellow-green color, the way tiny brown dots often mark its skin. I’ve never liked anything about pears, and now that he had given me one I liked them even less. I hated that pear in particular. I hated it on my counter, I hated its perfect pear shape, wide and round on the bottom, sloping and so very female as it curved upward toward its stem. I resented its existence, that it had decided to grow from a pretty flower on a lovely tree, big and bursting until someone decided to pick it, so that it would make its way into his hands, and eventually from his hands into mine. I wanted nothing that had touched his hands. I was not about to ingest something that had touched his skin. I would rather have starved.
So I left it there. It began to sink into the rotting flesh at its base, becoming shorter.
I refused to touch it.
Meanwhile, I cooked Italian sauces and pastas, homemade raviolis, and everything else in my culinary repertoire. I had my RAs over for the occasional dinner and my friends and of course Christopher, too. He never commented on the pear, but he was used to mess, his room in his apartment always a disaster. I wonder if anyone noticed there was a pear grown putrid in my kitchen, that it sat directly on the countertop in a pool of brown mush, whereas everything else nearby was spotless. I cleaned around it, ignored its existence, acted as though I couldn’t see it. I wonder if the people who visited my apartment saw it and thought it was disgusting.
It wasn’t the first gift he’d given me.
Aside from the letters, he’d been giving me books he thought I should read. Books from his very own collection, or the occasional one he bought just for me. I had them in a stack in the corner of my office, by the windows. While I was getting good at tossing his letters into the garbage without remorse, I could not bring myself to do the same with the books. How could I? How could anyone? I was a graduate student. Books were something I saved up for, objects I cherished. I spent entire afternoons wandering bookstores, especially used ones, scouring them for out-of-print volumes by my favorite philosophers and theologians, treasuring the experience of triumph when I managed to locate one on a dusty shelf. Some of the books he gave me were the out-of-print kind, books I needed to read for my PhD and my comprehensive exams. I seemed to have no other choice but to keep them. It was against sanity and defied logic to throw away books, it was a sin of unimaginable proportions. It was beyond my capacity.
As with the pear, once I put those books down somewhere, I didn’t touch them again. That allergy I felt in the vicinity of this professor extended to them, too. They were books I was supposed to read, that I needed to read to do well in my program, but I couldn’t bear the thought of doing so. My aversion grew to encompass the authors themselves. I now associated those writers with him, so I avoided them by extension. I found myself unable to go near anything they’d written, in addition to the books of theirs that he’d given me. These authors provoked the same dread, the same unease, the same nausea that he provoked. I knew this was a problem, that I could not erase these thinkers from my graduate program, because they were too central, that my other professors would not allow me to do this. But my sickness had become so constant that I didn’t care. By turning these books and these thinkers into special gifts, he’d ruined them, much like this ruined pear I couldn’t seem to throw away.
Most of the time I tried not to see the pear when I wandered into my pink kitchen, which was constantly. But there were times when I would consider the pear, its presence, the fact that I knew I would never eat it. Yet I still wasn’t doing anything to get it out of my house. I was allowing it to invade my consciousness, much like that article of his had invaded my consciousness in August.
What had he been thinking when he decided to carry this pear back from his travels? Did he think it was romantic, to give a female student a piece of fruit? To give me something so symbolic within religion? Was he playing the serpent, tempting me from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, albeit with a pear and not an apple? Did he know it would make me think of Saint Augustine and his Confessions? Was he certain that it would, since we’d read Augustine together in my first semester of graduate school, when I was in his class? Was he hoping this pear would transport me back to happier times, when I would waltz into his office on a weekly basis, ready to discuss whatever was on the syllabus, eager for his wisdom?
I’ve had a long love-hate relationship with Saint Augustine, ever since my first year as an undergraduate at Georgetown. He knew this about me. We’d talked about it endlessly during those office hours. The pear confession is one of my favorite moments in that famous autobiography by Augustine, a book I’ve taught many times now in my on-again, off-again life as a professor. It’s a moment that makes me roll my eyes at Augustine, makes me love-hate him all the more.
During his youth, many years before he converted to Catholicism and later became a bishop, Augustine was a champion sinner, a champion in that he was masterful at cataloging each and every sin he believed he had committed, down to his cries as an infant. One night Augustine wandered into an orchard with a group of boys and they decided to steal some pears. For most people this would turn into a funny story later in life, or an event that would fade until it was forgotten, but not for Augustine. For him it was a moment he could never let go, that he refused to let go.
Stealing the pear wa
s symbolic. It tortured him. It was so basic, so minor, so like the boy he was at the time, goofing off with other boys his age. But to Augustine it meant everything that he took that pear. For him it was the sin that began it all, the formative sin that led to his life as a sinner on a far more serious and condemning scale.
Now, sitting in my kitchen, I had a pear.
A pear given to me as a gift, from a priest who’d also sent me his article about the virtues of celibates who fall in love.
Did he think of Augustine’s first sin when he offered me this pear? Did he mean it to symbolize for me something similar? Was the pear intended to represent that first venial sin of Augustine’s, but as a parallel to him, in relation to me? Did he want me to understand this particular pear as his venial sin, the first of many, the sin that would lead to other, mortal sins he would commit with me on a far greater scale? Was this his fantasy?
I didn’t know, couldn’t know for sure, which was always the case with him. He would always do startling things, things that chilled me, like sending me that article, yet these things were never straightforward. They always left room for doubt, so doubt and doubt and doubt I would. One day when I walked into my kitchen and was confronted, yet again, by the pear, I would be sure he’d meant the world with it, that it was symbolic of the many other sins he wanted to commit with me, sins on the same grand scale as Saint Augustine, who kept a mistress for years and fathered a child with her.
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