by Lee Matalone
“Shouldn’t we talk about how you are feeling?” I ask.
“Thankfully, there is not much to discuss.”
“Then what can we talk about?”
“There’s you to talk about,” he says.
“If it disappeared, the cancer, then where did it go?”
“That is the question.” He pauses. “Do you want to see the CT scan?” He gets up from the couch and goes into another room. I cannot hear him rustling through a drawer or opening a cabinet.
He sits down, hands me the plastic image.
“That is beautiful,” I say. His insides reveal a void, a black and gray openness. He is free. “May I have it?”
“Of course,” he says, unsurprised.
I hold the scan and raise it above my head, like I’m going to give a rousing speech, like I’m going to tell him that now that nothing is holding us back we must be together, that we are free, not just him.
But like a statue I begin weeping, from my armpits, my eyes. He stands and reaches for me, this discarded Venus that he put out on the road for someone else to take. He rubs my cheeks, giving me a last polish.
Pat
There were always secrets between us. Though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that she never wanted it that way from the beginning. When we were first married, first dating, even, she wanted me to tell her everything. She wanted nothing to be off-limits. Like, if we were having a conversation, and I got distracted by some blip in my brain, my monkey mind following some new thread, she would ask, But what are you thinking? Where did your brain go? Or, if we were in bed, and we had been silent for a stretch of time, she would say, But what are you thinking now? And then, moments later, when another bridge of silence was built, And what now?
I would say nothing because at a time like that most people’s brains aren’t really focused, aren’t in the right state for complex thinking. For the times that I was indeed thinking about something, nothing stood in for all the things with which that moment didn’t need to bother, those stray thoughts from the recesses of the mind that slip through the fence when they’re not supposed to.
Over time, she became very used to this idea of unknowing. She accepted that some things were off-limits to the other. But I wasn’t deliberately trying to hide. I had nothing of consequence to keep from her.
Secrets is probably the wrong word. That makes it sound as if I were trying to keep important things from her, things that would break her heart if she discovered them. Really, what I was keeping from her were inconsequentialities, afternoon dry cleaning pick-ups and near-missed phone conferences, things like that.
I think we were both okay with this space between us. We grew accustomed to it, as all couples eventually do. We settled into our respective places in the relationship, happy that we could be the protector of the other’s solitude.
I knew that if there was ever something of real consequence that I couldn’t bring myself to share with her, that then our togetherness would be truly compromised.
Maybe I can never redeem myself. Maybe trying to explain any of it is just another narcissistic endeavor in a line of thinly masked efforts at self-preservation. I’m just an asshole. That’s how Chloe will always see it. Probably how Cyb sees me, too.
The only thing I can say is that I was just doing what I thought could give her the best shot at a second happiness.
Maybe that changes nothing. At the least, I hope that it shows that I had good intentions.
Maybe it should be known that I suffered without her, too. That I drove by her house at all hours of the day. That I, nearly, sent one thousand pitiful heartsick text messages. That I cried on the floor of the bathroom, our bathroom. That I yearned for Tito to keep me up at night, crying at the bed post to be let out. The wanting never stopped.
But I did my best to keep my yearning for her from her. I didn’t want to make it any worse than it already was.
Even now, I hold back. After all I’ve put her through, it would not be fair. Not at all.
Maybe happiness came too early for us, she emailed the evening after she came over to my house, when I told her that I had gotten better, that I would likely be fine. We had it too good in our pretty-bodied years. So when C. broke down the door we had not prepared. We had taken no precautionary measures, established no security systems, failed to lock our precious belongings up in a safe. All of it, all of the happiness was right there on the kitchen counter for C. to take. We were naive. Too happy too early.
When I learned about M., I realized I was naive to think that she never kept things from me. Still, I’m kept up by this anxiety, wondering what I never knew about her, what I won’t ever know. It’s funny.
Beau
When we found out Pat would live, for a time, things got worse. Chloe and I were snacking at a rest stop sixty miles from my apartment. We got farther than we thought, driving and driving with Faron Young and Loretta Lynn.
She said, “I wasn’t expecting the color in his cheeks when he opened our—I mean, his—front door. I wasn’t expecting his biceps.”
“You were not expecting that,” I said, feeding her a piece of cheese on cracker. It had poured rain a few hours earlier. Despite the sun that followed the downpour, the dampness still pressed through our blanket, making everything just a little bit uncomfortable.
She said, “He led me to the couch, which I didn’t recognize. There was a coffee table, too—hideous. One of those iron-and-glass-top things that only a man without a woman could find appealing.”
“What were you drinking?” I asked.
“French press. Did you know, in the winter, we had to roll up towels and shove them up underneath the doorframe? The house could get so drafty.”
I wiped my hands on the cloth napkin and dabbed crumbs from the edge of her lip.
“He was not completely put back together, you know.” She rubbed her fingers along the frame of her lips. “People say someone who’s ill is all skin and bones but I think the thing you notice really is the skin. Like the color of him’s changed from fawn to porcelain.”
“How did that make you feel?” I fed her again. She wiped her lips again.
“Good.”
A siren wailed on the highway. An ambulance sped by us, close, but kept going on away from us.
“What did you discuss?”
“He asked if I wanted to see the CT scan. I said yes.”
I did not say, Why would you do that to yourself?
“I told him it was beautiful.”
I did not say, Oh, Chloe.
“I asked if I could keep it.”
And of course, he let her keep it. It’s hanging on her wall now, over her toilet, framed in an ornate gold antique that was falling apart but that we glued back together in her kitchen, together.
She said she cried in his arms and he carried her up to bed.
Later she said that was a lie.
But truthfully, she said he said, I’m not forgetting you.
She said, I forgot my coat there, too.
After that, Chloe and I were bathing together at least twice a week.
A month or so after she went to his house, we saw a woman being zipped up into a bag in the grocery store parking lot. The paramedics had set her bag of groceries on top of the gurney, as if she still needed them. She looked middle-aged, like she had had half a life. On the drive back to Chloe’s, we wept.
We were nothing like Bonnie and Clyde. We played Cruelty, we had it in us, but we did not want it to be us. We wanted—
Family Room
When a child draws a picture of a house, Bachelard says, it signifies something about his childhood. If he draws a geometric structure with a neat roof and tidy yard, then he is representing the happiness of his rearing. If he draws a crooked house with two walls and no roof or windows or not even a doorknob, he is communicating the dilapidation of his homelife. “When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.”
I have no child to draw pictu
res of this house but let’s just say he existed. I want to create a home that would bring light to this child. I want him to be able to draw a tidy square house with symmetrical lengths and widths and boxes of petunias set below two square windows and a rectangular door with a large yellow doorknob. I want him to draw two trees with orbular red fruits adorning its chestnut branches. I want him to break apart the house and show its hearth, which is forever glowing with a red-blue fire. This is his family room. This is his happiness.
Among a crowd of homeless men living in Waterloo Station, Gavin Bryars recorded one particular man who happened to be singing.
Bryars returned to his recording studio and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape. Then he went to have an espresso. When he came back, a group of people, techs and engineers and studio haunts, were sitting in the room, some quietly weeping.
“What happened?” he asked, worried some global catastrophe, another school shooting in America or a police officer murdering a black child, had taken place while he burned his lip on cheap Cuban espresso from a tin.
Listen, they said.
Looping on the record player, twenty-six minutes of a man’s devotion.
I open my computer, find a link to the recording, and send it to Pat. I imagine him playing it as he falls asleep, waking in the night to the loop still rolling, Jesus’s blood never failed me yet echoing out into the hallway. I imagine him stepping onto the cold bathroom tile, the hairs on his legs stiffening as he takes a piss, the sound of the piss hitting porcelain ringing in the quiet of our house, his house alone now, causing him to realize how alone he really is, the cancer (The Great Puts-It-All-Into-Perspective Device) no longer there to mask his solitude, a big, black blanket that smothered all other senses, the emotional ones, too. Now, the piss is an alarm.
All the candles are lit in the house. All the white ones I ordered online at a bulk price. I have not hung any decorations otherwise, but the candles do the trick. It is Christmas Eve and our little family is in the kitchen, assembling dinner, Tito and Beau and Mom and me.
“A motley crew, aren’t we?” Mom says, placing the goose on the wood table, yet to be dented.
“Nowhere I’d rather be,” Beau says, filling the wineglasses red to the rim.
“What are we missing?” I stand by the oven with my hands mittened, arms akimbo, apron floured.
“Nothing, sweetie,” Beau says.
“Nothing, sweetie,” Mom says. “Sit.”
There is too much food but we all love to eat, in our own way. Mom will only eat a bite of this, a bite of that. Beau will fill his plate to the rim, layering goose with gravy with mashed potatoes with cranberry sauce. I will go back for seconds. Tito will lick our white plates.
“Take that off and sit down,” Beau says, lifting the apron off my neck.
The three of us around a round table. When we cheers we rouge our lips, we dot the new white tablecloth, creating a kind of memento of the occasion, a work of art, some kind of Kusama.
They are okay, these stains. Lived in, this house becomes home.
The things that never had a chance to come into our home:
Television set (Pat and I both had no use for it, a distraction, an ugly box, the great technological threat to feng shui.)
Linen bedsheets, on the list, “One Day”
Bookshelves that functioned as doors to another room, where we could disappear from dinner guests, my kisses rubbing along his ear while glasses clinked in the living room
Baby monitor
Like many precious rituals of the past, kura skymning (or halla skymning) is fading from Scandinavian life. According to this particular tradition, at dusk, the individual must sit in silence, jettisoning all distractions, and let his brain wander off in any direction it needs. He must not fidget with his cell phone or bicker about who forgot what on the grocery list. His duty is meditation.
Once dark arrives, he turns on the kitchen light and returns to the lentils.
In the family room, I sit facing a wall, which someone intended to host a television (the ugly cords dangling like entrails), and look at it. I do not close my eyes. I am here. I keep dusk for myself.
Front Door
Good morning, Reno. Good morning, Chloe.
Hello, Roger.
Do you see this sunrise?
I saw it. It’s passed now. But it was beautiful, yes.
It’s just coming up here in the desert and it’s something else.
Where are you going?
It’s a quiet morning, which makes me worry. Something is going on that we aren’t picking up on. Criminals are smart this morning.
And dumb other mornings?
Less careful. Are you okay? You’ve been listening to me a lot?
There was something about the way you say certain words.
Like?
Like “Good morning, Reno.”
What about it?
There’s something about you, unlike the others.
I guess you’re not one hundred percent incorrect about that.
Thank you for talking.
It’s my pleasure. Will you still be listening?
At least for a little while. You’re good company.
Is it strange, ma’am, to say it’s comforting to me to know you’re out there?
Not at all, which probably says something about me, doesn’t it?
Nothing that isn’t good, I don’t think.
That’s a generous opinion.
You can count on me, Chloe.
Have a good day out there, Roger. Be safe, please.
I’ll do my best, ma’am.
Around the anniversary of the sixth month in the new house, I thought about not doing this anymore. Why couldn’t I escape, put the house on the market, rent an apartment in a sweaty town on the Gulf or a remote cabin in northern Maine, give up on this project of home making? After half a year, the house still felt like a hotel, devoid of character and warmth, a shell of a space meant for people’s fantasies, romantic and twisted. I imagined myself alone in this house after another six months, lying on the guest room floor, swallowing sleeping pills in the bed-less, lamp-less, comfort-less room.
But I’m not that person. I couldn’t possibly stain the recently refinished hardwood floors. People don’t like to move into houses where murders and suicides have happened. Yes, the potential buyers would get a good deal on this renovated, updated home, but, still. I can never again be the person to spoil another’s fantasy of home.
The house is nowhere near finished, whatever that means. It is likely that I’ll be painting baseboards, installing light fixtures, caulking the windows of the shed, for years. I’m learning patience. That’s just as much part of the process as trips to Home Depot, appointments with the handyman.
I’m not going anywhere.
New Addition
Let’s say this child existed, or could exist.
How would he exist? Beau says, sitting on the edge of the bath, I in my towel on the lid of the toilet.
Would we—
No, he goes. We couldn’t. He knows we must sit in proximity to one another’s nakedness. We could use a surrogate, if you were opposed to carrying—
No—I wouldn’t want that. I’d want the weight of him, of her.
I fold my arms across my chest. A cold, pre-snow gust blows in from the shower. I get up to close the window.
Your ass, it’s getting big, I say.
I will be saying the same of you, soon enough.
I leave the bathroom, leaving him standing alone, return in jeans, a clean white T-shirt.
He takes my hands in his, like a movie man about to utter his proposal. I am so happy to give this to you.
On the floor, the little heater cooks. He stoops to turn the knob.
With a baby, you will have to be more sensible than to keep the heater on and the windows open. Whatever will the child learn?
I press my hand to his lips. You can’t do that. You won’t be allowed to do that.
I know. I will know when to shut up. You are the King and Queen.
Lullaby
Practicing lullabies?
Yes. Her text comes to me deliberately, with forward motion. So when he comes I won’t be holding him in one arm and Googling song lyrics in the other.
Henri and I are on a walk in the neighborhood. He pulls at the leash. He chokes himself with yearning for the neighbor’s collie we pass on the road. There is no sidewalk. We walk in the middle of the street. He is no good at this but we are trying something new.
Give me five and I will call you, I text back.
We are not far from the house and I was not planning any sort of set walk, so we go to the cul-de-sac at the end of the road and loop us back, toward my house.
“It is okay, Henri. It is okay.”
His mouth waters endlessly on the leash, his body wanting something his brain cannot yet fully comprehend. Maybe this is what it has been like for Chloe. Her eyes scanned the facades of houses, her hands tucked cotton sheets under mattresses, all while her mind said, Won’t this be nice for a child?
“Let’s get you dried off, Henri.”
Underneath this rag of a beach towel, his body moves in harmony with the gestures of my drying. I push and pull the towel against him, and he arches his back against my hands. There is so much to be said about the love of a dog, but now is not the time for that. Now is the time for Chloe, and—
Which song would you like to know?
Any, she texts. All.
This will be easier if I write them down. Email work?
Yes. Perfect.
I’ve situated my desk against a window that overlooks the pond. Depending on the season, I watch the geese circling and calling, the children in the paddleboats circling and calling. In April I sit here and prepare my taxes and in December I sit here and write Christmas cards. This desk has remained the same desk for thirty years. My routines I have kept with me as much as possible, a pattern against the chaos of the world.