A Parallel Life (6 page)

“You don't have to tell me this,” I said. My stomach was already clenching, my throat constricting.

“You've got to understand this. She wanted me to make love to her but I couldn't. There we were lying in this big bed in our stateroom and all we could do together was cry. God, how I cried, but even when I was crying with her I wanted you—I wanted a woman who wasn't dying.” He moved his arm so that it rested on my chest. His arm felt like the beam of a building had fallen on me and was crushing me. “Oh, Jesus, it was awful,” he said. “She's just so thin now, and her poor little head is like a little baby chicken's body with all this little fluffy hair that's like down on something new, something fresh. And she's rotting inside. Oh, Jesus.”

“But you said she was getting better.”

“Well, the doctors never say exactly what's going on, but they just did a scan and it's everywhere now. She wants to leave the hospital and spend her last days at home.”

“She's dying?”

His hand moved to my breast and rested there. I tightened every muscle in an effort to turn my flesh into some kind of carapace.

“I'm sorry to drop all of this on you. I know this isn't supposed to happen. I know you didn't bargain for this, but then neither did I.”

I took his hand away from my breast and brought it to my lips. It was a soft-palmed hand, the fingers narrow and tapering. I kissed the palm of the hand and slid myself away from him. “I have to go.”

“I need you,” he said. It was almost a whimper. “I told her about us. I'm a confessor. I mean, she's known all along, almost from the start, about you and all of the others. I just haven't been able to resist other women. She was going to leave me years ago, but she didn't. I've always
managed to talk her out of it. I'm a good husband in other ways. We have a beautiful house. Financial security. I love our kids. Jesus. It's just this business with women.”

“Like me.”

“You, yes. And, Jesus, there was a woman on the ship. Beautiful. Red curly hair. A widow. We had a drink while Roxie was sleeping. When she bent over I could see down her dress to her navel. She told me where her room was. I mean, I was giving myself points all during the trip for all the things I wasn't doing, patting myself on the back for being such a good boy.”

“I need to go.”

“Not yet.”

I put on my bra and my panties, my hose, my blouse and skirt, my loafers. I smelled sulphur as he struck a match and lit a cigarette. Then smoke. I smelled him on my hands as I lifted them to push back my hair. My hair would smell of him and of his smoke. The room reeked with our sourness. I had to get away. “I need to go.”

“This is agony for me,” he said and sat up resting the cigarette on the edge of the nightstand. “Pure agony.” His stomach sagged over his groin which beneath its tangle of pubic hair was a ghostly white in contrast to the deep tan above the waist. I wondered if Roxie had gotten tan, too. I fought away a picture of them lying side by side on those ship's lounge chairs, both of them slathered with oil, Roxie in a demure suit that wouldn't subject her tender scars to the equatorial blaze. She'd wear a big hat over her bandana—or her wig. He would hold her hand and be solicitous. He'd suck in his stomach when he stood to walk to the railing where he'd manage to rub against the shoulder of the widow with the red curly hair. Next year
he could take another cruise and find more widows with various hair colors who'd whisper their room numbers over margaritas.

I walked the eight blocks to the library facing a southerly wind that promised to bring rain. Maybe it would be one of the last rains of the season. There were only a few trees still in flower. Spring was no longer fresh.

Lately the library had more and more come to resemble a waiting room. A crowd of street people had arrived to establish their positions early, before the rain fell. They slumped in the armchairs, either leafing through magazines or dozing, their day thickly plotted with minutes to be filled. I knew most of their first names. Some were extremely literate and were proud to identify themselves with the library, pleased to be part of an institution that provided both information and shelter.

When I had been a girl in parochial school, I had considered life in a convent. It seemed to be daring to live apart from men. To aspire to a higher love. To reject the mundane. The library had become my convent. I was not celibate, but neither was I monogamous. I was using the tightrope of lust to span the abyss between these poles.

Alice Cortezar, the other reference librarian on then, was in the back room Xeroxing recipes from a new, expensively illustrated Italian cookbook. “Here,” she said handing me a sheet of paper, “try this one tonight. Everything I've made from this book is delicious.” It was a recipe for fettucini with crab and shrimp in a white wine and cream sauce.

“Bill doesn't eat seafood,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” she said and gave me a look of true pity, her dark brows coming up, her full lips drawing together. I wished I could store that look, bottle it, preserve it in amber, for the time coming soon when I knew I'd really want it.

Right around six o'clock two police officers strolled in and took away one of our patrons, a sweet-looking young man who had come before noon with one side of his face colored by livid bruises and an abrasion that suggested a skid over cement. He'd taken a chair in the music listening section, put on the headphones, and immediately passed out. He went quietly with only the most modest gestures of protest.

As I was filling in the day's final report forms, I got a call from Jack, who told me he had to see me the next day. He spoke in a whisper and I was sure he was calling from home. “I know I shouldn't have laid all my problems on you,” he said, “but you're the only person I can talk to right now. Listen, I'm going nuts. You don't have to give me any advice. I just need someone to hear me.”

“You told me already that you're a confessor. I can't absolve you of anything.”

“I realize that, and I do feel guilty, you know—I want you to believe that. I'm filled with guilt. It's worse than you know.”

“I'm not sure I want to know too much more, Jack.”

“I understand,” he said. “I'll try to spare you. But I've got to talk to someone.”

While I had only considered life in a convent, my sister, Maureen, had actually entered one right after high school at the time when nuns in droves were deserting. She
stayed for several years until her small order disbanded because it could no longer support itself. Many of her sister nuns chose to find houses together to try to maintain a semblance of their old life with outside jobs, but at that point Maureen decided to leave for good. She joined an airline as a flight attendant almost as if it were the same sort of thing—a service job helping others on their way to some destination. She stayed on until she gained so much weight that the airline made her leave.

Now she was an obese single woman working in the kitchen of a place that served free lunches to the hungry in downtown Los Angeles. Part of the job involved driving around and begging food from supermarkets and restaurants. Maureen was not only fat now, she could also be terribly smug about her life of good works. She and my mother were in my kitchen sitting on stools beside the counter when I got home. My mother was looking better than she had in months in a new pair of white duck slacks and a pouffy-sleeved green blouse that made her eyes bluer. Maureen had on one of her many muumuus. She had taken lately to wearing a large silver cross that hung between her breasts like a target.

“I make a fantastic spaghetti sauce with ground turkey,” Maureen was saying to Bill as he browned hamburger and onion in a large skillet. “Do you have any idea how much damage hooved animals cause on this planet?”

“It's just a matter of taste,” he said. “I like the way hamburger tastes.” As always, Bill was mild and tolerant.

“Well think of your health at least,” she said, giving me the merest nod of acknowledgment.

“I'll give up apples then,” he said, “if I have to give up something. They're sure to contain toxic substances at some level.”

“Don't you ever cook?” said my mother to me as I put down my bag.

“I cook on weekends.” I went to the stove and kissed Bill on the cheek.

“I like to cook,” said Bill. “Ellen restores my faith in myself by eating anything I fix.”

“I always did the cooking,” my mother said. “And I kept house. I could always find the table in my kitchen.”

I made a dramatic show of sliding newspapers and books from the table to clear it and dropping them on the floor. “Voilà.”

“And even though I cooked every meal, I managed to keep my figure,” she said, scowling at Maureen's wide backside.

Maureen acted as if she didn't hear and pointedly pulled a hunk from the loaf of French bread, buttered it, and shoved it into her mouth.

At dinner, Mandy and Amy did their job of diverting us by arguing which was really a better team, the Giants or the A's. Amy was a Giants fan and Mandy rooted for the A's. Each girl, with appalling seriousness, vehemently defended certain perfectly ineffable qualities inherent in each team. The rarified nature of the argument left my mother speechless. The rest of us more or less voted on various points by grunts or nods as we chewed. Maureen had refused Bill's sauce in favor of butter and Parmesan cheese on her spaghetti, having failed to connect the existence of those two food items with hooved animals.

“Mother's praying the rosary, you know,” Maureen said as we cleared the dishes. My mother, Bill, and the girls were playing Scrabble in the living room. “I thought she'd given up on the faith.”

“I don't know that it means she hasn't,” I said. “I know she's stuck in the Sorrowful Mysteries. I'm not sure that's a good sign.”

“She still loves our father. I think she's praying for him to come back.”

Maureen and I had had this discussion ever since he left us. “I think you want him to come back,” I said. “I think you want the circle closed neatly. You want the ideal of the holy family reified.”

“That's not fair.” She'd brought over a two-liter bottle of red wine for dinner and we'd each had a couple of glasses. Now she sloshed some into a water glass and tilted it back. “I believe in the sanctity of the marriage vow.”

“Oh, nonsense,” I said. “People say things in a ceremony with a lot of people looking on. It's just some primitive legalistic form. It hasn't anything more to do with life than a rental agreement. If the apartment suits you, you stay. If not, you look for another. You should know. You took a vow too—you were a bride of Christ—and look what happened to you.”

“That was different. We were forced to disband.”

“Well how do you think Jesus felt?”

“What would you do if Bill did what our father did?” she asked, ignoring my last comment. Her neck was blotched red and the red was spreading to her face.

“Bill's very happy,” I said. I poured my own glass, but left it sitting there. “Bill's not like our father.”

“But you are, aren't you?” she said. “You're like Dad. I've always suspected you.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I love Bill. I love my marriage.”

“You've always defended Dad.”

“His leaving made me unhappy, too,” I said. “I just thought I understood him.”

Tears rose in her eyes and began to slide down the sides of her nose. “Oh, Maureen. Don't still be miserable over that. It happened years ago—geologic periods ago.”

“I can't help it. I'm lonely and miserable and it's all his fault. If they'd stayed together, I'd have trusted marriage and I wouldn't be the way I am.” She let her head fall onto her folded arms and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved. The sounds of the sobs coming from her were terrible, big gulps like hiccups followed by choking.

“Maureen, don't do this.” I reached out and touched her shoulder and felt her quiver.

She looked up, her eyes red, her mascara flowing in tiny dark channels down her cheeks. “We're all empty inside. That's what being human means. Only God can fill us up. I eat too much because I've got a hole inside of me that I can't fill up in this world.”

“My sister Maureen says that we're all empty and that she eats too much to fill the hole inside her,” I said to Jack. We were back in the gray apartment. It was a sudden hot day and the leather couch stuck to the backs of my legs. “Does that make any sense?”

He'd mixed me a vodka with tonic but he was drinking his vodka straight over ice. “It sounds like she's been going to one of those groups where people talk about their feelings.”

“I just thought it was interesting.”

“Okay, it's interesting. But I've got my own problems. I'm sorry your sister's overweight.”

“No, I'm sorry. I know things are rough for you and I wasn't trying to diminish your problems.”

“Everybody's sorry.” He slammed down the drink and poured another. “You don't have any idea what's going on.
You don't know what my problems are. You have no idea.”

“I realize that.”

“She came home from the hospital yesterday. We sent the kids to her mother's so we could be alone. She said she wanted to talk. Do you know what she wanted to talk about?”

I didn't say anything. I could think of several topics Roxie might have chosen. Jack tried to get the glass up to his lips, but his hand began to tremble. The glass slipped from his fingers. His eyes followed its descent with as much horror as if it had been a bomb. When it struck the floor and shattered, he looked truly puzzled, as if he couldn't remember how the pieces of glass, the cubes of ice, the liquid had gotten there.

I went to the kitchen for some paper towels. He followed me, stopped me at the sink, and turned me around, holding my arm so that I had to face him. “She wanted me to help her die,” he said. “Roxie had some idea that I could help her die.”