All My Relations (5 page)

The oxygen mask was a fuzzy lump in her field of vision. White-jacketed EMT's circled her. At Emergency her gurney flew down the corridor.

Her son Tim stood over the bed, hair awry, shirttail untucked. He squeezed her hand.

After visiting hours the busy noises ceased, replaced by the wheezing of therapeutic machinery, the bellows-like breaths of hospital maintenance systems, punctuated by rhythmic groans of a patient across the hall. Uniform gray light left objects distinct but without relation to each other. Certain her breath would stop if she slept, Julia remained vigilant.

Since the moment was unendurable, she chose another—Tim's first apprehension of her, not as food or warmth, but a person, age four months. She had been swinging him in his canvas pouch. With his every downward swoop she reared back, hands upraised, in open-mouthed astonishment. Tim's laughing shriek squinted his eyes and showed his pink gums. But then he simply stared at her, I know you, you wonderful being. For two or three passes they beamed at each other.

The gray set around her again, like gelatin.

“All this brouhaha for someone who's dying,” she said to the nurses and technicians who monitored and tested her the next morning.

No, the doctor insisted. Although bronchitis had degenerated into emphysema, her most acute symptoms were anxiety and fatigue. “You will never lose this disease, and it will shorten your life, but we're talking years,” he said. Unless she continued to smoke. “Then you might as well hop under a bus.”

“Stay with me tonight,” she told Tim.

He fussed. “Against hospital regulations. I'm not a whatchamacallit, garlic around the neck for vampires, a talisman.”

“Make an effort,” Julia said.

Tim arranged a bed of chairs beside her, and she slept. Within a week prednisone had stabilized respiration and she was discharged.

When Julia stepped into her townhouse, even the gaudy Persian carpet was stale with her confinement. She had been ill for months before hospitalization. Nothing had changed except she wasn't coughing. She would watch PBS and attend theater and symphony with her reliable friends. Tim would appear at metronomically paced intervals. The current agreement was once every three weeks.

Julia tried to organize a routine. Retired two years, she was a zoo docent, but the connection had lapsed. Phoning booked her three days in the zoo's information booth.

Paying for groceries at the supermarket checkout, she yearned for a cigarette, that perfect moment when the body relaxed, the smoke jetted through mouth and throat to the lungs, out the nose, a continuity, complete. At even the crinkle of a package in her hand she was swollen with fondness like an escaped balloon. She bought Carltons.

Lighting the cigarette she hyperventilated and it burned halfway
before she could inhale. She sipped experimentally, drew more deeply. After fifty-three years of a carton a week, she must retrain herself to smoke.

Sunday, when the Unitarian congregation volunteered personal announcements, a man named Philip said, “I love to cook, but there's no one but myself to enjoy it.” He wanted to exchange dinners. A newcomer, he was six and a half feet tall, with a beard like fleece to his chest. He wore a gold earring.

To Julia the moment presented itself as a question: Am I acting for my life or against it? She felt she existed only through what she did. She stood. “I'd like that, too,” she said. They agreed on the following Saturday.

Since her husband's death six years before, Julia hadn't dated, not from deference—they had been divorced sixteen years—but simply believing that whole business was over. Saturday she chose a heavy cotton smock, jungle green threaded with scarlet and yellow. She even brushed on makeup.

Philip's second-floor apartment was one room with bath and kitchenette, walls bare. Though he had lived there two years, stacked books occupied the floor, crowding desk and futon into a corner.

Philip's meal consisted of thin-sliced abalone stir-fried with vegetables, and fat black mushrooms like those unspeakable sea-bottom creatures that one tried to accept as equal living things. The whole was drenched in chili oil.

Cross-legged on a mat, they ate from bowls. The food scalded Julia's mouth and flushed her skin. Their eyes teared, faces dripping sweat. Rocking, they laughed at the ridiculous agony.

“I'll never eat anything like this again,” Julia said. “Whoops, no, give me the recipe and I'll cook it for my son. Just kidding.”

“He lives with you?”

Julia explained the schedule, one visit every three weeks, that Tim had dictated.

“Grotesque,” Philip said. “A crueler deprivation than absence altogether.”

“No. At least I have him this much.”

Philip was childless. “For my wife and me, making a baby would have implied too much optimism about our future,” he said.

Tim was an only. “Opportunities for conception in my marriage were rare,” Julia said lightly, but again her face burned. She had decided to hold back nothing from Philip. “If we're going to be friends, I don't want to offer myself under false pretenses. I've been through a difficult episode.”

“Oh?”

Since childhood Julia's sicknesses inexorably progressed to bronchitis. “I can't sleep with your barking all night,” her father had told her. Every winter, for two or three weeks, a month, coughing from a chest cold interrupted conversation, eating, and her job as a home visitor for D.E.S. She canceled outings with friends.

The past November a tickle in her throat descended to her lungs. For five months the cough flapped her like a rag. Sleepless at night, Julia fell into afternoon naps on the couch. Without appetite, she drank soup. By Easter catches occurred in her breathing, when the ribcage would lift, diaphragm push—finally, whistling, a shallow expansion of the lungs.

Bent, hacking, Julia felt inescapably herself. Her shame at the noise, helpless jerking, sputum balled in Kleenex, was linked to the profounder embarrassments: her husband locked in the study with vodka and the Sons of the Pioneers. Tim accusing her, “You give me a
Peanuts
cartoon book, and when I don't laugh you say I've lost my sense of humor.
Your
sense of humor. When I'm with you I have to make a mental checklist of who I am.”

Embarrassment alone could make her cough, knocking the air out of her.

Julia had begun smoking in boarding school, where the girls called their cigs “little man,” as in “I have a rendezvous on the balcony with little man.” Beyond this delicious intimacy, Julia's cigarette was a complete if momentary satisfaction, a devotion to wholeness in things, the opposite of embarrassment. Of course it aggravated the cough.

As she concluded with her release from the hospital, Philip wrapped her in his arms. “Poor Julia.”

“That's not what I meant,” she said, but his broad hands cradled her back, and she settled into his embrace as if it received her exhaustion, not only from the recitation, but the months themselves. Philip straightened his legs to give her a lap. Smelling him through the faintly soapy denim shirt, Julia lay without speaking until, nearly asleep, she said, “I've got to go.”

Philip was unavailable the next weekend, so they set Thursday before, at her place.

When he arrived, Julia suggested a turn around the zoo. The coq au vin she had stewed the previous night; it needed only reheating. The park was so near her townhouse that nights she heard whooping, roaring, and trumpeting. May was still spring, temperature 85, and evening shaded the paths. Philip strode leisurely, hands in pockets, head swiveling with curiosity. In the aviary his eyes, intent, enlarged comically, tracking parrots' arrows of color.

“Why don't I do this?” he said. “The air is marvelous. I never go out.”

Julia chirped to the elephant. Swaying toward them, it greeted her with raised trunk.

“Julia, Dame of the Beasts,” Philip said.

“This is Philip,” Julia said. “Let's see, we toured the cat enclosures, and the lions were asleep, but the tiger was swimming, which I've never seen before.” His flanks had dripped, the sheen of his coat red-gold.

The elephant slapped its trunk side to side, head down, in cadence with Julia's voice.

“That great head with its ludicrous tweak of hair. The animal is so unselfconscious,” Philip said. “What separates them from us,” he muttered. “But not you. You don't seem to formulate yourself for the world.”

Quickly Julia skirted the sun bears, who, still awaiting their promised habitat, paced the cage, thrusting reproachful noses.

“For all that I love the tiger,” she said, “and the elephant—and the otters—and the polar bears—and the birds”—she laughed—“I keep coming back to the monkeys.” The macaques showed their gums and launched into a dizzying orbit of stump, trapeze, and bars.

Leaping for an overhanging mesquite branch, Philip swung one-armed, grinning. His teeth were weathered like piano keys. The plummet of feeling about him, not yet for him, filled Julia with dread.

Though landing softly, Philip winced.

“You're quiet,” Julia said presently.

“My feet.” His gait became delicate. “According to the doctor, heaving around my bulk all these years has jumbled the bones. Like a paleontological dig, fossils heaped up. I like to think that the burden has left the bones sad, disoriented. Anomie has set in.”

“That's the most highly developed thought about anyone's feet that I've heard.”

He laughed. “Curse of my life.”

Sunset ignited the haze of dust over the veldt herds. In the fullness of the moment Julia opened her purse for a cigarette—she'd
kept a half-pack daily limit—but imagined Philip's exclamation, “Emphysema?” Idiotic, she agreed, abashed as if he'd actually spoken, and withdrew her hand.

At the dinner table Julia fork-separated the tender chicken, but Philip ate with his fingers, gray sauce running into his beard, bones protruding like catfish barbels beyond his face.

“You look like an amiable sea monster,” she said.

“Mmm.” He seized her hand and nibbled up her arm. She scrunched back in her chair.

Rising, stooping over her, Philip lifted Julia in his arms until she stood tight against him. His heartbeat accelerated by her ear.

Julia's hands pushed against his chest. “Not yet.”

But when?

Julia poised on the deck of the community pool. Since her hospitalization the mere thought of swimming, the labored breaths, had constricted her chest. Now she craved the churning of arms and legs, the euphoric fatigue.

Julia had not made love as an old body. To conceal loosening skin she wore garments to her wrists and ankles. For occasional dips, always at night, she'd hiked panty hose under her suit. But this shyness would not lessen with waiting. Refusing Philip now, she understood, would be final.

Floodlights fanned a seething blue across the pool's surface. Beneath, the water was black, leaves circling. Julia would be diving into her own shadow, a thought she found unnerving and recklessly pleasurable. She splashed in, stroking easily.

When she and Philip undressed, Julia was compelled to imagine herself through his hands—skin sagging from the bone, flesh shrunken—and she could not respond.

Driving home in lemony brightness, Mother's Day, she resigned herself to not seeing Philip again. The affair already was a
gift, more than she'd expected from her life. She memorized, for the future, Philip's trunk of a body at the window, arms spread, sunlight playing over chest and belly hair.

Awaiting her guests, Julia felt acute but out of control, like a clear-headed drunk whose body consistently lurches into furniture. She drilled the vacuum cleaner into a spot of ground dirt by the entranceway.

Two weeks before as an amendment to Julia's celebration, Tim had requested including his new girlfriend, Linda.

“Come yourself on Saturday then, for lunch,” Julia had said.

Recognizing the ploy, an extra visit, Tim hesitated.

“Mother's Day is a freebie,” Julia said.

Tim blushed. “Sure.”

“I've had two dinner dates.”

“Wow. Congratulations.” The burden of her affections visibly slid from his shoulders.

“He's a poet but looks like a pirate. Gilbert and Sullivan, pirate and pilot.”

“Apprentice to a pi-rate,” Tim had sung, surprisingly.
Penzance
was a childhood enthusiasm.

Julia had sung a verse. “I'll put it on,” she said, starting for the records.

“No, that's O.K.,” Tim had said.

Julia stuffed the vacuum in the closet just as Tim arrived with steaks and Linda, a woman with flat, functional hands and a stupendous bust restrained by a snug flowered jump suit.

“What a relief,” Linda said, admiring the lace-embroidered bodice of Julia's blouse. “I was afraid I'd overdressed.” She and Tim were dancing later, she explained.

“Tim might not remember, but he's always been a dancer,” Julia said. The blunder loomed, yet she couldn't fend off the words. “Until he was seven or eight we would dance naked
together, Shostakovitch, running up and down with scarves.”

“Great.” Tim flipped his hands. “Now tell her how I breast-fed until I was twenty.”

But Tim, who honored holidays, righted himself, telling amusing work stories. He was Target's store manager.

Through dinner Julia's stomach still clenched from his anger. “Katherine,” she said, “could you pour me more wine while you're up?” Katherine was Linda's predecessor, and Julia's favorite, in Tim's succession of women.

“Mom!”

“I'm sorry. Linda. It's habit.”

“I understand.” Linda smiled as if to gobble the world's un-happiness, bite by bite. “Your vinaigrette was delicious.” She complimented each course in detail, wielding praise like an iron over a wrinkled shirt.

The pie was heated. Linda chatted through hers, Julia dawdled, Tim ate silently and quickly. Utensils clicked on the plates. The scraped-clean surfaces gleamed as if the evening had disappeared into them. Pressure built in Julia's chest. She gasped and swallowed air.