Broken Vessels (16 page)

“Sure,” the UPS man said. “Where is it?”

“Down at the end of the hall.”

I wheeled backward out of the kitchen to get out of his way, made a backward turn in the dining room to let him by, then followed him in the hall, and said: “All this time you've been waiting for a young wife to ask you to put it in the bedroom, and you get an old buck in a wheelchair.”

Still in the hall, he said over his shoulder: “I wish my wife would do that.”

“Do what?”

He was in the bedroom, and I was rolling through the door.

“Tell me to put it in the bedroom,” he said.

The summer before that, I had a lap pool built in my front yard, so I could have motion out of my chair. A lap pool is three feet deep. Beside mine is a concrete slab level with my chair; from the slab, steps with aluminum railings go to the pool, and by lifting myself on the railings, I can go down and up on my butt. Most of all, the pool is to replace the beach. I love the beach, and probably will always miss it, but I cannot go there anymore without someone to pull my chair backward and tilted, so the small front wheels are above the sand. They are the ones that sink. So now, when my little girls are with me in summer, we play in the pool. My two grown sons and two friends, on payroll, built the ramp to the pool, and, at the top of my driveway, to a built-up rectangle of asphalt with railroad ties as a curb. My driveway is all steep slope, and this flat asphalt allows me to get in and out of my car.

On a beautiful early summer afternoon my son Jeb and the two friends and I were sitting on the ramp, our shirts off, when the man who delivers for the pharmacy drove up the driveway. He is a short pleasant man, retired from the gas company. He wears thick glasses, always a visored cap, and has grey hair. Reading gas meters taught him to carry dog biscuits; he says they worked better than the spray designed to fend off dogs. Always he brought biscuits for my dog, Luke, a golden retriever. Luke was lying in the shade that day, and went to the man and sat at his feet to be fed. Someone brought the bag of vitamins and medicine inside and fetched my checkbook and I paid. I see this delivery man at least every other week, yet I had forgotten his wedding anniversary. But Bill remembered, and said: “How was the fiftieth wedding anniversary?”

“Oh, it was something. They picked us up at the house in a limousine, took us to the function room. There was a hundred people there. We had cocktails, prime rib, cake, champagne, the works. I says to the wife, when you've had a car this long, it's time to trade in on a new model. She says I was thinking the same thing. I says I was thinking of trading in for two twenty-five-year-olds. She says they'd kill you.”

“Fifty years,” Jack said. “That's something to celebrate. Any marriage is hard.”

“Oh, sure, it was hard. That first year, back in 1939, I couldn't get regular work at the shoe factory. For about six months, I couldn't get a forty-hour week. But after that it was all right.”

Jeb and Jack and Bill and I looked at each other; only Bill had a girlfriend, his fiancee. We looked back at the delivery man, reaching in his pocket for a dog biscuit.

“After the dinner and the toasts and everything, they put us in the limousine and took us home. We go upstairs and get into the bed and I says to the wife: You think we ought to try what we tried fifty years ago? She says it'll cost you money just to touch it. So next morning I go downstairs and I put a dollar bill under her orange juice glass, and I put another one under her cereal bowl, and one under her coffee cup. I put one under the sugar bowl and the salt shaker and the pepper shaker. Then I put one under my glass and bowl and cup, and one under her napkin so she'd get the message. Then I sat down and waited for her.”

He stood facing us, smiling, petting Luke, putting another bone-shaped biscuit in Luke's mouth. I said: “Aren't you going to tell us the end of that story?”

“That is the end,” he said, smiling, and lifted his hand in a wave, and walked away from us to his car.

On a warm blue September afternoon I went to see my paraplegic friend. A few years ago he fell off a ladder. I will call him Joe. He works for disabled people, out of an office in a nearby town on the Merrimack River. He taught me to drive with hand controls, but that is not part of his job. He did it one Sunday afternoon, at my house, saving me eight hours of lessons at ten dollars an hour.

In the parking lot outside his office, Joe was waiting in his chair. He wanted to see my new two-thousand-dollar rig: a steel box on the roof of my car that, with two chains like a bicycle's and an elongated hook, folds and lifts my chair into it, and lowers it to the ground beside my door. A button inside the car controls it. I parked beside him and opened my door and watched his face as I lowered the chair. He is a lean man with a drooping but trimmed black moustache. As the chair descended, he smiled and shook his head.

“It's too easy, Andre. It's too easy.”

I had learned to drive in his Cadillac. To remove the wheels from the chair and place them and the seat cushion then the folded chair behind the driver's seat, you must sit sideways in the car, with your legs outside, so you can pull the seat as far as possible toward the steering wheel. My right knee does not bend enough for me to swing my leg in and out of a car, but in Joe's Cadillac, I could shift backward to the passenger seat and get my leg inside. In my Toyota Celica the console and handbrake are in my way, and the car's lack of depth makes this movement difficult. I said: “Nothing is too easy.”

But he liked the machine. People who like machines admire its simple efficiency. People in parking lots stop to watch it work. Joe wheeled closer to the car to see the cellular phone I had bought the day before. Without a MacArthur Fellowship I would have none of this; and I would not have the car or the two-thousand-dollar wheelchair that is so much more comfortable and mobile and durable than those nine-hundred-dollar blue chairs you see in hospitals. You can go through two of them in a year, if you are active. I got the phone in case of car trouble. Joe wanted to know how the phone worked, and I showed him, and he called his office. Then we went inside and met the people working there. All but one was disabled. There was a blind man, and Joe grinned and asked him if he had read my books. The blind man laughed.

On our way out Joe introduced me to a quadriplegic, perhaps in his early forties. With him was a pretty blonde woman. Then we went through wide doors that open and close by buttons on the wall beside them, so that if you are in a chair you do not have to pull the door toward you or hold it open while you wheel across its threshold. Outside was a concrete porch and a long L-shaped ramp to the parking lot. We faced the sun and I took off my shirt and watched a black man drive a van into the parking space in front of the porch. He and Joe waved. Joe said he was from Nigeria and had a wife before his accident, a car wreck, but now she was gone. The man put his key ring between his teeth, transferred to his wheelchair on the passenger side, worked a switch there, and behind him a lift came out of the van. He wheeled onto it, worked the switch again, and came down to the asphalt. At the side of the van, he took the keys from his mouth, turned one of them in a switch, and the lift went up and back into the van, whose door closed behind it. Then he put his keys in a bag attached to the back of his chair. He wheeled to our left, to the ramp and up the first leg of it. As he turned up the last leg, facing us now, I said: “Are you having fun?”

“Oh yes; I am pumping iron.”

He had a strong torso and his face was broad and young and handsome. Joe introduced us. The Nigerian was lightly sweating, and had a good handshake. I said: “I'm just starting my fourth year. How about you?”

“Six now,” he said, smiling. “I love it.”

“That's right,” Joe said. “The crying days are over.”

“And who is listening?”

He is a paraplegic. For a few minutes he and Joe talked about burning themselves, carrying hot coffee and spilling it and not knowing they were being scalded. I said: “So when my leg hurts I should think about you guys, right?”

“That's right,” Joe said.

“I don't carry coffee anymore,” the Nigerian said.

Then he went inside. I looked at Joe.

“You can't feel anything? From the waist down?”

“It's funny. I can feel my left nut. And look: I can move my left leg from side to side.” He moved it a few times. “I can't feel it but, see, it moves. Everybody's different. One guy may be able to feel his toe. Just one of them. You know anything about the spine?”

“No.”

He clenched a fist, leaving an opening in it.

“Your spine is like the fucking phone company. There's all these wires.” He stuck his forefinger into the hole. “It depends on what gets cut.”

“Did you see
Coming Home
?”

“That's a good movie.”

“He couldn't feel her, right?”

“No.”

“But you get erections.”

“Voluntary, and involuntary.”

“Then what?”

“It's better. Look, before you get hurt, what do you do? You get on the wife and pump away, then it's over. Now I take my time. That's why it's better. It's in the brain, Andre. Why do you want to get laid? For your brain, right?”

“I guess so. Can you have an orgasm?”

“No. It takes muscles. So what?”

“I had a problem, my first year. Making love made me think about my legs, and I couldn't come. Sometimes, but not all the time.”

“So?”

“I know. But it got to me. Then in the third year, that lady you met at my house, remember her?”

“She was nice.”

“She surely was. She made me feel whole again.”

Behind us the door opened and the quadriplegic came out in his mechanical chair, the blonde woman behind him. They told me Nice to meet you, we all said goodbye, and Joe and I watched them go down the ramp and across the lot to his van, watched him go up a lift behind the passenger's seat, then move his chair to the steering wheel. He is able to drive with his hands. She climbed in beside him.

“Look at him,” Joe said. “A quad. She's been with him for seven years,
af
ter he got fucked up. What do you think
he's
got, a seven-inch tongue?”

They drove out to the street and she waved at us. We waved and I watched her smile and hair. Then I looked at Joe.

“What,” he said.

“You're telling me that you go to bed with your wife, you take your time, you get hard, your wife gets on top and does what she wants to do till she's finished, and you don't feel anything.”

“That's right. And, let me tell you, there's a lot more to our marriage than sex.”

That night Jack and I went to dinner at a restaurant in Haverhill with Gene and Jean Harbilas. Gene is my doctor. He and I drank vodka martinis, then we had a good bordeaux with dinner. The dinner was very good, but I had been sitting, either in the car or my chair, since leaving home early that afternoon to visit Joe, and for the last hour or so my lower back muscles ached enough to make me sweat. After dinner the young black chef came out to meet us. He was from the Gold Coast and spoke English with a French accent. He told us he had studied in Paris, and met his wife there. Someone asked what brought him to Haverhill.

“It is my wife's home,” he said.

I thought how strange it was, to meet two men from Africa on the same day in the Merrimack Valley.

1990

B
REATHING

A
T MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL
Hospital, Patrick was a good nurse. He loved adrenaline, he told me; he had been a paramedic. One night when I still had my left leg, I woke to a young nurse standing above me, crying out: “Oh my God.” She ran from the room. In came Patrick. Blood was spurting from an artery in my left leg. I could not see it, and I do not recall how I knew it. Two doctors came next, a black woman and a white man. But for a short time I was alone with Patrick. I told myself I was in good hands, but I did not do this with words; I surrendered myself. I focused only on breathing. I slowed my breathing, and tried to remain absolutely in the present, in each moment. I did not think. Much later, perhaps years, I remembered there was something I had not told my children, something they may be able to use. That waiting to die or to stay alive was like getting an injection as a child, when you first learned not to think, but to gather yourself into the present, to breathe slowly, to relax your muscles, even your arm as the nurse swabbed it with alcohol, to feel the cool alcohol, to smell it, to feel your feet on the floor and see the color of the wall, and nothing else as your slow breathing opened you to the incredible length and breadth and depth of one second.

1990

P
art
F
ive

B
ROKEN
V
ESSELS

for Suzanne

O
N THE TWENTY-THIRD
of June, a Thursday afternoon in 1988, I lay on my bed and looked out the sliding glass doors at blue sky and green poplars and I wanted to die. I wanted to see You and cry out to You:
So You had three years of public life which probably weren't so bad, were probably even good most of the time, and You suffered for three days, from Gethsemane to Calvary, but You never had children taken away from You
. That is what I wanted to do when I died, but it is not why I wanted to die. I wanted to die because my little girls were in Montauk on Long Island, and had been there since Wednesday, and would be till Sunday; and I had last seen and held and heard them on Tuesday. Cadence is six, and Madeleine is seventeen months.

I wanted to die because it was summer again, and all summer and fall of 1987 I had dreaded the short light and long dark of winter, and now it was June: summer, my favorite season since boyhood, one of less clothes and more hours in the sun: on the beach and the fishing boats and at Fenway Park and on the roads I used to run then walk, after twenty-five years of running; and the five-mile conditioning walks were so much more pleasurable that I was glad I lost running because of sinus headaches in my forties. It was summer again and I wanted to die because last summer I was a shut-in, but with a wife and two daughters in the house, and last August I even wrote. Then with the fall came the end of the family, so of writing; and now the long winter is over and I am shut in still, and without my children in the house; and unable to write, as I have been nearly all the days since the thirteenth of November 1987 when, five days after the girls' mother left me, she came with a court order and a kind young Haverhill police officer, and took Cadence and Madeleine away.