Moonface (11 page)

I pull the bed sheet up to my face to try to keep my nose from running. There's a lot I want to say, but not to my mother. Not right now. I think:
He gave me his kidney. I owe it to him to keep it. I don't want him to regret this. What is this between me and Charlie now? What have I done? I am ruining a solid relationship
.

“Of course, this is still a love story,” my mother continues, like she is reading my mind. “Can you imagine? Giving your body to someone else purely because you love that person? I think you forget sometimes that these people—your brother, Charlie—they are trying to save you. They have sacrificed for you. I think you forget how sick you really were. This miraculous transplant saved you from getting worse. From maybe dying,
anak
. Yes, it means Charlie loves you because he gave you a kidney, but if it doesn't take, that doesn't mean anything about his love. You might feel bad because he feels bad. But he gave you this so you can go back to being you. Now think. This is your body. Your mind. Who is this person I made?

“Of course, this is love. But this is also your story. This is about how you survived. How you are surviving. Charlie is doing fine. Now is not the time to worry about him. How are you going to get through this? You,” she says, pointing to me.

Chapter Ten
An American Ragtime Orchestra Plays the Tunes of Love

B
y day twelve of the unknown disease, everyone looks exhausted. My mother has worn her thumbprint into the wooden rosary beads that she hides deep inside her shirtsleeve. My father's already droopy eyes sag even farther down his face. These days, my parents and Charlie look like wilted flowers propped up against the walls of my hospital room. They come to life only when a doctor comes in, but shrivel back down when still no diagnosis just means more tests.

So much for magic, so much for our cells combining and our souls converging. I look at Charlie longingly at times, hoping that the kidney stays, that Charlie feels better, and that the love between us is real. My mother doesn't know what Charlie said at the doctor's office, and I don't want to tell her. But when I replay his words in my head, I can almost feel my body dissolving, the very tissue that holds us together coming apart.

When Blondie finally explains what I have, her diagnosis doesn't make sense to me.

“
Histoplasmosis
,” she says again, this time slower.

“Fungal?” my father the physician says, looking surprised.

“It's a fungal infection that we often see here in the Ohio Valley. The spores are in the air and usually come from bat or bird droppings. Now, have you been eating animal droppings?” Blondie jokes.

“Bat shit?” I say. “No.”

“Whoa!” Charlie perks up. While the thought of bat shit invading my system is grossing out everyone in the room, I am sure that Charlie is mesmerized by the possibility of this. He's probably wondering if people take bat shit as a hallucinogen.

“I'm just kidding. Usually we see it in farmers because they spend so much time in the dirt,” Blondie says.

My mother jumps out of her seat: “They live in the basement!” She points at me and Charlie as she talks. “They breathe in dirt all the time. I knew it. See? I told you.”

Blondie laughs and says, “We all get it. It's in the air. But most of us have the immune system to fight it off.” She turns to face me again. “But you don't.”

“Lucky me.”

“Lucky you. With all those immunosuppressants we're giving you for the transplant, the fungus found a nice place to stay. Your immunity is suppressed because of all the anti-rejection drugs, so you probably got what everyone gets, but we are just better at fighting the disease off.”

“So, I can go home now?”

“Not quite,” she says. “We're going to have to give you some heavy-duty antibiotics for a heavy-duty infection like this. We'll give them to you through an IV.”

“I know what that means.”

“You'll be in here for a while longer until we can get these drugs working. It will take a while for your body to respond. You might still have the fevers. But you'll still be here so we can watch them.”

Outside, the air already looks a little bit crisper. When Charlie comes to visit, the skin underneath his stubble is rosy and his curly blond hair looks windblown. Now that we know what is wrong with me, we know how to treat it. My parents are still in Iowa with us, but roaming around the town less frantically than they were before. My father can't stop talking about the hotel where they are staying.

Later that night, the smell of chicken patties and mashed potatoes lingers in the hall. I'm repulsed by the odor, but live with it for now because I feel like this situation is temporary. I'm going home soon. They'll give me medicine through an IV for a few weeks and then they'll eventually send me home.

My parents have left for the night, getting ready to head back to Pittsburgh in a few days. My father has fewer things to worry about, so he stops fussing over me and instead starts calling his office at home and worrying about his patients there. Sometimes, when he does feel moved to talk, he doesn't discuss my health with me. Instead, he sticks to talking about the hotel in which he has stayed for several weeks. He says that this little dinky hotel in Iowa has been his most favorite hotel in his whole life. His whole life! He swears. “The hardboiled eggs are boiled just right,” he says.

Blondie warns me that even though the doctors have identified the disease and are beginning to treat it, the effects of the medication won't be seen for a few days.

“You still might be getting the same symptoms for a while,” she says. “So, we'll keep you here just a little longer. We'll keep the nurses checking on you.”

As Charlie and I sit in silence, I feel my legs start to shake, and then my shoulders. It's one of those fevers again when the shaking will not stop. I need a shot of Demerol to make it stop. I try to tell Charlie this, but all that comes out is “Ch-Ch-Char—”

He notices only when the rail of the bed starts shaking. He turns. “The fever! Hold on,” he says, pressing down on my arms to hold them still.

He presses the nurses” call button. “Nurse! She needs the shot!” he says into the box.

“We'll be right there,” a grainy voice answers.

I can't stop shaking. Even my head writhes on the pillow, and Charlie puts a hand on my forehead to keep it still. I know these are the lasting effects of the virus. I know this is the end of it. If I didn't keep these ideas in my head, I would be panicking now.

Charlie holds me down but screams out the door this time into the hall.

“
Hello?!
”

The male nurse comes in, concerned, but holding nothing.

“She needs the shot! Give her the shot!” Charlie screams, in a role reminiscent of Shirley MacLaine.

“Right,” the nurse says. He turns and returns with just what I need. And Charlie stays there with me until the shaking stops, until I'm fast asleep.

The next night, the room is empty and i turn off the light over the bed so only the last fading rays of the sun come through the windows. I don't hear any alarms or call buttons down the hall. It's almost peaceful. I think that this is the quietest place I've been in a while.

I breathe and exhale purposefully. Again. I have never liked the idea of being alone in a hospital room. When I was young, I would almost panic if I found myself in a space like this, in this vulnerable cave that invites in people who want to deconstruct your parts, to break you down. I always thought that it was better to have someone there who knew how to put you back together again. The right way.

“Meditating?”

I open my eyes to Charlie's familiar face, his reddish stubble now grown into a full beard, his eyes catching the reflection of sun. He is dreamy.

The male nurse pops in after Charlie nestles into a chair. “Need anything?” he says.

“No, I've got everything I need,” I tell him.

“So, everything is going to be fine,” Charlie says.

“I'm so happy I'm not losing this kidney.”

“Yeah, 'cause I don't have another one to give.”

“Not that you would give it up.” It just comes out, like a piercing knife that you accidentally toss in the direction of a friend.

“Excuse me?” Charlie says, daring me to repeat it. “Is that what you think?”

I look down at the ground.

“Why would you say that, Moon?”

“You told that doctor that you regret it.”

“No, I said I wouldn't do it again,” he clarifies.

“Same thing.”

“No, it's not,” he says louder now, his voice in a deadlock with mine.

“Then why did you say it?”

He pauses. His sneakers squeak against the newly mopped floor as he steps closer and then farther, like he's trying to find a good place to stop.

“Man, Moonface, everything about that surgery hurt like a bitch. If I had to go through it again, it might drive me crazy.” Even as he says it now, grimacing as he remembers, I start to sink in the bed, my body feeling like deadweight.

“You know, Charlie, I've been wondering what it would be like if I never got this kidney, if I just stayed on dialysis. I mean, maybe I was being greedy or selfish. Maybe I could have stayed on dialysis forever, and we wouldn't have to worry about this.”

“Well, you hated dialysis, and no one is worrying about this but you.”

I can hear the anger in his voice rising, and it worries me more now that I'm worrying too much. He stands up and turns around like he's going to leave, and then turns back toward me. “Why are you so insane? Why do you and that crazy surgeon worry about what you would do different? What if it never happened? What if you just stayed on dialysis forever? What if we never met? What if I never got drunk and hit on you that night? What's the use in wondering? We'll never know.”

“I just think it would be easier sometimes.”

“So after all this, after all that we've been through, after we know everything is going to be okay, now you're going to take a second look at this? We didn't do this transplant so we could look back all the time. We've got to look forward, Moonface. You want to get out of here? You want to quit worrying about your health?”

“I don't want to be sick anymore,” I tell him. “Okay,” he says, sounding somewhat relieved. “I just want a normal life,” I continue. “Okay. What else do you want? I'll get it for you.”

“I want us to be crazy in love,” I say.

“Well, you're crazy. And I'm in love,” he says, easing into a dreamy smile.

“And while I'm at it, I want to get married. I want babies. I want little Charlie O”Doyles walking around in sailor suits.”

“Well,” he leans in close so we're almost touching noses, “you ain't gonna get that. Not with me. I have big plans for us. Next summer we're hopping freight trains across Canada. This winter, we're buying a motorcycle with a side car and we're touring all over the French Alps.” Then he stands back and waits for me to fill in the next line.

ACT III

Chapter Eleven
The Famous Minstrels of Baltimore under Exclusive Engagement in Moonface's Head

A
fter I graduate, I ask Charlie what's next for us. “Tell me where you want to go, Charlie. Seriously, I'll take you anywhere.” I am cocky now, with a masters degree under my belt and a body that works. “Freight trains? For real?”

“I'm tired, Moonface,” Charlie says. “Let's go home.” He slouches into the couch and from the look on his face, I know he means “home” as in “easy,” where we can take a breath. I know he means Baltimore. While it hasn't technically been our home for a long time, it is a welcoming place to return, it's close to our families and friends, and it's familiar.

Just like when we moved to Iowa, we pull into our new city with all our belongings in yet another neatly packed rented truck—how easily our possessions and organs move from one place to the next. As we head east toward where the states huddle in a corner of the map, I already miss Iowa's wide open spaces, its white lawn chairs in high grass, its lacy curtain hems sweeping against the windowsills. But here the lush green lawns of the Midwest are replaced by the gray concrete of Baltimore. The idleness of broad Iowa streets is replaced by the swift and jerky movements of trains, cars, and even bikers who pop themselves high over their seats and lunge into traffic without fear.

It's as if those bikers embrace the message on the posters that hang from every building in the city—believe, the signs read in thick white letters against a plain black background. They hang from some of the city's largest office buildings, from the windows of the skinny brick houses, from hotel canopies, and from City Hall. Smaller versions are on the bumpers of minivans and sporty wagons.

“Wow! This city really encourages its football team,” I tell Charlie when we pass yet another believe, thinking that the colors clearly resemble those of the city's local NFL team.

“I don't think those have anything to do with football,” Charlie snorts. Later, we find out that the signs are actually the mayor's campaign to fight drugs. How better to fight the city's increasing drug problem than to make its citizens believe it can happen? What else to do but post signs everywhere reminding citizens that believing is enough? The audacity of this little city, to think it can fight one of the nation's largest epidemics. I kind of like its ambition.

Unlike that apartment we had in Iowa, which was low and flat, our apartment here is high and narrow. It has only a few rooms, and I'm sure in our apartment hunting there were larger, more spacious options within our price range, but I liked the old glamour of it: the red-painted walls, the marble non-working fireplace, and the ever-entertaining pocket doors. In our new apartment, I wake up in the mornings and stretch my arms by the window to see a believe sign hanging from the school across the street, and I begin to like the city more and more.

Charlie is not only sick of gallivanting around the country; he is sick of having crappy jobs. We sit on the terrace of a coffee shop, and Charlie plays with his cocktail napkin, folding and refolding it into different shapes. “I need to start something,” he says.

“Maybe you should start writing again,” I say, knowing that he already has. I've seen the notebooks of handwritten pages piling up by his bedside. “Go back to school.”

“Yeah,” he says, still fidgeting with the tabletop origami.

“What do you want to do?”

“Write,” he says, “draw, read, sing, make dioramas . . .”

“Then you should,” I say.

I know how he feels. Now that I have the time, I'm ready to focus my energy toward a project. I take a part-time adjunct teaching position at a community college to make ends meet, and on the days I don't teach, I pull out a folder of old essay drafts I wrote in school. I sit at my desk at the window and leaf through them, trying to feel a spark.

Beth calls almost every week and gives me updates on what is happening with the people we know: who's getting published, who's moving where, who's dating whom. She also tells me that a woman who graduated before us is expecting.

“Whoa!” I shout into the receiver. “A baby?”

“Yup!” Beth says.

I rub my belly and imagine something growing there. I'm wearing skin-tight jeans and a tank top, so this image exercises all my imagination. I arch my back and push my belly out, and it doesn't feel as uncomfortable as I thought it would.

Beth tries to think of more gossip. “Let's see,” she sings.

I realize that if I want to know anything about what's going on with her life, I'm going to have to ask her point blank.

“How are you and the professor doing?” She pauses on the phone, and then confesses: “We might buy a house together.”

“What?!” I shriek.

“Do you think we should?” she asks, sounding like she just needs one nudge more to commit.

“Yes! So, what does this mean? Are you just playing along?”

“No,” she says firmly, “I think we should buy a house together. I think I like having him around.”

Apparently they tried to work out some scheme where he would sell his little house and move in with her, or where she would sell her little house and move in with him. But after talking to a real estate agent, it made more sense to sell both of the little houses and buy a bigger house that they would both fit into comfortably.

“What if you guys got married?” I tease her.

“What if you guys got married?” she snaps back.

“What if you guys got pregnant?” I say.

“What if you guys got pregnant?” she says.

Then the two of us hang on the line silently, one waiting for the other to say something.

In the fall, Charlie starts a graduate program in writing and publishing arts at a university nearby. It seems perfect for him: he shapes his drafts into stories, then turns around and creates what he calls a “physical container” for them.

“One might call such a container a book?” I suggest, as I watch him sitting on the floor, cutting figures out of magazine pages and pasting them into a shoebox.

“Yeah, one might say that. But a book isn't always pages collected and bound. Sometimes, it's a video you watch. Sometimes it's a box with pictures. Sometimes it's something you haven't even thought of yet.” He turns away from me and dives into another magazine with a pair of scissors.

Charlie is often gone in the first few months after we get to Baltimore, sometimes in the computer lab at school or in class or at a bar talking shop with his classmates. I get home from teaching some afternoons and have the place to myself. I make myself a pot of coffee, open up my folder of drafts, and force myself to pick one, just one, page to rework. But I don't. The damn window keeps catching my eye, or rather my skinny reflection in it. At first, when Beth told me about the pregnant woman in Iowa, I couldn't help but imagine how her life was changing: from being half of a couple to part of a family, from identifying herself as a writer to a mother, or both. Now when I think about her, I feel just a tinge of jealousy. And I find myself thinking about an unborn baby that doesn't even belong to me.

During our winter break, we fly to Las Vegas to meet up with Beth and the professor and to stay with my former classmates Violet and Raj. Violet and Raj married in Iowa the summer after we came, then moved to the desert so Raj could start a writing fellowship. Raj, with his dark beard and his fashionable gray glasses, picks us up from the airport and grabs us like we're long-lost relatives. “Vegas sucks,” he says. “I've been craving some intelligent forms of life.”

When we get to their house, Beth, Violet, and the professor are already in their pajamas, laughing and smiling on the living room floor. We catch up on each other's lives, which, though miles from each other, seem somewhat parallel. Beth and the professor settled on their house—a mammoth, rehabbed Victorian on Washington Avenue. We tell them that we have started to look at buying a house somewhere in Baltimore, but nothing as giant as theirs. Raj is back in school getting his Ph.D., and Charlie is back in school working on his masters. They sit in the corner and talk about what's on each other's reading lists.

Violet says she wants to get pregnant.

“Me, too!” I spit out. It comes out of nowhere.

“Really?” she says. “We should get pregnant at the same time.”

“Yes!” I say, arching my back again and pretending I'm already in my third trimester. “I would love to have a baby.” This is the first time I say it out loud, and I feel that when I say it, I can't stuff it back in.

“Would you get married first?” Beth asks.

“I don't know yet,” I say.

“Because I think we're getting married,” she says, “... tomorrow.” I freeze. I look over at Violet, and she's nodding as if to confirm that Beth isn't joking.

“What?” Charlie yells from the corner.

The sneaky rascals have planned it out. We thought we were just spending New Year's Eve getting drunk on the Strip. But now we learn that we have a wedding to attend at a little white chapel presided over by an Elvis impersonator.

The next afternoon, I have to borrow a dress from Violet's expansive closet and buy shoes at the local department store. We buy bottles of champagne from the market and red roses for Beth to hold as she walks down the aisle. Before we head out for the chapel, Violet and I help Beth get dressed. She wears a clingy satin dress that comes up high on her legs, nothing like the shapeless tunics she usually wears. She looks slim and sexy, and Violet and I catcall her from the corner of the bathroom.

As we stand in the vestibule of the chapel, I whisper to her, “There's nothing ambivalent about that dress at all.”

She turns around and winks at me before heading down the blue velvet aisle.

A mysterious crying begins next door to our apartment. I hear it in the afternoons when I am sitting on the couch. The wailing pierces through the brick wall in short bursts. I suspect a cat is trapped or a teakettle whistle has gone wonky, but before I have a chance to put a finger on the sound, it ends. I think that it might be my imagination, but once, Charlie hears it, too. He stops pasting together the pages of the book he is constructing and presses his ear against the wall behind the bed.

We don't yet know our neighbors, but sometimes when we hear their shoes stomping up the stairs, Charlie runs to the peephole on the front door and looks out. “Old lady with bad wig from the fourth floor,” he whispers to me in the kitchen. “Biker dude in spandex.” He has never once mentioned a pregnant woman or a baby.

Around the neighborhood, there are even more new sounds and sights emerging every day. At night, helicopter blades often sputter overhead like the city is being sprayed with bullets from an automatic weapon. The searchlights glare into our window while we sleep. Despite the chaos of Baltimore, it means something to me now: a whole new world, one free of surgeries or hospitals, trips to the emergency room. In another place, far from Iowa, it feels like there are things that can happen that I haven't even considered yet.

For instance: being inspired by an Elvis impersonator.

It is a moment that starts about as unromantically as you can get. Charlie and I are paying bills on the living room floor, sitting close to each other in the space between the coffee table and the couch. The rent for our spacious two-bedroom basement apartment in Iowa was almost half the rent of our one-bedroom with a narrow galley kitchen. Things are becoming tight. Money, too. Charlie has a full-time position at a nearby music conservatory, while still taking a full load of classes. As our bills begin to pile up, my health insurance from Iowa slowly begins to wind down. I've started looking for other plans, but insurance companies aren't particularly welcoming when you have kidney disease and when you've had two kidney transplants. Bills and envelopes are spread out on the hardwood between us like a heap of kindling, and Charlie suggests that we should get married.

“Right,” I say, resting an elbow on the seat of the couch behind me. “Then I could kill you for the life insurance.”

“I mean, we might as well,” Charlie says, shrugging his shoulders. “And it was actually kind of sweet in Vegas. The tiny chapel, none of the fuss.” I have not looked at Charlie closely in a while, the way his beard contours the sides of his face. His cheekbones are more defined now; he looks older. He is a man now, different from that young college boy with whom I escaped to Hawaii so many years ago.

I have never actually imagined the moment Charlie might propose or the wedding we might have. For years Charlie and I cleverly evaded the subject of marriage when our families brought it up, mostly because it meant that we had to start taking our lives more seriously. But after the transplant, it was cleverness that went out the window and the seriousness that lingered. The hot subject has lost its heat, and now, we find ourselves sitting on the floor asking ourselves, “Why don't we get married?”

We follow Beth and the professor's lead, but, unlike them, we don't tell anyone. Not even our closest friends. In the spring, we hop a plane to San Francisco and are married by a female Russian judge in the rotunda of City Hall. It seems like the perfect place to marry, not only because it's the city where we first fell in love, but because when we go to buy our marriage license, a seven-foot-tall drag queen in a red patent dress collects our money and tells us where to sign. I am in awe of her. I can't stop staring at her fake eyelashes and her long cascading curls.

“You are beautiful,” I tell her, looking up from two feet below.

“So are you, baby,” she says, puckering her lips and kissing the air between us. “Happy wedding day!”

Despite the majestic marble steps and columns, the ambience is not particularly romantic. It is a Monday morning and there is a group of elementary school students touring the building with a docent who leads them up to the grand staircase. They stomp their feet and try to listen for the echo of their voices against the walls. “Hellooooooooo,” they call. The sounds come back and make rings around us. They make their way past us and wait for our tiny ceremony to take place. Charlie and I wait and watch as they slowly make their way across the mezzanine, like a gaggle of geese, the stragglers and all, to the other side of the building to stand in the balcony that overlooks the steps, the dome, and the whole first floor below.