The Illumination (23 page)

“God no.”

She missed the days of dining out with her friends and lovers,
indulging her appetite for lobster or curry, pad Thai or seasoned French fries, before she knew how much would be taken from her, and how quickly. Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut butter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally,
protozoically
, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcestershire sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tomato juice or movie-theater popcorn. Certain pamphlets and magazines whose paper carried a caustic wafting chemical scent she could taste as she turned the pages. Perfume. Incense. Library books. Long hours of easy conversation. The ability to lick an envelope without worrying that the glue had irritated her mouth. The knowledge that if she heard a song she liked, she could sing along to it in all her dreadful jubilant tunelessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse. The coltish rising feeling of sex or masturbation, and the way, as it gripped her, she no longer stood between herself and her senses. The problem was that the more aroused she grew, the dryer her mouth became, so that she could never reach culmination without experiencing that awful germinating sensation she felt before an ulcer erupted, like a weed spreading just under her skin. She no longer knew when she was being sensible, when overcautious. She was tired, very tired, and she hurt. Writing about it did not make it better.

She and John Catau took an empty table in the center of the shop and sat across from each other sipping their drinks. While he spoke, she covered her mouth with her palm, trying to usher the coffee past her lips without visibly wincing. He was offering another one of his meandering narratives, about a rock concert
where the crowd was “so raucous” that it spilled out onto the sidewalk and he had traded jackets with the guitarist. Every so often she would punctuate the story with an
mm-hmm
or a
right
, thinking
Make me better, Take me home
, while he nodded and stroked the stubble on his chin. He must have been talking for nearly fifteen minutes when he made a remark that caused him to laugh, a quiet little two-beat arrangement, as if he were exhaling once through each nostril. “You know, like in ‘Sunset Studies,’ ” he continued. “Remember, that bit you wrote about the door hinges flapping loose from the house like butterflies?”

“Where would you have seen ‘Sunset Studies’?”

“
The Lifted Brow
began archiving its old issues online.”

“Hmm.” A group of teenagers in crowlike black clothing had stationed themselves by the graphic novels, their faces irradiated with patches of cruel red acne. “This place”—she gestured at the stiltlike columns, the vista of windows—“it reminds me of a bead shop I used to visit in college. Not that I had any interest in beads. I went because it reminded me of this art gallery where my friends and I spent all our time in high school. Freestanding counters everywhere. Polished white pine floors. It made me feel like I was reliving my past.”

“Mm-hmm. Very esque-ish.”

“What?”

“Esque-ish. It’s a word me and Coop came up with. First
esque
and then
ish
. Something that reminds you of something that reminds you of something.”

“That’s good. I like that.”

“Yeah? You think it will catch on?”

“John, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-three. And a half.”

She made the mistake of smiling. One of her teeth snagged
her lip, and there it was, that unsparing light, a spasm of pain that spread across her mouth as if a metal barb had punched through the skin, tugging it outward so that a living pink tent rose up from the tissue.

“Jesus H.,” said John Catau. “I absolutely did not realize. I’m so sorry.”

She waited until she was sure she could speak. “It’s okay. I a
pp
—I
app
—I thank you for your concern.”

“Will you show it to me? Your ulcer?”

“No.
No. John. God
. It’s not pretty. You don’t want to see it.”

But the look he gave her was full of such humble curiosity, with his eyes lingering on her mouth and his hair dangling over his creased forehead, that she placed her fingers on either side of the sore and slowly everted her lip for him. He inhaled sharply. In the space of that breath, between one second and the next, he understood. She didn’t have to tell him, didn’t have to explain or apologize. She didn’t have to combat the impression that she was undergoing some kind of joke ailment, like a hangnail or an ingrown hair, the kind of thing that could be remedied with tweezers or a topical cream.
A canker sore, yes. I had one of those myself a few years back
, people liked to say.
Grin and bear it, that’s my motto
, and they would clap her shoulder and wait for her to chuckle along with them at the human body and all its darling haplessness. And now here was this boy, this ridiculous boy, and he seemed to know everything about her.
Make me better
. His fingertips and the base of his palm were resting lightly on the table, creating a shadowy little hidden cove, and she found herself resisting the impulse to slide her hand into it.

“I’m so sorry,” he said a second time. “That’s terrible. Terrible. You really don’t want to be here at all, do you?” And then, before she could answer, he added, “You know, I read that there
are more nerve endings on the lips and the tongue than anywhere else in the body. Were you aware of that? Genitals included. Which means that your mouth is the most sensitive place you’ve got when it comes to things like hot and cold and pleasure and pain.”

“Mm-hmm. I know.”

“Okay. I’m going to drive you back to your hotel now.”

“No. Please. It’s not far. I can walk.”

“Right,” he said, “I understand,” and she believed he did somehow. “Nina? How long before you’re better, do you think?”

“I wish I knew. Not tomorrow. Two days, I hope.”

“Two days.” He made it sound like a fact he was memorizing for a quiz. “Listen, this bruise on my arm, on my biceps?” He notched the contusion with his thumbnail. “I got it from punching myself after your Bellingham reading. I kept saying, ‘Catau, you’re going to ask this woman to dinner.’ I was mad at myself for chickening out. That’s all. I was just embarrassed to tell you before.”

And then his hand was on top of hers, and he was saying goodbye, and she felt that old carnal tightening in her knees, that flush of heat in her chest, and suddenly, in her imagination, she was sinking into bed with him and his caresses were covering her body in babyskin. How long had it been since she was well enough to unbutton someone’s shirt and dot his stomach with kisses? And did she
have
to be well enough? Maybe she
was
sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn’t she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts?

In her hotel room, she cried and then set her clothing out for the next day, turned her blanket down, and called Wallace. For
half an hour, she lay in bed debriding her mouth with hydrogen peroxide, letting the watery chlorine taste spread down her tongue and into her throat as she wondered what had happened.

She switched on the TV. A sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were assembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest gestures set off waves of swirling photons.

There was a woman, not quite old but not quite young, whose fiancé had died unexpectedly. It was barely a month into their engagement and the two of them were attending a chamber music concert when he began coughing into his sleeve and excused himself from his seat. Because they had quarreled earlier over the cost of the wedding, she did not worry about him when he failed to return. Instead, with exasperation, she thought, What could possibly be keeping him?, little realizing that what was keeping him was death.

When she went to the foyer to look for him, she found a ring of ushers clustered around his body as if he were a spill for which no one wanted to accept responsibility. She would never forget the sight of his tongue pressed to his teeth, struggling to form some word he had just missed his chance of saying.

More than a year had gone by since then, a terrible year of ill health, sleeplessness, and rainy days that layered themselves over her like blankets. Who was she? Who had she become? Her skin was paler than it used to be, her hair grayer. Recently she had noticed creases lingering around her eyes in the morning, and also across her forehead, as if she had spent the night squinting
into a harsh light. The lines did not go away when she rubbed them, vanishing only gradually as the hours wore on, and she could foresee a time when the mask of age that grief had placed over her face would simply be her face. She missed her fiancé terribly. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was only a beautiful story she had told herself, so quickly had she fallen in love with him and so quickly had he left her. It was hard to believe that that man who refused to button his collar, whose kisses began so shyly and ended so fervidly, who never once looked at her as if she were foolish or tiresome or even ordinary, was the same man she had found splayed across the theater’s staircase like an animal pinned to a board.

Frequently she had the feeling that he was standing just behind her, his breath tickling her ear like it used to when he came prowling over to seize her waist while she was cooking. All the same she did not speak to him.

Instead, like everyone, she accumulated letters that would never be answered.
I don’t understand how this can be my life
, she wrote, and
What am I going to do?
and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as
Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard—that’s how it feels. So I want you to tell me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing?

That first summer, immediately after he died, she had barely been able to pick up a pen, but by the time the earth split open a year later, she had amassed three heavy baskets of letters. One afternoon, she went to the parched field where the fair sat in the autumn and the soccer team practiced in the spring and dropped
them into the deepest opening she could find. The ground swallowed them as neatly as a pay phone accepting coins, except for the last page, which continued to show through the dirt until gravity gave it a tug and it slipped out of sight. That was where her heart was, she thought, cradled underground with the roots and the bones.

As she stood in the dust listening to the insects buzz, she dashed off one last note and let it go:
Are you even out there?

The next morning, she received her answer.

The streets seemed to quiver and spark in the rain, and water cascaded from the roofs of the old Victorians, and the gray ash of the sky made the inside of the bookstore appear lustrous and unfamiliar, saturated with color, like a movie theater where the film has snapped and the seats have been engulfed in light, and in the bathroom, where Nina went to disinfect her mouth with Listerine, the walls were covered with photos of third-tier pop stars in unflattering poses, bizarre headlines clipped from tabloid newspapers, and when she stepped back into the store, she saw that the Newbery displays had been taken down and replaced with chairs and a microphone, and to the seven people who had braved the San Francisco weather to hear her read, she presented “A Fable for the Living,” coaxing each syllable carefully past her open sore, which was even worse than it had been in Portland. Every time someone entered the building, she could hear the storm drumming and resonating on Haight Street. Then the door swung shut, and the noise softened to a rustle, and once again they were all sealed together in their bright and cozy den. She kept waiting for John Catau to come slouching out from behind the survival guides, wearing a sly look of guilty satisfaction,
as if by following her across three states he had allowed her to defeat him in some subtle contest of expectations, but it soon became obvious that he was not there. She was not prepared to feel so disappointed.

Though the audience was small, the weather must have put them at their ease, because they posed an uncommon number of questions: “Do you go into an office every day? A coffee shop? Or do you write from home?”

“I have a spare room with a desk and a computer. That’s where I do most of my work. Except the revisions—those I finish by hand, usually at the kitchen table.”

“Are there any words you feel you overuse?”

“
Strange, great, little
—I heard an interview with an editor who was asked about her pet peeves, and she named those three words, I suppose because of the way they adjust a phrase’s rhythm without actually changing its meaning. And
soul
probably.
Terrible
. And also
lambent
, but I love that one.”

“Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing?”

“No. Never. The truth is I’m embarrassed by the sound my voice makes in an empty room, that grand pronouncement effect. And there’s something else”—
and it hurts, it hurts
—“which is that, in my experience, and this might sound completely absurd, but stories have a certain power the first time they’re read out loud, don’t they? An energy, or an honesty. The way the words cut through the air. And it seems a shame to squander that power when there’s no one else around to hear it.”