The Narrow Door (25 page)

I send an email to Denise once we’re back in the hotel, across the Delaware in Philadelphia. It’s not a long email—simply,
Hey, we’re in your town. Yes, on the other side of the city. Philadelphia. Sorry
I haven’t given you more warning but it was a spontaneous trip. Are you up for brunch tomorrow? Someplace close to you? Someplace easy? We’re only here for the day, but if it doesn’t work out, I’ll come down and see you very soon. I love you.

I don’t hear from Denise until the next morning. I can feel the labor in her note: a mix of capital letters, lowercase letters, misspellings, and unnecessary spaces. I can feel the supreme concentration behind each word, the effort and failure to get each word right. I give her a call, the connection is bad—or maybe that’s her voice. It’s quieter, shakier, and more tenatative than I would have expected, but then again that is probably the cell phone connection.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I say to her. “We don’t have to. I know I should have called you before.”

“No,”
she says. “We must. I’m fine.” And we agreet to meet at Parc, her new favorite place, on Rittenhouse Square at eleven o’clock.

M and I are seated at a table in the raised section of the restaurant. We’re trying to relax, we’re tearing off too much bread from the basket on the table. We watch the waiters move across the black-and-white checked floor, smell the hard mineral smell of poached egg from someone else’s plate. I tell M,
this isn’t going to be easy. You haven’t seen her in a long time.
And he assures me he’ll be fine. He is used to illness. He does well, he says, in the company of those who are sick. Someone throws a Frisbee across the street, in the park, and a Bernese mountain dog jumps, lifts, catches the Frisbee in her mouth with a snap, and takes it away, head lowered, as if she’s privy to a funny thing only she knows about. She lies down and gnaws on its red rim, lying in wait for other dogs to notice her good fortune.

And just then Denise’s ex is standing at the table. I’m not sure he even says hello to us. He sits down with us, as if it would always be clear that he’d be joining us. I have no problem with him joining us; he’s been so involved in Denise’s day-to-day care; he’s helped to find her a good living space and he’s paying her rent. He tells us that the two of them meet at Parc every Sunday, just at this time. I try to push back the sensation that there’s trouble in the air. Perhaps they have an announcement to make. Maybe they’re getting married again after having lived apart so long. B has proposed getting married again to Denise as a way to make sure she’d have the best health insurance coverage, the best care. And though Denise was initially confused by this, maybe she has since settled into the idea.

But my questions are shut off once M’s hand covers his mouth. Tears brim. A look of distress, genuine distress, creases his forehead. Denise is trying her best to creep out of the cab outside. B springs up from his seat. He walks out the front door to assist her, but where is the Denise I know? She isn’t the Denise of months ago, with her vigor and sass, her determination to look fine, go forth, in spite of murderous treatments. Of course she’s impeccably dressed: camouflage tank top, taupe scarf tied around her neck, lots of bare skin. The only concession to comfort is her sneakers, blocky white sneakers that must give her more traction than any other shoe. And there’s her port, just above her collarbone, the bruised square of skin around it exposed for all to see. It is her bit of a fuck-you to a world that would like to say disease doesn’t exist, disease happens to people I shouldn’t have to see. She is still beautiful, but her particular kind of beautiful cannot conceal how much weight she’s lost or the slowness of her walk. Each step takes such effort, and I can tell that the people near her are trying their best not to look. If we’re lucky, one or two might know exactly what’s going on, and they might be urging her forward, in silence. Or else they want her to go away. Maybe both.

And yet that smile on her face! A smile that could turn diamonds to black powder, which sounds more like her description than mine. The two of us sit side by side, B and M across the table, and the four of us do our best to demonstrate, through casual conversation, that disaster is not upon us. What do we talk about? The old points of reference don’t matter so much these days, though Denise is still wondering how she’s going to teach next month, and M is telling her, you don’t want to teach, why would you want to teach? Just take the semester off and rejuvenate. Use that time to get massages and read novels, don’t you think? And Denise slides over to another topic, not exactly ignoring the advice, but giving herself the freedom to bring up just what she wants to bring up. If illness doesn’t give us freedom, then what does it give us? Maybe we’re not talking so much about freedom, but her tact monitor. What could tact be when it takes so much to get from one second to the next? And whoever said that the mind must move in a straight line? One minute she’s funny, one minute she’s sarcastic. My God, her mind is all over the place. Each thought is another roll of the dice, and there’s no better demonstration that human personality is as reliable as chemicals and chance. All of this happens with a big goofy grin on her face. It would be a mistake if I didn’t say there wasn’t some fun in all this—see me put my arm around her shoulder as B aims the camera at us again and again. Hear the popping sounds? And if she knew how much she was sounding like my mother, my dead mother—the abrupt shifts in tone, the jokes with no context—she would stop it right now. So this is what happens to all things, I think, as two girls in the tallest possible high heels clomp and laugh down the sidewalk, bare arm in bare arm.

2010 | 
The email from Nancy comes in late one evening amid a cluster of other emails. She apologizes for the misunderstanding. I don’t appear in any essay—or she’s never had a copy of such an essay. She doesn’t even know if the piece even exists; it is likely yet another essay dreamed of, or in a half-finished state. But if there’s no record of an essay, there’s certainly an email about the essay, a letter she sends to me.

I read Denise’s email once, stop, then read it all over again. It takes me a second to figure out that this is a tough-love letter to Nancy, a letter in response to some misunderstanding between Nancy and Denise—or between Nancy and someone else in the family. The gist is this: since Denise has failed at everything, her work, her friendships, her relationships, she’s grown up and Nancy should, too.

There were dozens of Denise’s—a Denise for this friend, a Denise for that friend. That could be said of all people who have a genius for friendship. But—I shake my head. The email is composed in a tone Denise wouldn’t have wanted me to hear. It is a tone that identifies her role in her family, the expressive big sister who also happens to be the advice giver. It’s not a side I’m eager to know right now. I want my Denise, selfishly. I want her to speak to me, only to me right now.

I come upon one passage in the email:
When Paul stopped talking to me, he was simply too busy for me. I could accept that. I didn’t take it personally.

My hands are flat against the laptop keys. For a second they look distant to me, like another person’s hands, then they come in closer, clearer, and all I see are lines, bones, and veins, the fine light hairs curling over the knuckles.

Clearly this letter was written during the year and a half of our great distance.

Is that dust inside my nostrils, or is there an oil leak on the street nearby?

I stuff a wet bedspread into the clothes dryer.
Yes, you had nothing to do with it. Me. All me. Take no responsibility for anything.

“And what about North Carolina?” I say aloud.

Then I stuff a second wet bedspread into the dryer. I press the button, taxing the efficient machine with too much sodden weight.

I walk back and forth around what little there is of the apartment. If I had a bigger place, I’d walk from room to room, looking for a dirty floor to clean. What am I feeling? If I were in the mood to be a proper patient I could say, interest, betrayal, annoyance, excitement. I could probably keep on filling the rest of this page, but words fail in the face of strong emotion. They hold too little; they don’t pour into one another the way I want them to. There are solid walls between each word, and even if I named every abstraction, the list would never tell the complete story. There would always be another word to follow the last word.

I sit in the living room chair, looking at the jar that holds our late dog’s ashes. An apartment full of urns: our dog’s urn, our cat’s urn, M’s late lover’s urn.

I stay up till one, two hours past my bedtime. I’m feeling, I tell myself, which is better than feeling nothing. To be pissed at the dead—this is where these days have taken me. For God’s sake. It makes as much sense as being mad at the sidewalk, the cracks in the surface, the pieces of chewing gum blackened and crushed by so many feet. But I am not just mad, truly. It would be easier to sit with these feelings if I were simply mad.

A thought leans into me like a shoulder I can’t see: my life would be larger if I could hold the dark side of Denise alongside the bright.

2009 | 
Another note comes in from Nancy. It is Wednesday, the middle of August. Denise has taken a turn, and she thinks I should come right away.

I look out at the Springs backyard, the late-sumer heap of vine, rose, bamboo, and leaf. The brevity of the note makes me sluggish. Philadelphia. I do not want to go to Philadelphia, especially at this point in the summer when so many people are traveling, irritable. Especially with it being—what, two trains away. Six long hours. I just want to be still. I just want to sit on the living room couch until Denise gets better again. She will get better again. And I am surprised that Nancy doesn’t have the wherewithal to see that right now.

Maybe this is why Denise hasn’t answered my emails since our visit last week.

I walk to the window again. The view outside the window grows smaller, the edges less distinct.

Denise will get better tomorrow. I know she’ll get better.

An hour later I write to Nancy to tell her I will be leaving tomorrow on the 5:57 a.m. train.

I’m standing over Denise’s bed, then sitting beside her. She doesn’t look any different from how she looked at our brunch, but her eyes have been closed a full twenty-four hours, and she hasn’t talked in that long. The speed with which I’ve gotten to the hospice is already a memory: Nancy picking me up at Thirtieth Street Station, elevator lifting to a high floor. Hugging Denise’s mother, hugging Austen, hugging relatives, shaking hands. There is a surreal quality to the combination of orderliness and intensity in the air, the serene waiting room overlooking Center City, William Penn’s statue atop City Hall, the sleek modernism of the PSFS building. The sky over Center City looks troublesome, as if it’s about to darken and break and express itself.

I am alone with my friend. I am surprised to be given this private time with her. There are at least a dozen relatives out in the waiting room, each of whom would like to do what I’m doing right now. Only yesterday she was awake and present, still telling the workers that the hospice stay was temporary, a place she’d be leaving after she felt better in a few days. That changed when Austen’s best friend from New York arrived. She cried then as I’m told she cried when she heard I was coming. “Paul’s coming?” she said, and her eyes went wide. As if a visit from me should be a surprise. Denise.

But I have come too late. She’s not even the person I knew. I look at her sleeping face, grab her big warm toe poking out from beneath the sheet: monkey feet. It’s not even Denise’s face anymore: it’s impersonal, a mask. She’s breathing, head turned to the right, but her eyes are closed for good now. As awkward as it is to admit it, I’m relieved that we don’t have to say the usual final things. Too much pressure, and how could human language ever carry us to whatever is coming next? Better to hold on to her toe. Better to think of peace. Better to wish her out and away, as her mind and body are already wanting two different things, and the fight isn’t going to be pretty. But should I be surprised by that?

Then I change my mind. It is hard not to say all the deathbed things one has absorbed from books. It is hard to find the right phrase that might be carried off, beyond consciousness. She moistens her lips and coughs from deep in her throat. I sit down beside her and tell her I’ve been rereading her work all week. I tell her I’ve gone back to
Good Deeds.
I tell her I’ve read her essays, tell her about coming upon “Woman of Heart and Mind,” her piece about motherhood and her brief relationship with Sam. I want her to hear what I’m saying. My feelings about her work should not be a surprise; she shouldn’t have to be reassured just hours from the end. It’s as if I’m still confronting the old accusation, at least implicitly: I don’t love her work enough. Would it ever be possible to love her work enough? But I don’t know what else to give her right now.

This room feels lonely. This room seems to need other people in it. I know there’s a script, and even though I don’t want the script, I feel as if I’m required to perform its parts.

I don’t remember whether Denise’s mother comes to get me at the door, or whether I’ve just decided to walk down the hall. In the waiting room, Nancy and Joey hand me a large envelope of Denise’s work, and I read everything inside, from pieces she wrote as a teenager to newer stories, a few drafts short of finished. The lights are too bright for my eyes. I know the sky is glowering outside, but I do not raise my head to watch it change. I read and I read, as if reading is the only thing I can think of to keep me in the chair. On the other side of the room, Denise’s family looks at the Food Channel with interest, where the baker in question prepares a cake with one too many layers of icing.

2010 | 
I’d already suspected the trip would be significant weeks before our departure, and now M and I are walking up the plank to the ferry. It would be impossible for the trip not to be significant, on an island we’d never been to, thirty miles out from the mainland. We’re not here for a vacation, but for a reading we’re giving together, and since the island is an effort to get to, we long ago decided to stay an extra day. It helps that Ned is much appreciated in Nantucket—no more agreeable creature to bring to Nantucket than a golden retriever. As it is, Ned is already exhausted from greeting even before he’s trotted off the ferry. A handful of children surround him on the upper deck, rubbing him and playing tug-of-war with his chewy, while he rolls over on his back and shows everyone his belly, overstimulated by all those small hands in his fur.