The Narrow Door (6 page)

Decide that the capsule she was trapped in was comfortable, gave her room to walk around. Decide that she was touched on the face before they closed the door. That the rocket launcher wasn’t too loud, the temperature inside exactly right, all the food she wanted within reach. No trauma at all in being lifted off, as good as being lifted in Dr. Lavel’s arms. Decide that weightlessness is more blessing than curse. Believe that those on Earth are thinking not so much of measurements and controls, but of her well-being as she rockets farther and farther away from them. She always liked night, anyway. Decide that there will be someone to meet her on the other side, someone as kind and patient as Dr. Lavel, and when she looks back at Earth, she won’t think about any of the years on the street, or those first nights in the lab, but only about looking ahead. Seeing what’s next.

2010 | 
What is it that makes us turn away from the grieving?

Language fails. No one wants to say the wrong thing. Grief is a monster. Grief laughs at language, lazy language, its tendency to tidy, order, sweeten, console. “It’s all part of the deal.” Or: “You’ll meet again in another place.” Bullshit. It’s quite possible you could say such a thing and never mean to say it, never know where it was coming from.

Or is our aversion more animal than that? Is it a set about the eyes? The way they hold their mouths? Maybe it is a smell they give off, a sadness collecting in their hair. A smell of motor oil, basement, rotten leg of lamb, an oil burner gone wrong, and if we breathe it we won’t ever get that smell out of our nostrils. We fear that if we’re around them too much, some of their bad smell will put a spell on us, and we’ll lose everything that’s dear to us, too. We’ll lose our friends and families; we’ll lose our houses. And of course we’ll do a much worse job of it. Oh, we’ll be completely raw in our grief, crawling around on our hands and knees until our palms are worn. We won’t be able to get up off the ground. And no one will call our phones or drop off baked goods because we were always too self-oriented to think about anyone else.

Maybe it isn’t so sweeping. Maybe coming into contact with such immensity helps us to see that our lives are small, full of the dullest tasks made to distract us from the inevitable: we’re all walking up the road to death. We can’t hold on to that image without turning away from it. Virginia Woolf gets it right when she writes, “Bridges would cease to be built. Roads would peter off into grassy tracks …”

Today everyone—M, my good friends, everyone—is involved in their busy lives. I say that with as much neutrality as I can. I haven’t made myself available to anyone exactly. I’m a visiting professor at a university, and I’m mentoring four graduate students from another university. If I had a grant or a fellowship, if I didn’t have to go into work to lead my classes or meet my students, I’m sure I’d leave the house less and less, only forcing myself to the supermarket when the coffee situation required attention. I know I’m certainly guilty of staying away from others when they needed me most. Not deliberately, but it is so easy to put off that phone call to the next day.

We wait for the day when that friend has turned toward other things. No longer weighed down with the leaden coat of grief, and back to everyday anxieties: what to make for dinner, or what to do about jury duty.

I’m certainly not that person yet. After some good days, some good weeks really, I see a surprising feature on my skin as I step out of the shower. A constellation of pink and crimson welts. The band stretches from the middle of my chest, beneath the right nipple, around to the center of my backbone. It looks as if someone has taken a cigarette and burned me with it, strategically, to punish my nerve endings. The band is remarkably ugly, and I can’t tell what’s worse, the growing pain of the sores, or the way the sores make me feel about my body. There’s been no warning for this, no headache or fever, no tingling or burning. It looks as if a war has played out on my skin. The inside of me rising against the outside. The sores weep. I thought I was doing so well, and now I see what I really am underneath it all: lost dog, wild and yowling, walking farther and farther into the woods.

“Look,” I say to M an hour later. We’re standing in the living room. At Roger and Jill’s next door, someone is working a power saw. A mist of ripped wood is clouding the view beyond the fence. The sky looks like rain. I pull up my shirt to show him my torso.

“Ouch,” he says, wincing. “Sweetheart.
Ouch.”
He reaches out with his hand to touch—I know he wants to make it better—before he pulls back. “I’m sorry. What is it?”

“Shingles,” I say.

“Shingles? What makes you say that?”

I walk over to the open laptop, where I show him the results of my research. The faces in the images look miserable; it’s as if each of them has been exposed to a chemical blast. In one picture a man’s forehead is scabbed from the middle of his cheek to his hairline. The swelling is so extreme that he can’t open his left eye. We can’t even look without screwing up our faces. I make a loud sound of disgust and close the laptop with a snap.

“You have to go to the doctor,” M says. “I’m calling Dr. Steve.”

I shake my head brusquely. I tell him there’s no reason to go to Dr. Steve when I’ve already made an accurate diagnosis. I don’t want to go to Dr. Steve. He is simply going to tell me to stay home and rest as there is no treatment for shingles, just some medication to prevent it from getting worse, and I’m clearly past the initial stage where it could still be of use.

“If you’re sick,” he says, minutes later, “I don’t think I’m going to be strong enough to take care of you.”

M’s voice is quiet now, thick with suppressed tears in his throat. Then he starts to cry. By sick, he means HIV-sick. It hadn’t even occurred to me that shingles could be a sign of HIV. In three months I’ll find out from Dr. Steve that I’ve tested negative, but right now I want to say, you
could
take care of me, I promise. I wouldn’t be that much work.

I just want to be held. That is the one and only thing I need right now. But I don’t know how to ask for his arms around me, even though we’ve been together fifteen years. I might just be afraid that he’ll hug me for two minutes out of obligation and get on with his day.

Later that afternoon, I turn on the Weather Channel to see Washington’s Mount Rainier practically filling up the screen. Then another view of the mountain from the street of a featureless subdivision, another from the waters of Puget Sound, then one more from a tourist town with a coffee shop, a fruit stand, a gas pump, an organic food store. Boys skateboard through the haze of an unseasonably hot day. Haze against snow: it’s all a little nauseating. The voice-over says,
Not
if
It Will Happen
, but
When.
Then footage of a young couple walking briskly to a hillside to avoid the onslaught. Then a chart graphing the buildup of roiling matter beneath the poised, boreal mountain.

I get a kick out of the visual dramatizations, which is probably the unspoken wish of the producers and directors: they don’t really want to scare us. Pieces of rock belt the air, the atmosphere is impenetrable. But I’m especially mesmerized by the sluice of melted snow, lava swamping the streets to the eaves of the houses. You could say it’s the color of chocolate milk or mocha, but it’s not so appealing as that.

Bury it, I think. The whole fucking lot of it. Ugly houses and their vain yearnings.

I walk back to the bathroom, pull up my shirt, and study myself again. Shingles. What am I, old now? For the next month I’ll check myself every few minutes just to make sure I’m not leaking lava.

1985 | 
It must be nearly eleven when Denise calls me one Tuesday night, in spring. “I’ll take it in the den,” I say to my father after he’s already answered the phone. My father’s voice always turns gruff once he figures out Denise is calling. The truth is she calls a lot, two times a day, sometimes for two or three hours at a time. Calls to our house are met with a busy signal, a harsh warning sound. Do I like being on the phone so much? The question doesn’t occur to me. Denise is in my life, and this is part of the pact. And what must my father think when he walks into his den to see me lying on the bare floor, drawing air pictures with my finger? My face might seem to be a little blissed, as if Joni is singing her newest song only for me. I’m not speaking at all. There isn’t space for me to speak, which must prompt my father to think: what could this divorced woman, this single mother, want with my son? He’s seen her picture on the inner flap of her book. A glamour shot: half-parted mouth, a smart, but plainly sexual look in her eyes. She looks a little wounded, sexually wounded, actually, but there’s hauteur there, too: she is not someone to be messed with. She’s been places, if not literal places. She has the face of an actress, and perhaps that’s why he steps right over me, without apology or acknowledgment, to retrieve some file about the proposed condo project he’s been fighting across the lagoon from our summerhouse.

I’m not sure why I’m not fazed by his gruffness. Maybe it’s simply because I like his den, the no-nonsense masculinity of it: the hard edges, the solid desk, the metal lamp with its dark bronze hood. No pictures on the walls but a serene-spooky Jesus, with a dog-like face, and a band of thorns twisting into a sore, liver-colored heart. I dreamed of this Jesus as a child. I was sitting before him, listening to his mellifluous voice, when a man sprang out of the crowd and shot him in that holy heart. I woke up panting with two hands covering my own heart, and minutes must have gone by before I was back to myself again.

Not long before she dies, Denise mentions that she was always afraid to stay on the line whenever my father picked up the phone. And she laughs when she tells me that. She was afraid he’d be harsh with her, interrogate her. The deadly seriousness of that voice. And I’m amazed to think she had the nerve to keep calling.

Tonight she’s reading to me from the New Novel. She’s been working on the New Novel since not long after the
Good Deeds
pub party. This book is a lot different from that book: longer, more elaborate sentences. The central character is a writer of children’s books named Emily. Emily has a very young daughter named Lizzie. The husband, Peter, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. And most important, there’s a playwright. This playwright, Gene, rents the second floor of Emily’s house, on a beach block in a beach town based on Ocean City, after coming upon an ad she’d put up in the supermarket. The playwright takes an interest in Emily’s work. The playwright gets to know Emily; he takes an interest in Lizzie. You know where this leads.

The book pivots on one line: “sometimes relationships that didn’t happen are worse than the ones that did.”

I listen to a new page of the book every night. I try to get as many freshman comp papers graded as I can before Denise calls, but if I’m not done by the time she calls, I don’t mind. So I’ll wake up an hour earlier in the morning, so what? Listening to Denise is my real education. And besides, Denise is much more interesting than writing EXAMPLE? or CLARITY? in the margin of some comparison-contrast essay.

At first I am startled by what a terrible listener I am. It isn’t like watching a movie. And it is certainly not like reading. When I read, I’m so prone to stopping midsentence; my attention pools in empty space, and the floaters in my eyes drift down the wall until the next sentence pulls me back in. Denise doesn’t know it, but it can sometimes take me five minutes to get through a single page. Over the phone, her sentences speed past me like meteors, and I can feel Denise listening to me as I’m listening to her. By that I mean she is listening for laughs, pauses, silences after lines that are supposed to be jokes. She is listening for changes in my breathing. The enormity of this responsibility wipes me out sometimes. I stare fixedly at the paperweight on my father’s desk so I won’t get distracted, to anchor my attention.

The book starts, stalls, starts again, as all books do. Should it be in first person? Third? How many points of view? Denise seems determined to develop the language. She wants multifaceted sentences, rich with description and sound, that echo the books she loves:
Tender Is the Night, The Stranger, Madame Bovary, Ghost Dance.

I see how a book becomes your house. But soon you are just a function of your house. The house tells you what you want, how you should live. At the same time, everything that comes into your life goes into the house. The house transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, and without it, you’d never even know yourself, never even know that all those choices and consequences mattered. Your life has purpose inside that house, in its moldings and floorboards, in the way the light falls on the windowsill, and you pass on that house to others.

One day we take the hour drive to Ocean City, the Buick too wide for the lanes of the causeway. Austen, Denise’s six-year-old daughter, sits up in the backseat, studying the whitecaps on the bay, the blue power plant at Beesley’s Point. We’re here to find Emily’s house. For Denise, the task is not so much about finding the house that would be right for Emily as it is an act of attention, finding the house that’s always existed. But before we find that house, we park. We walk the boardwalk, scrubbed and bright on this cold spring day. Waves boom against the shoreline. They retreat and break once again, this time with the sound of a whip crack. We smell the ions in the air. There is a triumph about the three of us moving as one, the sights ahead of us—the Music Pier, Wonderland, Gillian’s Fun Deck—calling up old stories. A woman walks by, mystified, alarmed by us. Ocean City is comfortable. Looking at it the way we’re looking at it? Well, that would be like looking at your aunt Barbara as if she were the most wondrous creature on the planet, when in fact she’s just Aunt Barbara, with her loose cardigans and her wide hips. But we’re liked here, too. Others smile at us; they seem to want to be taken in by our laughter. They want to play along. I’m positive they’re mistaking Denise and me for a happy couple with their daughter—the wonders that await the happy heterosexual couple with their daughter! Don’t I feel it, a new stature accorded to me? I feel the swagger in my walk and talk. When we step inside Litterer’s, for instance, we’re directed to a table close to the boardwalk, as if we’re some centerpiece of fertility.