The Sea of Light (57 page)

“Would you like to see Kay?”

Thoughtlessly, instinctively, I open my hands. The urn settles into them. Not as heavy as I’d imagined.

Bren sits on the rim of her chair, leans toward me, reaches gently into the urn’s silent mouth until her hand disappears to the wrist, plastic crackles. She pulls it out carefully—a sealed, see-through bag. The patio light makes it gleam dully.

“Here she is.” Bren smiles, quietly. “In twenty-five words or less. Here. You can hold it if you want.”

I set the urn down, seize and fondle the bag of ashes. They aren’t ashes really. Or, at any rate, I’d pictured the substance as being similar to wood ash—fine, dusty, insubstantial, ephemeral material distilled to an almost nonexistent essence. Fragile. Easily dispersed by the slightest breeze. The reality is so different: these are hard, gritty chips, like gravel, heavy shell, pieces of stone. Tangible remains of the physical presence.

We are real, after all. In some way, Bren and her terrible DeKuts were right: Truth is in the body.

But not entirely.

And for a second, I think I understand—in a burst of thoughtless comprehension that is instant, then just as suddenly gone—what she was trying to tell me. Whatever it was—the odd phenomenon, the thing or place that common sense would not take her to, that words would fail to conjure—she had found or seen or experienced somewhere in the land of Not Entirely. Somewhere in that intermediate, limbo state between the truth of the body, and another truth.

I say good-bye to Kay and hand back the remains, murmuring thank you.

Oh, says Bren, you’re welcome.

“Will you keep her?” In the dark, I can feel myself blush. “I mean, them? It?” We both grin then. It’s hard to know what to call this—death’s leavings, packaged in plastic, the burned-down pieces of core material that fire has not destroyed. She sighs.

“For a while, I guess. I’m really not ready to deal with all that. Burial, gravestones, that kind of stuff’s
out.
Kay hated the thought of being underground. But there’s this point way off the Cape—she loved it so, we went out there once in a boat-for-hire one spring, early spring, and saw whales swimming along slow and graceful as you can possibly imagine, every once in a while they’d spout. I saw one of their eyes, and I swear, Chick, the thing was looking right at me. It was amazing. We took it as a good-luck symbol—for us, I mean—the sighting, I mean—for our love. I guess eventually I’ll scatter the ashes there. I think the notion would please her.”

She strokes Boz’s neck, squeezes a dog ear. He slimes her hand in pleasure. “You know, I kept having this feeling when I’d go to sleep at night, Chick—oh, for months after she was gone. Maybe just a wish fulfillment. I’ve never told this to anyone else. But I kept feeling she wasn’t really gone—she was still with me, somewhere, somehow. I’d talk to her, and everything.”

“That’s okay, you know.”

“I know.”

“What about now? Is she still around?”

Bren hesitates. Then: “No,” she says sadly, firmly. “Not any more.”

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. There’s so much loss in that, too.”

“Oh, sure. And change. Sometimes I think the hardest thing has been this selfish kind of—I call it survivor’s fear, you know?—of having to see, really
see,
that this—life, what we understand, what we do, who we are—none of it is really permanent. But it’s easy to take that feeling, that fear, and go into a spin about how nothing really
matters.
I mean accomplishment, goal attainment, any of the markers we use to measure existence. I went into that sort of a spin myself. It was like riding the big snowball straight into hell. Only I realized, after a while, that
permanence
and
significance
are two different things. I mean, ideas. Qualities. Whatever. And I started to feel better. Almost healthy again.”

Congratulations, I tell her.

Something else, she says, leaning forward to scratch Boz’s neck and chest, to take my hand in hers, and I let her. A sort of self-fulfilling prophesy, she continues. It came to me during the last couple of days, when I was at the hospital full-time—everyone knew she was going fast. I fell asleep in this chair and woke up, I could see how dark it was out the window, night, and I looked over at her. I figured she’d be asleep—they were always giving her these mega-doses of drugs, so a lot of the time even when she was awake she was more or less barely there, if you know what I mean. But that night, I don’t know why, I don’t even remember what time it was, she was completely awake. We looked at each other. She held my gaze for the longest time. Then she passed out again. But it came to me, Chick—somehow I knew—that in some important way I can’t even put into words right now she was going to be all right. And I would be, too. And so would we all. If only we could know it.

Wan moths and mosquitoes flutter. Her mouth is waiting for me and I lean forward to kiss it, find it surprised and soft, vulnerable, yielding; and in turn I am surprised to find it so—for the second time in my life, though not the last. Our noses smudge dirt-spattered cheekbones. I touch her lips with a finger and a kind of shiver goes through me. The tips of our tongues meet, very slightly. Tap each other lightly in a soft and indecipherable code. Then we both pull back into patio chairs, separate in the soft-lit dark but, this time with the once-sharp, clearly delineated boundaries of separation glowing fuzzily around the edges, pleased, a little shy.

*

Boz gets a bath that night.

When he hears water gushing into the tub he starts to whine and tremble in a strange, almost frantic, yet subdued kind of ecstasy, submitting readily with bowed head when Bren reaches to unbuckle his collar, standing stoically paw-deep while we pour pots of lukewarm water over him, work dog shampoo through his coat in a lather until the mud washes away and the bathwater’s inky, rinse him off from the spout.

Three worn old beach towels later he’s clean and proud, scattering around the house like a whirlwind of canine muscle, nails clicking the kitchen tiles and hallway floorboards. He rolls on rugs to dry himself more. Jumps onto forbidden territory: leather upholstery, downy bedcovers. Barks, acts coy, goads us into playing catch with the football-length rubber biscuit I bought him at an overpriced pet store in Beacon Hill. I look at Bren. We’re dirty ourselves, tired, our clothes grimed. Pitching the rubber biscuit down a hallway, I realize that the place seems smaller without Kay in it—glossy wood, rustic style and the exposed ceiling beams notwithstanding. Some things are put away. It is Bren’s place now. In it, she looks taller, more alone.

Ajax. Torn sponges. We scrub the tub clean of dog hair and dead twigs. The smell sifts up into steamy, fluorescent-lit air, collides with the fresh breezy damp of the night. The manufactured; the natural. Of both elements this human life consists. I resign myself to it: Walking down a supermarket aisle, or walking down a pine-softened, tree-shielded dirt trail, we humans are still creatures apart; never really, fully participating in any immediate environment. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what gives us consciousness. Awareness of continual observation in lieu of natural connection. Separate from each other, too—although, for sure, we seem to strive for something different; and, to be sure, none of us start out that way.
Born alone, die alone,
the old saying goes. But it’s not really true. We aren’t born alone—we come out of the body of the mother. We do die alone, though. And that—that conflict, between the way we begin and the way we end—that is the friction and the loss, the subtle underpinning of grief, that informs this human existence.

“Bath for you, Chick?”

I nod. What about her?

“Shower. You first, though. Hungry?”

“To be honest, Bren, yes, but not for that health-food stuff.”

She grins wryly. “Scored big with my latest fad, I see.”

“Yes, you Spartan. Is it the sports thing or the WASP thing that makes you so extreme?—tell me. Anyway, let me take you out to dinner.”

“Nah.”

“Why?” I tease. “Still afraid of running into your
crème de la crème?”

She shakes her head, gets a look in her eyes that’s part mischievous, part serious, part something else I can’t read.

“Just for you, Chick. What about pizza?”

I agree. Ask can we please order delivery, like all the college brats? because I’m feeling distinctly childish right now, a little spoiled and regressive? and she tells me Of course, of course, who would want it any other way?

Bath, shower. Baby powder, fresh scent on skin. I wipe a circle in the mirror and look: Not bad. Early middle age. Growing knowledge of self. Knowledge of self collecting, in fact, like the proverbial moss on stone. Each wrinkle, each deep line that sleep did not put there, that sleep will not ever take away—look at it, woman; look at it hard. Your face. Aging. You have earned all the dents in this fender. Earned every disappointment and desire, every loss, and every win. Which makes me more aggressive, somehow. Assertive. Lets me know more fully what I want. Need. The difference between. What I can do without. And what I must not pass up—or, rather, what I would pass up only at a great unendurable cost.

Cost to what, Chick? To self. And why? Because it would be an avoidance of truth. A banishing of real, raw beauty from my life. Like they say, after all: truth is beauty, beauty truth. Because, in the beginning and in the end, the only truth worth making a big stink about is love. And the truth here is that you love her.

Early middle age. The perfect age to be.

I don’t know why I think that, but I do.

Clean clothes, cool night breeze. Two fresh-scrubbed, good-looking women and one fresh-scrubbed, ugly-looking dog in a kitchen, in the country, pulling napkins and platters from cupboards, getting out salt and pepper. When the doorbell shrieks, Boz goes temporarily, protectively mad, and a red-faced teenager stands there shyly while Bren restrains the dog and I fork over bills. He hands back change and a big, flat cardboard box that smells hotly like spiced hell, thanks us for the tip. When he turns back to the gaudy lit sign on top of the delivery car I wonder, briefly, the way I wonder at every momentary human encounter—I can’t help it, it comes with the professional territory—whether or not he will have a long life, and what kind of life it will be. Gay? Straight? Full of honesty, or of lies? A life of tenderness and courage? Of pain, violence, love? The headlights flick on, recede down the long, long driveway. I wish him good-bye and good luck. I will never, ever know.

We turn on a couple of soft living room lights, toss cushions onto the rug and set up dinner: a dishtowel, cardboard box open on the floor and pizza mist rising, paper towels for napkins. The fireplace is clean, dark, cold. A simple black mesh grating covers it. I wonder if Bren used it at all this winter—or were flaming Sunday logs, fresh coffee, the
New York Times Book Review,
just Kay’s choices really?

“What kind of music do you want, Chick?”

“Something from the late sixties, please, or early seventies. To remind me of my youth. Not that my youth was all that memorable.”

She selects a cassette. I watch her move through soft circles of light, through long angular shadows. Her face keeps changing; sometimes it’s obscured, at other times gently illuminated, intent, gracefully no-nonsense.

We eat pieces of the thing I’ve ordered, in what was undoubtedly a mood of childish excess—or maybe just rebellion at Bren’s latest ascetic health-food phase. An extra-large deep-pan pizza. Very oily. Double cheese. Onions. Green olives. Black olives. Hot peppers. Mushrooms. I realize it’s the fulfillment of a long-term frustrated desire; the kind of pizza I always yearned to order during all the years working my way through a state college to pay for books and food, through the summers to pay off loans, trying to study for exams standing at cash registers or deep-fry vats, through all the lobster shifts and swing shifts of graduate school, pleas of poverty to financial aid committees; always jealous of the rich people who sat beside me in classrooms, envious of those wealthy straight white folk who taught us all—taught us the ways of the mind, gave us an edge in the world which, in the end, was really another ticket into privilege and power. For the people I envied, a way of maintaining the advantage they’d been born into. For me, a way of elbowing into it, once and for all.

At any rate, I’ve gone all this time without treating myself to anything so frivolous as pizza. It’s terrible-tasting, like most wasteful things. I will, nevertheless, enjoy it.

Bren stares at me, smiles.

“You look so happy.”

“Mmm. Living well. It’s the best revenge.”

Revenge for what? she asks. For growing up without a trust fund in America, I tell her. And she nods, knowingly; she has had to work hard too, to hammer out a place for herself.

She pats oily tomato sauce from her lips. “You know, one of the kids on the team told me the other day that she believed in reincarnation.” She imitates a husky young voice. “‘It’s like, I figure that, like, if I don’t, like, do real
well
in this life, I’ve, like, got a bunch more other
lives
to do
well
in. So, I mean, like, what do
you
think about it, Coach?’”

We laugh, long and loud. Settled flat under the coffee table, Boz cocks his head at us in brief alarm before deciding it’s nothing, then curls back to sleep.

“Well, Coach. What
do
you think about it?”

“I told her that I try not to worry about things like that. I figure we’re here, alive, in this life, now. And the best approach is to just get on with it.”