“My guess is that they end up at the Merchant and Ivory.”
“Daddy hates Merchant and Ivory.”
“Really? I’d have thought just the opposite. I’d have thought the European settings, the classic plots, the sophisticated company, would be right up his alley. Nothing to foment over, no contemporary angst to ridicule.”
“He can’t stand the way people leave the theater whispering ‘How wonderful’ after those films. That’s what he hates.”
Simon smiles. “I’ve underestimated him.”
“Oh, they’re fairly colorful, my parents. Mother was up on the Vineyard visiting her first love, who happens to be gay. Daddy couldn’t have been more pleased.”
“No threat there,” Simon reminds me.
“That’s not why he was amused, I don’t think. I think he just finds everything human amusing, or at least intriguing. He has an ability to see everything from a distance, to apply Hegel’s dialectic to a cocktail party. And Mother supplies the party for him to analyze.”
“Is that why they separated?”
“I guess it wasn’t enough of a party, just the three of us in one house,” I say. “In the absence of conflict we create it,” I boom out, in Daddy’s lecturing voice.
“Is that what happened with us? It’s not enough of a party for you anymore?”
“A party?” I demand. “Jesus fucking Christ, Simon!”
Simon raises his voice to meet mine, despite the sleeping children.
“Have you thought about him dying?”
“Yes,” I say, taking it down. “Party’s over.”
We drive on in silence until Simon breaks in again.
“You know that Isaac wants to meet him.”
“That’s not what Isaac told me. All Isaac wants, it seems to me, is an easy formula for matricide. Why? Did he say something to you?”
“He doesn’t need to. And he wouldn’t anyway. He probably thinks that by wanting to meet his real father, he’d be shutting me out in some way. I’ve heard it said that we can have no notion of our parents at all and still spend our lives longing for them. So here’s a request from his adoptive father.”
“Okay.”
“Please don’t let that meeting take place without my knowledge. I’m not planning to recede into the darkness because Fowler has surfaced, and I don’t think Isaac should think I will. Fowler, well or sick, is big on the meteoric appearance, but that isn’t going to be a totally great thing for Isaac. For any of us, really. I’ve got legal claim here, and I don’t want to be forced into calling upon it. So let’s do this thing right. I’m saying: you consult me.”
I agree to this. Then I ask to make a request.
“Shoot.”
“Talk to him about Alexandra. Just arm him with some information. They’re too young. Take it from someone who knows.”
“I’ve already talked to him. He did this one night last week. He spent the night on the floor of her room. It’s an enormous house. I told you. I installed a system over there a week ago, and believe me, that girl is not bad news. She’s a sweet kid, and her father is aware of Isaac. He even knows about Isaac being there overnight. He and I were on the phone about it.”
“So you pretended not to know where he was going.”
“I was a little angry.”
“You let me believe my son was out impregnating the local population at the age of fourteen.”
“She’s hardly a ‘local’ girl. And think of what you’ve allowed me to believe lately.”
I didn’t want to have to like this girl. “So, are you telling me we’ll have to meet these people and talk it over or something?”
Simon bursts out laughing. We slow for the toll after Dyckman Street. He flips the token into the basket.
“It might be nice for Isaac to see that we approve of her, providing they approve of him. Then he wouldn’t have to sneak around.”
“I think that’s the part of it he likes the most.”
I lie back, and the next thing I know we’re in the Toys “R” Us parking lot. Half asleep, I look to Simon for an explanation.
“I thought we all could use a lift.”
“Whoa!” Isaac says, waking. “What’s our limit?”
“Twenty each, not a penny more.”
Jane and Isaac tear like wild horses out of the backseat, and Daisy’s hands dance furiously at the prospect of this store, which she knows almost as well as ShopRite.
I stop Simon at the entrance. “This was a good idea,” I say.
“Yes, I think so. Try and center things a little.”
I tell him I have to shop for food, there’s nothing in the house, and he says we have time for all that. Then he puts a hand under my chin.
“Open,” he says. When I do, he looks perplexed. “That tooth doesn’t match your other ones at all. We’ve got to call that dentist.”
“It’s temporary.”
He isn’t satisfied. “Well, make sure you get a good look at the permanent one before he puts it in. They’ll have to break it in your head to get it out if it’s wrong. Look.”
He shows me his first molars on the bottom, the two crowns I’ve inspected for him before. “These were properly stained. I was lucky.”
“Could we get out of our mouths now?” I beg him. “It’s time to buy some toys.”
• • •
What is available to know about Sappho is representative, I’m starting to find out, of what is available to know about many aristocratic women of antiquity—precious little. That she was married to a wealthy man, that she had a daughter and plotted against a tyrant which earned her banishment to Sicily are undisputed rumors, as is the notion that on Lesbos in the seventh century B.C.E. aristocratic women met informally to write and read poetry. Sappho apparently led one of these societies, but all that remains of her ten books of lyric and elegiac poetry are the fragments for which she has been lauded and denounced through the millenia.
I read this one to Barry:
Leave Crete,
Aphrodite,
and come to this
sacred place
encircled by apple trees,
fragrant with offered smoke.
“Put that in,” he says. “The tone is what you want. It’s urgent and strong. It says what you’re saying. Have you done the proposal?”
“In the mail.”
“Good,” he says. “Keep working.” He clicks off.
What I’ve come to value in Barry is efficiency. Now that he’s on the wagon Barry runs a tight ship. It’s inspiring. And Sappho is inspiring, lifting the sensual above where our current world would have it, challenging those who have put nonstandard love in the gutter to leave their unholy places and venture into her holy one.
Tell me, beloved, what you want of me—
I am love, who am filled with the all.
What you want,
we want, beloved—
tell us your desire nakedly.
“Mom?” Isaac calls from the bottom of the staircase.
“What?”
“I’m going out for a while,” he says. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Not all night,” he says. “Chill.”
“Okay.”
He starts out the door.
“Isaac,” I say.
He turns around, about to lose patience, when I say, “She can pick you up here, you know. There’s no sense in waiting on street corners.”
“Right, Mom,” he says. And goes.
chapter ten
The last week of August Barry makes me an offer for the book. I go numb. I don’t leap up off the couch, toss the cordless joyously ceilingward, dance atop the folded sheets and trousers. The elation I’d planned to feel were something as unimaginable as this ever to happen to me eludes me. There will be money, apparently. And more work. But it fixes nothing. My children wish to disown me, my husband works overtime to avoid killing me, and I seem, for the moment, to have run out of old friends, so I scramble arou
nd after new ones.
I accept, of course, and thank Barry in as graceful a tone as a woman folding laundry in front of a talk show can muster. Then I return Fowler’s call, dragging my heels, afraid of what will be asked of me next.
“The fact is,” he says, “I need a wheelchair. Do you know anyone who could take me wheelchair shopping?”
I ask if tomorrow will be soon enough. I haven’t seen him since our day at the Seaport and have only permitted myself occasional daydreams, lapses in attention when I’m alone with Daisy. What I dream is always the same—the two of us at a table, staring off, desperate for the next moment of contact and afraid to let it occur because we know these moments are numbered.
He says his doctor has recommended a place midtown, if I wouldn’t mind picking him up. Without consulting Simon, I tell him I’ll be there at nine.
“How are you?” he asks suddenly.
“I think I’m all right. I really do.”
“I have some things I’d like to talk about.” His speech is slow, as if he speaks another language and is translating from it. “Will you have the day?”
“Yes,” I say, already arranging it in my head: older kids at camp for the final day, Simon at work, Daisy with me. “I’ll work it out.”
Simon calls from his post at the computer out on the porch, “I take it that was himself.”
“He needs a wheelchair.”
“And you’re going.”
“Tomorrow morning.” I wait for the éclat.
“Do you know where to get a wheelchair?”
“No, but he does.”
“Are you taking the car?” he asks, without hostility.
“Of course not!” I go into a spin about the train, the subway, a cab to the medical supplies outlet, a cab back to Fowler’s, and home on the train.
“I’ll take the kids to camp,” he says, “and then figure out something to do with Daisy. You’ll be home for dinner?”
Again, of course, a million times of course.
“How’s he getting along then?”
“I guess not very well. If he’s needing the wheelchair.”
“Well, didn’t you ask? A guy who has no wheelchair and needs one must be in pretty desperate straits. Did you ask him if he’d fallen and couldn’t get up? This strikes me as fairly serious.”
His aggression grates on me, but I treat it as concern all the same. “I’m sure things have gotten pretty bad. He wouldn’t have called otherwise.”
“Bodes ill for the course he’s slated to teach, doesn’t it?”
It occurs to me that we’re gossiping.
“People can do all sorts of things in wheelchairs,” I say.
“Please, Leigh,” he sighs. “Spare me those details.”
Simon and I have had more sex over the last two weeks than we’ve had in two years, it seems, and when we get to bed tonight I begin it, wanting to try something different, if there’s anything left. I’m on top, rocking on his mouth and then over to the side, my back to him. I try to think of where I am, with which man, but sometimes Fowler’s face and long, white body dominate and sometimes Simon’s mouth and hands do, and once or twice I just see myself in the company of the women I know and read about, caressing, being caressed, and feeling, ultimately, the peace of having come in the presence of them. So when, afterward, Simon starts to comment on what seems an unusual interest on my part, I hush him. “Sleep,” I say.
“Sleep,” he says, smiling, eyes closed.
• • •
The unburdened, untenanted look of Fowler’s apartment, as I originally saw it, has been overwhelmed by newspapers, clothing, books, and dirty dishes. I decide to straighten, despite pleas to the contrary, despite the limit placed on our time by the hours kept by the medical supplier and the message I left with Barry, that I’d stop by in the early afternoon to give him a more detailed outline.
Fowler has managed to dress himself in the usual classic gear, and he sits at the butcher block table on a stool.
“Isn’t there a better chair for you?” A man who is at the mercy of his own limbs should be wary of sitting on anything backless, I’m thinking.
“I’m all right. You clean,” he teases. The coffee and croissants I brought stay, untouched, on the table.
“Do you want some help with that?”
“I’ll have a sip of coffee, yes,” he says.
“How have you been managing with food?”
“Another challenge,” he says, affecting boredom.
He takes sips of the coffee as I offer it. The croissant he can handle for the moment. I separate the tasks, collecting dishes first, to put in a sink of soapy water, then clothing, to soak in the bathroom sink piece by piece, piling up books and newspapers. I make the bed, take a broom to the floors, and water the flowers in the window box. Then I rinse dishes, pile them in the drainer, and drain the clothes, to hang in the shower to dry. I’m aware of my efficiency, of his watching me bustle about, moving from room to room in Gillette’s dress, single of purpose, a professional housekeeper.
“You look great,” he says.
I try to stay straight about what I’m doing.
“It appears, sometimes,” he says in the new, studied way, “that I’ve thrown my life away.”
“I thought that for a while,” I say. “About myself. But it doesn’t help to think along those lines.”
I sit down on the other stool and open my coffee.
“You’re going to need more help. You have to start living with that. A wheelchair is only part of it.”
He brushes crumbs off his pants with a gentle sweep of the back of one hand, and I sweep again.
“There’s no way to get a wheelchair up those steps outside. Have you spoken to the landlord?”
“It was a lot just to call you,” he says distantly. “It’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
“What about the course? Can you still teach the course? Does the college know?”
“They know. I’m going to give it my best shot. It’s just screenwriting. I only have to sit in a chair and talk.”
“You have to get there. You have to feel up to it.”
He raises a hand, but I don’t stop.
“You’re going to need a ramp outside,” I posit. “And rails for the bathroom.”
“And probably a hundred other unspeakable things,” he says angrily. “Let’s just get the wheelchair done today.”
“Fine. But I have some questions.”
“You’ve gotten inquisitive.”
I remind him that I’m rearranging my world for him, in spite of the past, and that he must indulge my curiosity. I ask him about treatment, clusters, likely causes, the acceleration of the disease itself. “Because if I’m going to be your help, if I’m going to be with you while you die, I need to know what to expect. I need to know how to behave! It’s a lot, for you and for me.”
“There’s no cause,” he says, as if I’m ridiculous for wanting to know. “It is not hereditary. The clusters, of which you’ve obviously read, have been sighted in Berkeley, L.A., Guam, and among teammates of the Forty-niners. And there’s the case of the famous baseball player, as you know. All the information sits there and there’s no conclusion. You’d think a man like Stephen Hawking, who’s got it, would be able to come up with a known cause and a cure. Some people say toxins cause it, some say dormant viruses in the nerves. There might be a drug, but there might not. I don’t think about these details anymore. I’m just living it. Your reading will supply you with all the facts you’ll need.”
“What about J.T. and Evelyn? Don’t they want to be part of this? Don’t they want to help?”
“Yes, they want to help. But Mama likes a manageable world where weakness only comes to the back door and never sets foot in the house. This is an ugly thing that’s happened to me. She can’t fathom it.”
This much I believe. “And J.T.? Can’t he fathom it?”
“He lives with Mama.”
“Jesus Christ.”
/> “Look, unless you want me to get someone else, we should get going, so I don’t keep you all day.”
I throw the trash from breakfast into the garbage can, tie up the plastic bag, and take it outside, where I wait for him to join me. I have read about the football players and the isolated cases, but I’m not living this yet. I’m still with the facts he’s got past. I’m part of the ugliness Evelyn wouldn’t invite in through the back door.
• • •
“I’m sorry,” I tell him in the cab. “I’m not being fun.” I rest my head on his chest.
“We’re going to buy furniture,” he says. “Let’s enjoy it!”
“I almost made you lose your humor.”
“Not even you,” he says with confidence, and kisses the top of my head.
“You’re so small,” he says. “How could I love a woman so small?”
He has said this before, but I can’t remember when. It must have been at Hastings because I remember feeling I’d triumphed over the larger, fairer Pam. I remember liking his amused attention and thinking that this was as perfect an expression of love as any other. I love this man. I don’t want him to die, and I’m not sure I can bear for him to live. Those are the facts.
• • •
At the medical supplier we listen raptly but not distracted from the ludicrousness of our mission. We accept the offer of coffee from our salesperson, an older man with glasses, even though we’ve just had some. He brings out a binder containing pictures and descriptions of wheelchairs, manual and mechanized, for us to peruse.
“Would you both like to look at this?”
“I think so. Yes,” Fowler says.
I scooch over in my chair and consider the grim offerings.
“Do you think they’ll have this in a blue?” Fowler asks me, of an elaborate, multifunctional tan chair that I cannot imagine him sitting in, never mind operating.
“We can get that for you in blue,” the man says, coming around the desk to inspect Fowler’s choice. “It’s a cobalt, if that suits you.”
“Cobalt is nice,” Fowler says, not quite pleased. “But I prefer navy. Unless there’s a cerulean option.”