Now she had to face that loneliness all over again, holed up in her one-bedroom apartment. When I’d visit her, I’d sit at the end of the white couch where she lay. She slowly sipped cherry flavored morphine from a cut crystal glass, her inheritance from her mother who had died of cancer. Wrapped in a white sheet, Alice continued to suck cigarettes, all the while holding the elegant glass of pink liquid. Friends came in and out, bringing flowers and fruit, layer cakes and donuts. But Alice couldn’t eat any of it. She grew thinner and thinner until the only thing she could digest was a bit of rice cream slowly spooned into her mouth. But her blue eyes stayed the color of cornflowers that grew wild in summer at the edges of country roads.
Gauguin quit the band to be home more and help his mother. He went back to work for his father full time and visited Alice’s apartment every day after work. He read aloud to her from Time magazine.
One night he came home late. “Nell, I carried my mother to the bathroom and placed her on the toilet. I held her thin body as she sat there. When she was finished, I wiped her and carried her back to the couch. She can hardly even hold down the morphine now. She needs shots.” Then he folded over on our maroon couch and wept until it seemed the earth poured out of him and into his hands.
Later that night, he yelled, “Nell, goddamn it! You put the hangers in the closet the wrong way,” and slammed the closet door shut.
“C’mon, Gauguin. I know you’re having a hard time”—I stepped toward him—“but don’t take it out on me.”
He swung around. “What do you know? Your mother doesn’t have cancer. I didn’t know anything till now. My mother’s dying in front of my face.”
What could I say? I looked at him. His skin was yellow. His eyes were full of fear. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked. I knew there was nothing to be done, but I suggested making some chicken soup, if not for Alice, then for him.
“Nell, you can’t help. No one can.” Then he grabbed his jacket and headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve just got to move. I’m going to walk around the streets,” he said, zipping up.
“Want company?” I asked.
“No, not now.” He opened the door and then called out, “Thanks any way.”
I nodded and bit my lip.
When he got home an hour later, I tried to talk to him again. “Gauguin, don’t you think we should spend some time together?”
“Nell, my mother’s dying—”
“I know.”
“Nothing else matters.” He turned to me. “You can’t ask anything right now. Get it? Nothing.”
“Yeah, sure.” I turned and walked into the kitchen.
That Saturday morning, I went with Gauguin to visit Alice. I hadn’t seen her in a week and I couldn’t believe how thin she was. I reached out to take her hand then, frightened, pulled my hand back. My face flushed with shame. While Gauguin was in her kitchen making juice, she leaned toward me. I thought of our lunch at Tommy’s Grill. She had tried to be considerate since then, even though she hadn’t been sure how. My heart was filled with sadness. This was serious. She was dying. Any differences we had didn’t matter anymore. I leaned closer to her. She wanted to say something.
“Nell, I know you have it hard. Gauguin’s crazy right now. Forgive him. Last night he was here watching television with me, and an old rerun of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show was on. He got all upset and said he should have been on there.” Then she put her bony finger to her lips. “He’s coming,” she whispered.
“Hey, what’s going on in here? Looks like a coffee klatsch.” Gauguin walked around the couch, holding a tall glass of cranberry juice.
“Nothing, nothing,” Alice said, and managed to smile at me.
I bit my bottom lip and raised my eyebrows in acknowledgment.
My December art show almost went unnoticed, because it was about that time that an ambulance took Alice to the hospital. She could eat nothing now and couldn’t even swallow her morphine. We followed in our car. The ambulance parked in the oval drive, and two attendants carried her on a stretcher through the large swinging doors of the building. Her eyes were open. I bet this is the last time she will be outside alive, I thought to myself. The sun shone brilliantly that morning. Across the street were three redbrick town houses. In the basement of one of them was a small market with a glass window crisscrossed by metal bars and a thin neon sign spelling ice cream. The E of ice was broken off. I didn’t know how much of this she saw. I looked down at the cracks in the sidewalk and said farewell to them for her.
For the next week Gauguin sat by her bedside, holding her hand and whispering in her ear to her semiconscious mind, “Alice, it’s okay, you can let go.” He’d read about saying that in a book on dying. He didn’t know what else to do and he said it somehow felt right and true.
Mostly Gauguin seemed to want to be alone with Alice, but I went with him one other time. She was tender and wanted me to come close so she could feel the wool sweater I was wearing. I’d never seen someone that close to death before, and I felt a chill run down my spine.
Two days later, Gauguin came home and said, “I wish it was over. The nurses said they never saw anyone hang on so hard. I think she’s scared. Telling her ‘to let go’ suddenly feels like bullshit. Hell, it’s my mother! I don’t want her to die!”
At that, he collapsed on the couch and started to sob. “Mom, don’t go. Alice, please, I love you.” He rolled himself into a ball and rocked himself back and forth.
I ran to get him a box of tissues. I wasn’t sure what else to do. I sat down next to him on the couch and put my arm around him.
At 4:30 the next morning, Alice died. The phone rang twice. Gauguin climbed out of bed to answer. I heard his voice from the living room. “Yes, thank you. I’ll be right there.” He came back to bed and held me. “I have to go to the hospital. I wanted it to happen, and I didn’t want it—now I can’t believe it.”
He held me close for at least a half-hour. He hardly spoke. I could only imagine what ran through his mind.
At one point he did say to me, “You know, she fished real well. When I was seven, we went fishing down on the Blackhawk River.” He paused. “I’d forgotten all about it. It was a long time ago.” Then he was silent again.
Finally he said, “I guess I should dress and go.”
As he pulled away, I started to cry. “Can I come with you?”
He nodded, but when we got to the hospital room, he wanted to go in alone. I understood. I’d known her less than two years, and she’d given him his whole life. Gauguin told me later that Alice’s body had been covered with a white sheet. He pulled down the sheet, bent over her face, and kissed lips that did not kiss back. “I love you, Alice. I’m going to miss you.” Then he didn’t know what else to say. He was facing his dead mother. He couldn’t believe it. He began to cry uncontrollably.
When Gauguin emerged from the room, he was totally exhausted.
We buried her in the warmest January Minnesota had ever seen. A dense fog descended the morning of the funeral, and the grass was almost green. In the distance I could see the dark water of Lake Calhoun. Alice’s one sister, who still lived in Iowa, did not come. She said she was sick. Several of her divorced and single girlfriends clustered near the gravesite. Rip stood by the grave weeping into his hands. Gauguin was speechless. He looked like a ghost. Afterward, we all went back to our house and ate roast beef sandwiches. People tried to be social, but no one seemed to have anything to say, and Gauguin was relieved when everyone left.
A month later, Gauguin and I visited Alice’s grave. We could walk on top of the frozen snow. The headstone was buried in the drifts, but we stood near where we thought it was. Gauguin carried a bouquet of early daffodils that were already freezing. He placed them on the ground in an empty mayonnaise jar he had brought with him. Through the thin branches I watched the sun leave the city and sink behind the lake. The jar fell over and the yellow flowers la
y in a field of white. Gauguin’s lower lip trembled the whole time we were there, but he didn’t cry. I noticed that he hadn’t shaved in several days: Red stubble sprouted from his chin and cheeks, and he looked a lot older than when I had first met him in Taos.
That night at midnight I woke up, stone cold, and felt a deep crack from throat to groin opening inside me. In that instant I knew simply and clearly that I was experiencing the moment Alice had left her body. She wanted someone on earth to know how she felt, and she had chosen me because I was the other woman in the immediate family, and, I think, because she did not want to burden her son even further. It did not matter that it had been a month since she died. Time does not matter to the dead. It was just important that someone felt it, and I was chosen, not out of logic but out of connection. Though Gauguin was sleeping next to me, he did not wake up and I didn’t ever tell him about it. I was afraid Gauguin would think I was crazy—or even worse, he might have regretted missing one last chance to be with her or been jealous that it had been me who was chosen.
43
RIP DIED TWO MONTHS after Alice did, on a yacht near the Madeira Islands off the coast of Portugal. Crushing a Marlboro into a clear glass ashtray in the lower cabin, he turned to his new girlfriend, Sarah, who was lying next to him with her blond hair spread out on the white pillow. “This is the last damn cigarette I’m ever going to smoke,” he said. He reached for the silver cord to turn out the light and pulled it a little too hard. As the light extinguished, he let out a loud scream. That was it. A massive heart attack. He was already dead when he vomited. Sarah caught the scream and kept it in her mouth. She held its sound for a long time afterward. I bet some part of her is still tasting it.
The police packed Rip into a big black plastic bag and sat him upright in the window seat next to Sarah in the small prop plane that flew them to Lisbon.
We were at home when the phone rang. “Sarah! Aren’t you on a boat?” Gauguin asked.
“Your father is dead.” The words smacked Gauguin into another world from where he stood by our couch in the plain Midwest. His face twisted the way his father’s had when he’d chewed at a cigar. I turned to watch a crow fly by the living room window.
“Rip’s dead?” Gauguin said. The room exploded with the silence of gladioli. I walked across that silence to touch him, but he was breathing so hard that I knew nothing could touch his sorrow, and I stepped back.
The phone connection had a lot of static, so Sarah yelled into the receiver. I could hear her from halfway across the room.
“The Madeiras are Portuguese, so they won’t let the body go right away unless we cremate it,” she informed Gauguin.
“Bring my father home!” Gauguin screamed.
“He’s dead. He’s not coming home.” I’d never heard Sarah be so honest.
Then Gauguin said quietly, “Do what you have to,” and I saw in that moment he was thinking of Alice—that Rip had died in someone else’s arms.
Two days later, we waited for Sarah’s plane to land. Gauguin and I stood by gate seven and passed a can of Coke back and forth between us. The sky was overcast and even at midnight it felt gray. Through the window we watched Sarah’s small body walk across the runway to the waiting room. In her arms she lovingly held a small square box. She bent four times to kiss it before she entered the brightly lit airport and handed the box to Gauguin.
“Here’s your father,” she said.
We drove Sarah home and sat at her kitchen table while she recalled every detail. “One of the last things your father said to me was, ‘Honey, we’re going to be together a long time.’ ” Gauguin threw his eyes down at the carpet. Sarah continued, “The day before he died, he navigated the boat.” Sarah cocked her head to one side to see Rip better in her mind’s eye. “Yes, he looked very nautical that day.”
“Gauguin, it’s getting late. We should go,” I said to interrupt her. We kissed her good-bye, thanked her, and rode down the elevator with the box between us.
At home we put the box on the kitchen table and lit incense. It was wrapped in paper that looked like imitation wood. Gauguin just stared at it. “This is my father?”
“Do you want something to eat?” It felt like a dumb response, but I knew Gauguin hadn’t eaten since lunch.
“Yeah.” He looked up. “I’d love something.”
I took some leftover chicken out of the fridge.
“Where should I put it?” I asked, holding a red plate of roasted wings and breasts.
“I guess over there.” He nodded at the table where the box was.
“You sure?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess.”
We sat at the table in front of Rip’s box and a huge hunger overtook us. We tore at the chicken with our hands.
“This can’t be real,” Gauguin said as he yanked a piece of meat off a drumstick.
The box was a strange dinner guest, a silent shadow of his father. We both were in a frenzy. No amount of food could fill us.
“This sounds nuts, Nell, but let’s go to bed.” Gauguin licked his greasy fingers. “What better way to make tribute to Rip?”
I laughed, a little hysterically. “Okay. What should we do with the box?”
“Bring it in?”
“You’re kidding.” My stomach turned. “I can’t do that. That’s sick.”
“I can’t either. It was a bad joke.” Gauguin got up and blew out the candle. “Good night, Rip.” His lips trembled.
He took my hand. We turned, leaving the box and the plate of chicken bones on the table.
I stopped. “Wait. We should clear the table. It doesn’t seem right.”
We carried the plates to the sink and then went into the bedroom. We crawled between the cold sheets and clung to each other. Gauguin was trembling. We made love desperately, urgently, as if it were the only thing that would keep us alive.
When Gauguin poured himself into me, I pictured beaver swimming upstream. I knew if I didn’t get pregnant that night, in spite of the diaphragm, I never would.
Three days later, we buried the box at the veterans’ cemetery near a 7-Eleven in Bloomington off Interstate 35. Camille rode a train all night from Indiana to come to the funeral. A thin rain fell and made the edges of the grave soft.
Camille kept asking, “Why isn’t there a preacher?” We didn’t have the heart to tell her Rip had been an atheist, though in her heart she knew, so we all clasped hands and sang the Lord’s Prayer. We filled the hole with red carnations and each of us took a turn throwing in a shovelful of dirt.
Gauguin was first. Through the ceremony he had been dry-eyed, but when the dirt fell to the bottom of the hole, he started to sob. “Rip,” he called down into the hole, “I love you.”
Someone handed him a Kleenex, and an old friend of the family took the shovel from him and passed it to Camille, helping her scoop up some dirt.
I stepped forward. “Gauguin,” I said.
He threw his arms around me and wept on my shoulder.
After the funeral, Rip’s employees threw a champagne party at his architecture studio. Near his large white desk flicked slides of Rip at the Louvre in Paris, which he had visited two years earlier. There was Rip, standing by the Mona Lisa; there he was, by the Venus de Milo; and then in a flash he was contemplating Picasso’s two-breasted, two-eyed twisted woman.
I sat by the window and looked across Washington Avenue at the Northwest Bank. Then I got up and walked into the other room, where platters of rolled slices of roast beef, ham, and turkey were spread out. I spied Camille at the center of a small group. Everyone wanted to meet her. Rip had talked about her all the time. She had never visited Minneapolis while he was alive. She cocked her head to one side and listened to whatever people said about her son, as if their memories could bring him back to life.
Suddenly, Gauguin approached me from behind. Breathing heavily, he firmly grasped my elbow and led me to the elevator. He pressed the tenth floor button, and when we got in, he shoved
me against the wall. We rode up and down the shaft with his body pressed against mine and his tongue deep inside my mouth. He was sweating so hard his white shirt became transparent. There was a yearning in him that could have walked through walls. Tears ran down his face and his nose was running.
“Nell,” he said finally, “everything’s over. My whole life. First Alice, now Rip. I can’t work here—I don’t belong in this state. Both my parents are gone. I’m all washed out.” He leaned against the mirrored back wall and waited for the elevator to open. We’d already ridden up and down three times.
Gauguin had asked the authorities at the veterans’ cemetery if his dad could have “artist” written on the gravestone—Rip had hated the army and during World War II had suffered a depression so strong, he’d been discharged at Camp Douglas. They said yes but they must have made a mistake, because when the stone was erected it read, “Raymond ‘Rip’ Howard II, Third Infantry, First Legion. 1915–1980.”
When Gauguin saw the stone, he said, “Now it’s up to me.” His hand opened and closed in a fist.
44
IN THE MIDDLE of April, Gauguin and I drove up to Gull Lake, near Nisswa in northern Minnesota. The proprietor of the place where we stayed couldn’t believe that anyone would come farther north just when the cold was breaking down in the Twin Cities. We were the only ones at the resort cabins, and the canoes hadn’t been taken out of the boathouse yet.
We took photos of each other for the first time in our whole relationship. We had never had a camera before, but now we used Rip’s, which had become Gauguin’s. I took a photo of him eating breakfast the first morning. Fried eggs and potatoes, Sara Lee coffee cake, sliced oranges, English muffins, and coffee were laid out on the table, and I captured it all. He looked straight at the camera, his eyes weary and his smile twisted to one side of his face. He was pale, so his freckles stood out especially dark. I gulped, seeing him so haggard through the lens, and snapped his picture.