James asked, “What do people say in their sleep?”
It had been so long. There was only that one boy I’d ever spent the whole night with, and as far as I knew he never said anything. But maybe I hadn’t been paying attention. Maybe, so pleased with everything, I’d slept soundly, paying attention only to myself. If I’d been told, all those years ago, that this would be it, I would have learned it, the way if somebody said of a song I loved, you will never hear this again, I would try to memorize every little false note and trill and would play it in my head until it became my favorite song, until I was the one singing it.
“They talk nonsense,” I said. “And when you repeat it back in the morning, they don’t remember dreaming anything close.”
“Go to sleep.” I felt his arm move beneath me, then relax. “Say something.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I mean later. When you’re sleeping. Try to talk in your sleep. Make something up.”
The Altitude of Man
He died.
He died, of course.
He died, not that night, the one I fell asleep on his arm and slept soundly. I don’t know whether he did, too—it was only nine at night when he made room for me, half a day before his usual bedtime—but when I woke at five the next morning, his arm was still beneath me, and his faint snores weren’t much different from his speaking voice. I got up and went home alone to change for work.
He died a week after this, two weeks before the circus hit Boston. Feeling better, he’d gone into town by himself. He did that every now and then, to admire a store’s high ceilings, get a touch of admiration from the tourists. Ever since New York, he’d liked that: seeing people watch him, people who hadn’t been forewarned.
He went to the little grocery store in town to buy a Coke. There were two tourists there, men from Boston, getting things for a picnic in a more picturesque town than ours. They filled their baskets with packages of cheese, a loaf of Italian bread wrapped in white wax paper, and then they caught sight of what looked impossible: a man whose body had refused to stop, an ambitious body, beyond what they’d imagined architecturally feasible. First they thought it was some kind of costume, two men dressed up in a dark suit, a papier-mâché head on top of the top man. Was it advertising something? Wasn’t it hot in there, hard to balance?
Then the thing said something. “Mary,” it said, “could you open that for me, please?” The clerk pried off the crown cap of the Coke; it plunked off the glass and fell into a basket beneath the counter. The tourists realized in steps. The face was real, the head was real, that whole enormous span of body was a true thing, no fake, no hoax. He smiled at them, then turned to the door. Still precarious-looking, as he bent down his head to leave, started across the parking lot. You could understand why people thought at first he was two men: he moved like that. Like each part of him was a piece of furniture a little heavy for the rest, his Laurel and Hardy legs moving his piano-torso down a flight of stairs. Clearly his body regretted agreeing to this unwise proposition, getting James across the street.
It was halfway across the street that he fell, about two blocks from the library. Nobody came running to get me. He would have told them to, I think he would have, but he had a sudden fever and was not making much sense. The tourists got to him first; they dropped their bread and cheese in the middle of the street, as if they were the ones who’d fallen. Then Mary from the market arrived. She called the ambulance and then Oscar and Caroline. The paramedics couldn’t get him on a stretcher; he was too heavy, he wouldn’t fit. The tourists—they were good people, real estate brokers on vacation—said they’d help to lift him. The doors wouldn’t close. By this time James was back in the world, and Oscar was there.
“I want to go home,” James said. “I’m fine, I just want to sleep.”
“Think you better go to the hospital, Jim,” Oscar said. “You look terrible.”
“I feel fine,” said James. “I just want to sleep.”
So he sat up on the floor of the ambulance and they closed the doors and drove him home.
I found out an hour later, when two boys came into the library. “You hear about the giant?” one said to another. “Got hit by a car.”
“Naw, he tripped over some kid,” said his friend. “Killed ‘im.”
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“That giant fell on some kid and killed him. Squashed him flat,” said the second boy.
“Did not,” said the first.
I immediately called the Stricklands.
“Oh, good, Peggy,” said Caroline.
“What’s happened?”
“Jim had a little accident. Nothing serious. He fell in town, didn’t hurt himself, but I think he must be sick—he’s sweating, he feels terrible. We can’t get him to go to the hospital. Oscar’s over there now. We were just about to call you. Maybe—could you get away from work? Is this a good time?”
“Of course it is, of course I can.” I wondered where Astoria was, I wondered exactly how fast I could get out. “In a couple of minutes.” And then, as I hung up the phone, I did something I’d never done before: I yelled in my library. I didn’t care who heard me.
“Astoria!” I hollered. “Come here! I need your help!”
She came running up on her pointy little movie-star shoes.
“What is it?”
“Take the desk. I need to go. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
I left her there, calling after me. “Peggy? Just wait a minute, Peggy—”
He wasn’t asleep when I got there. I thought he would be; I’d imagined I’d have a few moments to think, to discuss things with Oscar.
“Peggy!” Oscar said. “How nice!”
“I’m not going,” said James. “I don’t have to.”
“I’ll just leave the two of you alone,” said Oscar. “I’ll be over at the house.”
“Had a fall?” I said.
“I had a fall,” said James. “Then I got up, and I came home, and I want to recover here.”
I put my hand on his head. “You have a fever,” I said.
“Well Jesus, Peggy, maybe I have the flu like a normal person. Maybe I feel a little lousy, and I fell because of that—my balance isn’t great in the first place—and now, like a normal person, I want to sleep in my bed and drink orange juice and feel better in a few days. If there’s anything that’ll make me feel worse, it’s being in a hospital.”
I nodded. Maybe he was right—how could I tell?
“Okay,” I said. “Do you mind if I stay?”
He sighed. “I don’t plan on being real entertaining.”
“I’ve watched you sleep before,” I said, “and you’re right, you’re not exactly enthralling.”
“Okay.” He gave me a grudging smile. “I’m going to sleep now.”
“I’ve been warned.”
He took off his glasses and set them on the windowsill beside his bed. When he was asleep, I called Astoria and asked if she could handle the library by herself. I was sorry, I said, I knew I had taken a lot of time off lately—
“Peggy,” she said softly. “You’ve barely taken off any. How much vacation time do you think you’ve got stored up?”
“No idea.”
“Call town hall,” she said. “I bet it’s a record.”
And then I sat there and watched him. Maybe this was the night he’d talk in his sleep. I even thought I’d claim he did; I thought he’d like that. Caroline came over at dinnertime with some soup and crackers for both of us.
“How’s the patient doing?” she asked.
“Okay, I think. Maybe tomorrow morning we can take him to the hospital, when he’s not so scared. I think the fall shook him up.”
“Naturally,” she said.
“Naturally.”
An hour later James said something. I thought he was talking in his sleep, and I leaned closer to hear what he said. It was my name. Then he opened his eyes.
“Peggy,” he said. He put out his hand. I moved closer, put my hand in his. “Don’t,” he began, and I took my hand away, but that wasn’t what he meant, he closed his hand around mine, made it disappear, and held on.
What he said was, “Don’t let them boil me.”
“What are you talking about?”
His eyes were glossy, strange paperweights in his face. “Like Charles Byrne.”
“Who?”
“You gave me a book,” he said. “A long time ago. Charles Byrne. He was a giant and he always thought this doctor, I forgot his name, was going to steal his body and boil it for the skeleton.”
“What a thing to be thinking of,” I said.
“And then he died and he’d paid his friends to take care of him but the doctor got his friends drunk and stole Byrne’s body anyhow and now it’s in some museum hospital. You think they’ll try that? With me?”
I felt his forehead. It was slick and warm. “How do you feel?”
“Don’t let them. They want my bones.”
“Nobody wants your bones. They just want you to get well.”
“Peggy,” he said, “don’t let them boil me!”
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
Then he started to shiver. Not the way I’d ever seen anyone shiver in my life, a brief electrical jolt that can be explained by anything, medicine or superstition: a goose stepping on your grave, your body working up heat. This was ongoing shuddering.
“I’m cold,” he said, and God help me, that explained everything. He was cold. He needed to be warmer. Later I would know it was the sign of a fever spiking; maybe I knew that before, too. But at that moment, standing next to his bed, all I knew was that he was shivering like someone who was cold, and that he said he was cold. This was something I could solve, despite the fact that all my suspicions were confirmed: me, my careless supplying of books, was the source of all his habitual nightmares.
I pulled the covers up, right to his ears. I unfolded an afghan and draped it over him. He still shivered. “I’m so cold,” he said, and I went to the closet and got his overcoat out and threw that over the blankets. I arranged the tweed arms like a muffler around his neck.
“How’s that?”
He nodded. Soon he fell back asleep. He didn’t shiver in his sleep. Tomorrow morning I’d call the doctor over. Maybe he could talk some sense into James. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that before.
I’d lied, of course. Somebody did want his bones: me. Not just bones, or the quilted muscles that wrapped them, or the resistant but assailable cartilage in his ears. I wanted to ladle together my hands and dip them in him and cast from my netted fingers a net of blood onto the floor to read, untangle what was wrong and fish it out, see, no wonder you felt poorly, this was in your blood. Hard work will solve all problems. I imagined fingering white and red cells as if they were beads, sorting them.
Not just blood, or flesh—everybody wants that. I was worse than vampire, worse than cannibal. I wanted everything. Every cell of him, an airy room with an atrium and walls you could hear the neighbors through. I would have stuck my face into his to get the curiously cold mist off a sneeze. I wanted the ephemeral oxygen that visited his lungs and exited, deflowered. His urine, which (this is a scientific fact) was sterile. I would have taken his shit—there should be a lovely word for it; the ones I know are clinical or vulgar—I would have taken what his body had deliberated over and rejected as useless. And I would have been amazed: it had been somewhere I could not venture, another part of him I could not know.
By now you think I sound desperate and sick. I’m just cataloguing all the things I could not have, desiderata, desiderata. By now you are tired of me insisting, but it wasn’t sex. Well, it was, in this way: all I wanted was to become a part of him, to affect him physically. Maybe that’s all anybody ever wants, and sex is the most specific and efficient way to achieve it.
But that night I did not want sex. I wanted to drape myself over his body and be absorbed, so when I left (and I knew I would have to), we would average out: two moderately cold people, two moderately sickly people, two—well, two extraordinarily tall people. Still the two tallest people you’d ever seen. But we’d have each other, we’d share that burden.
I was tired. A week before I’d slept in that room, in bed with James, and for a minute I considered climbing in with him again. But there really wasn’t room, not unless he made it for me, and I didn’t want to disturb his sleep. I reached under the blanket and felt his ankle, which, because of his bad circulation, was cold. I gave it a rub to warm it up, but it was too big a job and I was exhausted. Finally I crawled into the big armchair and curled up. And in the morning, when Caroline came in with Alice and breakfast, I was the only one who woke up.
Whatever Was Essential
Taking care of James was difficult work when he was alive, but at least he was there to help us. Caroline took Alice back to the house and got Oscar. I could hear the two of them, Alice and Caroline, crying from the front house. Probably Alice was crying only because her mother was. Finally we had to call a neighbor to go sit with them. Then we phoned a funeral home two towns over.
I went back to the cottage. Most of the covers, including the overcoat, were in a hill on the ground. Oscar had pulled the sheet over James’s head, the way they do in movies, and I thought this was wrong. Doctors do that, or clergymen. Standing there, I thought it was as if Oscar had tried to improvise the last rites because a priest wasn’t available.
So I walked to the bed. Beneath that sheet, he was still in his street clothes, the shirt and pants he’d fallen in. He’s dead, I thought, that’s a simple fact. It wasn’t him anymore. Anything I decided to believe, science or religion, told me that whatever was essential to his existence was gone now, soul or cold mechanical bloodworks. The sheet lay flat along the length of him, not moving at his mouth, nor at the rib cage over his lungs, nor at his hands or knees. It was still. Whatever was essential. That was the problem, what scientists and ministers forgot. It was all essential. His soul has departed the earth, the minister would say later, and I wanted to answer, but his soul forgot something, his soul didn’t pack for that long trip. I thought I was thinking of his body; really, I was thinking of myself. The two things, my self, his body, were not distinct entities. This is how I’d always allowed myself to love him: I hired on as caretaker of his body, because his self, his soul if that’s what you wanted to call it, had no reason to need me. I needed to be essential, too, but I was still here, I hadn’t gone, I was standing by the bed, my hand still out to the sheet. He had done an awful lot in the past twenty-four hours without my permission.
No profit to this thinking, I told myself, so stop it. I could not lift the sheet. What was I doing? That’s right, waiting for the men from the funeral home, better get ready. This place needs dusting, I thought, and I opened the top right desk drawer, where I kept a cloth. I dusted the sashes of the windows, the roses Oscar had painted; I spat on the cloth and rubbed at a stubborn spot.
I had my back to him. Can I tell you something? It wasn’t so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that’s all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.
But then Oscar arrived. He walked to me, took the cloth from my hand. And still, if he hadn’t said anything I could have gone on and got the cottage ready for whoever would come by to visit.
“Peggy,” he said, his voice not up to even these dumb syllables. It was Oscar’s breathy bad voice that made dusting seem like the wrong thing to be doing. “Let’s wait somewhere else,” he said. “Let’s not stay here.” And he put his arm around me, dropped the cloth to the floor, and led me to the front house.
Caroline had Alice on her lap, Alice had a book on hers. They weren’t looking at the book. The neighbor we’d called came in carrying cof
fee.
“Oh!” she said, when she saw me. She hoisted the pot. “Would you like some?”
I shook my head.
“I’m making cookies,” she said. She was alternately smiling and looking grief-stricken, not sure what her role in all this was. “I mean, I’m about to.” She was a nice woman, wearing one of Caroline’s gingham aprons. She stuck her hand in its heart-shaped pocket. “Maybe Alice would like to help me.”
“Maybe,” said Caroline. But she didn’t look like she wanted to let go of her daughter anytime soon.
“Cookies,” said Oscar. He sat down on the sofa and patted the cushion next to him. I sat down.
“This isn’t right,” I said to him.
“No. Of course not.”
“No,” I said. “We should be doing something.”
“There’s nothing to do, Peggy.”
“There’s something.” I rubbed my hands on my knees. And then he took my hands in his and held them in such a way I could believe he needed them, that I was being useful, lending Oscar my hands.
Is it possible that I knew all along that he’d die, that he’d be taken away from me, and that’s why I’d loved him? I don’t mean in any selfless way, but in the most selfish, the way that so many of us—we unhappy, I mean—want only to assure ourselves and the world that our unhappiness is justified and real. This is why the dying are so easy to love: it’s a magician’s trick, a paper vase with an invisible sleeve. Did I love him because I knew this moment would come, when James, who I’d poured my love into, would be gone, because I knew my love, my pourable love, was limited, and if I’d decanted it into someone whose prognosis was better I would have run out by our fifteenth anniversary (is that tin? paper? steel?) and would have then become the bitter empty person everyone knew I was destined to be, only with the company of my unfortunate husband?