I told the charge nurse how uncomfortable he was, how his throat was so dry that the NG tube had stuck to the inside of it and as a result he kept trying with greater and greater violence to cough it up. I told her I was worried that his flesh would tear away from the staples holding the left side of his chest together. I asked if they couldn’t give him some sort of mild sedative, at least. She leveled her gaze at me, an expression equal parts impatience and condescension, and said: He needs to learn how to manage his discomfort.
I stared at the nurse for a moment, and then I knocked a stack of files off the half-wall between us, showering her and her desk with papers. I told her that she needed to find a new line of work, since it was clear she’d become so well acquainted with pain that it bored her. She called security, and the surgeon in charge. The surgeon arrived first, and I told him that, for his part, he had the bedside manner of a mechanic gutting a wrecked Volvo. I spat the words at him. Two security guards arrived on cue after that. I was invited to leave the intensive care ward. And during the elevator ride down, flanked on either side by a guard, I chastised myself for the outburst, not because it had been inappropriate, but because after the incident with the cops at Fenway I’d realized that my father needed my protection, and I could not protect him from the sidewalk eighteen floors below his room.
By the way, don’t ever let someone convince you there’s anything—and I mean anything—good about dying. There is nothing redemptive in decline and decay. The hard candy of necrosis has no nougaty center where the human spirit prevails over all. Death is not a ‘journey,’ a ‘part of life,’ a ‘release from suffering,’ or any other such bullshit euphemism we employ to comfort and delude ourselves. And while we’re on the subject, no one ‘passes on’ or ‘passes away,’ either, and they sure as fuck don’t ‘cross over.’ They die, and then they start to swell and stink in the very next moment. When I knelt in front of my grandmother’s casket at the funeral home at age twelve, I snuck a look at her face and saw—under the grotesque makeup job, the screaming circles of rouge and the bloody lipstick—what I saw was the aspect of a piece of roadkill, her mouth caked dry and her eyes sunk under their lids, like a squirrel in the gutter with its legs up in the air and its entrails drying under the sun. The flies would have been on her, if not for the formaldehyde, is what I’m saying. And then when my friend Ronnie died at boot camp in Parris Island and the Marines shipped him home, the stories we heard were of Ronnie begging not to die on the table in the infirmary, and as far as I know he didn’t say anything profound or affirming, just pleaded with strangers to save his life, then died when they failed. And then when my father died I kissed his corpse on the forehead, over and over, and ran my palm along the side of his face, stroked the short sparse hair that remained, and all I could feel was how cold and vacant he already was, how every thought and aspiration and heartache he’d ever experienced was now and forever negated by his sudden nothingness. Later, when I helped move him onto the undertaker’s stretcher, there was a warm stench when his body left the mattress, and I realized he’d shit himself when he died, and this fact evoked in me the sudden understanding that in life we can fool ourselves into believing we are something more, and more permanent, than our constituent parts, but in death the truth becomes impossible to deny: we are nothing more than meat, bones, fingernails, and hair. Broken down further: proteins, mostly. Further still: carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and so on. Molecules on loan for our brief lives and times, reclaimed eventually, with grief as interest, by the creditor.
I tried to explain to Emma once that what men think they want from women, and what they actually want, are two different things. We think we want sex, or a friend, or someone to birth and raise our children, or some combination of these and other things. But here’s the truth that we keep hidden even from ourselves: men’s appetites and preoccupations tend to be simple, obvious; whereas women, at least from the simple perspective of a man, are complex and mysterious creatures.
And when a man sees a beautiful woman and thinks he wants to fuck her, what he’s actually after is that mystery. It’s the mystery that makes his heart pick up the cadence, makes his pupils dilate, makes the words catch in his throat. The pussy is a fulcrum, a mechanism, a mere mode of entrance into the mystery. A man wants to hold the mystery, turn it over in his hands and examine it close-up, even if he has no chance of ever understanding what he’s looking at.
And I said all this to Emma, and she listened quietly, and offered nothing by way of response, just gazed at me and smiled for long moments after I’d finished, and as was usually the case I had no idea what she thought—about me, or my ideas, or really anything. And those unknowable eyes, and the desire they aroused in me to reach across the table and take her face in my hands and kiss her hard, to plumb her body when she refused to let me plumb her mind, only served, of course, to prove my point.
Good as things were with Emma on the island, I still stayed up nights. Something still screamed inside of me. Guilt over Charlotte, sure, but something else, something abiding, fundamental, entrenched. I spent a lot of early mornings watching movies while Emma slept. One of those movies was Solaris, with George Clooney. In the film he plays a psychiatrist who is asked to investigate strange goings-on at a space station, and like the people he’s been sent to rescue, he begins to have bizarre experiences. He is visited by his dead wife, or actually a doppelgänger who in every way replicates his dead wife but is not in fact her, and this understandably causes him more than a bit of anxiety and confusion. The doppelgänger claims to be happy to see him again, and asks if he still loves her, and he doesn’t know what to think or say or feel, and he paces around the room and slaps himself in the face and claps his hands, trying to reassert, or reaffirm, reality. But of course reality is shifting and liquid and subjective, especially when it comes to who and why we love, and really that’s the whole point of the film, and so the comfort or reassurance he seeks to find by slapping himself is not on offer. The film is also about physics and how it informs emotion and perception. At a certain point the physicist onboard the space station says to Clooney’s character, regarding the doppelgänger, ‘It’s a mistake to become emotionally involved with them. You’re being manipulated.’ We learn, eventually, that the doppelgänger is nothing more than a physical manifestation of Clooney’s character’s memory of his wife. And this is the irony of him trying to reclaim the reality he thought existed, the reality wherein his wife is dead, because it’s his own brain that brought his wife back into existence in the first place. And the movie is sort of beautifully shot and ruminative and has an understated, almost nonexistent score, and raises basic and unnerving questions about time and memory and delusion and the nature of existence on this plane and others, and I was tired, exhausted actually, and though I watched the film from beginning to end I was sort of determined to not feel much. When it was over I went to bed and tried to wrap myself around Emma, but she was deep asleep, her limbs arranged so that it was impossible for me to lie close to her. Clooney’s character at one point in the movie tells his wife that he can handle all of their problems except one: ‘What I can’t deal with is you hiding from me,’ he says. After a long time lying next to Emma but not being able to touch her, I finally slept, and as you can tell none of this really makes for anything resembling a coherent narrative but anyway it seemed significant in a manner I hoped to figure out but have never quite been able to, obviously, because here I am still going on about it. But that one line, ‘What I can’t deal with is you hiding from me,’ well I’d be violating my promise to tell the truth if I said it didn’t immediately make me think of Emma. Because she hides. She doesn’t realize it, I don’t think, but she hides. Sometimes right in front of you. She can be sitting across from you at a table in a nice dining room somewhere and the expression on her face changes suddenly and she disappears, is in a very real and unmistakable way no longer there. You always find yourself reaching for
her an instant too late, and grasping at smoke.
Often I used my index finger to trace constellations among the tiny moles on Emma’s back while she slept. Andromeda. Aries. Aquarius. In my mind it was as though she had not just invented moles but imbued them somehow with an aching romantic significance. Canes Major and Minor. Cassiopeia. As though she were the only woman on Earth whose waist blossomed into her hips quite like that. Hercules. Horologium. Hydra. When the muscles in my shoulder started to ache, I’d shift my weight and switch hands. Leo. Libra. Lyra. She’d stir a bit, murmur, press her feet against mine under the covers, settle again. Sagittarius. Scorpio. Serpens. I’d let myself ruminate, briefly, on how simple it would be to replace the photos that had burned in her old house—the photos of her and Matty on their wedding day, the photos meant to last generations—with new ones. Taurus. Triangulum Australe. Tucana.
It’s the way she moves, too, that men find maddening. I can’t do it justice with words; you’d need to see it for yourself, and then when she approached and those eyes fell on you, you too would get as tongue-tied as a schoolboy, and wonder what she did with your self-assurance—it was just here a minute ago—and then you would understand. Her feline saunter, I call it. But don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not overtly seductive in the least. It’s not contrived, it’s just the way she locomotes, born in her as surely as the color of her hair or the galaxies of moles on her body. And like the rest of her qualities it’s at once distinct and elusive, so that as I sit here and close my eyes and try to picture her for the purpose of describing her gait to you, no image comes, nothing rises at all, in fact, except the stew of emotions always inspired in me by the mere sight of her walking across, say, a kitchen: lust and fear and wonder and gratitude and more than anything a great, dazzling yen that thrummed and ached like infection.
The pit in my stomach when she entered the room. Her hips rising and falling in languid sine waves.
If you continue to doubt that we are all drawing air at the beginning of the end of the human era, I refer you to May 6, 2010, the day on which what became known as the Flash Crash of 2010 occurred.
You remember this, surely. Between 2:42 and 2:47 P.M. the Dow shed 600 points. In less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette, a trillion dollars in market value vanished.
Initially, nobody knew what had happened. Over the next few months investigations revealed that, in large part, the crash had been caused by bots, automated trading algorithms that went into an orgy of selling at 2:42 P.M. It had little to do with, and could not be controlled by, the human beings whose money was disappearing before their eyes.
One morning we were making breakfast at the casita and I don’t remember how it came up but Emma wanted to know how many women I’d had sex with. I hesitated, hemmed and hawed, did some math, then told her. Her eyes went a little wide and her lips formed an oval of disbelief, and I knew it was a mistake not to have lied. I thought about explaining to Emma that with every one of these women I’d been alternately looking for her and looking to fuck her away, but then I decided not to explain, because it wouldn’t make a difference or she wouldn’t understand or maybe it was just bullshit, I couldn’t decide, but anyway there has never been a time in my life when keeping my mouth shut turned out to be a bad idea and so I didn’t say anything else after that.
That same day we spent the afternoon at the small private beach of an older man, a friend I’d met drinking at the bars. Jerry lived in the ruins of a sugar mill, sketching and painting and assembling kinetic sculpture. He was a widower, and his artwork featured a preponderance of the female form that was hard to miss. He and I sat at a low-slung table in the sand, drinking rum and talking about Robert Lowell and Dr. Seuss, while down the beach Emma lay on a towel reading. After a while the conversation dried up and we set about our respective work, he with his sketchbook, me with my Mac, alone together, until Emma rose, used two fingers to pull her black bikini bottom out of the mild wedgie it had settled into, and moved in her feline saunter toward the water. Both Jerry and I looked up from our work and followed her with our eyes. We watched as she bobbed among the blue swells and floated on her back with her toes poking up out of the water, watched still more intently as she emerged and came back toward us, her shoulders and midriff shimmering with saline droplets. When she settled back down onto her towel our eyes lingered for a beat, two, and then we got back to work. I looked up a few minutes later and saw that Jerry had flipped to a fresh page in his notebook, where he’d started a somewhat abstract sketch of a chestnut-haired beauty in a black bathing suit walking forever away, toward the water.
Incidentally, there are innumerable trading bots operating in the stock market which no actual person has created. No one knows what they are, or how or why they function the way they do. The only thing we know is that they exist, and that the activity they engage in has discernible patterns. And where there is a pattern, there is usually intent. And where there is intent . . . well, you see where I’m going with this.
Over glasses of straight rum, sitting at the high-top table on the porch, I told Emma I’d started a new book, and that it was all about her. I said I didn’t know if it would ever be publishable, but I was going to write it anyway.
I’m worried, she said, that your version of me will come across as sad. I don’t want people thinking I’m as sad as you make me out to be.
And so I’m telling you now that she was right about this. She is not as sad as I make her out to be. Emma is happy, the very picture of resilience. She wakes up in the morning and contemplates how much she loves her bed. She’s friendly and open with strangers who sit next to her at bars, and when the Patriots beat the Jets she jumps up from her seat and claps wildly. She smiles when no one is watching. She hopes for better things, even expects them. She is not like me. I doubt she’s ever once considered jumping in front of a train, or pointing her car at a concrete bridge support and flooring the accelerator. She is not sad.
A month or so before my father died, by which time his end had announced itself unequivocally, I found myself at the grocery store contemplating a small plastic container of salsa. Medium spice, all-natural ingredients, no preservatives so keep refrigerated and consume or discard within seven days of opening. Because the salsa contained no preservatives it seemed more important to check the expiration date than it would have been otherwise, and I turned the container around, flipped it upside down, searching for the tiny print. I examined the lid a second time and found the date, partly obscured by a graphic of a goofy cartoon donkey who may or may not have been drunk. And I read the date, and thought about it a minute, and realized suddenly that in all likelihood this container of salsa had a longer shelf life than my own personal father.
Apropos of nothing, at the beach, while a mackerel sky dimmed the midday sun, Emma asked me, Did you ever notice the orange towel on the back of the bathroom door? In the old house? Before the fire?
I thought for a minute. Shook my head.
You didn’t see it? It was hanging there forever.
No. Never noticed it.
It was Matty’s, she said. He put it up after the last shower he took, and I couldn’t take it down. So I just let it hang there. Eight months. Until the place burned.
How did you know it was his towel? I asked. There were three or four hanging up there all the time.
It was the only one there when I got home, she said. The maid had done the laundry right before he split.
Wait. When you got home?
Yeah, she said. I was in D.C. when he left. Didn’t I tell you that?
I paused. No. What? No. He left while you were away?
She stared at me. He sent me a fucking email, she said.
Later that day, after driving the narrow switchback roads from beach to beach, standing knee-deep in azure bathwater drinking Presidente, and
coming home to the casita with pink ears and noses and shoulders, we went to the porch as the sun set, and Emma started to cry.
I asked what was wrong.
Nothing worth talking about, she said.
I tried a few jokes without luck. We sat quietly in the awkward wake of those duds, watching ramshackle fishing boats return to port in the half-light. I glanced at her a few times, and her eyes remained wet and red-rimmed.
After a while she looked at me and said, I may need a few minutes.
As I stood to walk inside I tried to make an agreeable sound, a sound that conveyed understanding and empathy, but it came out choked and lame, gave me away. I went into the casita and resolved, in sudden frustration, that if things would always be this way, I would at least write about it and make a lot of money.
I had no idea how right I was. Things would always be this way, and I would make a lot of money.
And though she cried for someone else, someone long gone, someone who’d seen nothing wrong with ending an eight-year marriage via email, I was the one who comforted her, once she finally came in off the porch. I was the one who stroked her hair and held her hand. Kissed the top of her head once and again. That was me. God knows where the hell he was.
Emma took a long shower, emerged from the bathroom smiling. She asked if I wanted to go out to dinner. By now I’d had a couple of drinks—her favorite, the Emma Original, rum and tonic with a splash of orange juice—and I smiled back, my gratitude at her improved mood magnified by the booze.