IN BOSTON, OCTOBER is the month when you have to stop pretending to yourself that the good weather will go on and on. The leaves catch fire and swirl out gold and lemon patterns at the bases of maple trees, but it’s just a last show meant to take your mind away from the fact that things are dying all around. If you work outside, you can feel this dying very plainly in late October in the afternoon. The cold Halloween air has an unsympathetic quality to it. Lights blaze out from storefronts and third-floor apartments, but the darkness seems to swallow them after they’ve traveled only a few feet so that they feel cut off from each other, isolated pockets of warmth that offer themselves happily and optimistically but really are only hoping to make it through another night.
I like October-early October, especially-in spite of the slow death of things. Janet, it turned out, was a big October fan. And it turned out that we matched up in other ways, too. Drives in the country, Middle Eastern food, art museums, music that ran the spectrum from Bach to Pearl Jam, weekend nights in bed, weekend mornings in bed, spontaneous bursts of harmless adventuring, long rides on Friday nights (it took a while for the replacement parts to come in, but I’d gotten the truck fixed up finally), people who were quirky and generous-we had an appreciation for a lot of the same types of things.
We did not talk about the governor, or Giselle. And we talked only in short, rare bursts about cystic fibrosis-those were the unspoken rules for us. She was getting sicker; it did not take a pulmonologist to see that. And, by the time we’d been going out for a few weeks, I had done so much reading on the disease that I knew where the getting sicker would take her, and along what routes, and about how fast.
I had learned that there are certain kinds of bacteria with pretty names like Burkholderia cepacia and Pseudomonas aeruginosa that thrive in the thick mucus in the lungs of cystic fibrosis people. These bacteria are everywhere-in the skin of onions, in the moist air of a shower stall, in Jacuzzis, in river water-but they move into and out of normal lungs without anyone ever noticing. If they visit the lungs of a person with CF, though, they stay there and form colonies, and the colonies throw up dense films that act as shields against the assault of antibiotics. The delicate tissue of the inside of the lung tries to protect itself against these colonies and becomes inflamed. Over time, the inflammation breaks the cells down so that the complicated system of blood and breath doesn’t work anymore the way it was designed to work. Over time, over almost thirty years in her case, enough lung tissue has starved and rotted so that you can’t walk up three flights of stairs to your boyfriend’s bedroom without sounding like you’ve just been on the treadmill for an hour at the gym.
Near the end of September, Janet’s pulmonologist, whose name was Eric Wilbraham, sent her into the hospital for five days of intravenous antibiotics to try to control the bacteria, and I went there every day after work to make her laugh. One night I caught Doctor Wilbraham in the hallway. I have the bad habit of forming solid impressions about people on first meeting, and I didn’t like him. But we had a pretty good conversation about spirometers, and pseudomonas, and cepacia, and chest physical therapy, and inhaled steroids and Pulmozyme, and things like that. My mother would have been proud. I had become semiknowledgeable on the subject, which was not necessarily a good thing because I could see, beyond the doctor’s pleasant and hopeful science-talk, the outlines of what was happening, and it was like a small, sharp-toothed animal in my gut, gnawing away. In the week before she went into the hospital, Janet had started to use oxygen at night sometimes. Usually she had to stop twice to rest on the way up to my apartment. She was twenty-seven.
After that hospital stay, though-a “tune-up” she called it-she had a good week. The movement into her blood of the most powerful antibiotics in the medical arsenal had beaten back the bacteria. She coughed less, she had more energy, a healthier color returned to her face. She was pretty and hopeful again, the way she had been when I’d first seen her.
By then, Gerard and I had the professor’s addition all closed in and we were nailing up the long, rust-colored rows of cedar clapboard, a job I loved. On the second Friday in October, the start of the holiday weekend, I finished work, went home and showered, and drove down to the State House to pick Janet up. On two other occasions I had been to her office, and had met a couple of her friends there, and I could tell she had been talking to them about me, and that they were examining me to see if I was worthy, which is what friends always do. That night I found a parking space two blocks from the side entrance and went in that entrance, through the security checkpoint and up two flights of stairs. The Massachusetts State House is really a spectacularly beautiful building-murals on the walls, mosaic tile floors, stained glass, carved wood. Someone named Bulfinch designed it, and he went all out to impress people with the authority and importance of government. But for some reason I had never felt comfortable there. Years before, I’d been inside the State House for an Arts Council ceremony. I had won a grant, and though I was glad and honored to have won the grant, the air in the building seemed to press on me from four sides with that history-all golden and flashy on the surface, all dirty and smoky underneath. It was a strange thing: I felt that if I stayed in there too long, I’d never be able to paint again.
And that was before Governor Valvelsais had taken office, and before Janet and I never talked about him.
We could have set a time and I could have met her outside. It would have been easier not to have to look for a parking space on Beacon Hill. But Janet said she couldn’t always be sure she’d be able to leave right at seven o’clock or whatever time we set, and she didn’t want to keep me waiting outside like that. And I had the feeling she liked to be seen walking down the corridors with her arm hooked through someone’s arm, liked the security guards and senators’ aides and the people she worked with to know she had a semblance of a social life, an actual boyfriend, a date. One of the bad parts of her disease, along with the physical suffering, was the way the persistent coughing and sickliness made people want to push you away. Once, after three glasses of wine, Janet spewed out a whole list of things people had said to her as a girl-in movie theaters, in classrooms, at parties. “Go home if you’re sick.” “Stay away from me with that cough.” “Doesn’t your mother feed you?” “You’ve had that cold for, what, about a year now?” And so on.
Complete strangers and acquaintances alike would say such things, even though they were infinitely more dangerous to her than she was to them. She told me it made her want to just hang around other people with CF, but this was the twist of the knife: she wasn’t allowed to hang around other people with CF. She couldn’t be in a closed car with another person with CF, couldn’t come within three arms’ lengths for fear that one of them would give the other some lethal new germ they hadn’t yet been introduced to. She’d found out about that the hard way, she said, but wouldn’t elaborate.
I walked down a long hallway, past a dozen closed doors, and then toward the front center of the building, where the governor and his closest aides have their offices. A state trooper stood guard at the entrance to the executive suite. Janet had given him my name, and while he looked over my ID, I studied the portraits on the walls, all the recent governors, captured in oil, larger than life. As election day approached, more people stayed late in the offices there-strategizing, maybe, or proving to the taxpayers that, under the current administration, they were getting their dollar’s worth. Still, the doors were thick old doors, and it was usually quiet in the suite at that hour, so I was surprised, as the trooper handed back my license, to hear voices. Two people arguing, it sounded like. Syllables muffled. The trooper didn’t seem to notice.
As I walked on, making a right turn past the governor’s door, then a left, I was even more surprised to realize that the voices were coming from Janet’s office. And then that one of the voices was hers. I was about to turn around and make another lap of the corridor when the other person roared out: “I don’t give half a shit about him, alright?” It sounded like our governor, not on his best behavior. I hesitated for one breath. And then, because there was a note of what might be called distress in Janet’s muffled answer, I took hold of the doorknob, turned it, and pushed.
The scene inside was not a highly original one. The office was small. Janet’s desk faced the doorway, an old green-upholstered armchair in front of it. Behind the desk, with one large window as background, was the chair she sat at when she worked, and she was standing to the side of that chair, holding the top front of her dress together with one hand. Her hair hung messily over one side of her face and it was easy enough to see, in her eyes and the muscles around her mouth, that she was angry and upset. There was a wash of fear there, too. Before that moment, I had never seen fear on Janet’s face. I’d seen her cough until she almost lost consciousness, and I’d heard her talk about having her stomach cut open when she was twelve years old, and how she had become infected and sparked a fever of a hundred and five and almost died. But I had never heard the bruise of real fear in those stories, or seen it where I saw it now.
On the opposite side of her chair was the splendid governor of Massachusetts, the Honorable Charles S. Valvelsais, who had been elected in part by promising to make sure the legislature funded preschool and after-school programs for children from poor families-a promise he’d made good on. He was wearing a white shirt and a loosened tie. He also looked upset. There was a multitude of reasons why he could have been upset, but in the second or two seconds before I did what I did, it seemed to me that there weren’t many reasons why Janet would be standing the way she was standing with a button ripped off her dress and that look in her eyes. Governors sometimes yell at the people who work for them. Fair enough. But most governors don’t yell at the people who work for them and tear buttons off those people’s dresses. I was bothered to begin with, being in that building. And I had been a jealous person in a past incarnation, I admit that, and probably hadn’t yet completely reformed.
And so I sort of made a run at all that, without stopping to consider. A straight sprint. Except that the green-upholstered armchair and the heavy oak desk were in the way. So I ran over them, one step up on the chair, one step across the desk, and I leaped over Janet’s computer and onto Governor Valvoline. In mid-leap I remembered that he’d been some kind of judo champion in college. But college was a long time ago for the governor. And probably, whatever the other demands of the political life might have been, he hadn’t spent the past nine years carrying two-by-tens across job sites or walking half-inch sheets of wallboard up two flights of stairs.
We crashed to the floor, two nuts, arms and legs entangled, papers and statues of the Commonwealth and small electrical appliances banging down around us. Someone screamed, Janet probably. The governor was grunting, “I’ll fix… I’ll fix you,” in his most governoresque voice. He tried some kind of judo move on me, taking hold of my arm and using it as a lever to flip me out of the way, but we were on the floor, and the move only partly worked, and then it was all confusion and he was scraping at my face with his fingernails and we were wrestling and grunting and one of my hands flew free and so I punched him at close range, just a little awkward jab, and his nose started to bleed. One of Janet’s cowboy-booted ankles came between us where we struggled on the carpet. She was yelling at us and making small kicks with her foot. We scuttled away from each other and stood up.
I was breathing hard and feeling like a boy. Between breaths I could sense a putrid disgust seeping up from the floor and all around me. The governor was leaning over from the waist, trying to catch the blood in his cupped right hand so it didn’t fall onto his shirt. A very small white-haired woman came through the door with a security guard-not the trooper-right behind her. I had never had much to do with security guards before meeting Janet. He had a gun out and was pointing it, sensibly enough, at me.
The governor pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and put it up to his face. Through the material he said, in a weird voice, a public phony voice, “No, no. Get him out. I fell. I tripped and fell. It’s not broken.” He actually tried to laugh then. The sound came out from under the handkerchief like the chuffing of some animal trying to force its way up through the skin of a human being. “Out,” he commanded. “Everybody but Janet out.”
“Not a chance,” she said, in a shaking voice. She had been standing between us while we calmed down, but had now moved to the other side of her chair. The state trooper appeared at the door. The security guard put his gun back where it belonged, and when he did that I felt as though everything behind my navel-the mucus and blood and half-digested food-settled a few inches lower in a heavy soup. “Out!” the governor said loudly. “I just tripped and fell, that’s all. Everybody out.”
We made a not very graceful exit, me with my clothes all rumpled, and Janet breathing hard and having some trouble getting her sweater off the back of her chair, and Charlie Valvoline putting on a stern, manly face for whoever the older woman was-his secretary, I suppose-and the trooper asking the governor if he was sure he was all right, and the security guard eyeing me all the way out the door, as if, after all those years of just sitting around reading golf magazines, he had wanted more than anything to have been allowed to pull the trigger.
Janet and I walked out of the executive suite and down the long corridor, not touching and not talking. I had been an idiot, I understood that in the most visceral way. A dirty wave was washing over me, a bad mix of feelings from my worst days with Giselle. I shook my head, hard.
We walked down the steps. Before turning with me toward my truck, Janet seemed to waver a moment. We went the two blocks in silence and I realized I had parked near the little Catholic church where Ellory had liked to go after his conversion. I unlocked the passenger door for Janet and she climbed in. When we were pulling out of the parking space she started to cry. I wanted to touch her or find something to say, but wrestling with governors-with anyone, in fact-was not exactly a specialty of mine, and having a gun pointed at me was also not a specialty of mine, and I was not exactly in a state of mind where I could comfort someone else. My ribs and hands were sore, my left cheek was scratched, my left shoulder hurt where Valvoline had done the judo move, and my mind was replaying the scene again and again. So I just pulled out into the smoky madness of Friday-night traffic and listened to Janet cry.
Before the bad scene in the State House, I’d had an idea where we might go that night-we took turns deciding, surprising each other, seeing who could be more inventive. She loved New York City, and that’s where I had been planning to take her. In the fog of bad feelings I thought it would be best to basically stick to the plan, and just take things a minute at a time.
It was stop-and-go all the way down Beacon Street to Clarendon, and then not much better once we reached the entrance to the Mass Turnpike and headed west.
My body stopped shaking. Janet didn’t cry for very long. She coughed, looked out the side window for a while, and then said, “I hate things like that. I hate that you did that.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Here we are with brutal honesty.”
She kept looking out the window. We were stopped in holiday traffic in a long line of cars and trucks near the first tollbooth, still in Boston. Close enough to turn back.
“He was talking to me. I was trying to get something for him out of my files and I turned around and he was pressing his face close to me, telling me he loved me. I pulled away. I told him he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, that I was going out with someone now. He reached out for me, not to hurt me but kind of to get me to listen, and he accidentally caught the top of my dress and I pulled away. He started to yell… And then you came through the door like a wild gorilla. I don’t like that kind of thing at all.”
“I came through the door ordinary. Then I went to wild gorilla.”
She didn’t smile.
“He deserved it,” I said. “I’m only seventy-five percent sorry.”
“I’m not asking you to be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry… that I ever let him touch me. You can’t imagine the depth and range of my sorrow right now.”
“Why did you?”
She shrugged.
“Why did you let him touch you?” I said again, but I was just talking, filling up air. I was feeling less sorry by the second. By the time Janet spoke again I was down to thirty-five percent.
“Sometimes you just want a little pleasure, that’s all. Some connection with somebody. Some, I don’t know-”
“A doughnut.”
“What?”
“A doughnut, you want a doughnut. You want your share of sweetness to make up for all the shit you have to go through. You deserve the two doughnuts, or the kiss, or the cocaine, or the new car, or the new earrings, or the new fishing rod.”
“What in the name of God are you talking about, Jake? What fishing rod? I don’t-”
“Now you’re going to lose your job,” I said, to reel myself in.
She laughed then, a small laugh with a hem of bitterness along its edges. “Not before the election anyway. You heard him. ‘I fell! It’s nothing! Everyone out!’ When he goes to buy underwear he worries which brand will get him more votes. He’s the epitome of the political animal.”
“Why’d you sleep with him, then?”
It had slipped out, and I couldn’t pretend to myself anymore that I was just filling air. Janet looked at me, then looked forward again. An oily silence floated between us in the cab of the truck. Until that minute I’d done an excellent job of not being jealous. From the time I’d read the note she left on my sink, jealousy had been whispering in my ear night and day. I’d see the governor on TV and I’d look at his hands and wonder where and how those hands had touched her. I’d look at his mouth. I’d hear a radio talk show host-this was rare-say he was handsome, or dignified, or that his plan to execute criminals meant he was the first governor we’d had in years with any cojones; I’d wonder if she’d ever touched his cojones; I’d notice that Boston magazine had named him one of the city’s top ten eligible bachelors. I’d see news clips of the governor with his daughters, or on his morning run, or lining up to donate blood for the hundred and twenty-seventh time with a big sappy smile on his face. And so on. It’s one thing for your lover to have had lovers before-who doesn’t have to deal with that, high-school sophomores? It’s something else to have that other person’s face and voice and picture and name ricocheting around every bar you step into, every newsstand you walk past, every radio station you listen to on your way to work. Jealousy fun house mirrors.
Still, in the months before I met Janet, I’d had a lot of practice turning my mind away from certain types of thoughts, and, in the time I’d known her, whenever jealousy made one of its runs, I’d just stepped aside and let it crash past. Who knows why my little sidestep move wasn’t working that night? Because I’d actually wrestled around on the floor with the governor, maybe? Because he was still reaching into a part of my life with his pathetic I-love-yous long after he should have bowed gracefully out? Because the part of my life with Janet in it was becoming more important to me every day? Who knows?
The traffic softened up slightly. We headed west at a slow pace.
After a while Janet said, “I don’t ask you things like that.”
“I know it.”
“I don’t ask you who you’ve been with or anything about Giselle, or why you didn’t date for a year after you broke up with her, or even if you’re sleeping with someone else now.”
“I’m not.”
“Good. I’m not either.”
A mile or so of edgy silence, not so bad now. This was the weird complicated tango of modern relationshipping. This was as ancient as dust and sweat.
She said, “I was lonely. I got just very lonely. Of the four other men I work with, one is gay, two are married, and the other one has egg on his face when he comes to work.”
“Literal egg?”
She didn’t laugh. “I’m not exactly… I don’t exactly have attractive guys lined up at my door, no offense.”
“You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re sexy. What are you talking about?”
I could feel her looking at me across the cab of the truck, but I was afraid to look back.
She said, “Come on, Jake. I cough. I spit. I ply myself with pills before every meal when I’m out on dates in restaurants. I’m a fun time, but not exactly what you’d call a good long-term investment.”
“Not if I can help it,” I said, without thinking.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’m going to keep you alive.”
“By the force of your heroic masculine will?”
“Don’t insult the force of my heroic masculine will,” I said. “I have a perfectly solidly average-sized heroic masculine will, maybe slightly larger.”
She didn’t laugh then, either, but I glanced across the seat and caught something in her eyes, one flash of good light. We drove along. “Where are you taking me?”
“Sanctum sanctorum,” I said. It was Gerard’s term for a woman’s body. It had just slipped out-like everything else I had been saying on that blessed night.
“You are an odd soul, Joe Date.”
“To New York or by bus,” I said. One of my mother’s jokes.
“You are essentially odd. If you ran for office, you’d never make it past the primary.”
“Thank you. I consider that a high compliment. But could we keep all references to running for office out of the conversation? All jerkoffs?”
“Okay.”
“I have the blood of jerkoffs on my hands.”
“You’re going goofy on me,” she said.
“I’m on a crime spree. I’ve assaulted an elected public official and now I’m going to trespass on monastery grounds.”
“He won’t press charges,” Janet said. “What monastery?”
“We’re going to see my brother. The monk. Then we’re going to New York or by bus.”
MY BROTHER ELLORY is eight years and two months older than I am. After a brilliant teenage career of rebelling against what he called “our upper-middle-class subterranean upbringing”-including one glorious night in which he drove my father’s new Mercedes convertible off the road, between two pine trees and down the third fairway at the Wannakin River Golf Club-he decided to really hit my parents where they lived, and he’d converted to Catholicism. In the beginning, this conversion had everything to do with a college girlfriend named Renée St. Cyr (who believed that premarital intercourse was approved of by the Good Lord, in her particular case, as long as the other intercoursee was also Catholic), but soon it took on a life of its own.
My brother started to attend mass at the radical church near the State House that let homeless people sleep between its pews. He started to talk about “the Lord” all the time. He stopped driving cars onto golf courses. A year into this our father died, and my brother felt so guilty that he decided to leave his old life behind entirely and become a monk. After a decade or more of monkhood, he’d persuaded the abbot to let him live as a hermit in a one-room cottage on the monastery grounds (he told me there was some precedent for this in Church history), and he spent his days there praying and chopping wood, growing vegetables to give away to the local food pantry, and, three or four times a week, walking up to the main monastery buildings to teach and counsel novices. After the initial shock, my mother was not really unhappy about all this. If nothing else, it meant that Ellory would never again get his name in the paper under POLICE BLOTTER, and embarrass her at the hospital. It didn’t matter very much to me one way or the other, except that I saw him less. He was still my brother. He still smoked, still gave the abbot some trouble the way he’d given his parents trouble, and his teachers, his scoutmaster, his golf coach, and so on.
In the first blush of monastic infatuation, Ellory had been in the habit of sending me letters that always ended with a kind of eager encouragement. “The Lord’s gifts come in strange wrapping,” he’d write. Or “Pain is a blessing.” Or “Pray every second.” Things like that. It got so bad that, whenever Gerard or I banged a finger with the hammer, or dropped a crowbar on a toe, or tripped over a sole plate and went crashing into a wall, the other person would immediately say, “Pain is a blessing.”
But Ellory and I had always been close, in spite of the age difference, and his godly enthusiasms didn’t really put much distance between us. It seemed to me that he was at least as happy and well balanced as most of the non-monks I knew. On the four days a year when he was allowed visitors, I took my mother down there-it was less than three hours from Boston-and we had a meal with him and some of the other monks, his friends. Since a piece of her mind had been carted away, my mother had come up with the idea that my brother’s name was my name-John-and that he was, for some reason, an airline pilot, always in uniform, living in a mansion with all his pilot friends.
With time, Ellory had evolved an individualistic interpretation of the monastery rules. He was still celibate, as far as I could tell, though he told me he missed the company of women more than anything else. He observed a strict fasting regimen during Lent, and said formal prayers either six or ten times a day, I could never remember. But every few months I went down and visited him, in an unofficial way, sneaking through the woods to his hermitage, and he always broke the rules a little bit then. He always wanted me to smuggle onto the monastery grounds exactly one pack of Marlboro cigarettes. If it wasn’t Lent, I might bring him a bottle of red wine and some Jarlsberg cheese and good bread. Or a few cigars. Or some copies of Sports Illustrated (not the swimsuit issue). Once, on his thirty-third birthday, we arranged to meet at the side of the nearest road and I brought a change of clothes and spirited him off to a golf course for nine holes.
He was a good, devoted monk, and a good man. These were things he did, little things, ten times in a year maybe, to maintain some sort of interior balance. Even the pope, he pointed out to me, had sneaked away from Vatican City to go skiing once or twice when he was younger. “God doesn’t want machines, Jake,” he liked to say, after he’d been there awhile and had stopped ending his letters with “All the good Lord asks of us is that we think of Him.”
I said I didn’t know what God wanted anymore.
And he said, not in a preachy way, “You know right from wrong, Jake. God is just the part of you that knows right from wrong.”
“Sure,” I said. “Stalin had that part, too. Hitler. Mussolini. Idi Amin. They were all sure they knew right from wrong. So were nineteen assholes with box cutters.”
But by the time I took Janet there, Ellory and I had stopped having conversations like that. We just did what we did. He was a monk, I was a painter. I banged nails, I punched governors. His part of my father’s inheritance had gone to the monastery. My part had gone to buy the apartment I lived in. My sister’s part had gone into pharmaceuticals and roulette. We knew what was right and wrong and we wanted to serve our own little selfish demons, and balancing those things was called life.
I didn’t usually sneak up to the hermitage at night, though, unannounced. And I had never taken a girlfriend there.
For dinner, Janet and I stopped at a sub shop in Sturbridge-still a bit of bad air between us-and I had the pierced, beringed, and bespectacled young man make an Italian with everything on it, to go, for Ellory, and then bought the cigarettes at a convenience store in the same little strip mall, where another pierced and tattooed young fellow asked me to show my ID.
ON A QUIET, two-lane highway not far from the monastery there was an unmarked dirt parking area large enough for two cars, nothing but woods all around. Hunters used it in fall and spring. Teenagers probably used it as a lovers’ lane. I had used it a dozen times to make my clandestine visits to my brother. I pulled the truck off the road there and killed the lights. Janet and I locked the doors and walked up the highway to the spot where I had met Ellory on the day we’d gone golfing. From there we stepped off onto an old logging road that had almost been reclaimed by the forest, an old wound, mostly healed. I kept a cigar-sized flashlight in the glove compartment, and had remembered to bring it, so we had a little light to work by, and a three-quarters moon, and, for Janet, even in sneakers and a partly buttonless dress, the going wasn’t too bad.
She’d been out of the hospital only a week and wasn’t coughing very much at all, but even so her lungs were functioning at only about thirty-five percent of capacity, so I went along at a slow pace. The visit was foolish in several ways, but I had mentioned Janet to Ellory in a letter, and he’d written back saying I should bring her to the next family day, which was scheduled for the start of January. But I knew that when Janet’s lung capacity dropped into the mid-twenties, which it would the next time she caught a cold, it would not be very easy to take her walking in the woods, or on a ride to the monastery, or much of anywhere else.
It was about half a mile on the trail. We stopped twice to rest. Janet did not like me to see how out of breath she was, so when we stopped she stayed a couple of steps away from me and turned her back. I pretended I’d found some interesting mushroom or something to study in the beam of my little flashlight. From things that had happened in my own life during the previous year, I knew about pity and what it ruined. My promise to myself, from the night I’d first typed the words “cystic fibrosis” into Gerard’s computer, had been that, no matter what else I did, I was going to steer my feelings for her a hundred and fifty miles wide of pity.
So I waited for her to say she couldn’t do something-couldn’t make love, couldn’t come into my studio because of the fumes, couldn’t walk a flat half-mile in the woods-but she never said that. I sometimes thought of her toughness as an iron bar running up her spine. Other times I thought of it as a fire in her chest. Once in a while, on my three-times-a-week morning runs, I’d find a long steep hill and sprint up it as hard as I could, just to feel the pain of wanting breath, and to realize she felt some version of that pain for most of her waking hours.
Soon enough the woods ended and there were open, almost-flat hayfields coated in silvery light, and an old rail fence with signs every thirty feet: MONASTIC ENCLOSURE, PLEASE KEEP OUT.
We ducked under the top rail. Crossing the hayfield, I took her hand. By then we had left the State House behind, it seemed to me, though my face hurt where the governor had scratched it, and my ribs and shoulder where he had practiced his judo on me. Janet’s hand felt hot against my palm and I had an urge to stop and lay her down in the sweet grass and make peace that way. I put the flashlight in my front pocket, then took it out and put it in my back pocket. We crossed a low rise and could see Ellory’s cabin ahead another eighty yards. The only window was an ocher rectangle, but as we got closer the light went out.
“He’s just going to bed,” I told Janet quietly. “It’s good, he’ll be done with his prayers, he’ll be hungry.”
We walked up to the cabin and I tapped on the door three times, two quick, soft knocks then a pause, then one sharp knock. In a minute the light came back on. Another minute and Ellory opened the door, any ordinary, nice-looking thirty-eight-year-old in a bathrobe, little spark of devil in the eyes.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but have you noticed lately how much trouble there is in the world? Have you ever wondered why?”
ELLORY TOOK A STEP out of his hermitage and squeezed me so hard I thought the rib the governor had bruised was going to snap. Before I could breathe well enough again to introduce Janet, he said, “Either you’ve brought a beautiful woman with you or Brother Theodorus is playing dress-up again.”
“I’m Janet Rossi,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Sorry. I’m not allowed to shake hands with women.” Ellory stepped farther out from the hermitage and embraced her, too, though not as hard. “Come in, before the night watchman sees us and they turn me back into a Protestant.”
The hut was sixteen feet by sixteen feet with one chair, one table, one bed, one lamp, one three-shelf bookcase on the wall, a woodstove, a small sink with a hot plate to one side of it, a half-sized refrigerator, and a door that led to a closet with a flush toilet and a shower stall. I took the flashlight out of my pocket and Janet and I sat on the plain gray blanket on the bed. Ellory pulled his chair over. On his feet he was wearing a pair of no-heel leather slippers, color of a peanut shell, that my mother had given him when she was still, as we liked to say, “sharp.” They were in tatters, the tops and soles barely holding together, a toe showing through. Everything else in the room was perfectly neat-no cobwebs, no clutter, no excess-as if the monks had convinced my brother that the condition of his living space had some influence on the condition of his soul.
“Would you guys like me to call out for a pizza?” my brother offered. He paused one beat for effect, then went to the door, opened it, and, in a not very loud voice, sang out, “Pizza! Pizza!” He came back in and sat down, smiling like a kid in a swimming pool.
I could tell he was nervous.
Janet was watching him. “You have your brother’s sense of humor,” she said after a few seconds.
“It’s our dad’s, actually. He was an investment banker and then a financial counselor-did Jake tell you? White shirt and tie all week. Big serious meetings at which big serious men talked about large sums of money.”
“Big serious money,” I said.
“And at night, or on the weekends, or when we went someplace on vacation, he could be as foolish as a four-year-old.” He turned to me. His eyes were steady and clear. He was happy we’d come. “Remember Bastille Day?”
“We were on vacation in Paris,” I said to Janet, “and we were all sitting at a sidewalk table getting ready to have dinner.”
“Rue Mouffetard,” Ellory said. “No cars, you know. Little shops. Cobblestones.”
“And some guy with an accordion started playing lively French tunes. So my father grabbed my mother by the arm and pulled her out into the street and started dancing with her there, spinning her around, bending her backwards like Fred with Ginger.
“Which would have been fine, except he couldn’t dance to save his soul. He improvised. Mum improvised with him. It went on and on. The food was served, Mum came back to the table eventually, but Dad just kept going, solo. We started to eat and he just kept dancing, twirling around, flailing his arms up in the air. It really wasn’t that unusual a sight for us, him making a spectacle of himself. The people at the other tables loved it, though.”
“Mum loved it, too,” I said.
“Of course she did. She dealt with sick and dying kids all day, he was her relaxation… How is she anyway?”
“Okay. The same. Last time you saw her she was asking for me.”
Ellory almost smiled. “She’s not in any pain,” he said, and I could see the suit of guilt on him, too.
“She mixes us up,” I explained to Janet.
“You told me.”
We didn’t talk for a moment. Janet fussed with the top of her dress and pushed herself back on the bed so she was against the wall. She let her eyes wander over the sparse furnishings. Those sparse furnishings, I noticed for the first time, included a framed picture of a young woman, which sat on the top of Ellory’s bookcase, above a row of lentil soup cans and next to framed pictures of my sister, me, and our parents. I looked at it once, and then just focused on a corner of the room where my brother had set up a little shrine-crucifix, votive candle, a vase with a few stalks of some kind of wild berry in it.
I knew Janet well enough by then to see that she was at ease with Ellory and in his little house, the way she had been at ease in my apartment almost from the first minute. Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don’t, they feel at home there or they don’t. It’s like the taste of cilantro. Giselle had never liked cilantro.
I had been thinking about the photograph and holding the bag with the sub sandwich and cigarettes in it. I was somehow not paying attention. After she’d finished looking at the pictures and the soup cans and reading the titles on the spines of Ellory’s books, Janet touched my arm and pointed to the oil stain on my pants. I handed the bag to my brother and told him what it was. He insisted we share the sandwich with him. We said no. He insisted again and we said no again, we’d just eaten, we were fine. And then he said okay but he would save half of it for the next day’s lunch. And then he ate the first half of the sub from a plate on his lap, with his bathrobe on and his hairy shins showing, in about three seconds. My eyes wandered up to the bookcase again, and I could not keep myself from thinking about something he had told me: that the monks in his order weren’t supposed to talk and so they learned sign language and there was a certain sign they used for greeting each other and it meant memento mori, remember death. When he’d first told that to me and for years afterwards I thought it was one of the worst things I’d heard about the monastery, right there in line with Pain is a blessing. “Remember life,” I thought they should be saying to each other. “Remember fun.”
But I’d gotten older and certain things had happened to me and to people close to me, and the monks’ little hand signal had started to make more sense. All of Ellory had started to make more sense.
I took the pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket and handed it over. He placed it on his desk, just so.
Janet pulled the top of her dress together again and asked him what it was like, living alone all the time.
In his early monastic days, Ellory would have said, “I’m not alone, I have the Lord’s presence,” or some special thing like that. But he’d grown up, finally, after thirteen years of no sex and no carousing and no sleeping later than four a.m. He looked up at her and said, “Oh, shit. You’ve been here all this time and I haven’t asked about you at all.”
“My life is an open book,” she said.
He smiled. He was still holding the dripping oily sandwich in both hands an inch above his plate. “Mine, too, but… What kind of work do you do?”
“I work for the governor of Massachusetts.”
“Doing what?”
“Reading and interpreting polls, deflecting and entertaining lobbyists, working on his travel itinerary in campaign years, advising on speeches, being a liaison with the press. Getting him reelected. My title is Special Assistant for Public Relations.”
“He must be a good man, then, if you work for him.”
“He’s a jerkoff,” I said. My hand was hurting more now; there was about two percent of being sorry left in me.
Janet had a particular way of pursing her lips when she was bothered by something I did or said. It made small ridges of skin at the outside edges of her mouth, and made the freckle almost disappear. When she pursed her lips like that in my direction, I knew everything was more or less alright between us. Ellory looked from me to her and she said, “No, he’s… flawed. I thought he might be someone special when I first went to work for him. He’s charismatic, in a politician’s way. He seems to care about children, really, and he’s good with his own daughters. When I first saw him-I went to work for him during his first campaign when I was right out of grad school-I thought he might turn into a great governor someday. I thought he might even run for president-he still wants to. But I’ve been there almost four years now and he’s squeezed three-quarters of the idealism out of me.” She coughed her deep wet cough and I watched my brother watching her. “I wanted to do something good for the world. Now I want to keep my health insurance and have someplace to go on rainy weekday mornings in February.”
“I was more idealistic at first, too,” Ellory said when she was finished. “The routine here breaks it out of you. That’s good, I think, or natural. Every life does that. Marriage does it, work does it. The trick is to somehow keep the gates open in the fences at the edge of your mind and not get hard and bitter. You don’t strike me as hard and bitter. Jake doesn’t strike me that way either, in spite of everything that’s happened to him.”
Janet looked at me when Ellory said that. It was as if I’d just taken off a pair of dark glasses and she was seeing my eyes for the first time. She looked back at Ellory, who was taking the opportunity to gulp down the second half of his sandwich, and whose eyes slipped once to the cigarettes on the desk.
“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked abruptly. “Don’t you miss being close to someone that way?”
“Sure.” Ellory got up to put his dish in the sink, and toss the waxed paper in the wastebasket. He washed the oil from his fingers, dried his hands, and looked at the cigarettes again, then came back and sat in his chair. “When I first started living here I used to masturbate every Monday night, right on schedule, once a week. It was something to look forward to.”
It did not sound like he was talking about sex. All the dirtiness and sweet spark had been taken out of it.
“I miss women,” he went on. “I miss that kind of intimacy. But I think whatever people do, they do in search of pleasure. Or trying to get rid of pain or fear, which is the same thing, basically. Everything, everything is really about that. Everything is about bringing your mind to a place where it’s at peace. There are just different routes. Some of them seem to lead there, and lead there for a while, and then don’t. Some things work for one person and don’t work at all for another person. Our sister takes a lot of drugs. Jake told you that, I’m sure. She just wants to put her mind in a pleasurable place or she just wants to get rid of the pain that’s there. It’s not a sin. It’s not something God despises her for. It doesn’t work, that’s all. And it just leads to her doing things, to herself and other people, that drive her farther away from the peace she’s looking for. That’s hell.”
Janet was staring at him. I was looking at the bookcase on the wall, measuring everything Ellory said against the photograph there.
“Bro,” I said, when he stopped for a breath.
“What?”
“You’re, you know, preaching a little.”
Janet said, “No he isn’t, Jake.” Then, to Ellory, “And this works for you, living like this?”
“It’s a good setup for someone like me, it wasn’t always.”
“Jake said you were wild.”
“I was afraid of dying, that’s all.”
“And now you’re not.”
“I might be, when the time comes. I imagine I will be, but maybe less than I would have been if I hadn’t come here. I’m curious about it some days.”
“Me, too,” Janet said.
I got up off the bed a little too suddenly, stepped out through the front door, and closed it most of the way. I went just far enough to be out of the window light, partway around the corner of Ellory’s little house. I looked across the dark fields. By then the moon was well up in the sky and the night was clear and we were far out in the countryside so that, even with the moon, there were about three times as many stars as I was used to seeing. You could feel the first bite of winter in the air. And in the darkness the monastery grounds and the dark shapes of buildings on a little rise half a mile away seemed to be giving off the scent of desolation.
My hand and my rib and one side of my face throbbed every time a pulse of blood went through them. I knew we weren’t going to New York then. I suspected I had never really been planning to take Janet to New York on that trip. Something moved up through me when I admitted that to myself, a twist of old anguish twirling up the bones of my back. Riding along with the anguish, or right behind the anguish, came a beautiful sense of relief, something like what I had felt at Diem Bo on our first date. It was a kind of fearlessness, I understood that then, a way of just standing in the moment of time I was standing in and knowing I could probably survive whatever was going to follow that moment. I understood, too, that, in their own ways, Janet and Ellory had both learned to do that, live in the present like that, gobbling up their fears.
After a time I went back into the cabin and they were looking at me. “Thought I’d pee outside,” I told them, and when Janet pursed her lips again, I said, “The neighborhood has gotten lousy here, I thought I heard somebody stealing the golf clubs out of my truck.” And when she kept her eyes on me and that expression on her mouth, I said, “I just needed a few seconds. All is well.”
But she kept looking.
We stayed another ten minutes. We talked about plans to bring my mother there for the January visiting day, and about the season the Red Sox were having, and a little bit about Janet’s mother, a devout Catholic herself. Over the course of the time we’d been dating, Janet had told me how her mother had taken care of her as a girl and as a young woman, doing her chest PT every night, taking her to doctors, sleeping on a cot beside her hospital bed, cooking special meals. A little overprotective at times, Janet said, but kind and tough and fond of men who worked with their hands. Janet kept saying how much I’d like her and how much she’d like me. I’d seen pictures of the woman. But, though she lived only ten minutes from Boston, I noticed that Janet made no move to actually introduce us.
My brother gets up at 4:15 every morning to pray, and Janet and I were supposedly on our way to New York City, so we said our good-byes, exchanging embraces like explorers getting ready to set off across different oceans. Janet and I stepped out into the night. When we were a few dozen steps from the cabin, I looked back and saw that the light was still on, the door still open, Ellory standing there in his bathrobe, watching us. Just before we crossed the rise, I looked back again and saw that the door was closed and the light still showing in the window and I knew he was praying for us then, asking whatever saints and spirits might be out there to watch over us, help us not to turn bitter and hard, not to be afraid.
I did not feel any of those things as we made our way across the monastery hayfield in the moonlight-not bitter, not afraid. I felt then, for some reason, that life was larger and more complicated than I’d ever thought. You couldn’t always be sure where bad luck ended and good luck began. You had to just endure certain things, and let time pass, and try to keep the gates open at the edges of your mind.
JANET AND I didn’t say a word as we made our way across the field and onto the logging road. We didn’t say anything walking back along the two-lane highway toward where the truck was parked, either. No cars passed, and the moon had swung behind the trees, but there were small breaths of cool October wind against the skin of our faces, and the woods were black and trembling on both sides of us, and we walked through a feeling you can’t find in the city. The whole human drama seemed like just a crazy sideshow, a circus ring of glitter and anger set against some enormous dark background, little wisps of hope here and there.
When we were sitting in the truck with the heater on, I said to her, “New York or by bus?” because I couldn’t yet bring myself to tell her where I was actually planning to go.
And she said, “A decent motel. New York tomorrow, okay?”
There was something strained and unfigurable in her voice. I thought maybe she was in a hurry then, or tired out, that she wanted to get to a motel room with enough time and energy to make love. But when we found a place, and checked in, and had gone into the room and closed the door without turning on the lights-which had become a little ritual for us-she said, “I want to do something different tonight, will you, Jake?”
I said that I would be happy to, depending on what kind of different she had in mind, but probably I’d be happy to.
“I want us to take off all our clothes and sleep next to each other and not make love.”
“Not make love, or not make love and not indulge in any variations on the same theme?”
“Nothing. I just want to talk a little, and then sleep. We’ll make love when we get to New York.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve never done that before.”
“I have,” I said. “I did it lots of times when I was fifteen and sixteen, except the girl wasn’t completely naked and neither was I and it didn’t go on all night.”
“And you remember it fondly,” she said.
“Vividly.”
“It’s one night, Jake. I’d like to try it.”
We tried it. We took off every particle of clothing and climbed into the motel bed where so many other souls had made love and had sex and been angry and hopeful and afraid and alone. We just lay there in the darkness holding hands. It wasn’t too bad until she hooked her left ankle over my right ankle, and I could feel her thigh against my thigh, and the heat of her all down the length of my leg.
“Is this supposed to be in sympathy with Ellory or something?”
“He’s a kind man. I liked him. I liked what he said about pleasure and dying.”
“Are you paying me back for being a gorilla with the governor?”
She pushed me with her elbow, not too gently. “It’s not a punishment, it’s an experiment. It’s just something I want to do. I want to feel what there is between us if we don’t have sex.”
“You can feel what there is between us. Let me turn on my side.”
Another strong elbow. “Stop,” she said. “I mean it. If you can’t handle it I’ll just crawl into the other bed. It’s one night.”
“Alright.”
“I have something important to tell you.”
“Alright,” I said, but in the course of three seconds the air in the room had changed. I breathed in and out. I said, “Is this because of what happened in your office?”
“It has nothing to do with that, and it has nothing to do with meeting your brother. I had already made up my mind before those things.”
“You’re going to become a nun,” I said, because I was nervous then. Memento mori. I was worrying about what Ellory might have said to her when I went outside. I was thinking there are all kinds of deaths and you’d have to be half-machine in order not to remember that.
“Jake. Stop.”
“I’m stopped. I’m ready,” I said, but naturally I wasn’t. All my beautiful thoughts about being in the moment and not being afraid just lifted up and flew out through the cheap drapes and I was left lying there in the body of my actual self.
“I’m going to put my name on the list for a double lung transplant,” Janet said, up into the darkness of the room. “I thought, before, that I’d never want to do that, but now I’m going to.”
WHEN SHE WAS ASLEEP I tried to time her breaths against my own. Three to one-quick short inhales and slower exhales, as if her body didn’t quite have the strength to push all the old air out. I wondered how she could even sleep, breathing that way, and why it didn’t exhaust her by about eleven o’clock in the morning.
I heard trucks going by on the highway next to the motel, and I thought constantly about what she had said. From the hours I’d spent in front of Gerard’s computer I knew what it meant to sign up for a double lung transplant: it was the last miracle a CF person reached for before giving up. Even if she made it to the top of the list of people waiting for new lungs, and even if the operation worked, she’d be condemning herself to a life of even more medication and even more side effects. Tremors, bone loss, sleep problems, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, muscle cramps, increased susceptibility to diabetes and to opportunistic infection. She’d still have cystic fibrosis, but for a year or five years or eighteen years, she’d breathe, and for a while at least the breaths would come easy.
I took her left hand and lay it palm-down on top of my thigh, and put my own hand over it. I tried to calm myself by breathing with her, concentrating hard on that awkward rhythm and the feeling of her hand and nothing else.
But it is hard to keep the mind still like that. I went from the rhythm of our breathing to thinking about what Ellory had said about his wild years. From there I tried to imagine, for the ten thousandth time, what Giselle must have gone through in the hour before she died, and then what dying really was.
Air stopped going into and out of a pair of lungs, that was all. Your heart stopped squeezing and relaxing. Millions of cells stopped doing the kinds of things they had been doing for ten or twenty-seven or ninety years. Clear enough. But if you tried to ask what happened to the part of the person you couldn’t see or measure, the part you envied or argued with or loved, then you sounded like a ninth-grader on marijuana.
It seemed to me, lying there with Janet, skin against skin, that Ellory had come to understand something I didn’t understand-not about death or God as much as about minute-to-minute living. In the sterile room, with the whine of tires and truck engines beyond the windows, I felt that some absolutely essential fact was right there for me to take hold of, right there. I went to sleep reaching for it.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning I told Janet I had changed my mind about where we were going. “I’ll take you to New York next time it’s my turn to pick,” I said, and she nodded and said that was fine. But there was a strain in my voice, a weight, a bad nervousness. And I knew her well enough by then to see in her eyes that she wanted to talk about it.
When we were in the truck again, I asked if she could deal with four more hours of riding.
“I love riding,” she said. “It’s moving without having to get out of breath.”
“We’re going to Pennsylvania.”
“Fine, Jake. Just go,” she said, but there was something unspoken between us, wisps of warm smoky fear in the air of the cab.
She sat with her bare feet up on the dashboard, one arm dangling out the window, the wind blowing strands of hair around her face. To make it so we didn’t have to talk, I put good music on the CD-John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Springsteen, Chopin, Saw Doctors, Dave Matthews, a little-known Cajun outfit called Doctor Romo.
To someone used to the Rhode Islands and New Hampshires of this world, Pennsylvania seems like an enormous state, the Montana of the east. I remember Gerard saying, after his cross-country bike trip the summer of his divorce, that Wyoming and Idaho were nothing compared to Pennsylvania, where, instead of one long climb and one long descent, you had an endless series of exertions and exhilarations, pain and freedom, pain and freedom, sweat and pain and then wind in your face and pure effortless speed.
From time to time I would feel Janet looking at me in a way she had not looked at me before our monastery visit. But we said almost nothing and did not touch. We drove and drove.
The place where we finally stopped was a humble little city in the middle of the Alleghenies. A few months earlier, nine miners had been trapped in a coal shaft there for three days before being pulled out. They had gone through something unforgettable, horrible. And the people who rescued them had been smart and brave, and all kinds of other people had given food and help. But something about it sickened me: the news anchors with their manufactured earnestness, the way the reporters seemed almost to enjoy it, locals enjoying the attention, too; the way, after a certain critical point, you could smell the book deals and movie deals, as if all of it had been nothing more than food for a ravenous entertainment machine. Not long after the miners’ ordeal, I gave my television set away to one of the local homeless shelters. I did not know how you were supposed to tell about that kind of terror, that kind of worry that someone you loved might slowly suffocate underground while you wanted to help them and couldn’t. But I knew a sour note when I heard it, and the TV, it seemed to me, had been full of sour notes all that year.
The pickings were a bit slim thereabouts, but I found the nicest hotel I could. We walked the streets for a while to work off the dullness of the drive, then ate at a steak house, went back to the room, and left the lights out.
“Are we there yet?” Janet asked. We were on the fourth floor and she was standing at a half-open window looking down at the lazy traffic.
“Almost.”
The day had been warm for October-low seventies-and at lunch she’d changed into the other dress she’d brought, a summery dress with small yellow flowers everywhere on a sky-blue background. I stood behind her, unzipping it. When I had unzipped it as far as her hips, I tugged it down off her shoulders, and when she took her arms away from the windowsill, the dress fell around her feet. Carefully, as if we had all of time in front of us, I picked up the dress and lay it on one of the beds. I put my hands on her bare shoulders and we stood that way, front to back, looking out. “The kids are asleep,” I said. “I checked.”
“You’re nervous again. I could feel it at dinner.”
“Calm is my middle name.”
“You’re going goofy.”
“Highway hypnosis,” I said. “Hydroplaning. Driver’s side air bags. My other truck is a Cadillac.”
“Jake.”
“What.”
“Take off the rest of my clothes.”
I did that. Still, she did not turn around. Our breathing was more similar now.
“Is there something here you want me to see?”
“Tomorrow there is.”
“Alright. Are your clothes off?”
“No.”
“Is my body exciting to you? I’m not fishing for… my hips seem wide to me, my feet seem large. I don’t think that would be exciting. This body doesn’t work right in so many ways I just want it to be right in one way.”
Instead of answering I lifted up her hair and kissed the back of her neck. Which was saltier than any normal back of the neck should have been. Which was the whole problem. I kissed the back of her neck and then I kissed the back of where her lungs were, and then kissed down bit by bit to her heels. She turned around and I kissed slowly back up, not touching the usual sex places but spending time on the bones at the top of her hips, the insides of her elbows, her collarbone, her throat. She stood still and didn’t touch me, but the tightness came out of her muscles almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep against me the night before.
“Cells singing,” she said, at one point.
I kissed her mouth, and because she could go a fairly long time that week without coughing, it was a long kiss, something new for us.
For some reason then, I bent down and licked the surgery scars on her belly, which she’d thought were so ugly that she’d stopped ever wearing a two-piece bathing suit, thirteen years old. I kissed the soft fleshiness of her breasts as if I could heal what lay beneath them, as if the pure force of my wanting pleasure for her could pass through skin and flesh and blood and cauterize the colonies of bacteria. Cells singing. In fact, the bad bacteria communicated with each other-researchers had just discovered that-and different ones had different assignments, like bees in a hive, like terrorists on an airliner. The tiny tubes through which her life ran were being choked off in minuscule increments every day, every instant. I kissed and licked her and I believed I could feel all that going on inside her and I wanted to burn down into her with what was in the middle of me, with the good in me, the good-wanting. I did not want any more death and suffering now, in my little world, not for years and years. Sometimes I could feel the force of that not-wanting as it scraped up against something larger. My own power, my own small will, against the huge merciless spinning-out of time. I had made a year of trying to yield to that something larger, and be understanding, mellow, resilient. But I wasn’t in a mood to do that anymore.
The song of Janet’s cells lifted up through her throat and murmured in the back of her mouth, echoing there, as her voice always did, soft flute notes tapping against the sides of a wet barrel. As I kissed her I unbuckled my pants. I pulled the zipper down and let them drop and stepped out of them and she pulled my underwear down, letting her soft hair brush the insides of my legs. I started to move her toward the bed but she brought her face up so that I was looking into her black eyes and she said, “I want it to be not just sex.”
“You’re talking to the right man.”
She turned around and put her hands on the windowsill and I stood very close behind her, with the shadows of the room on us, and the tinny bell of an elevator beyond the door, and then two or three people walking along the corridor, laughing loudly. I had my fingers on the tops of her hip bones and I could feel my pulse in every square centimeter of skin, but I knew exactly what she meant. I wanted a connectedness that was not just about lust, not just about orgasms. I wanted to pull it back from the world of gossipy magazines and television, the seen world, the talked-about and written-about world, the world of pretending life went on forever. Janet wanted that, too, I was sure of it. We were both all full of want on that night.
THE NEXT MORNING we slept in later than usual, and made love again when we woke up. Something had changed in the lovemaking, I don’t know how to say it. It was not driven by anything. There was nothing watching us. We could not have talked during it, or about it.
The diner where we had our late breakfast was busy with lunch customers, so instead of sitting in a booth we sat on stools at the counter. We didn’t talk about our feelings for each other, but those feelings had changed, had moved from blossom to fruit. In some strange way, going to visit my brother had been a kind of public statement for us-though a hermit’s house might seem like an odd place for public statements. I wasn’t a sacrilegious person. Ellory knew I wouldn’t take just any date onto the monastery grounds. And, once we’d been there, Janet understood that, too.
The food was oily and real and served on big oval plates-eggs and link sausages and potatoes. Janet liked raspberry jam on buttered wheat toast, almost burned. We drank coffee and grapefruit juice and ice water and afterwards shared one piece of warm apple pie because the pie was sitting in a glass case just in our line of vision. By then I did not want to find the place I had driven all that way to see.
When Janet went to the bathroom I started talking to the man on the stool to my left. He was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers cap, and the skin of his cheeks was pitted, and he was eating pancakes, and he told me his name was Peter. There was something wounded and friendly about him. We got onto the subject of children, and he told me he had three of them, two almost-grown boys and a girl. They had lived with their mother for a long time now, but everyone still got along pretty well. I asked him what he liked best about having children, and he thought for a few seconds and said, “It’s the closest you can come to being the other person.” And then, after another couple of seconds, “A lot of times, if you try, you can be who you really should be with them, who you want to be.”
I thought about that. I said I thought there was always a distance between who you are and who you want to be. And then, because it was hurting me to think about those things just then, I tried to make a joke. I said, “I have an appointment with disappointment every day.” It was foolish. I was nervous. I waited for the stupid words to drift away. I asked him how to get to the place we were headed for and he gave very careful directions. When I asked him what it looked like he said, “I’ve never gone out there. I’ve seen enough of things like that. I never wanted to go.”
“Where did you see things like that?”
“I flew fixed-wing propeller planes off carriers, in Vietnam.”
I asked if I could buy him breakfast. It wasn’t because of the Vietnam part, but just because I liked him. He said, “Why?”
“I’m just in a mood to.”
“Alright,” he said, after he’d considered the offer a moment. When I got up to go to the bathroom he took hold of the sleeve of my shirt and held me there. “I don’t talk about this with a lot of people, but if you get Life magazine and look at the issue for April 1970, you’ll see my picture.”
He was perfectly sane and normal, but I had the feeling that if the waitress had been just slightly rude to him one day, by accident even, he might never come back there. April 1970 had made a mark on his life that could not be erased. He seemed to me to be filled to the eyes with all the awful things he had seen, all the friends he had lost, to be swimming along on a sea of suffering that was invisible to everyone else. I liked him.
The bathroom was very small and clean, but the tiles were broken here and there, and powdered soap poured out of the dispenser if you barely touched it. I turned on the water too hard and it splashed right out of the sink and all over the front of my pants. Coming out of the little room, I took a right instead of a left and walked into the kitchen.
When I made it back to the counter at last, Peter thanked me for the breakfast, and when Janet came back he thanked her, too. He reminded me about the Life magazine, and I said I’d be sure to check it out, but I have never done that.
“This town has some odd energy,” Janet said, on the sunny sidewalk. She had been in the bathroom a long time and I worried she was getting sick again already.
“This is the town where the miners were rescued. Over the summer.”
“I saw the ‘God Bless Our Heroes’ sign. I was wondering. That’s not where we’re going, though, is it?”
“Not those heroes, no.”
“Your voice is different today, Jake.”
We drove out of town on a two-lane country highway, past an airport and a two-truck volunteer fire station and a man in a checkered shirt with his hands in his pants pockets, staring at a ten-foot-tall pile of gravel. The land there was woods and farmland, hilly but hard-edged, and you could see the marks of the severe winters on the roof shingles and clapboards. At one point we passed a sign that said:
WELCOME TO SHANKSVILLE
HOME OF THE VIKINGS
A FRIENDLY LITTLE TOWN
ESTABLISHED 1803
Shortly after that we passed a wire fence where someone had tacked up a piece of one-by-ten with FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL and an arrow painted on it. But I did not think Janet noticed.
Following my friend Peter’s directions, I turned off the highway and we wound along a smaller road lined with fluttering flags. There were streaks of sweat on the steering wheel. We made a right turn onto a steep gravel road called Skyline Drive. Next to that road, outside a house decorated everywhere with stars and stripes, some enterprising folks had set up a gift shop where you could buy souvenirs. We rolled on, over the crest of the hill, and I pulled the truck into a lot where a few other cars had parked and where people had covered the aluminum guardrail with a kind of worshipful graffiti. The land in front of us was desolate land, slanting down and away in stony, weedy slopes with a lot of Queen Anne’s lace growing there, and with sharp-winged brown birds darting back and forth and making shrill cries. I remembered that the site was in fact a filled-in strip mine, but it looked to me like an abandoned cattle ranch where the soil had been too stony and poor to grow meat. Far off to our left, on another hill, sat a rusty strip-mining crane, impossibly big, and there were fences, a farmhouse, the birds squealing, but your eye was drawn straight down the slope to a new chain-link fence that enclosed a more or less rectangular area, several hundred yards long, with a treeline behind. There was an American flag tied to the fence. Janet was looking in that direction.
“You can still see where the trees were burned,” I told her, but it came out in an even newer version of the new voice so that she started looking at me instead of the woods behind the fenced-in area. I tried again. I said, “Let’s go up on this little hill.” But I should have just kept quiet.
You could not get anywhere close to the actual fenced-in site with the burned trees behind it, but on a little rise near the parking lot there was a piece of chain-link, maybe ten feet by twenty feet, that had been erected as a sort of public billboard. Hundreds of people had left things on that scrap of metal, an odd assortment of things: baseball and football caps, rosary beads and medals of saints, Stars of David, crucifixes, a couple of Buddhas, real and plastic flowers, stuffed animals, children’s toys, a T-shirt from a Las Vegas plumbers’ union, flags and flags and flags and not just American, drawings, notes encased in plastic wrap so the rain wouldn’t spoil them-“Let’s Roll” and “God Bless You All” and “For the children who lost a parent, friend, or loved one.” Dollar bills.
I hadn’t wanted to ever come here because I had wanted my own grief and confusion to be private. I did not want anyone making assumptions about what I felt for Giselle, or what she had felt for me. I did not want the newspapers and television to touch even the smallest part of that, not because I believed it was more important or more special or even different from what other men and women and children had felt on that day and afterwards, but because I did not want my feelings cheapened, and the entertainment machine was all about cheapening feelings, about making complicated things simple. That was the whole purpose of it, after making money: to dull the edge of things. Scenes of blown-up discothèques in Haifa one second, and racy commercials for lite beer the next. How could we tolerate it?
Not far from me, a little girl was standing with her father and she said, “These people were good people, Daddy, weren’t they?” But even that was somehow a wrong note.
Janet had drifted away from me. I saw her standing in front of an unofficial plaque that showed the names of the dead. The flags there were fluttering loudly in the wind. I stared past her, down the slope, to the fenced-in area near the line of the woods. One of the things I’d read-when I had started to let myself read about that day-said that, at the very end of the ordeal, the plane’s engines were no longer functioning and it had been coasting along in silence, upside down, as it came over the houses near Shanksville. I had thought about that many times.
Many times, times beyond counting, I had imagined Giselle’s fear, and the feelings of the rest of the people in that plane, and in those other planes, and in those buildings. Every sane soul in the world, it seemed to me, had imagined that.
Janet walked over to another memorial someone had made, with small photographs of the passengers glued onto it, their names and ages. Hours and hours some person had spent doing that. I did not want to see it. I could feel myself starting to cry. Not cry, exactly. I could feel myself starting to weep. So I walked past the chain-link billboard, past a sheriffs car, over a second small rise, and I stood there where no one could see me, with my back to the filled-in strip mine. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans and I let my head droop down so that a steady salty stream worked into the corners of my mouth and onto my T-shirt, and though I tried to be very quiet, I could not. I walked a little farther away, over another stony rise, and I stayed there a long time, weeping until it was all out of me, and then I wiped my face with the bottom of my T-shirt and looked up into a perfectly empty sky and breathed and breathed.
It seemed to me then that the whole problem with the way the world was designed came from the fact that we lived in separate packages. You could not ever really reach out of your miniature world and into someone else’s and feel what they were feeling. Not really. Not enough. Maybe making love, or maybe during short flashes of conversation with a friend, or maybe, maybe, for a few hours after the world had witnessed something horrifying. Gerard had said to me that when your children were young you could do that. And when my mother had talked to me about her parents’ deaths-which had been slow, hard deaths-she’d said there came a point when you felt something like that. All the dying person’s protection had been burned away, she told me; it seemed as if they opened themselves up to you, cut themselves open and allowed you in.
I breathed and breathed, wiped my face. After a long time, when I was more or less calm again, I turned and walked back toward my truck. From the top of the second rise, I could see, over the white roof of the sheriff’s SUV, that Janet had put down the tailgate of my pickup and was sitting there in her summer dress, dangling her legs over, watching for me. I looked away. Another few steps and I looked back and when I was up close to her she put a hand on my shoulder, leaned forward, and licked the salt from my face.
THE TRUTH IS that Janet and I did not talk about Shanksville on the first part of the long ride home. The silence was uncomfortable. At the same time, there was a way in which we were at peace with that discomfort. The distance between us felt like an honest distance, unthreatening.
I could not help thinking that, with Giselle, if things had happened differently, we would have talked and talked, about the memorial, about America, about former lovers and families, and God and pain and death and mysteries. We would have filled the cab of the truck with words because that was the territory we had gone to in order to try to escape the loneliness we felt with each other, the vague, nagging, secret disappointment. If she had not been on that particular plane on that particular day, if we had been able to work out the trouble between us, then Giselle and I would have grown old together sitting on a porch somewhere, reading aloud to each other from sections of the Sunday newspaper, waiting for the grandchildren to call.
The road away from Shanksville lifted and dipped, curling along high slopes over wide red and gold valleys, with sparking rivers slicing through them, and the long rich hills rising on either side like blanket-covered bodies sleeping at some distance to one another. Janet and I listened to one CD-Derek and the Dominos, made before either of us was born-then just rode quietly. She had started coughing again, intermittently. The sound of it stabbed at me like a dull blade.
We stopped for lunch, and for a gas fill-up for the old machine, and afterwards Janet asked if she could drive for a while and I said, “Of course.” She was an intent, careful driver, speed limit minus five. I closed my eyes and moved in and out of a half-sleep infested with smoky dreams.
Somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania she pulled over. We switched places, but still didn’t say much. Darkness fell when we were in New York State, on 684. The highway was a necklace of white and red lights looping toward home.
In Connecticut she said, “I went to prep school near here. My mother thought it would be good for me to go away after my father died. We argued about it. I wanted to stay with her and I was really private about taking medicines and so on. The last thing on earth I wanted was to have a roommate watching me use the inhalers and the vest and so on. She’s sweet, my Ma-you’ll see when you meet her-but she has this drill-sergeant/kung-fu master side that comes out when she’s worried about me. So I applied, got a scholarship, ended up with a bulimic genius roommate and some great friends. Senior year I had a boyfriend named Alonzo. From this fabulously wealthy family in Venezuela. He invited me to go home with him for Christmas, and my mother said I could go-his family was paying-but I didn’t want to.”
“Were you sick?”
“Not that sick then, no. I just wanted to be home at Christmas. I knew my mother was having a hard time and trying to pretend otherwise for my sake, and I wanted to be around her. Anyway, Alonzo and I used to go out for walks in the woods near the campus and just kiss and hold hands. We never did make love. The summer after graduation we wrote a lot of letters. And then every year I was in college he’d write to me in November and ask if I wanted to come to Caracas for the Christmas holidays. I always said no. Senior year, for some reason or another, I went. I was really starting to feel not so good by then, maybe that’s why. Maybe I was starting to understand that no one would ever marry me, and I knew that Alonzo had always had a special thing for me. Plus, a friend of mine I’d been in the hospital with a few times had already died… Anyway, I went. It was about like you’d expect: the family lived in a twenty-room house with servants and they were very gracious with me and we had a feast on Christmas Eve and went to church the next day and had another feast after church. I had my inhaler and my pills and my vest, and I was feeling okay, but I could see it made Alonzo uncomfortable, you know, how much sicker I’d gotten since high school, the progression of things, the medications. I think, since then, I’ve always been sensitive about that, on dates especially. One of the things I liked about you in Diem Bo was that you didn’t seem bothered.
“Anyway, they were a very kind family. I went horseback riding with his sisters. I’d never been on a horse. The next day Alonzo and I drove to a beach house they had near a place called Puerto La Cruz, which was a beautiful little city with pastel houses and a stony beach. It was warm, we took a swim, we had crab legs and this delicious white wine for dinner, I remember. We went back to the house and went to bed together for the first time and we kissed and everything and it was just like before except that I was coughing a lot and when it came time to… he was, he couldn’t… he was impotent. He felt horrible. Eventually we went to sleep, but in the morning it was the same. It didn’t matter to me very much, but to him it was terrible. For the rest of the time I was there he could barely look at me. All the way back to Caracas he talked and talked, but he could barely look at me. Has that ever happened to you, Jake?”
“Once.”
“I’ve always believed it was because my being sick turned him off so much.”
“The woman I was with that night wasn’t sick,” I said.
“Was it Giselle?”
It was the first time either of us had spoken that name. I shook my head.
We rode on. After a few minutes I asked Janet why she had told me the Venezuela story just then, and she said she didn’t know.
“Was he the great love of your life?”
“No, you are,” she said, just straight and plain and serious like that, without any drama. And then, “Was Giselle the love of your life?”
I shook my head without looking at her, and then looked. She was almost smiling and seemed very calm. I drove along. We were past the little knot of Hartford by then. “We met in a bar on Boylston Street,” I said. “Three and a half years ago. We had a good time at first. I had my first show, sold a couple of paintings. We went to Mexico. We went up to Quebec City a couple of times. Everything was nice. We fought a lot-stupid little fights-but everything was going along pretty well. She was selling mobile phones and she was good at it, and then she got promoted to regional sales manager and, I don’t know, things started to go sour. She wanted to start having children and I was fine with that idea. But she had a whole plan-three children, a certain kind of house in the suburbs-and I kept saying I’d grown up in a family with three children in a nice house in the suburbs, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t really want to do it all over again exactly that way. She was pushing me to go back to med school. I kept saying I didn’t want to go back to med school, I wanted to paint. It got to be a regular thing for us-”
“I didn’t know you went to medical school.”
“I quit after the first year. I… we’d go along fine for a few days or a week, sometimes two weeks, then we’d get into the med school discussion, the suburbs discussion.”
“Ellory said you were planning to get married.”
I looked over at her. In that quick glance across the shadowy cab I couldn’t read her face, but there had been a kind of sad, bending note in her voice when she said “married.” It surprised me.
“I thought he might have said something.”
“I asked about the picture on his bookshelf. He said she’d died, he didn’t say how, but he told me you’d been engaged.”
“No,” I said. “We’d talked about it, but no.”
“No ring?”
When she said “ring,” I heard the bending note a second time.
“No.”
“I interrupted you. I’m jealous, I’m sorry. Keep going now, and then after this we never have to talk about it again, alright?”
“Alright. Giselle had grown up poor-her parents were from Brazil, actually. After she met me, she started to make a lot of money and then she started to worry that if she stopped to have kids she’d be poor again. But she didn’t want to leave the kids and fly all over the place every few weeks. It was a big confusion for her. I have plenty of money, you know. I make a good amount from carpentry. I sell a few paintings every year, the apartment is paid for and worth a lot. She knew all that. But… I don’t know… everything got tense. She started to travel more. She started to talk about this guy she worked with. They traveled to sales conferences once or twice together. I met him once. I knew there was nothing going on. But then some more time went by and I wasn’t sure there was nothing going on. I asked her. She got upset. Nothing was going on, nothing. Then the next day she told me they’d gone out for a drink at the last conference and they’d kissed afterwards and made out a little, but she hadn’t gone to bed with him. So I didn’t like that, naturally…She said it was wrong, she was sorry, she would never do anything like that again. From there, somehow, we got into another three-kids-in-the-suburbs fight. A few days went by. We made up. It was rocky for a month or so-this was the summer before this one, a year ago, a little more than a year…She had a meeting in New York and then a conference in San Francisco, and, I don’t know, we were talking on the phone when she was in New York and I had a bad moment-I thought I was done being angry and jealous but I wasn’t-and I asked her if this guy-Brian, his name was-if he was going on the trip with her the next day and she said he wasn’t, and we left it there…And then, afterwards, you know, after the day and the funeral services and everything, I went about three months without checking and then I had another bad moment and I looked up the list of the people who’d been on the plane and Brian’s name was there.”
“She could have just wanted you not to be jealous and that’s why she didn’t tell you.”
“I know that.”
“But you still didn’t go out with anyone else for a year?”
I nodded. I promised myself not to say anything else about it, and then I immediately said, “I did that for myself, for my own guilt. I wasn’t in good shape. Gerard used to take me places like I was a little kid-to his daughters’ dance recitals, to museums, to scuba classes. I was a little zombie-ish for a while. There was so much talk about it, naturally, in the papers every day, on TV every night. People who had lost husbands and wives and children. I stopped reading the papers, stopped watching TV. I banged nails and painted and got through the winter, and in the spring I started driving into the country alone on weekends and sleeping out in the woods in a sleeping bag, or going for long hikes, or going to see Ellory. It was rough for a while and then not so rough, and then I was starting to feel semi-alright again. I remember calling you that first afternoon, from work. Just sort of peeking my nose back into the dating world.”
“And I responded so nicely,” Janet said.
“I was almost better by then. I knew when I put the phone down, after you said no, that I was most of the way better.”
BY THE TIME we got back to Boston it was eight-thirty at night. We stopped for takeout at Fez and set the warm paper bags between us in the cab of the truck on the way to my apartment. While I was getting out plates and glasses, Janet called the governor on his private line and I heard her leaving a message in a don’t-mess-with-me-you’re-lucky-to-have-me voice: “Charlie, Janet. I’m taking the holiday tomorrow. I’ll be in the office Tuesday morning as usual.”
We sat at the small kitchen table I had made from some tiger maple I’d found at a mill in western Massachusetts on my way home from visiting Ellory one time. Maple is a nice-looking wood anyway, but tiger maple has shimmering bands of light and dark running down the grain, so that even a board that’s been planed and sanded perfectly smooth seems to have ripples in its surface. In certain kinds of light, the ripples seem almost to be moving. During the first breakfast we ate together at that table-it was the morning after the third time she slept over-Janet noticed the wood and said how much she liked it. I’d been starting to feel something with her that I didn’t think I was going to be able to let myself feel again, and I was nervous, and in a little spasm of nervousness I started to tell her all about the different woods: how poplar had an olive-green or brownish tint to it and how well it held paint and how it was more stable than pine for interior trim; how southern yellow pine was as hard as some hardwoods, even though it wasn’t one, technically, and so it made good flooring if you didn’t mind the heavy, wavy grain; how the architect I liked to work with ordered screen doors from a tiny company in Maine that made them from South American cedar, which was not really cedar at all but a species of mahogany that was used on the decks of ships because it was resistant to insects and rot and didn’t swell or warp when it got wet. Interesting stuff. I went on and on and she watched and listened and started to smile and finally I stopped and smiled, too. It became a joke with us. We’d be at a bar downtown and she’d say, with a perfectly serious expression, “Jake, what kind of wood is this?”
“Siberian chestnut,” I’d say. “Very rare.” And I’d go off on some made-up spiel about how the chestnuts themselves were considered to have aphrodisiac qualities, or how the black Siberian squirrel gnawed the twigs to survive in bad winters. Some elaborate mishmash like that, just to hear her laugh.
She’d taken her pills and she’d done her chest PT with the vibrating vest, and while I was putting together the food, she sat running her hands over the tabletop. We’d bought lamb kebabs with hummus, pieces of warm pita bread that the people at Fez baked themselves, a spicy yogurt dip-and there were Fudgsicles in the freezer for dessert. I opened a bottle of white wine-Sardinian, the same Argiolas we’d had on our first date at Diem Bo. Janet was coughing more already. Just as I sat down she coughed and got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. When she came out she had one very small droplet of blood on her lower lip. I started to eat.
“So how did you ever end up working for this guy?” I asked her after a while.
She looked up, searching for jealousy in my face, but there was not much jealousy there anymore. No jealousy at all, really. Almost none.
She said, “I was having a conversation with some friends in my college dorm and I was saying how rotten the world was, how the politicians were corrupt, how the system was all twisted and skewed. One of my friends said, ‘Why don’t you do something about it, then, instead of just whining?’ So I decided to. I went to the Kennedy School and got my master’s and Charlie was running and he was promising to fund children’s programs and completely eliminate poverty in Massachusetts-not cut it down, completely eradicate it.”
“I remember.”
“Nobody says that. Most politicians don’t even mention the poor.”
“The poor don’t fund-raise,” I said.
“So I thought it would be perfect. I was still fairly healthy. I thought I’d do that for a while and then, if they came up with a cure, I’d try something radical like running for Congress. I was twenty-three, a bit on the naive side.”
“You’d make a good congresswoman.”
She waved a lamb kebab and coughed. A little flash of pain cut across her face.
“I mean it. You care about people. You’re tough, you’re smart.”
“One,” she said, “I’m not a millionaire. Two, I’d go crazy saying the same thing over and over and over again during a campaign. Three, Americans don’t vote for sick people. Four, I’m not that great a compromiser. Even if I got elected somehow, I’d just alienate everyone. I have crazy ideas. I think we should put a lot of money into desalination plants, for example, because the key commodity of the future will be water, not oil. I think each little town and neighborhood should have its own high school again and that the buildings themselves shouldn’t hold more than about twenty classrooms, and that the healthy kids should spend some time every week tutoring the special-needs kids, and that nursing homes should be built right there against the school in the same complex-they do that already in some places, but not with high schools, usually. I think everyone should do six months of volunteer work between high school and college-not just grunt work, painting bandstands and bleachers, but hospice work or environmental work or…” She coughed and coughed and made another trip to the bathroom. When she came back the drop of blood was gone and she went on talking as though she’d never left. “…or military service. Everyone. Every single kid, even the ones in wheelchairs. I think women should have six months’ paid vacation after they have a baby.”
“I’ll write you in,” I said. “You can run as the Idealist Party candidate.”
“It’s just smart,” she said. “It’s all just really practical.”
“Or you could run on the electrocute criminals, cut-art-in-the-schools, hate-your-gay-neighbor platform like the guy Valvoline’s running against.”
“Right.”
“Makes your boss look good.”
“He changed, Jake. Power changes people. The fear of losing power changes people most of all. His wife left him-because he’d changed so much-and then he panicked and changed some more. He’s not a bad man.”
“Just small,” I said, without thinking. But almost all the ugliness in me had been washed out during that day. It was as if I’d finally decided that I’d had enough jealousy for one lifetime. It must have showed in my voice because Janet was watching me, and after a few seconds she smiled her pretty smile, and it was like forgiveness.
AFTER THE MEAL I said I wanted to paint her and she said she didn’t mind, but that she was tired, and could probably only stay up another hour or so.
In the warm months Janet liked to sleep naked. But it was getting colder by then, and she had a pair of sea-green silk pajamas she kept at my apartment in a drawer with a change or two of clothes and some medicines. I turned on the air purifier I had bought after the second week we were together. She put the pajamas on and sat in a chair with her legs crossed at the knee and her arms crossed at the wrist, looking straight at me. I paint in oil on linen, as I said. Linen is expensive, but I like it because, even though most people say it doesn’t make any difference, I think it makes the edges of things not perfectly sharp and if you don’t lay the paint on too thick, it can give everything a smooth quality. I had a canvas already gessoed. In the center of it, I painted just the sea green with its light and shadows, and worked for some time getting the arms and legs right. Then I painted Janet’s face and hair, and then I used a #16 brush and almost a whole tube of Paynes gray to make a background. When I had it roughed in enough so that I thought I could finish it without her being there, I stopped and cleaned up and we went to bed.
I lay on my back in the bed and she lay half-leaning against me with her face on my shoulder and one arm across my chest. When she coughed she brought her right hand up to her mouth and trapped the cough between her palm and the skin of my bare shoulder. Between coughs I could hear her breath rattling around. We lay like that for a long time without saying anything.
“What is the waiting list looking like?” I asked her finally.
“I’m eighteenth. In Massachusetts they’ve been averaging about two a month.”
“So next summer.”
She coughed, then nodded her head against my shoulder, but I listened to her breathing and I knew she wouldn’t live until the next summer. I was sure she knew it, too.
She wrapped herself tight against me, one arm over my chest, right thigh on top of my thighs, face against my neck, and we fell asleep that way.
THE NEXT DAY, Columbus Day, there were tremendous winds in Boston during the morning hours, winds like I had never seen except in the edge of Hurricane Belle. The tops of the trees whipped back and forth. Leaves and newspapers and people’s hats went skidding down the sidewalks like exuberant children. Janet and I slept late, then she sat for another little while and I worked some more on the painting. Afterwards, we took a trolley to the North End and had pasta and salad in a place with six tables, where, before you ordered, they brought you small bowls of olive oil and a basket of hard-crusted bread that was soft as cotton inside.
After the meal I said I wanted to walk to the Back Bay, my favorite part of Boston. In the 1800s it was just marshy tidal flats, but as the city grew, the area became more valuable and the marshes were filled in with thousands of tons of granite from quarries in Needham. Something about the flat straight avenues lined with four- and five-story brownstones, something about the particular mix of buildings on Boylston Street-clothing stores, churches, skyscrapers, little take-out Thai and Szechwan eateries-something about the beggars and businessmen, something about it just felt to me the way a city is supposed to feel-edgy, busy, a visual feast. The winds had mostly died down. Janet said she was feeling strong enough to walk, but by the time we’d gone as far as the Public Garden-maybe a mile and a half-she was having a hard time. When I glanced at her once I could see that the muscles of her forehead were pinched tight, as if she were working out some complicated math formula, when all she was trying to do was breathe.
I said how nice the gardens looked, with the trees so bright, and the more muted colors in the flower beds. I pretended I wanted to sit on one of the benches there and watch kids feed the ducks.
“I hate this,” she said when we sat down and she caught her breath. A hard little wind blew her hair up around her face. She was quiet for a minute, then, softly, almost as if she were talking to herself, “Being dead, I think I can deal with. Being alive and not able to do things, not be able to walk, for God’s sake…”
I put my hand on the top of her leg. In a minute she turned her face away, and started crying. I took my hand from her leg and put it around her shoulders, and pulled her against me.
“Some days I want to scream. I want to stand out in the middle of the street and look up at the sky and just scream and smash things. I want to ride a horse or jog on a beach or go bowling. Anything. I used to be so physical. I played field hockey at school. I loved to swim, to skate. Everything I tried, I loved-hiking, cross-country skiing.” She stopped. She swiped at her right eye with the bottom of her palm. She took a breath and blew it out. We stared at the Public Garden for a long while and then she said, “Alright. I’m finished with that.”
“All you do is complain.”
“Right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Do you want children, really?”
I heard the bending note again.
“Most of the time. You?”
“I’d have eight if I were strong enough. I’d fill a huge house with them. I have dreams about having children. Two or three times a week now I have a dream like that.”
“Are you sure you can’t?”
She turned her face away.
Not far in front of us, in the direction Janet had been looking when she asked the question about children, a little towheaded boy and a little towheaded girl were throwing something into the pond. Potato chips, it looked like, tossed up and wobbling in the breeze. The ducks weren’t interested in that particular brand of potato chips, and the girl was getting more and more upset about it and trying to stamp both her feet at once and yelling in a lispy, weepy, aggravated voice: “Duckies! Duck-IES!” The boy seemed to think the problem was that he wasn’t throwing the chips out far enough, so he’d rear back and fling them mightily and then stand with his fists at his sides as the ducks made their quick turns back toward the middle of the pond. There were adults, alone and in pairs, sitting nearby on the other benches, and on the grassy bank, but whoever the parents were, they were of the school of parenting that said, Let your kids play right on the edge of a dirty pond deep enough for them to drown in and let them get really frustrated there and don’t say anything to them or do anything about it.
After a few minutes an older woman walked over to them. She reminded me of my mother, the same erect posture and sure-ness about her. The boy and girl didn’t seem to know her, but the woman gave each of them a slice of white bread, and showed them how to tear up the bread into pieces. When the ducks saw this turn of events, they came gliding toward the towheaded twins, a white fleet of expectation, and the girl started jumping up and down again, her shoes lifting all of an inch into the air. Duckies! Duckies!
Janet and I were both watching. For some reason the little drama made me think of something I had seen in Mexico, years before. I had sold a painting-my first-and to celebrate, Giselle and I had flown to Puerto Vallarta on a whim. We didn’t even make hotel reservations, just took a taxi from the airport into town, asked around with our high-school Spanish, and found a very clean casa de huespedes with pastel-colored tile floors three blocks from the beach. We stayed ten days. In the mornings I would get up early and go for a run before the sun had come up over the mountains. Then I’d go back and shower and we’d walk to a breakfast place we liked, where there weren’t any other tourists. One morning we were sitting there with our huevos rancheros and café con leche and a small skinny boy walked in and began going from table to table with his hand out. The boy was six or seven. He had sores on his face and arms, and a threadbare T-shirt. We gave him what amounted to three dollars or so and he managed to get to one more table before the owner came and roughly ushered him out. At the next table, behind Giselle’s back and directly in my line of vision, sat a man in a fine gray silk suit and a white shirt open at the collar-I will always remember this man-and when the boy had been chased out unceremoniously into the happy seaside morning, this man started doing strange things with his food. He took one of the fresh breakfast rolls that eggs were served with in that place and he opened it down the middle with his thumbs. He picked up the juicy browned slice of ham with his fork and folded it into the roll, then he lay a piece of avocado in there, then some fried egg. I watched him over Giselle’s right shoulder. The owner watched him, too. The man worked with a surgeon’s grace, with careful movements, without dropping any food on the material of his expensive suit. When he was finished he wrapped the sandwich carefully in two napkins, stood up, and hurried out the door, and I watched him trotting down the sidewalk in the same direction the boy had gone. In a few minutes he came back and finished what was left of his breakfast.