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Bee Meyer
151 S. Resler, Apt. #189
El Paso, Texas 79912
THE TWO OF THEM
[First written circa 1977 in Miami, Florida]
His face is silvery in the light of her bed lamp. His mouth is
open, even though he is breathing quietly. She is frightened when she looks at
him sleeping. He could be dead and look like this. She wants to shake him, wake
him, hold him. But her body holds still, rigid. They fought so bitterly before
they came to their room, she didn't think she could stand it or sleep through
it. Something cold, constrictive, held her back from him. More than anything she
ached to say, "Hold me, kiss me." But she didn't. She couldn't. How she hated
herself when she hated him. How she loves and hates him. How old he looks she
thinks. He looks quite dead. Oh no, not dead. Please, not dead.
She thinks she must have been asleep when he came to bed. She falls asleep
quickly, heavily, but not for long. Sometimes it's two o'clock and more often
three, when she can no longer lie back, her book fallen unread from her hand.
She can't concentrate on her books nor the stacks of her magazines. The words
run off the pages by themselves. She reads one paragraph over and over without
meaning.
She wonders when this began. Was it when she realized he'd be seventy-nine in
March, that he'd already had a long life? How much could she hope for? How much
could she stand? How much pity is love, how much self pity is hate?
Before she undressed, she mended his heavy beige sweater which her mother had
knit for him. As she folded and put it away, she saw him as he had been the,
always there for her, doing all the things she didn't like to do. Errands,
shopping, taking the children to their lessons, their doctors, caring for her
mother and father through the years they couldn't manage, couldn't cope. He was
always there, holding in his feelings, walking away from his angers with her.
But there. Now where is he? So much of him still here, so much gone. Her brother
says, "No wonder I love your old guy. He's the kind of man who will take care of
you all your life."
No, she thinks. Some taking care, when now he's so quick to answer, to scream
his frustrations. Where is he for me now? He sleeps. She gets up, leaves their
bed. The night is at her throat, on her chest.
She has learned how to use touchstones to get her through her waking hours. She
can use symbols, sounds, a voice on the phone. She has found how to overcome the
spaces between by using her hands or walking, or in yard work, heavy cleaning or
laundering. Cooking doesn't help much. To cook well she needs the faith which
has somehow deserted her, that flavors will blend, textures will build,
coordination and time can be achieved.
Her cooking has become erratic. A chiffon dessert turns sullen and stiff. Cakes
burn. Puddings stick. She pleads with ingredients. "Don't be ridiculous," she
hears herself saying to a chicken which remains tasteless, "when I've given you
all the salt and pepper and garlic and Rosemary you are entitled to."
There's still enough of herself to smile at her attempt to make friends with a
dead fryer, to try to coerce a custard from curdling. She feels as if she
weren't still able to be for a moment amused, she couldn't cross this pressured
space to the next safety zone.
She becomes temporarily free at a phrase, at concentrating at a picture-hung
wall which has always given her pleasure, or at the height of the tall glass
doors to the patio. If she follows the line of shutters from the floor to the
top of the glass with measuring eyes, she can use the vertical pull and return
as an exercise in concentration. When this works, the pressure of her chest is
eased.
During the days, an occasional phone call will free her. She stays as long on
the phone as she dares, fearful of breaking the connection and returning to the
isolation of her fears.
If she believed in prayer, she could be said to pray. Always compulsively
verbal, she talks to herself aloud now, but carefully. She is as careful of how
she speaks aloud, alone, as she is of looking past the shelf in the medicine
cabinet to the label, "Take one every four hours for pain only." Percodan. She
holds the little bottle and rereads this instruction and thinks that is for pain
only, means only pain. She thinks longingly of how good it would be to know
actual physical pain. She wonders whether she would know release if she were
found to be dying. She knows, however, given her ego drives and lifetime need
for good grades, head-patting and gold stars, she would probably join with her
doctors to put everything she has or once had into a battle to survive. She even
admits in the longest hours of the night that if she really thought herself
incapable of making it through every next day, she would somehow manage to find
a way of doing away with herself and the bones of her chest, pressing, pressing.
She is packaged in two layers. The one on top smiles, laughs, makes contact. The
other one under her chest bones wants to close doors, to hide, to have nothing
expected of it. She tries out the words saying aloud, "I want to have nothing
more expected of me."
Do his angers come from not wanting her to continue expecting so much of him?
How long has he wanted, needed, to be free of being expected of? When he shakes
his fist at her, when he pounds on the arm of his chair, things he had never
done before, is he saying what she is saying, too, that his time of being
expected of is over, over and he wants no more of it? But how can she stop
expecting of him? How can she stop assuming that he is here for her? That he
will be here for her? That he will remember all the things she has not had to
think about, of where to find things, where to put things, where to buy things.
That he can once again walk quickly, lightly, that he can reach the ringing
phone before it stops.
Face it, she thinks, you hate it when he gets up so painfullly from his chair,
when he takes so long to get out of the car, when he walks so slowly, when his
hips hurt, when he can't hear, not only what you're saying but what you really
mean.
She thinks sometimes that her greatest suffering comes from her own sense of
shame at not meeting her own expectations. Then how much is he feeling? She rubs
her hands together as if washing them. She wants to wash this out, blot it out,
put it away, forget it.
She denies that this is what's the matter with her. She walks quickly now
through the dark house. She switches off her mind about him, like turning off a
light. Maybe she feels as she does because of their children. Is this one of her
sticking points, that of all three, only one can be considered self satisfied?
The younger daughter still says, but not as often, that she isn't sure she
really likes herself enough. Their only son doesn't say, doesn't open.
"I will think of the day the twins were born," she thinks. "I am in my room at
the hospital when I wake up from the Caesarian." The first thing she saw clearly
was his face. He was sitting next to her bed, his hand on hers, where the IV
tube was attached. He was waiting for her to wake, to stroke and pat her hand so
she'd not pull out the tube. She had never seen his eyes so brooding, so filled
with love, suffused with tenderness. She loved his eyes, hazel and what she had
always called "trout speckled." He smiled at her when he saw her eyes open and
on him. "Wouldn't you know," he said, "that you'd have to do twice as much as
anybody else. Do you know we have twins?"
She needs to remember this man as he was and when she demands it of herself she
can see him. Only yesterday he said, looking up from his paper, of their younger
daughter soon coming to visit them, "My arms can't bear to wait much longer for
Debby." And when was it, not so long ago, he held her, enfolding, not merely
giving her a hug and said, "The way I love you is something awful -- the whole
damned ball of wax." She looked up, they both laughed. At exactly the same
moment they had remembered what he said the first time they danced together. He
had already begun to know he was in love with her but he was surprised at
himself and her. Seriously, unsmilingly, he said, "I have never danced with a
fat girl before." She was both hurt and amused. Mostly amused. She recognized
what was happening to him and that he was wondering how all of it had come
about, that here was such an armful of woman and he would never want any other
woman the rest of his life.
"I will concentrate on how lucky we are to have lived long enough so that now he
has begun to be able to say aloud what he possibly hadn't even realized he felt
about the children. Oh surely he thought he loved them. I can't deny him that, "
she thinks. Yet would they have grown as they did if from the beginning he had
been able to value them consciously as he does now? It wasn't so long ago, maybe
only two or three years, when suddenly he placed his hand over his heart and
said, "I love Roger so much it's like a physical sensation." Roger, the son who
at eight had said coldly, "Tell him to stop giving me those bats and balls. He
ought to know I'm not the athletic type." Even now she smiled at remembering the
precision and precocity of his speech so young. But for how long now has she
asked whether Roger would have grown more open, more demonstrably affectionate,
if his father could have shown him such love when they were both young enough to
have found each other. Could they have done it then? Did it have to take so
long?
She has tried to shut the children out of her night hours. She had begun to feel
she had learned to cope with her feelings about them but that was when there
were more safe places in her head than now. Now the wounds are open again,
bleeding against her guilt, her unanswered questions as to why their children
who had such promise, such quick and facile intelligence haven't yet learned how
much they have to give, how they deserve recognition and happiness.
There she goes again. There's the crux. There she goes equating recognition with
happiness. She remembers when their older daughter wrote in a freshman theme
that she and her twin brohter and kid sister weren't ever told they had to earn
the best grades, to be most outstanding in their classes. They just knew it was
expected of them.
She has chosen all her life to consider herself free of outside judgments,
demands and expectations. Now she knows she has lied. She has been performing
all her life for the audience outside her window.
Her mother often repeated the story of what an enchanting baby she was, set up
high and sweetly dressed in the sunny bay window of the old brownstone apartment
on Van Sicklin Avenue in Brooklyn and how men and women coming home from work
would vie for her delighted, laughing attention. Her mother said she was like a
first night in the theatre every day. Now her adoring, blue-eyed, sharp-tongued
mother isn't here to tell her how wonderful she is, nor her father, either.
Years before their deaths she mourned them as their once clear, bright minds
became confused.
Is she terrified she is becoming like them? She asks herself this often and
insists this isn't basic to her fears. Is it because she isn't able to accept
that what happened to them may be beginning to happen to her? At sixty-five she
is fifteen years younger than they were when they began to lose their
competence, their crisp ability to think and express themselves.
Does she prefer to think her husband is becoming like her father rather than
admitting she's the one it's happening to? Why else does she compare what he's
doing to saying or not hearing to actions she remembers of her father?
Is this why she walks the night? She denies this as a serious enough fear to
bring her to this -- this what? Depression. She says the words out loud: "I am
depressed. I am deeply depressed." She checks out self-tests in newspapers and
magazines which are, "Are you Depressed, Incapable of Coping?" She denies that
she shows a completely depressed profile -- yet. She can function during the
days and is somehow even managing the long nights. She can make decisions.
Hold it. How is she with decisions? What happens to her when she is trying to do
something as simple as decide the kind of soup to have? All the soups run
through her mind like a paper strip through an adding machine. She sees the
chicken and cheese chowder flying past and the deep sea chowder and the black
mushroom soup and she is cooking a chicken and shaping matzo balls. Hopeless,
she is walking even faster now and lighting a cigarette, fighting with soup
bowls and spoons and table settings.
She walks into the kitchen, looks out into the patio to see if there is any
chance of morning, but she knows better. It's the hour of the night that the
sins of the old Chinese emperor sit upon his chest and crush him near death with
the weight of guilt that comes from all the wrongs he committed.
She was six when she first read the story. That winter in New Haven, when she
walked to school on a wooden bridge across the railroad tracks. What a miracle,
to stop and watch the small puffings of smoke when a train passed underneath and
to feel the trembling of the bridge under her feet.
And to come home with books, as many as she could carry and to look up to watch
her mother light the gas mantle lamp which exploded softly into light like a
white puff ball, a flower. The night she stayed as long as she could hide in the
bathroom, reading the Emperor and the Nightingale, was a night of terrifying
excitement and fear. She remembers how their upper duplex became the Emperor's
court and she could see the stiff brocade skirts and feel the weight of the
heavy gold headdress the Emperor wore. She felt the Emperor's joy when the real
nightingale first sang to him and told him of the world outside the court. She
knew the Emperoror's sadness when he heard of the poverty and unhappiness of his
people and she rejoiced when he became thoughtful and generous as for awhile a
new spirit came alive in his court. Her heart broke when his courtiers and their
ladies brought the Emperor the mechanical nightingale which could sing better
and longer and only needed to be wound up and never sang of pity of pain. How
she suffered when the Emperor lay dying and what happiness she felt when the
real nightingale came again from the woods to save the dying old man.
When she was even younger and deeply, irrationally frightened, she woke to
another kind of horror. There was somehow in her mouth the thickness of castor
oil, as though it was gelatinized. It had no flavor, but the weight of the
substance clung to her teeth and gums and prevented her from swallowing easily.
Soon after she would feel this terror and the dry, yet oil-like sensation in her
mouth, she would be running along a city street, always a city street, she had
lived so little of her early life in cities, and she ran and panted and then,
somehowe pursued, felt herself rising hither, higher than the buildings, higher
than -- then the plunge. And then the catapulting downward, not a fall, not a
dive, but as a projectory downward to wake, drenched and shaking, choking,
crying, "Mama, Mama!"
When she cries "Mama, Mama" now who will hear? In these long, tight-chested
nights, she needs to be held and patted, returning to her husband who sleeps too
quietly at the other side of their old double bed. She wakes him. "Please," she
says, "please put me to sleep, sing to me, knock me out or put me to sleep." And
in his old voice, crackly but amused, possibly one of the few moments of his own
long days when he consciously feels sweetness and amusement, he will turn and
hold her tightly . He passes his free hand down her back from her shoulders to
her buttocks saying, always saying, "Somehow you have the softest backside. How
come it's so much softer than anywhere else on your body?" And she turns from
him, wanting to hold him and love him and take him and yet denying him,
incapable of letting him be at her again. There have already been too many years
when, even as he begins to breathe quickly and feel mounting excitement, she
knows that quickly, without his realizing most of the times when he happens, he
would have wet himself and her with no feeling that he was coming or had come
and she'd exclaim, unwilling, "My God, not again!" and he would ask, "What
happened? What happened?" And in shame and revulsion, the sick sisters of pity,
she'd throw off their covers, go quickly into her bathroom and scrub and scrub
as though she had been defiled. How could she think this, feel this about him?
Is this why she walks the nights, is this why she feels the bones of her chest
against her heart, her lungs, crushing her breathing, keeping her skin taut,
crawling? She knows this is a part of her self pity and defeat. She had always
believed and confidently said that a woman can keep her man vigorous and young
forever. But when her husband's last small stroke came simultaneously with his
prostate trouble, there was almost total lack of control for months. It wasn't
so much the physical problem of the enlarged prostate as that his coordination
never completely returned. Nervous now, wherever they went, she asked if he
wanted to use the bathroom, knowing the question would trigger his annoyance
which turned so instantly to anger at her constant interference and goading.
Was she reminding him for his own sake? She needs to think so but she knows
otherwise. She does it for herself so that she won't have to feel the distaste
that wells up in her for his lack of ability to control. As much as he hates her
interference and questions. He has begun to share every act in detail with her.
Even though he had never been able to share feelings, was never verbal about how
he felt, now he is colorfully explicit about every accident, listing each
detail. He always begins with, "I just had the damndest accident...." She
wonders whether he does this to shame her or because ne needs to verbalize his
humiliation. When he tells her, she becomes instantly defensive for him,
pointing out to him that it is ridiculous to feel shame about his condition, as
if she constantly were to feel shame at how the skin of her body sags, how her
face wrinkles, how her arthritis gnarls her fingers. How she loves him. How she
needs him.
If she feels this love for him so keenly, why does she feel such revulsion when
he describes his accidents? She knows why. She is aware that she indulges
herself, justifying her compulsion for neatness, cleanliness, ordering,
straightening, always straightening, putting to rights.
He has begun to scream at her, "Leave my things alone, goddamn it, leave them
alone. Let me put my own dirty clothese in the hamper, let me hang up my own
pants for god's sake. Leave my things alone."
She says she only wants to help him. Another lie. How can she continue to
pretend to herself that she helps him when he keeps telling her how he hates
what she does for him? She can't stand disorder, the heaped-up clothes on his
chairs, the many pairs of shoes on the floor, his limp trousers heaping up,
their suspenders hanging loosely. If she keeps out of his dressing room, she can
hold back from cleaning up. But she can't stay away often or for very long. Her
hands ignore her promise to herself to hold back. Her hands live their own
compulsions, putting to rights, mixing him up so he can't find what he wants and
once again he complains bitterly, "Leave my stuff alone for godsake, leave me
alone."
But they can't leave each other alone. They know too well the words and actions
which goad the other and each, lemming like, is driven to do or say that one
thing, the many things, which drive the other to fury and in her case nearly
always, to tears. Not the quiet tears down her cheecks in her room alone, but
noisy crying so he can hear her and be made to feel ashemed that he has wronged
her and ought to comfort her.
But even before he comes slowly to this, to turning toward her, she flings
herself against him, clinging and wild with fear that he will become so upset he
will die and she won't have him to hurt nor to hug nor to deride nor to lean
upon.
She is the first one to say, "Come darling, come back to bed." Or, "Please,
darling, we mustn't do this to each other," and she comes up onto his lap in his
old black lounge chair and curls around him and he holds her as he says, "Why do
you go on so, what do you ask of yourself?" She answers that she is purposeless.
"Your purpose," he says sternly and clearly," your purpose is to be happy. You
are old enough to deserve to be happy."
Happy. "I must be grateful,' she says aloud, walking through the hours of the
night. She looks at the pool in the moonlight and the silhouettes of the hanging
baskets against the beginning light of morning. How beautiful it is. How lucky
she is. How grateful they should be that they have each other and their gracious
house and are still able to manage and maintain it and keep it as a welcome to
their friends.
Then why doesn't she really want people now, she wonders. All her life her homes
have been staging ground for the people she wanted. Some were good friends. Some
were asked because they helped to delight, such friends who could enjoy the
uniqueness of the young scholar from Parkistan, the fat young gourmet chef from
Denmark, the brilliant political analyst from Ankara. She collected people with
unusual life styles and achievements, enhancing what she considered her own
lesser abilities.
Functioning in what began to be called the communication arts, she considered
the word overblown for her radio, television and consultation skills. She had an
ability to come quickly to the essence of information or expressed ideas in what
a later instructor described as an "instantaneous integrative skill." In the
same way, she was able to bring people together so that they meshed.
Now if she thinks about her obligation to invite people who had once delighted
her, she feels such sinking in her stomach it is like physical pain. She has
even felt a cramping as though her intestines were turning and knotting. She
turns from the thought of entertaining. She says aloud, over and over, "I'm done
with that. I don't want that." But she is afraid that as she turns from friends,
friends will forget her. She isn't ready to be totally forgotten, if at all.
When her phone rings, more often than not she answers it reluctantly but her
phone voice is always up and lifted as it was when she meant the tone of it. Now
it is the surface layer of her, making the sounds of pleasure and airy mouthings.
Underneath, that other layer cringes and presses and only wants to go into her
bedroom, shut the door, turn on the air conditioning and the television set, so
there will be noises around her but not of her making, rather than those which
must be responded to, expectations made of her.
She resents being asked what exciting things she is doing now for she is hard
put to continue to create such excitement. She still manages to create the
illulsion of being busy but in herself she feels limp, unneeded, undone. Friends
say they can't find her at home. "I phoned and phoned but of course you're so
busy." She protests, "Oh no, I'm not that busy." She would like to be able to
say honestly that she is trying very hard to feel busy and it is useless. She
compares herself bitterly to anyone who has had enough sense to remain employed,
involved, treadmilling.
But no. "Oh god no," she says aloud to herself. "I don't want to be on that
push-push-wheel-deal-treadmill anymore." She has lived too long by her wits. She
wants out. She wants to be able to sit on the pine-needled slope above the lake
in Maine and only look down at the water and up at the great pines and not be
expected of.
Yet even as she thinks this and says it to herself, she knows it to be another
lie. She envies her younger, busy friends, envies her own children, worriedly
tied to their jobs and responsibilities.
She is pulled in every direction. She wants not to be expected of at the same
time as she wants to fly up in one last hurrah, always just one more, to
arrange, accomplish, achieve, to perform. She also knows that she can't take and
doesn't have what it takes to make the effort. She has spent many years pulling
out her connections with groups and jobs and individuals. She grows tired
quickly of anything which demands more than a few hours of her. She long ago
began to find excuses to disconnect, to run.
She reminds herself of the little gingerbread boy who ran away from the little
old lady and the little old man and who kept saying, "I can run away from you
and you, I can." The little gingerbread boy. In his frenzy for freedom, she
remembers how he hopped on the back of a fox who offered him a ride across the
river and who, in midstream, gobbled him up with one flick of his clever, narrow
tongue. Gone, gone, this runaway boy of cookie dough.
"I am my fox and he is me. I've crossed my river and I am being gobbled up." She
feels herself on the back of the gliding, easioly swimming fox. Now she feels
herslef swimming deep, deep, trying to get up to the surface of the water,
trying to draw a breath of air, but the water presses her down as she struggles
in weak, choppy strokes, trying to force herself upward.
Wait a minute. Maybe she can come up to breathe if she remembers that lovely
April morning, could it have been a whole year ago....she wrote about it,
scrawling with her felt-tipped pen in the large, running script she had begun to
use when she could no longer see the smaller letters she once wrote so
carefully, with such pleasure. That day she had tried to capture the morning in
words before she forgot it.
"I am cleaning house. No pressures. No deadlines. My man is off on errands. I am
puttering, fiddling. I have never worked like this before. There was always
drive, compulsive pressure in everything I did, as though I constantly attempted
to meet a deadline or beat a record.
"I have been certain all my life that I hate housework. Then why am I filled
with this ease, this conscious sense of pleasure? I'm not only cleaning, I am
feeling. I am listening to music, to the birds, to the child next door. And I am
sitting here with drawers and doors open, in the kind of disarray usually
intolerable to me.
"Is it possible I am beginning to find a part of me long denied and ignored?
Have I found a little place of inner peace? Amd I actually happy to be doing
simple, physical chores without reward, applause, ego feed? Maybe this is a need
I never knew or one I could have scorned. Maybe I am beginning to accept a part
of myself which doesn't perform, achieve, posture.
"I am a stranger to me. If this woman is me, will she be a friend? Will I enjoy
her? Will she and I be able to develop a sense of affection and respect?
"I am suspicious of me. I don't know if today's me is for real. She has a long
way to go to be whole. She has a long way to go before I can accept her as
dependable. How soon will that other me be at her, cynical, mocking her pleasure
as a cop-out, denying it as growth?
"Which is it anyway? If the use of self and time can be accomplished with
self-acceptance, maybe it's just giving up. But giving up what? The image I
always need to project of drive, achievement, a kind of spurious glitter?
"If it is true that there is a time for all things and for each there is a
season, could it be my season following the time of harvest? Whatever the crop,
it has been put by.
"But how sweet this moment is. It it were possible to describe it, I'd call it
conscious joy. It will be spoiled if I try to hold it, try to own it, as though
it were a "how to" I could rerun on demand.
"I won't try. I will treat it with gladness. I will go now, put my clothes in
the dryer and live the day."
She tries to hold on. She reaches her hands out in front of her and tries to
grip that April morning. It won't stay. It doesn't work. Her mind is off it,
against her. Instead she remembers only another morning, an ugly morning.
It began well for her. She was up early. She had slept nearly five hours and
felt refreshed and eager for the day to begin. She breakfasted, walked around
the house to take the feel of the day, set his table, prepared his breakfast and
was already at her housecleaning and laundering. When she came back into the
house from the laundry room, she found him in his bathroom and cheerfully wished
him a good morning. He seemed amiable and in good health. She went into their
room, finding her small housecleaning tasks good companions, good reasons for
being up and doing in the morning.
As she squeezed the mirror cleaning spray, the cloth she used to dry the glass
gave out a long, sustained squeak. She grinned at the sound as she heard him ask
sharply and with concerned, "What are you doing? What is that noise?" She
answered, "These are the sounds of the workplace."
Was she being sarcastic that she was up and working and he had only arisen and
it was already well after nine? It was that, too, although she insisted to
herself that she was only sounding cheerful and enjoying what she was doing. But
now he was angry. As he did so often now, he began to feel as though she were
deliberately baffling and eluding him. Now he was asking sharply, angrily, "What
was that noise?" She could very easily have answered that she was washing the
mirror and the too-dry cloth caused the squeaking like chalk on a blackboard,
but some perverse humor forced her to say, "These are the sounds of complaint at
the workplace."
Within a second he was at her bathroom door. "I asked you to tell me what you're
doing and you can't give me a straight answer. What in hell is happening?"
She was startled. And frightened. "Please," she said, "don't do that. Don't look
like that." His face was contorted and furious. What was he saying to her? Was
he saying he could never understand her and why in hell didn't she speak
straight to him instead of obscuring everything. Was he really saying that he
had enough of her so-called humor and her sarcasm, too. She was so frightened at
his anger that she could only plead, "Don't look at me like that." And she tried
to close the door against him. He stoof strong in the doorway in such a fury
that his face was a working mask of deep wrinkles and snarling mouth. He
screamed, "Don't ever do that again! Don't do that to me!"
But it was too late. The day was already spoiled. How she hated him. He
frightened her. He was out of control. Did she deliberately want to trigger him,
was she playing a game of trying to make a joke of something while all the time
she actually intended the basic message to come through, that she was working
and tending his house and him while he slept and only took care of himself? Her
wellspring of self pity was at the full again. And he was responding to feelings
in her which were coming through to him, as sometimes radio signals come through
the gold fillings in a tooth.
She is walking quickly now in a circle that tightens her steps like a skein of
yarn. Living room, kitchen, front hall and round. She has walked herself a
circle as tight as the tightness of her chest, the pressure in her head. She
stops this exhausting circling and walks down the hall back to their bedroom.
He is sleeping now, too quietly. She walks to his side of the bed and feels his
face with her hand and then reaches to his wrist to feel his pulse. He wakes and
mumbles, "You all right?" "Fine," she says.
He asks her to turn out her damned light. She says she will in a minute. Maybe
one Valium. She knows in the dark wht the Valium bottle stands. She had one last
night and slept until nearly eight this morning. How good it was to wake in the
morning instead of walking the night. But now it's three o'clock and the
Emperor's sins are heavy on her chest.
What will become of her if she dies before her? He mustn't. He can't. She won't
let him. "Darling," she says. "Don't. Don't." But there are days she screams
into her closet, "Go ahead. Call it quits. Die. Die."
What will she do without him, how will she learn to live again? Where? Here in
the heat of South Florida. Up in Maine, lost in the darkness of the huge pines,
there at the end of the old camp run as it runs down hill to the lake under the
heavy summer rains.
She turns out her light and crawls up against his back. She puts her right arm
over his hips and presses her hand hard against his firm belly. "I am sick,
sick," she says. "What? What?" he asks.
He insists that there's nothing wrong with his hearing and it is she who
mumbles. He asks, "You all right?" He doesn't remember he has already asked. She
answers, "Not really," and begins to cry. He turns to her and holds her.
"Now, now, " he says. "Try to sleep. Try to sleep." "I can't," she says. "I
can't." He turns again, his back is warm against her belly. She holds onto him
with all her strength. "Oh god," she says. "How can I keep calling on you and I
don't even believe in you but oh god," she says, "please please let me sleep
with him awhile. Just a little while."
And soon she does.