Husband and Wife Page 19

  “But what does it look like?” she whispered back.

  “It depends on how long it’s been dead,” I said. I expected a follow-up, but this answer seemed to satisfy her.

  “He had a cough,” Mrs. Dodson was saying. She’d stepped back from Nathan. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped at her eyes. “They took X-rays. It’s lung cancer. We had no idea. They said he could live for twenty years or for a month, but now, he’s just gotten so much worse, it’s been so fast, we have to have this woman in the house, and he’s not going to hang on much longer, I know he’s not. He’s going. He’s leaving me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Nathan said, and I repeated it.

  Mrs. Dodson folded the tissue and put it back in her pocket. Her face had resumed its usual stoic lines, though both her mouth and her eyelids trembled. “Will you come inside and see him?” she asked. “I know he’d like to see you.”

  “Of course,” Nathan said, and I echoed him. That seemed to be all I was capable of doing.

  We’d never been inside the trailer before. The front door opened directly into the living room, which was small, low-ceilinged, dark, and cool, so that I had the impression we were stepping into a cave. The furniture had obviously been rearranged to accommodate the hospital bed on which Mr. Dodson lay under a white sheet, his upper body propped with pillows, a tube in his nose. His eyes were closed. Mrs. Dodson went immediately to him, her eyes on the rise and fall of his chest, and I wondered how many times a night she got up to watch him breathe.

  There was an old-fashioned brown couch still in the room, and on it sat the nurse, wearing scrubs and an expression that fell somewhere between sympathy and boredom. I gave her an awkward smile, which she returned. I noticed over the course of our visit that she and Mrs. Dodson maneuvered around each other in that small space like pedestrians in a crowded city, enduring the other’s presence only by resolutely ignoring it. Behind the nurse, on the wood-paneled wall, hung school portraits of the Dodsons’ three smiling children, now adults, older by twenty years than I.

  “It smells funny in here,” Mattie said, and at the sound of her clear, ringing voice, Mr. Dodson’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Mattie, shhh.” I bent to whisper in her ear. “It does not.”

  “Yes, it does,” she whispered back. “It smells funny.”

  “Well, be quiet about it,” I said. I squeezed her hand. Mr. Dodson gaped, bewildered, at the ceiling, and then he seemed to register that he was still in the world. He pushed himself up on shaking arms to get a better look at us, and his nurse got up and moved with slow deliberation to the bed, pressing a button to raise the back of it higher, staring at a spot on the wall. When I could see him more clearly I realized that he didn’t have his teeth in, and that that in part explained the slack-jawed, skeletal look of his face. I’d never seen him before without his teeth. I’d never seen him inside his home, prone in a hospital bed. I’d never seen him dying. He shifted, and the covers did, too, and though the nurse moved quickly to straighten them, I glimpsed the edge of a bed pad, poking out from beneath his lower half, and a flash of his bare, gnarled foot.

  “Let me see that baby,” Mr. Dodson said.

  Nathan obeyed. He took Binx right up to the head of the bed, where he beamed at Mr. Dodson and then lunged forward to grab his glasses. “No, no,” Nathan said, extricating the glasses from Binx’s grip.

  Mr. Dodson laughed. “You’re quick, little man,” he said to Binx.

  Nathan tried to put the glasses back on Mr. Dodson’s face, but holding Binx he couldn’t manage it smoothly and nearly poked him in the eye with the earpiece. I waited for Mr. Dodson to protest irritably, to snatch the glasses from Nathan’s hand—this was a blunt, irascible man, a man who’d patrolled his property with a gun, who’d told me, when I was pregnant, that I was getting fat, and then laughed and laughed, a cigarette in his hand. But he just sat, grinning at Binx, and waited for Nathan to get his glasses on.

  “Little man,” he said to Binx. “What a little man.” He extended his pointer finger and Binx grabbed it, babbling, “Na na na na.”

  “Na na na na,” Mr. Dodson said, and Binx laughed.

  Mattie tugged on my hand. “Pick me up, Mommy,” she said, and when I didn’t immediately respond, “Pick me up!”

  I bent and hoisted her up, and she put her hands on either side of my face and said, “I want to tell you something.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I want to leave,” she said. “I don’t like it in here.”

  “Shhh,” I said. “We’re visiting Mr. Dodson.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s scary in here. I’m afraid of going closer to stuff.”

  I wanted to reassure her, but also I wanted her to be quiet, to not offend these nice old people in their darkest hour. To my relief Mrs. Dodson, too, was focused on Binx, who was smiling and chattering away, swinging Mr. Dodson’s finger—and isn’t that the wonder, the grace, of a baby, the way that their profound lack of understanding allows them to be representatives of purity and joy? Mattie, only three, was already old enough to share the discomfort and worry I felt, if not yet old enough to know she shouldn’t express those things aloud.

  The nurse had moved away from the bed to sit on one end of the couch, and I sat on the other, whispering to Mattie that we wouldn’t stay long and that she shouldn’t say she wanted to leave because it was rude. She curled up in my lap, squinched her eyes shut, and put her fingers in her mouth. Nathan and Mrs. Dodson talked about Binx and Mr. Dodson talked to Binx, and Binx, sweet Binx, gripped Mr. Dodson’s finger and smiled and shouted, “Ba!” I tried not to stare at the nurse.

  I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the nurse, who maybe wasn’t even a nurse but an aide of some kind. I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about whether she was a nurse or an aide. I was supposed to be thinking about death in general and Mr. Dodson in particular, and I was supposed to be thinking about grief in general and Mrs. Dodson in particular, and maybe even reflecting on the trivial nature of the event that might end my own marriage in the face of the unchosen, unavoidable end of this one. I saw nothing in the nurse’s face. Nothing about what was it like to enter people’s lives at their most grotesque and pitiable moments, about whether you had to be a compassionate person to do this work, or the opposite. How could you endure it, life among strangers, the sound of an elderly soon-to-be widow weeping in the next room? How could you live your life confronted day after day by the losses that await us all? Stranger after stranger, dying in your hands. Was it possible to go on believing, in the way that all of us who manage more or less to stay sane go on believing, that the worst of life won’t happen to you? You won’t be the man in the bed, so recently up on ladders and tinkering under cars, now unable even to use the bathroom. You won’t be the woman who’s lived with that man for fifty-three years, helpless to slow his departure. You won’t lose your mind, your dignity, your partner, your life. The world is not an abyss into which everything you love must fall. It’s a world. You go on home and watch TV.

  Eventually Mr. Dodson grew too tired to hold his hand up for Binx anymore and sank back against the bed, and Nathan said we should go. I carried Mattie out. She was clinging to my neck, still feigning sleep. Mrs. Dodson walked outside with Nathan and Binx. “Thank you,” she said, her voice trembling with gratitude. “I haven’t seen him like that in two weeks. He really lit up when he saw that baby.”

  “I’m glad we got to see him,” Nathan said. “Please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.”

  “Will you come back and see him again? With the baby? I know he’d be mighty grateful.”

  “Of course,” Nathan said.

  “Please,” she said. “Please come back.”

  “We will,” Nathan said. “We promise.” We promise, Nathan said.

  I carried Mattie all the way back up the drive, though she grew heavier with every step and my back began to hurt. I liked the warm weight of her in my arms,
and I thought that it made sense to crave the embrace of a child in the wake of a visit to death, and that one could write a poem about such a feeling, and that many many people probably had, even if at that moment I couldn’t think of one. I said nothing to Nathan about this as we trudged back up to the house, but he, too, must have felt the desire to cling to new life in the face of death, because he carried Binx all the way, pushing the stroller awkwardly with one hand. I was sure that we were going to have a conversation about life and death and love and marriage, that the scene in the trailer—the scene that should have been an epiphanic moment—demanded it. I could hear the dialogue in my head, lines about seeing what was really important. If one of us were writing the scene, we’d try to avoid such clichés, but in actual life we employed them as readily as anyone. The situation called for such a conversation, and we were fully capable of enacting it. I saw all that, I saw the need, and yet I didn’t feel it. I didn’t actually feel compelled to speak. I was still encased in a weird remoteness.

  When we got inside, Nathan said, “That was heartbreaking.”

  Line, I thought. I nodded. Then I reached for the baby, took him over to the couch to nurse. I could tell that Nathan didn’t take offense, that he thought I was too shaken to talk about what we’d witnessed. I could tell this by the gentle way he spoke to Mattie, a gentleness that extended to me.

  Over dinner, Mattie was full of death questions, which Nathan answered in a vague yet truthful way, while I poked at my lasagna and tried not to listen. It was a vegetable lasagna out of the Moosewood cookbook, one of Nathan’s specialties, and I thought that if we didn’t go back to living together, I might never have it again. I almost never did the cooking anymore, though there had been a time when we alternated that chore. What would I do in his absence? Would I take up cooking again, or would we subsist on a steady diet of cereal and scrambled eggs? Nathan mowed the lawn, took out the trash, went to the grocery store. The thought of taking on all these tasks as well as my own made me want to put my head down on the table. And Mrs. Dodson? Could she live there alone, with no one to help hoe the garden, no one to lie under the truck doing whatever it was Mr. Dodson did under there, no one to steer the riding mower over their three acres of land?

  “If Mr. Dodson has been so sick, I don’t think he could have fixed the mailbox.” I separated a noodle from the cheese with my fork. “Did you fix it?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Stupid question,” I said. I dropped the fork on my plate. I looked up to find him staring at me, wearing the expression that presaged a scolding. “Don’t look at me like that,” I said.

  “I can’t believe that’s what you want to talk about.” He rose abruptly from the table, grabbed his plate, and dumped it with a clatter into the sink.

  “Be careful,” I said. He ignored me.

  “Are you all done, Mattie?” he asked her. “Are you ready for your bath?” She said that she was, and he wiped off her hands and scooped her up, bouncing her up and down to make her laugh as he carted her off to the bathroom. I extricated Binx from the high chair, wiped sweet potato out of his eyebrows, and took him to his room. I changed his diaper and prevented him from sticking his fingers in the butt paste and pajamaed him and wiggled him into his sleep sack and plopped him on my lap for a reading of Owl Babies, and the whole time I carried on a mental argument with Nathan, that self-righteous man. Surely it wasn’t difficult to grasp how much easier it was to focus on the petty and the trivial than on the heartrending, the life-and-death. What did he want me to say, what useless profundities did he want me to offer on the subject of loss? Besides, didn’t it matter that he didn’t do what he promised to do? Wasn’t that the entire problem? The personal is political, it’s the little things, for want of a nail, and so forth. You said you were going to be faithful to me, and you weren’t. You said you were going to fix the mailbox, and you never, ever did.

  I took a long time putting Binx to bed, reading him books until I heard Nathan say good night to Mattie. Then I laid Binx in his crib and stood over him a moment, patting his back while he made the cooing, moaning sounds he made before sleep, plucking at his eyelid in what Nathan and I agreed was a weirdly painful way to self-soothe. I was steeling myself for an argument with Nathan. I was gunning for him. But when I left Binx’s room, I found that he wasn’t waiting for me in the living room. I went into the kitchen and spotted him on the other side of the glass doors, pointing the key fob at his car.

  I followed him outside. “What are you doing?” I said.

  He turned. He looked genuinely surprised. “What do you mean? I’m going home.”

  “You’re going home?”

  He flushed. “You know what I mean. Back to Alex and Adam’s.” I stared at him. “What?” he said. “The kids are down.”

  “I thought we were postponing an argument until they were.”

  “Oh.” He looked at the ground. “I don’t really want to have that argument.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just think there are some things that don’t need to be said.”

  I felt my eyebrows shoot up. It was clear from his tone that these unsaid things were about me. “Like what?”

  “Just…” He shook his head. “I’m disturbed you reacted like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “So coldly.” He looked at me like he couldn’t believe what he saw. “I mean, what’s happened to you?”

  “What’s happened to me is you cheated on me,” I said. “What’s happened to me is you screwed up our lives and wrote a book about it. And then you disappeared for two days, remember that part?”

  “I’m talking about before that,” he said. “Mrs. Dodson was in terrible pain, and you just stood there. You didn’t reach out to her at all.”

  “Are we talking about you now? That I somehow failed to reach out to you? Because it’s hard to reach out to somebody who won’t answer the phone.”

  “No.” He sighed. “I knew we shouldn’t talk about this.” He started toward the car.

  I grabbed his arm and dropped it. “You say what you want to say.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You used to be different. You used to want to see art films. Now unhappy endings make you squeamish. You used to read books because they were good, or interesting, or challenging. Now you abandon them if the chapters are too long. You used to talk about poetry, not NEH forms.”

  “NIH forms.”

  “What?”

  “The NEH is the National Endowment for the Humanities,” I said. “Do you even know what I do?”

  “You sit in an office,” he said. “You move some numbers around.”

  “Once again with a little more scorn,” I said.

  “You don’t seem to care about my writing anymore. You sure don’t care about your own. You said you wanted to lead an artistic life, but at the first opportunity you took a job so you could stop worrying about money.”

  I stared at him. “I took a job for our family,” I said. “So we could have health insurance.”

  “I’m not saying those things aren’t important,” he said. “But you’ve got to think about quality of life.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like having food in the refrigerator and prescription medicines.”

  “I just don’t think you value art like you used to.”

  “And Kate does, I suppose? That’s your point?”

  “No, that’s not my point.”

  “Did you give her the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ routine? Did she stroke your ego and your penis simultaneously? What other insights did she have to offer?”

  “She said maybe we didn’t have the same values anymore.”

  “What?” My body rocked like he’d punched me in the stomach. “Are you actually saying this to me? Are these words coming out of your mouth?”

  “I’m not saying I agree with her.”

  “But you’re not saying you don’t. So while I’ve been
working my ass off for this family, trying to think about everybody’s future, your interpretation is that I’ve grown materialistic and shallow. Meanwhile you’re keeping the flame alive writing a page every other day.”

  “I’ve been writing because I’m a writer, that’s who I am, and might I add that I’ve made money doing it. I didn’t make you give up writing. It’s not my fault you decided the creative life equated to irresponsibility.”

  “I don’t want to feel like that!” I screamed at him. “Don’t you get it! This wasn’t my idea at all!”

  “Whose idea was it?” he asked.

  “Yours!” I knew that was unfair. I said it anyway. I lobbed the word at him, hoping that, fair or not, it would knock him flat.

  “Mine? Mine? You’re kidding, right? I’ve done nothing but suggest you keep writing.”

  “Somebody had to change,” I said. “And it wasn’t going to be you.”

  He pointed at me. “You,” he said, with a jab of his finger. He took a breath. “You chose to change.” He hit each word like a drum, the finger keeping time. “I will not let you blame me for that. When we met, your favorite movie was Last Picture Show. Now it’s Spider-Man 2. When we met, you wanted to stay up all night talking about Alice Munro. Now you go to bed at ten o’clock. I try to talk to you about what I’m reading and you say you want to watch TV. You’re a poet, for God’s sake. When’s the last time you read a poem? What’s the last poem you read? What do you care about now? What do we have to talk about?”

  I stared at him. “You liked Spider-Man 2,” I said.

  “That’s not the point,” he shouted. “You’re so conventional! That’s the point! And you were never conventional. That was one of the reasons I—” He stopped himself, but too late. I’d heard him start to make the word loved.

  “Go ahead and say you don’t love me anymore,” I said. “You’re saying everything else.”

  Slowly he lowered the accusing finger. He stepped forward. He softened his voice. “I do love you,” he said. “What I mean is that I miss you.” He reached out to touch me, his fingertips skimming my arm. I looked at my arm where he had touched it. “I know you’re my wife, you’re the mother of my children, but I miss you. And she—”