Imagine Me Gone (34 page)

And with that, she shrugs, as if to say,
C’est la vie
.

When the waiter appears to check on us, she puts her hand on his forearm and says, “Be a darling, won’t you, this Sancerre is just delicious.”

I was hungry when I sat down, but I’m not anymore. “The fact is,” I say, “I don’t need that whole house, and if we moved closer in it would be easier to get to things. And better than shouting with Alec about money, and Alec shouting at Michael, which is all some families do.”

“You’re a good mother,” she says. “Better than mine ever was. You’re devoted to those kids.”

“I’m not sure they see it that way.”

“They should. Are you kidding? You could have been a train wreck, and who would have blamed you?”

Despite my protest, she won’t let me split the bill. I’m still trying to give her cash as we walk back onto Dartmouth, where the wind has picked up.

“Don’t give me any money,” she says. “Just shop with me for a bit.”

I can hardly decline, and it will give Michael longer before I go looking for him. I have to fight off her suggestions for a half dozen dresses and little bits of jewelry, after which she finally settles down and shops for herself. When we eventually say good-bye at her car, she makes me swear she hasn’t been a bore, and that we’ll do it again.

“About all that other stuff, I always thought your house was a little drab,” she says, displaying her usual tact, her mouth still loose with wine. I shouldn’t be letting her drive. “So don’t worry about it. You’ll do the right thing.”

Leaves rain down across the wide path that stretches along the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. I pass women with strollers, and joggers out in the fine fall weather. Whenever it was pleasant out, this is where I came to read while John had his appointments with Dr. Gregory on Marlborough Street. In the cold or the rain, I would stay in the car, and wait. For someone else, besides me, to tell him that things couldn’t go on the way they were.

I ran into him once, Dr. Gregory. At the cinema with his wife, a few months after John died. I wanted to hurt him. But we shook hands and he asked politely how I had been. It wasn’t until much later that Michael began seeing him. I imagine he’s still there, in that grand office of his.

When I reach Mass. Ave., I turn left, looking for the door that opens onto the staircase to the little record shop. I’ve been here once but forget which entryway it is. Up the block is the Virgin Store at the top of Newbury, and there in front of it, to my surprise, is Michael. He’s standing on the corner, his messenger bag slung over his shoulder, handing out flyers to the people rushing by. He holds the papers out, forcing them to decline before passing. As if he’s been paid to advertise some suit sale, or attract converts to a religious cult. The sight of it makes me flinch. Something is the matter. He’s become confused somehow, unmoored.

I’m less than half a block away but still he hasn’t seen me. I start walking toward him, to help him out of whatever trouble this is, and then I remember the pamphlets—the ones he keeps in his bag, with the picture of the black farmer tilling a field. That’s what he’s doing. He is handing out his pamphlets on reparations. Little booklets on the history of the slave trade for these Saturday-afternoon shoppers, who think they’re being offered coupons and freely ignore him.

He’s smiling as he does it, at each person, trying to establish a second of rapport. It’s that deliberate, nodding politeness of his, apologizing for the inconvenience he’s putting them through while imposing himself nonetheless.

I can’t move. I want to stop him, to save him from being judged a kook, reduced to proselytizing on a street corner. But I’m the last person he wants to see. To be embarrassed by his mother fretting over him in public would only make it worse. I’m about to go, but he’s seen me now and appears frozen, his hands down at his sides, his smile suddenly gone. He looks fixedly at me, as if suddenly there were no one on the street but the two of us. I must not cry. It isn’t fair to him. I wave, and smile, and call out, “I’ll see you later, then, I’m off,” and I turn my back to him and retreat up the block.

Later, in the evening, after he has returned, the rain comes. It begins as a shower but soon the skies open and the drops drum fast against the roof and slap the windowpanes. I hurry around closing windows before the sills get soaked. Warm air floats through the screens of the vestibule and the back porch on this October night, as if carried in by a belated summer thunderstorm, one of those that never delivered its moisture back in August. On the dry ground, the water will run straight to the gutters, wasted. We need a soak, not a torrent. Twenty minutes later it is gone, swept away to the east, and there is only the sound of dripping branches, and the dark shining in the porch light.

One of the cable channels is showing
The Philadelphia Story,
which I haven’t seen in years. I ask Michael if he’d like to watch it with me but he declines, saying he’s going to head upstairs. It is such a pleasure of a movie, so stylish and light. You can’t help but cheer for the drunken Cary Grant to get Hepburn back. They are meant for each other. I watch a bit, then a bit more, and soon it has carried me off into its gentle absurdity. It’s already midnight when it ends. On my way to bed, I see Michael’s light on under his door. Best to leave him be, I think, which is what I do, walking past without saying good night, in case he’s fallen asleep reading.

It’s in the small hours of the morning that I’m startled awake by a knocking at my door, and then the door opens and Michael stands there silhouetted by the sudden glare of the hall bulb.

“What
is
it, what
is
it?”

“I can’t breathe,” he says. “I’m suffocating.”

My bedside lamp reveals a look of pure terror on his face. He comes to the foot of my bed, clutching his chest.

“Are you choking?”

“No, no, I just can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

“Well, sit down,” I tell him. Which he does, perching by my legs, his whole torso heaving. “Is it the asthma? Do you have your inhaler?”

“I’m not wheezing. I have to go to the hospital, you have to call an ambulance.”

I get out of bed and put on my bathrobe. “It’s all right,” I say. “You’re having an attack, isn’t that right? You’re worried. It’s okay. Just keep breathing. Did you have a bath? I can run you a bath.”

“No!” he says. “You have to call an ambulance.”

“Michael! Come on now. You need to calm down. We’re not calling an ambulance in the middle of the night. We can try Dr. Bennet in the morning. You’re not going to the hospital.”

He stares at me as if I’m casting him adrift in a storm. But what in God’s name am I supposed to do? Drive him through the night? Or have sirens and lights in front of the house at four in the morning?

“There must be one of those pills that makes you sleep, surely. I can get it for you.”

He shakes his head, as desperate and miserable as I have ever seen him.

“Come here,” I say, sitting next to him on the bed, trying to hug him, though his body is stiff as a board.

“You’re not going to help?” he asks.

“I’m not saying that. Stand up. We’re going downstairs.”

He follows me down into the kitchen. I turn on the lights, and fill the kettle, and get out the lemon and the honey, and from the cabinet in the dining room I fetch the Scotch that I never drink.

“I’m being crushed,” he says.

I take a mug from the shelf above the sink, and make up the hot toddy.

“Why won’t you call an ambulance?” he says.

I set the mug down in front of him. And then I sit in the chair beside him and I lean over and try again to hold him, listening to him tell me why the drink will do no good. And I tell him to sip it anyway. He says that he is going to die. I tell him that he isn’t. Eventually, he picks up the mug.

He needs rest. A great deal of rest. And so do I.

Celia

On the way back up the hill, Paul walked ahead with Laura and the dog, and Kyle and I followed behind. The day was bright and clear. Through the gaps in the cypresses you could see across the mouth of the bay to the Golden Gate, and over the water to the slopes of the Marin Headlands. Little white sailboats crisscrossed the channel, and closer to the shore kayakers paddled, the waterway busy on a warm and pleasant Sunday.

Laura and Kyle had arrived Friday afternoon from LA. Her parents were taking care of their nine-month-old, giving them their first weekend off since her birth. They were appreciative guests, happy simply to be eating in restaurants or seeing a movie. The visit was good for Paul, too. They were his oldest friends, and a couple I knew well myself by now with all our visits back and forth, first to Boulder and then Southern California. It helped that neither of them had anything to do with the world of independent film, which meant Paul could share the vagaries of his periodic employment without the professional need to be relentlessly upbeat and bubbling with exciting projects. Once I had established my practice, he’d gone back to scriptwriting and line producing with enough success to keep at it, though still in a business that offered no security. In the presence of his college friends, the weight of all that lightened.

“I always forget how gorgeous it is here,” Kyle said, pausing at one of the overlooks that opened onto the headlands and the ocean beyond. In the decade I’d known him his appearance had changed little. He still wore ratty jeans, a faded T-shirt, and a baseball cap over a thicket of dirty-blond hair, as if he’d rolled out of a dorm room bed, slightly hazy but in good spirits. “I guess we live on the coast, too, but you wouldn’t know it.”

I didn’t much notice the landscape anymore. Or when I did, it was mostly to wonder how much longer we would be able to afford San Francisco. The tenuousness of remaining seemed the more present fact. But we were at least enjoying the outdoors more. It had been one of the reasons to get the dog, to spur us to take the hikes that we’d enjoyed when we first got here. We’d driven out of the city more in the last eight months, pressed by Wendell’s pleading, than we had in years. It did all three of us good. I got a different kind of release than I did from sprinting, and Paul came home more relaxed than he ever did from the gym. And more likely, I noticed, to have sex. Which was good for more than just our love life. It calmed the worry, which I’d never quite rid myself of, that there was something lacking between us. A missing ease born of an insufficient trust. It didn’t press on me the way it used to. But it was there still—the thought that we might not always be together. And that if it was going to end, I would be the one to end it. I knew it wasn’t that simple, and that this idea served its own function, to regulate an older, more basic fear of mine that one day Paul, like my father, would simply vanish. Sex banished those abstractions. At least for a time.

“How are the two of you?” I asked Kyle. “Since the baby.”

“We’re good,” he said. “I thought I’d hate having Laura’s parents so close, but it’s actually kind of great. Their whole freak-out mentality—the world as this ginormous danger, and how Laura would miscarry if she went jogging—they just dropped that stuff once the kid was born, which makes them a lot saner. And it’s great for us. We’re here, right?”

Saner. That was exactly how I thought of Kyle. He and Laura had married a few years after graduating with Paul. They’d moved to Colorado because they both loved to ski and hike. She’d helped to run a bakery for a few years, and he’d gone back to school for video-game design, which was what had eventually taken them to LA. Now he worked at a company where he smoked less pot than most of his colleagues and made enough of a salary that she could stay home, which she wanted to, at least for a while. I knew from Paul that they had their ups and downs, like anyone else, but their way of being in the world together was so full of ease, and so seemingly optimistic, I couldn’t imagine them apart. At dinner the night before, when Laura had asked me how my practice was going, Kyle listened to my response as if I were a zoologist describing the behavior of primates. Therapy had never even occurred to him. It existed in a parallel universe. Which might have been one of the reasons I laughed more with him than almost anyone else I knew. The things that preoccupied me didn’t enter his head, and that was permission enough to let go of them.

“What about you?” he said. “You still thinking about the kid thing?”

It seemed strange, in retrospect, that we had never told him or Laura about my abortion, given all our weekends together over the years, and how much else about our lives we tended to share with them. Paul and I had come back from that Bethany Christmas in Walcott still arguing about it, not because we disagreed about what should be done, but because I needed an acknowledgment from him, before I did it, of the depth of the inequity in what one contraceptive failure had cost my body as compared to his. A few weeks after I’d had the procedure, though, a kind of mutual forgetting settled over it, helped along by the fact that I told so few people, other than Alec and one or two friends. When the subject of children came up now, usually because of another couple having a baby, it was mostly an occasion to remind ourselves of how impractical it would be for us. And a reminder to me of how impossible it seemed that I should give that much more care than I already did to the people around me.