Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (4 page)

W
ell, that was fun,” Marion said, her eyes dark, steely globes. Her face was pinched up and damp.

“What happened, honey?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Can we please just get going?”

“Sure.” Arnie squatted to hoist her golf bag off the cart and shouldered it up. He waved to the others and followed Marion slowly back to the parking lot.

“You don’t have to walk behind me like that,” she said. “It’s like you’re constantly waiting to catch me in some horrible collapse. It makes me nervous.”

Arnie set his jaw and counted to five. He let her open her own car door. He wrestled the clubs into the trunk and got in on the driver’s side. It was less than a quarter mile on the empty resort road from the clubhouse to the hotel over by the lake’s edge, but he took the route slowly, thinking of the cocktails. “Is the leg bothering you, Marion?” From the others today he had learned that the type of suction socket she used gave a lot of people trouble, especially on hot days—blisters, heat rash, chafing. But Marion had never mentioned any of these problems.

“Arnie, you asked me to try this tournament and I tried it. Can we please just go home now?”

“Sure,” he said, pretending she had said hotel instead of home. “We’ll just go check in and you can take a nap if you want before the banquet.”

Marion shivered and turned from him, but she didn’t put up a fight. Arnie could feel her removing herself from her body, from the car, drifting out the window and away from him so that none of this could touch her.

“Marion,” he said quietly, to bring her back.

She didn’t move.

I
n the hotel room Arnie unpacked their things and drew her a bath. He unfolded the walker she used whenever her leg was off, and put it next to the armchair where she was sitting. At home, lately Marion had been dressing and undressing in private, but here there was just the one big room and the bathroom. Arnie wondered if he ought to excuse himself, go downstairs awhile to give her some space, but he was tired, and tired of giving her that. Exactly when things had come to be this way was unclear to him; in the early weeks after they got out of the hospital, she had let Arnie help her with everything—bathing, the bathroom, dressing. She had let him see her in every imaginable state. And he didn’t mind it. He was good at it. This was his wife, alive and conscious; they had survived. But over time, once she started walking with crutches and then the new leg, Arnie felt her pulling away from him, hiding everything, using each new bit of independence against him.

From her chair she looked at her leg, then at him, then gave a sigh and went into the bathroom fully clothed, taking the walker with her.

“Would you like me to help you?” he said, but she closed the door.

Arnie lay back on the bed and tried not to think so much. He took his pain pills and did his back stretches, then found his phone and dialed their daughter out east.

“Well, I just wanted to give you the number here,” he said. It was a silly excuse—she didn’t need a hotel number when he had his cell—but Elizabeth let it go.

“Your mother’s just resting after the first round.” Arnie stared up at the dusty globs of spackle on the textured ceiling. He tried to picture Elizabeth’s new condo outside Boston, which he hadn’t yet seen. “She did real well. I imagine she’ll probably get a trophy.”

“Really.”

“Well, there aren’t that many women,” he admitted.

“Dad,” she said, searching for words. “Just don’t…I mean, do you have to—?”

“She loves the golf, honey.” Arnie tried to make his voice bright. “You should see her. She’s still better than half the women at our club.” There was no way to tell Elizabeth about the days and days Marion had spent curled up on their bed with pillows over her face, refusing to brush her teeth or wash, refusing to speak. If Elizabeth wanted to think he was pushing Marion too hard, he could live with that.

“Sure. But a tournament’s a whole different thing from a quiet game at home.”

“You should see the people here, Lizzie. How well they handle it.”

“Like how?” she said.

“I don’t know. Just, they do. Very pleasant people.”

Elizabeth waited for him to elaborate.

Triumphant
was the word that came to him, though it seemed ridiculous to say such a word aloud.

“Well, that’s good, Dad,” Elizabeth said politely. “I’m glad it’s good for you. Can I talk to Mom?”

This was the way most of their phone conversations ended. Arnie tapped lightly on the bathroom door, then opened it a crack and spoke without looking in.

“Honey, Lizzie’s on the phone. Do you want to talk to her?”

“Hang on,” Marion said. “OK.”

When he opened the door the beige shower curtain had been pulled across the tub so that only Marion’s arm stuck out, disembodied, reaching for the telephone. He put it in her palm and left again.

In the other room Arnie sat in the armchair against the bathroom wall and listened. The words were muffled and bleary, but the rise and fall of her voice was unmistakably lively, the way it used to be, with Arnie and with everyone. There was no reticence. After a while he even heard the traces of laughter. It occurred to him that maybe Marion was only putting on an act for Elizabeth. But again, the laughter rose up, and he heard Marion cry, “Exactly!” before the words drifted back into mush. If it was an act, it was a pretty good act.

Outside, the sky was putting on its evening colors over the lake, and Arnie sat staring out at the water, trying to remember better times. There were lots of them, decades and decades of them. They had been very fortunate, as a family, but now, when he tried to reconstruct a scene, say, from one of their old camping trips or holidays, it would crumble and drift away from him before he even got through the first moments. He concentrated on their vacation in Alaska two years ago, when Marion surprised him with a daylong boat trip, though she always got sea-sick, because she knew how much he wanted to see the whales. He could picture her there, rocking at the back of the boat, trying to put on a smile though her skin was downright greenish. She kept pointing out at the whales and telling him to take pictures so that he would look away from her when she needed to be sick. He could get that far into the memory, usually: the blue-black lumps of flesh breaking the surface, their white scars like chalk marks in a foreign language. Then a crash of the tail and the water hid them again. He held her hand. And now, focusing everything he had, he could also remember the two of them curled up on the hotel bed that night, eating mashed potatoes they’d ordered from room service to settle her stomach. But from there the scene quickly faded and escaped him. He knew in his brain what they had done next and next, but he could no longer see it or feel it. It was gone.

After a while the bathroom grew quiet. Arnie decided to get dressed for the banquet, so he’d be ready when Marion got out. But a long time passed and she didn’t come out. There were no sounds of movement or water for over an hour.

He knocked on the bathroom door. “Marion, honey?”

She didn’t answer.

He believed in her right to privacy. He did. This was not a thing you took from a woman. But he also had a sudden piercing vision of her, passed out asleep in the tub, under the water. Her naps were so deep and demanding these days that she could fall asleep sitting upright in broad daylight; he could only imagine the effect a warm bath after a hard day might have on her. He called her name again, then opened the door.

The shower curtain was drawn halfway across the tub, and Marion was dead asleep, though her face, crooked against her shoulder, was several inches from the water. “Marion,” he said, blinking the lights. “Wake up.”

She opened her eyes and stared at the water for a long time, opening and closing her mouth. When she finally turned her face to him she gasped. She shifted in the water, trying to cover herself, then remembered the shower curtain and pulled it closed again.

Arnie sat down on the toilet seat next to the bathtub. “Marion, I have seen you naked for forty-odd years.”

“Please, Arnie.”

He sat quietly, elbows on knees, chin on hands, waiting for some kind of words to come to him.

“It has been my privilege,” he said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marion said, but with a lilt of laughter in her voice.

“I remember that time in the Wisconsin Dells,” he said, “when you did that little striptease in our motel room.” Marion grunted behind the curtain, but Arnie went on thinking about it. This was when Elizabeth was about six months old, once Marion was starting to feel like her own person again, and Arnie’s mother had agreed to watch the baby while they went away for their anniversary weekend.

“I remember thinking how strange it was. Don’t get me wrong, it was sweet. That you still thought any of it mattered, the physical stuff. The visuals.”

They were quiet for a moment, then Marion said, “I’m not going to that banquet tonight.”

“Who’s talking about the banquet?”

“You’re trying to butter me up, and I’m just saying, it’s not going to work.”

Behind the curtain the water sloshed around, and Marion turned on the faucet to add more hot water.

“Marion, if you gave these people a chance.”

“I gave them a chance. And to tell you the truth”—she searched for the right words—“they disgusted me.”

“Marion—”

“I spent the whole blessed morning watching them show off their fake parts. I must have heard the words
bionic man
five times. As if they’re proud of it.”

“Maybe they
are
proud of it.”

“Give me a break. And then”—she got more excited, even pulling back the curtain a few inches to make eye contact with him—“they started telling these horrible stories,” she said. “You couldn’t even say ‘pleased to meet you’ without having to hear all about their miserable tragedies.”

“I got that too.” Arnie smiled. They were talking. “Yeah. It’s interesting.”

“The worst moment of their lives, and they want to peddle it around to perfect strangers.”

“Maybe it’s just part of the whole process of getting used to this new life. In a year or two, maybe you’ll think it’s the most ordinary thing.”

“Why on earth”—she turned on him, suddenly glaring—“would I ever want to do that?”

Arnie sat silently, wishing he knew that magic trick she’d learned in the accident, the ability to slip away, evaporate from your most unbearable moments. He envied her.

“Why don’t you just go,” she said, “to the banquet down there, without me. If you like these people so much.”

“I will,” he said, first bluffing, then meaning it. “I will. As soon as you get out of that tub.”

“Arnie—”

“You’re going to pass out in there. I can see it.” His voice rose up beyond his control. “And I’ll come back later and find you dead under the water.”

The words echoed over the tile like a wish.

“Get out,” she said.

Arnie stood up, swelling, wanting to be elsewhere, unconnected, but here he was, dumb socks stuck on the wet tile, dumb white hairs poking out of him everywhere in the mirror. On his way out he punched furiously at the curtain, which gave way only briefly before falling back into place.

D
ownstairs, the banquet room was empty. An hour early, Arnie paced by the doorway, alone with his useless anger. On the table next to him someone had arranged dozens of name tags in perfect little rows, with so many pairs of matching surnames. Arnie couldn’t stand them. He scooped one hand across a row, but the pins snagged on the tablecloth and only five or six took flight. Then suddenly a group of little boys in swimsuits raced through the hallway screaming, leaving their wet footprints and echoes everywhere. Arnie stepped out to scold them, to tell them to slow down, but they disappeared around a corner, their little brains already deleting him from their day.

He went back in the room, kneeled down, and picked up the name tags. Rearranged them. Pinned his own name on. Marion’s he left there with the others.

He walked down the winding hall past an arcade room and a coffee shop, until finally he came to a dark, wood-paneled room that had a long bar at one end. There were wide bay windows behind the bar, so that you could look out on the lake as you drank. The only other person at the bar was a young man sitting alone with a beer. Arnie took a seat one space away from him and ordered a beer himself.

“Are you here for the golf tournament?” Arnie said after a while.

The young man turned and nodded, and Arnie saw that he was scarcely more than a teenager, maybe not even old enough to drink.

“Is it your parents who are playing? Or your, uh, wife?”

“No.
I’m
playing.” The boy smiled and lifted his other hand up from where it had been hidden under the bar. When he waved it around Arnie could see it was really only half a hand: He had his thumb and forefinger, but the rest of his palm and all the other fingers were gone.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Arnie said, trying to act casual. “Well, how’d you shoot today?”

The boy shrugged. “Pretty good. I got a seventy-eight.”

“Holy cow,” Arnie said. “You going to win the whole tournament?”

“We’ll see,” the boy said. “How about you? You here with your wife or something?”

“Yeah, my wife’s playing. She’s an above-the-knee. I don’t think she did too well today though.”

“It’s a tough course,” the kid said. They sat quietly for a long time, watching the water-skiers out on the lake. There was a ramp set up in the bay, and some kids were trying to do tricks jumping off it, but mostly they kept falling on the landings, sending up great splashes of thick, greenish water.

“I was surprised there weren’t more women players,” Arnie said after a while.

“Oh, you know why that is, don’t you?” The kid smiled.