The Narrow Door (2 page)

“Stop,” her mother begs, as if it hurts for her to watch it. “Stop! Please! Denise!”

But her mother should know better than that. Denise only dances harder.

2010 | 
Eruption.
I look up the word and assemble as many definitions as I can find. There’s a strange comfort that comes from making a list, a collection. Eruption as disease. Eruption as outburst in a crowd, on a street. Eruption as volcano. Every day in the world a volcano goes up. Just today, January 5, two volcanoes have erupted: the first in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo; the other, Turrialba, in Costa Rica. Both mountains are far from towns and coffee plantations and are thus of little interest to the news machine.

But the volcano that snags my attention is Mount St. Helens, the first volcano to go off in a major population zone in an industrialized country. I put off writing some more by wasting time on YouTube, mesmerized by footage of the 1980 explosion. The footage isn’t actual; it’s built of still images in the manner of an old-fashioned cartoon. What startles me is the clarity of the lava. The lava slides down the mountainside in a silvery wash, with the translucence of saliva, pre-come, tears. It takes down a side of the mountain with it. It takes down birches, buildings, cabins. It buries tractors, mailboxes, mule deer, though you can’t see any of that from here. I refuse to say the earth is reflecting my feelings; the story of perception is more complicated than that. But the earth is certainly having some trouble with itself, and I keep playing the video over and over, until I feel both better and a little sick about it.

I scroll through the comments on YouTube, all of which are written with the calm precision of people who know what they’re talking about. It’s a wonder that these comments still appear with regular frequency, as if the mountain went off just two years ago, not thirty, and the people are still hearing the grit on their windshields, spitting ashes from their mouths.

—
I was finishing at Detroit Lake when at about 8:30 I heard a sound that closely resembled heavy naval ordnance at sea. I had no idea Mt. St. Helens let go at that time. This might have been a distance close to two hundred miles.

—
I was a little kid in Victoria when this volcano erupted. Crazy. It sounded like thunder with too much sharpness. Then later the ash.

A few clicks later, a photographer’s website:

—
As the smoke rose in the sky, the wind picked up. Specks of pumice were lifted like sandpaper grit, smashing into the few obstacles on the surface sparse landscape. There was little chance to escape the constant bombardment.

—
Spirit Lake was inundated with fallen trees and volcanic debris. The fallen forest still floats on the surface of the lake.

I look up from my computer and two hours have passed. What about the book I’m trying to write, the book that wants to bring back my friend?

I scrawl a little math on the back of an envelope. Today Denise has been gone four months, two weeks.

Her eyes: playful, wry, soulful.

Her charisma, her wattage. A movie star.

Her old plea, the old accusation, “Nobody loves me.” Or worse: “You don’t love me.” And her joy when I shut my eyes, or gave her that look that said, I’ve had all I can take of you.

Her quickness to laugh, the laugh that came from deep in the body. Part silly, part womanly.

Her cup of scalding-hot coffee, held with both hands, close to the collarbone and throat, even if it was ninety-seven degrees outside.

Her toned olive arms.

Her monkey feet.

Her ability to walk into any room and warm the atmosphere. A ray of energy moving right into you.

2008 | 
It’s the third afternoon of the summer writers conference. I’ve loosened up enough to admit that I dislike the room they’ve given M and me. There’s no sunlight, and for several hours every afternoon, the family next door turns on the TV as the kids run in and out through the orange trees out back, shrieking. It feels transgressive to say, I don’t like this place, I don’t like this muggy, dark room, as this gig is especially prestigious. I might be violating some pact between us about making the best of our lot. Am I complaining? A look of confusion registers in M’s blue eyes before it’s gone.

M yawns and stretches, sitting up from his nap. M is a poet, six years older than I am. We’ve been in each other’s life for seventeen years now, four as friends, thirteen as lovers. For years I’ve traveled with him to readings and conferences, where every so often I’m asked to read and teach, too. It’s not always easy to be away from home so much, to be open and friendly to strangers when you’re feeling tired and shy and not terribly strong, but I love this life. I’m so much inside my life with M that it’s hard for me to see it, name it. As much as I pretend to, I don’t even mind the psychic challenge of it—this morning it was the administrator who laughed derisively at my name as she admitted to misspelling it on a poster. It is enough to be with M, really. To watch him reading a book, his brow intent, enmeshed in thought, beautiful thought. Clear eyes moving from left margin to right. A smile breaking light into his face. I am safe, fully myself in his presence, and that’s not anything I’ve ever felt into my blood before.

In a little bit, all nine members of the faculty will meet at the drive-in, a much-loved place in town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1960s. Picnic tables, burgers, french fries in paper boats, grass, flowers, and those remarkable California bluebirds flying from tree to tree to tree.

But before I change into my shorts, I check my email. Among the three new messages, an unexpected name.

My heart should be beating, but it is not beating.

I try to take in the palms outside the window, but they blur. The lawn, absurdly trimmed, hosts the brother and sister next door. They run before our windows, throwing a mottled orange at each other’s back.

I read the message again. I tell M. I lie down for a minute, talk to M again. He rubs his eyes; he’s still a little foggy, still waking up from his nap. I read it one more time, get up, put on my shorts.

I believe it will help to brush my teeth. I squeeze toothpaste onto the brush, but more of it ends up on my hands and sleeve than on the bristles. I glance up at my face in the mirror. If the news were serious, I’d have heard from Denise’s brother, her sister, her daughter, Austen, by now. Doris Granito? Denise can’t stand Doris Granito, the woman who lives down the hall from her, the woman who tries to act like her, dress like her, talk like her, only to get it all wrong. The woman with the same initials, who believes this is a sure sign that they’re sisters, lovers.

Toothpaste bubbles at the corners of my mouth.

Doesn’t Doris know Denise? Denise is a burning torch, Denise is a firestorm. Denise has already beaten cancer, colon cancer, six years ago. Cancer is a fucking joke in the face of Denise.

I take another look at the email. I shake my head at her delivery, which seems simultaneously cranked up and dead. In days Denise and I will probably be rolling our eyes and sighing about the tone of this note. Poor Doris, we’ll say; her whole life has been streaming toward this moment. Anything to be at the center. But that’s the thing about Denise. The people she’s hardest on are the people she thinks about the most. And maybe that’s why people like Doris throng to Denise. For who else but Denise ever looked to Doris with such light in her face?

A half hour later I’m laughing with the others at the picnic table. The night is sweet, windless. There’s a smell of lawn clippings and wet mulch. It astonishes me that I can turn off the disaster and listen to my friends. Claudia and Nick are discussing bewilderment as an aesthetic, what it might mean to how poems get made. They’re having a hard time of it: how
does
one talk about the ineffable? In another life I would have used this window to talk about
my
bewilderment, the news that came to me an hour ago, and my worry would have been the subject of our night. But not tonight. We need this night. We need to pass Nick and Lili’s baby back and forth, not just for the weight of her—feel her between your hands, lighter than a bag of sugar—but for the wonder of looking into another face. Isn’t that why people lean toward babies and dogs, after all? We want to look into a face that isn’t going to judge, dismiss, or hurt us, but one that looks back at us with amusement, a face that makes us wide awake.

Maeve moves from one set of hands to the next. She smiles, reaching toward us with a hand no wider than two of my fingertips together. She squeezes my fingers hard, as if to say, Look! Beware! Maeve is strong!

Across the country Denise tries to be perfectly still as the technician pulls the hood down over her eyes.

2008 | 
Finally, some quiet time in which to write you. Darling, I heard your messages and love them so much, but usually when I get them it’s before a procedure, after one or in the middle of something. Sorry I have not spoken with you yet.

2010 | 
Six months after Denise’s death, M and I are standing before a four-foot-wide nineteenth-century photograph of a crowd on the beach. We’re in Cape May, at Congress Hall, the old hotel with the forty-foot pillars, where the picture in question hangs in a low-lit hallway. It’s almost impossible to make out any details. Maybe that’s because the photograph itself is showing its age. Some might call the color of the paper sepia, coffee, soil. To me, it is the color of Time, though I don’t want Time to be that color. I don’t want it to cloud or grime or seep into everything. Right now I want it to be clearer, brighter. If it can’t be a color, then it should be the white of the snow around the shrubs outside.

And yet, what is worse than a room where there’s nothing old, where the chairs and paintings have been bought from the same furniture store at the same time? No signs of fading, chipping, loose threads, or paw prints. Or the water stains on this photograph, from which we can’t quite tear ourselves away. There’s a shipwreck, a lighthouse, and two bird sanctuaries down Sunset Boulevard, yet here we are, on a cold January afternoon, sinking into the nineteenth century.

How often do we get to see this many people at once, fixed? I think people are beautiful when they’re together like this, even though I know I’m not seeing them as individuals. From here I can’t see their resentments. I can’t see them wounding the people they care about or jockeying for position against one another. This is a production. It’s likely the hotel had put up a sign by the front desk: GET YOUR PICTURE TAKEN BY THE PIER AT NOON! The people on the beach seem to know they are part of a larger scheme (advertisement?), so it’s no surprise they do what they can to resist it. One stands with a foot in the surf, looking toward shore. One hands another a baseball or a piece of fruit. Another drapes his arms over the shoulders of two muscular men, as if to claim them as brothers. Off in the distance there’s a lifeboat—or maybe that’s just the dark head of a swimmer—the lifeguard inside trying to protect bathers from going out too far. These people must have money. Their casual indifference suggests they don’t need any more attention than they’re getting. There is no lack in them. But it must be work to pretend it’s a casual occasion. And in that way they have no idea how fragile they look.

I wonder if they know they might be rehearsing for their deaths. Probably they were asked to hold still. Thirty seconds, thirty minutes. Maybe a whole afternoon went by when they could have been moving around in their good clothes, getting ready to go out for fried chicken or oysters. Very likely it wasn’t a single shot. Keeping still is harder work than digging a ditch. Why would they even put up with this, on a sunny day in summer, if they didn’t want someone 122 years later to do exactly what we’re doing: standing in a hall on a wintry day, asking who might that have been? If their souls could see what we’re doing, wherever they are, whatever they are, would they be saying, Watch me? Pick me?

I glance over at M. His eyes are as clear as they’ve ever been. Is he imagining W, his late partner, into that crowd? I imagine he is, blue eyes following W out into the waves as if W has lost all semblance of human form and become a marine creature. W has been gone for sixteen years, but M’s attachment to that fact does not shift or diminish. Death shadows his face. It draws him away from me. I have willed myself not to feel apart from M when he goes to this place. I have learned not to think:
replacement—I am not his great love.
The love coming at me is the love intended for the lost. I’m swimming in it. I’m trying to ride the wave of it. And yet I have been chosen. I have
enjoyed
being chosen, picked out from the crowd.