The Narrow Door (21 page)

Two hours after my session, M runs into a friend from way back, someone he’d once hooked up with, and it seems crucial that they meet now, immediately. We haven’t seen each other for two days. I know they’re not meeting for sex, but
still.
They are going out for a hamburger together. As to the dinner I’d been imagining with him? I leave the apartment. I walk west to the High Line. I trudge up the staircase, turn south past the fringetree, the smoketree, the quince. I look out to the Hudson, the late sun over Hoboken, Jersey City, the Statue of Liberty. The asters smolder as if they’re about to burst into flame. I sit on the edge of a lounge chair. Okay, I should have asked earlier in the day if he’d wanted to go out for dinner. I just assumed he’d want to do what I wanted to do. But that doesn’t stop the rage from heating up my face. I walk back down the High Line steps. Soon I am walking through the Meatpacking District, crossing the West Side Highway. Past the trees, the river, the benches where lovers sit, leaning into each other. The night is beautiful, hot. Waves pulse against the bulkhead, the air fresh with the smell of the ocean. Water plunges and lifts beneath the open metal grate. Still, it is New York City in July. What the hell am I doing in New York City in July, when I’ve spent every summer of my life near the ocean? The desire for the ocean has always come before anything, and I am hours from where I really want to be.

An hour later I am back inside the apartment. It’s humid and stuffy inside, the air conditioner is off. M is on the sofa.
Hi
, he says. And I know my face is the color of heart attack, my peasant ancestors rising up in me. I ask for his hand and tell him how angry I am, how hard it is to say how angry I am. The two of us must look like monsters to each other, our faces clenched into unexpected shapes. This is not the way we’ve ever known each other, but it is the way we must behave if we’re to accommodate conflict, not simply be the couple that looks happy from outside. The anger is as thick as musk in the air. My thoughts are out of sequence, or is this what it feels like to run sixty miles per hour into the side of a mountain? We are quiet for some minutes. The argument is not resolved. Tonight I don’t think it will ever be resolved. I am in a complex position: To say I am jealous is to be possessive, to lack trust. To stay silent is to grow hurt in myself.

And when I stay silent, I am tested by M.

If there were any more freedom in this house, there wouldn’t be a house.

I sit down with my laptop. I open the inbox, and ten sample covers of my novel come in from Kapo, my book designer. I click the icon. “Look,” I say, and M glances over my shoulder, puts his glasses on. I start scrolling. As if no argument had ever transpired in that room, we sit side by side on the sofa, knee pressed into knee, and begin to talk about the sequence of twelve burning houses. For a while, we are back to our old sweet ways.

2008 | 
Can it really be two months since I’ve last seen Denise? Her moving, my cold, her cold,
C. diff
, radiation, chemo, her move to a one-floor apartment—so many things standing in the way of us, even though we’ve talked a lot on the phone and sent messages to each other. I don’t want any of my fear to show on my face. I know she will look different; she has been through so much since my last visit-will she even be the Denise I know? I try to relax the muscles in my face as I walk up the steps to the new building. I speak my name, as calmly as I can, to the doorman behind the desk.

And there she is at her door. She is looking hard at my face to see how she might look, and I am watching myself, trying to let her know that, no, I’m not shocked that she’s thinner. I’m not shocked that she’s blond. Denise, of all people, blond. Not that she chose blond, but blond’s the color of the soft hair that’s come in after chemo. Her hair is like the down on a chick, so impossibly new that you might not even want to bring her out into the world. If she could have foreseen this transformation from an earlier point in her life, maybe she’d have enjoyed that trip to Wisconsin more. There she swore that everyone looked at her as if she were trouble. So dark, so
Sicilian
—they stood back a few feet from her, as if certain she’d put a curse on their families, or worse.

I stop thinking about her hair. If there’s anything that shocks me, it’s the apartment itself, which is certainly a good apartment, facing west toward the Schuylkill, with large windows opening to the western sky and the playing fields of the University of Pennsylvania. But it doesn’t look like an apartment that she’d put together. All of her things are here, her chests, her paintings, but it doesn’t have— what? Her love, her sense of making a work of art out of her home. The rooms feel temporary, with none of the full range of her personality, as if a group of well-meaning people had approximated her personality for her and she was too tired and compromised to care. The apartment’s a way station, and that is a notion I find hard to bear. But she distracts me from any of that, and within minutes, we’re sitting on her sofa, looking out to the sky, watching a September thunderstorm flashing, pretending that we’re much more scared than we actually are.

2010 | 
It’s not the biggest shock to find out that M is getting a dog. After all, we’ve talked of getting a dog for six years, ever since we lost Arden. Arden had many functions in our lives. Uncle, child, brother, friend—all these things and more, and maybe we were honoring his absence by traveling, by doing all the things we couldn’t do when he was sick. It was freeing to move again, without thinking of him being left behind, resting his head on his paws on some concrete kennel floor. But if you’re a person who has loved a dog, you can’t live so long without sharing your bed with another creature. You miss the routines (feeding, walking); you miss meeting the people you wouldn’t talk to without a dog. You don’t know how much you’re giving up simply by keeping yourselves alone.

But a golden retriever? I keep quiet as he tells me about the breeder on the phone. Hadn’t I once said that I wanted a blond French bulldog? A German shepherd, a pit bull, an English bull, a boxer, a beagle: any breed but a golden retriever, all goof and wiggle. A golden retriever, the kind of dog who rolls in the slop, runs toward you, wiping the slop on your best jeans, expecting you to find him endearing. I want a dog with spine. I want a dog with gravitas, a dog with a little shadow in his face and walk, eager for boundaries and conditions and agreements, if not for you, then for himself. Any creature, canine or human, deserves the joys of accomplishment.

And yet there’s no turning back for M. In spite of my anger about S (I still refuse to go out to the Springs house, which I think of as my lost house, the closet still full of my shirts, my study still packed with school books, teaching papers, bank statements), I don’t discourage him, especially as he’s as nervous as he is excited about the appointment to come. Life with a dog. A walk in the morning, a walk in the afternoon, filling food bowls, thinking about a dog, missing a dog, the kind of looking and listening any human could use, especially those of us who think of ourselves as too busy, with no time for anything more.

What must it be like to take that ride he’s on? Trees going by, brake lights ahead, burning. The stomach burning, or maybe empty, as who could eat on the verge of changing your life, another life? Then to park, to walk into the breeder’s. To see the puppy in the playpen, back warmed by the white fur on his brother’s stomach, and the face tilted up to see you for the first time—that first
who are you?
cock of the head that literally grounds you to yourself.

I am dog. Who are you?

Smell of sawdust in the air. Biscuit, flour, corn muffin, a little ammonia in the mix. Pee? The smell of puppy.

Why am I not standing in that room with him?

I press my head hard, harder into my hand. The solutions to our problems seem even further away now. They’re out on some island and the boat has left without us.

2008 | 
I can’t tell whether Denise’s health situation is better, or whether it’s in some holding pattern. Maybe we’re just pretending it’s in a holding pattern. It’s definitely easier to live that way than the other, which says that death is inevitable, so it’s time to start getting one’s books in order. Denise is having no such thing, and maybe that’s why she seems to be the model cancer patient. Maybe that’s why she’s taking higher doses of chemo and radiation than was thought possible for someone of her age and weight. I can believe she’s going to go on and on, as I am not seeing her every day. The story of I’ll-be-around-longer-than-you-think requires physical separation, and imaginative faith from both parties. And maybe that’s why a month or two after her death, Denise’s ex sends me a folder of photographs from her final months, without any words attached. Just a folder in my inbox. The Denise in these photographs is not pretty or composed, even though she could be those things during those months, her hair short and blond: half Annie Lennox, half professor of women’s literature. You can see pain in her face, tension hardening her mouth. You can see her trying to feel better when family fills the kitchen, though she feels anything but. I can’t help but feel a stab of helplessness. Denise wouldn’t want me to see her this way. But maybe there’s value in getting to see what it was like for those who were there for her, by her side, night in and night out. Denise looks around as if to say, who are these helpers in my house? And why are their coats and bags on my bureau, my table? My apartment, the apartment I once called my own.

2010 | 
I check my computer to see that my mail program has updated itself. Somehow syncing it to my phone has disrupted everything, and six years of emails disappear between five o’clock and six, without any warning. Not only the addresses but the messages themselves, messages I’ve been unknowingly using as a kind of journal, whenever I needed to see what I was thinking on, say, Christmas Eve 2004. Inside the lost mailbox is much of my correspondence with Denise. As troubling as losing it sounds, I’m in the frame of mind where I’m not shattered—though I am curious about not feeling shattered. How many times have I read her letters, heard her voice on the page, so certain of its persistence, its ability to keep on? Maybe Denise’s messages, maybe the messages of any of the people now dead, are best consigned to the ether. Probably I am thinking there will be a way to get all those emails back, an adjustment of a server setting, a reconfiguration of a password. But I must think about what I’d do if I couldn’t get them back. Would I be okay enough to go on without her written voice, no chance to read them some July, ten years from now, on her birthday? Sure, I might think I’m okay with it tonight, when I’m sitting in the chair by the open window with a glass of red wine in hand. None of the old fears of loss stirring up panic. But maybe it won’t be okay ten years from now when someone asks me who she was to me, and I’ve just turned her into some myth, so many versions away from the person I knew.

It helps to be asked who she is to me, even now when it hasn’t even been a year yet. In an email one night, Braunwyn asks,
I need to know, I don’t understand.
She is wondering about Denise’s importance to me. Have I talked about her that much? And the starkness of her confusion brings me back to familiar ground: What must it be like for Braunwyn to walk in the shoes of the dead? Or better said, to walk on after the dead? It’s a territory I know. Walking on as another version of my mother’s twin, Paul, killed in a car accident at seventeen. Walking on as another version of M’s lover, dead at forty-two. Of course, we’re all walking in the steps of the dead, but it’s different to play that role for someone who’s lost another person. Replacements are never as good as the dead—we never can be. We’ve never achieved that level of perfection—that story with an ending. Closure, as it’s called. We have faults, we feel them burning inside us, wanting to fly out, to twist our mouths. So we end up keeping those fires inside. We don’t let our lover or mother see those fires. They already have too much on their minds, too much worry in their hearts. They don’t need to know that we’re jealous, maybe sometimes even resentful of the power and purity of the dead in their hearts. We know these are ugly feelings, we know we would like to be remembered, so we just make ourselves small, smaller, until we shrink to the tiniest light.

Yes, this is how I will care for you. I will tune out my light and tune out my light until the fire stays completely inside, maybe unreachable to you. It doesn’t even occur to me that you might want to warm your hands on that fire, that you might need it in order to forget.

And so I tell Braunwyn all about Denise. She, of course, has heard all the stories; she knows all about how I wouldn’t be writing without her; she knows about that last year in which we became closer. But it is different to say it clearly, directly. And in the clearly and directly I’m also able to say what was difficult about Denise, about our friendship. I tell Braunwyn about her competitive streak. I tell her she wasn’t always a good listener. I tell her about Denise’s volatility, her insecurity, her need to be affirmed—how many times a day? But in saying it like that, it doesn’t feel as if I am betraying her. It is the first time I’ve said such things without feeling bad about myself. The acknowledgment of her complexity feels like love, and if that means Denise is just a little further away from me right now, then …

I like to think of what M said on the day of my mother’s funeral mass. He said he saw my mother sitting on the bed of the old motel in Pompano Beach, exhausted from having visited so many people.
It is hard work to be dead
, he said she said—or approximately that. She needed a rest. She wanted a cup of tea. But the most arresting thing? She could lean in and listen without judgment. For the first time she could look at people—even the people closest to her—without judgment. And that, according to M, is the great, great blessing of the dead.

In asking these questions, Braunwyn is doing her part to pull me down to earth. She says, look at my face, I am here. This is all we have.