The Summer Guest (18 page)

“Sure.”

“I’m thinking of trying out for the varsity.”

“Hey. That’s great. You should.”

He bounced the ball again. “I could have done that,” he said flatly, and pointed with his eyes to the cans.

“It’s no bother. I’ve got it.” I rolled the last can into its spot by the curb. “The varsity. That’s really terrific, Hal. What does your coach think?” I tried to remember his name but couldn’t. A heavyset man with a back wide as a tortoise, wearing a whistle on a string. Myers?

“The cans are my job, Pop. That’s all I came out here to say.”

By this time-the day I saw my son’s shadow in the driveway and knew how much I’d missed-Meredith’s hand was no longer a mystery. Another shadow falling across those years of work and worry: as Hal grew, the inkling that something was seriously wrong with Meredith grew beside him, like a dark flower in an adjacent pot. Small, inexplicable injuries, the kind of mishaps that happen to everyone from time to time but in Meredith began to accumulate with the force of a mortal argument. For a while it was a joke: clumsy Meredith, accident-prone Meredith, Meredith who could trip over her own feet on a bare floor in broad daylight. She dropped things, knocked things off tables, sliced her fingers open on knives and can openers, banged into other cars in parking lots; her arms and legs and hands accumulated scars like a Russian general’s medals. Headaches, and a permanent sheen of sweat, and she was always, always cold: For goodness’ sake, she would grouse, why is it always so freezing in here? Did somebody forget to pay the gas bill? What’s wrong with this thermostat? What’s the point of finally having a little money if we can’t heat the house? Never mind that it was summer, the windows wide open, the leaves fat and full of chirping birds. Once, on a trip to Florida, on a day of ninety-degree heat and humidity heavy as goulash, she wore a wool coat to the beach.

It was when her speech began to flatten and slur-not the way a drunk speaks, the words collapsing under their own weight, but more as a kind of snuffing out, certain syllables inexplicably melting as she spoke: peesh for peach, shuz for shoes, tawble for table-that a diagnosis was achieved. I use the passive deliberately; it was an event without agency, as when one says “It’s Tuesday” or “It rained.” Syringomyelia: nothing we had ever heard of, and for just a moment, sitting in the doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue on a pleasant winter afternoon after a train ride into the city and a good lunch downtown, the newness of the word itself made us fail to feel its weight. Seated on the far side of his desk, we shared a funny look. We had a boy in school, a business to run, ideas about the future: of a house in Maine or Florida, or selling the business and retiring early, of seeing London and Paris and Rome. If we had never heard of it, how bad could it be? Though of course the opposite was true: we’d never heard of it because it was rare, infinitesimally rare, and nothing you would want to know about if you didn’t have to, like a brutal little war fought far away among people whose names you couldn’t pronounce.

The doctor removed a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and, on a yellow legal pad, quickly sketched a pair of lines with a series of flattened circles between them. A cutaway view of Meredith’s spine, we understood; really, it ought to curve a little bit, he said, like so, but we got the idea. He pointed with the tip of his pen to the flattened circles. See these? They were cysts, he explained, fluid-filled spaces where none should be; it was possible Meredith had been born with them, or at least had had them many years. It was hard to say, though in her case he believed the condition had been present for some time. She might have a single cyst, or several. The precise mechanisms were not well understood, he continued, though it was known that over time these cysts elongated, pushing nerve tissue against the bones of her spine. Imagine a balloon, he said, slowly expanding in a tube. Patients usually felt the effects first at the extremities-she said she’d first noticed this some years ago, yes, an incident with a cigarette, when she’d burned herself and not felt it? And, as the condition progressed, other things, the complaints she knew so well: the sweating and the constant coldness, the headaches and stumbling, the cuts and scrapes and difficulties of speech and the lack of sexual responsiveness. (For we had conceded this, too, when pressed, though also saying, well, wasn’t such a thing more or less natural, didn’t that just generally fade over time in any marriage?) All of this happening as the cysts filled and stretched and did their damage.

We listened like students, feeling somehow chastened; I had the absurd thought that we had fallen into a dream in which we were kids together at school and had been held back after class. The doctor’s office door was closed; hung on the wall behind his desk were diplomas, certificates, assorted testaments to his credentials, all in heavy, gilt-edged frames. I tried to read them but failed, realizing only then, and with a mild alarm, that they were written in Latin. Time flattened under their gaze; all our life, it seemed, we had been sitting in offices like these. All right, I said, rousing myself, but about these cysts. When would they stop growing? Or could they be removed somehow? A pained and startled look bloomed across the doctor’s face. He was sorry, he said, that he had not been clear. The thing was, they didn’t stop growing. And inside the spinal column was far beyond reach. Perhaps someday such a thing would be possible, but that was years away. The nerves, we understood, were slowly being crushed. There was nothing to be done. He was truly, truly sorry. He knew we had a boy, still young. It was not good news, he knew.

How does anyone begin such a new era in their lives? We thanked him and left and took a taxi to the station. The strangest thing of all, how ordinary life goes on: even the condemned man needs to fill the hours. Beneath the smudged heavens of Grand Central, we ate littlenecks at the Oyster Bar, then went to catch our train. Before boarding, Meredith bought a magazine from a vendor on the platform, and a bag of roasted cashews. As the train carried us north, I watched her flipping through the pages, pausing here and there to read an article of interest, chewing on the roasted cashews that she removed, one at a time, from the waxed paper bag. The pages were printed with a cheap ink, and I saw that her fingers were smudged. Neither of us had said a word about the doctor’s pronouncement; we had entered a kind of trance, the bubble of first-knowing. Her condition could take ten years to run its course, he’d said, and watching Meredith read her magazine, I felt for the first time in my life the shortness of a decade. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand-once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over. When the train stopped at Hartsdale, I saw, under the lights of the platform, that it had begun to snow. The air was as still as held breath, absolutely without motion, and the snow descended through it in loose, unhurried swirls, following barely detectable currents. A moment of churchlike silence: the car was so quiet I could hear the snow falling. I watched it a moment, then closed my eyes and tried to hold this image in my mind, to make it last, but then I felt the yank of the car as the force of the engine was relayed down the line and we were pulled out of the station, away. A surge of cold air behind us, and the conductor marched through the car, grabbing ticket stubs from seat backs, singing the names of the towns that lay ahead: White Plains, Valhalla, Mt. Pleasant, Hawthorne.

Meredith took my hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

I wanted to tell her this was so, but couldn’t. It would not be all right. I looked at her hand in mine, then back out the window, where the darkness of a winter night hid everything from view.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Our car was waiting in the station lot, the windshield and fenders dusted with snow. Hal was still at a friend’s; we would have the house to ourselves. As we stepped into the front hall I felt a sudden rush of panic. The stairs, the narrow doorways, the bathrooms with their sleek tile floors: everything would have to be changed. Meredith would need a bedroom on the first floor; we would have to add on, or move. What a heavy task, to plan for these things, to sit at the kitchen table over cups of coffee and describe to a carpenter the ramps and handholds we would need to install before they actually became necessary.

The house was cold, even for me. I let Ritzy out into the yard, adjusted the thermostat, and got myself a whiskey; Meredith moved through the house, turning on lights and setting things to rights. I heard her dial the kitchen phone, then her voice, tired but somehow bright, speaking to the mother of the boy Hal had passed the day with: oh yes, absolutely, everything was fine, it was a nice day to be in the city, especially with the holidays over and all that craziness done for the year, and would it be all right, we were wondering, for Hal to spend the night? We so rarely got an evening to ourselves. One of us would come by in the morning, to pick him up for school. Wonderful, she said, loud enough for me to hear. We couldn’t thank her enough.

She came to me where I was sitting on the sofa, a glass of whiskey in my hand, though I had yet to take a sip.

“Do you want one?” I raised my glass. “I could make tea too.”

She shook her head: no. After all that had happened, after this long day of all long days, she still looked fresh: her gray suit still pressed, her makeup in order, her brown hair framing her face. Around her neck she wore the pearls I had given her for our fifth anniversary; somewhere between the front door and the kitchen she had removed her shoes.

“I always knew, Harry,” she said finally. “Not exactly, not the name for it, but the kind of thing it was. In a way I’m relieved to hear it.”

“How did you…?” But of course I knew how. It was her body; she’d felt it moving away.

“That’s not important. And I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” Her eyes were unyielding; she had decided something. “I’m tired, Harry. I need you to warm me up.”

“I set the thermostat. I can build a fire too.”

“Never mind that.” She extended a hand to me. Beneath the skin her bones were rods of ice. “What I mean is, you’re my husband, and I want you to come upstairs with me, now.”

She led me up the stairs, slowly, each step cautiously planted, as she had learned to do. In our room she turned on a bedside lamp, a blaze of light that neither of us wanted, and she quickly doused it again. The house had never felt so quiet. It seemed as if the whole world had forgotten about us, that the lights had dimmed everywhere, all across the planet. In New York and Chicago, Paris and Peking, in all the towns and villages of the world, humanity had lapsed into a sleep that did not include us, even in dreams. In the dark we undressed and got under the covers of our bed. For months, a year even, making love had been impossible; she was simply not able. We held each other a long while without speaking, both of us crying a little; I thought how we would have to be content with this from now on, holding and crying, but then she left my side. I felt myself sink into the warmth and softness of her, then the familiar pulsing that seemed to come from everywhere at once: from what she was doing and the air of the room and deeper still, through all the walls of the house, into the foundation, straight down through miles of rock to the center of the turning earth, and I closed my eyes and followed it. I understood what she was telling me; this was how we would make love from now on. She would love me with her body, however she could, until this could happen no more.

I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough, or well enough, because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all.

And yet to say I loved Lucy would be a lie, or at least a kind of self-flattering half-truth. Those weeks in summer: I took them like medicine, a balm against my life, and Meredith’s slow dying. All year long I didn’t think of the place at all; I saw to my business and took Meredith to the doctor and learned to dress and bathe her, and hired the nurses that would help me do these things; I learned, in due course, about the drugs she needed for pain and infection, and how to keep her skin healthy and dry, and about the pans and bags, when that time came. When she could no longer hold a book or magazine or even a newspaper, I read them aloud, or sat in our bed beside her, turning the pages as she asked. I did all these things, and then each July, I packed the car, leaving Meredith in the care of her nurse, and drove north, and the camp would be there waiting, as if I’d never left. Nothing was ever stated or planned; and yet Lucy would find me at the check-in desk, timing some minor chore to coincide with my arrival, or else leave a basket waiting for me in the cabin, always number nine, and tucked in with the sandwich and fruit and sweating bottle of beer still cold from the icebox, a sarcastic, flirty note: Back for more raspberry pancakes, huh? or Warning, this basket will self-destruct in ten seconds, so eat fast. Innocent enough, though they were nothing I could bring myself to throw away or allow myself to keep.

Hal accompanied me only a handful of times in those years; it was boring, he said, by which he meant quiet and always the same, and he missed being at home with his friends. He was an athletic kid who liked and did well at sports, rough games where boys collided into other boys: basketball for most of the year but also football in the fall and lacrosse when he was old enough. Standing in a cold stream or sitting stock-still in the bottom of a canoe for hours at a time, not even daring to speak so as not to scare the fish-these were as anathema to his nature as needlepoint. By the summer he was twelve he had had his fill, and it wasn’t for years and years, not until long after his mother had died, that he joined me again; for now I went alone.

“Tell me about Meredith.”

It was the summer of 1968, our fifth July, when Lucy asked me this. A year of tribulations: King was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, there were riots in the slums and in the prisons, that great liar Johnson had all but locked himself away, a mad king in his tower; on television every night we watched the prosecution of a war that seemed to test not one’s patriotism but the human appetite for gore. In March, Meredith had broken her hip in a fall in the bathroom; two surgeries, and it was still unclear if she would be able to walk again. The worst possible year. And yet here I was, drinking a beer on the dock after a day so idyllic I hadn’t wanted even to cast a flyline into it, lest even this small fingerprint of my presence disturb its perfection. I had spent the morning walking the long trail that ran beside the river, and then taken a canoe out for an aimless paddle around the lake. I hadn’t spoken a word since breakfast, not until Lucy had seen me on the dock and taken the Adirondack chair next to mine. That summer she had taken over the kitchen from Daphne Markham, who, it was said, had met a man through a Methodist missionary pen-pal service and gone off with him to Ecuador.