There's Something I Want You to Do (24 page)

She’ll take me over to the Lake Harriet Band Shell, where on warm summer nights the Lake Harriet Orchestra (there is one) will play show tunes, and I’ll sit there in my wheelchair tapping along with “On the Street Where You Live.”

We’ll go down to the Mississippi, and we’ll walk, or I’ll be wheeled, along the pathways near the falls where the mills once were. I’ll hear the guides saying that Minneapolis has a thriving industry in prosthetic medicine because so many industrial accidents occurred here years ago thanks to the machinery built for grinding, lost arms and so on, chewed up in the manufacturing process.

We’ll be out on the Stone Arch Bridge, and Corinne will be absented in her usual way, ideas batting around her head, all the bowling pins up there scattered and in a mess. “I just don’t have any filters,” she’ll say. “Any thought seems to be welcome in my brain at any time, day or night.”

“Yes,” I’ll agree. I’ll see the Pillsbury A Mill from here. What a comfort these old structures will be to us, still standing, their bright gray brick almost indestruct
ible. Spray from the Falls of St. Anthony, named by Father Hennepin himself, will lightly touch my face, and I’ll feel a sudden stab of pain in my body, but it won’t matter anymore. Pain is the price of admission to the next world. Here will come a boy on a skateboard talking on his cell phone, and behind him, his girlfriend, also on a skateboard (pink, this time), texting as she goes. They’ll look just born, those two, out of the eggshell yesterday.

“Jeremy has one of those,” Corinne will say, meaning the skateboard.

“He’s quite the expert.”

A fat man in flip-flops will pass by us. He’ll be carrying several helium balloons, though I don’t think they’ll be for sale. On the other side of the bridge in Father Hennepin park, we’ll rest under a maple tree. A single leaf will fall into my lap.

Here. I place it before you.

Glory, gloriousness. During my life, I never had the time to look closely at anything except Wes, when he was a baby, and my husband’s headstone after he was gone. Now I’ll have all the time in the world. Nothing will bore me now. My obliviousness will sink into my past history. Henceforth my patience will be endless, thanks to the brevity of time. Stillness will steal over me as I study the world within. When I look down into my lap, I’ll see in this delicate object the three major parts, with their branching veins, and the ten points of the leaf, and the particular bright red-rust-gold color, but it’s the veins I’ll return to, so like our own, our capillaries. I’ll finger the maple leaf tenderly and wonder why we find it beautiful and will answer the question by saying that it’s God-given.

“There’s that nice Dr. Jones, way over there,” Corinne will say. “Lucy’s doctor, out on a stroll.” She’ll pause, then say, “He could lose some weight.”

“They’re doing a Katharine Hepburn revival at the St. Anthony Main movie theater,” I’ll say, gazing at the marquee listing
Bringing Up Baby
.

“I always found her rather virile,” Corinne will reply.

Thus will our days pass. You need a companion for what I’m about to do, and she’ll be mine. Once I’m in bed, and then in the hospice, she’ll read to me:
Pride and Prejudice,
my favorite book after the Bible, and she’ll read from the Bible too, in her haphazard way, wandering from verse to verse. I wonder if she’ll read from the Book of Esther, which never mentions God. Slowly I’ll depart from this Earth, medicated on morphine as I will be, mulling and stirring the fog descending over me, over Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, over daytime and its dark twin, night, while in the background someone will be playing Mozart on a radio. What is that piece? I think I’ll know it.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
is it…? Then I’ll know more pain, and darkness. And then the light won’t go on ever again, here.

—

On the other side I’ll float for a while, between worlds. The pain will be gone, the pleasure, too, those categories neutralized. On all sides the boundary markers will have softened. Instead of coming from a single source, sound—musi
c—will come from everywhere, and I’ll hear it with more than my ears. I’ll see with more than my eyes. Faces, I think, will pass me in corridors that are not corridors. The old vocabularies will be useless. They will name nothing anymore. This is the afterlife: we will be headed everywhere and nowhere, and we will drink in light, swallow it, swim in it. We’ll hear laughter. And then—but “then” has no meaning—my dear Michael will find me, without his former shape but still recognizable, and he’ll take my hand and lead me toward two rooms, and he’ll say to me, “Oh, my dearest, my life, there is only one question, but you must answer it.” And I’ll ask him, “What is that question? Tell me. Because I love you…” I’ll want to answer it correctly. What has this to do with the two rooms? But for that moment, after he puts his finger to his lips, he dissolves into air, he becomes pollen, and is scattered.

Somehow I am led into the first room. I’ll be in a chamber of perpetual twilight. No one predicted this twilight, or the shabbiness, the feeling of a beggar. How richly plain this all is! Something wants something from me here. My attention. My love.

Now I’ll enter the second room. And all at once I’ll be dazzled: because here on the richest of thrones, gold beyond gold, sits this beautiful man, the most beautiful man I have ever seen, smiling at me with an expression of infinite compassion. His hair will be curling into tendrils of vibrating color. He will be holding up his palm, facing toward me, and in that hand I will see the world, the solar system, and the universe, rotating slowly. Behind him somehow are the animals, the great trees, everything.

It will be a test, the last one I will ever have. Which room do I choose?

The beautiful man clothed in light will ask me, “Do you admire me? Care for me?”

And I will say, “No, because you are Lucifer.” And I will return to the room where it is always twilight, where all that is asked of me is love.

Gluttony

Immediately after the accident, the doctor thought:
Stupid pain. Stupidity itself.
Below the knee, thanks to a fractured tibia, pain sent its dull, insistent neurological message upstairs. Pleasure never works that way. Pleasure’s vague fog spreads underneath the skin in a warm narcotic glow—a fog that lights up the soul. Then it fades. You try to locate its source, and when you do, you crave more of it. The bottle. The drug. The woman. The meal.
Especially
the meal.

—

He found himself in the car eating beef jerky and the contents of a jumbo bag of potato chips. He didn’t remember buying either one, but he must have purchased them when he stopped at the gas station. There, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, everyone had the doughy complexion of figures in a Hopper painting. Now, lying voluptuously on the front seat next to him, the bag of potato chips had been slit open in a kind of physical invitation into which he inserted his hand and withdrew food. Who had opened these packages? Someone had.
He
had, the doctor, Elijah. Who else? He didn’t
remember
opening them; they had commanded him to make the first move, like the cake in
Alice in Wonderland
with the note attached: “Eat me.” The food carried some responsibility for his excesses. It had desires, especially the desire to be consumed.

As he chewed and swallowed, he piloted the little car homeward through the dark. The steering wheel, however, was greasy with salt and cooking oils and saturated fats transferred from his palm, and although he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg, he couldn’t get the grease off his skin. He felt drowsy. A literate man who entertained himself by reading Shakespeare, the doctor thought of Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” No, not these hands.

Against his own obesity, he had concocted his own diet plan, the Jones Plan. It was simplicity itself: every time you go into a restaurant, you order an entrée you do not want to eat. You don’t like the taste of pork? You order pork. If the very sight of lobster disgusts you, you order lobster. You search the menu for an unpalatable culinary miscalcula
tion, and then you request it. You ask your wife to prepare distasteful meals. The whole point is to be presented, day after day, with the unwanted. Naturally your wife is horrified and insulted by these ideas, when she does not regard them as comical. So far, however, no weight has been lost by anyone, thanks to the plan.

He pulled up into the driveway and wiped his hands again but this time on the car’s dashboard. The lights were blazing inside the house, so Susan would still be up, vigilant about his arrival. When he stepped out of the car, he stood for a moment underneath the linden in the front yard and thoughtfully noted its seeds scattered on the lawn, pale green against the darker green of the grass illuminated by the streetlight. He felt a pain in his chest, and its attendant breathless
ness.
Ah,
he thought,
it’s that again
.

Inside the house, dressed in her blue bathrobe, Susan put down her book, a history of the Armory Show, and rose to greet him. Her perfume preceded her. She kissed him, her eyes still on the door through which he had entered, a kiss both perfunctory and ironic, gestural in its well-meaning sweetness. “Your lips taste of salt,” she said.