Unkiss Me (7 page)

At the edge of the wasteland-in-transition, next to the tram station, stood the capstone of the $2 billion urban utopia: The Center for Health and Healing. The flagship marketing miracle, branded “a space of civic quality” was an attempt to make medical treatment and wellness hip. To equate it with the bustle of travel to foreign, exotic places. Like the Epcot Center, he thought, remembering his trip to Disneyworld with his girl and boy so many years ago. 

Inside the bright lobby of the Center for Health and Healing one could arrange to have a complementary acupressure treatment or enjoy a green tea latte while reclining on a retro mid-century sofa. There was a day spa nestled in one corner that offered exercise classes and facial waxing. All on a Superfund site, he mused. The Superfund Center for Health and Healing.

The tram doors yawned open. He boarded the same silver vessel upon which he’d embarrassed his girlfriend not fifteen hours earlier. It lifted from the station, leaving in its wake dissimilar shapes, a curious mixture of linear and circular, opposing forms of industry: port engineering, haute cuisine, fountain-of-youth technology. He and the other passengers rose up and up, wobbling as they approached an immense white concrete tower. They hovered a couple of breaths from people’s backyards and patios. In summer, one could look through the bottom-to-top glass and make out the degree of doneness of the burgers being grilled beneath them.

The tram advanced steadily toward the conglomerate of buildings on the hill. The myriad styles and degrees of modernity never ceased to amaze him. The hodgepodge of geometry brought to mind bag ladies who pushed shopping carts filled with discordant objects. His mother was beginning to resemble those poor souls. Just last week she’d greeted him with her jumper inside out. As the tram eased to a stop against a chartreuse patch of building, he felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He snapped open the phone and said, as he always did, “Ralph here.”

“Um,” said the somewhat squeaky voice of the security guard. “I think your stalker has arrived.”

“Really?” he said.

“Yep. Some guy claiming that he had an appointment in 1411.”

Ralph’s heart froze. “Some guy?”

“Your typical perp,” she said. “Looking to score a 40.”

He’d guessed right about the rent-a-cop; she wanted some action. “Can you stall him?”

“Affirmative.”

The tram seemed to be slower than usual in its sink back to the river. Once it docked, he burst through its doors and sprinted diagonally across the parking lots to the crime-in-progress. He was aware that his breath was audible as he approached the hi-rise. He pressed in Candi’s code, the door released its lock and a tinkle sound announced his entry was granted. In front of him stood the stalwart guard and various views of the building’s interior.

The security guard whispered something into her collar, and then said to him, “That was quick.”

“He still up there?” he said.

She nodded, enthusiastically.

He said, “I’ll call you if I need back-up.”

She waved him on.

The debate in his head as the elevator levitated skyward was whether to burst in angrily and catch her in an egregious act of cheating, or to knock softly, as though he were a concerned neighbor checking in. Once the elevator doors parted on the fourteenth floor he held his finger (which still smelled vaguely of her) on the open button until an alarm sounded, at which point he hopped out.

He was aware of the space between his chest and his throat as he walked toward Candi’s door. His lungs felt as though they were filling with flames. He put two fingers against the artery in his neck. Slow down there, Ralph. And just then, just when a small bolus of resolve began to bubble up from his groin, his girlfriend’s door opened, and out came Candi and the man Candi was cheating on him with.

He was a wizened boy—almost like one of those youngsters with the disease that renders one elderly while still in grade school. What was that called? Perjoria or something? There had been a few cases up on the Hill. Actually, the fellow that his girlfriend was using to cuckold him with wasn’t a child at all, but a middle-aged man with a youthful bounce in his step. Ah—post-coital verve. He knew it well. And stride for ebullient stride, there she was, her long, long hair knotted into some sort of hammock. She noticed him immediately, and when no look of distress came over her, it perplexed Ralph all the more.

“So,” he said, plainly.

“Ralph,” she said, brow furrowed. “What did you leave behind?”

He stuck out his hand toward the aging youngster. He angled it just a bit, the way younger men do. Not quite fist-bumping, but akin to that. A more professional version of that. The man shook his hand, and both men glanced at Candi’s face for an introduction. When none came, they introduced themselves to one another.

“Guy.”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph,” Candi said. “I think there’s something you should know.”

Ralph squeezed shut his eyes, set his jaw. Here it is. Her tapered fingers grazed his arm hairs. He smelled her musky oil.

“Guy is my advisor.”

He heard advisor, but his brain, his linear, left-hemisphered cognition turned advisor into lover, and sent fight-or-flight chemicals blasting along his neural pathways.

Before he could untangle his response, he heard, “He is my, well, my death coach.”

Guy’s hand was now gripping his shoulder—a grim reaper claw, an undertaker’s practiced steadying.

Ralph opened his eyes. “Your what?”

“I have a recurring condition. I’ve stopped treatment.”

“Candi is working hard to leave the physical world having made the most of her gifts,” the death coach offered.

The fluorescent tube lighting in the hallway accentuated the pallor Ralph suddenly saw on his girlfriend’s ruby-pierced face. “Treatment,” he managed. “What gifts?”

“Please,” said, Candi, “let’s go back into the apartment.”

Ralph followed Guy and Candi, careful to stay behind them as a child who’d misbehaved might follow disappointed parents. He hesitated before crossing the threshold into the concrete box he’d come to know so well. As soon as he entered the space, the long table he’d leaned against while drilling the length of his erection into his dying girlfriend just the night before loomed before him. The top of it was hinged on one side and now yawned open, and he could see, immediately, that this piece of furniture was created to be neither table nor carnal facilitator.

“Can I get you a drink, Ralph?” Candi said.

He shook his head, and, feeling a growing weakness in his legs, he melted into one of Candi’s less comfortable chairs.

Guy whipped out a business card and thrust it towards Ralph. CONSCIOUS DEATH the card exclaimed, by Guy LeGrange.

It’s definitely black, Ralph thought, and this thought accompanied the image of a thick, steel wall, much like the walls that held this building together.

“I owe you an explanation,” Candi said, sitting down next to him, gently massaging the top of his arm. “When I met you that day running, my heart just curled in on itself. He’s the one I’ve been looking for, it said.”

“You’ve heard of the bucket list?” said the creator of CONSCIOUS DEATH. “Candi and I explored her gifts, and made a list too. Only, we don’t think of it as a bucket list, really. More like the last chance to plant and tend a garden, which can be harvested after she passes.”

Ralph heard the words, and they sounded good, like words you’d use to soften a firing, or an audit. But where he went with them was across the river, to the Parlor, where his mother, his blind, toothless and deaf mother, was most likely picking at a congealing bowl of oatmeal with the tine of a soiled fork.

His mother was the one who should be seeking the counsel of this Guy LeGrange, not this vibrant, calico vixen sitting next to him.

“Just one question,” said Ralph. “And please, answer truthfully.”

“You want to know if you were a mercy case?” preempted Candi.

Ralph glared at the rude top of the handmade coffin. “Was I?”

“When people truly embrace death,” Candi said, “there is no mercy.”

The floor-to-ceiling windows revealed so much of the landscape. There was that mountain, the hills, the sky, the river. And here they were, the three of them, as if in the bulkhead of an airplane remarking on mankind. On their collective good fortune.

“But you don’t seem like you’re dying,” Ralph said.

“In about six weeks, things will look different. Six weeks should give me time to finish my list.”

Ralph had to know. “Was it that obvious?”

“Your sorrow?”

Ralph nodded. “That, and my need for…” he couldn’t finish. A choking ball of snot and rage came careening up like volcanic activity. Candi helped it escape. She was gifted. Her hands, her soft skin, her muscular biceps.

Guy LeGrange, the wizened reaper, raised both arms as though on a pulpit. “We’re all moving toward death,” he said as he stepped into the open casket, “one day at a time. We can do it with grace, or we can do it with blasphemy.”

His girlfriend’s touch, her soft kiss on his earlobe, her gentle massage, Ralph couldn’t help it. He began to grow stiff. His actuarial mind started crunching numbers; calculating how long a person could survive in a closed casket. If life were this tenuous, then he knew how he wanted to spend his last little while. Ralph raised his leg, partly to conceal his growing tented trousers, but partly, too, in preparation for kicking closed the lid of the odd table. He was going to live as never before, one last time, on top of Candi’s coffin, with the death coach clawing beneath.

Every morning I go two miles out of my way to drive by my husband’s new house. I tell myself I do this because seeing his yellow Chevy truck calms me down—negates the morning’s tank of coffee. Truthfully, though, I drive by the house to check in with the meter that measures my degree of regret. To check the level of sap in my spine.

The safest days begin with a scan for the piles mounded in the driveway.
I am at my most pragmatic when considering the physical evidence of our dissolution. There, next to the mouth of the carport, is the rotting worm bin. Next to that, four large hunks of basalt. Old-growth lumber, still studded with nails, stretches the length of the yard. My husband has an eye for the raw, worn, and semi-functional items of the previous century.

This reverence for treasure falls under the category, “things one appreciates about one’s spouse from a distance.”

But the days when my vision won’t take in the full picture out the broad curve of my minivan window, when I can’t get past that old Chevy—or the lack of the Chevy there in the drive—those are the days. The worrisome days. The days I’m likely to come home and notice the one copper salmon on the wall, instead of the two that were given us as a wedding present.

This is a long-time-in-the-making separation.
A crock-pot split up. We tried, a few years back, to do this: live cleaved lives. It didn’t work. We weren’t ready. But every day since, we’ve forged incrementally into aloneness.

It is a dance we’re perfecting.
We sidestep, dip, come apart, tango and bow to the partners that we’ve never been able to be for one another. And in this dance, we fever. We sweat. We lay limp, and contained. Last night, for instance. Last night I craved coffee ice cream. The Safeway just steps from my husband’s house. Call? Ring the doorbell? There was no bell, so I knocked. His roommate answered with the shock of seeing the person you were just talking about. Or maybe I’m paranoid.

Ordinary separated spouses would be annoyed by the intrusion.
My husband smiled with genuine happy surprise. He opened his arms to me. He wanted, I think, for me to sit on his lap. The roommate scuttled upstairs to his section of the house.

My husband’s new bedroom is a replica of the one he had when we were dating:
his Goodwill As Is lamp with the amethyst base teeters on his pile of Fine Homebuildings. The other lamp, the one with gilded cherry foliage snaking up to the light, that one sits on the desk he made in community college. I can tell you which drawer knobs are just screws sticking out, which drawer holds his bag of weed, which contains the love letter I wrote him after our first significant date.

The blanket on his bed is new.
The new thing jumps around in my stomach. Good? Bad? Don’t know. And there’s that other salmon, propped above the window trim.

“Show me the kitchen,” I say.

A safe place, the kitchen, because it showcases more of his roommate’s stuff than his. He steps ahead of me, into the yellow and green space, and he lifts a yard sale find from the counter: a glass Chemex coffee urn.

“And look.” He shows me a fresh box of vintage cone filters that reek of river-killing by-products.
The address on the box is listed as Pittsfield, MA.

It’s the weirdest thing, seeing that city printed there, “I lived there as a kid.”

“You did?”

“Two years.”

The things about me my husband of nine years doesn’t know. And the things he thinks he does. And the things he really does. It’s complicated, this dance. Especially in moments such as these: small movements into uncharted waters. Filters, blankets, history, future.