The Saving Graces (11 page)

"Well, I'm not sure why I told that story," Isabel marveled, shaking her head. "I honestly haven't thought about Norma in ages." "It's a sad story," Rudy said.
"You said you'd been thinking about infidelity," Lee reminded her.
"Yes. But not for any particular reason." Was it my guilty imagination that Isabel flicked a look at me then? A quick, appraising glance to see if I'd gotten a message? Because infidelity has been on my mind lately, too. I don't know if I could commit adultery. If she was trying to tell me something, she'd done a clever job. It's useful to keep in mind that if I -began an affair with Mick Draco, there would be nothing more than her Door Store furniture to distinguish me from the Norma Stottlemyers of the world. - Isabel put her forearms on the table, leaning in. "No, I do know why I told you." She spoke in a low, earnest tone; we bent toward her, catching her intensity. "I wanted you to know that I've forgiven him. No, wait"-I must've made-some scornful noise-"listen to me, it's important. Nobody knows why a man does what he does-" "Isabel, there are standards, there's-" She made a violent slicing motion with the side of her hand. I closed my mouth.
"No-one knows why someone acts in a certain way, not all the reasons, not the compulsions or inducements that led up to it, what weapons a person has inside himself-to fight temptation. We can't know that. Listen, all I want to tell you is-life is so short. It's so short, and I can't waste any more of mine on resentment. Forgiveness isn't weak, it doesn't mean you have no moral center. Buddha said wanting revenge is like spitting in the wind-you only hurt yourself." She spread her hands- honest to God, she looked like an angel in the vanilla scented glow of the candles. "I believe it's true that we're all one, all . . . one." Her smile was wry and self-conscious, perfectly aware of how daffy this sounded to someone like-say--me. "And separations are an illusion. When I forgive Gary, I forgive myself." Talk about a conversation stopper.
"Yeah, except you didn't do anything," I threw in, mostly to break the silence. Isabel's sad smile said I'd missed the point, but she loved me anyway. I got up to make coffee.
I dimmed the lights to bring in dessert-Isabel's homemade, candelit cake. It was a big hit. We sang "For she's the jolly good fellow," and she blew out her candles. - - - "Oh, why didn't I bring my movie camera?" Lee wailed. "I'm so proud of you," she told Isabel, kissing her on both cheeks.
"Me, too," Rudy said, leaning over to hug her. "I love it that you're doing things for yourself for a change. And from now on it's just going to get better." "Right," I said. "The second half of your life is going to be great." "To the second half of Isabel's life," Lee proposed, and we toasted with our coffee cups and waterglasses and wine dregs.
I didn't think she was going to be able to say anything. I've never seen Isabel so overcome; it almost made me cry. Her soft blue eyes were shimmering, but finally she managed to say, "To all of us." "To all of us," I seconded, and added my all-time favorite toast: "May we live forever." Rudy stayed after Lee and Isabel left. I put on my coat and we went outside on the porch to smoke cigarettes and look at the moon. My neighborhood is about one-third black, one-third white, one-third other, mostly Hispanic, and I like it that way. It's real. Sometimes it's a little--too real, like when you wake up to sirens and cop radios at four in the morning, or read about a mugging in the next block, or stumble into a drug deal in front of the Latino grocery store. Still, I like the mix of colors and classes, most of us law-abiding, all of us just trying to get along, as Rodney said. Tonight it was peaceful, the quiet sweetened by the soft yellow light in the windows of my neighbors, nobody out except the dog walkers.
"Isabel was awfully quiet, wasn't she? Except for the Norma story," Rudy said, and I said I'd noticed that, too. "Emma, do you think Lee really doesn't mind about Curtis and me? Trying for a baby?" I answered carefully. "I think it's bound to be hard on her. Whether she knows it yet or not. I think she and Henry are in for a pretty rough time." Rudy sighed. I watched my breath condense in the cold, silvery air. "So. A baby. I thought Curtis wasn't interested in having children." She got that pleasant, determined look we both wear when we talk about him. "He wasn't at first, but he's come around. The new job I was telling you about is almost a cinch now, and when that happens our income will more than double. And that's only to start." "The lobbying job? So he'll be a lobbyist?" Perfect.
"Yes, so money won't be an issue anymore." "Money was what was holding him back?" And here I thought it was total self-involvement.
"Mostly. Oh, Emma, I'm so excited. 1 didn't want to show it because of Lee. But, God, can you imagine me a mother?" I sidestepped that by asking, "What does Greenburg think about it?" She took a nervous drag and flicked ashes over the porch rail. "He won't say, he just keeps asking what I think. So She laughed giddily. "He's probably against it." "Well, you can't live your life according to what your shrink thinks." Although sometimes it wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm always trying to find out, in clever, oblique ways, what Greenburg thinks about Curtis. Rudy never tells me, which either means she's too smart for me or Greenburg's too smart for her. I'm not even sure I'd want Greenburg to disillusion her about Curtis. Sometimes I think he must be in the same conspiracy I'm in, which involves saying nothing bad about Curtis in order to keep Rudy from getting hurt.
"That's right, and you also can't put off having a child until you're in perfect mental health. God, I'll be dead by then." "Well, I hope it's a girl and it looks like you, not Curtis," I said, pretending that was a joke.
She hugged herself, laughing. Her eyes were shiny with wistfulness and hope, and it finally hit me how much she wanted a child. "Oh, think of it, Em. I could be somebody's mother in nine months." She turned her face up to the moon, and -when she shivered, it wasn't from the cold.
"I hope so," I said truthfully. "I really hope so,- and I think it's great. I hope it happens soon." "Thank you. Really. That means a lot. Well, hey, it's late, I'd better get going." She gave me a strong hug, which I returned weakly. She'd forgotten to ask me about Mick. And I'm so screwed up on this subject, I couldn't bring him up first. "Do you really have to go? It's only eleven." Hint, hint. Stay longer and ask me about the man I'm obsessed with.
"No, I should go, Curtis doesn't like me driving at night." She started down the steps.
"Want me to call him?" Yuck. "Tell him you're on your way?" "That's okay, I've got my phone." She patted her purse. "Thanks for dinner, everything was great. Hey, do you want to go to the movies on Monday?" I brightened. "Sure. I'll call you Sunday night." "Sunday's good." She blew me a kiss. "Night, Em." She'd parked half a block up the street. Rats, I thought, watching her negotiate the grass strip between sidewalk and curb with the dog shit-avoiding grace of a D.C. veteran. Thoughtlessness, self-absorption, preoccupation, negligence-you expect these from the average run of your acquaintances, but not from your best friend. From her you want perfection. You want her to read your mind.
Parking is a bitch on my street. The car behind Rudy's khaki-colored Wrangler had boxed her in. She inched back and forth, back and forth, about ten times before she finally jerked free of the space. As she started to pull away, a speeding car roared past, practically sideswiping the Jeep, and slid to a long, -screeching stop fifty feet down from the front of my walkway. My heart stopped but started again and began to race when I saw what kind of car it was-Volvo station -wagon-and who was getting out of it. Lee.
Rudy and I converged on her. "What happened, where's Isabel? What's wrong?" She grabbed us both and held on. She was crying and -couldn't talk, I had- to shake her. "I took her home-she told me. I'm not supposed to tell-" "What?" "The cancer." "Oh, my God" She kept swallowing. I had her hand, I felt it shaking. "A recurrence. The doctor's almost sure. She has to have a bone scan." Lee broke down, and Rudy hugged her. I hung my arms around both of them; we stood there in the middle of the street, holding on for our lives.
A car came and honked at us. I gave it the finger. "Let's go." I started for Lee's car, which was still idling. "Rudy, you drive." "Where? You mean to Isabel's?" "Nell, where the hell else?" "But I wasn't supposed to tell you," Lee cried, "you're not supposed to know!" I just stared at her.
"Right," she said, coming out of her trance. "Let's go." A lot of my youth is a blur, great chunks of it simply missing, as if I periodically contracted amnesia along with the usual measles and chicken pox of childhood. And yet my recollection of the night I gave up on my parents is as clear and vivid as a piece of clip art. I was eight. I know because I tagged it in my consciousness as if with a book mark, quite aware that something significant had happened. I'm eight, I thought, and this is true. This is something I know about Mother arid Daddy.
It was in Marshalltown, Iowa, early on a winter evening. I remember the lamps burning in the living room, the smell of hot dust from a hissing radiator. The sound of a page turning, and then the dry, unnecessary cough, uh ehh, of my mother. Creeping down the staircase, I paused to look at my parents, peering at them over the banister rail. Our small house had no office; my father wrote sermons in the living room seated in his morris chair, using the broad arms for a desk, notebook on one side, Bible on the other. He sat with his foot propped up on the needlepoint stool, his elbow on his knee, forehead on the heel of his hand. Slowly, steadily, and without pausing, he composed the dry, ineffably dull discourse he would deliver in a passionless monologue next Sunday at the Concordia Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Across the blue oval of the braided rug, in the cheap, sixty-watt, old-gold beam of the toIe lamp, my mother bowed over a fall of heavy cloth on her lap-curtains, perhaps, or some dark, dreary garment of my father's. Her forehead furrowed slightly at the first prick of each stitch, cleared with every long, smooth pull of the thread. There was no music playing, no television, no radio, Definitely no conversation. My parents faced each other in perfect half-profile, still and silent as coins.
In that moment I understood-without knowing the word, of course-the meaning of stasis. And the futility of hoping that anything could change, not here, not in this room. Silence reigned; silence saturated. There couldn't possibly be any communication between them, or among us. My father spoke more in church on Sunday than at home the rest of the week. And here is the insight that ultimately saved me: Something is wrong. Other people aren't like this.
Arrested, I came down the rest of the way and drifted over to my mother, stood beside her chair. She made some gesture, a nod or a shrug of her shoulder, but she didn't look up or speak to me. She wore a tan woolen jumper with a mustard-colored blouse, white kneesocks, and loafers. She was fifty-three years old. I leaned against her tough, stringy shoulder, watching the changes in her face, thinking how gray her dry, wavy hair was. When I pressed my arm against her arm, she looked at me, startled. "What's wrong?" And she covered my forehead with her cool, spidery hand. To see if I was sick.
I considered my answer. "I don't feel good," I could have said. Had said in the past. I was a clever child, not above malingering for attention. Not above hypochondria, either.
But this night was different; this was the night I grew up. I said, "Nothing," and sidled away. My father never looked up or stopped writing. And I gave up on them. In that moment, I ran out of hope.
How lugubrious that sounds. Poor little me. In fact, it wasn't that dire. And much better to give up cleanly then and there, I think, than to yearn and long and nurse false hopes for a closeness that can never come. My parents weren't monsters. I never hated them. Years later, when my father was dying, I kept watch with my mother and sister as he lay in his steel hospital bed, stone-faced and speechless as ever. "I love you, Daddy," I told him once-only once. He was still conscious then. He turned his pale blue eyes on me and blinked. His tongue came out to wet his lips, and I thought he was going to speak. He didn't. But he nodded a little. And I thought-maybe he thinks it's understood. All these years, maybe for him it's been a given, not worth saying out loud. Maybe.
My sister is just like them. I barely know her. Eighteen years older, she's more like an aunt than a sister, some relative I rarely see. I write her spare, jovial thank you notes when she remembers my birthday with a card.
Lately I've been hearing from her more often, though. "Shall we put Mother in an assisted living facility?" she wonders, Oh, I should think so. Mother is ninety-four and losing her mind. Odd: she never gave much of herself to me, my mother, only the bare essentials, no frivolous extras like hugs, silliness, laughter, conversation. And yet now that she's all but gone, I miss her very much. My father, too. It's odd.
Why didn't I grow up remote and cold, or frightened and clinging, pursuing one wrong man after another in search of the elusive embrace of acceptance? Maybe it's only in self-help books or on television talk shows that such a fate lies in store for every lonely child. Real life is much more complicated. Or much simpler. One thing I know: love or the search for it is- stronger than neglect, or indifference, or rejection. I looked for it in other places, not in my parents' house, and I found it. Occasionally.

   The Graces didn't come to see me after all, that night Lee raced back to Emma's and told her and Rudy what Ihad just asked her not to tell them. They drove to my street and parked in front of my building for ten minutes, debating what to do. They decided to reconnoiter-drive through the alley to the back, see if my lights were on. If they were, they would park, knock at my door, and demand entrance. The lights weren't on.
They debated again, and eventually drove back to Emma's. Where they sat in Lee's car for an hour and fifteen minutes, talking about me. This was the best of all possible resolutions, since talking about me that night would have been infinitely more satisfying for everybody than talking to me. "Nobody wanted to get out of the car," Lee reported afterward. "We didn't want to land. We didn't want to go in, sit down, drink coffee, look at each other in the light. So we just sat and talked and stared straight out the windshield. Like we were at the drive-in." Emma's feelings were hurt because I'd told Lee but not her. (She didn't confide that in me, of course; Rudy did. Emma still imagines that if she hides her vulnerabilities, no one will notice she has any.) But there was no help for it, nothing I could have done except what I did. The news was too fresh-I was too raw. I shouldn't have gone to Emma's house at all that night, but at the last minute I couldn't stay away. I knew it would be warm there, and I was freezing cold.
"A metastasis, I'm almost certain," Dr. Glass said.
"I'm very sorry." It was hard to listen after that. I heard "stage four," though. And I heard "bone," and thought of the mild ache in my hip I'd thought was a muscle strain.
After that, my mind went blank. The oddest thing. I turned icy cold all over, a gelid, numbing horror. I remember leaving Dr. Class's office, but not getting on the elevator or going out of the building. 1 remember men digging up the sidewalk on P Street with jackham mers. The noise was so deafening, it jarred me awake and I realized it was raining. The bus stop was blocks away. I thought, Should I take a taxi? But it would only take me home, and what was the point of that? What was the point of anything? I stood on the curb and watched pedestrians come and go in the crosswalk, listened to the Walk/Don't Walk light click on and click off, on and off. A woman bumped me. "Oh, sorry," she said with a quick smile, and I stared at her in dull surprise. Do you think it matters? I asked her retreating back. Whether you hit me, or say excuse me, or wear a warm wool coat, or buy an expensive briefcase or read the newspaper-or make an appointment at the optometrist's for new glasses, or have a dinner party, or get enough sleep, or dream about your vacation, or meet a man, or take your vitamins, or buy flowers from the vendor on the corner? Do you think any of that matters? Nothing matters. I know it-why don't you?
I had fallen into the rut in my mind from the last time someone told me I had cancer, A habit. Chill rain soaking the shoulders of my trench coat woke me up, like the jackhammers. Mundane reality forced movement on me. I could go home, get warm, get on with it. As long as you're not dead, you're alive. I lifted my hand. Immediately a braking cab splashed water on my shoes. I told the driver my address and he took me home.
Since then, I've survived by getting from one moment to the next moment. I feed the dog, take in the mail, wipe crumbs off the counter. Contrary to how it felt, my life didn't stop in Dr. Glass's office; it keeps moving on, the future as big a mystery as ever. Well, no, that's not quite true. As a matter of fact, the only good thing I've come up with about my situation is: at least the suspense is over. It's looking as if Isabel Thorlefsen Kurtz will die of breast cancer, not in an automobile accident, not peacefully in her sleep of old age, not of AIDS or a heart attack, not in a drive-by shooting. No more wondering; finally knowing. It's something.
I want to be wide awake to the truth, not pretend and not hide, quaking, behind irony or passivity. Acceptance is dead last, though-forgive the pun-on the famous list of five stages. First comes denial, but I seem to have bypassed that one. Because of immediate past experience, I suppose; having had cancer before has inured me, to some small extent. What is the difference between hope and false hope? Who's to say what is "the best way" to die? How am I, how is anyone expected to know that? Oh, I see it's just beginning-I'll be on intimate terms with these and all the other unanswerable questions soon enough.
But I have things to do, decisions to make. I have to keep my head clear, not cloud it with thoughts of loss and dread. Plenty of time for that, too. I'm not ready for the sympathy of people who love me (this is what Emma couldn't understand, and I'll make her understand, but not yet, I can't do it yet), I have to hang on a little longer to my impersonality, my anonymity. That's why I haven't called anyone. I have to put my house in order. It's crucial to keep working, planning, going on with my life just as before, as if it still had meaning. And-I must confess to a little loop in my brain that keeps insisting I still might get out of this. A low, adamant voice saying, You're only fifty, you won't die. It can't be finished.
The last two years have been the best ever, and I wouldn't have had them if I hadn't gotten sick in the first place. So, inevitably, I must ask, was it worth it? Is this a fair trade? On the outside, it looked as if the best was just about to happen to me-satisfying work, finally some security and stability, maybe even a man to love. But on the inside, I already had everything. Life is for living, not relishing in retrospect. I've been given two splendid years of rich, tantalizing uncertainty and unexpected contentment. Was it enough?
I'm afraid of the question. I said I wouldn't do this. But everything is conspiring against me, all the things I love. I made a pot of Indian tea and drank it with saffron honey, and I savored the musky, smoky taste as never before. If I had scotch, I would pour a little glass and let it prickle on my tongue, let the hot, masculine fire burn all the way down. An inch of snow fell last night. I opened the window and scooped up a handful, let it melt on my palm. I stuck out my tongue and tasted it, and it was dirty and metallic and delicious. I can't get enough of anything. Music-but I put on the Beethoven piano sonata that always makes me cry, and when the adagio came, I broke down.
Grace suspects something. She watches me. I look up and catch her brown eyes on me, steadfast and worried. Sweet old girl. She's ten, we think, and might outlive me. I never expected that.
Little things. The thought of losing them makes them unbearably dear. It's easy to forget at a time like this that life also features cruelty, indifference, brutality, perversion, bigotry, starvation, greed, venality, madness, corruption. I only think of the sweetness. Simple things. The quarter moon, the taste of an orange. The smell of the pages of a new book. If I pause to listen, I can hear Kirby moving around in his bedroom, right over my bedroom. Would he have been my lover? I listen to the voices of my friends who call and leave me messages- "Isabel, oh God, I don't know what to say," "Isabel, please call me, I love you"-and I know I can't stay away from them much longer. I have to tell my son, my mother, my sister. Oh, the world is hurtling toward me, all the pieces of my heart flying at me at once, I'll be 1eveled by love if I don't take care.
A bone scan on Tuesday-pro forma; Glass already knows - then his office again on Wednesday. He says he'll tell me everything. I'll take a notebook and write it all down. I have to be smart, stay focused. I'll go with a list of questions. Maybe. . . no.
Yes. I'll ask Lee to go with me.
13.
Lee.