The Sea of Light (16 page)

I realized something else had taken place in him over the past week, another change that wasn’t entirely physical. His body was emaciated, bent, fragile now, inconsequential—a ruined stick around which cloth wafted like a scarecrow’s suit. But his head seemed enormous. Swollen, barely recognizable, it was omnipresent. As if all the weight of his body had gone straight up there. His tortured cheeks glowed, making the face almost luminous.

There was a difference about him, too—as if something new shone through even the luminosity—an unspeakable, nameless substance that was terrible, but also extraordinary. He was running a high fever. Even across the room, I could feel heat radiate.

Finally, he turned his head sideways to see me better out of the slits of eyes. Then he said something very strange. At first I thought it was just feverish delirium. Or maybe there were lesions on the brain now. Then I understood.

“I felt very frail this morning. Very light. Like I could fly. And you have to stop holding me down.”

I reached to turn off my clock—set to go off in another two minutes, signaling the session’s end. What I did next was sheer instinct, it certainly didn’t come out of clinical psychology texts. I crossed over to sit beside him on the couch, and we faced each other. And I told him, very slowly, that I knew. That I thought we’d done a lot of work together over the past seven years. That, as far as I was concerned, he’d grown tremendously, and that I had been a fortunate witness to his maturation process. So—with his consent, of course—I now felt entirely comfortable with the thought of terminating his therapy. We could do so now, or the following week. Or we could take longer, if that was what he wanted. Anyway, I would always be available to him if he needed help. He could always call me.

“You, too,” he said. “You can always call on me. If you’re ever in trouble, or have need. You can call on me any time.”

We stood and shook hands, hugged each other. I could feel the bones of his shoulders and ribs knobbing out against the flesh. He left then, and died on Sunday.

*

Kay and I were friends, but it was always a difficult friendship. We competed for the same things—including Bren. Kay won. I didn’t fight it. Bren was too crazy about her.

And I loved Kay, too—for her savvy, for her mind.

But she and I clashed sometimes. Our styles were different. It was a cultural thing, I think: her with the Jewish guilt, me with the Catholic. Or, as she said once, the spikes
she
nailed into her own hands and feet were, at least, purely
metaphorical,
whereas she wasn’t sure about mine. Then she grabbed my hands, palms up, searching ostentatiously for stigmata. Very controlling. Mildly insulting. I told her, later, that it had made me want to slug her.

Still, she was good for Bren in so many ways.

And I respected her when she said she didn’t want to see me any more. It was too depressing, she said, she hoped my feelings weren’t hurt.

So I stopped going up there and just called on the phone a lot. At that point, I was more concerned for Bren than for Kay. Because, in some way—in the way she always knew how to be—Kay was all right. She understood herself. And resented dying horribly. Like most of us, she loved as much as she could. Often, not enough. But she tried, up to the end, to get better at it.

For all those reasons I could say good-bye to her when she chose. I could cry, and let her go.

*

Bren is, always has been, so different. A stoic. Borderline uncommunicative.

The thing she calls “the incident,” for instance, was a full-fledged kiss that surprised us both. It had force and sincerity, and a kind of tenderness. But at the time we were much too young to make anything of it.

Things would be made for me of other kisses, with other women. But the truth is that while my brothers and their wives, my friends and their lovers, built relationships that seemed suited to the long run—I have so far failed at lasting intimacy. Every day of the week, I tell myself, I work through the gamut of human woes with an emotionally suffering clientele. But who am I in my own life, really, to act the expert?

In the middle of berating myself, mercy will kick in. I’ll examine, reexamine. Conclude that I simply haven’t come across a real matching of needs, or of tolerance, in any woman I’ve loved. That love alone certainly isn’t the whole story—and isn’t always enough, anyway, to make a union stand or endure. Some women marry men, some women other women. And some of us live alone. The last two options are mine. Heads or tails, I say, I’ll have to keep feeling it all anyway—in my life, in my work. I will have to make the best of it.

Sometimes, after all this internal babbling, mercy kicks in in the form of an order. Spoken only once to me out loud—by Bren, actually, long ago:
Shut up, Chick. You talk too much.

And the damnedest thing about my relationship with Bren is that, without having much in common except for the fact that we both fall in love with women, we’ve been friends for so long. Over the years, I found that when she was out of my life I didn’t miss her. Although I’d think about her often.

*

“Hiya, Chick!” She waves.

You can always spot her in a crowd: that stiff-shouldered, almost martial gait, fine features and thick dark hair—a more than handsome woman—and, from halfway down the block, Boz pulling her along with his leash, my first impression is of how great she looks. I wave back, she sees, but closer up I realize she’s actually thinner and seems tired, the high color of her cheeks a little feverish.

She drops her overnight bag. The dog’s jumping up and down in friendly panic. I don’t know which one of them requires the most immediate attention, so for a moment it all feels like triage. I sort things out: quick belly pound and ear rub for Boz, Bren in my arms.

“It’s so good to see you, sweetie.”

“You too.” She lets her head rest on my shoulder a minute. Then pulls back.

“Long trip?”

“Mmmm, bad traffic. I’ll make a deal with you—you take him, I’ll take the bag. My shoulders are killing me.”

That’s when I tell her the first unguarded thing of the day:
There are no deals here, Bren. Just ask and receive. Or ask and don’t receive
—
but at least find out why not.

I grab the leash, nearly get dragged half a block with my other arm flailing in a distinctly undignified manner—Boz is crazed, and strong. But I collect myself, sweep hair back off my collar with one diva-like motion that makes her laugh, then pick up the bag too. She moves to fight me for it and I say, very deadpan: No you don’t, Brenna Allen. Don’t you butch me around.

*

I’m a pushover for animals, especially dogs—they’re so needy, and, unlike people, their needs are relatively easy to fulfill. Open can of food. Fill water bowl. Take for walk. Reap endless adoration. Become instant center of another being’s universe.

I write down “narcissism” as a diagnosis so often during the week.

But, practically speaking, that’s self-love that excludes others. Not a yearning to
be loved
by others.

Although, in my book—off the books—any neurosis is just that: a distorted longing to be loved.

And then, of course, to love.

*

Bren admires the walls’ wood finish, and a new area rug, imitation Oriental.

“The place looks great, Chick.”

I tell her I’m profiting as people get sicker and sicker.

She knows where the guest room is. She and Kay slept there several times. But I take her into it anyway. Fresh towels are laid out on a chair. Everything’s neat, clean, open drapes letting in sunlight. I want her to feel welcome. To feel ultimately safe. Boz wags along and jumps on the bed.

It occurs to me that I don’t feel quite safe myself; this weekend has been worrying me. I realize I’m afraid I won’t be nurtured at all, will spend the time being a caretaker and a mother—again—the way I do all week. But on weekdays, at least, I get paid.

I tell myself: Lady, you are a selfish pig. Your friend’s lover has recently died, for Christ’s sake. You ought to have more compassion.

So I head into the kitchen with Boz slobbering frantically after me, set up a water dish for him. Pull out some fruit and cheese for us.

Very compassionate. Very motherly.

I promise myself to be a good mother now, not a bad one. Because mothers are first and last in the heart.

And Bren, in particular, is the stoic she is partly because of her parents—both of whom were about as warm as an icehouse in winter—but especially because of her mother, who gave her a cold model of love to act out. To rebel against. She was a handsome, cold-eyed, hard-working woman, Bren’s mother. She kept a neat and dustless home, seemed to easily maintain a considerable but equal emotional distance from both spouse and children, and punished, not with rage, but with silence. Her expectations were high; her disappointments, many. I can still remember visiting once, during college days, sipping perfected coffee out of matching cups and saucers, feeling the chill settle deep, deep down as she and Bren chatted, saying little, listening less. Every once in a while her eyes would slide sideways, and evaluate me. I felt like a hawk’s prey being sized up for the kill. But the kill never came—I realized, later, that she had been frightened, too. And once, in the pale northern eyes, I thought I saw tears glimmer. But I wasn’t sure. Years later I would share these thoughts with Bren. Suggesting that her own manner of coping with pain was—like mother, like daughter—not to reach for help, but to bear the pain in silence.

Oh,
Bren said, dismissively,
that’s just a lot of your jargon, Chick. I was never really close to her, anyway.

Yes, Bren. That is the point.

*

My own mother was my hero.

Her name was Mary. Mary Logan Clifford.

Unlike her holier namesake, nothing was easy for her, certainly not giving birth. Five brothers surrounded me. Each labor had been long and painful. But she took on difficult things, family, and work, and love, and grappled with them as if they were the unwilling strands of a dry mop—wringing them apart one by one, making them fit in her hands, soaking and twisting and feeling them, thoroughly, in an attempt to know more, to serve better. Staring at her only daughter, eventually, with large loving eyes clouded by panic.

I
saw that movie about the homosexuals, the one they showed on TV. Is that your life? Because the way I felt, watching
—
like what it must be to have a heart attack.

I had to assure her, then, that I did not engage in certain types of sexual activities involving whips and chains and stirrups.

She was relieved. Otherwise, she said, she would have worried about me suffering in this life as well as in the afterlife.

“Those people, your patients. They’re homosexual too?”

“Well, Mom, not all. But most of them.”

“They know you’re that way?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course. They tell me a lot of their very personal stories—I have to tell them a little about who I am, you know? It’s only fair.”

She liked that, the part about fairness.

But don’t tell your father,
she begged.
He’ll have another stroke.

Later, though, she began to cut things out of the paper and save them for me. Articles about homosexuality. Same-sex couples. Gay rights. Especially when women were mentioned.

Her death was quick and unanticipated. A day of hemorrhage, a week in the hospital. It wasn’t pretty. Left no time for goodbyes. But she died in unconsciousness, eyes fully closed. And there was still enough body left to lay down in velvet, in a dress she had made herself, place her stiff waxy hands over the space between her breasts, put good makeup on. The sharp stab of grief—and then, grief’s softening—she’d left to us completely.

*

“Here, Bren. Eat.”

She does, setting cheese rind aside on a plate. I watch her chew a Macintosh apple seriously, thoroughly, the bites larger as her appetite seems to grow. When it’s finished she sags visibly at the kitchen table. Autumn sun streaks her face a moment, splits it into flesh and ghost-white. Boz settles down near the water dish, against a sink cabinet. I sit across the table from Bren. Thinking how strange it is to see her here in my kitchen alone. Strange and unlikely, strange and painful. But not necessarily bad.

“Tired?”

She nods.

“Hassled?”

Tears shimmer in the eyes and dry without spilling. I have a sudden urge to feel her forehead, take her temperature, but wisdom rears its ugly head and I stay where I am.

From across the table I can watch her control at work. Quelling all that grief. Hunting it down, lassoing it. Tying it hands and feet, burying it skin-deep. There it is: the last pat of deadening shovel on fresh earth, open wounds. She looks up and manages a grin.

“Work’s been crazy.”

“Ah.”

“You sweat for years to build a team that wins. I’ve got one kid—I recruited a national-class swimmer for the first time, Chick. This girl—”

She pauses, struggling.

“What, sweetie. What about her?”

“Nothing. Just funny that it’s happening now, I guess.”

“That what is happening now?”

“Success,” she says. “Winning.”

I ask if they’re the same thing.

I used to think so, she tells me. But these days, I am not sure.

*

We take a walk by the river. Boz gets tired of straining and gasping and, after a while, calms to a steady trot interrupted by occasional sniffs or pit stops at the bases of trees. I can feel them both relax more. This reassures me, too—that everything is safe after all, that I’m doing things right.