The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (11 page)

He looked toward them only after he was at the bottom of the driveway and knew there was no turning back now. He had to act. He had the shovel; she was coming home tomorrow, and today was garbage pickup day. Anyway, the ground was too hard to dig a hole in which to bury them.

The air was still. The only sounds were his feet crunching the snow and a lone bird scolding the day. A hundred feet away he finally looked toward them but saw nothing. He stopped, breath held in his throat. He looked again. Nothing. The dogs were gone. He began running toward where they had been. He fell twice in the snow. They were gone. He dropped the shovel. A second snow had fallen sometime in between and even the places where their bodies had printed the snow were now filled and smoothed flat with new white. All traces were gone

F
ROM THE BEGINNING, HE
wanted no pity. Wanted no part of the awful, gentle kindness people automatically extend when they discover you are dying. He had felt it himself years before for his mother when the same disease slowly stole her face; all of the ridges and curves of a lifetime pulled back until only the faithful bones of her skull remained to remind the family of what she would soon look like forever.

Because he liked the sky at night, the only thing “cancer” originally meant to him was a splash of stars shaped vaguely like a crab. But he discovered the disease was not a scuttling, hard-shelled thing with pincers. If anything, it was a slow mauve wave that had washed the furthest shores of his body and then lazily retreated. It had its tides and they became almost predictable.

He had been married to a woman who thought she was exciting and fun. For years both of them were fooled by her conviction. When it ended, she cried and blamed him for everything—for stealing her fire and then allowing it to go out. They knew this was untrue but it was better than having to admit they were both, at heart, dull people.

They lived in the same city. Now and then he saw her, almost always with embarrassingly strange-looking people. He knew what she was up to and it saddened him. The last time they’d crossed paths, she was wearing a yellow hat and black basketball sneakers. He had run into the nearest store to avoid their meeting.

He taught history at a mediocre private school. He gave the same tests year after year and knew no matter how bright or curious the students, he was incapable of conveying any of the shine and flash of the past to them. In class they watched him with the same expression one gets watching soap commercials on television.

He had never been to Europe, never fought in a war. His purpose on earth wasn’t to live in exciting places. He’d once owned a dog but when it died he didn’t want another.

He lay in bed at night thinking the only companion he had now was the cancer that was killing him. He had thirty-seven thousand dollars in the bank and no idea of what to do with it. He certainly wasn’t going to give it to his ex-wife who would probably buy a lot of sneakers with it, or in a fit of ersatz passion give it to some struggling artist she knew.

Besides the cold inevitability of death, he was frightened by his lack of desire to do or own something completely out of the ordinary in his last days on earth. The doctors said he had a year or two to live if he was careful. He knew that was about the only thing he was good at—being careful.

At the end of the school year he notified the principal that he would not be returning in the fall. He relished the perplexed, admiring look given him when he said he couldn’t disclose why he was leaving. He had never caused that look in another person.

He sold his white car, his black television and mud-coloured couch. He had so much money that he felt guilty. He reconsidered giving some to his wife, but the memory of her ego and yellow hat dissuaded him.

On her deathbed, his mother had said she only regretted not having gone to Bali. How lucky she was to have had dreams and disappointments like that! He thought that if he went to a travel agency the colour posters and glossy pamphlets would inspire him to buy a ticket on the spur of the moment to some dangerously exotic and distant place where thin dogs lay panting in the middle of the road and women with baskets on their heads sold fresh pineapple on the beach.

The travel agent he visited took one look and suggested Disneyworld. He knew his face read banality, a cheap wristwatch, and ballpoint pens with the name of a plumbing concern on the barrel. Sitting across from this hip young woman who had probably just returned from Tangier with one of her lovers, he was tempted to say, “Look, I am different—I’m dying!” But he wasn’t that kind of man. When she saw he wasn’t interested in a four-day tour—hotel and flight included—to that land where families went to indulge their children and take a happy rest from their happy lives, she dismissed him with a blink.

He asked for a brochure on an African safari and she handed it over grudgingly, as if even photographs of lions and Victoria Falls didn’t belong in his hands.

So he began to welcome the pain when it came. Why not? If he couldn’t be remarkable, he could try to be stoic. He could keep his impending death from the rest of the world like a child’s secret. When he was gone there might even be one or two people who would be impressed by the fact they had never known he was on his way out, right up until the time he was gone.

It took him a short time to put all of his papers in order. When he was done, he closed his bank account and changed his cash into a chunk of traveller’s cheques thick enough to make his pocket bulge.

He went to New York. He didn’t know how long he would be there but it was huge and charged, and unconsciously he hoped it would lend him some of its infinite energy. He had gone there with his wife on their honeymoon and, although it scared him then, he had nothing to lose now.

One of the first things that struck him was the thought that thousands of people here were dying too. He spent one morning looking closely at faces, trying to detect through some sign or gesture in passers-by the mark of a known end. He soon gave up, trying, but came away heartened by the realization that steps away, either now or in a minute, would be someone who shared his fate.

He was sure that if he went up to the darkest, most ferocious part of Harlem he would be perfectly safe because no one would waste their time hitting him over the head. They’d be sure at a glance that he was the kind of man who only carried nine dollars and a plastic comb in his pockets. To test his theory, he took an evil-looking subway up to 125th Street at ten at night and was right—he might just as well have been invisible.

But the trip wasn’t a total loss because the streets teemed with a dangerous life that made him feel brave and adventurous. For the first time he wished his wife was around so he could call her and tell her what he’d done. Not that she would have believed him, but that made no difference because he
had
done it, and the experience was as much his as the hair on his head.

The next day the spirit of the trip to Harlem remained and, for absolutely no reason at all, he took every one of his traveller’s cheques with him that morning. How many people walk around Manhattan with almost forty thousand dollars in their pocket?

A storm blew up out of nowhere and he was caught on Fifth Avenue with nothing to protect him but his shirtsleeves. Standing under a broad awning with several other people, he happened to turn around, and saw he was in front of a very exclusive Italian menswear store. In the window was the most beautiful umbrella he had ever seen. He couldn’t imagine how something that banal could be turned into something so extraordinarily lovely. It depressed him to think that somewhere in the world were people capable of thinking this kind of beauty up every day. A beautiful umbrella. An exquisite umbrella.

It depressed him but he knew he must have it. Shivering slightly, he pushed open the heavy door and walked into a store he knew he had no business being in. Except for the fact he was actually going to buy something here. Something beautiful and outrageously expensive and soon to be his, actually his, for the rest of his short life. As he crossed the thick plum carpet, he knew he never would have done this if it hadn’t been for last night’s adventure.

The salesman who came over was dressed in a suit another Italian genius must have dreamed up. He was slow and kind and didn’t seem the least bit surprised or offended that this wet man in a vague yellow Banlon shirt was asking to see the Veroni umbrella in the window. With the gesture of a confident matador, the salesman opened the beautiful thing and placed it with great care on the floor.

The gesture was lovely but unnecessary because the man was already reaching into his pocket for the cheques. Even the umbrella seemed to accept its fate gracefully. It knew it should be on the seat of a silver Lear jet, or hung on the arm of a man with a telephone in his car, but like all beautiful and noble things, it said it would serve the dying man as well as if he’d been a prince or a tycoon. It knew its worth and would lie to the world that its new owner deserved to possess it.

It cost three hundred dollars. The man was amazed someone would have the imagination to think of asking so much money for an umbrella. But he paid and was thrilled by the salesman’s slight, approving smile.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

He was about to say no when he remembered the orange arc lights and blaring street music of the night before. He closed his eyes and saw himself dead in a few months. What did it matter? Thirty-seven thousand dollars and dead. He laughed. He knew that, more than anything else, he wanted to be buried with his umbrella next to him, like an Egyptian pharaoh, taking his own small wealth with him to the other side.

He laughed again and the salesman looked at him attentively.

“There is something. I guess it’s a strange thing to ask, but I’ve been admiring your suit ever since I came in. Is it from this store?”

“Yes, sir, only it’s last year’s model. As you know, the lapels on Veroni’s suits are much narrower this season. Would you like to see them?”

In the happiest dream he had ever known, he followed the nice man to the suit department and, after an hour of looking and choosing, he left the store with boxes and bags wrapped in the famous brown and subdued green paper of the Enrico Veroni store.

The pants to the thousand-dollar loden suit would be ready in a week, but that night he wore the cashmere sports jacket and open-necked linen shirt which, combined, cost more than he’d made in two months of teaching.

He had no idea of where to go in a king’s robes, so he walked up and down Third Avenue looking at the people and deciding on the film he wanted to see and then the restaurant for dinner afterwards.

The film was so moving and the meal so delicious that after they were over he couldn’t see ending the evening just like that, so he found a wonderful bar where it seemed like every other person was beautiful.

These people came in and out, shouting and laughing and lovely. A woman with short hair and long fingernails sat down next to him and looked him over appraisingly.

“You’re the first guy I’ve seen who looks halfway decent in Veroni stuff.”

And his magical evening went on.

The next day he woke with a hangover and the woman’s name and address written in orange felt-tip pen on his handkerchief. The first thing he did when he reached the street was to buy three men’s fashion magazines. In the quiet of an empty cafeteria, he studied their words and pictures with the zeal of a rabbinical student memorizing the Talmud.

Again he was struck by the colour and textures designers had thought to combine to produce funny, striking, wonderful outfits that made the human form a cousin to rough animals, forests in the fall, tropical sunsets.

By the middle of the morning, two wondrous things had happened to him. A pain the size of the world tore across his stomach so quickly and totally that he knew what death would be like when it came. Nothing could be more or less than that. It took every ounce of strength and courage for him not to die then. But the second thing that happened came moments after the attack, when he weakly tried to steel himself against the possible aftershock to come. He simply decided he wasn’t ready to die yet. For the time being, Death would just have to wait its turn because he had other things to do before he lay down forever with his umbrella.

In the months that followed, he learned how to buy carefully and well. He returned to Veroni’s so often that the salesman and he became quiet, if distant, friends. He finally got up the courage to tell the salesman his fantasy about “dying with his umbrella on”, as he called it now, although he said nothing of the fact that he’d be dead long before Veroni introduced his new women’s line in two years’ time.

Because the store was often empty, the salesman answered all his questions and advised him on what to buy. Once he even dissuaded the man from buying an expensive sweater because he didn’t think it would go with the other’s narrowing face and frame. The man never knew, but from the beginning the salesman suspected he was very ill. Not that he had any idea why this pale, quiet man was so obsessed with fashion; but the salesman was that rare person who unthinkingly gave all he had, though he was surprised when his gift was appreciated.

That is all. The dying man soon owned the wardrobe of a rich man with very good taste. He often stood in front of his open closet and smiled. He lived in New York until he died. Before the tin-top that was his life began to wobble and then fall, stopped, on its side, he had had a love affair with a really exciting and alive woman who was a buyer for an exclusive women’s store. She had been instantly impressed by his knowledge and taste in clothes. She was the only person he told his terrible secret to. In the greatest moment of his life, he watched her face turn to bitter lines and tears after hearing the truth. She loved him, she said. She had never known someone so nice and yet interesting. Wonderingly, he watched her cry and couldn’t believe his good luck.