Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (15 page)

Since the powers that ruled the hospital had given no consideration whatsoever to creating an atmosphere in which pleasurable intimacy was easily accomplished, we decided that we would put into practice a similar system of carelessness.  If nurses and doctors and technicians felt there was no imaginable reason to knock before entering a patient’s room, then it wouldn’t be our responsibility to shield them from what they might find inside.  We were presumptuous enough to believe that we would be providing a valuable lesson to the staff.  If they happened upon us in full coital combat, we reasoned, maybe they’d think twice next time before assuming that all their patients were nothing more than sexless vessels of disease.  Unfortunately, the interruptions were so frequent — an uninterrupted series of interruptions, one could accurately say — that this crusade proved more frustrating than satisfying.  While various unwelcome interlopers would routinely happen upon us snuggled into my hospital bed together, the amount of time between intrusions wasn’t enough to achieve even a mild level of arousal.  In the end, we did what, I suppose, was expected of us all along.  We moved into the bathroom.

In we would lumber, I dragging my IV pole loaded with twenty pounds of liquid behind me, to begin groping our way toward some level of gratification.  With Jackie’s leg propped up on the toilet bowl, me clutching the cold metal support bar on the wall for leverage, we would triumphantly stake our claim to our right to consummate our love for each other.  When things really got swinging in there, when we were both good and tangled in the tubes feeding me fluids, and banging our heads against the paper towel dispenser, one of us would inevitably knock against the little lever and the loud roar of the toilet flushing would send an extra little shiver up and down our spines.

It is remarkable, the extent to which one’s surroundings can disappear when in the grip of sexual energy.  Those were the only moments when I was able to even partially forget where I was and be fully engaged in the moment and activity at hand.  Not surprisingly, however, there were times when bringing sex into the situation only added to the unreality of our existence.  Either sitting on the toilet bowl myself, with Jackie leaning back into me for support, or standing behind her as she gripped the sink with both her hands; with the smell of powerful disinfectant burning my nose and the sounds of hospital business ringing in my ears, I would watch as the waves of orgasm tore through her.  I wondered whether she was oblivious, in those few instants, to the circumstances that had led her toward those twelve seconds of bliss.  It seemed incomprehensible to me, my muscles aching as I rubbed furiously to help her reach the release she was straining for, that she could be feeling anything other than mortification over this arrangement.

I sometimes caught myself stumbling into sadistic and masochistic imaginings surrounding her inner turmoil.  Much like one might prod a painful loose tooth with his tongue, I would convince myself that Jackie was pretending her pleasure and giving me the gift of her performance out of some misguided sense of pity.  Then I’d become angry and, in the privacy of my mind, I would relish the opportunity to debase her in this way.  Other times, I would just stare at her, marveling at the miracle of the woman.  I would study her face, only inches from the drain as she stretched to squeeze the spasms out to every fiber of her being, and I would send myself out of that narrow cubicle and float off into space.  Looking down from high above, I would no longer experience the building as a hospital, or the room as a bathroom.  I would only see two small creatures, dwarfed by their surroundings to an extent unimaginable to them, busily engaged in a frantic activity that, seen from a distance, had no discernible significance at all.  None, but for the desperate determination burned into their faces.

Eventually, blow jobs in the bathroom and tubes, illness, and frailty took their toll on Jackie.  By the time I left the hospital after round three, she had become my caretaker and my partner, but lovemaking had been, for some time, an activity we shared only rarely.  I was well aware of the old adage that says “When the patient recovers, the nurse falls ill,” and it was fast becoming much more than a trite aphorism back at home with us.  For the last three months or so, even during the periods when I was well and strong enough to enjoy sex, it had become a subject surrounded by tension and discomfort.  What had at first presented itself as a series of painful attempts at intercourse was eventually diagnosed as a vaginal infection, and it stayed a vaginal infection.  For weeks.  For months.  When we discovered that Jackie’s “infection” had never really existed, and that the cause of her discomfort was actually a common allergic reaction to a contraceptive product, our problems were not alleviated by banishing the culprit.  Jackie continued to be unwilling to attempt any sexual contact.  If she could be coaxed into trying, she would lie rigidly beneath me, completely unresponsive, looking traumatized and on the verge of tears.  Any attempt to talk with her about it, any inquiry into what might be bothering her, resulted in Jackie lapsing into a state of total silence and emotional paralysis.

My mind raced wildly over all the most unbearable possibilities.  In the latter part of the last six months Jackie had been taking better care of herself by taking days and nights off every so often.  I completely understood her need for some relief from her incessant caretaking.  But I would still be seized by feelings of fear and inadequacy when male friends of Jackie’s, and often my own good buddies, would arrive to take her away from me and the hospital to go out and have a good time.  After they’d left me alone for the night, I would begin to construct the most painful explanations possible for our problems.

What if Jackie never had an infection at all?  I wondered.   Wasn’t it possible that Jackie was hiding the fact that she had become pregnant over the past few months?  I groomed and cared for this fantasy like a masochist’s good luck charm.  I embellished it, weaving in the detail of the abortion she’d had, and how she was keeping the whole thing from me to spare me any more grief than I was already suffering.

Once I had settled on this particular method to best torture myself, it was a breeze to pollute my thinking even further.  I began building upon this scenario, deciding that Jackie had kept the pregnancy from me not to spare me conflict over the dilemma, but rather because she knew that I was not the one who had caused it.  I would shuffle my plot lines daily, imagining first that one particular friend had seduced my girlfriend while I lay dying.  The next day I might cast Jackie as the villain, playing explicit films in my head of her initiating a liaison with another of my closest comrades.  Occasionally I would give myself a break, content to stop with the comparatively comfortable thought that the reason Jackie hadn’t told me about her “pregnancy” and its termination was as benign as her desire – should I happen to survive the illness — to leave me as soon as I was well.

I suppose it might have been easy enough to slice through this swamp of morbid self-pity.  After all, I could have just asked Jackie if any of these events had taken place.  But I was bound up by a more complex collection of knots than ordinary jealousy.  I was, I believe, involved in an intricate method of working through the extraordinary level of helplessness I was feeling.  All my efforts at maintaining control of my situation fell far short of accomplishing any true independence.  The fact was, by this time, I had come to rely on Jackie for the only pleasure I experienced.  A better recipe for sexual problems would be hard to come up with.

My only power existed in the privacy of my own thoughts; hence, the retribution I sought in my angry assumptions of her nonexistent betrayals of me.  Simultaneously, I was ashamed of the ways I was succumbing to the strain.  So I kept my insecurity-driven suspicions to myself, concluding that if that’s what she needed to get herself through the crisis; if that’s the sustenance she needed in order to rescue me, who was I to complain?  I didn’t want to do or say anything that might drive her further away.

Walking the trails and pathways of Temescal Canyon; sitting through one Simonton workshop after another; and then each evening with Jackie back in our grungy bungalow, I was becoming increasingly exasperated with the status quo at work in our relationship.  It wasn’t so much the problems we faced that were unacceptable to me, but the silence surrounding them.  Jackie seemed to have instituted a hard, unspoken rule against broaching the topic, and, whenever that rule was broken, she would disintegrate.  I was left trying to reconcile the promises I had made to myself in my death therapy sessions and the “Always ask for what you want one hundred percent of the time” mantra with the meek acceptance I was practicing in the privacy of my life.  During the long evenings spent alone together in our cabin, with nothing to do but talk — about the day, about our classmates, about ourselves and each other — I was covering every conceivable topic but the one that was on my mind.  And, try as I might, I couldn’t get Jackie to open up and begin a dialogue about what was bothering her.  It wasn’t that she was unwilling; that much was clear.  She was simply unable.  Any mention of the problem, any search for an opening for a discussion, resulted in her collapsing into a frozen silence.  Jackie was petrified, and any attempt I made to encroach upon her well-defended psyche, no matter how gentle the approach, was responded to as if it were an overwhelming attack.

Had it been another time in my life, I might have simply waited to see where things might go.  Had the events of the past six months not occurred, there is no telling how I might have reacted.  But at that particular juncture in my existence, I was under the spell of the theories and slogans that had served me well so far.  I might not be able to choose what happened around me, but I could decide how I would respond to it.  Any failure on my part to live up to the beliefs that I’d latched on to, at this point, felt like a potential threat to my life.  I decided that I was not going to forgo anything that might help me to maintain the remission I was in, and I stopped cooperating in the unspoken pact Jackie and I had made about the problems we were facing.  While the risks were great, toward the end of our week at the Simonton Center, I turned the same uncompromising scrutiny that I’d brought to everything so far to Jackie, and to our life together back home.  For the first time in our relationship, I started to complain.

At first, nothing else really changed.  Nothing was transformed, and our evenings continued along their usual patterns.  The only difference was that now, when Jackie started to cry, I didn’t stop talking.  I went on and on about what it was that I wanted from her; how important it was to me that we find happiness together; and how much I wanted to make love with her.  I told her that I didn’t understand what the problems were and that I would need her help in trying to solve them.  I talked, and talked, and talked.  And Jackie cried.  Oh, how she cried.  When she did speak, it was usually to say something along the lines of “I don’t know.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you knew what was wrong, would you tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m upset.”

“What are you upset about?”

“I don’t know.”

Believe it or not, this was some kind of improvement.  And even as Jackie became more and more aggressive in her defensiveness, I tried to believe that this was an improvement as well.  Eventually, as communication improved slightly, Jackie shared with me some of her fears.  She told me she perceived each of my entreaties as a subtle threat.  To Jackie’s mind, inherent in my insistence upon opening our problems up to discussion was an ultimatum: either we find a way to address difficult issues, or Evan will leave.

Our last few evenings at the Simonton Center were spent having chilling arguments like none we’d had before.  Then we’d spend the next day smiling with the others, holding hands and laughing with the group.  For the first time in my life I was walking through my days wondering at the bizarre disparity between a couple’s private persona and their public facade – and the couple included me.

Our Temescal Canyon adventure ended, as promised, with a nighttime fire walk.  All the seminar participants gathered on the lawn of the Presbyterian Church Retreat, along with the staff members and some friends of the center that had been invited.  There were what looked to be Native American drums and other musical instruments scattered about, and the ceremony started with a communal New Age jam session beside a crackling fire that sent sparks swirling around our heads.  After some singing and drumming, during which most of the seminar participants looked somewhat pained and uncomfortable, we were gathered around the hot coals for our demonstration.

I had been extremely curious about this fire-walking business.  All week it had been held out as the ultimate illustration of nearly every theory that was being passed along to us.  The main tenet of Simonton’s philosophy was simply that people could change their belief systems at will.  If one could imagine something as a reality, Carl would say, then it is just one more step to creating it as such.  Walking across burning hot coals without suffering injury certainly challenged everything I had accepted as factual in my life.  And all week, at each reverential mention of the hallowed event, my thoughts were, Sure.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

And I
wanted
to believe it.  Hell, I wanted to believe in every kind of magic and marvel that I had ever heard about.  It would have given me a much greater sense of security than the tenuous one I was trying so hard to manufacture now.  But I couldn’t.  It didn’t come naturally to me.  Maybe it was the result of having grown up so close to Manhattan.  I was a native New Yorker, and in New York, skepticism is a necessary survival mechanism.  I had already done a remarkable job of creating belief in all kinds of unprovable methodology — my healers; my visualizations; meditations; the Simonton Center itself — but each new addition required its own elaborate “prove it to me” test period.  So I was excited about the fire walk.  I wanted it to be something that would force me to reexamine my suspicious nature.  But I was just as prepared to have a good laugh at a lame  attempt at some kind of spiritual optical illusion.