Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Page 13

  Just the same, it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her. She looked first on the floor, thinking that he might have swiped the paper off the bedside table with his pajama sleeve when he set the water glass down for the last time. Or he could have taken special care not to do that—she looked under the base of the lamp. Then in the drawer of the table. Then under, and in, his slippers. She picked up and shook loose the pages of the book he had lately been reading, a paleontology book about what she believed was called the Cambrian explosion of multi-celled life-forms.

  Nothing there.

  She began rifling through the bedclothes. She stripped off the duvet, then the top sheet. There he lay, in the dark-blue silk pajamas which she had bought for him a couple of weeks ago. He had complained of feeling cold—he who had never been cold in bed before—so she went out and bought the most expensive pajamas in the store. She bought them because silk was both light and warm, and because all the other pajamas she saw—with their stripes, and their whimsical or naughty messages—made her think of old men, or comic-strip husbands, defeated shufflers. These were almost the same color as the sheets, so that little of him was revealed to her. Feet, ankles, shins. Hands, wrists, neck, head. He lay on his side, facing away from her. Still intent on the note, she moved the pillow, dragged it roughly away from under his head.

  No. No.

  Shifted from pillow to mattress, the head made a certain sound, a sound that was heavier than she would have expected. And it was that, as much as the blank expanse of the sheet, that seemed to be saying to her that the search was futile.

  The pills would have put him to sleep, taken all his workings by stealth, so that there was no dead stare, no contortion. His mouth was slightly open, but dry. The last couple of months had altered him a great deal—it was really only now that she saw how much. When his eyes had been open, or even when he had been sleeping, some effort of his had kept up the illusion that the damage was temporary—that the face of a vigorous, always potentially aggressive sixty-two-year-old man was still there, under the folds of bluish skin, the stony vigilance of illness. It had never been bone structure that gave his face its fierce and lively character—it was all in the deep-set bright eyes and the twitchy mouth and the facility of expression, the fast-changing display of creases that effected his repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience, suffering disgust. A classroom repertoire—and not always confined there.

  No more. No more. Now within a couple of hours of death (for he must have got down to business as soon as she had left, not wanting to risk the job’s not being finished when she returned), now it was plain that the wasting and crumbling had won out and his face was deeply shrunken. It was sealed, remote, aged and infantile—perhaps like the face of a baby born dead.

  The disease had three styles of onset. One involved the hands and arms. The fingers grew numb and stupid, their clasp awkward and then impossible. Or it could be the legs that weakened first, and the feet that started stumbling, soon refusing to lift themselves up steps or even over carpet edges. The third and probably the worst sort of attack was made on the throat and tongue. Swallowing became unreliable, fearful, a choking drama, and speech turned into a clotted flow of importunate syllables. It was the voluntary muscles that were affected, always, and at first that did indeed sound like a lesser evil. No misfirings in the heart or brain, no signals gone awry, no malicious rearrangements of the personality. Sight and hearing and taste and touch, and best of all intelligence, lively and strong as ever. The brain kept busy monitoring all the outlying shutdown, toting up the defaults and depletions. Wasn’t that to be preferred?

  Of course, Lewis had said. But only because of the chance it gives you, to take action.

  His own problems had started with the muscles of his legs. He had enrolled in a Seniors Fitness class (though he hated the idea) to see if strength could be bullied back into them. He thought it was working, for a week or two. But then came the lead feet, the shuffling and tripping, and before long, the diagnosis. As soon as they knew that much, they had talked about what would be done when the time came. Early in the summer, he was walking with two canes. By the end of summer he was not walking at all. But his hands could still turn the pages of a book and manage, with difficulty, a fork or spoon or pen. His speech seemed to Nina almost unaffected, though visitors had trouble with it. He had decided anyway that visitors should be banned. His diet had been changed, to make swallowing easier, and sometimes days passed without any difficulty of that kind.

  Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they—or he—might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.

  The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.

  That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis.

  Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn’t others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?

  No.

  She picked up the bedside phone book and looked for “Undertakers,” which was a word that of course did not occur. “Funeral Directors.” The exasperation she felt at that was of the sort she usually shared with him. Undertakers, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with undertakers? She turned to him and saw how she had left him, helplessly uncovered. Before she rang the number she got the sheet and the duvet back on.

  A young man’s voice asked her if the doctor was there, had the doctor been yet?

  “He didn’t need a doctor. When I came in I found him dead.”

  “When was that, then?”

  “I don’t know—twenty minutes ago.”

  “You found him passed away? So—who is your doctor? I’ll phone and send him over.”

  In their matter-of-fact discussions of suicide, Nina and Lewis had never, as she remembered, talked about whether the fact was to be kept secret or made known. In one way, she was sure, Lewis would have wanted the facts known. He would have wanted to make it known that this was his idea of an honorable and sensible way to deal with the situation he had found himself in. But there was another way in which he might have preferred no such revelation. He would not want anybody to think that this resulted from the loss of his job, his failed struggle at the school. To have them think he had caved in like this on account of his defeat there—that would have set him raging.

  She scooped the packets off the bedside table, the full ones as well as the empties, and flushed them down the toilet.

  The undertaker’s men were big local lads, former students, a bit more flustered than they wanted to show. The doctor was young, too, and a stranger—Lewis’s regular doctor was on holiday, in Greece.

  “A blessing, then,” the doctor said when he had been filled in on the facts. She was a bit surprised to hear him so openly admit that, and thought that Lewis, if he could have heard, might have caught an unwelcome whiff of religion. What the doctor said next was less surprising.

  “Would you like to talk to anybody? We have people now who can, just, you know, help you sort out your feelings.”

  “No. No. Thank you, I’m all right.”

  “You’ve lived here a long time? You have friends you can call on?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “Are you going to call somebody now?“

  “Yes,” said Nina. She was lying. As soon as the doctor, and the young bearers, and Lewis, had left the house—Lewis borne like a piece of furniture wrapped to protect it from knocks—she had t
o resume her search. It seemed now that she had been a fool to restrict it to the vicinity of the bed. She found herself going through the pockets of her dressing gown, which hung on the back of the bedroom door. An excellent place, since this was a garment she put on every morning before scurrying to make coffee, and she was always exploring its pockets to find a Kleenex, a lipstick. Except that he would have had to rise from his bed and cross the room—he who had not been able to take a step without her help for some weeks.

  But why would the note have had to be composed and put in place yesterday? Would it not have made sense to write and hide it weeks ago, especially since he didn’t know the rate at which his writing would deteriorate? And if that was the case it could be anywhere. In the drawers of her desk—where she was rummaging now. Or under the bottle of champagne, which she had bought to drink on his birthday and set on the dresser, to remind him of that date two weeks hence—or between the pages of any of the books she opened these days. He had in fact asked her, not long ago, “What are you reading on your own now?” He meant, apart from the book she was reading to him—Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford. She chose to read him entertaining history—he wouldn’t put up with fiction—and left the science books for him to manage himself. She had told him, “Just some Japanese stories,” and held up the book. Now she threw books aside to locate that one, to hold it upside down and shake the pages out. Every book she had pushed away then got the same treatment. Cushions on the chair where she habitually sat were thrown to the floor, to see what was behind them. Eventually all the cushions on the sofa were dispersed in the same way. The coffee beans shaken out of their tin, in case he had (whimsically?) concealed a farewell in there.

  She had wanted no one with her, no one to observe this search—which she had been conducting, however, with all the lights on and the curtains open. No one to remind her that she had to get hold of herself. It had been dark for some time and she realized that she ought to have something to eat. She might phone Margaret. But she did nothing. She got up to close the curtains but instead turned out the lights.

  Nina was slightly over six feet tall. Even when she was in her teens, gym teachers, guidance counselors, concerned friends of her mother’s had been urging her to get rid of her stoop. She did her best, but even now, when she looked at photographs of herself, she was dismayed to see how pliant she had made herself—shoulders drawn together, head tilted to the side, her whole attitude that of a smiling attendant. When she was young she had got used to meetings being arranged, friends bringing her together with tall men. It seemed that nothing else much mattered about the man—if he was well over six feet tall, he must be paired off with Nina. Quite often he would be sulky about this situation—a tall man, after all, could pick and choose—and Nina, still stooping and smiling, would be swamped with embarrassment.

  Her parents, at least, behaved as if her life was her own business. They were both doctors, living in a small city in Michigan. Nina lived with them after she had finished college. She taught Latin at the local high school. On her vacations she went off to Europe with those college friends who had not yet been skimmed off to marry and remarry, and probably wouldn’t be. Hiking in the Cairngorms, she and her party fell in with a pack of Australians and New Zealanders, temporary hippies whose leader appeared to be Lewis. He was a few years older than the rest, less a hippie than a seasoned wanderer, and definitely the one to be called on when disputes and difficulties arose. He was not particularly tall—three or four inches shorter than Nina. Nevertheless, he attached himself to her, persuaded her to change her itinerary and go off with him—he himself cheerfully leaving his pack to their own devices.

  It turned out that he was fed up with wandering, and also that he had a perfectly good Biology degree and a teaching certificate from New Zealand. Nina told him about the town on the east shore of Lake Huron, in Canada, where she had visited relatives when she was a child. She described the tall trees along the streets, the plain old houses, the sunsets over the lake—an excellent place for their life together, and a place where, because of Commonwealth connections, Lewis might find it easier to get a job. They did get jobs, both of them, at the high school—though Nina gave up teaching a few years later, when Latin was phased out. She could have taken upgrading courses, preparing herself to teach something else, but she was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it.

  They had left it rather late to have a child. And she suspected that they were both a little too vain—they didn’t like the thought of wrapping themselves up in the slightly comic and diminished identities of Mom and Dad. Both of them—but particularly Lewis—were admired by the students for being unlike the adults around home. More energetic mentally and physically, more complex and vivid and capable of getting some good out of life.

  She joined a choral society. Many of its recitals were given in churches, and it was then that she learned what a deep dislike Lewis had of these places. She argued that there often wasn’t any other suitable space available and it didn’t mean that the music was religious (though it was a bit hard to argue this when the music was the Messiah) . She said that he was being old-fashioned and that there was little harm any religion could do nowadays. This started a great row. They had to rush around slamming down the windows, so that their roused voices might not be heard out on the sidewalk in the warm summer evening.

  A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles.

  Can’t you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?

  If this isn’t important, nothing is.

  The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear—hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.

  That was not the last time. Nina, brought up to be so peaceable, wondered if this was normal life. She couldn’t discuss it with him—their reunions were too grateful, too sweet and silly. He called her Sweet Nina-Hyena and she called him Merry Weather Lewis.

  A few years ago, a new sort of sign started appearing on the roadside. For a long time there had been signs urging conversion, and those with large pink hearts and the flattening line of beats, meant to discourage abortion. What was showing up now were texts from Genesis.

  In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.

  God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light.

  God created Man in his own image. Male and Female created

  he them.

  Usually there was a rainbow or a rose or some symbol of Edenic loveliness painted alongside the words.

  “What is the meaning of all this?” said Nina. “It’s a change anyway. From ‘God so loved the world.’”

  “It’s creationism,” said Lewis.

  “I could figure that. I mean, why is it up on signs all over the place?“

  Lewis said there was a definite movement now to reinforce belief in the literal Bible story.

  “Adam and Eve. The same old rubbish.”

  He seemed not greatly disturbed about this—or any more affronted than he might be by the crèche that was put up every Christmas not in front of a church but on the lawn of the Town Hall. On church property was one thing, he said, town property another. Nina’s Quaker teaching had not put much emphasis on Adam and Eve, so when she got home she took out the King James Bible and read the story all the way through. She wa
s delighted by the majestic progress of those first six days—the dividing of the waters and the installation of the sun and moon and the appearance of the things that creep upon the earth and the fowls of the air, and so on.

  “This is beautiful,” she said. “It’s great poetry. People should read it.”

  He said that it was no better and no worse than any of the whole parcel of creation myths that had sprung up in all corners of the earth and that he was sick and tired of hearing about how beautiful it was, and the poetry.

  “That’s a smoke screen,” he said. “They don’t give a piss in a pot about the poetry.”

  Nina laughed. “Corners of the earth,” she said. “What kind of talk is that for a scientist? I bet it’s out of the Bible.”

  She would take a chance, once in a while, to tease him on this subject. But she had to be careful not to go too far. She had to watch out for the point at which he might sense the deadly threat, the dishonoring insult.

  Now and then she found a pamphlet in the mail. She didn’t read them through, and for a while she thought that everybody must be getting this sort of thing, along with the junk mail offering tropical holidays and other gaudy windfalls. Then she found out that Lewis was getting the same material at school— ”creationist propaganda” as he called it—left on his desk or stuffed into his pigeonhole in the office.

  “The kids have access to my desk, but who the hell is stuffing my mailbox in here?” he had said to the Principal.

  The Principal had said that he couldn’t figure it out, he was getting it too. Lewis mentioned the name of a couple of teachers on the staff, a couple of crypto-Christians as he called them, and the Principal said it wasn’t worth getting your shirt in a knot about, you could always throw the stuff away.

  There were questions in class. Of course, there always had been. You could count on it, Lewis said. Some little sickly saint of a girl or a smart-arse of either sex trying to throw a monkey wrench into evolution. Lewis had his tried-and-true ways of dealing with this. He told the disrupters that if they wanted the religious interpretation of the world’s history there was the Christian Separate School in the next town, which they were welcome to attend. Questions becoming more frequent, he added that there were buses to take them there, and they could collect their books and depart this day and hour if they had a mind to.