I lean down, sniff. Not enough aftershave. Jay used to pour aftershave in his hand, then slap it on, as men do. They have a robust approach to scenting themselves. It’s so no one will think they’re wimps, I guess. Well, they’re right, you would think differently about a man who applied scent to his pulse points with his index finger. I pour a small puddle of aftershave in the palm of my hand, try to pat it on Jay’s face, but it mostly falls onto his neck, pools in the tender indentation below his Adam’s apple. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I use his sheet to blot at it. “I guess you have to do it faster. I’m sorry.” He does smell good now, though.
I look down at his still face, then at his arms, at his beautiful hands. I liked holding hands with him at the movies. It seemed as sexual as anything else we ever did. More so, in fact. His thumb would move, just slightly, to caress one of my fingers. He’d squeeze, just a little, then let go, caress my finger again. Sometimes he’d open my hand to gently rake his fingers across my palm and a kind of shock would run up my arm and into my shoulder. He knew about the power of being gentle.
I lower the bed rail, sit down beside him, remove, with some effort, his pajama top, then his pajama bottoms. I kiss his mouth. His lips smell like lemon-glycerin swabs. I don’t like that smell. I blot at his mouth with the edge of the pillowcase. Then I kiss him again. And then I unbutton my blouse and take it off. I stand to take off my jeans and then, quickly, everything else, go over to the chair and lay my things there. I have my arms wrapped around myself as I make my way back to Jay’s bedside; I have never felt quite so naked. What if someone comes in? Well, he is my husband. But this is a nursing home. I get in bed with Jay, then get out again. I’ll move the chair over, block the door with it. I see my breasts swinging in the moonlight as I push the chair across the floor. I think this image might be funny, later, but now it feels grotesque. Still, the chair will give me some peace of mind. At least this way, I’ll have some warning. “One minute,” I’ll say.
After the chair is in place, I stretch out beside Jay, pull the sheet over both of us. I lay my head on his shoulder, rest my arm gently across his stomach. “Hey, Jay,” I say. “Want to hear something?” I clear my throat. And then I sing softly, “Today I got up, and the first thing I did …” I swallow, continue singing, “The first thing I did is miss you. That’s all I do. I just miss you.” I feel the tears start, for the aching familiarity of all this, the feel of his flesh next to mine. I let my hand wander everywhere on him. “Jay,” I say into his ear. “Remember? It’s me, Lainey.” Down the hall, I hear Mrs. Eliot screaming, “Vixens! Get out of my house! I’ll call the police!” I lay my hand against the middle of Jay’s chest, feel the movement of his soft breathing. That is the only movement there is. I imagine Jay’s arms waking up suddenly to pull me closer, the slight pressure I’d feel, the stunning relief. What would I say? I think. What would he? What words would be important enough to use? I wait, but no movement comes. I reach for the angle of his jaw, rest my fingers behind it to feel the pulse in his neck. “You smell good, Jay,” I tell him. I move my leg up to lie across his. I want a solid line of connection between our two bodies, no breaks. I breathe in deeply, sigh, close my eyes and hold as still as he does. I hold so still that I begin to feel disoriented. I feel as though I suddenly hear everything, including the absence of sound. And then I feel dizzy, as though I am falling backward into a soft space where only thought exists.
Come.
I startle, open my eyes, reorient myself. Then I close them again, settle my head into Jay’s shoulder, begin to time my breathing to his. There. We can have that.
Inside my head, I start to see things, the warm-up show I have every night before I fall asleep, the parade of images that begins with things I can understand, then cannot. It is a very mysterious place we go to, when we go to sleep. I breathe in, breathe out. I say, “I love you, Jay.” The sound of my words hangs in the room, seems to hover above us like a cloud with arms that reach down. We breathe in, breathe out. We do. I can’t tell whose breath sounds are whose, and I am aware, as I feel myself falling asleep, of my gratitude at having this small communion, at being once again in this place of peace.
Six-thirty, my watch says. And at the same time I look at it, I realize where I am. At some point during the night, I turned away from Jay; I can feel him behind me. I turn quickly toward him now, look to see if the power of my presence has done anything. Apparently not. He lies still, eyes closed, presents me with the same weary blankness I’ve been studying for so long now.
I’ve slept wrong: my neck hurts, my back. I sit up, stretch, which only makes things hurt more. Then I get out of bed to collect my clothes. It’s warm in the room, stale-seeming. After I’m dressed, I open the drapes, then the window. As though it has been waiting outside, a breeze rushes in. I cover Jay, kiss his temple. “I’ll be back this afternoon,” I tell him.
Why isn’t this mouth opening? What is that smell, this silken air? Down and down. Lost.
Out in the hall, I see Wanda pushing the medication cart toward me. She nods at me, smiles.
“You have to give people pills this early?” I ask.
“Sure. Seven o’clocks. Mostly antibiotics. You have to start now to get done by seven-thirty.”
“I’ll bet people are really happy about that.”
“Yeah, especially Mrs. Eliot.” Wanda holds up a bandaged finger. “She bit me.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No. She’s done it before.”
“But … Isn’t it dangerous? I mean, aren’t people bites worse than dog bites?”
“I washed it out right away. I poured alcohol on it, too. Hurt like hell. It’s all right now. How did you do last night? Did you sleep?”
“Yeah, I did. I need to get home, though. I didn’t tell my neighbor I’d be gone so long.” I hope she slept, I think.
When I am almost to the door, I see Flozell wheeling slowly down the hall yawning. When he sees me, he yells, “You here already?”
“I’m just leaving.”
“Leaving! You been here all night?”
It seems a little inappropriate to me for us to be talking so loudly at this time of day. I walk over to him, say quietly, “Yes, I slept here.”
“No fooling. In the bed? With your husband?”
“Well.”
“That’s all right, Peaches. That’s a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I know that, Flozell.”
“Did it help?”
“No.” I look at my watch. “What are you doing up so early anyway?”
“Oh, this my time. This my best hour! I get up, take a big long piss—sorry, but you know that’s it—and then I go watch the sun come up in the day room. I do it every morning. Be my peaceful time. After this, all hell breaks out, they be getting those old skeletons up and out, line ’em up in their wheelchairs, feed ’em their mush ’fore they take ’em to the car wash. They look bad, ’fore they washed! Their hair be sticking out from the sides of their heads, look like they seen a ghost.”
“I really have to go. Speaking of breakfast.” Speaking of ghosts. “I’ve got to get the kids up.”
He wheels along beside me. “Johnny got your husband a little something. Bought him a wind chime.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, it’s in my room. She was in Chinatown, she thought he might like one. Might like the sound.”
“Well, that’s … Please tell her thank you. I’ll tell her. I’ll be back this afternoon, and we’ll hang it up. Thank you.”
Jay’s room is full of the kindness of people he’s never met. It seems a miracle to me, living in what the world has become, that there could be such overt, free caring, such loving generosity. If Jay wakes up, I’m making a turkey and having all these people over for dinner. “This is Gloria,” I’ll tell Jay. “She brought you a geranium.” Maybe he’ll know. Maybe he’ll be standing there with his arm around me—God! With his working arm around me!—and he?
??ll say, “Yes. I remember when she brought it in. I heard her.”
“She got voodoo in her background, old Johnny,” Flozell says.
“Does she?”
“I’m not lying. She got folks in New Orleans do things to you, you never know what hit you. She put a spell on me, tell you that, look like it make me crazy ’bout her for the rest of this natural life. I’m a dead man.”
“I thought you had a lot of girlfriends, Flozell.”
“I do. But she’s the main one. Other ones, they come and go. Johnny’s the permanent variety. She have the children.”
“I see.”
I am at the door, see the red sun rising up over the horizon. “There it is,” I say, and Flozell nods; says, for once, nothing.
Alice is sleeping, her mouth open slightly. I tiptoe past her, go into the kitchen, sit wearily at the table. Nothing works. Nothing I do works.
“You can’t force miracles,” I hear Evie say. “You just need to stay out of the way for when they want to come.” She is standing at the sink, the light from the window outlining her square-shouldered blouse, her plain blue skirt. “I nearly lost a daughter. My middle girl, Patricia. She was the one who liked to play in the pantry, used to sit on the floor in the corner, pretending. She’d take my purse, put my scarf on her head, my heels on over her socks. Then she’d go and sit in the corner, arms out in front of her. I guess she was driving, I don’t know, she wouldn’t ever say what she was doing, she was awful shy.
“She got pneumonia one winter. She woke up one night and she just couldn’t breathe. I never saw Walter so scared as the night we brought her down to the hospital. They were taking so long to fill out the forms when we registered. And he finally got real mad, and he stood up and hiked up his pants and said, ‘Evie, you stay here and do this; I’m taking this child up to see a doctor right now.’ And he just took her in his arms and went on up to the children’s ward, didn’t listen to what anyone was trying to tell him. Everyone thought she would die, she was so bad off. But she didn’t. There was a day she just turned the corner. No reason for it, they said. But I thought there was a reason. I thought it was something we were given, and that it was for a reason.”
I sigh, shake my head.
“Don’t you lose your faith. You have a good life, and you’re not finished together. You know, I like how you two talk, how you say so many things. That’s important. We had a hard time with that, my husband and I. We didn’t say too much, I guess we kind of kept things to ourselves. I think the best we ever did at talking was once when we were fighting. It was the worst fight we ever had, and do you know I have no memory of what it was about? No memory at all. I just know we were so angry! He’d gone stomping outside to sit on the porch, to cool off. I was in the living room, sitting in the dark; I’d turned off the light, I didn’t want any lights on. I didn’t know whether to cry or yell out loud. I had my fists balled up in my lap, didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe I’d call my sister Irene in Chicago, she never did marry. ‘Come ahead,’ she’d say; I knew she’d say that. But then Walter and I began to talk, just our voices floating through the screen back and forth. Neither of us could see each other. Well, I could see a kind of dark hulk out there on the porch swing. I could see the smoke from his cigarette rising up. But you know, I think it was the cover of the dark that let us talk that night, say things we hadn’t said before. We started with how angry we were, but then it changed into something so nice. Kind of romantic. And he had just come in the door, he was coming back inside, pushing his hair down in the back like he did when he was feeling a little shy. But right then one of the kids came down for a drink, little Billy, he was always so thirsty at night, and he wouldn’t drink bathroom water. Thought it was different. And my husband looked at me like his mouth was full of words he was dying to say but then he put his hand on Billy’s shoulder, went with him into the kitchen. I heard them talking. I heard Billy’s sleepy voice asking a question and my husband answering him, I heard the tap turn on and the water fill the glass. And that seemed to me to be all we needed to say. Any more, why, I think it would have been too much.”
I stand up, stare at the coffee pot, think whether I should make some or go back to bed.
“Might as well stay up, now,” Evie says.
Exactly what I’d decided. Start the coffee, take a shower, pretend I’ve slept just fine, sometimes that actually works. I reach through her to the sink to fill up the pot with water and she disappears like steam on the bathroom mirror, first her edges, then all of her. This is something I’ve never seen. In the midst of all of this spectacular unreality, something new. I get the feeling that she won’t be back. I don’t know whether to feel comforted or abandoned. I stand still, see the sun coming through the water in the glass pot I’m holding. Yes, she’s gone. Why, I wonder.
Floating through the middle, pulled. The sights of life on either side. Me, in a corner, in the dark, hunched over on a chair too small for me. I can see Lainey standing so close, her hair lit up, her face turned slightly away. I can’t open my mouth to call to her. But here: I feel a slow lifting, a peeling away of the veil. And there, I see. Oh. Oh.
At seven-thirty, Alice comes into the kitchen, her hand at her back like a bad actress playing an old woman. She looks like hell—face creased, eyes swollen. She slept about as well as I did.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What are you sorry about?”
“That I stayed there so long.”
“I thought you might. It’s fine.” She pours herself a cup of coffee, sits down with me, takes a sip. “Ugh.”
“It’s too old. I’ll make more.”
“Please! God, this is awful. This is like—”
“All right!”
I dump out the coffee, start a new pot while Alice watches in silence.
“Were you awfully uncomfortable on that sofa?” I ask.
“Let’s see. Yes. But you were in a chair all night. Couldn’t have been any better.”
“No, I wasn’t in a chair.”
She looks up at me. “Weren’t you at the nursing home?”
“Yes. I got in bed with him.”
“Oh. Oh! Funny, I never thought of that.”
“Me neither. Wanda did.”
“See, that’s why I like her.”
I sit down at the table. “Me too.”
“So you slept with him. God! Was it weird?”
“Kind of.”
“Did anything happen?”
“No.”
Silence. Then, “Oh, Lainey.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, I guess we each have our own troubles.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I have any troubles.”
I look sharply at her.
“It’s not so bad, as it happens. It’s not! Maybe when the truth finally gets spoken, it’s only a relief. At first, I felt awful. But I wonder now how much I felt like I was supposed to feel awful. I’m not so sure that I wasn’t as deceitful as Ed was, in my way. It’s occurred to me that maybe we picked each other because neither of us really wanted each other. Does that make any sense?”
“Oh, sure. Very clear. Very sensible.”
“I mean it, Lainey. This big a shake-up, it makes you take stock of everything, see it all in a different light. I think what I really wanted from our relationship was Timothy. And he’s here. I think that’s all Ed wanted too, and we spent years trying to talk ourselves into something else. At terrible cost. At terrible cost! This is better. I’ll stay here; he’ll go live with Mr. Beautiful, and I know everybody will be all right. There are things about living alone that I look forward to.”
The phone rings, and I grab it quickly. I don’t want it to wake up the kids, though it’s time to get them up for school pretty soon anyway. After I say hello, I hear Wanda’s voice. It is saying the most incredible thing. Though I would not have thought myself capable of it, I hear myself talking. I hear mysel
f say, “Alice? Can you take care of the girls a little longer?”
Her mouth becomes a straight line, and she gets up to come and stand beside me. I hear the coffeemaker gurgle at the same time she says, “Oh God, Lainey, is he … Did He …?”
“Thank you,” I say, into the phone, and hang it up. And then, to Alice, “He woke up.” It’s just three words, which seems amazing to me.
I have never felt the steering wheel quite the same way as I feel it now, have never been so aware of its shape and abilities. I have never stopped at red lights with such care and simultaneous impatience. “Now, drive carefully!” Alice had said, and watched from the steps of the porch as I pulled out of the driveway. We agreed that I would be the one to tell the kids—later, after I saw Jay. I am less than a block away, now. The road is still black; the trees are still rooted. I’m not sure that my head is not going to explode, that is the feeling. I wipe away tears from my face; that’s not the way I want him to see me. It’s bad enough that my hair is in a wet braid, that I have no makeup on. I’d thought I might look beautiful, when this moment came.
No one is in sight when I come in the door, and though my impulse is to run down the hall, I don’t. I walk. I bite my lips and feel as though my breath is captured inside me like a big square box with sharp corners. When I get to his room, I push open the door and there he is, sitting up in bed, being examined by a doctor, a woman I’ve never seen before. He turns, sees me, and I stop walking. My knees are becoming unreliable; I drop my purse to get rid of the weight so that I can make my way to his side.