Marry or Burn Page 6

  “That may be what men look for in friendship,” Alice said. “Us girls want a commitment: call me every day or else.” How could anyone harm Alice?

  ONE NIGHT MIKE mentioned in passing that he was being treated for a disease. He had a lymphoma, a mild one. Hardly breathing, Molly looked at Alice. “They think it’s the kind that can be relatively benign,” Alice said after she took a drink of her beer. But if it was that kind, Jeff said when they got home, it didn’t sound as if it was taking a benign course in Mike’s case.

  Five years went by. In some of them Molly was able to put Mike out of her mind for days at a time. In others it seemed she stood for half the year with her hand on its way to the phone. It’s Molly. I have something to tell you. Of course he would answer sometimes, when she called Alice. At those times her own voice surprised her, greeting him with normal concern, asking questions about the chemo, the steroids, the possible dietary measures. Of course she saw him. He was getting sicker. She began to let her thoughts of him take her where they would. As for dreams, she no longer hoped for them. She would have kept him out of them if she could, because as often as not the man finally drawing her to him was breathless and thin, the chest like an egg carton when she finally lay against it.

  In real life he was not yet that bad. This condition of his did not appear to worry him. Early in chemo his hair fell out. His daughters gave him a cashmere ski cap, which he wore a time or two until they went back to school. “Half the men we know are bald,” Alice said. Nevertheless, Molly had a recurring dream of holding him, comforting him, enclosing his scalp in her hands.

  His eyebrows and lashes did not fall out. Gradually his cheeks sank in an unpleasant way, though, high up under the cheekbone where it didn’t look like the normal hollowing you might acquire in middle age if you went on a diet, but like an excavation, as if tissue might have been siphoned out. Molly knew his face so well by then that she knew where every cell belonged, and she was seeing them change, shift, vanish. She wanted to ask Alice how she could stand it. Of course Alice was watching. Then he was on steroids, and when his cheeks filled out the strange little hollows were still there, like thumbprints in dough.

  ONE DAY THE doorbell rang. When she opened the door, with the chime still hanging in the air, there he was. “Come in,” she said after a second. He walked in unsteadily—nobody knew any more which caused the gait, illness or liquor—and sat down at the kitchen table. He asked if Jeff was there, but of course Jeff was at work, it was daytime. Like many people who work on their own, like Molly, in fact, even without alcohol Mike often forgot whether it was the weekend or not and where people were who did go to the office. It wasn’t that he didn’t work hard. He was always on the track of somebody who could put him on the track of something before his deadline, and his big eyes, too big for a man really, almost in a class with Peter Lorre’s eyes, were always searching down a street or around a room or over the planes of a face. If it was your face, those eyes were a snare. They were the famished, dreaming organs you see on posters of ragged children. They had down-sweeping lashes, black and thick, that acted on Molly the way the forest in a cartoon draws the scared kids in on tiptoe. Her body followed her eyes, her mind swayed, she stepped closer. Even a man—Jeff, for example, ordinarily a man of few words—would talk more freely, and in a more fervent way, with Mike as his listener.

  “You’ve never had a friend like this,” Molly said to him.

  “He comes down there, he finds me,” Jeff said humbly. Jeff was well liked, but nobody much hung out in the Path lab or saw a lot of him. But Mike would get him out of the basement and make him eat lunch. “Drinks his lunch,” Jeff said. “I keep warning him. But you can’t tell him. He drinks because of the things he deals with.” Molly had never heard Jeff, who kept at a remove the worst of life that he himself dealt with, plated out on glass and magnified, make a psychological assessment of another man.

  “Why deal with those things?” she said, clinging shamelessly to the subject.

  Jeff said, “Fate. Fate put him there. Look at the guy. His whole life. What’s he going to do? No money for school, smart.” Another first for Jeff, generalizing about another’s life. Usually he stuck with facts. In that way he resembled Alice, who read every page of the newspaper and knew what was happening in the world without any wish to remake it in her own words. “The guy should be teaching. When he’s done with chemo I’m getting him in to talk to the students. Why not? They all watch TV, they all want to do forensics. Smartest guy I know.” People said that all the time, because Mike had not gone to college.

  Jeff could say that.

  Molly could say, “Did you see his column today?” And so on. Nothing more. She couldn’t say, What is it? What has happened to me?

  Not for years could she ask anybody for confirmation of Mike’s effect. Finally she brought it up with her friend Rita, who had known him. Even then Molly couldn’t say anything about how she had felt. And what Rita said . . . but that came later.

  On the day he came to her house Mike said, “Are you really busy?” Molly had been working at the computer but she said no. She said it several times. He said, “I’ve just seen something terrible. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  She knew this must be the child everybody had been looking for. A six-year-old boy. They already had the man who had been seen with him. It had been in the paper for days, as helicopters circled above the woods of Seward Park.

  Mike closed his eyes and made a tent over his forehead with his hands, as if he and Molly were sitting in the sun, and for a minute the eyelashes slept on the skin of his cheeks and drove all thought of what he might have seen from her mind. She supposed if he had been her husband she would have gotten used to the sight and maybe even been mildly irritated by it, as we sometimes are by a thing that once bewitched us.

  Right away she thought he must have come from the morgue. Alice had told her his visits to the morgue figured in his drinking.

  “I wish I could talk to Jeff,” he said as Molly poured coffee. His eyes had opened. He shook himself like a dog.

  She could have said, Why didn’t you go to the lab if you want to talk to Jeff?

  He and Jeff had a little contest as to which one had seen worse sights, though by then Jeff was out of the county hospital where gruesome events from the newspaper drew to a close in the cold rooms of Pathology; he was back at the university and spending most of his time looking at slides.

  “Do you want to call him from here?”

  “No . . . no.” He swirled his coffee. “This was a kid. I can’t mention this to Alice.”

  Oh? How come you can mention it to me? But she leaned forward sympathetically and cupped her mug in her hands. His attention swiveled down to her hands. She saw it. His mind would narrow like that.

  In a low, despairing voice he said, “Your hands . . . they’re nice, they’re . . .” She set the mug down. He took hold of her hands. He folded the fingers in to make fists and raised the fists to his face and ground them into his eyes. A solemn shock ran through her, as if a comb had been dragged through her body.

  All the blood had run out of her brain and into the skin and muscles of her hands, which were like invalids given up to a drug, and at the same time she had a marvelous clarity of thought, of almost disinterested pity for him. But that was quickly replaced by the familiar dazed longing. It seemed to her that he must know, having forced her hands to be the envoys of the secret, and yet something told her not to move, because assuredly he did not know, and would not want to know. When he stopped grinding her knuckles into his eyes and let go of her hands, it would shock him, she knew, if she spread them on either side of his head and pulled him across the table to her. No, he was like an animal that had come up to her in the wild, trustingly, and she had to be still.

  “That’s not really what I came about. There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” he said, still in the despairing voice. “Because of Alice.” What was coming? She had to ste
ady herself, try not to let her chest display the speed and shallowness of her breathing.

  What is love? What is it? What is it? How can it be what it seems to be, nothing? A vacancy, an invisibility, a configuration of the mind. But with a weight, perceptible to the body. And a married woman with a husband she loved and liked, caught under the weight, unable to breathe? And it wasn’t even a person for whom she felt this nothing, this love, not a personality, a self, a man who drank too much and wrote for the newspaper and had five kids, but the face and eyes of a being of some kind who lived in the body and looked out of the eyes of Mike O’Meara. A being from an earlier life trapped in the layers of this one. Or a primitive version of a human being, say a Pleistocene man off the northern grassy plain, looking for the first time into the eyes of a rough creature on the same plain, herself.

  It wasn’t even that she wanted all that intensely to go to bed with him. Or it wasn’t primarily that—though she knew a lot of people would have said so. “Lust,” Alice herself would have said in a minute, hearing of these symptoms.

  She wanted to see him. Just that. Year after year she had remembered and rehearsed and desired the sight of Mike O’Meara more than the sight of Jeff or her children or her dead mother or anyone else. She had wanted to know she would see him and for as long as possible each time and with some promise that he would come back so that she could see him again. It was a primitive feeling without very much of herself in it, like the wish to get warmer when you’re cold.

  She had other friends, who, if she had called them and wailed out what was happening to her, would have kindly said, “You pity him. He’s dying.”

  “Tell me,” Molly said to him. But again the doorbell rang.

  It was Alice, at the door. “Hello, Molly,” she said. Her voice was that of a school principal who stands up by degrees and comes out from behind a desk. “I’m surprised.” She walked in. “I’m surprised.”

  Mike was coming out of the kitchen. “Hi,” he said to Alice with a benign tiredness.

  “Hi, I saw the car,” Alice said, looking no different from the way she always looked, with her rosy cheeks and thick half-combed hair and her chin tucked into her neck in a motherly way. She had on her red necklace; her fingers were touching it. She didn’t look angry. “I just didn’t know where you’d be. Who.”

  “Don’t tell me you think I’m here with Molly.” Mike sat down heavily on the bench in Molly’s hall. Alice didn’t answer, she just stood there. Molly can still hear what he said next. “Don’t tell me you think that,” he said. “It’s not Molly.”

  “Sorry,” Alice said, without looking at Molly. It was not like Alice to leave off the I’m.

  It wasn’t very long after that that Mike began to go downhill fast. He had to go for outpatient transfusions. Molly was one of those Alice invited to drive him and sit with him while the blood dripped in.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL there was a long period when Molly contrived to have his name come up. Her friend Rita, who was a reporter at the paper, said, “O’Meara. Jeez, the poor guy. Something about him. He had that way. He never acted on it. Whoa, don’t get me wrong. But he was always kinda playing. Those eyes. I know a couple of women who—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that, Rita.”

  “Don’t speak ill of the dead?”

  “I don’t mean that. I just don’t want to know who. Who?”

  “I think Marian. Yeah. She taught their kids. And Cathy Daley at the paper. They were always flirting around. She actually tried to get him to meet her someplace. He didn’t, of course. He never would have.”

  Molly had never seen Mike flirt with anyone. Never. Was there a world for each pair of eyes? Like a private screening for each person, and yours was tailored to you?

  She tried to ask Alice about this, delicately. Maybe the woman was just a fling. Obviously his heart was still with his family. Was he a man who had flings? “No,” Alice told her. “No. That, he would never do. This was serious. He was in love. He thought we could separate, for God’s sake. He was trying to figure it all out. Whether I could take it. That’s probably the worst thing he said. ‘You can bear it, can’t you, you’re so strong.’ He was in love. He could barely walk at that point, his counts were so low, and he was talking about getting an apartment.”

  “Oh, Alice.”

  “To be with her.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I know. I know. But he didn’t get to, did he?”

  “No.”

  “He never got to. And I have to think it was because of her, because she wouldn’t. And I never knew who it was. It was a freak thing. Oh, he had his deal, with women. That was just his way. But you know him, Molly. You know how he was, about his family. But one day . . . he said he just looked up one day and there she was.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It was love. He couldn’t think about anything else. She was younger than we are, of course. But she broke up with him at one point. When she told him she wouldn’t see him any more he said that was like what he sometimes felt in the morgue. He would tell me these things. If he saw something unbearable in the morgue, his legs started to hurt. So I knew I had to let him. Oh, first I said, ‘Maybe your legs hurt because of the lymphoma.’”

  “Oh, Alice. His legs hurt. You thought it was me.”

  “Only that one day. Unbelievable. Sorry. I used to ask myself whether it was this person or that person, how young she was—I never could ask him her exact age—was she some friend of the girls’—but she was too sad-sounding to be all that young, she wasn’t so ruthless, was she, or wouldn’t she have gone off with him? Or whether she was somebody I saw in the grocery store, or at church . . . he liked Catholic women, you know, they were the kind he really liked because of filling the time at Mass when he was a kid, lusting over all those kneeling legs. But of course he didn’t go to Mass now so how would he have met them? Molly—” She gave Molly a wolfish glare. “You would tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you?”

  Jeff said the same thing to her. “You must have known who it was. Women always know.” He was angry at Mike; he wanted to have been told. He was Mike’s best friend. “Think she came to the funeral?” But at the funeral, only Alice was watching. None of this was spoken of before he died.

  Alice never apologized for saying “I’m surprised” to Molly, in her front hall. That one “Sorry” was for having even dreamed it could be her.

  Molly got through the funeral. As a friend, she could be forgiven a choked sound when the priest said, “Receive our brother Michael.” Alice held herself together, though she gave a little laughing moan a couple of times when they were all eating and drinking afterwards, and let tears run down her cheeks without wiping them. But she didn’t stutter or gasp or double over; she hugged her friends; when she wasn’t doing that she kept her arm around whichever of their children was near, or held onto Molly.

  And who was she, the one Mike chose? Who leans on the car door when the thought of him stabs her, who loses her cart in the grocery store? Who lets out a groan in the shower? Who can’t go into the part of the cemetery where he is buried, in case his family, his friends have come to visit the grave?

  They would not despise her. Why will she not make herself known to them? Why won’t she answer to them, Alice, and Jeff, and Molly?

  Invisible River

  1.

  A WOMAN STANDS at the mirror in a train station bathroom. Next to her a dark-haired girl is blending the shadow on one eyelid with a fingertip, while the woman marvels at the black pressed-down lashes, thick as a pocket flap. When both lids are done the girl pulls down her lower lip with two dark nails, perfect ovals, and examines her teeth and gums. Now she’s making an O of her lips to cream on red lipstick, furiously round and round, not pausing at the corners. All right, all right, thinks the woman, you’re a beauty but that’s too much lipstick. The girl goes on a little longer and then without blotting her lips drops the lipstick in a little velvet bag and roughly cinches
it tight.

  She grabs the handle of a black leather suitcase on scuffed wheels, with a strap around it, and drawing her black eyebrows together yanks it on one wheel through the door a fat girl coming in holds open for her. Whoever’s out there waiting for you, the woman at the mirror thinks, he’s in for it. Or maybe there’s nobody. Maybe that’s the problem.

  Of course nobody paces outside the door waiting for her, either. What train would she board, to what destination would someone accompany her, a woman of fifty-some who has laid a big brown purse in a puddle on the counter and seems content to daydream in a public bathroom? Finally she takes her hands out from under the water and pulls down the groaning belt of towel. She looks at herself. Despite her open stare she didn’t get a fraction of a glance from the girl. She isn’t old. If she were, a quick smile might easily have passed both ways between them, a small bow across time. She is unsure, herself, about applying lipstick, which may in this light have the effect of a label stuck on an orange, but eventually she does it anyway.

  Unlike the girl, whose big eyes were red-rimmed under the makeup, she is happy. Or very close. She sees the possibility.

  2.

  GROUNDLESS NEAR HAPPINESS doesn’t do anything for the Reader, if she comes across it on the page. She is looking for something with an edge.

  The Reader is blond, healthily pretty in a laissez-faire way. At first glance her clothes look casual too, but they are carefully chosen. Two years in the city have taught her where to find clothes, which colors are hers, how to minimize her breasts. Intelligence and determination have won her the job she holds, not her first by any means, despite her youth. Having worked on publications for years, ever since high school, she has a long resume that belies her wide, crooked smile and her accent. Those in the ranks above her rely on her to hear a certain range of notes, in particular the notes struck by some of the newer writers, and convey it to them in the way of someone quickly transposing a tune. Some of her enthusiasms make them scratch their heads. “Take a look at this,” they say. “What can I say, the Reader likes it.”