Chapter 35
35
You don’t remember when you slipped into somewhere else. A place where I couldn’t join you. A place away. You couldn’t hear me or sense me. I’d come in and out of the room. I’d take your hand. Jane. Jane? Good morning.
I’d put my hand under your nose for your breath, which seemed not to belong to you but to a tiny, resting mouse.
You don’t remember how your face went different then. Underwater, atmospheric. Like a pink cloud at dusk. Your eyes went rounder. As if they weren’t connected to your heart but placed on top like a snowman’s, two stones.
You don’t remember staring as if you could see through the wall, down 25, the LIE, the FDR, and through the Park, where the sun was just setting. And how it looked, unbelievably to us both, as if the buildings themselves sustained the light.
You don’t remember that on the days when I was most desperate, I’d bring the photo album onto your lap. Here we are at Yellowstone, with your night-blooming cereus, at the Zabelskis’. Your dress matched my tie. Here you are with Max. You can only see his back. Here you are, turning toward me just to smile before looking up at the canopy of elm trees in the Park’s Mall, gleaning something useful, something staggering about shadow.
You don’t remember when I’d beg you to eat.
You don’t remember that I wiped yogurt from your chin, mucus from your nose, changed the bedpan. And you didn’t turn away. You didn’t look at me either. You just kept looking wherever you’d been. As if what was happening was fated, inescapable.
You don’t remember when I begged you to prove me wrong that you were no longer mine. You don’t remember how sometimes I squeezed your hand too tightly as if it might bring you out.
You don’t remember when Max came and told me I was giving you too much medicine. You don’t remember that I told him that he didn’t have a say. Was he a doctor now too?
Enough.
You don’t remember when I came back to you and apologized for him, for any part I had in all of it, any of it.
Instead, I remember you at twenty-three, eyes the color of autumn, a dimple spooning the side of your mouth. I remember you knew things I didn’t, saw things I hadn’t, and I could tell from your face. I remember wanting to be close to you as if you were the shore or a warm cat. I remember thinking that it was your strength, your ardor, that might offer a safety net for us both.
I remember you with blue paint on your pants, your mother’s gold bangles on your arms, white sandals with two straps against your skin. I remember you swimming on your back, walking with your face up, reading, your hand making shade. I remember you painting, drawing, smudging. I remember you focused, with your lip curled. I remember you asleep, ink on the intimate side of your arm.
I remember you peeling a tangerine, walking toward me in sleet. I remember you filling a photo album, eating lentil soup with a small spoon.
I remember you soaping the sponge, using a straw. I remember you letting sand fall between your fingers. I remember you opening a door to a library. I remember you looking for a lamp switch and keeping your fingers to it even after the light was on.
I remember you walking fifteen steps ahead of me, and talking to me still. I remember how you’d hum a tune only you found true.
I remember you in ecstasy. I remember your doctor’s visits. I try to forget them.
I remember that we got through the hardest things together. How it could have been otherwise. How we still found each other’s bodies, capsized, underwater, but moving, for so so many years.
I remember how we used to sit on the benches outside Strawberry Fields, watch the dogs, scruffy, skinny, short, stocky, and remember. It wasn’t so long ago now. Do you remember?
And, Jane, do you remember all those things you taught me? How to draw a rabbit, be patient, peel a grape with my teeth. Remember how you liked your tea? Remember how you liked your mornings? Remember how you used to love when I rubbed your back with the heels of my hands? Remember that Max was lucky to just be near you, okay? I want you to remember that.
For so long, the remembering kept you alive. You cannot turn back time on the page. That’s what flashbacks are for. And we don’t have the luxury of that. No matter how evocative the language, the life.
It is evening again today. And again. Tonight, I put my whole self on your whole heart. Cannot break you. No time for pronouns. Or to give breath. Warm body. Cannot be warmed.
But I can lie here. I can remember. I find the words to say that all this, language even, is finite. Breaths, body, steps too. My hand on your shoulder. Church bells. Songs. The ending point is distinct.
But love. Memories. A promise I whispered to you once. You were asleep.
I’ll say it again. Nothing could stop it. Upend it. End it. Nothing. It goes on.
Okay, okay, I say out loud. It isn’t a plea or a promise or a poem. The repetition, as you liked to say about art, is not for the sake of itself.
It might be a chorus. Repeat only for emphasis.
A story must only be as long as a piece of string.
The room is silent and the instinct remains.
The room is dead silent.
I listen. Hear it all. The breeze. My heart. The body’s language goes on. And story.
Jane?
Love like driving with a nest of new doves on the hood.
The blanks are nestled in between everything. The non-sounds are deafening. Sometimes, the less sound, the more feeling. The more feeling, the more feeling.
The world flickers. The last sentence turns off everything. Ends on a moment. Stillness sets in. I count backward from a hundred. Forward to the end. If you are still counting, you are still breathing.
If you are still breathing, you are still listening. If you stop breathing: that’s how you know.
The difference between stopping and ending is that one is intentional. Anything can be a beginning if you say it right. Any moment can be the end.