85
Ed had lost faith in the physical properties of things. On the way up the stairs that night, he stopped on every step. She had to follow closely behind him and tap a leg to indicate which one was next, then lift it for him. He was frantic when his foot was in the air. They proceeded at a glacial pace, and then he stopped and simply wouldn’t budge, despite how hard she pushed his leg, which still had considerable strength in it, the atrophy notwithstanding. She couldn’t get him to let go of the banister. This was one of those moments—they had been coming more frequently lately—when she wished Sergei didn’t go home on the weekends.
By the time they reached the top, they were both exhausted. She steered him into the bathroom, where she undressed him with great difficulty. Getting one leg over the high lip of the bathtub was no mean feat; getting the other over seemed an impossibility. He straddled the bathtub wall like a rodeo performer athwart two prancing horses. She upset his balance enough to get his other leg in, but then her troubles started. Laying him down was out of the question: she would never get him up again. Showering him, though, presented the risk of his slipping and cracking his head open. A visit to the hospital for something so severe almost certainly meant he would be taken from her care. While the tub was dry, her anxiety was contained; when the water came on, she began fretting in earnest. Whatever purchase he had on the tacky mat was tenuous, and there was nothing for him to grab on to but her body if he started falling. She turned the shower on and cleaned him, but when the time came to emerge, his anxiety spiked. He simply wouldn’t step over the lip of the tub. She tried coaxing him, forcing his leg up, making feints at him, but nothing budged him. His legs shook from standing so long in that fixed intensity of opposition, and his body quivered under a dew of cold droplets. She decided to turn the water back on to warm him up. He stood wordless in that superfluous rinse until she shut it off. They could not go on like this. She thought to get the cordless phone and call for help, but she didn’t want to leave him alone for even the several seconds it would take her to retrieve it, and besides, she didn’t know whom to call, and she didn’t want an ambulance to come for fear of his never returning. She could shout for help, but no one would hear.
She attempted a few more times to tap and lift his leg, exhorting him to cooperate and be a man about this. She tried luring him into a sense of ease and then going after his leg when he wasn’t expecting it, but he stiffened as soon as she wrapped her arms around his calf. She wished she’d bought the goddamned shower chair. He was in a kind of agony of fatigue now. He didn’t want to resist her, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to sit and he couldn’t sit; he wanted to leave and he couldn’t leave. He somehow had the strength to stand, though she knew he couldn’t do it forever; he would eventually fall like a felled tree. She sat on the tile floor and looked at him in his nakedness.
“Please, God, tell me what to do,” she said aloud.
Something in her aspect of defeat might have triggered some atavistic impulse to protect his mate from suffering, because he motioned to step out of the tub. She leapt up to offer a steadying hand. He lifted the leg with a vigorous thrust, as if it had come unstuck from mud after a struggle. She walked him into the bedroom and saw that it had been two hours since they’d started up the stairs. It felt like an augury: his brain was freezing up. Their time left together in the house seemed precariously little.
She dressed him with deliberateness and care. He sat on the bed in the bright white of his underwear and T-shirt and she felt tenderness for him and a yearning that she almost couldn’t bear. She laid him beneath the sheet and tucked it up under his arms. She curled up to him, clinging to his side, trying to memorize the feeling of his corporal presence in the bed with her. She did not sleep. She lay listening to his breathing, watching his chest rise and fall, staring at his face in the moonlight coming through the window. Sometime in the middle of the night she felt his erection and pulled his underwear off. He did not startle awake but rather came to gently and with tender murmurings and she climbed atop him and took him inside her. She looked into his eyes as she used to when they were first married and he did not look away. Despite his incapacity in almost every area of his physical life, he was still able to climax, and she was startled into a giggling joy at the wide-eyed surprise that overtook him as he did so. She lay in his arms for a while afterward, and in the drift of her thoughts she was brought around to her parents. This unlikely coupling with Ed tonight was proof that what was visible to others was only a sliver of the spectrum of a couple’s intimate life. A hunger for contact could overcome intractable impediments. She began to reconceive of her parents’ lives, to imagine that a shadow passion overtook them when they might least have expected it to.
She had to get some distance if she wanted any hope of falling asleep, but she wanted to be close to him, so for the first time in years she attempted to sleep facing him. She didn’t think she would actually drift off, but the next thing she knew the room was flooded in light.
? ? ?
That morning, a Saturday, she wanted to pay a visit to Cindy, who’d had her gall bladder out, but she didn’t want to bring Ed. She left him with Connell and drove to Nassau University Medical Center.
When she walked in that night, she found all the lights out except for a cabinet lamp in the kitchen, and Ed lying on the cold bricks of the vestibule. She cursed herself as much as she did Connell, because she’d had a strange intimation of disaster when she’d left. She knew she couldn’t trust him, and she’d left Ed with him anyway. She called his name and got no answer.
She couldn’t lift Ed, couldn’t even get him to sit up. It was as if rigor mortis had set in while he was still alive. She rushed to the cordless phone and saw a note that said that Connell had gone to the city to meet some friends. Rage coursed through her. She brought the phone back with her to Ed and set it down. She didn’t want to call anyone until she absolutely had to. She tried to get under him and wedge him up under her thighs, but she couldn’t get a purchase on him. She tried to roll him onto the rug, but he was raving, and she gave up and tried to soothe him, to no avail. He was making his clicking noise. His body was seizing up. He had never felt heavier. She wondered whether she could manage the situation until Connell got home, but most likely he would take the last train out of Grand Central.
The ambulance arrived in minutes. Two guys strapped him to a gurney and she rode with them to Lawrence, where he was admitted. The trip in the ambulance must have revived him, because he walked in with assistance, but in the ER he went wild, screaming, flailing his arms and striking one of the orderlies. They used restraints to tie him down.
“Why?” he kept asking. “Why? Why?”
He looked less healthy than he had even a few days before. It amazed her how quickly catabolic processes could take over a body once they’d begun. She hadn’t noticed how skinny he’d gotten, how bad his teeth were, how much he needed a haircut.
She stayed as late as she was allowed. At home she couldn’t bring herself to go up to the bedroom, so she just sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t consciously intended to wait up for Connell, but after a while she realized that was what she was doing. She tried to watch television in the den, but she couldn’t concentrate on any of the shows. The only thing that made any sense to her was to sit in the silence of the kitchen. She chewed her rage, grinding her teeth.
He walked in at two fifteen. She sat silently looking at him.
“What are you doing up?” he said, throwing a canvas bag down on the island.
“I asked you to stay with your father. Why did you leave him alone?”
“It was only for a little while.”
“What made you think it was okay to leave him alone?”
She had shouted. She saw the boy flinch, his eyes widen with fear. He picked the bag off the counter and put it across his chest as if he might make a run for it.
“He was asleep in bed when I left. He wasn’t going anywhere, and you were coming home in an hour.”
“Well,” she said. “He went somewhere.”
? ? ?
She went upstairs to put her head down for a moment. The next thing she knew, the room was bright and Sergei’s throaty greeting was booming up at her from the bottom of the staircase. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. She remembered that Ed was in the hospital.
She went to the banister and looked down the landing. “I should have called you,” she said. “With everything that was going on, I forgot. I didn’t need you to come.”
He stood in the vestibule holding his hat against his chest. “You not go to church today?”
Lately he had taken to coming earlier on Sundays, to be there when they returned from twelve o’clock Mass.
“Something’s happened with Ed,” she said. “He had some kind of collapse. He’s in the hospital.”
“I stay here with you,” he said.
“I’m leaving soon.”
“I stay anyway.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I stay with you,” he said again, this time more decisively.
Connell wasn’t in his room. She called downstairs to him, but he didn’t answer there either. She dressed without showering, not because of the late hour but because with Ed’s absence it felt like Sergei was a guest in the house, and even though Sergei had passed many hours there sitting and doing nothing, she had a strange feeling of having to attend to him.
When she got downstairs she found him sitting at the kitchen table in a state of contained agitation. She could see his deep breathing, the tautness in his fists, one of which still clutched his hat. He asked what had happened. When she told him, his hand on the hat squeezed tighter.
“I stay here,” he said.