Dream of the Blue Room Page 10

After dinner, Graham and I return to our empty bar, where he reads me a passage from the collected letters of Vincent van Gogh. The excerpt is from a letter Vincent wrote to his brother in 1888: I am beginning to consider madness as a disease like any other… it came very slowly and will go slowly too, supposing it does go, of course.

  “I’d give anything to trade my ALS for an illness like that,” Graham says.

  “Madness? Surely not.”

  “Madness, alcoholism, heart disease—anything that comes with the possibility of recovery.”

  “But it never got better for Van Gogh.”

  “Even the illusion of a cure is better than the certainty that there is none,” Graham argues.

  “At least you have your sanity.”

  “ALS leaves its victims with too much sanity. Even once you’re totally paralyzed, your mind keeps running along perfectly.” He closes the book, stares at the cover, runs his fingers over the self-portrait of Van Gogh’s haunted face. “If you had to have a degenerative illness, which one would you choose?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Try.”

  “Why?”

  Graham runs his hands through his hair, toys with the ginger candies, looks up at me. “Every healthy person in the world should have to experience the certainty of slow death for one day at least.”

  I imagine Graham stretched out on a bed, reduced to half his normal weight, unable to lift a hand to scratch his face, unable to turn his head, tubes running in and out of him, nurses padding around in soft shoes, talking over him in low professional voices. It’s difficult to reconcile this vision with the Graham I know.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just remembered something I need to do.” I get up and walk away so he won’t see me crying.

  “Wait,” he says, but I keep walking. The last thing he would want from me is pity.

  At times like this I wish I could be more like Dave. He would know exactly what to do in this situation. He wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t have to hide his emotions, because he wouldn’t have any. “I see,” he would say. “Tell me, what are your symptoms? Does this hurt?”

  I wander the ship and find myself standing outside our cabin, ear pressed to the door, afraid of what I might hear. Nothing. I turn the knob, tiptoe into the room. In the darkness, I listen for the sound of Dave’s snoring, try to make out a shape on the bed. But there is no sound, no shape. I flip on the light. The bed is made, the cabin empty. I open the closet, stare at the row of Dave’s shirts, hanging neatly on wooden hangers. Blue, brown, rust, the pale yellow one I bought him last Christmas. I wonder why he brought it, try to read something into that small act—does he mean it to be a sign? Is he trying to compromise? Is he telling me that this is a gift he wears? I imagine him in his apartment at Eighty-first and York, dressing in the evening to go out. From dozens of shirts, he chooses this one. He buttons it slowly, remembering me.

  I run my fingers over the cotton, lean into the closet, trying to breathe him in—his smell, something of his presence. But his clothes don’t smell like him. They smell like the river. And then I notice a small white thing dangling from the cuff of the yellow shirt—the price tag. He has never worn it.

  I lie on the bed, stare up at the ceiling, waiting. For what, I’m not sure. I feel divided, unfocused. I want to stop loving Dave. Why is it so impossible to do so? And I want to give myself, completely, to Graham, whose need for me is clear. Dave looks at me and sees nothing, or perhaps he sees the past. Graham looks at me and sees what—hope? Love? His brief future? Perhaps in some way, I’m more like Dave than I’ve ever wanted to admit; maybe some small part of me aches to play the savior.

  There’s something I need to tell my husband, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ll give you half an hour, I think. If you’re not back in half an hour… What? What is my ultimatum? And shouldn’t someone who gives an ultimatum have something to bargain with? I watch the clock. The minutes click off in red. 9:31 … 9:37 … 9:45 … 9:59. “One more minute,” I say aloud. I count the seconds, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. No steps in the hallway. No rattling of the doorknob.

  “Okay,” I say at 10:00, rising from the bed. I smooth my dress, slip on a pair of sandals, and check the mirror, grateful for the cheap quality of the glass, the vagueness of the reflection. A little powder, a little blush. I lock the door behind me, feeling jittery, like a teenager on her way to the prom. I go out looking. It’s not Dave I’m looking for.

  I search the ship, all the places where Graham and I go together, but cannot find him. I begin to panic, counting down the days we have left together, breaking the days into hours, hours into minutes, imagining my life returning to normal, a blank state of being at my apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. My apartment, no longer ours, the side of the closet that used to hold Dave’s clothes now empty, the top two dresser drawers now home to my things, not his. I knock on Graham’s door, softly at first, then harder. No answer. Minutes later I find myself pounding on the door, saying too loudly, “Graham, are you in there?” An elderly couple passing in the hall stops and stares. The woman says, “Are you okay, sweetheart?” Only then do I realize that my face is streaked with tears.

  It is Graham who finds me sitting alone in the lounge half an hour later. “I’ve been waiting for you,” I say.

  The rain continues. “Let’s go exploring,” Graham says. We wander the ship, eventually coming upon the racquetball court. We walk past the desk and are just about to enter the court when a voice calls out behind us. “Wait! You must check in!” We go to the desk, where a sleepy attendant shoves a clipboard toward us. “You must sign here before you play.” His name tag says Bill Clinton.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Graham says. “We don’t want to play racquetball.”

  Bill Clinton looks suspiciously at Graham. “No happy happy in recreational facility. Happy happy is against regulation.”

  “We’re not here for happy happy,” Graham says. “We just want to talk.”

  Bill Clinton taps the clipboard with the pen. “You want to use court, you must play. Do you have identification?”

  “Okay,” Graham says, writing down his name and room number and sliding his driver’s license across the counter.

  Bill Clinton scrutinizes the license for a couple of minutes, then says, “In one second I get two racquets, then you play racquetball.” He takes a packet of tobacco out of his pocket and proceeds to roll a cigarette very slowly. He smokes it while thumbing through a magazine. The magazine is full of photographs of women in pink bikinis striking coy poses. Finally, when his cigarette has burned down to a nub, he puts the magazine down, disappears into a back room, and reappears with two racquets. “You must finish game by twelve thirty. At twelve thirty lights go off.”

  Once inside, we sit in the middle of the court and lay the racquets on the floor beside us. We spend a good deal of our half hour making jokes at the expense of the grouchy attendant. We laugh so hard our eyes water. I feel like I did when I was a kid and I’d go to lock-ins at Amanda Ruth’s church. We’d stay up all night playing board games and drinking Coke, and by morning we’d all be sprawled on the floor of the fellowship hall, giddy with exhaustion. “Hey,” a voice calls from the observation deck. “You can only stay if you play.” The attendant’s words are slurred, and he’s unsteady on his feet.

  “Sure, mate,” Graham calls, slipping into his Aussie charm. He picks up his racquet, stands, and slams the ball against the wall. I return it. We continue in this manner, miraculously keeping the ball in play, until Bill Clinton leaves. We sit down again.

  Graham takes the Van Gogh book out of his satchel. “Listen,” he says, opening the book to a page he has marked with a scrap of newspaper: “About my malady I can do nothing. That’s the beauty. I can do something.”

  I feel my heart lifting. “There’s some new cure? Some alternative medicine?” I have an absurd vision of Graham and me together in New York City, eating green curry chicken at Rain, w
atching a Woody Allen movie at Lincoln Plaza.

  “No. I’m finished with medicine. What I mean is that I can take care of it myself before I’m too far into this thing.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Imagine—to choose one’s own time and place of death. To make a conscious decision to leave this earth while you’re still intact, still functioning.”

  Panic rises in my chest. “You don’t seem like the kind of person to just give up.”

  “It’s not living when you can’t walk, you can’t make love. You can’t write letters or use a fork or tie your own shoes.”

  I stand up and toss the ball in the air, raise my racquet to meet it. “Let’s go another round,” I say, trying to change the subject.

  I reach for the ball on its return but miss. Graham tugs at my hand. “Eventually, carbon dioxide builds up in the blood. You suffocate in your sleep.”

  Suddenly, the lights shut off, and the court goes black as midnight. I drop my racquet on the floor and sit down beside him. “I’m so sorry,” I say, knowing that he needs something from me, and I have nothing to offer him.

  “Me too.”

  Even in this echoing room, surrounded by the smell of mold and sweat and tennis shoes, I want him. I unbutton my shirt, place his hand on my breast. He relaxes, moves closer, and then he is undressing me and I am undressing him, our hands moving quickly over buttons and zippers. He pulls me down on top of him. I keep my eyes open and wish for light, so as to clearly see him.

  Graham enters so slowly, moves as if I am a fragile thing he fears breaking, strokes my body with a quiet intensity. I grip his waist with my legs. Expertly he turns me over so that my back is to the cool hard floor. He lifts me by the small of my back, sinks deeper into me, moans and shudders. I expect it to be somehow different this time—an experience entirely new, some sensation I’ve never felt—but as it is with Dave, so it is with Graham: pain and pleasure, his need stabbing to the center of me, the physical act tied inextricably to something greater that starts somewhere in the brain and slides down to the heart. I try to keep quiet, but it is impossible. My sounds are magnified in the echoing room.

  We lie still. His weight bears down on me so that it’s difficult to breathe. Why is it that loving a man always seems to end this way—sublime suffocation, my lungs compressed and emptied—with me feeling somehow less substantial than I did before it began?

  Minutes later we separate. “Are you cold?” Graham asks.

  “A little.” He lays his jacket over me. It is made of worn brown leather with satin lining. I imagine living inside this jacket, inside this room, keeping Graham alive with the sheer strength of my desire.

  “How long’s it been?” he asks.

  “About eight months. You?”

  “Two years, give or take.”

  “I guess it was time.”

  He laughs. “Long past.”

  I rest my head on his chest. After a while I ask, “How will I know when it happens?”

  “When what happens?”

  I don’t answer, because I know he understands. I imagine him in some dusty motel room in Australia, a paid nurse at his side, someone who knows how to be discreet, checking in under a made-up name. A vial of medicine. A needle. The nurse’s quick retreat in the middle of the night, out a back door and into a waiting taxi. Some Jack Kevorkian disciple, with a firm belief in the integrity of her mission. I imagine her blonde and slim, pretty, young, her eyes misting as she drives the needle in. Graham looking up at her, mistaking her in the final confused moments for an angel, or a devil, depending.

  There’s a long silence. I can feel the ship breathing, the depth of the river like a great coffin beneath us. Finally, he says, “You’ll know.”

  At dawn, passing by the desk, we find Bill Clinton snoring, his head cradled in his arms, a full ashtray at his elbow; he makes sleeping look so easy. Several empty bottles of Baiji Beer are scattered across the desk. The room smells of mildew, old smoke, and something else, familiar and disturbing. Walking alone through the hallway toward our cabin, I realize that the familiar smell has not left, that indeed it is our own, the memory of sex clinging to my damp skin.

  FOURTEEN

  One summer, about a year after Dave and I were married, my parents spent a week with us in New York City. On the last day of their trip, I took them to the Empire State Building, where I was working at the time. I was the receptionist for a children’s clothing company that had an office on the seventy-second floor. My parents seemed pleased upon realizing that one of the elevator men knew my name. They were even more impressed when I showed an identification card and was allowed to skip to the front of the long line of tourists waiting to go up to the observatory.

  On the viewing platform at the eighty-sixth floor, my parents held onto the latticework of bars and gazed out at the city. They had never understood my love of Manhattan, had never been able to figure out why I would choose to live there. Now, I wanted them to see New York as I saw it: the vast matrix of buildings stretching out below us, their rooftops a dizzying pattern of squares and rectangles that reflected the morning sun; the gleaming silver spire of the Chrysler Building; the mammoth towers of the World Trade Center; the constant flow of yellow taxis creeping along the organized network of streets below. Most of all, I wanted them to be impressed by the fact that I navigated this city daily.

  My father took a picture of me and my mother, standing arm in arm, the brown Hudson sliding past in the background. Then I took a picture of them together, with my father standing behind my mother, his arms around her shoulders, both of them smiling. The photo, I knew, would be identical to any number of other photos I’d taken of them on family vacations over the years; the only difference would be location.

  Before leaving, we each slid a penny into a big machine, pulled the lever, and retrieved a flat copper oval imprinted with the image of the Empire State Building. On the way down, we shared the elevator with a family from Missoula, Montana. “Where do you live?” the woman asked.

  Both of my parents spoke at the same time. “Mobile, Alabama,” my mother said, while my father blurted, “Austin.”

  “Austin’s nice,” the woman said. I just stood there in confusion. Both of my parents looked at me, waiting for the fact to register. The woman told a long story about how she’d once been to Austin to see a Mac Davis concert. Meanwhile, I let the news settle. My father was no longer living with my mother. A guilty grin spread across my father’s face, and then he began to giggle. He looked down at the floor and tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t.

  “What’s so funny?” the woman’s husband said. “Did I miss something?”

  My dad started turning red. He put his hand over his mouth and faced the corner, trying to stifle that odd, inappropriate sound. But he couldn’t. He just kept laughing, while my mother retreated quietly into a corner. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. The woman put both arms protectively around her two young sons, who were staring at my dad like he was a real live lunatic. When the doors finally opened on the ground level, the couple from Missoula quickly ushered the boys out of the elevator.

  By now my dad was laughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. The three of us stepped out of the elevator, into a crowd of men and women in suits. Once we were outside, my mother clutched her purse to her side and pretended nothing had happened. My father’s laughter subsided. His face was red. He was miserable. He checked his watch and put his hands in his pockets. We began walking.

  “Well?” I said.

  “We were going to tell you,” my mother said.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “So is this a divorce?”

  “No,” my dad said, catching his breath. “Just a brief separation.”

  “You’re living in different states. That sounds serious.”

  “We’re just trying it out,” he said. He stopped at a vendor’s cart and bought three pretzels. We ate them without speaking, then pushed through t
he crowd and descended into the subway station.

  While my father bought subway tokens, I asked my mother, “What about last night?” The night before, the two of them had slept on an air mattress in the living room of my apartment. I had heard them having sex, the telltale whistling of air escaping through the tiny hole in the mattress.

  She twisted the pendant on her necklace, bit her lip. “An accident,” she said. “A moment of weakness.”

  Years before, after a brief episode between my father and a woman who managed a pet store, my mother had said, “You may stay together after something like that, but you never entirely recover.” Over the years, she had become more and more bitter, while my father had grown more and more silent; so when I learned of their separation, I wasn’t really surprised.

  As we waited for the N train, no one spoke. I did feel sad, but more than that I felt, somehow, vindicated. For the first time in my life, I believed that I understood something that my parents didn’t. Marriage seemed to me then a simple thing, and I couldn’t help but think of my parents as somehow flawed. I made a mental list of the mistakes they’d made, quite certain that I wouldn’t make the same ones myself.

  Now, walking alone through the empty hallway, feeling somewhat bruised from my night with Graham on the racquetball floor, I have an urge to call my parents and apologize for being so smug, for feeling that marriage was a challenge I could easily meet. I imagine my mother laughing and quoting a line from a country song, something about how even good love goes bad.

  FIFTEEN

  I vow to tell Dave everything, and wonder if it will even faze him. When I arrive, the cabin is empty, the bed unmade. I shower and dress, rehearsing my confession. In the tiny bathroom mirror I see a woman I hardly recognize—the circles under my eyes growing darker from so many nights without real sleep, my hair brittle from the ship’s hard water.

  In the dining room, I approach Dave at the fruit bar, where he’s preparing two plates. “Hungry?”