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Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 03/10/2003 09:31:33 AM EST
© Jennifer Oh
Jennifer Oh
Tonight I am wearing a dress and sheer black nylons, the kind my ex used to like to peel off, wet and sticking to my willing legs. I met my ex at a bar. It was the night before my first med school class, it was raining, and I was having a drink. His pick-up line as he touched my chair: “Do you always wear wet stockings?” The next morning, when Sean’s blue eyes and biceps teased me from the front of the classroom, I was grateful to fate, or whatever it was that threw us together.
I am of a different opinion now.
Fate can go fuck itself.
As raindrops knock on the windows like specters uneasy in tombs, I finger my drink. A man old enough to be interested in my mother puts his forearms, crossed, on the counter. “Whiskey sour, please,” he says to the bartender. He takes a clear straw from a rack and chews its end.
While he waits he looks at my hands, then my wrists, which are encircled by silver chains. His breath reminds me of my mother’s mint garden, and I realize that his night is still sober and clear. His hair is the kind Sean might have if he ever reaches his forties: curly mud-brown frosted by white wisps, untidy and graceful against the back of his neck.
When he receives his glass he raises his head. His cheekbones leap out, like sculptures of angels arrested in flight. My eyes pull his gaze toward me. He has irises the color of clouds. They are sadder than the rain.
He puts his glass to his mouth then lets it escape the pressure of his spare lips. “Hi, I’m Jon. I’ve got AIDS. Care to talk?”
That is supposed to be my pick-up line.
*****
Over his second drink Jon wonders why I fell in love with Sean, why I allowed myself to take his sex and give him mine. To a certain extent I am mystified, but I know this: you are capable of seeing things that are not there, and you lie to yourself to make the story as fairy tale as possible.
I try to explain. That his accent fascinated me. That his medical degree, his tennis arm, his comments about my skirt lengths and lips, it all drew me in, like the forbidden treasure so gaudy and sleek that you have to touch it, even if it means certain death. That one lonely night I came dripping to his apartment, and on his rain-soaked couch I lost my virginity.
But Sean knew. He knew it was wrong.
When I was diagnosed HIV-positive a year ago I went to his apartment bent on killing him. Except that when I came in he started crying and I couldn’t hate him anymore, even if he was weeping not from guilt but self-pity. So I left him still sobbing, smothering his tears in a towel, his form slumped over his kitchen table. I would never see him again.
“I am stupid, for falling in love. Because you risk so much. It means you open holes in the softest parts of you.”
Jon takes my wet grip. “Love is never stupid. Never.”
He looks away. “Just unlucky sometimes.”
*****
The glow two doomed-to-die people see in each other. Loneliness. Desire. Whatever it is, we know we must go home together, pull off our wet clothes, and make love to each other.
When it is over, I turn and trace his sweaty nose with my thumbs. His eyelashes lift at my touch.
“Let’s die together,” I whisper.
*****
“Did I hurt you?”
“No, of course not.”
“I love your hips,” he says, his hands curving up my thighs.
I laugh. “Why?”
“They’re like marble statues. Only softer.”
And our rhythm of passion begins again.
*****
“Why are you crying?”
“I thought I would be alone until I died. I never thought I’d find anyone, ever.”
His sadness mingles with my hair. Together we breathe, listening to the rain.
*****
I am exhausted, but something else needs to be asked, and answered, before we finally go to sleep.
“Who infected you?”
“A one night stand. I was at a party and was a little drunk, and I took her home with me.”
“Why?” But I know why. Surrounded by the dark I remember what solitude is, how it can make your heart hot and achy, even for the wrong person. “When?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
Long after Jon has fallen asleep I turn the number over and over in my head. Fifteen years, my thoughts shout so loud not even the storm can drown it out. I put my head on his chest and imagine it colder, stiffer than anything alive can be. It keeps me up until daylight pushes between the curtain cracks, pulling me out of bed and into the kitchen.
*****
“A tomato sandwich for breakfast?” Jon, freshly risen from the bedclothes, smiles at me from the doorway.
I don’t smile back. “They’re good for you. They cured my dad’s warts.”
His mouth twists down as he comes and puts his arms around my neck. “It doesn’t cure AIDS by any chance, does it?”
I pull away. Because his heart is too close to mine.
“Mary?” Jon’s breath hurts my ears.
“I can’t. I don’t want to.”
He says something else but my thoughts are too loud, my tears come too fast.
I can’t. No more holes.
I pull him, push him, lock him out. But his knocking won’t go away.
I take my plate and hurl its contents out the door.
“I love you,” he says, his eyes full of rain.
This, after I have fucked him, thrown him out and assaulted him with a tomato sandwich.
I am crying and fall down the steps into his thin arms. It hurts to press hard against him but I swallow his lips and tongue whole. We are plastered together, trying to heal each other’s heart.
*****
I let him come back inside. He cooks scrambled eggs and I make myself another tomato sandwich. Jon offers to feed me some eggs. “A cure for the human condition,” he says. I laugh because his fork tickles. And our food is forgotten, quickly.
As we return to the comfort of enshrouding sheets, I know that someday all I may have left of him are the memories of his taste, how his love touched my cheek. We will hold hands during checkups, and we will comfort each other in hospital rooms. And one day I will watch his casket being lowered into the earth, somewhere forever damp from the tears of the living.
I foresee all of this. But I will be stronger than loss.
*****
It is a sunny day. We dress and walk outside where we find a patch of grass so sweet it is hard to believe that anything can perish. We lie down, closer to the earth than we will ever be until we die.
“Jon, do you believe in unicorns?”
He touches my chin, smiling. “They’re a lovely idea. Do you?”
“I’d like to believe in them. Did you know that unicorns can’t regret? And only virgins can touch them. After I first had sex with Sean, I wasn’t sure if it was worth losing the ability. And I was so sad. Because what if unicorns are real.”
“Am I worth it?”
“Yes. But I’m still sad.”
I know he understands because he wraps himself towel fashion around my damp body. I was three when someone last held me like that, with my breath seeping into the other’s pores. My mother in a rare moment of closeness cradled my newly bathed body and squeezed me, delighting in the softness of a child’s form.
But it was not like this, a man and a woman fitting so naturally together that it sends songs up and down the lengths of our limbs.
After our kiss he lies back to view the cloudless sky. I watch his lips part slowly, like two weeping lovers.
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he says.
II. Snow
Chords of color singing in my vision. Is that a unicorn I see? Silver flashes. Feathers. I reach out my hand, but it disappears. Come back, I wail.
Someone is shaking me, clutching my arms, kissing my lips.
“Wake up.”
“What?”
“You were crying. Something about your mother, then you mentioned feathers.”
My mother? I do not remember that part. Just the leaving.
“I think I was dreaming about birds.”
“And your mother?”
I do not want to talk about my mother.
We are in bed and it is snowing outside. Big flakes cover the rooftops of our neighbors’ houses, making them look soft enough to hug. Lac Léman seems to be a glacier parked by mistake in Geneva, surrounded by mountains and lonesome park benches. When Jon’s mother died, he inherited this warm chalet that resembles an ice cream stand, with its red-striped roof and white exterior.
I wish I had known his mother. I have never known anyone who painted her house with stripes.
“When I was little, I wrote a story about snow being the fluff that fell when angels aired out their pillows in the mornings. And I showed it to my mother, but she scolded me for not spelling ‘morning’ correctly.”
“I’m sure she loved you.” Jon holds me closer, but I cannot stop shivering.
“Let’s not discuss her. It’s too cold outside for that.”
He rolls away and I reach for my nightgown, a white flannel dress that used to be his mother’s. Like everything else in this place, it smells of smoky perfume and cedar log fires. Ten years ago, his mother died of too many cigarettes and too many good steaks.
My mother is a vegetarian, and she has never held a cigarette in her life.
The gown is too long but I like the way it lingers on the staircase, catching on the rug like hands on unshaven cheeks. The fireplace in the parlor is dark so I thrust in some logs, and soon light is dancing amidst the ashes.
But I am still cold, all over.
“Why do you always run away when I ask you about your mother?” Jon has followed me, and his hands touch my waist, rubbing through the soft material. He places me on the rug and runs his fingers around my neck and breasts. In a moment we are two bodies glowing, competing for shadow space on the walls.
“Your mother, she loved you,” I whisper.
He traces the trail of water on my face with his lips. “She loved me, even after I was diagnosed. She died here on a summer day, with the windows wide open. She wanted to go out with the breeze, so that her spirit could drift over the mountains as she went to heaven.”
“My mother believes in hell and that’s where she told me I would go.”
*****
“Did you ever try to reconcile with her?”
The snow crunches beneath our boots as we walk around the frozen lake. The sound reminds me of an old graveyard near my childhood home, where I used to skip rope over the gravel paths. I played hopscotch and marbles on the tombstones, well worn like the knees of a kindly grandfather. Mother was afraid of graveyards, so it was my refuge when she was angry. Sometimes I would huddle there for hours, brushing the dirt from the stones with my fingers, listening to the crickets play their evening songs.
“She and I were never close, and when I told her about being HIV-positive, she slapped me and said never to come back. That she couldn’t believe a daughter of hers could be a slut. I shamed her, and I deserved to die. I haven’t talked to her since.”
This story has been told in my head too many times for me to cry.
“Did your father understand?”
“My father was dead already. He died when I was seven.”
Jon embraces me, whispering sounds softer than the snow that he brushes from my hair.
*****
At home, we shell roasted chestnuts, warming our legs in front of the fire.
“What’s your mother like?” Jon asks.
“She’s not motherly.”
“You’re her only daughter. Maybe you should call her. I’m not convinced that she would reject you again.”
“No. Because even if she does love me, it’s too late for her to care.” Pure poison is my mother’s voice bottled from long-ago memories, and it taints my words with bitterness.
“It’s never too late to care. Neither of you can correct the past, but you can love in the present.” Jon stares at the fire. “My father, he was like your mother. He couldn’t bear to see me after I developed AIDS. After my mother died, we began talking again. Remembering the things she did to bring us together, the self-help books she bought, the family breakfasts she burned. I saw that he was an old man who was afraid to love, afraid of loss. He died five years ago. But not before he told me he loved me.”
*****
“Leave a message. Beep.”
“Mother, it’s Mary. I’m calling to tell you that I’m in Switzerland with my husband. It’s snowing here, and everything’s white.”
I pause. “Remember when Dad was still alive and we made maple sugar candy on the front doorstep, watching the snowdrifts get bigger? You loved the snow, even after Daddy put a handful down your black sweater. You said snow made you dream about angels. And then you told us to go upstairs and brush our teeth. You couldn’t ever let us go to bed without brushing our teeth. We didn’t have school the next day, and we got up late and built a fire. That was the winter before Daddy died.
“I’ll call you back. I hope you’ll talk to me. Because I love you.”
*****
That she is not home early the next morning worries me. So I call my cousin, who also lives in Vermont. “Peter, I telephoned Mother twice, but she wasn’t home. I wanted to know if something was wrong.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you – Mary, she’s dead. She had a heart attack. Two days ago. We’ll wait for you to come home for the funeral. I know you were estranged, but I’m sorry.”
I look out the window, at the mountains buried under piles of snow.
Mother, I will dream of angels for you.
*****
Peter calls me back later in the day.
“About your mother’s will – she left you her house, her jewelry, her paintings. In short, most of her assets. The rest to the AIDS foundation.”
Maybe she loved me after all.
It is something I dare only to whisper to my heart, only after Jon makes love to me that evening. But the possibility, it will have to be enough.
*****
The airport is closed for the night in order to clear the runways, so we pack our bags, planning to leave tomorrow for Vermont. After supper we walk down the pier over the lake. It cheers me to think that creatures are living under the frozen waves, their sleeping heartbeats slow but steady.
“I remember a story my mother once told me about stars. Stars were the engagement rings of rich ladies who went to heaven.”
I smile. “My mother loved diamonds. I think she might have liked that story.”
We stop by the lake’s merry-go-round, ghostly under its icy plastic cover. Jon scrubs away at the snow to peer inside.
“Look, it’s the blue unicorn. The one we rode together before the snow came.” He pulls me to the peephole he has made. It reminds me of the summer day we spent eating each other’s ice cream and riding the merry-go-round, giggling with the children. We bought all of them pink sherbet before we went home.
Jon is thinking about the children too, because he asks, “Do we have any strawberry sherbet?”
“How about some mulled wine instead?”
“Sherbet, then mulled wine, and a fire. Then bed.”
“I hope the sheets are warm,” I say.
“But cold sheets make you want to snuggle closer to your wife, especially if you’re naked.”
“Forget the sheets. What’s colder than snow?”
“Hey, not in my sweater!”
In the end, it is the wind that pushes us home, laughing.
III. Egret
In our last weeks together we discover the pond and take to feeding ducks with remnants of bread. I wheel Jon’s chair over the gravel paths, and he keeps the bag of bread tucked in his blanket, as if it holds baby birds asleep.
I have felt Jon’s arms and hands cradling me just so. With his warm thigh crooning to my sad cheek. Now, he can do little more than breathe, but it is enough. To feel the air hovering about his lips.
“Mary, remember when we jumped into Lac Léman and frightened the swans?”
We chuckle, recalling the days when he was still well enough to play. For six lovely months. Before medical bills became a priority and hospital visits more frequent.
Here at the hospice, Jon says, he feels removed, a step closer to heaven. Less resentful about leaving this world and greeting the keepers of the next. In a way he is right. It is like a gentle purgatory, this place. When I wake up in the mornings, I have a sense of expectancy, of something floating and fresh, spirit-like and cool. Then the rasp of Jon’s lungs brings me back to my body, reminding me that we are still alive, that we can still laugh together. And we do. But there are moments when we are both silent, listening to the heartbeat of the hanging clock. Watching the hands cross, too fast.
I stop the wheelchair by our usual place, a big rock smoothed by time and the rhythm of children’s feet. Here against the singing sunlight his lines, his tubes, his catheter twist as if they are broken strings, surrounding a wasted instrument. A song that is fading. But in the harmony of the outdoors Jon is at his clearest. My memories become our memories again.
“Bread?” He offers the bag. We throw crumbs, the quacking and quarreling of ducks accompanying our laughter.
After the bread is gone, we see an egret emerge from the reeds, dabbling its feet in the shadows. It is alone on this late summer day, fishing for supper by the peaceful sunset.
“I wonder if he lost his mate. He’s always by himself.”
“I’ve heard that some egrets spend most of their life alone, even though they’re monogamous. Then they find their partners again during the mating season.”
We hold hands, waiting until the tall bird makes his way back into the shadows of the trees.
On our way back to the ward, bells from a chapel make us pause, to listen.
Hallelujah, they sing. Hallelujah.
*****
Tonight he is feverish and uneasy in sleep, a puppet twitching to unheard tunes. In the dark, I doze upright on my cot.
“Mary.”
His eyes are closed.
“Are you nauseous?”
“Take off my oxygen tube. And kiss me,” he adds. “Kiss me until I remember what it was like to make love to you all night long.”
He is infectious. He has diseases I, too, must die of.
But the tube is off. We taste the wine of Greece, the snow of Paris. A swan and her cygnets. Two French women kissing on a park bench. Children playing tag in the streets of Rome. Mountain creeks and autumn leaves, circus rings and windswept beaches, tousled hair and rumpled sheets.
*****
“Do you ever think about Sean? The one who infected you?”
“No.”
“What are you going to do after I am gone?”
Weep, I want to say. Sing lullabies to your gravestone at night. But I do not say.
“I want you to call Sean. To thank him, for the gift he made possible for me to receive.”
His request bewilders me.
“I am grateful. I am selfish but I am grateful,” he says.
He starts coughing. I adjust the tubes in his nose and check his monitor.
I feel horrible. Sick.
*****
“I wondered what became of you.”
“How are you?”
“Okay. I’ve been diligent about my medications and expect to live another ten years or so.”
“Diligent? So you can infect more women? Is that why?”
Sean is quiet. “It’s hard. When you are still young and women offer themselves to you, turning them down is hard.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. You were my last.”
His voice is sad. The phone echoes with a loneliness that burns at my heart. The way Jon sounded when we first met.
“Please, forgive me.”
*****
“Why should I forgive him? Did you forgive the girl who gave it to you?”
“Yes. Because I found you.”
*****
“Jon, do you regret anything?”
“That we didn’t have children. That you will be alone.”
I climb into his bed and hold him. His sobs become quiet, a drizzle after the storm. My own tears dampen what is left of his hair.
He falls asleep on my chest. I remain awake all night, vigilant over his breathing. Remembering the ecstasy, the sadness as we pressed against each other during so many nights. Knowing that even if we never slept, we would never have enough time with each other.
I touch his eyelashes, wishing that I could see his dreams.
*****
The next morning, Jon is no longer with me.
AIDS dementia, it is called. And I do not have a name. I am who-are-you, get-out-of-here, where-is-my-mother, where-am-I?
I run out of the room, away from this hoarse skeleton. Away from death filling the pauses between his breaths. My anguish echoes like wild footsteps in the halls.
But then I hear someone. Singing. Tapping the bars of a xylophone. I stand and take in the way the notes touch the silence.
I follow the sounds and in room ten I see a little girl, humming the sorrows of childhood under her breath. Her thin arms have scabs, although they are hard to see because they blend with her dark skin. She looks up and smiles, her mouth upturning like curling feathers.
“Hello. May I come in? I’m Mary, what is your name?”
“Leah. Come and listen to this one.” She taps the shortest bar with quick motions. “It’s like an angel laughing.”
“Who gave you your xylophone?”
The child sighs. “My mother, who is waiting for me in heaven. Can you tell me what heaven is like?”
“I think it is warm. Lots of music, always. Laughter. Many sunbeams. Soft feathers. Bells that sing.”
“Like my xylophone?”
“Better.”
“Yes, because my mother is there to hear them.”
“Do you like feeding ducks? Would you like to come with me to the pond today? I usually go with my husband, but he is ill. He cannot throw the bread. Perhaps you could help me.”
“Are you an angel? Why are you crying? Did my mother send you?”
“Maybe she did.” With the palm of my hand I envelop one of her feet.
*****
Jon is still unresponsive in the evening, so I slip out and get my bread, then find the little girl’s room. Only she is not there. At first I think I may have made a mistake, but I see her xylophone, a silent rainbow resting on the bed. I look for the attending doctor.
“Where is Leah?” I ask. “The little girl in room ten?”
“She died this afternoon,” he says.
“But she was playing. I saw her, this morning.”
“Sometimes it happens in the young patients. They seem better, and then their hearts stop beating. No one knows why.”
*****
When I return to Jon, it is his voice again.
“My wife.”
But I am afraid to touch him. He is so fragile, sunken and hollowed by illness. A withered leaf clinging to a tree.
He sees my hesitation. “Are you repulsed by me?”
“No, dearest.” And I am not. His body remains beautiful in my memories.
“I believe you,” he says.
Comfort me, his eyes beg. Hold me. It is the pleading of a dying man.
So that is all I can do. Take him in my arms. Listen to the fading lifebeat.
And pray.
*****
Alone, I walk to the pond. My breath is in and out and sad. Below me the water is as soundless as the night sky, calmer than the face of the unhurried moon. I watch the egret that is without his mate but still awaits her in the evenings, waiting for the spring, when they will raise children together again.
I wonder why egrets spend most of their time apart. Perhaps loneliness sweetens their reunion, making it more blissful. Their passion when they are together, is it worth the wait, the pain of separation, the solitude?
Egrets. Regrets.
Are birds able to regret?
No one knows for certain.
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