The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (11 page)

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d style might have changed: he cut his own hair—badly—and wore thrift shop clothes, but he was still a very attractive man. He had streaked blond hair, eyes so blue they were navy, and he was in the kind of enviable shape you enjoy when you use your body for real work. Michael had taken his shirt off that day, and Suzanne stood with her arms crossed and watched the muscles move in his back. I thought I knew a little about what she was thinking. And I had the misplaced proprietary feeling of a married woman who has a handsome single man for a friend.

One day in August, when I was seven months pregnant with my second child, Dennis, Will, and I all went up for a visit. Michael had lots of animals by then, including a big, fat pig named Sally. I had always been beguiled by pigs, or at least by the E. B. White–ish idea of them, but standing right beside Sally, no fence between us, made me a bit nervous. She ate huge mounds of scraps every day, and it is something I would have happily paid to see, the pig’s ears coyly over her eyes from the way she bent down to attack her dinner, her grunting sounds that made anyone watching smile, you really had to. The curly tail going round and round and then stilling for a certain kind of pleasure: a hard scratch to the hindquarters, or coming upon something delicious to her in her slop pan—bits of blueberry pancakes, perhaps, Sally was inordinately fond of blueberry pancakes. Bizarrely enough, she also liked bacon.

There were lots of cats and dogs by then. The cats were nearly feral, and came close to the house only at dinner-time. They formed a semicircle not far from the door and waited, and Michael put out food for them and then sat in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette and watching them.

The dogs were another matter: they loved all hu-mankind, all the time, and they lived all over the house.

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Michael favored cocker spaniels, and it seemed that one of them was always having puppies. The one he named Señorita Rosalita Carmelita had delivered seven fawn-colored puppies—all boys—on the day before we visited, and Michael let my then five-year-old son hold one of them. Will was overwhelmed with the pleasure and the re-sponsibility: he sat still as a statue, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe. When my husband asked him to smile for a photo, the most he could offer was a twitch of one side of his mouth. Rosa watched my son anxiously but did not move from nursing the rest of her brood. When the puppy was returned to her, she eagerly sniffed him everywhere she could reach, and then Michael turned the puppy on his back so that Rosa could leave no spot unexamined. “Everything appear to be in order?” he asked. Rosa looked up at him and wagged her tail, and Michael put his hands on either side of her head and kissed her full on her mouth.

“Eww,”
Will said, but he had the courtesy to whisper, and I think, too, that there was some respect and understanding mixed in with his squeamish commentary. It occurred to me to make some flip remark about Michael being lonely up here, just as I had years ago, but it seemed as though it wouldn’t be funny anymore.

I remember we went into the house afterward, and I made spaghetti sauce from the riches of Michael’s garden: onion and garlic that were sautéed in olive oil, basil and oregano and tomatoes still warm from the sun. I added a little honey and a little red wine and we let the sauce cook down, and then we ate outside, watching the sky redden, then purple, then go black and starry. Maybe it was the wood-burning stove, but I have never tasted better mari-nara. We had salad, too, butter lettuce also from the garden dressed simply with lemon juice and olive oil and salt.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Michael had Hershey bars from his last trip to town, and we ate those for dessert.

After that we moved back inside the house, and I lay Will down on Michael’s bed, where he always liked to fall asleep. I did the dishes while the men sat in the living room and talked. At one point, Michael came into the kitchen, moved close behind me, and put his arms around me. “You and Rosa,” he said quietly, and there was less irony than admiration in his voice. He put the flat of one hand to my belly, and I laid my hand over his, pressing down, so that he could feel the baby move. “Ah,” he said and kissed the back of my neck, then moved to the refrigerator for beer. “Heineken?” he yelled, and Dennis yelled back, “Great.”

When I finished the dishes, I came into the living room and waited for the evening’s entertainment: Michael had finally broken down and gotten a phone and had left a message on a more forward-thinking friend’s message machine to call him when she got home so that he could hear it ring. We waited, idly chatting, until it did ring, and then we all stared in wonder at the thing—we had slipped into Michael mode, as people often did when they visited there.

You walked onto his land, and within a few minutes, the rest of the world fell away. So when Michael’s new phone rang, it was as though a Martian had landed, and I suppose in some respects it had—Michael had by then gone a very long time without a phone—for years he’d had to walk half a mile down the road to his neighbor’s if he needed to make or receive a call. But he hardly ever did need to. He wrote letters, is what he did. He wrote,
You’ll forgive my silence. Winter is knocking at the door and I’m far away from
completing fall’s chores. Firewood in these parts is not a lux-

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ury.
In deepest summer, he wrote:
A picnic lunch on the
newly erected breezeway of Anne and Peter Sullivan.

Rhubarb crisp took first place here, followed closely by the
sweet corn , then by the honey wheat-berry bread, served still
warm from the oven. No offense to the tomatoes, which also
deserved a high place in the running, but which are too often
and easily praised.
Often, he wrote about his inability to stay with women:
Disheartening to see how soon the straw
begins to suck air. I suppose I admire your willingness to
hang tough in your marriage, despite your complaints. I
never could argue for trying to force a relationship. Once my
mind has decided there’s no future, I’d rather read a book.

Still, it’s awfully humiliating to find oneself masturbating
his way through his forties and into his fifties. Especially on
those nights I beg off to my own self, pleading the proverbial
headache. I’m afraid that the state of my love life might best
be summed up by the state of my refrigerator: I have plenty
of margarine, but I’m low on the high-priced spread.

Once, sadly, he wrote,
I came home to find little Sophie
dead at the side of the road. She had gotten out of the house
somehow and engaged in her bad habit of car chasing. She
was a pretty dog, with a pleasantly blocky face and silken
ears, and she was full of life and good humor, as Rosa’s puppies always are. Her dance card turned out far shorter than
I’d anticipated, and I buried her this morning with a regret
that seemed barely able to be contained. I put her next to
Mona, who lived a far longer time but less happily, I think.

(You might remember Mona as the Lab mix I got at the
shelter who never would lay off licking her forepaw. On a hot
afternoon , it could get on your nerves.) Sophie lies not far
from the brook she loved to swim in. I expect it will take a
while before I can visit her there. But you know one of her
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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d
virtues was patience. That and licking the grease off the
hamburger wrapper without ripping it up, allowing for a
much appreciated ease of disposal.

His stationery moved from blue fountain pen on brown Eaton pages to pulpy lined paper he found at the dump (
Reams!
he said.
If you like, you can have some, too. It makes
you feel young to write on this
) to the back of flyers and of solicitations that came in the mail. Then he began reusing envelopes from those solicitors, ironically highlighting their gaudy call outs in one way or another before he taped the envelopes shut. When he visited, he gently chided me for the paper cup dispenser I had in the children’s bathroom. Dennis suggested at one point that Michael was going round the bend; I hotly defended him.

The fall after we’d moved to yet another, bigger, house (the last one! Dennis and I promised each other), we invited Michael and several others of our friends for Thanksgiving dinner, and Michael didn’t show. Finally, we all sat down to eat without him, and the phone rang. “It’s Michael,” I said.

“Go ahead and start.” I had been fearful that we had fatally offended Michael with this last acquisition—it was a really big house—and that he was calling to say he’d decided he’d rather not be faced with yet another evening of values clashing. I figured he’d say, as he often had before, that it worked best when I came up to see him, and why didn’t I do that, soon. But it was not Michael on the phone. Rather it was his brother, Sam, whom I’d never met. He told me that Michael had asked him to call and explain that he’d not be able to come to dinner. He was in the hospital. He’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor. And what did I do? I laughed. I said,

“What?”
Then I burst into tears, and then I immediately stopped crying and apologized. I said, “What can we do to help?” Dennis came into the room and put his hand to the
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small of my back, a question, and I grabbed on to it and squeezed. Michael’s brother said it might be nice if we visited him at the hospital, but not that night, as he’d had a lot of visitors already. I said we’d go tomorrow, and his brother said maybe in a few days would be best: his surgery was tomorrow.

I hung up the phone and said to Dennis, “Let’s just eat.

I’ll tell you later.”

After we got into bed, I told Dennis what Michael’s brother had told me. We said the usual things: How could this be, what did this mean, what if he dies. We talked about the last time we saw him, how he had seemed
fine.

And then Dennis said, “I always wondered. Did you ever sleep with him?” I said no. He said, “Maybe you should.”

I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Yeah.”

“Well, which is it? ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Yeah’?”

“I guess it’s ‘Do you want to?’ ”

“
No,
Dennis.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that.” He turned out the light and rubbed my arm. “I don’t know why I said that. I guess I always thought you two were attracted to each other. And now that he’s . . . Never mind. I don’t know why I said that.”

We lay awake, silent, for a long time. Another episode of off-the-mark communication, a problem in our marriage, as I supposed it was in countless others. So many of us dream of complete honesty in our love relationships, believing it to be the way to achieve true intimacy. Then we discover that the truth can be dangerous, even cruel, and we struggle with what to offer and what to withhold.

It wasn’t true that I didn’t want to sleep with Michael.

I’d always wanted to sleep with him, and all these years 88

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d later, I still did, and I thought I understood the confused generosity of my husband. He was making an offering of his wife against sorrow and fear, and in deepest friendship.

He had assumed, for a moment, at least, the wide perspec-tive that the prospect of death can bring.

And so the cards. The phone calls. The visits to the hospital bearing homemade soup, books, funny slippers. The hope that the tests would come back one way, and they came back another. The hope again, that maybe he would defy the odds. Then, finally, the end of the road. Everything tried; nothing successful. What was left was for him to go home and try to keep comfortable for as long as possible.

We visited often at first, Dennis and I. All Michael’s friends did. But our visits fell off: the distance, the necessity of living our own lives, the way one becomes used to anything, even a good friend dying.

In mid-July, I got a call from Michael’s brother asking if I could drive Michael to the hospital the next day; he couldn’t stay at home any longer, even with all of his friends and neighbors checking in on him, it wasn’t safe.

His doctor had called Sam that morning and told him it was time. Sam asked if I could deliver Michael to Mass General tomorrow by four; Sam couldn’t, because he himself was hospitalized for a hernia repair. He could ask one of Michael’s other friends, but they’d already done so much, and they were all so busy at this time of year. Could I do it? Yes, I said, yes, of course.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Sam asked.

I confessed, guiltily, that it had been a few weeks.

“Be prepared. He’s pretty bad off now. He might need help with . . . He might need help. He’s not walking too well.”

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“I’ll take care of everything,” I said and hung up the phone as though it were made of thinnest glass.