A Jest of God (24 page)

They said I was a co-operative patient, to lie so still. How did they know? They thought I was worried about having cancer.

And of course I was, as well. There is room enough in anyone’s bonehouse for too much duplicity.

Nick, at first in there I talked to all the time, on the private telephone of silence. I thought I would ignore the walls, the hollow needles filled with oblivion, the faces, the kindly prodding eyes. I thought if the old game could be coaxed and
conjured up once more, it would be a way of seeing the days through by not seeing them. So I allowed that I was in the hospital, but it was always visiting hours and you were there. Sometimes you were there because everything had been done and settled in advance.
Item on City page – High School Teacher’s Wife Dies in Tinned Salmon Ptomaine Case.
Or more satisfactorily, in an obscure column of small print close to the obituaries,
Notice of Divorce
, and after a decent interval of thirty seconds, printed notices to friends and relatives,
Mrs. Niall Cameron has pleasure in announcing the forthcoming
– and so on. Sometimes you were there with nothing settled, but that didn’t matter – I never held out for any precise settlement. You wanted to be there, was the thing. Naturally, you were concerned about the child. Thousands wouldn’t have been, but you were. Of course. It went without saying, But even more, you were concerned about me. You kept saying “Are you sure you’re all right, Rachel?” I had to laugh a little at that, because men always think it’s much worse than it really is, and as I told you, unless the woman is positively deformed there’s actually nothing to get alarmed about in ninety per cent of cases, barring bad luck. Stacey’s voice, her exact words, those years ago, the last time she visited here – “As I told Mac, unless a woman is positively –”

Then the operation. Afterwards, I felt only sick. Nothing else mattered, not even you.

You weren’t there, after that. Something collapsed, some edifice. No – not so much, that, not a breaking, nothing so violent. A gate closed, quite quietly, and when I tried to open it again, it wouldn’t. There wasn’t any way around it. No way in, not there, not any more. Visa cancelled. I don’t know why. The gate just shut. I once used to try to stop myself going there, but now when I tried to get in, I couldn’t. I needed to and wanted to, but I couldn’t.

Nick – listen –

That’s what I was afraid I would say under the anaesthetic. When I came to, there was only myself in the room, and then I saw there was a very young nurse as well. I asked her, and at first she wouldn’t say, although I could see she knew, because I suppose they’re not supposed to tell, and I was certain I had spoken your name and God knows what else. “Nick, what I love is the way the hair grows under your arms and down from your belly to your sex, and the way your thighs feel, and your voice’s never-quite-caught mockery –”

What did I say?

I must have sounded so obsessed that finally she told me, explaining beforehand that patients said some funny things and it made no sense and so one shouldn’t mind. Then she repeated what she’d heard me mumble.

I am the mother now.

The tumour turned out to be benign. The surgeon told me the next day. “You are a lucky young woman,” he said, and I felt weak-mindedly touched by the adjective, although he was all of sixty and would have thought of me as young no matter how haggard I looked. “You are out of danger,” he said. I laughed, I guess, and said, “How can I be – I don’t feel dead yet.” And he looked at me for the merest flick of an instant, only curiosity, and then he passed on to another bed.

The days and trays followed one another. Flowers were received, and letters. Calla sent a dozen yellow roses. Willard and Angela sent a potted begonia. How like Willard, something practical that would last. My kids sent russet asters with a card in Calla’s beautiful script –
From Grade Two
, and they had all signed their names, the faint spidery printing of Eva Darley, Petula Thomas, Marion MacVey, the heavily pressed-down pencil strokes of David Torrent, Ross Gunn, George
Crawley, and one who had evidently thought his surname too laborious and so put only Jim L. I felt something at the sight of that card, the first of anything I’d felt since the operation was over, and when I once started to cry went on for a long time and the nurses said delayed shock and seemed unperturbed as long as it could be readily explained.

Mother had wanted to come into the city with me. I said
No.
She was hurt. “I won’t hear of you going in there all alone, dear – why, that would be simply awful.”
No.
“But Rachel, all on your own with no family – it’s unthinkable.”
No.
Later, when it was all over, I wrote to her and explained I hadn’t wanted her to undergo the strain, what with her heart and everything. I suppose she knew I lied. I was sorry. I couldn’t help it, but I was sorry. She sent letters every day. She was worried the whole time. Yes, I know. She really was. I know.

When I was discharged – like a freed prisoner, I think, slightly dazed at the sudden concrete presence of the outside – I travelled back to Manawaka by bus. Calla came into the city to get me, to come back with me. She didn’t fuss or treat me like an invalid, the way some people might have done, forever asking after one’s comfort until the burden of reassuring them that you are fine becomes unbearable. No, she simply said, “You won’t want to talk much, I expect,” and for the whole three hours we hardly said a word. I wanted to thank her for this gift, which had cost her something, but I could not seem to clarify my mind enough to decide what could be said and what could not. So I never mentioned it, and she thinks still, no doubt, that I never noticed.

I felt, those first few days back at home, brittle and thin-textured, like a dried autumn flowerstalk that might snap in the slightest wind, an empty eggshell skull that might
crumble at the slightest tapping from the outside. I wanted only to take great care. Not of my flesh and bones, which were resilient enough, as I had discovered, but of the other.
Nothing must disturb me.
That’s what I thought. Nothing must happen to disturb me. Everything must be exceedingly calm. We must have no difficulties. Do not let there be any arguments or anything unexpected which demands decision or response. This was all I prayed, to no one or to whoever might be listening, prayed unprayerfully, not with any violence of demand or any valiance of hope, but only sending the words out, in case.
Do you read me? This
message is being sent out to the cosmos, or into the same, by an amateur transmitter who wishes for the moment to sign off. Don’t let anything happen.

I wasn’t quite myself.

Mother pampered me for a week, which was appreciated, and then for a further week, which wasn’t. Then she had an attack and her mouth went dark lilac and Doctor Raven came in the night and I got up and was recovered and now we are back to normal.

When she was reasonably all right again, that night, and Doctor Raven had gone, I made tea and sat beside her for a while. Just as she was beginning to go off to sleep she murmured something so fretfully that I wondered how many thousand times she’d stabbed herself with it.

Niall always thinks I am so stupid.

I looked at her – she was asleep now – the ashes of her face, the ashes of her hair. I drew the sheet and blanket up around her scrawny and nicely lace-nyloned shoulders, as people do when there is nothing they can do. Then I went back to my own room and got out my clothes, ready for the next day, knowing I would be returning to school.

That was the night I quit sending out my swaddled embryo wishes for nothing to happen. No use asking the impossible, even of God.

“Rachel, do you think you should go out this evening, dear?”

“I won’t be long. I’m only going for some cigarettes.”

“Oh – do you really need them, dear?”

“Well, I’ve run out.”

“It’s up to you, of course, dear, but I would have thought – what with getting back to school and everything – it might just be advisable for you to conserve your energy, that’s all.”

“It’s only a step from here to the Regal. I’m all right. Now please don’t –”

“Well, I know you think I’m being silly, dear, but it’s only because I –”

“I don’t think you’re being silly. But I feel all right. Honestly. Look, should I get you a chocolate bar, while I’m there?”

“Nothing for me, thanks, dear. I’ve got everything I want. Only, do take it easy, won’t you? And don’t be too long.”

Walk slowly but hurry back.

“Yes, I will. And I won’t be long.”

I had forgotten it was Saturday night. River Street is crowded as it always has been on this particular evening, with women in from farms to do their shopping, and teenagers bound for the Flamingo, and men with a six-days’ tiredness and yearning for voices bound for the beer parlour of the Queen Victoria.

I don’t like the lights and noise, and I walk along the extreme outer edge of the sidewalk in order not to bump into anyone. Then I see them, walking towards me. Astonishing
that I never saw them all summer, all the time he was here, and now they are directly in front of me, not ten paces away.

She is not hanging on to his arm. Nothing like that. They are walking beside one another, but disconnected, as though it were sheer chance that they happened to be on the same sidewalk at the same place. Yet when I look again I can see that she keeps glancing at him, checking his bearings, making sure he’s there. He walks as though the rest of the world were an interesting but unlikely story he had once told himself.

Nick said she was the one who could live by faith although she didn’t look it. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She certainly doesn’t look it. She is short and squarely solid, a low stone tower of a woman. And yet there is an ever-onwardness and thrust about her.

Nestor Kazlik is not so immense a man as I used to see him when I was a kid, but he is still large. He hulks along the sidewalk. He is a head at least taller than his wife, and he is dressed in a dark-brown suit and yellow tie, pressured into this decent garb by her, probably, for he looks as though he wouldn’t notice what he happened to be wearing. He has a wide hard bony face, high-cheekboned as a Cree’s, a crest of thick grey hair and a grey ferocious moustache.
What a crazy man he is
, Nick said. I’m not going to speak, or ask them. I won’t.

“Hello –”

“Hello.”

“I’m – Rachel Cameron. You remember me?” I am speaking only to him, the old man, I don’t know why. His face comes back from its inner tale, focuses and recognizes.

“Sure, sure.” His voice is rasping, as though from a half century of tobacco. “I know. I never – how is this? – I never see you for a long time. But I know. Your father, he is a good man, eh? I say to him, it is my son, and he says don’t worry,
Nestor, it will be done very nice. A good man. You tell him hello for me, eh?”

He smiles at me, confidently. Nick said
He’s not senile or anything.
Nick could bear to feel that Nestor was difficult, eccentric, even a giant buffoon, but not diminished. Not saying
Steve
because he no longer knew. Nick could look at everything. But not at that.

“Yes, all right. I’ll tell him. Thank you.”

He shrugs massively, as though it were nothing, no more than he owed, a recognition for a well-performed rite. Mrs. Kazlik turns away, not wanting to see him betray himself in this way, not wanting to hear my playing along with it, my acceptance of messages for the dead. But what else could I say to him? This man whose voice no longer in the raw frosty dawn roars his princely cursing at kids and horses. Nestor the Jester.

I remember all at once that Steven Kazlik died of polio. There used to be epidemics, scares of a month of so, and kids kept out of school because of the thing that threatened like the medieval plague. My mother would bring out the syringe bottle with the squeeze-bulb top and the dark-yellow liquid within, and would command Stacey and me to spray our throats. And we would spray –
piff! piff! –
a magic potion against fate, death, hell, damnation, putrefaction. We never worried about ourselves. We were young enough to believe ourselves immortal. When we heard that someone we knew had died, we would feel queasy for a little while, then put it from mind or pretend the person had never been.

Nick’s spine was slightly twisted. They both had the plague. But Steve was the one who died.

I have to draw away from the old man, and so I turn to her.

“How is Nick?”

“He is well.”

“How – how is his family, his wife?”

Teresa Kazlik looks at me, not with a great deal of animation, only as though looking disinterestedly at an outsider who could not be expected to know.

“Nick is not married.”

“I – how stupid of me. I thought he was.”

“No. He’s never married yet.”

We speak some more words but not about Nick. I don’t hear what I’m saying, the necessary phrases of departure that people use to get away from one another. Then they’ve gone, and I can go on, too, to wherever I’m going.

Nick is not married.

I wonder why he lied to me. Maybe he thought it was easier that way, the least complicated way of dealing with my unconcealed hankering, the embarrassment of my obvious angling. How he must have laughed at how easy it was, at how easy I was, both to pick up and to put down again. God damn him, now and forever.

Yet – did he lie, though? He showed me the photograph of a boy, and I said
Yours?
And he said
Yes.
When I think back on it, it seems to me that the picture had the pale grey of an old snapshot. It was, of course, I see now, Nick himself as a child. Yours? Yes, mine.

But he intended me to misunderstand. He must have hoped I would. The intention of the lie was there all right. Unless he was simply trying to change the subject. It might never have occurred to him that anyone could possibly mistake a picture taken thirty years ago for one taken recently. He may have brought out the photograph only as a diversion. He’d already done what he could, to warn me.
I’m not God, darling – I can’t solve anything.