Elegy on Kinderklavier (29 page)

“And maybe I'm just not one of those people who can find in a career the kind of meaning that can sustain a life,” she said that night of the decision, her face drawn from crying. “I just think, I just really
think that maybe I'm supposed to find meaning in something else—that maybe what I'll be really good at will be loving our little kid. I can feel that. I just know it's true in my heart.”

For weeks I said I didn't know; I talked about how we didn't have any money, how if we had a kid now we'd have to take money from my mother for a long time. I talked about how much we fought, how we weren't quite ready, and Charlie listened but then she said, “I think this is one of those things where you're never quite ready. Where the only way you learn how to have a kid is by having one. You figure it out as you go, I think. For instance, I think we'd fight less if I was pregnant. I think we wouldn't want to fight. I think we'd be better people because that is what our lives would require of us.”

And she wasn't wrong, really. We had only the one bad fight while she was pregnant, and never argued at all while Haim was a baby. It was only in the middle of his second year, when he started to resemble a separate person, no longer our little ball of love and chubby rolls, that we began to fight again.

There was only one time that I doubted anything in those years. Charlie was five months pregnant, and going through a phase where she was so fatigued, she climbed into bed at about six p.m. and slept through the night. Usually, I lay with her for an hour or two because she said this was the only way she could fall asleep. It was a Saturday, though, and I had been invited to a party thrown by my fellow students in the masters program. It was at seven thirty, and after ten or so minutes of lying still with Charlie, I got up. I felt anxious. I wanted to take a shower and get ready.

“What are you doing?” she said, and I told her. She didn't say anything after that.

The party was in an old, warm house. A cool drizzle had begun to fall in the twilight as I pulled in. Inside the front room a couple amps and an electric organ were set up and a few of my colleagues
were playing together. In the kitchen a group of women were pouring bottles of alcohol into a pot on the stove, making something they called “blood.”

After about an hour I texted Charlie. I was thinking that I wished she was there with me. There was something refreshing about the way these new people looked at her, about knowing they were looking at her and not seeing Attica and all that had happened there.

What are you up to?
I sent her, hoping she was still awake.

After a few minutes she texted back.
I've packed
, it said.
By the time you get back, I'll be gone.

I suppose I should have thought she was joking, should have paused at the unbelievable, melodramatic way she was doing this. But a few weeks earlier, Charlie had come home and not been able to recognize my face.

“It's different somehow,” she'd said, looking at me almost with wonder. “It's like, you don't look like you. Or you do, but just not you you.”

“It's like,” she said later, “imagine if you had an identical twin. You look like your own twin, if that makes any sense. I know it's you, but for some reason it doesn't feel like you. Like you're an impostor of yourself.”

This kind of dissociation had happened once before, in Attica, right before everything fell apart. Back then I was obsessed with the medical implications, an official cause, maybe Capgras Syndrome. Then, when everything happened there, I spent days wondering if my wife was schizophrenic, if she had some kind of early-onset dementia, if maybe even she'd had some kind of traumatic brain injury years ago without knowing it. But by the time it happened again, by the time Charlie was saying this pregnant, I understood that she was not sick, that there was nothing actually wrong with her. This was not dissociation, I thought, standing in the bathroom door,
watching her watch me. This is the imitation, subconscious or not, of dissociation, of delusion. Just as back then her wandering down the shoulder of the highway had been, this was Charlie getting scared, and attempting to leave me.

That was three weeks before the party. Then I got the text.
I've packed
, it said.
By the time you get back, I'll be gone
. I wasn't even surprised, just ill. I stepped outside of the crowded kitchen, into what was now a steady rain.

“Where are you?” I said into the phone. “Tell me where you are, and we'll talk about this.”

“No more talking,” Charlie said. “I have nothing more to say.”

“Come on,” I said. “Just come back home, I'm going to my car now, I'll come back and we'll talk about it.”

“I don't want you to try and bully me out of it,” Charlie said. “I've decided.”

The wife of the poet who was hosting the party stuck her head out of the back door.

“Come in, come in!” she called. “You're getting all wet!”

I waved to her that I was OK.

“I won't try to talk you out of anything,” I said. “I just want to see you.”

Charlie didn't say anything. There was the sound of children laughing. Until that moment I'd thought she was bluffing, was sitting in our bedroom, the suitcase open dramatically beside her.

“Come on, Charlie,” I said. “If we sit down and see each other just for a few minutes before you go it's one thing. If you leave like this, via, via text message and a phone call, it's something else.”

Through a side window I could see one of my classmates playing guitar, his eyes closed, face gesturing with the emotion of the riff.

“I was very angry when you left,” Charlie said after a while. “When you get back home go inside and see if you still want to talk.”

Back at the house, her closet was emptied out, her suitcases and car gone. I thought she might've broken my laptop, but it was safe on my desk. In the living room, though, our TV stand and the shelf underneath it were bare; only a few jagged, smashed pieces of plastic were left in the places where our television and my expensive game system usually were. The hammer was sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Everything was strangely orderly. This missing television and game system was what I'd been using to kill the long hours between when Charlie fell asleep and when I went to bed.

“I can sense you're gone,” she often said. “Even in my sleep.”

I called Charlie again.

“I still want to talk,” I said.

“I'm on my way,” she said.

And it was in these few minutes before she got back to the house from wherever she was that I thought all the things I had not allowed myself to dwell on. I remembered her face in the queasy lights of the rest stop, the two policemen bracketing her. I thought of how desperate I'd felt when we'd moved here to Iowa, how much I thought that if something drastic didn't change, I would lose her. I remembered thinking that a baby would be the thing, maybe the only gesture crazy or grand or selfless enough to jar us both out of our failing, competing ideas of ourselves and our marriage and make our life a life spent together, about something more than our problems. And it was only when I heard her car pull up, and tried to imagine how it would work for the rest of the pregnancy, if someone would have to call me to tell me my wife had gone into labor, if she would even still be my wife by then—it was only when the door opened, and I saw her empty, even face that I thought, just for a moment, to my great shame, that she was carrying my mistake.

“I'm so manipulative,” she said later that night, almost laughing. “The TV and your system are in the basement. The plastic bits were
from an old shower radio. I bet you didn't even really look in the closet, did you? All my clothes are still there, I just pushed them way to the ends of the bar, behind the doors. You know where I was when you called? I was at the movie theater. I thought I might see a movie, to keep myself from answering when you rang. But I couldn't choose one. I couldn't go in. I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry. I walked in and I saw you and you looked so . . . and I thought, I thought that I'd really done it this time, that you were going to leave me and that would be it. I was so angry, and I didn't realize until I saw you how stupid, how totally stupid it was of me.”

There may have been a time when we were not yet the people we are now, but we certainly always contained them.

Now, in the car, the post-parade traffic was letting up. Charlie's hand was still on mine. There is a time just after your child is born when you fall wildly in love with your wife all over again. There is something new in this world only because you have loved her, and that fact is its own kind of rapture, with the squealing, squirming proof right there, always, in your arms. For the first three months, when Charlie's breasts swelled with milk and all you could see of Haim's limbs were the rolls of fat, I couldn't take my eyes off of either of them. I don't know what happens to this feeling, if it simply fades or if it just breaks apart, letting its embers fall and be buried in the middle of other, different feelings that trouble you years later.

We were almost to the restaurant's parking lot when I said it, as if I'd been frustrated the whole time.

“You're emotionally illiterate,” I spat, continuing the conversation that we'd both agreed to leave off.

“I
know
,” Charlie said, frustrated. “That's why I need you to tell me why you're upset.”

This was only a year before Charlie began painting, before a dealer from New York discovered her at a local show, before her first
painting sold for more money than both of us together had made in our whole lives, and Charlie had the idea of moving to England so that we might be “closer to the world.” This was not even a year before I would fail to realize that we were at the exact middle of Haim's entire life. And this was four years before he started babbling again, the tumor muddling his speech gradually, taking back the exotic words first.

“I'm just so tired,” Charlie said, and out of nowhere I thought of the first few weeks after we'd brought Haim home from the hospital, the way he could never cool down. It seemed to be keeping him awake, so I'd sit up with him all night, holding him in only his diaper, his body impossibly small in my hands. The only thing that ever made him feel any better was when I lifted him up and put my open, wet mouth on his stomach, then withdrew and blew on it. His skin was so hot, even though he didn't have a fever, that I could feel it radiating into the air inside my mouth. He'd be quiet until I did it again, and I'd do it all night, all over his body until he fell asleep. And for days afterward, even when he no longer needed me to do it, I would still feel that kid's warm skin against my lips.

“I'm tired too,” I said lamely, into the quiet.

“Ewok ewok ewok,” went Haim.

•

The medical team has come and gone, and Haim didn't struggle at all against the extubation. He's awake now, though something seems to have been lost in his long period of unconsciousness, some part of his health that will not be recovered. All day he's been listless, slow-eyed, and quiet. They say that Haim's status is “declining” and even though what they really mean is “descending” or “deteriorating,” it
does seem to be the act of declining, of not wanting, of withholding, that tells you that you're finally in the woods you will not find your way out of. Charlie has still not answered her phone, as if she can sense how serious things still are.

There is one last hope, which they told me about at Haim's “Care Conference” this morning. Haim's name has finally come up for a late-stage clinical trial that I signed us up for a week after his diagnosis. It is at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and would require us moving back to the States and living there for a few months. The doctors and nurse and technician representatives and hospital social worker were all sitting there at the conference table looking at me after they explained how long the trial would take, sitting there looking at me like I should not want to do it, should just want to take Haim home to die. They'd already given me the “goal checklist” of medical things that needed to happen before I could take him home, if I wanted to take him home. But how can you want to do that? Maybe I've missed some important step or process in being the parent of a terminal child, maybe that's what everyone else would have been going through during the holiday, but how can you want to do that? How can you ever hear someone tell you that there is something you might be able to do to have even one more week with this kid, this little boy whom you have fed, whose shit and vomit and tears and sounds of delight and mysterious, incommunicable discomfort you have known, whose impossibly rapid growth you have measured against your leg, whose tiny hands have grabbed desperately at your face and then your knee and then the bottom of your shirt wanting always to tell you something, to show you something, to call you to the things of this world—how can you have woken to the sound of his laughter, his crying, even sometimes just his labored breathing and not want to do it, to pump whatever vile thing into his changed body in the selfish hope of having even one more day, one more hour full of that unrelenting life?

Though, of course, you know you are selling him out, that this is a selfishness. You are thrust into the parsing of guilt, afraid of echoing to yourself the thought that you “just want it to be over” because you do want your son's suffering to be over but you also want him back, specifically you want him back the way he was, and both things are impossible, and both ways is the only way you want it.