Like Family (8 page)

I
f it weren't for my wife's aptitude for phone conversations, the heroic methodicalness with which she makes the rounds, each week, of friends and acquaintances, giving each one the time and attention he deserves, we would not have heard much about Mrs. A. starting that spring. In fact, if it weren't for Nora and her devotion to the telephone, a lot of things would not have happened: we two, for example, would not have fallen in love.

The impatient guy I used to be couldn't keep up any dialogue that wasn't face-to-face for more than a few minutes: I was dismissive, not inclined to chat,
and I always had something in front of me that demanded my attention, usually a page of notes. My friends knew this, being programmed approximately the same way, so communication between us usually took place via brief text messages or a few lines via e-mail. By age twenty I had gained a questionable reputation for being rude to a classmate who had a crush on me, a girl I even liked. Every afternoon she called me on the phone for no particular reason, just to chat, she said. One day I had the guts to tell her not to call me anymore, because, unlike her, maybe, I had more important things to do. Wouldn't it be better to see each other at the university or when we had a date? Couldn't she do me a favor and hold whatever interesting thing she had to tell me until break time the next morning?

Nora had managed to turn all this around. The amount of time I spent on the phone with her had quickly aroused the suspicion—scary and disturbing—that something unprecedented was happening: to me, to her, to the two of us together. No matter where I was or with whom, I managed to find time to talk with her, unceremoniously leaving other people and
obligations behind. At the end of every call, I checked the usage counter on the screen and was amazed at the lack of remorse I felt and, on the contrary, at the urge I had to redial her number. I have a sequence of recollections of myself walking around in circles, looking down at my feet, mostly listening to Nora and her pauses, while my earlobe overheated, pressed against the device's tiny speaker, and the palm of my hand sweated a little. She still teases me about how I was before I met her, and I doubt she will ever stop. “When I think about where I found you,” she says, “in that hidey-hole where you'd retreated, all rigid and terrified, together with your quarks.” For me, I suppose, falling in love will always be something akin to being flushed out.

In May, Nora, in a voice that's bright and chirpy (though too loud, exasperating me and making me ask her to lower it), uses the same Socratic skill she used with me to draw our unsociable, battered Mrs. A. into the futile conversations like those of the past. The remission period has arrived punctually for her, like every other codified stage of the illness. The magical disappearance of symptoms, all symptoms, including
those related to the toxicity of the chemotherapy, has revived her interest in the world that still exists outside her body. And so here come the horoscopes again, the pearls of wisdom summarized into pithy proverbs, the in-depth dissertations on how best to cook the zucchini that are just starting to flood the market stalls (yes, that's right, even her appetite has reawakened, what joy!)—in short, here is Babette, the woman we know and love, the rock we all lean on, who has no one to lean on in turn.

Occasionally dozing off, I listen to Nora, who is listening to Mrs. A. It's Saturday morning, past ten, but we're still lingering in bed as Emanuele busies himself in his room, making more noise than necessary to attract our attention. Getting some rest has put us in an easygoing, generous mood, appropriately sympathetic. While Mrs. A. fills Nora in on the cancer's remission, the hair that is growing back faster than expected (a little thinner than before and surprisingly darker, some of it actually brown), I wonder if she knows that her refound paradise is a classic stage, a temporary reprieve, ephemeral and somewhat sadistic,
which represents nothing more than the classic approach to the final abyss.

She betrays some awareness of it only toward the end of the conversation, when, in a burst of enthusiasm, Nora asks her if she feels ready to resume caring for the vegetable garden now that she has her strength back.

“Oh, no, not the garden,” she backpedals quickly. “I'm too weak for that.”

They hang up after a moment, the sour aftertaste of misgiving in their mouths.

Nevertheless, the deeply rooted good sense with which Mrs. A. is equipped dictates that she live the final period of well-being as if it will never end. Fortunately, Emanuele's performance falls right within those two months or so of improvement. He has been chosen to play the somewhat unseemly role of the scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz,
a leading role that Nora takes more pride in than he does; he would have preferred the part of the lion with the regal red mane.

We leave the making of the costume to Mrs. A. She still has admirable dexterity, and her hand is steady
when she searches for the eye of the needle with the saliva-moistened thread. The result of an afternoon's work is impressive: she sewed patches on a pair of torn overalls, made one of my shirts into a jacket, and embellished them—along with a pair of boots that we had to buy—with strands of yellow yarn, to simulate bits of straw. When he puts on the costume, Emanuele hops around her, hands on his hips, like a sprightly imp, and for a few minutes they are again lost in each other. That will be our son's last private performance for his adoring nanny, who is captivated. I'm tempted to reach for my phone and take a picture, but I know that the balance of the moment is fragile and I don't want to disturb it.

The play, in fact, turns out to be very different from its domestic prelude. The unexpected attendance of all the members of Nora's family creates an emotional snarl-up during the long wait for the thing to start. The grandparents have gotten all dressed up as if for a gala evening—Nora's mother in a showy evening gown, her first husband and the current one in two curiously similar herringbone jackets—and now they all seem annoyed to find themselves in the bare foyer of an elementary school, among dozens of parents
in jeans and short sleeves. They expect me and Nora to do something, find them chairs appropriate to their clothing, get them something to drink or at least come up with some way to entertain them.

Further, the gym where the show is staged turns out to be too small to accommodate this unruly crowd of relatives. Antonio, the second husband, wanting to impress everyone with his photographic equipment, complete with tripod and white reflective panel, argues heatedly with a man who, he maintains, is in his frame and who eventually tells him rudely what he can do with his panel. Mrs. A., being short, has her view blocked by a solid wall of backs and jackets. She, too, gives us disappointed looks, but we ourselves can hardly see the stage, which is not the least bit elevated off the floor, and we can't help her. The oppressive, stale air and the waiting on her feet make her dizzy. A woman holds her up, then fans her with a sheet of paper. Before the end of the play, even before her adopted grandson has appeared onstage, Mrs. A. elbows her way through the crowd and leaves.

On the way out, Emanuele immediately asks for her. “Where's Babette?”

“She didn't feel well, but she saw the whole thing, and she said you did a great job.”

His shoulders curve and his face takes on such a dejected expression that I wonder if he's still acting a little or if a tiny piece of his heart has indeed just been ripped off.

The exaggerated praise of his various grandparents is not enough to raise his spirits. On the streaked linoleum of the gym, Emanuele had performed especially for Mrs. A. and for the two of us, but his happiness is not equivalent to two-thirds of that hoped-for total, because her absence counts more than our presence.

We quickly extricate ourselves from the good-byes and walk home, just the three of us: two parents and a small, sad scarecrow who doesn't let go of our hands until we reach the door; as if to say he gets it, he understands that people leave, people just go away, forever, but not us, he won't allow us to, not so long as he keeps us together like that.

E
very child is also an extraordinary seismograph. Emanuele understood it before we did; he felt the shock wave that was approaching, and that's why he clung to our hands the evening of the performance. After Mrs. A.'s desertion, there had been a subterranean quake, a silent slippage of water tables and groundwater levels, and over the summer we would discover that the hypocenter of the disturbance was located in Nora's womb.

One morning, already dressed to go out, she announced that she was two weeks late. It didn't seem
like news you would tell someone in a hurry like that, standing up, car keys in hand.

“Have you done the test?” I asked her, mainly to stall for time and transform my reaction into something preferable to confusion.

“No. I'd rather we first decide what to do about it.”

“What to do about it?”

Nora sat down at the table where I had stopped sipping my coffee. She did not lean toward me, nor did she show any emotion when she recited the words she spoke right after that; she reeled them off like a paragraph committed to memory. “It's best if we talk about it now. I don't feel ready. I don't have the energy. I can barely manage the work I have to do and look after Emanuele. There is no one to help us, and you're always at the university. Plus, I don't think we'll have enough money, and to tell the truth . . .” Only then did she hesitate, almost as if the last words had slipped out of her mouth unintentionally.

“To tell the truth?”

“Things aren't going so well between us either.”

I pushed away the place mat with the remains of breakfast. I had not had time to question how I felt
about the news, but that wasn't the point: the point was how casually I was excluded from any real possibility of having a say in the decision, the abruptness with which Nora affirmed that our lives were, after all, separate. I tried to appear calm. “Nora, one chooses whether or not to have a first child, not the second. We're young, we're in good health, what would justify such an action?”

She thought about it for a moment. “That we're afraid. Too afraid. I am.”

“It seems to me you've already made your decision. I don't know why you're even bothering to tell me about it,” I said, and now my words sounded sarcastic, full of indignation.

She nodded without looking at me, then stood up and walked out. She kept her face hidden from me. I'm almost certain that her endurance had been exhausted and that by then she was crying.

_____

Oh, if Mrs. A. could have seen us in the weeks that followed! How disappointed she would have been. When Emanuele was nearly three years old, she had
launched a personal campaign for us to give him a baby sister (she never even considered the possibility of a boy): a series of inconsequential pedagogical opinions suggested to her that there was a precise window of time within which to plan for another child.

“You have the room,” she said, as if that were the main obstacle.

We'd tease her. “Isn't one enough for you, Babette? In a while, maybe. Who knows?” In the meantime we procrastinated, disappointing her. Never would she have expected, however, that, faced with a fait accompli, Nora would dream of backing out.

But Mrs. A. was more unreachable than ever. Since the illness had advanced swiftly and steadily, around the middle of July she had moved to her cousin Marcella's house, where for the most part she would live out her last five months, lying on the right side of a double bed that wasn't hers. The cancer had breached another rampart and seized control of her brain as well. Talking on the phone had become difficult—her voice was gone; to communicate with her, we had to go through the extraneous filter of Marcella, while to see her we had to ask permission and then be watched the whole time.

Nora wouldn't admit it, nor would she do so later on, but she was scared, terrified of the possibility of spending a second pregnancy in bed. The months of immobility with Emanuele had marked her more deeply than I had realized, and this time there would be no Mrs. A. by her side, only a harried husband in whom, I understood that summer, she did not have enough faith. From that day on, neither of us held anything back, baring resentments that had long been concealed, in a painful, relentless crescendo.

_____

In the end Nora's lateness turned out to be a false alarm, but at that point it didn't matter much; the effects had already been felt. Outwardly our married life went along unchanged, structured around a sequence of commitments, yet as if its heart had been drained. I had seen Nora sad, upset, angry but never listless or indifferent. Without the intercession of her exuberance, the world went back to being the cold shell that I had inhabited before I met her. Even Emanuele, at times, appeared alien to me.

“We could eat at the fish place tonight, talk a little.”

“If you want. Though I'm not very hungry.”

“Let's go anyway.”

And then we sat there eating dinner like strangers, no different from those couples who have nothing to say to each other, whom we had often pitied from the pedestal of our rapt enthrallment.

“What's gotten into you?”

“Nothing.”

“You look sad.”

“I'm not sad, I'm just thinking.”

“About what, then?”

“About nothing!”

“You're scaring me. Are you doing it on purpose?”

We continued needling each other, anything to break a silence for which we were unpracticed. Nothing seemed to come to our rescue: considering how foolishly we behaved, ours might have been the first marital crisis in the history of mankind.

A young couple can also fall ill, from insecurity, from routine, from isolation. Metastases flourish unseen, and ours soon reached the bed. For eleven weeks, the same period in which Mrs. A. was losing the elementary functions of her body one by one, Nora and I
didn't touch or reach out to each other. Lying at a safe distance, our bodies seemed like impregnable slabs of marble.

Dozing lightly, I tortured myself thinking about the time when her body was available to me and mine to her, when I could caress her without asking permission, anywhere—on the neck, her breasts, between the curved notches of her spine, along the cleft of her buttocks—when I was free to slip my fingers under the elastic without worrying about annoying her and she, drowsy, would return my attentions with an instinctive shiver. Neither one of us refused sex, ever; we might neglect it for long periods of time due to lack of opportunity and energy, but we did not withhold it. No matter how things were going, we knew that an untarnished space awaited us in our bedroom, a refuge of furtive embraces and caresses.

If our cancer had also aimed to affect the brain, then it had succeeded: with my wife lying a few inches away, I no longer knew how to approach her. My memory of those days and nights is sketchy and contradictory, riddled with rancor and appalling fantasies in which Nora betrayed me with someone, anyone.

_____

What Galen does not explain clearly is whether humors can be mixed together like paints or whether they coexist separately, like oil and water; he does not explain whether yellow produced by the liver combined with the red of blood creates a new orange-colored temperament, nor whether an exchange between individuals is possible, through contact, effusions or even pure sentiment. For a long time, I thought it was. I was sure that Nora's silver and my black were slowly blending together and that the same burnished metallic fluid would eventually course through both of us. Then, too, we were both convinced that Mrs. A.'s glowing lymph would add another nuance to our own, making us stronger.

I was wrong. We were wrong. Life sometimes narrows like a funnel, and the initial emulsion of the humors produces layers. Nora's exuberance and my melancholy; Mrs. A.'s viscous stability and my wife's ethereal disorder; the lucid mathematical reasoning that I had cultivated for years and Babette's intuitive way of thinking: each element, despite assiduousness
and affection, remained discrete from the others. Mrs. A.'s cancer, a single, infinitesimal clot of unruly cells that had multiplied relentlessly before becoming evident, had called attention to our separateness. We were, in spite of our hopes, insoluble in one another.