The Unnamed (3 page)

“How come he’s in handcuffs?” she asked.

Now finally her mother stood with the cutting board and looked at her. “Did you see Daddy in handcuffs?”

Becka nodded from the kitchen table.

“Daddy doesn’t want to leave the house,” said Jane, setting the cutting board down and the meat on top of it. “We’re just trying to keep Daddy inside the house.”

Becka didn’t want him inside the house. She heard him at night making noises like he was straining to lift something heavy. She heard the rattle of the handcuffs. His curses filled the house and his mumbling carried through the walls. Sometimes she heard nothing at all. Once she tiptoed to the door and put her head in the room and found him bound to the bed, staring into space. He saw her in the doorway and called to her but she ran away. “Becka, come back!” he cried. “Come talk to me.” She raced down the stairs. “Becka!” he cried out. “Please!” But she kept going.

It left as quickly as it came and he went back to work. After a few months her memory of him bound to the bed faded. They didn’t talk about it. They talked about other things. He came to her recitals again. Once again he woke her in the mornings and made her breakfast and got her ready for school. He never let a day pass without calling her before bedtime. Jane slept in and took care of her at night. That was the routine, the blissful family groove, and it had returned.

Was she up for this? She lay in bed under the covers, her breath visible in the slant moonlight. Really up for it? The long matrimonial haul was accomplished in cycles. One cycle of bad breath, one cycle of renewed desire, a third cycle of breakdown and small avoidances, still another of plays and dinners that spurred a conversation between them late at night that reminded her of their like minds and the pleasure they took in each other’s talk. And then back to hating him for not taking out the garbage on Wednesday. That was the struggle. Sickness and death, caretaking, the martyrdom of matrimony—that was fluff stuff. When the vows kick in, you don’t even blink. You just do. She had to be up for it.

She had nursed him once, and then a second time. About a year and a half of their lives, all told, and by the end of his first recurrence it was a full-time job. He was exonerated of all trifling matters when it returned. They were up against a specter that dwarfed the daily vexings. He could die out there. And so she set to the task of picking him up immediately, of learning how to properly rewarm the skin, of what food to bring with her in the car. She read survivalist manuals and prepared the pack. And when she wasn’t picking him up or preparing the pack, she was making the appointments and taking him to the doctor. She was his support staff and counsel. And when she was driving him home from the doctor she was the sounding board for all the confusion, doubt, anger and frustration. And when not the sounding board she was the cheerleader, dragging him out of the morass of self-pity. And when not the cheerleader, the quiet, supportive presence that said simply, I’m here, said without a word, you are not alone. But it was all-consuming, two intense periods of uncertainty and fear to which she gave herself entirely, often at the expense of Becka—after which, once it was over, in a mad dash to catch up with his life, he went back to work. He treated his first day back like any other day, while she was left wondering
just what day is it?
What cycle of their marriage had they left off on? How did she resume ordinary life after so many arguments with doctors and late-night car rides to random street corners? He was fine again, as if nothing had ever happened, but she wasn’t unchanged. She was suddenly bereft of purpose. And he wasn’t there to say, I’m here, you are not alone. She didn’t fault him for that. If anything, she envied him. He had an admirable passion for the work he did, and partnership at Troyer, Barr meant he did important work. But she did no favors to anyone by ignoring her own needs. She wanted what he had, something that would not abandon her to her own devices upon his recovery. She needed a purpose not entirely predicated upon other people, loved ones, the taking care of loved ones. She earned her license and started selling real estate.

Was she really up for a third time? To do it right, she would have to quit. She could not keep showing houses with him lost in the world. But what would happen when it was over? When it was over, if she quit and took care of him for however long, what life would she have to return to?

Jane stepped out of bed into the freezing room and walked down the hall to Becka’s. Becka was playing a late-night set of coffeehouse ballads cryptic with yearning, which came to a halt when Jane opened the door.

“What happened to knocking first?”

Gone were the days of her good-faith efforts to fit in with the TV-commercial vision of life. No more running shoes, no more hair gels. She let her heartbreaking weight be what it was, hiding behind the acoustic guitar. Senior year in high school and she refused to so much as order a yearbook. She wore her flannel shirt, Roxy Music tee, black sweatpants. Big surprise.

Jane peered unrepentantly around the room, at the mounds of clothes just waiting for the torch, the slag heap of dirty dishes on desk and nightstand. The room smelled heavily of itself. “Any good developments in here lately, Madame Curie?” she asked.

“I’m making music right now, Mom.”

“And a vaccine or two?”

“Do you even realize how old that joke is?”

“What are you doing up? It’s one in the morning.”

“What are
you
doing up?”

“Can’t sleep.”

Becka had eight or ten thick dreadlocked strands. They moved about her head the way mitter curtains dance lazily over the car at an automatic car wash, heavy and grayish. Their weight exposed the pale faultlines of her scalp. They cushioned her head as she leaned back on the headboard. “Do you think he fakes it, Mom?” she asked.

“Fakes it?”

“Have you ever Googled it? Google it and see what comes up.”

“Google what?”

“Exactly.”

“What comes up?”

“Some disease horses get when they eat poisonous plants.”

“That doesn’t mean he fakes it.”

“Not faking, then,” she said. “Just… I don’t know… mental.”

“There’s a lot of debate about if it’s psychological or not,” said Jane. “He doesn’t think it is. He thinks—”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” she said. “I know he thinks it’s the legs. I just have a hard time buying it. I think he’s mental.”

“You’re talking like a real jerk, kiddo.”

“He could control it if he really wanted to.”

“Like you can control your weight?” said Jane.

It was as if she had slapped the girl in the face, and for a moment, before the recriminations and tears, they stared at each other unmoving and silent, stunned into recognizing, after so long an indifference, the wicked force they could work on each other. Becka threw a guitar pick at her. “Get out.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Get out!”

“I was just trying to make you see things from his—”

“Get! Out!”

The room was cold. She was relieved to find him still there, asleep in the down coat on top of the covers, as if he could expect only a brief nap. He was breathing heavily, perspiring through troubled dreams.

She got under the covers. She didn’t mind the cold. She preferred it, actually. One day she had been a young woman, and the next a panting complex of symptoms. The hot flashes and night sweats, the mood swings and sleep disruptions. And there was no way, no possible human biological way, of explaining to him, a man, what her body was putting her through. She could talk to her gynecologist, who understood. She could talk to her friends. But the words
hot flash
hit his ears and bounced right off. She imagined how maddening it would be for a doctor to insist that her discomfort was “all in her head,” or the burden of explaining symptoms no one had ever heard of. Thankfully she didn’t need to. Her problems were widely shared. Pharmaceutical companies spent millions developing medicines to ease her suffering. She was alone with specific hot flashes, but she was not alone in the world with them.

After menopause set in she stopped speculating that he might be crazy. She stopped speculating altogether. She didn’t know what had its hold on him. She didn’t care. He couldn’t know about hot flashes and she couldn’t know about walking. They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other’s air. She chose to believe him when he told her that his condition was not a disorder of the mind but a malfunction of the body.

The health professionals suggested clinical delusion, hallucinations, even multiple personality disorder. But he said, “I know myself.” He said, “I’m not in control, Jane.” His mind was intact, his mind was unimpeachable. If he could not gain dominion over his body, that was not “his” doing. Not an occult possession but a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor’s car in horror. That was him. That was her husband. She reached out in the darkness and touched his breathing body.

The next day she brokered negotiations in a half daze. She accepted offers and arranged showings for later in the week. She tried calling him at work. When he picked up, he picked up on the first ring; the secretary waited until the third ring. That gave Jane the second ring to hang up and try him again later. She came to the second ring again and again, and then she quickly put the phone down. She didn’t want to push through to the secretary. She didn’t want to know if he’d left the office. If she didn’t know, she could still picture him in a climate-controlled conference room with his associates arrayed around him in their decorous business attire, drinking civilized lattes and assessing the other side’s evidence. It was what he wanted, this corporate pastoral. What the glove box had given its life for: the perpetuation, inherently a kind of celebration, of uneventful everyday life. Long live the mundane.

In early evening she tried him again but again he didn’t pick up. He didn’t pick up because he was walking through the front door of the realty office. She looked up from the telephone and there he was, with flowers.

“I’m sorry about the other morning,” he said. “The boxing match with the car.” He handed her the flowers, and they went to dinner.

It wasn’t the Italian you could get in the city but the food was better than most. The private lighting of the place lent itself to both proposals of marriage and requests for divorce. They sat in back in a dimly lit booth, dipping bread into an olive tapenade, a wine-red rococo carpet underfoot. Outside a new snow had started to fall over the old, adding a pristine frost to the winter’s blackening palimpsest.

They had agreed that the alpine pack could remain in the car.

“Five o’clock,” she said. “And with flowers. I didn’t think that would happen until I announced I had cancer.”

He stared at her intensely, as if this were a visit monitored by guards who would soon break them apart and return him to captivity, while she would walk through the parking lot to weep in the car. His expression was earnest enough to appear before God and she expected an apology for something: the late nights, the missed opportunities, the lacunae born of married days. But instead he smiled and picked up his wine and said, “It’s not coming back.”

“What’s not coming back?”

“I’ve gone two entire days,” he said. “It’s not coming back.”

The waiter appeared. Tim sat back to allow him to move in with the plate. Ordinarily after the food arrived she tucked her hair behind her ears and picked up her silverware. Now she pushed the plate away and leaned into the table on her elbows and looked at him.

“It’s happened twice already, Tim.”

“You should have seen me today.”

“I found you in the woods just yesterday morning, remember?”

“Sitting at my desk. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“You know and I know that two times—”

“Are you going to eat?”

She looked down at her plate. “No,” she said.

“Why did we come here if you’re not going to eat?”

She didn’t want to fight. She picked up her fork. He took his first bite.

“Can we just assume?” She didn’t know how to continue. “What if it is back? What if?”

He took another bite. “Then I will buy a gun,” he said, swallowing, picking up his wineglass again, “and blow my head off.”

He drank. She removed her elbows from the table and sat back. Did she just hear him right? He continued to eat his penne. Was he that far gone? She entered a blinded moment. Kill himself? He was the only one in the body. Everyone else was locked out. But this misfortune was not his and his alone! She left the booth.

In the movies they throw cash down on the table but he didn’t have any cash so he stood quickly, instantly aware that he had provoked the response he’d wanted and just as quickly regretful of it. He removed a credit card from his wallet and followed her out. She was walking very quickly across a parking lot shared by suburban retailers and a grocery store, car-packed and big as a football field. “Jane!” he cried before he was out the door, and people seated near the window turned their heads and watched them go.