The World's Largest Man (24 page)

“It's hard for me.”

And we talked some more.

And I knew, as we talked, that I'd have to make my wife want me around again.

And that I'd have to work on the budget, the real one, not the sex one.

And that maybe we could work on the sex one, too, later.

But I didn't say it out loud, which was an improvement.

It had been a difficult season. The rains came, washed things away, exposed bones. It would take a while for us to laugh together like before, but we could get there. All it took was getting back in the car and holding hands and moving on down that road, trying to pay attention to the signs.

Penis Construction Ahead.

Why had she ever married me? I have no idea. Whatever it was, I was hoping she remembered. I think she did.

I stood up.

“I love you,” I said, all hot, all sweaty, and she closed her eyes, and I touched her, and she didn't wince.

I
t took a little time, but with great effort and prayer and love, the salad days returned, and I understood my family in a rich and profound new way, had seen the innermost wonders of my wife's tender and tangled heart. There were stories in that heart I had not known, and I knew them now. I listened. I learned. I ironed. She made me iron. My own slacks. My own shirts. My children's smocked dresses, which turned out to have more folds and pleats than an origami croissant, and I ironed the hell out of those dresses, often while cursing aloud.

I had been so terribly humbled, everything that mattered to me put into a bag and dangled in the air over a bridge over a river that would never give it back.

My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as:

“I like meat.”

“Water feel good.”

But a woman is a sentence eighty yards long with no commas, a cryptogram, a
Finnegans Wake
, and a man is holding the book, and he is trying to read it, and he is confused.

“Women are funny,” Pop said, on the phone.

“They sure are,” I said.

These Sunday afternoon phone calls were reserved almost exclusively for expurgating the mysteries of women and football, but I had another motive, trying to convince my parents to move to Savannah by making Pop think it was his idea. He was getting no younger, and so were his grandchildren.

“Aw, boy, I don't know,” he said.

“They have ESPN over here, too.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And you know Mom wants to come.”

“Oh, she's about crazy over it.”

We had been reveling in what we believed were the emotional eccentricities of women for many years, but these phone calls took on a new dynamic after the apocalyptic thundercloud had covered my own marriage for a time. I'd always thought it was mocking we were doing, but I saw now that we were only admitting to our own fumbling of the various balls we'd been handed to carry, much like our beloved Rebels, and that it was hard.

I
t had been a year since we'd talked of divorce, but it seemed a hundred years ago. We laughed, and even danced. My wife loved me. The way I knew was, she started mocking me in public again, which is how she expresses love. In the previous year, I'd learned to remember the best parts of our marriage, so that I could draw on those memories if things ever got bad again, so I could stop myself from believing it had never been good, which is so easy to do when you're enraged and wish to run over your spouse with heavy machinery.

Pretty soon we were looking at another wedding anniversary, and that got me to thinking once again about the strange covenant of marriage.

What had we said back then, a decade ago, in front of the church? I tried to remember our vows. I didn't recall much from that day, owing to fatigue and the residual effects of enough English beer to have tanned three or four beaver pelts. There were several cakes, I remember, and roses the color of butter, and my wife looked prettier than Grace Kelly. I found this quite disturbing, as it occurred to me that women who looked like Grace Kelly generally did not stay married to men who looked like me, unless we owned small aircraft.

Yet I did recall our uttering something about sickness and health. Which was good, because something had happened to my health, and I soon found myself lying on the couch and taking abuse from my wife.

“You're not sick,” Princess Grace said.

“I am,” I said. “I might die.”

“Your back hurts,” she said. “It's not like you have
cancer
.”

I reminded her about our vows. “You promised to tend my infirmities,” I said.

“Yeah, well, try giving birth to three children.”

There was that irony I so deeply loved. My little shrew.

Princess Grace was always doing this, reminding me that she thrust three live human people through a hole in her crotch. She seemed angry about it, reminding me that I was the one who put them there.

“You didn't seem to mind at the time,” I said.

“Vomit,” she said.

Apparently, the very fact of childbirth trumps all pain-related complaining by all men for all time. I could have my arms ripped off by the world's largest gorilla and she would say, “At least it was quick. Try taking thirty hours to pass a watermelon out of your birth canal with no medication.” But I would not be able to hear her, because the gorilla is beating me to death with my own arms.

I
don't know how it happened: I simply woke one morning and was unable to stand fully upright. It felt as though the brisket of my lower back had been broiled in a still-warm oven. I pulled myself to a hunched position and hobbled to the kitchen, leading with my head.

“Oh, please,” my wife said. “You're so weak.”

“No, it
really
hurts this time,” I said.

I cataloged my most ambitious movements of the day before. There was the small box (lifted), the flight of stairs (climbed), and the BMX bike that I appropriated from a neighborhood boy in order to demonstrate for the crowd of curious children how legends are made (ramped). Sensations rushed back, of this moment when I launched from the homemade ramp's zenith amid dropped jaws and willed my body and the bike into flight. Yet, just as my rear wheel left the earth, I received a message from my lower back that indicated caution and horror, a neural communiqué hushed by the endorphins of ramp glory and the cheers of neighborhood children—until now, the following morning, when I received a new message from my back, in the form of a letter of resignation.

I did not remind my wife of the bicycle incident, as it would only be cataloged in the evidence room of her memory for future depositions and prosecutions. Instead, I lowered myself to a supine position in hopes of having gravity collaborate with the wood flooring to help straighten me out.

“Don't be so dramatic,” she said, stepping over me to fetch her coffee. “You'll be fine.”

“All I am to you is a speed bump.”

I lay there for the remainder of the morning, until she and the children departed for school. They mostly ignored me, although one of my daughters used me as a sort of park bench, sitting on me to eat her breakfast.

Finally alone, I pulled myself to a hunchbacked position, dressed in great agony the way I imagine Yoda must have, and mounted the Vespa for what turned out to be a torturous commute through the midcentury neighborhoods of Savannah that were nicer than my own. I moved slowly, feebly throughout Arnold Hall, the building where I work, and no one said a thing, except for a colleague who noticed my limping. He sidled up, smiling, had a secret.

“I've got two words for you,” he said. “Horse liniment.”

I thanked him and made a mental note to start bringing a handgun to work. I limped on, until something worse happened during my afternoon lecture, as I rhapsodized to a classroom about Aristotle's use of the topography metaphor in his
Rhetoric
.

“Think of the human mind as a map,” I said, arms outstretched. Then something snapped, as though a distant bridge were slowly giving way, and it struck me that the bridge was nearby, and that it was the meat and bones and cartilaginous substances of my back, and that I was going to die.

“Oh, no,” I said, falling to my knees in a dramatic flourish. The students, or at least those who remained awake, yawned, returned to studying the inside of their eyelid skin.

W
hat seems to be the problem?” my internist asked as he settled himself onto a stool.

He had the build and disposition of a gentle, unassuming superhero: broad shoulders and thick arms and trim waist of a man who would probably look entirely normal driving a Jeep without a shirt. He was not a large man, but everything about him screamed fitness, protein shakes, and the dedicated consumption of legumes. He was in his late forties, I'd bet, with a model-worthy head of silvery hair that seemed to have no plans
for retreating into the interior of his scalp. He was, in short, exactly the kind of man you hoped would be your doctor, if you were an emotionally scarred woman between the ages of twenty and seventy who had no qualms about removing her clothes in front of Captain America.

As for me, I didn't mind disrobing in front of him, because I liked to believe he had a tortured inner life that the horror of my nakedness could not match.

“It's my back, Doc.”

“Take off your shirt for me.”

The next few minutes progressed like many of my best high school dates, with a great deal of touching and bending and whimpering. It was awkward, also, because Dr. America and I frequented the same café, where I was usually in the corner, brooding, thinking of myself as a visage of controlled existentiality, as though I were prefiguring the dark Kierkegaardian voids of my own and many other possible lives. And perhaps I appeared to be that. But when Dr. America entered the café and saw me there, he knew about things that others did not, like my rash. This was the reason for my last visit, before the back thing. And so, when others observed me at the café, they might've thought:
Writer
or
Thinker
or
Chess Master
. But when he saw me, what he must've thought was:
Ointment
.

“What's wrong with me?” I said.

I secretly hoped it was something debilitating. A simple back injury would be enfeebling, emasculating, but there could be great glory in a disease requiring a wheelchair. Something permanent, but not terminal, a malady that might lead to a career in motivational speechmaking and the lucrative field of disease memoirs.

“I don't know how to say it,” Dr. America said. “You need to strengthen your core.” He swept his hand across the snug, tailored waist of his shirt, where his carbon-fiber abs lay dormant for weekend display on various beaches. He explained, as
gently as he could, that my only malady was frailty. “You need to work out. Nothing too rigorous. Just the occasional crunch. Do you know the crunch?”

I explained that I was the kind of man who prefers to use
crunch
as a verb, but he only smiled the smug smile of those who feast on ambrosia from the navels of Polynesian virgins.

“I'm going to give you some exercises. Very basic,” he said. “It won't even feel like you're working out.”

He handed me a printout of an illustrated elderly man in various postures, mostly on his back and mostly looking dead.

A
man doesn't like being told his body is too weak to stand upright, especially when standing upright is such an important part of his life. It's something I did almost every day, such as when I needed to walk from one place I had been sitting to a different sitting place. A moment like this makes a man wonder if he spends too much time sitting, and so I sat down, so I could think, mostly how men in my family did not generally complain about lower back pain or dental pain or whatever they call the sort of pain you have when an organ bursts.

Organ pain.

When Pop invariably lodged a barbed fishing hook somewhere inconvenient, like an eyelid or a nostril, he did what manly men do: He took out his pliers and did things that reminded you exactly where you'd left your sphincter. I have no memories of him going to the doctor for everyday complaints, although I am sure he did, to have his eyelid sewn back on.

This one time, when I was six, he had a heart attack.

It happened while he was duck hunting near the Mississippi River. As his heart exploded, he dragged a boat through a river bottom, loaded it onto a trailer, and drove himself an hour north to the hospital.

“Your father's had an episode,” Mom said.

They were going to have to put him on the table, cleaving his chest open like an animal's, and saw through his sternum and reroute his arterial interstate.

It was difficult to imagine my monstrously vital father on a table like an animal, sawed practically in half, his holiest parts exposed, the very mechanisms of life laid bare for all to see and steal and ruin and wreck.

“He's going to be okay,” Mom said, but she was not the same after that.

He didn't complain. Never complained. Never asked for anyone's pity about the long fat scar running from navel to neck.

I pictured him pulling a boat with one hand, heavy Red Ball waders dragging him down, a gun on his back, hitting his chest hard to keep the motor running, the fist coming down like a hammer, and getting to the truck, and getting to the highway, and getting himself to the hospital, his eyes going dark, the light fading, and marching into the hospital an hour away to tell the doctors he was about to die and to make sure his wife got the keys to his truck and his boys got his guns.

I told myself this story, and then I told others, and it was frightening and funny, and I kept getting new stories to add to the routine, and everybody laughed: The man could not be real.

“He's very real,” I promised them.

And people would ask me to tell the story again, any of the stories, all of them, and that is how he became a legend, a man in a book.

P
op was a man's man, and I was a man's child, or a child's man, a hobbled man-child.

“What'd he say?” my wife asked.

“What'd
who
say?”

She rolled her eyes. My wife had elevated eye-rolling to an art that can only be practiced by the demon-possessed and various dark wizards of irony. The iris goes up and all but disappears under a lid that flutters like a windblown sheet of paper under the burden of a commemorative paperweight. I tried to imitate this maneuver, to show her how attractive it made her look, and came near to severing my optic nerve.

“Are you crippled? Is it a
disease
?” she said.

I wanted to lie, to invent something, a rare ailment not yet searchable on WebMD, but I decided not to deceive my wife. It would be too much work and might require the remembering of conversations, a responsibility I long ago delegated to her.