Vital Signs (10 page)

“I’ve spoiled them?” I say. “I am the only one who ever gave them a curfew, made them do homework.” I smile at Anna and watch the smile rise on her own face. “It was always, ‘Wait until Dad gets home.’ You gave them money every time they held out their hands!”

“That’s true, Mom,” Charlotte contributes.

“Don’t mind me,” I say, laughing, enjoying the three of us this way. “I just went to work, faithfully, every day, to give you all these little extravagances,” and I hear my voice catch with regret and hope to God that neither of them has noticed, “and about that, anyway …” I am shocking myself, hearing these words come out of my mouth, “about all that … work … it’s something I’ve been meaning to say, to tell you …” and I can sense Charlotte’s eyes on me, her brow furrowed in confusion, like mine, “around that time, you know the work was very trying … and it’s …” What am I doing? “It’s strange, but I think I must have felt …”

I look up at Charlotte, whose lips are pursed so fully in disapproval that they look clownish. We hold each other’s gaze for so long I feel my eyes start to get watery.

“Dad, Mom and I aren’t finished all this sorting,” Charlotte says and gives me a look that says “Over my dead body will you speak now.” Yes, Charlotte has known all along, I think. What is this facility with truth that women have?

“Michael Williamson,” Anna says as she comes up beside me. “Don’t worry, the tear mountains make yellow stripes of us, frozen like the ones in Kyrgyzstan that time the dog bit you.”

And I laugh.

Instead of weeping, I laugh so hard that tears come anyway. I take a breath. “I think you’re right; we spoiled them,” I say. “But at least they’ve had to find a way to hang on to the lifestyles they grew accustomed to. They’re rich! They can look after us.” Charlotte looks at the two of us and then walks out of the room. Anna smiles and takes my hand and leads me to the edge of the bed, where we sit.

“If anything—” she starts, but I squeeze her hand so tightly that she stops.

“I think you’re supposed to eat a lot of liver when you come out. And carrots. I’m stocking up. Thought I’d make soup too.”

From my research and from talking to Gottlieb and others I know every stage and intricate detail of the operation Anna will undergo, from the amount of anaesthetic she will need to the instruments they will use to cut into her. I know far more than I am comfortable with, so instead I focus on liver and carrots.

“Fixing market waves in black leather …”

“Lentils, and corn on the cob.”

“My driver’s licence,” she says, returning to her three-fingered accompaniment. She is reminding me that we have to surrender her licence at the hospital. “You’ll have to do all the vacuuming—” and I know she
means “driving.” Or does she? I have grown to enjoy the uncertainty. I am fond of this aneurysm now. Her hands, I notice, are more wrinkled than I remember, and this arouses me.

“I want to show you something,” I say, and I get up from the bed and go the drawer of my bureau, where I have hidden little snippets of writing, all the small things I want to tell her, which I promise myself that I will gather and put together into one letter. I catch sight of the words on the top sheet. “I always appreciated when you threw yourself into our life, giving the children things you never had
…”

These are clumsy, vague imitations of what needs to be said.

When the squalls and frost and minus 20 of January days threw you into your Mediterranean body, you plucked light from a vault and decided to take up cross-country skiing with eight-year-old Fred, who slipped and slid to keep up with you, as you said, “faster, faster, come, we’ll stay warm.”

I wonder if this is the right way. Perhaps there’s a way to be more precise. I retrieve the illustration I began working on last week and finished yesterday. I take it out and close the drawer.

“Here,” I say, giving it to her as I sit back down. “Like the old days,” I add, and watch as she takes the sheet and examines it.

The light in her face tells me she has understood. I am grateful.

“Slip part of the window under a fountain and off comes the frame,” she mutters.

I nod. She’s right. Whatever she means, she’s right. I can feel her. Everything is perfectly clear. Something new for us when the frame comes off. The past takes too much language. This is how we must proceed.

The lawn mower has stalled. Should I go to the rescue? I watch through the window of my office as Sasha dismounts the John Deere tractor mower, opens the hood and peers at the engine, adjusting wires and checking valves. Her movements are winged and certain. When I look at her I cannot for the life of me understand why she has been without a boyfriend for so many years, or why she isn’t married. Charlotte, I know, can be hard: beautiful, but anodized. Sasha, her face asymmetrical, her eyes small yet penetrating, her heart tender, should be a young man’s boon. I think again that it could be something I’ve done or not done that keeps
her single—something that has caused this cultivated loneliness which sends her into her own body, so aware yet unknowable. She starts the motor and hops back on the small tractor.

I turn back to my work. I must manage this small feat before the operation. I have something to tell Anna, but I don’t yet know how, or even exactly know what it is. If I can get this right, if I stay at this desk and work through the day, and, if necessary, all night, I will glimpse it.

What more than a sex and a pulse—a slow, deep pulse—make a woman? Yes, this is the difficulty. How to represent Anna. Not the me of Anna or the children of Anna. But Anna’s essence. Who is she?

“There are magpies in the corn again.” She is standing in the doorway.

“Crows,” I say, as I turn toward her. I cover the sketch with my hand, stretching out my fingers to slide some opened bills over my handiwork.

“Crows,” she repeats. “They shred all the wind in the fountain.”

I want to talk to Anna, like this, forever.

“Three greens gobbled in the field, cluttered white clouds two in the sky; the shadows are fences,” she says.

Yes, this is true.

I crumple up the sketch, shove it aside, and reach for a clean sheet of paper.

I take my marker and do a quick sketch as she watches over my shoulder.

She takes the sheet of paper and examines it. She smiles. “Mmm,” she says, and here we are, for the first time in months, perhaps years, in the same moment, the same way. I see what has been wrong with my previous drawings: my concentration on meaning through a linear process. What Anna and I have in common now is more like a grunt. I need to think more like a cave painter.

I hold her hand as I get up and walk with her outside. The July corn is like a teenager, gawky and nearly as tall as it ever should be, but with the dangerous possibility that it will keep growing. The ears are bulging like oblong testes, and silking has begun: that spurt of thin tassels at the crown of the husk, like the crystallized dregs from a boy’s dream. We stand looking out onto the field and I think of the old couple in the painting
American Gothic—
the man grasping his pitchfork, that look of disaffection on their faces from the toil of everything between and around them, everything that makes their lives so fucking hard. I have my marker in my back pocket, and I am standing next
to a woman who is stripped of the language that once defined her. We are all that is left of our past and the future.

“I don’t want you to have the operation.”

But I don’t turn to her as I say this. I stare at the corn spewing in its ecstasy, and I wonder if she and I should run through it.

“What?” She turns and faces me.

“There is, there’s a chance these symptoms will disappear on their own,” I say. It’s all lies, all diversion, all desperate keening.

“Michael,” she says, and touches the outside of my arm with her hand. “Michael—”

“Martinique!” I blurt out to stop her. “We could go to Martinique. I know it’s summer, but we could stay till winter, we—”

“Don’t!” she shouts, and I listen for an echo but there is none; the corn has absorbed it. “Owls. The wife ate the owls by mistake, but the trees made holes in her.”

“Anna, please, we could take a trip, really. Florida, to see your brother—” and I know this is a dead end, as there’s no pretending that seeing Joe would be relaxing for her. She hasn’t even told him about the operation. She has no reason to visit the States, and so before she floods on about oranges and grapefruit and Mickey Mouse, I quickly take her arm and draw her into a dance. I find myself singing Tom Jones, “But for me they shine within your eyes … As the trees reach for the sky above … So my arms reach out to you for love … With your hand, resting in mine …” I sway with her until she starts to snigger.

And then she stops and pushes me away. “Michael.” Her tone is harsh.

“What?” I am a hurt, silly little boy. For some reason I think of Mustafa in Luxor, and an Egyptian ideogram comes to mind: a man on one bended knee, a hand to his mouth as though he’s eating, a curve that looks like a fragment of Horus’s eye before him, and below that, near his knees, an oblong shape like a cushion on a pedestal. It is the ideogram for love, wish, want, desire. But this sign cannot possibly represent all of those disparate emotions. What is supposed to be obvious is not obvious at all. I want suddenly to get back to my desk to work out a new idea.

“Fixing up the second barn is something I’ve been planning to do. Put windows in the barn loft, make it a place for the grandchildren,” she says, and I think she’s speaking remarkably clearly, and that I am right: she doesn’t need the operation. “Gold eyes in the glimmers,” she continues. It’s a delicate mistake. She is better, I tell myself.

“We will do all that, yes, and maybe China … we could go to China, you know; we could even sky dive, scuba dive, dive and dive and dive …” and I am delirious.

She punches me in the arm.

When I rub it she takes another swing and hits my ribs, then lands another over my kidneys.

“What?” I ask in pain. Her two fists come at me now. Girl punches at my chest, and then on my forearms when I raise them in self-defence. She hates me now, I’m convinced, and it’s finally now, this moment, when I’ve been so stupid, that she will tell me she knows, that she knew
all along, and could in fact recite what Christine said to me on that last night, nearly three years into our relationship, when she saw me for the despicable coward I really was. Anna is about to tell me what Christine said then; she is about to say, “you deserve nothing that you have.”

I let Anna hit me until she exhausts herself and flops into my arms.

She doesn’t cry. I don’t cry. I smell her hair.

When I came home from Fallucci’s that first time and smelled of cigarettes, not mine—their rusty perfume on my shirt—you told me that there were ways of talking to one another that would not sting. I didn’t want to understand what you meant, and believed you had found me out. Worse, I wanted you to know. Wanted to punish you with the knowledge of how I’d lifted her leg, placed it on my shoulder to angle in, just so. Wanted you to know how lost I had become
.