Parachute
The day I found out that my wife had cancer, I became obsessed with a story I heard on the radio. It described how a young skydiver in New Zealand had survived a 10,000-foot fall with a defective parachute because he landed in a duck pond.
The skydiver’s father was watching from a grandstand at the moment the accident happened. As I listened to the story on an Indianapolis radio station, I tried to imagine the terrible arc of feelings that must have sped through the father’s mind as he saw his son tumbling and spinning through the air. In that surreal instant before the boy landed, the father may have already resigned himself to burying the broken remains of his son, the son that he had taught and encouraged to jump out of airplanes. Perhaps he had a sudden image of the grief-stricken mother, and another image of his own shamefulness at the graveside. There’d be funeral expenses. Possessions to sort. A hundred well-meaning letters of condolence arriving at the doorstep. For the father, this fully imagined scenario of grief and shame must have seemed a hard kernel of inevitably that was just waiting to explode in that heartburst moment before his son crashlanded into a circle of nesting mallards with a sound like vegetables slapping against a wall.
The son stood up in the middle of the duck pond without a broken bone. The delirious father waded out to greet him, and by the end of the day they were both making wisecracks to reporters from around the world.
Driving home that night, I reenacted this scene over and over again through the father's eyes, hoping in the most self-conscious and pitiful way that my mental reenactment of the skydiver's good fortune would ward away the illness that was bearing down on my wife. I did not know then if my wife was dying, and I do not know now as I write this.
To call Ashley my wife is a technicality to which I have clung for almost five years. We were married at a chapel in Las Vegas while we were in town for the taping of a television program on the death and possible resurrection of Elvis Presley. At the time of our wedding, Ashley was my roommate in a little house in Hollywood. So was her boyfriend. They were both friends of mine from St. Louis. The periodic and playful affair we conducted behind the boyfriend's back was further complicated by the fact that I had a perfectly lovable girlfriend of my own. Unless you've met Ashley, who is an unstoppable force of nature and not incidentally the most beautiful woman I have ever known, you cannot fully understand why I went along with this scheme to get married in Las Vegas and keep it a secret for the rest of our lives. Ashley, after all, was reasonably happy with Mike, who liked to build shelves and argue politics and play volleyball at the Y, and I was reasonably happy with Millicent, who wore funny pajamas and danced the mambo and frequently lost her car keys. But in those stolen hours when we spun through the Hollywood night, lifting latches, speaking in code, drinking Mexican gangsters under the table, Ashley and I were functioning on a level of instinctual purity where moral considerations had never been invented. In that sawdust circle we drew around ourselves, reality was something we could shape for our own amusement, like balloon animals. When I was with Ashley, I believed that I was funnier, wiser and more valued than I could ever be otherwise, and to this day I think that the sheer act of believing made it so.
During our affair, the thing that I most wanted to believe was that my feelings for Ashley were mutual. I flattered myself that this remarkable woman saw something kindred in me, something so elemental that it didn't require an open declaration. But Ashley has had many lovers, and it would probably be a necessary step in my maturity to acknowledge that she never felt the same reverence towards the affair that I did. Beyond the fond looks and the gumball trinkets that occasionally materialized at my bedside, she certainly never give me an indication one way or the other.
Ashley is not a self-revealing or openly sentimental person, and because she is blonde and her family is well-off, some people mistake her ready laughter for evidence that she is spoiled and mean-spirited. She is not. She is a practical joker, yes, and a gifted mimic, and maybe even a witch. (She was born on Halloween, almost literally pulled from a pumpkin when her mother went into labor while wearing a jack-o-lantern costume.) But that's all part of the package, and for those who are invited to sit near the source of all that crazy light, Ashley is a thoroughly convincing advertisement for human freedom. The worst I will say of her is that she is cunning, with a kind of animal intelligence that has always helped her evade the many troubles that her beauty and recklessness attract. At least until now.
The first time we talked about getting married was over tequila shots at a dive called the Ski Room on Sunset Boulevard. It was Nov. 8 , 1988, the night that George Bush was elected president and just a few hours before my 30th birthday. Two hours earlier we had hopped a fence at a television studio across the street to see an election-night broadcast of It's Garry Shandling's Show. Afterwards, celebrating our break-in, we met an old woman who told us sad stories about stillborn babies and busted marriages. She confided the only good part of her adult life had been the weddings themselves, all of which took place in Las Vegas. I honestly don't know whether I then proposed to Ashley or she proposed to me. I do know that the other one said yes so quickly that it inspired a legend of simultaneous inspiration.
Just for the record, I wanted to marry Ashley from the first night that I met her (which also happens to be the night that she met Mike). As we sat with mutual friends at the Courtesy Drive-In after a bout of nightclubbing on the south side of St. Louis, I consulted the fortune-telling machine on the counter in front of me. The machine was about the size of a napkin dispenser and cost a single penny to operate. "Is this the woman I will marry?" I silently asked while my new acquaintance flirted with Mike at the adjoining stool. I pulled the lever on the front of the machine and a little window slid open. The message read simply "YES." Considering how things turned out, I probably should have worded the question more carefully.
A month after the proposal was spoken in that bar on Sunset Boulevard, we boarded a Greyhound for Las Vegas. The night that Ashley and I got married, our respective lovers were sure they could trust us. Looking back on it now, I cringe at how easily we misled them. They already knew that we were exactly the kind of condescending smartasses who belonged at the taping of an Elvis special, and when I received the invitation to attend this particular show through my work at a music-industry trade magazine, nobody thought it inappropriate that I would bring along Ashley as my editorial assistant.
Just after midnight on the night before the taping, we put two tabs of blotter acid on the ends of our tongues and allowed ourselves to be wed at one of the little chapels on the Strip. We chose the Silver Bell because it's the chapel where the Albert Brooks character and his wide-eyed wife were supposed to renew their wedding vows in Lost In America (before the wife squanders away their nest-egg at the roulette table).
The owner of the chapel was an affable guy named Ken. As we filled out the paperwork before the ceremony, Ken told us that he'd been married seven times himself. When he saw that we lived in Hollywood, he asked us what we did for a living and seemed genuinely surprised when Ashley said she was a receptionist at an art gallery and not an actress.
The service was performed by the Rev. George Cotton, a Pentecostal minister from an inner-city congregation. (A couple years later I saw him interviewed on Entertainment Tonight for having performed the wedding ceremony of the rock star Jon Bon Jovi and his high school sweetheart). The Rev. Cotton didn't seem too happy to be working at that hour of the night, but he handled the formalities with ease and even a certain moral gravity. "Joseph, turn and face your bride," he instructed me at the exact moment when a taped rendition of "The Wedding March" bleated through the sound system in the empty chapel. I turned. There was Ashley, pearlescent in the bejewelled thrift-store gown she'd bought, black gloves up to her elbows, a new species of grin on her face. She proceeded up the aisle, roughly in tempo to the music, with a rocking tiptoe goofiness that made me think she was scared. The reverend led us through the vows without the slightest concession to our secret, winking motivations, and he didn't give us the dirty looks that we probably deserved when, at the end of the ceremony, we exchanged plastic mood rings. By the time we embraced, the seriousness of what Ashley and I had done was rumbling toward us in the silvery wake of the LSD. In that kiss-the-bride moment--the most intimate that I can imagine in human experience--I felt both of us lightly shiver. It was probably the acid kicking in.
The reverend wished us well, and then Ken handed me an envelope and left us alone to review a videotape of the ceremony that we could purchase for an extra $50. The envelope was for an additional payment to the minister. I slipped a $5 bill into the envelope and ran it out to the reception desk while Ashley bent over the viewfinder of the camcorder to watch the tape. When I returned, I could hear Ken and the Rev. Cotton bickering on the other side of the frosted glass doors. The reverend opened the doors, poked his head inside and called out "Good luck, kids," before hurrying out of the building. Then Ken returned to the chapel and talked us into purchasing the basic wedding photo package (although I declined the videotape after a quick mental calculation of my remaining money). He snapped a few pictures of us standing inside the chapel, then led us outside to the fountain garden. On the way out the door, I looked at the empty envelope on the reception desk and saw for the first time the words that were printed on the front: "Suggested donation: $40."
On the little bridge that rainbowed over the artificial brook, we kissed in the white explosion of a flashbulb. Ken shook our hands and asked us if we'd like a taxi back to our hotel room. We insisted we really wanted to walk. He told us to come back and visit him again sometime, and off we went into the Vegas night, giddy with the laughter we'd been holding back and dizzy with the possibility that we might have just tricked ourselves into something permanent and real. We skipped along the sidewalk into downtown Las Vegas, announcing to everyone we passed that we had just gotten married. "Congratulations," they invariably said, and we took our young marriage straight to the casinos. We gambled just enough to attract the free cocktails, and several waitresses were quick to tell us what an attractive couple we made. Actually, it was true. We were beautiful and sanctified, joined together in the eyes of God and by the power of the state of Nevada, gliding through the neon night behind the softly purring engine of our license.
We ended up on the tenth floor of the Union Plaza, bouncing on the beds and decorated each other with temporary scorpion tattoos before we began a relentless lovemaking that lasted until the dawn. Today I almost regret the blind, athletic fervor of those final hours, my failure to hold that moment upward like a snapshot in the light. What I'd always expected on my wedding night was a kind of religious rapture; what I got instead was sex so spectacular and convulsive it affected my judgment for years to come.
The next evening we went to one of the local television stations for the taping of the Elvis special. I said hello to Gabriel, the good-hearted lounge singer who first got me involved with the project when he sent a copy of a record called "Somewhere Elvis is Smiling" to the magazine where I worked. In a subsequent review, I had called it "the most entertaining record of the year," and soon I was entangled with the producers of this hopelessly amateurish and painfully sincere video production about the death of the King. I introduced Gabriel to my new wife, and he in turn introduced us to Bob, the executive producer of the show, with whom I had previously spoken on the phone. We told Bob that we had just gotten married that day, and he overflowed with congratulations.
The taping was a succession of colorless interviews with people who had briefly met Elvis or who had a theory about his current whereabouts. There was an aging comedian, who told anecdotes about Elvis' karate skills and did bad impersonations of Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone. There was the fey director of the "Las Vegas Institute of Parapsychology," who told the audience that he had visited Elvis' gravesite and felt no human vibrations whatsoever. "I might as well have been standing next to a hat rack," he said. There was the unveiling of a song recorded by a mystery man with an Elvis-like voice, who urged the grieving public to "check the spelling on the stone" for the truth about the fate of the King. (It was a reference to the misspelled middle name on Elvis' Graceland tombstone.) And finally there was a lady from Columbus, Ohio, who had a premonition that Elvis himself would appear at the taping before the night was over, perhaps in disguise. (The camera then panned to a man in the back row, an Elvis impersonator with gigantic sideburns and a raccoon coat who whispered something into a cellular phone.)
In the last segment of the show, Bob the producer took the microphone from the master of ceremonies and told a rambling story about his lifetime of charity work for dying children and about a near-death experience where the Blessed Virgin compelled him to go see Viva Las Vegas four times in one day, which led to his meeting Gabriel (the singer, not the saint) and releasing the Elvis record. "True story," he insisted, and then he added that the song had been named "'the most entertaining record of the year' by Mr. Joe Williams of Cash Box magazine. By the way, Joe just got married today." And the camera zoomed in on Ashley and me, the two of us almost as dumbstruck by the revelation that the Virgin Mary was an Elvis fan as by the fact that our secret marriage was being revealed to a worldwide television audience.
As it turned out, the tape was too badly produced for anything other than mail-order sales through tabloid newspapers; but our secret came out regardless. For a few weeks, we were more openly flirtatious than usual, thinking that the very outlandishness of the secret made it immune from discovery. At night Ashley stayed in the bedroom with Mike, and it was no great feat of surveillance to hear them making love or splashing in the bathtub together. Yet we fed on each other in furtive moments, playing a kind of mental footsy, convinced we could make our own rules and have the world conform to them. I felt proud and strong--proud because I had somehow realized my adolescent daydream of marrying the prettiest girl in the world, and strong because I believed that what we had done was absolutely right in a way that was beyond the understanding of the people around us. I even had the gall of casually mentioning to my sweet, unsuspecting girlfriend that I had never felt so alive.
It was a delirious balancing act that I sustained for all of three weeks, until the night that Millicent walked into my bedroom while I was entertaining the newest member of my family. At first she apologized and retreated from the room; then quickly she returned and started smacking me. I pulled on a bathrobe and steered her outside, where I tried to explain the situation without actually invoking the word "marriage." She cursed me as she jumped into her Volkswagen and headed for the New Year's party in San Francisco to which we'd both been invited. When I returned to my room, where Ashley was now hiding under the blankets, I remarked on the absurdity of my girlfriend catching me in bed with my wife. Then we greedily finished what we started.
Whether it was a temporary fit of remorse or a calculated attempt to legitimize the marriage, I knew that I couldn't keep the arrangement a secret any longer. Somehow I weaseled myself back onto speaking terms with Millicent, and two weeks later, while watching the Super Bowl at a Mexican restaurant in Costa Mesa, I told her that Ashley and I were such wacky and dedicated performance-artists that we'd gotten married in Las Vegas as a kind of theatrical experiment. Instead of stabbing me on the spot, she nodded as if this news was a strangely welcome confirmation that all men were dogs and that there was no further philosophical barrier against her turning lesbian. Later that night we went to the Queen Mary with her artist friend Andy, who sported a blonde mop of hair and took endless snapshots of us not talking to each other.
The new policy of full disclosure was only half implemented by this point, and nightly I pressed Ashley for the go-ahead to drop the news on Mike. She demurred, and now the sounds that the two of them made together behind the locked door of their bedroom were enough to send me into seizures. I started playing my stereo at full volume, both to drown out the sounds of their lovemaking and to convey strategic messages to my wife through the code of song. I kept waiting for our little prank to mutate into a real and gigantic love, hoping that the power of the paper would eventually compel us toward the blissfully hard work of cohabitation and child-rearing. But once I had spoken the secret out loud and fired my wounded and juvenile hopes in her direction, I could tell that my wife was getting bored with me and returning in her heart to the decent, industrious man she had dated for the previous two years.
On a night when the three of us were sitting around the dining room table in the posture of camaraderie we once legitimately shared, I felt that I could take the pressure no longer. When Ashley went into the kitchen for more of the Thunderbird-and-Tang concoction we were drinking that season, I followed her. "I'm going to tell him," I whispered, hoping for the kind of conspiratorial assent that made the marriage seem like such a right idea in the first place. Ashley shrugged and said okay. Five minutes later, while Mike was expressing a woozy political opinion that nobody else had the patience to follow, I interrupted my buddy to tell him that I was married to his girlfriend. "It was just kind of a joke thing," I added.
Just at that moment, our fourth roommate entered the front door with a co-worker he really wanted us to meet.
Mike and Ashley diplomatically slipped off to their bedroom. I suppose that Mike was familiar enough with Ashley's character by this point that he was able to resist hitting her, because they both emerged alive and unwounded the next morning. But the next few weeks turned into a fever dream of slamming doors and drunken apologies, a melodrama from which I was largely edited out.
The end result was that Mike took a job painting movie sets in New Orleans for the spring, while Ashley rented an apartment with some friends across town. Later she lived with a man from Pasadena who she met while working at a promotional job in Florida, and Mike moved into a house down the street from me and started dating a nice girl from Germany. Millicent was promoted to associate producer at the advertising agency where she worked. Ken, the owner of the wedding chapel, won a Cadillac on a telecast of The Price Is Right that aired on a Christmas morning.
Meanwhile, I lost my job at the music magazine in a management turnover, and my subsequent plan to start a record label with a friend of mine was sunk by the mogul who had promised to bankroll us. Then, on an autumn morning, my brother shot himself through the heart after a night of drinking at my kitchen table and quarreling with his girlfriend. After that, my life described a downward trajectory that might easily be interpreted as divine retribution, an arc that passed quickly from unemployment to drug addiction to my eventual residence in a neighborhood park, with nothing to show for my five years in Los Angeles but my dead brother's backpack and a change of socks.
Throughout this extended freefall into destitution, one thing remained constant--Ashley was still my wife. I rarely saw her, and on those few occasions when I dared to call her, I had to rehearse my opening small-talk like a nervous teenager; but in the eyes of the law, we were still married. A couple years ago I coaxed her over to the old house to sign divorce papers. I had hoped this would never be necessary, that we would go to our graves legally bound to each other. But she was living with another man, and if I didn't quite want to give her her freedom, I at least wanted to give her the chance to address the issue. As it turns out, that night was the beginning of the U.S. aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and instead of signing divorce papers, we watched CNN and got drunk and enjoyed each other's company like the old days. The divorce was put on hold, and soon my circumstances would compel me to leave town without having tied off my loose ends.
It's a testament to either the healing power of time or the difficulty of making friends in a new city that Mike invited me to share an apartment in Indianapolis when he accepted a transfer and I found myself with nowhere else to go. That is where I am today, living in an apartment community with the man whose girlfriend I married and earning my keep as a copy editor for a company that publishes computer books. It's a pinched and middling kind of life, the kind I always imagined that everybody but me would end up living sooner or later. To keep me company I have large debts and a small bedroom and very little else. Because Mike is an especially finicky guy and because he has reasons to hate my guts that must be terribly difficult to control, he is prone to periodic bickering about household chores and the prompt payment of our bills. I cannot begrudge him his mixed feelings about this arrangement, but when the disputes become too personal I tend to withdraw to my bedroom and start planning my escape. Between friends' couches and my parents' house and a doomed romance that has little bearing on this particular story except as confirmation that I am not handling things very well, I have lived in eleven different places in the last year and half; and beyond the parameters of this odd penance I am performing, I cannot imagine where I will be a year from now.
One evening a week ago I came home to find a message on our answering machine from Ashley's sister. Kristin is a good pal, as mischievous as her little sister and unencumbered by the almost-cartoonish beauty that Ashley has to lug through the world like an alligator suitcase. Kristin was calling to invite me to her wedding, to be held under a full moon on a Tuesday night in Michigan later this month. The message promised me unlimited corndogs if I would confirm my attendance.
The next afternoon I called Michigan to trade stories and good wishes with Kristin. Instead I reached Bill, her fiancé and virtual twin spirit. When he heard my voice, he hesitated in a way that I first ascribed to a hangover. "There's been kind of a change in our plans," he said. "It's about Ashley." In the space between that sentence and the next, I already imagined that Ashley was dead. I instantly recalled the way I had told people about my brother's suicide, the first halting hellos over the telephone, the strange weight of the information I was yet to deliver. For these people--friends and relatives around the country--my brother would remain alive until the instant I told them the news, and I let the moments between my sentences stretch to the breaking point.
Haltingly Bill told me that Ashley had gone into the hospital to have a growth taken off her knee. "It's pretty bad," he said, and then: "They think it's malignant." He said that the wedding was postponed, that Kristin had already flown out to Los Angeles to be with Ashley, and that their parents were there as well, waiting on a diagnosis from the specialists.
After catching my breath, my immediate strategy was to bully this threat out of existence. "I won't allow her to be sick," I announced. "I simply won't allow it." And to a certain extent that is the blustering attitude I have tried to impose on myself ever since. I am perfectly willing to fight with God on this one, to cut a deal, perhaps to die in her place if that's what it takes (although I suspect that at the last moment I might change my mind and tear up the contract, deferring to all the other men who would gladly make the same deal). But I will not be enslaved by helplessness, the kind of weary dread that will kill me off in slow degrees.
When I got home that night, I said nothing to my roommate about the situation, and I decided that I would withhold all news of this looming catastrophe until something definite was confirmed. I'm not sure whether this was a considerate gesture on my part--sparing him needless worry before the specialists had had their say--or a cynical hoarding of potentially devastating information until the moment when I most needed some leverage. Even under the best circumstances, Ashley remains a forbidden topic between us, and we only mention her name when we're getting drunk together and trying to prove that the whole thing's been forgotten. Perhaps I would wait until our next squabble over housekeeping to quiet him with the news that his old girlfriend was on her deathbed. Considering how badly Mike and I had been getting along lately, it felt like the only pacification strategy at my disposal.
I retreated to my room with my awful secret and started searching my closet for magic charms that might dispel the cancer. I decided I would send Ashley an item a day, in ascending order of value and power, until the disease was tickled from her body like a big, holy sneeze. I found a pair of "x-ray specs" I'd bought at a thrift store a week earlier and mentally ticketed them for mid-week delivery. There was a postcard featuring the cover illustration from a Cocteau Twins album called "Heaven or Las Vegas," a title whose ironic reverberations I thought she might appreciate. There was a little wooden box with a picture of the Last Supper on the lid beneath the words "Souvenir of the Ozarks." And on the wall next to my closet there was the one item that I knew I would have to send Ashley if it did indeed turn out that she was dying: the giant velvet Elvis.
I had bought the Elvis painting from a gay couple's yard sale in Los Angeles. It is easily the finest such painting I have ever seen, a full-sized airbrushed rendering of the King circa '68. He is resplendent in a blue leather jumpsuit with rawhide laces across his chest. He is handsome and inscrutable, with the glint of the spotlights reflecting off his aviator shades. He has not yet degenerated into the rhinestone buffoonery of the fat years.
The painting bears a long gash across the middle, a remembrance of the mishandling inflicted upon it by the baggage handlers at the Indianapolis Greyhound station. For months I have tried to fix or conceal this imperfection. Once I tried sticking some electrical tape behind the gash, which is about as long as my hand, but the fabric had gone slack, and a strip of black adhesive was clearly visible through the aquamarine heart of the jumpsuit. Then I tried to find a piece of cloth that would suture it, but between the texture of the painting and the color of the outfit, the closest thing I could find was the side panel from a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which I stuck behind the torn area with a drop of Super Glue. But the eye was not fooled, and I couldn't look at the painting without being jarred by the mismatched sliver of Pabst blue that was embedded in the velvet. Now, thinking I needed this painting to save Ashley's life, I frantically set about healing the flaw with any means at my disposal.
I dug through my closet for a box of chalk. There among the busted pastels I found a powder blue that was close to the color of the jumpsuit. Carefully I dabbed at the opening in the velvet, dusting the cardboard backing with a baby-blue patina that would match the cloth. Still, the color wasn't quite right, and so I extended my chalking technique to the area immediately surrounding the gash. With my fingertips and a moist napkin I blended the chalk powder into the fabric, trying for a subtle chiaroscuro effect. It wasn't altogether bad, but now the powdered section of the painting leapt out at me. My only hope was to overlay the whole jumpsuit with this same shade of blue chalk, to distract the eye away from the tear in the fabric. At every ripple in the jumpsuit, I added a light buffing of blue powder, a faint suggestion of reflected spotlight. Wider and wider I worked, into the hollows of the collar, the crook of the elbows, the corrugated tautness of the belly. Every time I thought I was done, I would pause to step back and assess my work, and another area would seize my attention. For five hours I kneaded the colors into compliance, finessing the individual threads of the cloth until hot, salty tears were brimming in my eyes. I doubted that Ashley, who was living with yet another man, thought very often of the long-ago guy she had married one night in Las Vegas, and I worried that my presence in her life right now would be more an annoying reminder than a comfort. Yet here I was, shaping the magic artifact that I hoped would save her life. And every time I stepped close enough to the painting, the gash would call me a murderer.
The painting by now was a psychedelic amplification of its previous self, an eye-popping 3-D nightmare of Elvisness. In the right light, from the right distance, it was almost beautiful; but to me on that night, it was proof of my utter deficiency both as a witch doctor and as a human being.
I trudged to the bathroom to wash the chalk from my hands. Mike called out to me and I walked to the kitchen to see what he wanted.
"When I came home last night, the sliding glass door was shut. Do you have any idea how hot it was?"
I shrugged and said I was sorry.
"And it was bolted shut. What were you afraid of? We're on the second floor."
"It was two in the morning, I was going to bed, and you weren't back from your trip to Ohio. I don't like leaving doors open when I'm the only person in the apartment."
"I don't think that's it," he sneered. He then delivered his contention that I was hooked on crack cocaine, that I had locked the doors to keep away the cops and that I had spent the night peering through the blinds in a fit of drug-addled paranoia.
As his voice grew louder and louder, I felt a volcanic acidity in the pit of my stomach that might have expressed itself in physical violence if Mike's theory hadn't been such a humbling reminder of the mess I'd been a year earlier. But with Ashley in the hospital, I was in no mood to entertain a roommate's hysterical conjectures. All I could think in that dizzy, white-out moment was that I would rather move on--yet again--than be regarded with such suspicion. And so, when Mike spit out the last of his accusations and stormed out of the apartment for his nightly round of bar-hopping, I crept to my bedroom to gather my belongings.
After that, there was a three-day window of opportunity when Mike's work schedule would keep us from crossing paths, and I used that time to prepare myself. In the mornings, I sent the first of my voodoo tokens to Ashley in California. In the evenings, I canvassed a string of boarding houses in the area, hoping that one of them would rent a room to a man with my checkered credit history. And at night I carried boxes to my car.
From my office I placed another call to Michigan. Bill told me that Ashley's tumor was so confounding to the specialists that they had submitted a slide of it to a convention of visiting oncologists. I imagined that a gaggle of researchers were gathered around a slide projector, placing bets on how long the anonymous manufacturer of this lovely tumor could sputter along before the body was sawed into pieces for scientific posterity.
By the third day, death-awareness was seeping like a gas through the rickety facade of my existence, and I stumbled through the world with the punch-drunk gait of a man who fully expected to lose what little he had left.
I remember that in the week immediately after my brother's suicide, I was able to see the fingerprints of death on even the most ordinary objects, to hear the rasp of it in the everyday speech of co-workers and newscasters. And although it was almost three years ago (is it really that season already?), the wet and heavy smell of that awareness is still vivid in my memory. Just as my first sexual experience was the key that unlocked for me the secret meaning behind Picasso and pop music, my first encounter with death was the missing element I needed for a fuller understanding of life. To say that everyone dies is to reduce this understanding to its skeletal essence; it was more than that. It was a sense of human powerlessness so deep and inarguable that it demanded complete surrender, and despite the tears that I shed for my brother, the surrender was eerily pleasant. It freed me to cavort with the spirits and rendered me immune to the earthly implorations of bosses and bill collectors. At the very moment that my brother's body was being fed into the crematorium a couple miles away, I sat on a shaded veranda with a handful of other mourners and heard a single wind chime as a breeze blew through the garden. I knew in that instant that an angel was getting his wings, because it says so in my favorite movie and because everything I chose to believe that week was horribly, beautifully true.
But whatever lesson I might learn from the long, slow death of Ashley was likely to leave me more bitter and exhausted than tender and wise. That such a fully-alive woman could die at age 28, that the bright wonder of her face could be stricken from the world at the end of a pointless and pharmaceutically-prolonged torment, would seem to me more evidence of God's perversity than a logical confirmation of the yin-and-yang. Before Ashley could collect her wings, there would be the months in the hospital, the extended decay, the amputations and hair loss, the awful vigil of her family. And meanwhile I would wait for relayed messages, wishing I was closer, hoping that someone would think to tell me that, yes, my wife had died. Like every other story, I thought that this one was really about me, not about the beautiful woman on the deathbed, not about the family at her side, but about me, the sensitive loner who saw her and loved her and built a religion out of her and wouldn't be there when the flesh-and-blood person faded away like Ali McGraw at the end of Love Story. And therein lies the lesson that I feared the most: that I had become a marginal character in a life that I thought was my own.
I know I'm not the only person who will project himself into the center of this story. There are at least a dozen men who are walking this earth believing that the love they shared with Ashley was so unique and holy that no one else could possibly understand it. And they might even be right. I can imagine a comical scene in the hospital, with her father and brother kneeling at her bedside, crowded next to me and every other guy who thinks that he's the co-star of the Ashley story, and as the twelve of us are arguing over who should be holding her hand, Ashley is winking at the Mexican orderly.
Earlier this evening, the final night that I have the apartment to myself, I carried the Elvis painting and the last of my belongings to the car. All that remained was my typewriter. I sat for a moment in my room and toyed with the prevailing emptiness like a stray lock of hair. By this same time tomorrow, I would be living out of a hotel room and subsisting on peanut butter crackers. If the hovering doomsense just beyond my shoulder was any indication, I would be of little use to anybody for the foreseeable future, and certainly in no position to send recovery vibrations halfway across the continent to a friend with cancer. This was my last chance as an able-bodied man to argue before the court why Ashley's life should be spared. But what could I say to influence God--a God who dispenses pestilence like Halloween candy, a God who watches the guiltless millions wither away in hunger while warriors are given tickertape parades and allowed to die peacefully in their sleep? I could say that Ashley loves children and animals (although I have never actually seen her with either). I could say that she's quite possibly a genius (although the paintings and little contraptions she makes are often more silly than substantial). I could say that her jade eyes and corn-silk hair and the luminous miracle of her skin are their own justification (although I dimly accept the possibility that physical beauty is no guarantee of goodness). I could say a lot of things, but I’d sound like a penis that's imitating a reasonable man. In the end, all I really knew about Ashley were the things that I did to be near her.
A little while ago I lifted the plastic cover from the typewriter. What I needed was an incantation, but at that moment the only honest prayer that I could offer in Ashley's behalf was a full and final confession of the sins that I had committed in her name. And so I made a vow, that if I could keep Ashley alive for one minute longer by reconstructing the details of our affair, by acknowledging my deceit, by taking the blame for whatever damage it has caused, I would gladly let myself be hung on the cross of these words until everyone I have ever harmed has pecked at my ragged liver and left me for dead.
No problem.
But as I sit here now, cross-legged on the floor of this empty bedroom, the one thing I’m forbidden to do is lie. And that is why, when I myself am nearing death and remembering what led me to do what I did on that particular night in Las Vegas, not even God will get me to say that I'm sorry.
* * *
The morning after I typed those words, I left a brief note and some money on the dining room table and went downstairs to the parking lot for what I thought would be the last time. There was an odd, narcotic edge to my resolve, a sense of absolute, terrible freedom. I'd been in this position before, and I was getting good at it. Once again, everything that I owned fit neatly into one vehicle.
I started the Impala and had gone about twenty feet when it stalled. I turned the key again, and again it stalled. By the third try I was chuckling to myself and preparing for one of those miniature ordeals that gives a departure the flavor of legitimacy. The gas gauge said that I still had a quarter tank, but these things had lied to me before, and I was willing the hike the half mile to the nearest gas station to prove that I wasn't a quitter.
I pulled the empty gas can from beneath the boxes in my trunk and started up the road to the Marathon station. I asked for a dollar's worth, filled the can, and followed my footsteps back to the apartment complex. The air was heavy with morning symbols, and the dangling weight at the end of my arm seemed a kind of final test before my release.
I poured most of the gasoline into the tank and splashed a few drops into the thirsty carburetor. I turned the key in the ignition. The engine huffed and quickly died. I could see little strands of gray smoke lingering beneath the raised hood. I added several more doses of gas to the carburetor, and when this failed to elicit anything more than temporary cooperation, I found myself with an empty gas can and thinking that this symbolism thing was going a bit far.
I pushed the car into a parking space and went back to the apartment, where I pocketed the money and tore up the note before Mike could wake up and find it.
For the next four hours I shuttled back and forth between the gas station and the stalled car in the parking lot. By the middle of the afternoon, I wore down the battery and had to lug it up the road for a recharge.
I described my situation (or at least the part of it that involved an automobile) to the kid behind the counter at the gas station. He advised me to keep pouring gasoline into the carburetor until the fuel pump was primed. "After you run out of gas," he said, "it sometimes takes a while."
I dragged the battery back to the car, stopping every twenty yards to catch my breath and curse whoever it was that invented irony. By now the summer sun was high overhead and vultures were wheeling across the sky. In a gesture of slaphappy fearlessness I dumped a half gallon of gas directly into the carburetor throat, then sat behind the wheel and prepared myself for the fireworks. I turned the key. The engine gave a mighty hiccup, followed by an explosive cough that rocked the whole car and sent smoke through the open windows. I raced out to the front of the car and saw flames shooting up from the carburetor like fountain spray. I grabbed a bottle of Mountain Dew from the front seat and tried dousing the flames. The bottle was empty. The fire traced an angry ring around the air cleaner, blackening the engine compartment with a noxious, chemical smoke. I slammed shut the hood, thinking with the mind of an eighth-grade science student that this would choke the fire.
I ran inside the apartment and past Mike, who was drinking a beer and reading the sports page. He raised a suspicious eyebrow and pointed it in my direction as I grabbed a pot from the stove, filled it with tap water and hurried for the door.
"What's the deal?" he asked.
"My car's on fire."
I returned in time to see a bruise-colored burn mark spreading across the hood of the car like an alien virus. Threads of white smoke were streaming out from beneath the engine. I tore open the hood and flung the water in the general vicinity of the flames. The engine hissed and the flames grew higher. I turned to retrieve more water and immediately bumped into Mike, who was bearing a fire extinguisher that I didn't know we had.
"Stand back," he said.
He fired a stream of foamy retardant straight into the heart of the carburetor and the flames disappeared. When the last of the foam had settled onto the engine like snowflakes, we waved our hands in front of our faces and peered into the cavity to inspect the damage.
I told him I thought I was out of gas but now I wasn't so sure. He nodded his head, then he glanced at the boxes piled in the back of the car.
"Where you movin'?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
Again he nodded. For the rest of the afternoon we stood in front of the car, diagnosing the engine trouble in abbreviated guyspeak.
"I think it's your fuel pump," he said, crouching beneath the front fender and shaking the gas line.
"Yeah, that's what I figured."
"We can go get you one."
"Nah, I'll just wait till tomorrow."
"You want a beer?"
"Sure, why not."
We went inside the apartment and as we drank our beers we tiptoed around the obvious issue like aging prizefighters. Finally Mike said, "Hey, about the other night--" and I waved him off before he could either apologize or accuse me of trying to steal his stereo.
"There's something I have to tell you," I said, and I told him what I knew about Ashley. I chose my words carefully and delivered them with a nonchalance that suggested it might all be a big misunderstanding, but there was no concealing the potential seriousness of the situation. Mike, whose mother had died of breast cancer when he was still a teenager, never said a word. The evening ended with the two of us silently sitting at opposite ends of the apartment. Now it was Mike's turn to think that the story was about him, and I couldn't deny him the privilege.
Around midnight I started hauling boxes back to my room.
I spent the next afternoon installing a fuel pump on the Impala. With every turn of the ratchet, I told myself I was a man of achievement, someone who earns his keep. To my shock, the engine was running by nightfall, so I put away my tools and headed for the liquor store. That’s what I meant by earning my keep.
When I got back to the apartment, I fortified my courage with a big swallow of malt liquor and called Michigan for another update on Ashley's condition.
"Hey, I'm glad you called," said Bill. "You'll never believe what happened." Ashley, he said, was perfectly healthy. The specialists said that she'd never had cancer in the first place. It was just a weird kind of lesion, a glorified pimple, and no threat to her health whatsoever. The whole thing was such an obvious oversight that the original doctor was practically being laughed out of the profession. Now Kristin was on her way back from Los Angeles and the wedding was rescheduled for the end of September. "The invitations are in the mail," he said "I hope you can make it." And just like that, the world was set back on its axis.
After I told Bill I'd be honored to come to the wedding, I hung up the phone and stood frozen like a grandfather who's forgotten why he entered the room in the first place. I had already set aside the next few months of my life for an Olympian ordeal of grief. Now I felt strangely emptied out, almost deprived. I was hugely relieved for Ashley, whose capacity for eluding trouble continues to border on the supernatural. But what lesson was I supposed to learn from all this? That some people are luckier than others? That life is fundamentally absurd? It was far too puny a resolution. Without a counterweighting incident, Ashley's escape didn't make any sense, not in the way that I needed life to make sense. Until there was a new element added to the story, I wouldn't be able to rest. I had to keep looking over my shoulder for the other shoe, for the bittersweet punctuation that would give the story closure. For the rest of that night, the suspicion kept running through my mind that Ashley wasn't truly safe until I either won the lottery or was mutilated in a horrible gardening accident. But nothing happened. Nothing at all.
This morning, at last, I received an invitation to Bill and Kristin's wedding. I opened it carefully, eager to see how much sly humor they could stuff into an ivory envelope and still be assured of sensible wedding presents. The text had a quotation from Native American folklore and invited their many friends and loved ones to a celebration of the human spirit beneath the harvest moon. And there at the bottom of the invitation was the date, the date when they would pronounce their love, the date when I would see Ashley for the first time in almost two years: September 30th. The third anniversary of my brother's suicide.
And that's when I finally laughed out loud.
September 30th is a week from today. A good day to celebrate the living. A good day to bury the dead. And if, after I shake Ashley's hand and wish her well and agree to submit the divorce papers, I feel myself hurtling towards the earth, I'm going to let myself believe that the blur that's rushing up to meet me is not a jagged cluster of rocks but merely the upturned faces of some gently bobbing ducks.
--Joe Williams