The Vigil Chair

Originally published in Crazyhorse 94, Fall 2018.

This is a love story.

There. I’ve begun. I have set the words down neatly, as we used to print our names when we were kids, pressing down with the No. 2 pencil, shaping the letters on the wide-ruled line: capital T, loop of the lowercase y. I write the words slowly, sounding them out with my mouth: this is a love story.

There are things I haven’t told you yet, and I fear already that there may not be time.

For one thing, I’ve never told you that I don’t like to call you my husband. It feels more natural to say I am your wife; for example, I say to the young ICU nurse who asks if I am your mother, “No, I am his wife.” In this way I establish my position in space, put myself in my place; you are the variable, I am the fixed point. In this way, if you are gone, I can still technically exist.

Also, I have not told you about slant rhyme, or the villanelle. I have never told you that poetic time is counted out in feet. I have not told you the probably apocryphal story about how Michelangelo, when asked how he created David, said he simply took away everything that wasn’t David. It doesn’t matter now that your name is David, or that you are beautiful, exquisite, embarrassing; it doesn’t matter. I never told you the name of the first boy I kissed: Josh Flossi. It was a hot day, we were in the field behind the school. Drought season; the grasses hissed, and in all ecological probability, we weren’t more than a few inches away from a rattlesnake or a rattlesnake’s nest of young. My feet in small red sneakers, patches on the knees of my jeans. It would have been 1979, now that I think of it; the year you were born. I have not told you that two of the boys I loved when I was a girl killed themselves before they were 25. I do not think it was my fault; I hadn’t seen either in years—but if it is true that such things are no one’s fault, then, tautologically speaking, it is also true that such things are not not anyone’s fault, either; so it follows that while I do not think it was my fault that these two boys died (one put a revolver in his mouth, one hung himself from a ceiling beam with a belt), I also do not think it was not my fault.

You would of course say I am being silly.

I would laugh, regain my footing, settle back into this sphere: the domestic, the daily, the neat diurnal measuring out of space and time. What is marriage but a series of arrangements of what happens next? An ordering of days and things that happen in the course of days, a series of choices for and against, a general sense of direction, a central agreement, more or less fixed, that we are both here for some unknown duration, the precise length of which is not chosen but externally imposed; a joint navigation of space and time?

This is a love story.

Is this how it begins?

---

The sounds of the hospital—a thick, electrified silence, faint beeps, soft clicks and whirrs—are the same as they were when we visited your mother here, our last visit before she came home to die. You sat in the chair at her bedside. You’d brought her a card, and a borrowed stuffed bear. Your father and I stood in the doorway. Formally, as if we’d never met, he thanked me for bringing you; fighting tears, he managed to say, It is appreciated. You sat looking stunned into silence, as if it had just then occurred to you that you had been a bad son.

Now, I sit in the chair at the side of your bed, not two feet from your body, north- northwest of your hand, within reach. This chair is made for vigil; it leans back, becomes a narrow bed. I sleep in it under my coat. Now it is the stillest part of afternoon. On the floor is a window-shaped square of light. Through the window, the window-shaped world. You sleep, entirely still. I watch the screen above your bed: your heart beats, your lungs flutter open and closed; your oxygen is at 98 percent. The numbers are those of a healthy young man, which you mostly are. Your birthday is next week. Sometimes you ask me how old you are. You’ll be 39.

The day after we met with the doctor, we went to the graveyard, which would be more politely called a cemetery, where your mother is buried, or rather where the lapis-blue urn of her ashes is buried, under a small plaque in the ground that bears her name and the years of her birth and death, and the words Beloved mother, grandmother, and wife. Your family is so insane it took them two years to have the plaque inscribed; before that, we walked up and down the rows of new graves with blank plaques, trying to figure out which grave was hers. That day, when we went to the graveyard, you said to her, “Mom, I was thinking that if you had a headstone I would just curl up around it, but there’s no headstone, so I decided I would curl up on the plaque. But there’s too much snow.” And then you paused, and said, “Well, Mom, I’m scared.” But you didn’t cry. If you had, or if you had just lain down in the snow anyway, I would have waited. I would have stood an appropriate distance away, for an appropriate period of time. When that time had passed, I would have followed you into the snowdrift, and lifted you up by the shoulders, and you would have let me lead you back to the car.

This is a love story.

---

I feed you a little of the broth from your hospital tray that has been sitting untouched for a day, and tilt the bendy straw in the cup of warm ginger ale to your lips; I lift the sleeve of your hospital gown to wipe the droplet from your chin.

These actions feel foreign to me, clumsy. There is an awkwardness to caring for the body of another, no matter how well that other body is known. The very young and the very old are forced to submit to this terrible care, and so are the ill and infirm. You seem not to mind, or I tell myself you do not mind, that your body is a foreign body to us both. Lately I myself feel corporeal, a corpus, too much embodied, misshapen and somewhat rudimentary; I do not have the right hands for this. My hands feel brutish and heavy at the ends of my arms; I wash them a hundred times a day, so they are dry, they are my father’s hands: kind and strong, but rough as sandpaper, foolish in their utter lack of grace.

I have used my hands to measure, mix, and stir, to kneed, punch down, let rise, roll out, to chop, filet, slice, bone, gut, and carve. I cooked ferociously, voluminously, while your mother was dying. No one was cooking and I was useless so I began to cook. For forty years, she did the cooking, but she was dying and no longer could; soon, your father and sisters were haunted apparitions of themselves, their belts cinched tight to hold up their too-large pants. I cooked throughout that long winter and spring. I was a thing possessed, portioning out individual servings of soup, making up plates so your father would know what he was supposed to eat with what and how much. I made your mother’s favorite things even though I knew she couldn’t eat them, so she could have just a tiny taste.

Your father was different back then. I liked him; I saw a man who loved his wife and was duly grief-stricken by the specter of her loss, stunned by the silence that preceded death itself, settled into the corners the day we brought her home, gathered around her shoulders like a shawl; she wore the silence, her face seemed lit from below. I extrapolated from your father’s grief that he was a good man. He floated from room to room, white-bearded, his face in his hands. He did not sob or make noise. He grew gaunt, watching her die, and sat in the blue chair in front of the fire. She sat next to him in the red chair, with her feet up on the ottoman, I wrapped her legs tightly in bandages and hand-knit blankets from various Catholic aunts. Catholic aunts, like children, take death as a matter of course. It’s not that they do not grieve; it’s that they see death as a natural, non-catastrophic occurrence, essentially temporary, one more step on the journey toward a state of grace. Your father was telling us one evening, as winter hung on and hung on and would not end, that his friend’s dead wife still talked to him, every day. Your father turned to your mother and said, “You’re going to talk to me too, right?” He meant it to sound like a joke; it was not a joke, and his voice cracked, and he covered his face with his hands. Your mother cast her eyes down to her lap, smiling faintly, beatific as Mary, and pondered these things in her heart.

At her funeral, the priest quoted poetry and the spirituals she’d sung to you when you were small. You sat to my right, tears pouring down your face. Frantically, I tried to keep up with them, first wiping your tears with my fingers, then my palms, then my sleeve. I wiped your nose and held your hand as we processed to the graveside. It was a sunny day; there was the lake, and somewhere a tree. You fell asleep in the car and slept the whole way home.

---

I have used my hands to support your head, to raise it up, to tip your mouth to the lip of the glass to drink the water to take the pills, and I have used my hands to gently lower your head back down.

I have used my hands to put your cufflinks in your cuffs while you stood patiently waiting, as I’m sure you must have done when you were small, waiting to be buttoned and zipped into snow pants and coats to go outside in wintertime. You would have been one of those terribly tidy children. My mother says there are certain children who are able, by force of will, to repel dirt; you would have been one of those. I was one of the other children, the ones who dug holes in the creek bed, wallowed barefoot in the mud. You have two pairs of cufflinks; both were gifts. You also own a pocket watch on an elegant chain. These things are in your bedside drawer, in the cigar box, from the years when you smoked cigars. Then there were the years you smoked a pipe, tamping the tobacco neatly, chewing on the stem.

Then there was that awful year, when your mother died, and I left, and you sat in bed smoking cheap cigarettes and sniffing snuff at the same time, and by the time I came back, the whole house had fallen into disrepair. The postage stamp lawn was a riot of dandelions, grass shaggy and thick. The window boxes leaned away from the house like women in a brothel, displaying the scraggly remains of the rust-colored pansies we’d bought on sale when we moved in, much too late in the season for pansies, and planted in a frenzy as the green of June ran roughshod over the lawn, tore through the mammoth house-eating hydrangea, took the apple tree by storm, and even the edges of the yard began to sprout strange Seuss-like plants with improbable flowers that can’t have been native to here.

Your hands are long and slender and elegant. Mine are short and clumsy, but strong; I ran them slowly through your hair until you fell asleep, each night, for many years.

That awful year, when I left you alone in that awful house, I jotted the following on the back of an unopened bill that followed me, forwarded and forwarded, as I shuffled my things from place to place, packing and unpacking books and papers, a pot and pan, four plates, four cups, four bowls (the Target set you get every few moves, which seems to assume you, too, are part of a set: a set of two, and the two of you will, by manufactured design, have another matched set of people over for dinner, and sit neatly at a nicely set table, and discuss items of relative interest and import, politics and gardening, mulch and loam, but what really happens is the set of dishes dwindles; items die off one by one, you pack and unpack, counting down: three plates, two chip-handled cups, a single bowl, and in the end, this is the only dish you use: cereal for breakfast and dinner, at the table or over the sink): on the back of the bill for heat or repairs, I wrote: He calls to report on the hydrangea, which is the only hydrangea not blooming on our street. He says the green shoot that had burrowed through a crack in the basement wall has grown, uncut and unbidden, all the way up the stairs, fingered its way through the doorjamb, snaked around the corner, and is crawling up the kitchen wall. The grass has gotten long, the mailbox overflows; as he was coming out of the house this morning, the mailman asked him, “Does anyone live here anymore?”

I don’t know why this conversation mattered, or why you called to tell me any of this, or why I bothered to write it down. I have lived in other places where the grass grew long and bent to the side in the northern damp and heat. I have incanted the warning signs: collapsing structures, swing sets rusting, plants growing untended, green underground shoots rooting upward, finding their way into the foundation, causing upheaval from below. I have known the balcony was falling off the house and sat there on it anyway, having coffee with the forces of chaos each morning in the sun. I have lived in these places, and left them too. I cannot fathom why your report of the hydrangea was worth writing down, or why the memory of that hot day planting the garden was enough to make me come home. It was something about smell of the dirt, or the smell of your skin; perhaps the smell of the dirt mixed with sweat on your skin, I can’t say.

On another envelope, torn open and empty, I wrote:

I will write it down, to get it comprehensible, manageable, reduced, distilled, to almost nothing, less than an atom, less than a quark, and even then divisible: technically I can write until he disappears. I can write him out of the story. I can just kill him off.

But breakups are boring. It’s best I never went anywhere with that.

And in the margins of a draft—it seems that year I was compelled to fill all blank space with my unreadable scrawl, cluttering the cacophonous silence with the scratching of a pen—I wrote:

I’ve grown used to holding a thing; the thing was heavy, but it was mine, like a monstrous child; and now the weight of its absence pins me down. Is this the sensory manifestation of negative space? Invisible, amorphous, but present, possessed of its own physics. It bears down with inordinate force.

This seems unfortunately prescient.

---

Your head is wrapped in gauze. Blood and whatever else is wet in the brain circulates through clear tubes. I try to picture what your head would look like without the gauze: you are missing both sides of your skull. They call this the bilateral bone flap. On a piece of surgical tape, taped to the gauze, it says in handwritten letters, NO BONE FLAP. I don’t know why it isn’t plural: flaps, bone flaps. These pieces of your skull are somewhere in the hospital, safely kept, so they can be put back on your head. I want to know what they are kept in—a plastic container? A safety deposit box? I picture them, curved and smooth as salt-worn shell. We have been assured that the bone flaps, once put back, will fuse into place, the way a baby’s skull bones jigsaw themselves into position, closing over that terrifying soft spot babies have on their heads. I have always been afraid of babies, with their soft pliable heads, their perfectly coiled pink brains, the amniotic watercolor wash of their minds. Once I dropped a baby. He looked surprised at first, then howled, but seemed for the most part unhurt. I have not held a baby since. I was 12 or 13; not old enough to babysit a newborn, but I was cheap labor, easily plied with junk food and long air-conditioned summer afternoons in front of the gigantic faux-wood TV, belly-down on the carpet, watching soap operas and paging through the father’s vast collection of Penthouse and Hustler magazines. I never told you about that. Somehow it didn’t come up.

The patient in the next room died today. No fluster, no fuss. When I got here this morning at five, it was dark, he was in the bed, fluorescent, under a tangled mass of tubes. When I came back from the bathroom this afternoon, the bed was empty, stripped and tightly remade. I thought absurdly of Jesus, stripped before they nailed him to the cross. This is an old Catholic hospital; there is a brass crucifix on the wall in every room, portraits of nuns in the hallways, carved wood, stained glass, bronze statues of saints. The kind-eyed young chaplain visited us while we were waiting for you to be wheeled into surgery; we chatted about things, killing time while he gave you the chance to say anything you might need to say to a priest, unburden yourself of your secrets, or ask to be given whatever rites come before last rites—penultimate rites, the rites of just in case there isn’t time for last rites—but you did not. You did not seem to understand, and I couldn’t explain; there wasn’t time.

I want to tell you everything I’ve never told you, now. I would clarify something, why I’ve stayed; I would explain what keeps such systems cohesive, what forces cause us to orbit in this fashion, rather than flying apart. But you are confused. You drift in and out of clarity, lose your sense of place and time. We’ll be speaking softly, and then your eyes will cloud over with opiate sleep and fall closed. One evening a few weeks ago, before the hospital, I said, My hands ache. I did not say that also my hips ached when I tried to sleep, when I lay next to you in bed. I did not tell you I felt heavy. Dense, impermeable, made of something solider than flesh and bone. The human organism is mostly water, I know that. But in the night, when I lay on my side, watching your mouth, waiting for your lips to part slightly in the wake of sleep, when I watched the breath enter your body and then rush out, I became convinced that I myself had gathered gravity and mass. My hip pinned the bed to the floor. I lay my arm across your chest, and watched it rise and fall.

Have you noticed that it’s never fully dark in the city? It makes it easier to watch you sleep. From this angle, at your bedside, the blue light through the window traces the sharp line of your features: forehead, eye hollow, cheekbone, your father’s nose and chin. But your lips are soft and full; they part just slightly in the instant when you fall asleep. Inhaling, your nostrils flare; exhaling, your lips part, and you say poof. I have grown accustomed to listening for it, your tiny plosive poofs. They tell me all I need to know: you still draw breath. If I know this much, I can orient myself: your breath, true north. This is a love story. I strain through the night to guide us, and keep us on course.