I come back to the room from a coffee run in the deserted cafeteria and Haim is gone. I find him a floor down, in the pediatric intensive care unit. The lone nurse at the duty station gives me a sad little smile as I pass, as if to say she’s sorry.
Haim has been back and forth between here and the pediatric oncology ward so often that everyone knows us. The only real regulars in the PICU are from our ward upstairs; most everyone else on the PICU floor is already close to the end of their story, happy or sad, and, one way or the other, doesn’t return.
Haim met Ava on his first return from the PICU, when they’d both gotten C. diff after starting chemo. They were each in contact isolation rooms which were situated next to each other at the end of the ward. The bathrooms, which they both occupied a lot, had extremely thin walls, and at some point they realized they could hear each other. Dozing beside Haim’s bed I would hear their tiny voices talking for hours as they each waited out the diarrhea, the tinny laughter echoing strangely, always sounding so surprised. Each time the IV team came to access their ports, the nurses moving back and forth in the lock between the two rooms, Haim and Ava craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of one another when the doors opened, and sometimes waved. Ava got cleared to leave contact isolation first and Haim moved into her room. She’d spent a lot of time writing random phrases and words in dry-board marker on the large windows that looked outside. Her handwriting was rounded and girlish and after she was gone, Haim changed her letters into numbers, solving the complicated equations idly against the furrowed clouds.
Ava, who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is not doing very well. Haim asks for updates about her every week and I usually tell him whatever the nurses tell me when I pause at their station. He has his own information-gathering services, I guess, because lately I’ve just told him I’m not sure. He’s not really allowed down in the PICU, but he knows this and usually goes at night, when the nurses are too tired or defeated to stop him from wheeling his chair along to Ava’s room. I nod to Ava’s mother as I pass her in the lounge, but she is sitting forward, perfectly still, elbows on her knees and face completely covered with her hands.
I don’t disturb Haim. I lean against the wall in the hallway and watch through the doorframe. The only light on is a long, tubular fluorescent one above Ava’s bed. She is lying flat on her back, beset by the Lilliputian tubes, wires, and monitors. Her mouth is taken up by the breathing tube, but she is looking up into Haim’s face with her sharp, clear blue eyes, her small brow rising, steepled in what seems like fear. I don’t know if she recognizes him. It probably won’t be long now.
A man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence — I can never remember who wrote that.
Haim strokes the girl’s white-blond hair, so light a color that when it miraculously remained through round after round of chemotherapy it seemed providential, a gift. Now, though, I can see it coming off in Haim’s hand like spent animal fur, as he does his best to pretend that it’s not, and continues his smooth stroking in the imperfect quiet.
•
There is a time in the beginning of a marriage when your wife’s body is still a discovery, when — at least if you were married young — the changes you notice on certain nights as her flesh begins its shift to the denser, solid tone of mid-range adulthood are to you still a delight, something new to learn and take pleasure in. This is almost evolutionary, you might understand later, after the birth of your first child, a graceful biological swing to the kind of ruddy corporeality that can best protect and deliver a pregnancy, but there is a period when her body is not yet on this spectrum, is still only made up of the surprise of a cupped buttock or thigh, a new fullness in your hands in the dark.
We’d been married for two years when Charlie’s body began to change. Up until that point, she had looked more or less like she had the night we first met; if anything, she’d lost weight, seemed to have become younger somehow. In the eighteen months between our first date and our wedding, she had grown more and more animated, her neural circuits blinking faster and faster, her hair becoming relaxed and silken, her skin smooth and clear, full of color. Most days during our time together in college, I dropped her off in her study room, an abandoned office in the graduate mathematics department (the office where, lost in her depression the year before, she’d spent months of long afternoons lying flat on top of her big desk, asleep), only to return after class to find the big chalkboard that dominated one wall filled with complex systems of numbers, symbols, and signs. By the time we were both graduating, Charlie had won a prestigious mathematics prize from an international science organization for her thesis work, which turned out to be the hypothetical solution to a problem that had stood unsolved for seventy-five years. This award came with a large cash award, but in order for it to be granted the judges’ committee wanted a fuller work, a long paper to be peer-reviewed, a more elaborate proof.
We moved that fall after graduation to Attica, Missouri, home of Attica State University, which had offered Charlie a fellowship with a large stipend in order for her to complete her work on the proof under their auspices. It was a good university — one of those tiny schools with a handful of highly specialized faculties, largely supported by very specific government or corporate grants for research or innovation. The only catch was that we had to move to Attica, Missouri.
It was a very small town in the southeast corner of the state, with four restaurants, a mall, and one movie theater whose reels always seemed to be slightly damaged. I was still a little in shock that for all my worrying about what we would do after graduation (what job I could get with my literature major, how we would ever be able to start paying off our student loans in six months, when they began to become due) it was Charlie — Charlie who preferred not to talk about a “careerist future,” Charlie who seemed to just drift forward in her academic life with the fickleness and detachment of a child — who ended up with the good job, the good paycheck.
Because of the low rent in town, we managed to find a small house with new fixtures and a room in the half-finished basement that Charlie, in a gesture of support, agreed could be my “office.” We took walks to the nearby city park, which had a duck pond. I spent the days staring at my computer during the hours I was supposed to be working on a novel. Charlie called it our “starter town.” If we can learn to be married here, she often said, we can be married anywhere. When I complained about things like the lack of culture in the area or the fact that the nearest bookstore was forty minutes away, she tsked and smiled, shaking her head, not looking at me. “The writer in exile,” she said.
What does one remember of the collection of selves one must inevitably prove to be to sustain a marriage over the years? The story of our time in Attica, Missouri (and even that of the years afterward, in Iowa) is so tired to me, so oft-repeated and reduced down into the kind of cocktail party summary that proves to be so startlingly effective that you eventually forget that the things which made the experience meaningful are exactly what you now excise, all the details that would most likely matter to no one else but you.
I remember spending those two years marooned in small-town Missouri learning and relearning Charlie’s body, falling in love over and over with the angularity of her jawline as it drew close to me in the morning just before she left for work, with the pulsing, contracting spasms around my fingers as she orgasmed when I went down on her. There always seemed to be something to learn. I remember leaping, shoeless, from our wooden stoop onto the hood of Charlie’s moving car to keep her from driving away after a particularly bad fight. Our fights were not even saved by being interesting, or original, and Charlie was always leaving. She’d come back a few hours later, never saying anything about where she’d gone, and be silent until she’d slept, after which it would be like it never happened. We thought we were learning how to be married. “Think of us living here,” Charlie said, “as performance art.”