She auditioned the tune. Bounce me high. Bounce me low. Only by hearing it out loud, in her own voice, could Helen probe the thing, test it against itself.
She was stuck on the first phrase, that unfinished half-stich, because that's all I'd sung her. Because that's where I had stuck. After twenty-five years, I could not remember how the rest of the tune went. Over and back Helen hummed, not knowing she possessed but half the melodic story. Bounce me up to Jericho. Lack of tonal resolution did not faze her. No one told her that tunes were supposed to come home to tonic. This was the only one anybody had ever sung her.
And in that moment, I understood that I, too, would never have a handle on metaphor. For here was the universe in a grain of literal sand. Singing — enabled, simulated on a silicon substrate. I felt how a father must feel, seeing his unconscious gestures — pushing back a forelock or nudging the sink cabinet shut with a toe — picked up and mimicked by a tiny son.
"Lentz," I whispered, so as not to distract the miracle, "is this what it's like to be a parent?"
Very like, his eyes leaked back. And I saw what it meant to want that awful next step, tasting oneself from the outside, in a flash of constructed recognition. To say the thing I made I did not make and is not mine. To know in Polaroid advance that hour when all life's careful associations will come undone.
Less than a year after we moved to E., we got a letter from the Taylors. I wrote them often, for after we bolted, I needed word from U. more than I ever did while living there. They wrote back jocular stuff: "Don't you two realize the age of Europe is over and that of North America is following in its wake? Get back over here before it's too late."
Taylor had so little time to reply that any word was an event. I kept the envelope sealed, thinking it would be fun to read to C. when she got home from her latest temp job. We'd marvel at Tayloresque sentences together, over the dinner I prepared for her.
I watched C. step off the bus, waving from the balcony as I did each evening. She shot me back one of those terrified, fatigued, smiling, full-body waves that never failed to cut right through me. The letter is dated September 17, but it must have been a cold fall. C. was already swallowed by that giant navy coat that ran all the way down to her ankles.
In the kitchen, she danced a little jig at the sight of the letter. Anything that made me happy might increase the chances for our transplantation. "Come on, Beauie. Read it, you loony-tick. What in the world are you waiting for?"
I slit the packet open and read:
"Dear Rick and C.,
"Belatedly, I take up pen, first to thank you for your welcome tape of good music and loved voices. Similarly welcome have been the letters, which I have meant to answer every day. Recent weeks have both dragged and hurried, creeping by the minute but vanishing into an unreal limbo so that even less than usual am I able to believe that months have passed since we have seen you…
"For nearly a full month I have had a succession of terrible waits after tests, each of which finished a three- or four-day vigil with more bad news. CAT scan, bronchoscopy, bone scan, and finally a week in the hospital for removal of a piece of rib for bone biopsy determined that in addition to a main tumor in the right lung I have cancerous bone in the left rib cage, ruling out an operation and leaving radiation and chemotherapy as treatment. The only test with encouraging results showed no evidence of metastasis to brain.
"Since then, my silence has been caused by effects of treatment. The dreaded nausea did not last long, but loss of appetite and weight did, and a fatigue so profound that I can't adequately describe it. My muscles have atrophied and I spend most of my time lying down. I am good for little more than harvesting the odd tomato, gathering windfall apples, picking some late-planted lettuce. .
"Our long silence is terribly misleading. Your departure left a large emptiness that has been italicized by this illness and our being more solitary than usual. If we possessed ESP, you would have been deluged by messages from here. Still, it is a pleasure to imagine the two of you together in the wide variety of settings you manage to inhabit. My life would seem pretty bounded-in-a-nutshell by any measure, but your joint enthusiasm in getting out and seeing the world is overwhelming.
"I've exhausted my pitiable energy, though not my love. The best way you can please me is to promise that my illness will not lead you to even the slightest tendency to avoid pleasure out of affectionate empathy. Try to adopt the opposite attitude; let me hope that thoughts of me will enhance pleasures I'd enjoy, too, if we were together."
After the first paragraph, I looked up at C. But we'd read too far to pretend the message away. I got through the whole history. Finishing, I looked up across the widening kitchen table at the college girl who had sat with me on the Quad, when still young enough to believe in consolation. This was the same woman, the same panicked doe, in the same glare that life keeps training on us until we can no longer even dread it.
An awful half-second stutter step, and C. said, "You'll have to go back to the States."
"Just to see him, at least," I pleaded, the exact reaction her reflex generosity meant to stave off. But I was not pleading with C.
I flew back to U., numb to the new feel of the place. Taylor could still get out. We went to a nearby woods. We talked. He knew he was done. The only thing for it was presence of mind. Taylor brought along his camera, took a snap of me. I wanted to take one of him, fix him forever. But Taylor had already begun to waste away and refused to be captured like that.
I showed him the excerpt from my new book that had just appeared in a glossy literary weekly. Taylor, for whose approval I'd developed my labyrinthine style, delighted in the piece's uncharacteristic breeziness. He delighted even more when I told him how much I'd been paid. "A dollar a word! That has a solid ring to it."
I had done what everyone in Taylor's line, what he himself had once dreamed of doing. I could wake up every morning and devote myself to making worlds. People read my inventions and wrote about them in turn. My words had grown careers of their own. My overnight success gave Taylor such pleasure that I couldn't bring myself to tell him I meant to quit fiction.
"I didn't want to burden you with such a prediction when you were an eighteen-year-old kid memorizing The Windhover.' " He beamed. "But however much luck always plays into such things, it was possible, even then, to imagine your getting away with something like this."
We turned to the real issue. He protected me from what his disease was doing to him. He seemed, for half an hour, the equal of any formulation he had made before the tumor came alive inside him. I asked him whether, at that stage of the illness, literature helped much. Did it make things any clearer, any easier?
Taylor stayed as brutally forthright with me as ever. He thought for a moment, to get the prosody right. "I would say that literature is not entirely irrelevant, in this circumstance. But it's not quite central, either."
Before we headed home, I asked if he had any regrets. Anything he still needed to do. Taylor told me then that, to his mind, the only two careers worth striving for were doctor and musician. I could not tell how figurative he was being.
Taylor sickened. I found a house-sit in the neighborhood, and came by every day. I sat with him as he napped, or I read to him, or we watched sports on television. Sometimes we talked, but never again like that day in the woods. He lost his appetite, shrank to insubstantial nothing. His gut stopped working. His skin gained purple-green highlights and his joints grew smooth as polished metal. When muscles gave out, he cupped his question-mark head in both hands. He sat in the sunroom until he could no longer sit up. Then we moved him upstairs, into his long bed.