He waited for Jane to pick him up in a public park full of dead trees and flitting shadows, in the dugout of a baseball diamond where trash had accumulated ankle-deep. He followed the car as the headlights turned in the parking lot. He crept out across the shadows. He hurried toward her in his underwear.
She saw him coming across the dead field and opened the door. “Where are your pants?”
“Stay in there.”
“Is that blood?”
“Not mine,” he said. “Janey, get back in.”
He stepped inside the car and they drove out of the park.
She put his bloodied clothes in the washer and then walked up from the basement. Over the kitchen sink she opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass, drank it down, and poured herself another. She took the second glass and the bottle over to the kitchen table. It was two thirty in the morning.
He came downstairs after his shower in sweatpants and T-shirt. He saw how tired she was. The bags under her eyes had never been more pronounced. He was ruining her.
“I can’t keep doing this to you,” he said.
He saw it written on her face. She had had enough. No one could blame her.
She poured herself a third glass. “Sit down next to me,” she said. He did as he was told. “You’re going farther and farther away. You call me, it’s midnight, you’re in Newark. In Newark with the murder rate and the ghosts drifting across the street.”
He mumbled a tired apology.
“Listen to me,” she said, finally feeling the effects of the wine. “You’ve lost more weight. You’re depressed. You ran out of that dugout naked, blood all over you. If the walking doesn’t kill you, something else will. Is that how you want to go?”
“What’s the alternative?” he asked.
“I’m quitting my job. And you’re going back in the cuffs. No more midnight trips to Newark. No more somebody else’s blood.”
27
They say it takes a long time to really get to know somebody. They say a good marriage requires work. They say it’s important to change alongside your partner to avoid growing apart. They talk about patience, sacrifice, compromise, tolerance. It seems the goal of these bearers of conventional wisdom is to get back to zero. They would have you underwater, tethered by chains to the bow of a ship full of treasure now sunk, struggling to free yourself to make it to the surface. With luck he will free himself, too, and then you can bob along together, scanning the horizon for some hint of land. They say boredom sets in, passion dissipates, idiosyncrasies start to grate, and the same problems repeat themselves. Why do you do it? Security, family, companionship. Ideally you do it for love. There’s something they don’t elaborate on. They just say the word and you’re supposed to know what it means, and after twenty years of marriage, you are held up as exemplars of that simple foundation, love, upon which (with sweeping arms) all this is built. But don’t let appearances fool you. That couple with twenty years still fights, they still go to bed angry, they still let days pass without—
The trouble with these cheap bromides, she thought, is that they don’t capture the half of it.
He spent an entire day walking, only to arrive at the back of a grocery store. He woke up to a man attempting to rape him in his sleep. He beat that man to within an inch of his life.
When that’s your husband, who’s the right counselor to see? What episode of Oprah will be most helpful?
She would have liked to know if the man he beat was dead or alive. She didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. He just said, “It was in self-defense, Janey. I did it in self-defense.”
She would have liked him to show some greater agony over the beating and less certainty that he had done what needed to be done.
But then she hadn’t been there. How could she know what he needed to do, any more than he could know what she needed to do?
Which was, simply put, to leave him.
I dare you to leave him.
The timing was right. Becka had started college. She made good money on her own. She was still beautiful. She could start over. She had half a lifetime remaining.
The alternative to leaving him was sitting at his bedside for who knows how long, waiting on the whim of an unpredictable illness to lift, at last, and allow them to resume some measure of real life.
And what if it didn’t lift? And what did real life mean but the struggle to get back to zero?
Did she need him? She didn’t think so. Was there really only one person for you, one man, the one? She didn’t think so.
She would sit with him if he was wasting from Parkinson’s. If he was wasting from cancer or old age, she’d sit with him. If he just had an expiration date, of course she’d sit with him.
But this thing, this could go on forever. Is that how she wanted to spend her life? Tethered alongside him to that bed…
I dare you.
She pulled the cork out and filled the glass and downed it quickly. She needed a second one and poured it out and drank that one at the table waiting for him to come downstairs. He shuffled into the room.
“I can’t keep doing this to you,” he said.
He looked contrite and sad and ten years older. He was thin and desperate and as needy as a child. She poured herself another glass.
“Sit down next to me,” she said.
28
Bagdasarian came in and removed two toes. Tim screamed despite the anesthetic that dulled what surrounded the dead nerves and he thrashed futilely against his restraints. After fierce refusal he had capitulated again to being so narrowly confined, and now it felt like waking inside a coffin six feet under.He cursed the doctor angrily and his curses were mixed with personal insults aimed at the doctor’s ugliness and his medical impotence and the recklessness with which he offered hope to the sick. Dr. Bagdasarian said nothing but commented to Jane, who stood horrified in the doorway, that Tim was very lucky to suffer only the loss of two more toes, and that the absence of gangrene was nothing short of a miracle. Tim continued to scream, and his screams could be heard beyond the window, picked up by the breeze and spread throughout a neighborhood that otherwise knew only calm and prosperity.
Jane saw the doctor out. Before leaving he gave her two letters. He explained that the first was a letter to Tim from a friend of his, a renowned neuroscientist who had authored many books on medical curiosities. He said she might even have heard of him. The second was from a woman from an institute. The doctor didn’t know what to make of it. He told Jane that she’d have to decide for herself.
Dr. Bagdasarian reached out gently and put a hand on her shoulder. “Try your best that he doesn’t forget what it means to be human,” he said.
“I’m trying,” she said.
He opened the door. They shook hands and she thanked him. “You’ve been so helpful,” she said.