Kamikaze Lust (37 page)

“I never had a surf board.”

“You learned how to ride a bicycle in one day. I remember the bike. It was red and you didn’t come home last night.”

“I was at my apartment.” I felt myself blush though I was indeed telling the truth. I raised my upper lip the way I remembered Ivory doing it. Strange, that I’d taken to imitating the gestures of a ten year old.

“Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on with you. I watch. I know.”

“Apparently,” I said, feeling my temperature rise, my pulse speed up. As much as I wanted her to know about Shade, I hadn’t been able to tell her. I barely knew what to tell myself, so I decided to stop talking, become a zen-head, live in the moment, learn to eat raw vegetables. If pressed, I could say that for the first time in months I felt as if I were in my life. Not in waiting, not striking, not on vacation.

“You know that actress, the one with all the husbands?” Aunt Lorraine said, and I was relieved, yet also offended by the change in subject. “She was in that movie with the horse, such a little thing with her purple eyes. Ach, those eyes! Well, she’s just now in the hospital with a broken hip. Too much sex.”

“Too much sex.” I couldn’t help giggling. Clearly, she was fishing, but any words suddenly seemed too death-bed confessional, too movie-of-the-week. I just stared as she continued to speak.

“It was so cold in here last night…first it was too hot so we had to put the air on, then it was freezing. I kept seeing icebergs and the Bermuda triangle, and then I heard on the television about her hip and I cried. Rowdy came in and told me to drink two glasses of water. I don’t listen to him, he’s crazy. I used to want to see you settled, believe me it’s not easy being alone. But, look, you break a hip, you break a hip.”

“You’re saying I should have a lot of sex.”

“Sure, why not?” she said.

“Like, with anybody?”

She shrugged, “
Eh?
” and was looking at me, her eyes sad, but inside the lids a vibrant brown. They were the same eyes that as a child had seen the waters of the Atlantic, the beaches of South America, Ellis Island.… And they hadn’t changed. Everything around them had wrinkled and crusted, but the insides were timeless, ageless. “Listen,” she nodded her head. “I know you’re picky, but life passes too quickly. It goes too fast, do you understand? Everything goes so fast.”

I cannot describe adequately those next few seconds, how I felt as she bobbed and weaved her heavy head, and fought every blink to get her eyelids up again. I knew only that something had changed since I’d last left the house, something that made me realize we were no longer talking about me. I wanted to scream: No! Not yet! Not with spring almost here. Not on this odd morning of record-breaking sunshine.

But my silent pleas fell upon ears equally deaf. “The doctor called,” she said. I shut my eyes. “The thing he said is I’m blocked, you know the intestines, and with this condition one should be in the hospital. There’s some kind of surgery, I don’t know. I’m already not digesting food right for months.” It was then that I noticed the pieces of white tape above her nightgown. Our eyes met. She lifted an unsteady hand and pulled down her nightgown enough to expose a bloodied bandage where her catheter had been. “I had him take it out the other day. Enough already with the tubes. I’m a human being, not some kind of machine.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You shouldn’t worry—” her voice broke off abruptly as the tears flooded in. It was the first time I’d actually seen her cry; she’d always been such a tough old broad. I knew then that her strength would fall to me.

We spent most of the day playing backgammon and watching television. I stayed in the room for her bath, watching as the nurse turned her on her side and neatly set down a towel on the bed before removing Aunt Lorraine’s nightgown and diaper. She used a basin of soapy water and a pink washcloth, lightly scrubbing Aunt Lorraine’s skin as if she were washing a newborn. Deformed and trembling, stripped to the essentials of eating and voiding, Aunt Lorraine was herself infantile, and like an infant not completely without sexuality. I wondered whether she was still receptive to pleasure, now with her vagina hairless and rib cage ballooning. It chilled me slightly, but, at the risk of sounding like a freak or pervert, I had to believe she could still experience something. I had to believe one’s sexuality or sensory receptors didn’t simply take flight with age or disease. For pleasure, like pain, is ultimately more psychological than physical. There comes a point where the body clicks over and can sustain almost anything. Until the bruises. The cancers. Aunt Lorraine had said this the other day. “It’s torturous,” she’d said. “Complete and total torture when the body goes and you’re sane enough to wave goodbye.” And I was with her now, slowly and peacefully waving.

After the nurse left, I went downstairs and filled a bowl with cornflakes, slices of ripe banana, and a scoop of cottage cheese. I took the bowl to her, along with a glass of orange juice and a jar of applesauce. Ever since she was a child who couldn’t swallow big, chalky tablets of aspirin, she had taken pills with applesauce. So many pills recently. Rowdy was buying applesauce by the case.

I mashed a few anti-nausea pills into a tablespoon of applesauce and handed it to her. “Well, bottoms up,” she said and swallowed. “Now I’m supposed to eat a little something. What else? A steak, some chow mein…I haven’t been eating right, I haven’t been living right.”

“You want a steak, I’ll go cook you a steak.”

“No, no. You stay right here,” she said. She took a few scoops from the cereal bowl and chewed with her mouth open. Tiny, white curds of cottage cheese stuck between the grooves of her dentures as always. I remembered the first time I’d seen her without her teeth, how her caved-in, granny mouth terrified me, made me cringe at the thought of losing my own teeth. I have always been fastidious about brushing and flossing. Yet I’ve had dreams about my teeth falling out. There are dream theorists who believe this signifies pregnancy, which somewhere in the cycle of birth and death and life and loss seems to make sense. At least it seemed plausible to me as I watched Aunt Lorraine chew and swallow like an eager toddler. She finished about half of the bowl then set it aside.

“Now listen,” she said. “I do not want to wake up, do you understand? Whatever happens, I cannot wake up.”

I nodded.

“You’re such a good girl, the only one in the family who’s got her head screwed on. I know it now.”

“You were afraid I wouldn’t come back.”

“No, I knew you would. I just didn’t know how you’d be, but I see you’re okay. You know what you want, and I hope that you get everything you want in your life. And that would be nice. But we don’t run the world, Rachel.”

I felt my vision blurring, a heavy weight on my chest. “Who, you and me?”

“You and me and the Jewish people.”

“What do they have to do with anything?”

“I only wish I knew. Then maybe I’d understand a little bit more about what happens after they throw all that dirt on you. The dirt, it gives me goose bumps.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yes I do,” she said. She’d had it all planned out; there was no room for alternatives.

I felt a tear run down my cheek and wiped the back of my hand against it. “I love you,” I said spontaneously, and felt as if my skin had been pried from the rest of my body. But I didn’t care. Too many times I’d hedged on saying those words.

“I love you too, now I’ll have my applesauce.”

I held the jar for her as she loaded up the spoon with the strained fruit and dropped a few orange capsules on top with her shaky fingers. The first went down okay. So did the next. But on the third spoonful, brimming with capsules, she started to gag. She covered her mouth with her hand and squeezed her eyes shut. Her Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. I rubbed her back. “Just swallow,” I said, trying to sound as if I knew what I was doing even though I thought I might puke myself. “You can slow down, you know. This isn’t a hot dog eating contest.” She gurgled into a cough. “It’s okay,” I massaged her back some more. “You want to stop for a while?” She nodded her head right to left, fiercely. “What do you want then? Water? Some juice?”

She coughed a bit more. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “It went down the wrong way,” she gasped. “I just want to finish already. I want it over!”

I wanted it over, too. Believe me, judge me, persecute me when I say that I wanted nothing more than to watch her slip peacefully into the big sleep. Time stopped, freezing the scene as if I myself had made it happen with the blink of an eye or nod of the head just as the pretty witches on television used to do. Nothing existed but Aunt Lorraine and me. Gone were the boundaries of the body, the borders of reality, of legality. I would not let anything else go wrong.

I dumped the remains of her cornflake mix and wiped off the bowl. Then I split the capsules, one by one, watching the white powder break egg-like from its neon shells to form a malignant anthill at the bottom of the bowl. I mixed in a few scoops of applesauce and for a second imagined swallowing the mixture myself. Elixir, poison, who’s to say? I knew only that I didn’t want to die just then.

Aunt Lorraine was breathing heavier now. She’d mashed a tissue to pulp in between her jaundiced fingers. It was so cold in the room with the door closed and air conditioner pumping. I took her afghan from the armchair and draped it over her legs before sitting down in front of her. She opened her mouth slightly. I put the first spoonful to her lips. She swallowed slowly. “I used to do this for you,” she said. “You don’t remember?” I nodded no and fed her another scoop. “You were so cute.” She swallowed and swallowed again. “We put you in all the best lacy stuff, but all you wanted was your brother’s old T-shirts.” I scraped the bottom of the bowl and fed her the last scoop. Tried not to think, just listened to the lulling rasp in her voice, letting it seep through my tired skin. “Then you came in crying one day that you were fighting with one of them or something, I don’t know. They were rotten, I never liked them so much. I hope that’s all right to say just now.” She coughed. I squeezed her arm.

“I’ll take a sip now,” she pointed to the bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, the only alcohol she could still stomach. That’s what it comes down to in the end: diapers, strained fruit, and spiked chocolate milk.

I opened the bottle and took a swig straight up. “There’ll be nothing left yet,” Aunt Lorraine said, her voice slowing to a mellow monotone. “Such a drinker, you. When did that happen?”

“It’s in the genes,” I said, lifting a small glass to the bottle’s neck.

“That’s it, just a few sips.”

I looked down one second. Finished pouring. Came back and her eyes had shut. I took a deep breath, bit down hard on my tongue. As much as I wanted to nudge her awake, I knew I couldn’t. It was as if I’d been practicing for this moment these past few months, quietly learning to let go.

So I stayed on her bed a while, listening to the rhythm of her breath feeding my breath; her breath, my breath, and the mild din of the air conditioner, a lullaby so soft I could have fallen asleep. When my right leg went numb and I could no longer hold the glass of Bailey’s, I knew it was time to move. I drank the contents of the glass and poured another. “Here’s looking at you,” I said, and felt ridiculous talking out loud to a comatose body.

I got up and, though I could still hear Aunt Lorraine’s slow, canine breathing, hung the stethoscope around my neck. It gave me an immediate feeling of security, of authority, as if donning the simple tool had conferred upon me an honorary medical degree. I was ready for anything. Walking downstairs, however, each step next to the Baby Jane chair spooked me that much more than the last. This old brownstone was really creepy. I wished Rowdy would come home already; I had no idea where he was.

Downstairs, I turned on all of the lights in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then I went back upstairs and down again. I paced in and out of my room, Mom’s room, lifting a photograph, reading a book jacket, and then returned to listen to Aunt Lorraine’s heartbeat.

At one point I ventured out into the street, the evening air clinging like a wet rag to my skin. I could barely breathe. My leather jacket felt oppressive. The weather seemed fixed, too hot for the end of winter, antithetical to the cold chill of death.

I walked a few exhausting steps before sitting down on the curb. Not a single person was outside, and I hadn’t seen a car for a while. I could have been the star of an apocalyptic sitcom where lighted windows tease with the promise of life, the pursuit of happiness confined to hermetic boxes. Only nobody would let me in, which forced me—the hero with supernatural powers—to watch, to listen, to tap into their lives with my magic stethoscope. As if I were the last journalist on earth.

Inside, Aunt Lorraine was breathing as she’d been before my walk. It had been nearly four hours since she’d taken the pills, and I was getting anxious about what I might have to do next. I wanted to call Shade. I needed to touch her, smell her, hold her in the most primal way. But it was too early.

So I continued the up and down, the down and out. I was beginning to think this night would never end. I went into my room and lay down on the bed. Surrounding me were the few vestiges of my childhood. Afraid I might start breaking things, swinging at my past, I shoved my hands underneath my ass. My pulse was jumping. Sweat dripped from my temples, collected in my armpits. I needed a sedative, and all the Seconal was gone. I unbuttoned my jeans and slipped my hand inside. Listening to my heart through the stethoscope, I brought myself to a fast, symphonic orgasm. So loud, so alive, like coins falling all at once from a row slot machines.

Before the isolation kicked in, I returned to Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom. The air conditioner was still chugging along. With the stethoscope pressed up against the panel, it sounded a bit like the ocean you hear when you hold a shell to your ear. I wondered then what it might be like to wear this stethoscope always, forever prepared to delve into the heart and soul of everyone and everything. An ear that good, an ear like Chet Baker’s. Probably, I would go deaf in a matter of weeks.