The Atomic Weight of Love (35 page)

“Do you miss them, your birds?” Emma asked when we were seated in the restaurant.

“I do. All the time.”

“Will you go back to ornithology at Berkeley; is that part of the plan?”

“Not immediately. I’ll miss the fall semester, even assuming Berkeley will have me. Clay will go out first in September, find us a place to live, and I’ll go later—once I get a divorce, pack my things.” I sighed—what I was contemplating was daunting.

We were quiet while the waiter, in a cropped turquoise jacket holding a silver pitcher, filled our water glasses. He lit the tabletop candle and brought Emma a clean fork.

“May I ask you an extremely intimate question?”

“I’d say I opened that door, Emma.”

She steeled herself. “Are you leaving Alden for Clay or for your birds? Why are you leaving? Why Berkeley and not someplace else? What do you think a divorce and move will do for you that you can’t do here?”

“That’s more than one intimate question.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to be. Oh, Emma, I’m just stalling because you’re asking me hard questions I can’t really honestly answer, questions I’ve been asking myself.” I overloaded a chip with salsa and tried to keep from dribbling tomato juice down my chin.

“Will you try to answer even a few of those questions before you take this irrevocable step?”

I finished chewing. “Let me say this . . . I can say this: it’s not just lust. It’s not just Clay. It’s that if I don’t do this, if I don’t take this risk, then I’m afraid I will live with such enormous regret, such a sense of failure for never having tried. Does that make sense?”

“Abundant sense. I just . . . I’m not sure how to put it, how to say what I’m feeling, but let me try.” The waiter delivered her tostada plate with extra sour cream, and Emma eyed my chiles rellenos.

Holding her fork above her plate, she delayed the first bite. “Make sure this is your dream, no one else’s. The risk should be for you, not to please yet another man. Don’t follow another man because he asks you to—don’t repeat your previous error. This should be for you.”

We ate in silence except for commenting on the delicious food. Finally, I said: “I’m not doing this just for Clay.”

Emma looked at me, nodded solemnly. “That’s good.” And then, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, she said, “And don’t stay because I will miss you so.”

“I know,” I said, looking at her across the table, seeing the flickering candle reflected in the lenses of her eyeglasses. The waiter cleared our plates, brought us sopaipillas with honey and coffee. I poured a generous amount of cream into my cup and then remembered: “I brought a poem for you to read.” I handed her a folded piece of paper. She read it out loud:

Men do.

Women make do.

We wait, patient Penelope at the hearth.

We conform, good girls in girdles.

We serve, suppressed sighs growing stale.

We meld with oblivion,

Flying ever in his slipstream.

“Remind me about slipstreams,” she said, folding the page and handing it back to me.

“Migratory birds make use of the slipstream. Alden calls it ‘vortex surfing.’ Wingtip vortices generated by the lead bird donate a sort of lift force so that the birds following the leader don’t have to work as hard to achieve lift. The trick for the subsequent bird is to achieve optimal adjustment of distance between herself and the lead bird so that she can obtain the benefit of added lift. The follower also has to adjust her wing flapping to that of the lead bird.”

“Wonderful. Now in my variant of English, please.”

“I can benefit from flying in Alden’s slipstream if I adjust my position and speed, the timing of the flapping of my wings, to his. If I don’t do that, there’s no benefit to flying in formation, and I might as well be on my own. He also determines where we fly.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “Crows don’t fly in formation; they do not vortex surf.”

“All right . . .”

“The slipstream is an illusion. It’s a trick, a deceit.”

“For some women. For some couples.”

“Granted.”

ON THE NIGHT OF
May 8, I awoke to the noise of Alden retching into the toilet. I tied my cotton robe about me and stood in the doorway to the bathroom. He’d thrown off his T-shirt, and I could see the vertebrae of his spine etched in his flesh like the fossilized remains of a fallen dinosaur. He straightened, wiped his mouth with a length of toilet paper, and saw me standing there.

“Go back to bed.”

“Something you ate?”

“It’s been going on for a while,” he said, using the edge of the sink to help him stand. He ran cold water, rinsed his face and mouth.

“What does ‘a while’ mean?”

“Several hours. But don’t let’s start with the interrogation.”

The retching began again, and Alden knelt once more on the floor. This time I saw the result—dark, green-brown bile. When he moved into profile, I could see his belly: It was the size of a bass drum, blown up like some sort of aberrant creature in a carnival freak show. I knelt beside him, touched the taut skin.

“There is something terribly wrong here.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No. I’m taking you to the emergency room,” I said, assuming greater authority than I had. “This is dangerous, Alden.”

“No.”

“You’re being foolish. Foolhardy. Your body is speaking to you.”

He turned and looked me full in the face, peevishly imitating me: “
Speaking to me
, Meri? Where in the hell do you get that kind of language?”

“What does it matter where I got it?” I fumbled. “It’s obvious to anyone who looks at you—you are ill.”

He flushed the toilet and almost immediately sent another torrent of brown liquid into the bowl as it slowly refilled.

I stood. “Your choice. Either I take you in, or I call an ambulance.” He motioned for me to leave the room and then his legs gave out, and he sat hard on the floor. I was already untying the sash on my robe and slipping it from my shoulders: “I’m going to put on some clothes and start the car. Stay here until I come get you.” He was wearing his shearling slippers and blue cotton pajama bottoms—that would be enough, if I grabbed a blanket. I’d get the mop bucket and a roll of paper towels so he could throw up in the car on the way to the hospital. Because I wasn’t sure how long we’d be gone, I filled Jasper’s bowl with extra kibble and made sure he had plenty of water.

Alden was like an obedient, chastised child by the time I held the door for him and handed him the bucket, stowing the paper towels at his feet.

MILES OF SAGE-GREEN
WALLS
and pine-toned linoleum. Starched white uniforms, crepe-soled shoes squeaking on polished floors. The purgatorial wait for blood tests. Reports of bowel habits coaxed from the reluctant, private, dignified scientist who’d never once even mentioned the existence of bowel movements to his wife of nearly three decades. A man who was used to being in charge and plotted all contingencies in advance, was now reduced to a helpless state. When Alden began to hallucinate, asked me about the “white stuff all over my legs,” they started an IV to keep him from becoming further dehydrated. Finally, interpretation of X-rays of Alden’s abdomen: intestinal blockage, a growth of some kind. It was most likely a tumor, cancer.

In two terse sentences the doctor altered the course of our lives, like a lightning-felled tree suddenly damming a stream, sending the flow skittering across tender green fields.

They decided to send him by ambulance to Albuquerque for surgery, and I was to follow in my car, as he’d probably be admitted for some time.

I stopped by the house, hurriedly packed a bag, turned on some lights, and called Clay, asked him to come get Jasper, and then to lock up our house. To all of his questions, I said “I don’t know,” including his questions about me, how I was doing. There was no time for the luxury of contemplation.

THE SURGERY
TOOK OVER
six hours, and although at one point the nurse came out to tell me that Alden would not have to endure an ostomy, in the end, they created a mouth in the soft flesh of his abdomen that pursed its lips and emptied the contents of his bowels into a bag.

The cancer, they said, had set up shop in several areas of his intestines and had likely spread to other areas of his body, including his liver. His body was shot full of rampaging, mutinous cells, although Alden didn’t yet know any of this. He’d be sleeping off the anesthesia for some time. With the exhausted surgeon seated next to me in the waiting room, the nurse encouraged me to find a motel room and get some sleep.

“But what’s the prognosis? What does all of this mean in terms of his life?” I asked.

The doctor removed his surgical cap, fiddled with it in his lap, slouched, and relaxed his long legs. Dr. Bridges had been on his feet most of the night, his hands in Alden’s guts. I thought with some amazement that he’d seen parts of my husband I’d never seen, that, in a way, he knew Alden on a more intimate level than I ever could.

“It’s hard to say, Mrs. Whetstone. It’s highly variable, highly individualized. Your oncologist can give you a better idea, a bit further down the line.”

“All right,” I said, exhausted, benumbed.

“He could have months, maybe a year.”

“Ten years, maybe?” I bargained.

“Probably not.”

I checked into the Trade Winds Motel, called Emma and Clay, and then slept for a few hours. I hadn’t yet cried; I didn’t panic but instead focused on listing what needed taken care of: bills to be paid, Alden’s work to be notified. I was focused on Alden, how he would handle the news, how he would respond to plans to treat his cancer. I guessed that he’d first defer to the medical experts and then make himself into an expert, too—that he’d learn it all, manage his fear with his fierce intellect.

“THERE’S MONEY,”
ALDEN SAID,
his voice hoarse from the tube they’d slid down his throat during surgery. “Enough to take care of you when I’m gone. I’ve made arrangements. Everything’s been arranged.”

A brutal, chain-stitched incision ran from the top of his pubic hair, around his belly button, and up to his sternum. I gripped his hand, hard, and said: “Just focus on getting better.”

He put a hand to the base of his throat. “The top left drawer in my desk has the safe deposit box key. My will is there.” He winced and touched the thick gauze over his incision.

“All right.” I put my fingers lightly to his brow.

“Meri.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Alden, don’t.”

“I let you down.”

“This isn’t your doing.”

“But it is. It is. The doctor was in this morning. I should have paid attention to the warning signs.”

“It doesn’t matter now. Don’t go down that path.”

“But I made you that promise.”

A promise?
What promise?
I wondered. Then I remembered. There had been one night, lying in the dark with Alden, just months into our New Mexico life, when I’d made him swear that he would not die on me as my father had, that he would not abandon me, leave me alone.

Seated beside Alden’s hospital bed, watching him as he slept, I realized something: I’d chosen crows for my research because of their intelligence. I’d not chosen a bird with interesting feather coloration or displays, a songbird or a bird that migrated to exotic climates. I chose the smartest bird, a bird with complicated language and behaviors.

I chose Alden’s boundless intellect, the complexity of his language. I should never have expected him to step outside his species, to dazzle me with reds, greens, blues, and yellows, or to sing me into serenity.

I kissed the back of his hand, next to where the IV needle dove into his vein. How could I have thought about leaving this man? A man who had loved me as best he could? He was apologizing for unwillingly dying and abandoning me—when I had intended to abandon him quite willingly.

I cried then. For Alden, Clay, for the three of us, my face buried in the rough hospital sheets stamped “BCMC” in bold black letters—as if any person in his right mind would steal the Bernalillo County Medical Center’s horror-stained linens. Alden rested his palm on the top of my head, and I thought I smelled his pipe tobacco, that the smoke of his pipe circled the two of us, settled warm and comforting next to Alden’s hip, laid a protective, comforting head lightly on him.

I RENTED A FURNISHED
apartment near the hospital. Soon, I had a routine: first thing in the morning, I climbed the hospital stairs to the sixth floor. A kiss on Alden’s forehead, a series of questions about what the doctors had said when they made their rounds, and then downstairs to the cafeteria for coffee and biscuits, a piece of fruit. Playing Chinese checkers and Parcheesi with Alden in between his being whisked off in a wheelchair to one section of the hospital or another for one treatment or another, sitting with my sketchpad and drawing while he slept. He’d never been willing to pose for me, but now he was captive, and I chronicled the emergence of even more of his bones as the chemotherapy took its toll, as they took him to the edge of death in an effort to heal him.

At the apartment complex, I met my next-door neighbor, one of the soldiers forced on the Bataan Death March when we lost Corregidor to the Japanese. Berto had been sent to Bataan with a large contingent of New Mexicans, mostly Hispanic. He showed me his mess kit one hot summer evening as we sat on the steps sipping iced tea. The pitted metal dish bore the scratched names of his fellow prisoners of war, many of whom had not survived the lack of food, the heat, the disease, brutality, and haphazard machine gun fire. He touched his fingertips to the sacred names and told me he’d never washed it—that it might still have microscopic remnants of rice, rotten chicken, blood. Berto’s other souvenirs of Bataan included malaria, beriberi, nightmares, an inability to feed his dog without retching at the smell of the dog food, and a promise to himself never again to go barefoot—not even at night when he got up to go to the bathroom or to check the locks on his doors.