The Atomic Weight of Love (36 page)

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an eighty-pound Berto was on a boat, barely alive and being taken to Japan as slave labor. He said men in the hold of the ship were killing their fellow prisoners, just to be able to drink blood and slake their thirst. He held my hand and told me that the atomic weapons created by Alden and his fellow scientists had saved his life.

In that moment, I knew that I would not leave Alden. The Meridian I wanted to see in the mirror would not leave him to die alone—that was not who I knew myself to be.

CLAY WAS TO HEAD
for Berkeley in a week. He was still following our original plan—that he would go first, find us a place to live. During Alden’s hospitalization, we’d talked sporadically on the phone, but we hadn’t seen each other at all since I’d made my decision. Now, I’d asked that Clay come to Albuquerque for the day to see me. I had to tell him.

Just after dawn, before the September heat had a chance to intensify and leach the minerals from our bones, we threaded our way through the petroglyphs on the mesa west of the city.

“Here,” I said, pointing to some shadowed chunks of black lava next to a petroglyph depicting a family of goats grazing near water.

A student pilot circled his small plane slowly overhead, and the sound of the plane’s engine reverberated off of the rocky escarpment. A pair of juvenile turkey vultures landed on a nearby escarpment.

“It’s probably stating the obvious,” I began, “but I’ll do so nevertheless.” I reached for Clay’s hand, and he gripped mine.

“You’re not coming.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Ever?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He tossed my hand from his and stood with his back toward me so that I couldn’t read his expression. “If he gets better?”

“I don’t think he will, Clay.”

He faced me once more, his jaw set, challenging. “If he dies?”

I gripped the sharp edges of the rock where the lava had been sheared off. I wanted to cut myself, slice my palms, release and so end the pain, avoid hurting this man whom I so loved. “I’m so sorry, Clay. So, so sorry.”

“Everything we talked about, all of the things we planned. Your new life. Your
full
life, Meridian. What was that? Lies? Just talk? Did you mean a single thing you said?”

“You know what I wanted. You know how
much
I wanted.”

“But you’re going to give it all up, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“No, not just like that,” I stood and snapped my fingers in response. “Do you think for one moment this is easy for me? God,” I spat, “what am I supposed to do? How do I live with myself, no matter which way I turn? This is untenable. I can’t win, don’t you see that? I’ve lost
everything
, Clay.
Everything!
”

“You’re really doing this. You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?” He kicked at broken pieces of rock. It was then that I saw the coiled rattlesnake just inches from his feet, lying in the shade of a chamisa.

“Snake!” I yelled.

Clay leapt backwards, nearly falling. “Shit!”

I grabbed him from behind, encircled him with my arms and buried my face in his sweaty back. I breathed deeply.

“Fuck!” he said. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he finished.

CLAY HAD TO COME
through Albuquerque on his way to California, and so I met him in the hospital lobby. We sat in a line of gray molded plastic chairs as far from squalling babies as possible.

“For you,” he said, handing me a wrapped gift. I could feel a binding. “But open it later, when I’m not around.”

“If Alden weren’t so sick. If he weren’t dying.”

“I know, Meridian. I know. I understand, OK?” He patted my knee. “I don’t like it, I don’t agree, I hate this beyond belief, but I get it. I know why you’re doing what you’re doing. I just . . .” He stopped and cleared his throat, gained control of his voice. “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s too painful, this teeter-totter of hope. And,” he paused, clearly considering whether he should verbalize his next thought. “Maybe if I leave, maybe if I go, you’ll change your mind.”

There it was again, that beast of hope without which life would be so much easier.

“I love you. I swear.”

“Baby,” he breathed into my hair.

And then he stood and walked away, leaving me in that roomful of strangers, his gift clutched to my chest as if it could protect me.

THE BOOK WAS
THE
Painted Bird
, by Jerzy Kosinski. In the front, Clay had written: “To my love, Meridian—named for an imaginary line, but so real to me. PEACE. LOVE. Fare
well
.” He’d marked a page with a crow feather, and a penciled star told me where to begin reading.

It was a passage about a wild hare, a spectacular hare that had been caught and caged. At first, the hare rebelled against captivity, threw itself against the walls of the cage. But eventually the hare’s captor could open the cage door, and the hare would not attempt escape but instead would only move inches outside of the opening, briefly smelling freedom but finally choosing to turn its back and return to the hutch. Clay twice underlined Kosinski’s beautiful words about the rabbit having taken the cage into himself.

A Fall of Woodcocks

1. This solitary, superbly disguised bird is almost impossible to discern as it forages on the forest floor.

2. Woodcocks are widely hunted, with about a million birds killed annually.

Alden and I paid obeisance to the god otherwise known as five-fluorouracil, 5-FU. We drove back and forth to Albuquerque for treatments, Alden suffering even more indignity by having to ride in the passenger seat while I piloted the Morris Minor. The drug’s side effects were horrific necessities: agonizing joint pain, ulcers in his mouth and throat that further decreased his ability and desire to eat, volcanic eruptions of the skin on the backs of his hands, and—worst of all, given his ostomy—diarrhea. One by one, he lost his toenails; his beautiful, thick, curly hair thinned until I could see the vulnerable pink skin of his scalp. He was tired all of the time and could not get warm, no matter how many layers of clothing we dressed him in, no matter how high the level on the heating pad that accompanied him everywhere.

He endured it all, mostly silently. Often, his throat was so sore that he couldn’t call to me for help, and so I gave him a little silver bell that he could ring. Even that he did reluctantly, as if he shouldn’t ask anything more of me.

In November of 1971, just before my forty-eighth birthday, the brown-bile vomiting began again, and his gut blew up to the size of a dirigible. This time, he didn’t fight me—we headed straight for the hospital and then were sent to Albuquerque for another surgery.

The BCMC waiting room where I sat was packed with impoverished people from distant parts of rural New Mexico who had moved in for the duration, accompanied by pillows, blankets, and shopping bags full of food. I watched one woman who barely fit between the arms of her chair eat an entire bag of Lay’s potato chips, washed down with a can of Tab. Her thick black hair was matted on one side, and dingy gray bra straps escaped from her short-sleeved top. A toddler crawled at her feet, pushing a Matchbox car back and forth on the linoleum while a television bolted near the ceiling spewed a soap opera.

An elegant black man pressed his wife’s shoes to his chest and stood, staring silently out a window at the variegated pigeons that intermittently wheeled on and off of the rooftop. His posture was stalwart, dignified, and he wore a light gray suit, a purple silk tie. The low heels he held were cream colored, with precise bows decorating open toes. I resisted an impulse to pull him from his isolation and comfort him. I could do nothing for him.

This time Alden’s operation took eight and a half hours. Dr. Bridges walked me down the hallway in an attempt to find some privacy, and standing next to a display case filled with meaningless, self-congratulatory placards the hospital had undoubtedly awarded itself, he told me he’d removed three more tumors from Alden’s intestines. There would be no 5-FU miracle.

“Meridian,” he said—because after all, by this point we knew each other better than we’d ever wanted to know each other—“it can’t be long, now. It’s unstoppable.”

I said I understood, but I didn’t. There was no sin Alden could have committed that would justify this slow, torturous death.

“I’ll speak with your oncologist, but I don’t see any reason to continue putting your husband through chemotherapy or radiation. At this point, it should be palliative care. We’ll do our best to alleviate his symptoms.”

“Yes,” I said.

“His pain.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Meridian, is there someone who can drive you? Are you staying in Albuquerque?”

“No and yes for now,” I said. “But I’ll be fine.”

“If you’re certain.”

“Oh, I’m not certain of anything anymore,” I said.

I walked back to the waiting room. A baby had the collar of my coat stuffed in his mouth, and I could see a wide, hydra-headed sheen of saliva coating the navy-blue wool like a freeway system of snail trails. The child’s mother paid no attention as I pulled the material from the baby’s tiny fists and he began to wail. I used a tissue to remove what I could of the slick spit, and when I searched for a trash can, I saw the elegant man once more.

He curved his body so as better to hear the diminutive nurse who was speaking to him. The leather of his wife’s shoes crumpled as he clutched them tighter. The nurse put a hand on his elbow, and he buried his face in the shoe bows. As I watched the stranger’s drama play out, I felt the beginnings of tears. For the man, his wife. Not for Alden or me—we were now old hands at this business of pain, of hope and despair.

CLAY’S BOX OF BIRTHDAY
gifts was waiting for me when we returned. Bob and June had been watching the house and keeping Jasper for us, and when Bob took Jasper into the bedroom to greet Alden, I slit open the tape on the box.

On top, there was a sandwich bag in which Clay had rolled an index finger of dope and written
For Alden—good for nausea
. Then, nestled in a small black box was one of the brass buttons from Clay’s Marines uniform. He’d threaded it through a leather thong so that it became a bracelet. I ran my thumb across the button’s eagle, globe, and anchor, and noticed that on the reverse he’d had it engraved:
Nemo me impune lacessit.
It was the phrase my father had loved, the one that adorns the Scottish pound coin:
No one wounds me with impunity
. I didn’t read it as angry or vengeful. What it told me was that Clay was going to fight; it told me he wanted for me to fight, too. Not for us—we were done, over, and my skin was stitched to Alden’s slow death. But for life, for hope.

In an envelope at the bottom of the box there was a photo showing the inside of Clay’s left wrist, now tattooed with a replica of my painting of Withered Foot, bordered by an elaborate, twisted oval that made me think of Clay’s long braid. On the back of the photo, he’d written lines about a man, a woman and a blackbird from Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Indelible
, I thought,
he made us indelible
, and I began to cry.

I did not respond to Clay’s gift box, as beautiful as it was. I thanked him in my heart, just as I told him every night that I loved him, missed him. I also wrote to him, in my journals. Notes about crows, birds, my thoughts, drawings, poems. What I would tell him, were he seated with me before the fire or lying next to me in bed. In my journals, we had wild, animated conversations. On good days, I knew he could feel me, that he understood.

ALDEN AND I TOASTED
1972
quietly, the reality of his impending death left unacknowledged. His weight had dropped to less than 130 pounds, and although palliative care had been promised, the doctors were stingy with their prescriptions for pain meds. Alden remained stoic, but I was desperate to relieve his anguish, and Clay’s gift of marijuana was long gone. My desperation bore no fruit—nothing that would let Alden float above relentless bone pain, for now the cancer carved byzantine catacombs through his bones.

In April he fell from the edge of the bed, and I was unable to lift him. I called Bob, who carried Alden to the car and drove us to the hospital. Alden’s left femur was broken, and he was admitted for observation. Then, in the chain reaction that had become Alden’s life, he developed pneumonia. He spent his days sleeping in a fetal position, an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, tubes extending from his frail remnant of a body, and one leg encased in plaster, an anchor weighting him to this life.

For a week, his body put up an ineffectual battle against the pneumonia. I listened to his moist, labored breathing. He had not spoken for days, had not eaten in over a week, and his eyes, on the rare occasion they opened, were unfocused. Alden had stepped back from the world; I could feel his departure, could almost glimpse the stark white bottoms of his bare feet as he ran briskly away from me, down a long, dark hallway.

On the 21st of April I climbed onto the bed, fit my body to his back. His love for me had been clumsy, at times wholly inept, but it had been solid, unwavering. And, I realized, my love for him fit the same description. I had never once stopped loving Alden Whetstone, not in the entire twenty-eight years of our marriage. I whispered: “Tomorrow is our anniversary. But you don’t have to stay, my love,” I said, my voice breaking. “You can go now.” I reached around him, took one of his hands in mine. I kissed his medicine-scented neck. “I can do this. I’m strong enough.”

I doubt it was in response to anything I’d said, but he took a deep breath, and I could hear it crackling in his lungs. His legs jerked a few spasmodic kicks, and I put my index finger between my teeth and bit until I tasted blood.

WHEN I ASSURED ALDEN
that I was strong enough to survive, I was sincere. I was also naïve. Surviving his actual death, making it through writing his obituary, funeral negotiations, the well-meaning telephone calls and deliveries of flowers and food, the thank-you notes—that was nothing. I made my lists, crossed things off. It was after the rituals were past, when the house was ominously quiet, the phone silent, when people no longer knew what to do with me, what to say to me, and so chose instead to avoid me—that was when depression arrived to sit in my lap like an obstinate bowling ball.