Lisa laughed. “She looks deeply involved,” she said. She glanced at Kate. “The ‘Guess what I’m going to do to you in the car’ look.”
“I think we all remember the look,” Kate answered, with a sardonic roll of her eyes. “However long it has been since we had it ourselves.”
I did know the look. When Jill talked about him her face took on a secretive, voluptuous expression, her gaze cast off to the side, eyelids slightly lowered, mouth opening just enough as she considered him that it showed the whiteness of her teeth. Every now and again a smile surfaced and disappeared again. It was that face that says you’re thinking of something you won’t share, but you’ll keep it there with you, like extra money in your pocket. It was kind of maddening. I had forgotten about that sensation, but, seeing evidence of it, I felt how it had been that first time after Liam left the house, when I kept thinking of the backpack he’d pushed to the car floor.
Well. Good for her. Jill may have exuded such general contentment that Lisa could spot it twenty yards away, but I was becoming more distanced from sex every day, like a foreign language I’d forgotten to practice. At least I tried to practice. My Japanese purple wand had
gone from whimsical purchase to sexual oxygen. The problem now was the monitor we’d strung between Kate’s and my rooms in case of an emergency. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, fire up my vibrator with those around. Mine was only a speaker, not a transmitter, but the connection was too intimate, somehow, and I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d be broadcasting my lonely passions into Kate’s room and all over the house. I thought of turning off the monitor and switching it back on when I was done, but when I tried it once I was sure it only telegraphed my intentions: that suggestive click off to dead air and then, eventually, the sated, quiet static.
So instead I took sybaritic showers and baths, accompanied by ever-filthier narratives in my head. The baths felt secret and hidden, like when I was eleven or twelve and had just discovered the perfect use for the warm jet of the faucet. My parents never said anything about those baths, which often took forty-five minutes, and neither did Kate. (Unlike Kate, my mother occasionally had rapped on the bathroom door when, enthralled, I had probably run the water bill into the thousands. From where I lay with my ears beneath the warm shelter of the water and my eyes shut against the bright overhead light, the knock on the door was always startling, shocking me up through the water’s surface like a criminal rejected from the depths of a puritan lake.)
Half the time it wasn’t even that I was so desperate for sex itself. I wanted the distraction of it, the concentration that excluded everything else. Sex with myself satisfied something completely different from what sex with Liam had done. With him, self-awareness was so much of it, the way I felt him watching me, as though I must be so irresistible. But alone, I didn’t do any of the things you see in magazines, the ones that tell you to admire yourself in the mirror and revel in your beauty and what have you. Alone I was an instrument, a working tool of the simplest sort.
When Jill offered to set me up with one of Tim’s friends I didn’t even pretend to hesitate for form’s sake. I’m sure she had in mind some nice conversation over dinner, but I was thinking about the end of the night when I and whoever this guy was would get rid of the other two. I wanted out, out of my own body and out of my quiet bedroom. Let someone else join in.
Kate, of course, was in a similar dilemma, but the only solution we’d come up with for her was structure. I put the blue butterfly vibrator on her about once a week—often Thursdays, for some reason neither of us elucidated—and then went for a walk. I told no one about this, not Hillary or Simone or even Jill, and I don’t think Kate ever said anything to Lisa. No one thought to ask me anyway. As I once had, most people were content to assume that Kate had forgotten sex when she got the diagnosis. I wasn’t too embarrassed to admit what I did. Had someone implied there was anything unusual or distressing about the situation I would have protested. I think I might even have meant it. But whatever my involvement in her sex life, it was, as always, not mine to reveal. It was Kate’s, and it remained the one topic we did not bridge with humor or self-mockery. Everything else was fair game, which made the taboo even stronger. Even Cynthia, whose name was close to verboten in our house, came up for the occasional jab, especially if Lisa were there to spur it. But we talked around the vibrator and the nights Kate chose to use it. She cast her gaze in its direction and I followed, and we didn’t have to say a word.
Eventually I had decided I was wrong in assuming Hillary and Simone did the same thing for her. Kate still seemed mortified by the whole process. I couldn’t imagine her putting herself through it with more than one person. Sometimes I thought I should just say something to her to break the tension, make reference to my visit to A Woman’s Touch or leave a pornographic novel lying about—not to out Kate but to out myself. I thought it might be helpful to expose, so to speak, my own habits, just so we were both out there, equally vulnerable.
One evening, I strolled around the block, waving to neighbors and checking my watch to see if the hour had gone by. I had my winter coat on but unbuttoned. April had been even slower to warm up than usual, and we’d had more than one flurry. As I walked I began thinking about the butterfly. After the first time I put it on her I’d done a little Web research—unsure if I was being a good, clinical caregiver, figuring out precisely what my employer needed and wanted, or if I was intruding: She couldn’t even come without me trying to figure out the physiological functions. What there was on the ALS sites was fairly general—the nerves weren’t affected, and the muscles that affected sexual
function weren’t either. Then the sites went on to talk a lot about the partners, and intimacy, and touching. There was only so much I could take away from it, not being Evan, or an actual lover.
When had she bought the butterfly? Maybe it had been a gift from Evan years ago, a lagniappe before it had become a necessity. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she had bought it once she felt her hands giving way, the muscles getting softer and duller. (Was there a Web site or catalog out there that specialized in sexual fulfillment for the disabled? The idea almost stopped me in my tracks—if there wasn’t, there should be. I felt brilliant.)
I kept picturing Evan presenting it to her as a gift, wrapped up by her plate at dinner one evening, balanced atop the ice in a bucket of chilled champagne. But even when I tried to think kindly of him I couldn’t, and I imagined this as the most backhanded of gifts, the replacement, the turning away.
Why, I thought, stumbling over a tricycle on a sidewalk, did he get to go off and find sex somewhere else? Lately I just kept coming back to it, over and over. Why was it that he lived across town, rolling around naked and sweaty on a bed or a floor or the manicured lawn with Cynthia, while Kate and now I lived in a house so overheated with suppressed sexuality that it barely needed a furnace?
I turned the corner back to Chambers Street and checked my watch. An hour already. I jogged up the drive to the front door. I wanted Evan there with us, sleeping fitfully in a little room of his own, his skin constantly stippled with a rash of excitement until he finally gave in and spirited himself away for a solitary shower of his own, desperate for romance.
I
’M SORRY. I JUST
. . . I feel awful,” I said. I stood beside her bed, arms crossed over my breasts. Kate, on her belly, looked back over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow arched.
“How bad is it?” she asked. “I can tell it’s bad.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said, staring down at her skin. I was stalling. It was bad, but not as severe as I had feared at first: a bruise in the middle of one of her buttocks, but no breaking of the skin. The contusion was the size of my palm, plummy and vivid, with an oval splotch in the center that would soon turn yellow, like a serpent’s eye. I was more worried about a red patch I’d noticed near the base of her tailbone, which could be the beginning of a pressure sore. We moved her from her chair to her bed to a recliner several times a day, and padded everything in sight with foam and sheepskin, but with bad circulation and her bones pressing on her skin, sores were a big risk. Looking at that red spot now, which could have been a sore and could also just be a mark from the fall, I felt as if I’d just hit something with my car. My job included keeping her free of sores—and not dropping her—and I’d fucked it all up.
“It’s not terrible,” I said. “Really.” I wasn’t saying anything about the spot for a few minutes, though I would tell Hillary to look. I touched the red spot with my fingertip. It felt as cool and soft as the rest of her skin. It blanched white when I pressed lightly.
“Stop it,” Kate said. Then she closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry. I know it was an accident.”
“I know it hurts,” I said. “I don’t know how I let you slip.”
It had happened as I was getting her from her wheelchair to her bath chair—one moment I was lowering her right in place, and the next her skin was terribly slippery, and I felt a sickening lurch as I lost hold of her. Her buttock had hit the arm of her chair, hard enough to bruise, especially since she had no extra fat to cushion the blow. Now it hurt her to sit, and I had to keep her on her belly, in bed, for at least a day, and when I’d checked her bruise I’d seen the red spot for the first time. It was mortifying, all the attention we had to pay to a bruised ass, a bruised ass I’d caused. She was angry at me and trying not to be, humiliated and trying not to show it.
“It could’ve been worse,” she said now as I pulled her panties back up and her nightgown down from where it had been bunched around her waist. I set a frozen gel-pack on the curve of her butt and excused myself to go to the bathroom.
I washed and dried my hands, staring at myself in the mirror. I needed a shower and a few pounds of makeup if I was going on this stupid blind date tonight. Kate had called for me at four that morning, I’d dropped her in the shower at six, and nothing had gone well since. She hated being on her stomach or her side the whole day, stuck in bed, and it was making her irritable and me guilt-ridden. I splashed water on my face and went back in.
“You want the window cracked or anything?” It was still chilly outside, but the room smelled musty and close. I’d meant to change the sheets today.
She shook her head. “I told you, I’m really too cold for that. Open a window out front, if you need to, but close my door. Please.”
She was facing the television, one hand crooked up toward her shoulder with the remote beneath it. “What do you need?” I asked. I settled another blanket over her. “Can I move you, or give you a back rub, or put on some music? I can read to you, if you’re bored with TV.”
She shook her head. “Nothing, thanks. No, wait. Maybe a hit of the sleeping stuff.”
This meant grinding up a sleeping pill, dissolving it in water, and running it through the feeding tube. It was such a production that I wished we had a liquid form, maybe dispensed with an eye dropper. Moreover, I hated the pills because she looked waxen and unreachable
hours after taking them, her eyes unfocused, white strings of saliva clinging to the corners of her mouth. It frightened me how ruthlessly the medication knocked her out, the way she could barely speak as she came out of it, much less crack a joke. But it was the wrong day to suggest anything else, so I went back to the kitchen to get it ready.
I got out two of her sleeping pills and set about crushing them in a little mortar and pestle designated for this alone. Then I scraped the powder into a glass of water and stirred, watching till I didn’t see any particles. I could have used some rest too. I needed to get out of the bedroom that smelled of old laundry and the heavy coconut moisturizer I anointed her with each day, away from the endless strobe and blather of the television set. I needed to get out of the house, go somewhere I wasn’t a liability. How had I lost my grip on her? I kept imagining the moment, but worse: What if I’d really dropped her on that ceramic tile? I looked at the floor of the shower, its gleaming white squares. I could have knocked her out, or maybe even killed her. Her eyes had flicked open and the exclamation that flew from her mouth was made unintelligible by surprise.
I went back to her with the water glass and the feeding tube tucked under my elbow. “Ready?” I asked. She nodded, and I put another layer of foam beneath her hips, where I had to roll her over to get to the valve.
I tipped her over, careful to keep from touching the bruise directly. A muscle strained across one side of my back. I must have pulled it when I tried to catch her. Kate watched me while I pushed up the nightgown and opened the valve, fitting in the feeding tube and pouring in the medicated water. We stayed silent while the water drained into her. When it was done I removed everything, patted her belly with a towel where a bit of water had dripped off the tube, and resituated her on her side.
“Thank you,” she said.
I turned off the television but left the remote beneath her hand. She closed her eyes, though I knew it hadn’t put her to sleep that fast, and I turned out the light and closed the door quietly behind me.
There was still a ton of stuff to do—she had needed me so much today that I hadn’t had a chance to straighten the front room, do the
laundry, or eat a better lunch than a carton of yogurt. I felt filthy, my hair unwashed and my face shiny. God, maybe the bedroom smelled stale because of me.
It was five o’clock. Hillary would be here soon. I’d start the laundry; she could finish it and probably even change the sheets without waking Kate. I couldn’t ask her to straighten the front room because it was all my stuff, but maybe she’d hate it so much she’d be compelled to clean. I should clean it up before I got in the shower. I had the time, and I was in the doghouse whether Kate would admit it or not. But I just couldn’t face it right then, any of it. I felt like a housewife with a kid who hated me, and the kid was right.