“What do you want to do about dinner?”
“Nothing. I never want to eat again.”
“Not even steak?” my wife asks. “I was thinking I’d make us a nice thick steak. Yesterday you said, ‘How come we never have steak anymore?’ I took one out of the deep freeze this morning.”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it.”
“Fine, but I’m having steak. Let me know if you change your mind.”
There is a coldness to her, a chill I find terrifying, an absence of emotion that puts a space between us, a permanent and unbridgeable gap—I am entirely emotion, she is entirely reason.
I will not change my mind. This isn’t something new, something that started late in life. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It is the most awful addiction—the opposite of being a vampire and living off the blood of others, “eripmav”—sucked backward through life, the life cycle run in reverse, beginning in death and ending in…
Short of blowing my brains out, there is no way I can demonstrate the intensity, the extremity of my feeling. Click. Boom. Splat. The pain is searing, excruciating; the roots of my brain are hot with it.
“You can’t imagine the pain I’m in.”
“Take some Tylenol.”
“Do you want me to make a salad?”
I have been married before, did I mention that? It ended badly—I ran into my ex-wife last week on the street and the color drained from both our faces; we’re still weak from memory. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m better,” she said. “Much better. Alone.” She quickly walked away.
There is an enormous amount of tension in being with someone who is dying every day. It’s a perpetual hospice; the grief is too extreme. That’s my specialty, pushing the limits, constantly testing people. No one can pass—that is the point. In the end, they crack, they leave, and I blame them.
I’m chopping lettuce.
“Caesar,” my wife says, and I look up. She hands me a tin of anchovies. “Use the romaine.”
“How was work?” There is relief in other people’s tragedies.
“Interesting,” she says, pulling the meat out of the broiler. She slices open the steak, blood runs out.
“How does that look?”
“Perfect.” I smile, grating the Parmesan.
“A guy came in this afternoon, high on something. He’d tried to take his face off, literally—took a knife and peeled it.”
“How did you put him back together?”
“A thousand stitches and surgical glue. Another man lost his right hand. Fortunately, he’s a lefty.”
We sit at the kitchen table talking about severed limbs, thin threads of ligaments, the delicate weave of nerves—reattachment, the hope of regaining full function. Miracles.
“I love you,” she says, leaning over, kissing my forehead.
“How can you say that?”
“Because I do?”
“You don’t love me enough.”
“Nothing is enough,” she says. And it is true, excruciatingly true.
I want to tell her I am having an affair, I want to make her leave, I want to prove that she doesn’t love me enough. I want to have it over with.
“I’m having an affair,” I tell her.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. I’m fucking Sally Baumgarten.”
She laughs. “And I’m giving blowjobs to Tom.”
“My friend Tom?”
“You bet.”
She could be, she very well could be. I pour Cascade into the dishwasher and push the button—Heavy Soil.
“I’m leaving,” I tell her.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“When will you be back?”
“Never. I’m not coming back.”
“Then you’re not leaving,” she says.
“I hate you.”
I married her before I loved her. For our honeymoon, we went to California. She was thinking Disneyland, Carmel, Big Sur, a driving trip up the coast—fun. I was hoping for an earthquake, brush fire, mudslide—disaster.
In the hotel room in Los Angeles I panicked. A wall of glass, a broad expanse of windows looking out over the city—it was a surprisingly clear night. The lights in the hills twinkled, beckoned. Without warning, I ran toward the glass, hurling myself forward.
She took me down, tackling me. She sat on top, pinning me, her one hundred nineteen pounds on my one fifty-six—she’s stronger than you think.
“If you do that again I won’t forgive you.”
The intimacy, the unbearable intimacy is what’s most mortifying—when they know the habits of your bowels, your cheapnesses, your horribleness, when they know things about you that no one should know, things you don’t even know about yourself.