redamancy: act of loving in return
One Friday a couple of years into my first loveless marriage, I run away for the weekend with a man who drives a blue convertible. He’s an orthopedic surgeon moonlighting at a hospital in Beaumont. We drive over the causeway leaving behind Galveston Island, where I live, leaving behind his wife and my husband.
The doctor-on-duty is given a private room in the ER to rest between medical crises. He stashes me here while he works. I lie on the hospital bed staring at nothing. The song “Islands in the Stream,” a duet between Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, which played on the radio driving here, continues to play inside my head. Sail away with me. I want nothing more than to sail away with the man in the blue convertible, driving the car out into the Gulf, across the sea.
That evening, while convertible-man fixes broken limbs, I go to the movies. I sit inside the dark auditorium while “Islands in the Stream” still loops around in my mind. I am an island in a dry stream. I know that convertible-man is on the cusp of leaving me after a two-month affair. I am merely waiting to be abandoned on a shore littered with bones. Silence envelops me until I can’t hear the movie. I slide down in the seat. I close my eyes. The scent of popcorn and sugar makes the back of my throat metallic and hot, blistering enough to evaporate an ocean of saliva. Love is blind. . . . Nonlove is not blind. I see that the doctor will leave. But I can’t see how I arrived here with him in the first place—a man who doesn’t love me—anymore than I convinced myself that I love him. Flickers of light from the movie screen flash against my lids, strobing my mind, interrupting what I want: a smooth life instead of haphazard events and thoughts.
Later I again lie on the bed in the hospital listening to my mind repeat, repeat sail away with me. The man in the blue convertible will never sail away with me. I know I’ll never see him again once this weekend ends. He will return to his wife. I will return to my husband who, working all weekend, will barely notice my absence. There is no one with whom I might sail away from this inevitable narrative.
Or wait: I will sail away but alone. No one else can go where I venture. No one can stop this trip. I will sail out the open roof of the man’s convertible as he speeds back across the causeway Sunday night. I will land in an ocean of bones.
It’s not yet Sunday night.
Even so I accurately predict the future. I already see, before me, that ocean. Not a salty ocean scent but medicinal—plaster casts, harsh astringent—how the doctor’s hands smell when he enters this hospital room where I wait for him between emergencies.
Or as if I am the emergency.
An unseen emergency. You don’t yet see the jangled intersection between the man under the boardwalk and this man. Here. Now. You don’t yet see the many moments locked together with a lost key.
No windows interrupt the hospital room. No flowers. Medical supplies and equipment line the walls. One is an EKG machine to determine whether the patient has a heartbeat. I press my palm to my heart. Still here. Still there.
I wear a white-canvas sailor jacket bought at an Army-Navy Surplus store in Galveston. He unbuttons it. He slides down my khaki shorts and underwear. I have my period, I whisper. He shrugs. We’re on a hospital bed—sheets, a mattress—accustomed to absorbing blood. He will fuck me. There is no other word for what we do. “Islands in the Stream” repeats, repeats, repeats.
He must have drunk a glass of water. When he kisses me droplets from his mustache dot my upper lip.
We open our eyes, stare at each other, when we do what we do to each other. His eyes are pale blue. Gray? So pale they seem rinsed by sleet. I can’t imagine what or who he sees when he observes me in these fluorescent lights. Why don’t we switch them off? Switch our eyes off?
He is paged to return to the ER. He pulls on his scrubs.
I remain naked on the bed in a hospital room that’s white, bleached, antiseptic, acidic, except for a splatter of blood. The only trace of me. This is what crime scene detectives examine after a murder to determine who killed the girl, how, and why.
For years after that weekend in the emergency room, I hear “Islands in the Stream” rasping my skull. Sure, it’s an easy-listening kind of song, pure melodramatic country-western, love tilting, inevitably, toward heartbreak. When I hear it, I envision plaster casts, broken limbs, a splatter of blood, an ocean of bones.
Maybe that weekend I sit on a shoreline waiting for a Gulf of Mexico sun to scorch the skin off my bones.
I torture myself with memories. I prefer bad memories to good ones. I prefer to remember pain more than pleasure. I carry such memories with me as if in a knapsack, a weight I’m unwilling to relinquish. Pain is more mysterious. It will take several lifetimes to comprehend it.
Death terrifies me. Yet I constantly live or recall miniature forms of it: heartbreak and pain sung to a country-western beat.
It’s six in the morning, Sunday, and I walk alone to the hospital cafeteria. The blue-convertible man is setting the bones of two drunk teenage boys who were in a wreck. Their blood must be splattered all over their car. The hospital intercom pages doctors. The corridors hum with the skim of rubber-soled shoes hurrying from one disaster to another.
In the cafeteria I order eggs over easy, toast, orange juice. I stare at the plate of food but can’t eat. I rest my chin on my palm. I stick the tines of the fork in the egg yolks. Yellow spits across a bone-white plate. The back of my throat tastes like mercurochrome.
Here I am still in my body, a body, with all its complicated maintenance to stay afloat—food, sleep, water, shampooing, cleansing, vitamin D-3—the body and its slovenly, cumbersome, time-consuming need to survive.
Does it need love more than sex?
But, really, isn’t its only true job that of being a container, a receptacle, to hold a soul? I want a better prototype. One less needy. One that better solves the problem of housing souls, lost or otherwise.
One that knows the difference between dragons and men.
One that knows how to live.
Not just exist.
Live.