TWENTY-ONE

I’m pretty sure I had never heard about the concept of “time dilation” before. My mother had never discussed it with me when I was a child. I wonder why. Could it be that she hadn’t found it useful before? Perhaps she understood its meaning only now, at sixty-seven, as she was rushing toward death with greater velocity than she had ever expected. Or perhaps she decided to include “time dilation” in her notes because she saw death as the ultimate gravitational field, pulling us all right to its center. Anyway, soon after I realized that my mother was dying, something changed in my perception of time as well. I didn’t experience time as a smooth flow carrying me forward anymore, but as a series of sharp painful leaps.

Seven months before my mother died, I spent the happiest three days of my life.

I spent them with B., in a cheap Staten Island motel called Bella Luna, where he took me after meeting me at JFK.

No, the births of my children were not the happiest days of my life. Both times, I was physically torn apart, and heavily drugged. And when I held each of them in my arms for the first time, I felt heart-wrenching affection mixed with terror, rather than happiness.

The time I spent with B. on my return from Italy gave me pure happiness. It was a different happiness from the one we experienced at the beginning of our affair. Back then we felt drunk; this time we were happy and sober.

What I can describe is our fourth day together, which I happen to remember in the tiniest detail. We woke up very late, and had breakfast at my favorite McDonald’s, decorated like a fifties drive-in restaurant, with those neon-colored booths made to look like cars. After breakfast we went for a walk on the beach. It must have snowed while I was in Italy, and there were patches of snow melting on the sand. The wind was attacking us in sharp gusts, and I kept saying that this was like some insane Arctic fairy tale and begging B. to wear a hat. B. refused to wear a hat, his hair was flying in all directions in the wind, he was smiling almost the whole time, and his dark eyes looked impossibly bright.

Then we went back to the motel, turned the heat all the way up, and jumped into the bed. Sex was not as intense as during the first three days, but it was somehow better, simpler, happier. Afterward we fell asleep, even though it was still light out.

We woke up to a phone call. My first thought was that it was Len, calling to say that something had happened to the kids, or that it was my mother and something had happened to her. I was afraid that B. and I were too happy, that happiness of such intensity couldn’t go unpunished. Then I realized that it wasn’t my phone ringing, it was B.’s.

He sat up in bed and looked at me in panic. “It’s Nadya.”

I sat up too and pulled the sheet up to my chin, because I couldn’t bear to be bare-breasted while he talked to Nadya. I could hear that she was crying. Not wailing, but rather whimpering. B. got out of the bed and carried the whimpering Nadya into the bathroom. His butt was all creased from the motel’s sheets. He closed the door behind him and fumbled with the lock for a long time because it wouldn’t close all the way.

He was in there for ten minutes or so, mostly silent, mumbling something occasionally, and when he emerged, he was wrapped in a towel. Now he was the one who couldn’t bear being naked.

Nadya was in bad shape. Really bad. He had to go.

He asked if he should give me a ride home. Home, I thought. Home. He wasn’t coming back. I said no, I’d call a cab. I did my best to act supportive. I helped him pack, even though I wanted to scream and grab on to him and not let him go.

Then I went up to the window, pushed the blinds away, and watched him put his bag into his car, get into his car, turn the ignition, pull out from the parking lot, drive unsteadily down the hill toward the main road.

An hour later, I called a cab to take me home. I dragged my suitcase up the steps leading to the porch, opened the door with my key, and walked in, panting from the effort and misery.

My mother heard the noise and asked who it was from her apartment. I opened her door but didn’t see her. She must have been reading in her bedroom alcove. All the better, I thought. I couldn’t face her now.

I spoke to her from the threshold.

I said: “It’s me, don’t get up!”

Then I said that it was all over with the guy in Italy, and with the guy I loved it was over too. Then I added that the divorce was still happening. I was positive about that. I had been considering going back to Len the entire time I was in Italy with Victor, but the three days I had spent with B. made that impossible. I couldn’t possibly go back to Len.

I walked out of my mother’s apartment, but then I remembered to tell her something else, and came back.

I said that I needed some time on my own, before the kids came home. So I was asking her not to bother me, not to come upstairs or even talk to me. I would really really really appreciate that.

She said, “Okay.”

I went upstairs, plopped onto my bed, and dove into my grief. I had two full days to indulge in it. I would cry and scream and do whatever I wanted to do, so that by the time the kids came home, the acute stage of my grief would be over, and I would be able to pull myself together, and figure out how to handle this new stage of my life, and act as normal as I could. I guess what I imagined was some sort of Grief Express vacation. There were moments when my pain was so severe and all-encompassing that it could be mistaken for happiness. I felt like all my nerve endings were open and raw, which made me feel as if I were expanding, as if I were able to experience the world as fully and as acutely as anybody ever could. Everything I saw or touched or tasted had this tragic tang.

I didn’t hear from my mother for the entirety of that first day at home, and I was grateful to her, but also a little disappointed. I had asked her not to bother me, but didn’t she worry about me? Didn’t she care how I felt?

The next morning I woke up feeling so bad that I had to abandon my perfect grieving plan. I jumped into the car and drove to my family doctor’s office to beg her for antidepressants.

The doctor was a sweet bug-eyed Romanian woman. She said that she was a family physician, not a psychiatrist, but in her opinion what I had was situational depression, which wasn’t really depression at all. I dropped to my knees and grabbed the lapels of the doctor’s white coat and said: “Please!” She must have decided that I wasn’t as mentally healthy as she’d thought I was and gave me samples of Zen-pro, a new expensive antidepressant.

The first dose of Zen-pro made me violently nauseous. I had never experienced anything like that, because this nausea was overwhelming and didn’t lead to vomiting and didn’t have any end in sight. As I lay on the bathroom floor with my forehead pressed to the cold floor tiles (I found this position slightly less unbearable than all the others), I wondered how I would feel if B. appeared in front of me right now and said that he had changed his mind and realized that we must be together for the rest of our lives. I wouldn’t have cared. Zen-pro made me too sick to care. I was relieved to discover that there was a force stronger than my love for B.

My mother knocked on the door just as I managed to pull myself up and was sitting with my back pressed to the toilet. She must’ve heard me retching and was worried.

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “Please, go away.”

Note to an angry reader. Yes, that’s how selfish I was. But don’t waste your breath. You can’t possibly make me feel worse about that than I already do.

My mother didn’t go away. She knocked again. She said that she needed me to take her to the hospital. Her voice was different, feeble and croaky.

Her voice scared me. I scrambled up and opened the bathroom door for her.

She was leaning against the wall. Trembling. She had to hold on to that wall to keep her balance. She was white and frighteningly gaunt. Her features were distorted by a grimace of pain. Then I saw her stomach. It looked like an enormous balloon, taut and heaving, about to blow up.

And like that my nausea was gone. I rushed out of the bathroom and grabbed my mother by the shoulders, just as she started sliding to the floor.