Correlatives
Jackie Davis Martin
That week Johnnie Cochran died, then Terri Schiavo, and even Pope John Paul II, but not Bob. We flew to Maine because his cancer was pushing him rapidly toward death, a word we kept in abeyance where, ignored, it hovered and drifted like the snow. We watched him sleep in his leather La-Z-Boy, the stoves banked up above 80 degrees, the daytime TV hosts loudly exuding personalities to the empty room. Bob sagged into himself, thin legs draped in corduroy trousers that pleated at his skinny waist, his shoulder bones like clothespins beneath a moose-printed flannel shirt. As I mounted the stairs into the main living area I’d see his La-Z-Boy but did not know whether Bob was sitting in it until I was fully in the room and could look head on.
It’s not that we didn’t talk about it, about not-being. Bob confided in his brother Bart, my husband, that he was worried about what would happen to his partner Jeff without him. Jeff told me that at least Bob had realized his dream. He gestured to the expansive house, a wood and glass monument to luxurious living snugly ensconced in nature—woods, mountains, wildlife, a lake, now frozen. He hoped Bob would get to use his revered boat once more, that he would last until spring thaw.
The cancer was like the moose that I didn’t see, in spite of all the road warnings, or like the deer that moved silently, then suddenly were right at the window. We often discerned the deer, soundless and graceful, weaving through the trees across the snow. Snow still frosted the hemlocks and spruces, dusted the redwood decks and balcony, creating a Christmas background for our Easter dinner. Bob, at the table’s head, reached hands toward Bart and me; we clutched Jeff’s, and the four of us formed a living circle of completion as fragile as the snow already dissolving in breeze and sun. We served Bob toddler portions, which he couldn’t finish.
Television became our main connection. We called in our votes for “American Idol” and followed the results as though they mattered. On his most energetic day, Bob took us for a ride along the frozen Kennebec River to see the “Ice Out” about to happen. Ice out, life out.
Everything had too much meaning. A story I started to read was about a woman with cancer living alone on a mountain.* I put it back in my suitcase. Another, in a collection, began: “ . . .but in [the marriage’s] last days, they became a couple again, as they might have if one of them were slowly dying.” ** The metaphor has no metaphorical correlative—what is it like if half a couple is indeed dying?
Bart and I, as a couple, had to return to our lives in San Francisco. We left Bob and Jeff in that setting of restrained ruggedness, flanked by their high circular house, a huge jeep, a pick-up truck, the barrage of trees and snow. What could ever be an appropriate setting for this drama? We left these aging men, who had been together for forty years, surrounded by their bulwarks against everything except this, this insidious disease. “Keep eating,” we urged Bob, pointlessly, hugging his frailty.
We got into the rented car, a black PT Cruiser that looked unsettlingly like a small hearse, where the radio was still tuned to the local oldies station. We waved and blew kisses at their twosome at the top of the driveway. They, arm-in-arm, waved back while our radio’s speakers sang out about losing a loving feeling, the deep bass voice moaning, against an echoing background beat, that the singer just couldn’t go on.
But we had to go on, my husband and I. We would drive past rows of birches, their spindly gray-white branches stretching skyward, mindful of the moose that we were warned were out there.
*”The Lives of Rocks” by Rick Bass, Zoetrope: All-Story, Spring 2005.
** “The Winter Father” by Andre Dubus, from In the Bedroom. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, 2002
Jackie Davis Martin has had stories and essays published in journals that include Flash, Flashquake, Fastforward, JAAM,
34th Parallel, and Sleet. Her most recent work is in Bluestem, Enhance, Counterexample Poetics, Fractured West, and Dogzplot, as well as in a story collection just released called Modern Shorts. Her novella, Extracurricular, was a finalist in the Press 53 Awards of 2011. A memoir, Surviving Susan, was published in 2012. Jackie teaches at City College of San Francisco.