The Living End Read online

  His watch. I put that right in my tote bag. I gave that to him for his fortieth birthday. Real gold too.

  Khaki green Dockers. Nothing in the right pocket but the receipt from that blasted Golden Corral. I rip it into little shreds, then sit down in my chair. His wallet in the left pocket. I’ll need that, I’m sure. I briefly examine the cards inside: health insurance, driver’s license, social security, Klein’s check-cashing card. My picture. Oh, my, there it is, my senior portrait from high school. Now where did he find that?

  I move on.

  Boxers I bought him at The Gap. Bumblebees fly all over the mustard-colored cotton.

  Soft, well-worn white undershirt.

  Stewart plaid shirt. I lift it out, burying my nose in its pliancy. Ah yes, his smell. Oh dear God, his smell is right here. I fold it neatly and put it in my tote bag with the other Joey things. I decide to throw in the T-shirt and the boxers, too. I hug the bag to myself, and I stare at Joey until my eyes burn and I forget to breathe.

  The doctor joins me at the bedside thirty minutes later. “How are you doing, Mrs. Laurel?”

  “As well as can be expected.” Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?

  “I’m sorry to keep you so long.”

  I shrug. I can’t say, “That’s okay,” because it’s not. And yet it is, too, right? I didn’t want Joey to die sooner, did I?

  He clears his throat. “We’ll get started in a few minutes. Again, I’m so sorry.”

  Again, I shrug. This time I shake my head as well.

  Ten moles. Seven liver spots.

  “I think it’s time to set him free, Doctor.”

  Joey believes in heaven, and I doubt skin blemishes flourish there, at least I hope not. So these things remain my own.

  A few minutes later a male nurse enters and explains the procedure. I wish he were Cindy, but then I wouldn’t want to put her through the ordeal. And maybe he’s a specialist at this. If so, I feel for him. I try to listen to the words, but only “blah, blah, blah” makes it through. Until he says, “When it’s over, we’ll come and get you in the waiting room.”

  Oh, so I don’t sit here? But surely that can’t be? Don’t you sit there, holding the dying hand, waiting between the click of the shutdown and the final self-issued breath? No?

  I am relieved. I don’t want to watch Joey die, I just realized. Some people do, I suppose. And I don’t blame them. I say, “May I have one more minute with him?”

  “Of course. Take as much time as you need.”

  He leaves, and I lean over Joey. “If you suffocate now, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just don’t know what else to do.”

  I take a chance and say, “If you hear me, squeeze my hand.”

  …

  I kiss his lips one last time, flesh lingering on flesh, tears cementing them together for only seconds. I taste my lips as I straighten. Salt. Water. Him. I thank him for a lifetime of love, take a mental photograph, and leave the room before my abscessed heart erupts. The male nurse hurries up to me. “Shall I show you to the waiting room?”

  “No, thank you. I know where it is.”

  I look back one last time, and I am staring down a well at Joey and the well is deep and the candle at the bottom is flickering wildly, its light growing smaller and bluer and truer, and soon it will follow the way of all that is temporal.

  I walk past the waiting room, my feet unable to make the turn. Down the elevator, through the revolving door, I find myself in the thriving lights of a nighttime city.

  Joey’s blushing like crazy.

  Oh, no! He’s a virgin!

  Inwardly, I roll my eyes and think this is one of those negatives about getting married so soon. He never made sexual advances during our courtship, something I found refreshing. Most of the guys on campus had paws on the ends of their arms, the clumsy buffoons.

  Not that Joey and I didn’t make out. We did, but he always stopped short of touching me “down there.”

  “You’re too good for that,” he’d say, then he’d get up from the couch in his apartment and suggest we do something else, “anything else.”

  I am not a virgin.

  Crud.

  Never in a million years did I expect to marry a virgin. I mean, only lecherous men sowed their wild oats and settled down with an innocent.

  I feel really dirty right now. And unexpectedly dirty, as though my Harley went out of control, skidded through a manure pile with me on it and crashed through a set of sparkling French doors right into a circumcision gathering or a first communion or a first-time mother as she rocks her newborn to sleep.

  “Oh man, Joey.”

  I don’t have to say anything else.

  “You’re experienced, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “I figured as much, Pearly.”

  I don’t know whether to yell at him or cry. I just say, “This is awkward.”

  “Have you made love with anybody since we met?” he asks.

  “No.”

  I stare out of the motel window and onto the highway. The neon sign flashes Vacancy every other second. Tawdry-like, as if it should really be saying, Girls, Girls, Girls! “This isn’t a good setting to lose your virginity in, Joey.” I turn back to face him. He’s so vulnerable looking right now. I am in pain! I am immoral. I kind of suspected I was immoral, but right now I know it for sure and it is humiliating. None of those guys were worth this! Why didn’t I see that then? And it wasn’t like I even enjoyed it all that much. I just wanted to fit in and play the role of free spirit at one and the same time.

  Now only car seats and crummy apartments and closets in classroom buildings come to mind, and I can hardly remember an accompanying face. It’s all just genitalia and sin. This stinks more than the elephant emporium down at the zoo.

  Then he smiles. “I’m twenty-eight years old, Pearly. If it makes you feel better, I’ve done everything but the act, and being a red-blooded male, I wouldn’t care right now if we were in an abandoned factory!”

  I chuckle despite my mortification.

  “I have one favor to ask,” I say. “Just don’t expect me to teach you anything.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “From what I’ve heard, I’m not all that hot in bed.” At least that’s what Bob Lansing told me last year after I said I wasn’t into commitment. “Maybe we’d do better to start from scratch. Maybe you’d better just lead the way.”

  Reaching out and touching my cheek with his fingertips, he tells me he loves me, that we’re beginning a brand-new life together. “Brand-new, Pearly. Do you understand what that means?”

  I do.

  He smiles into my eyes and seals that informal vow with a soft kiss on my lips, lifting me out of the bargain basket at costume jewelry and placing me in a guarded case in the fine jewelry department, setting me aside now for him and only him, under the lock and key I willingly place in his hands.

  The silence usually fills me.

  Joey loved silence. He fed off it, nourished by its possibilities. “Pearly, silence has no boundaries.”

  I didn’t understand that. I only understood that the sound of his breathing was all I needed to hear.

  I flick a glance at the car clock. 9:42 P.M.

  He’s dead by now, Pearly.

  At exactly 53 MPH I negotiate the skyway ramp leading from downtown to I-95. Now at its apex, I soar above Baltimore. Joey soars as well, I’ll warrant. If there’s anybody destined for heaven, it’s Joey.

  I examine my hands, keeping one eye on the road. But I see Joey’s. Seven liver spots. Ten moles. I cannot go back to the hospital. I seek a greater silence, one with indelible boundaries encased by an impermeable membrane, only memories of a good life allowed to tumble and squeal within like lively kittens on an acre of early summer grass.

  Joey would have understood.

  I begin tumbling into a world of past-tense.

  Joey would.

  Joey did.

  Joey had.
<
br />   Joey was.

  Only a very few modifiers can now be put with Joey is.

  Dead.

  Cold.

  Decaying.

  Gone.

  “Nevermore,” quoth the raven. I can say without hesitation that Edgar Allen Poe never envisioned his sinister bird as the mascot of an NFL team. And that seems to be the only thing I can say for certain right now. Joey thought the entire matter amusing, after all, “Nobody can replace the Colts, Pearly, nor should they try.”

  Forty minutes later, I pull over at the first gas station on Route 50 as I continue the journey to our vacation house on the Chesapeake Bay. I place both hands atop the steering wheel, and once more I count the liver spots and moles. I count until I can no longer see, a tear for each blemish magnifying the marks of a life lived for no other purpose than to love a man now gone, then spilling over.

  Why I gave up on myself I don’t know. It was never a conscious decision. I just delighted in my husband, that’s all. So easy to do if you know Joey.

  A phone booth sits vacant near the car, so I ring Maida after the tears dry. Thank goodness for her palindromic number or I’d have never committed it to memory in the first place. The first click of her answering machine sticks my eardrum, and I blurt before she can greet the unknown caller. “Joey wanted to be buried. We have a plot at Harford Memorial out on Route 155. Bye!”

  Opening the jointy door, I sit upon the small cement slab in the booth and light up my first cigarette since leaving the hospital.

  I stare at the pack.

  Merit Ultra Lights.

  Merit Ultra Lights? Ridiculous!

  See, Joey is dead.

  I crush the cigarette right away and walk into the Snak Mart. For some reason, I picture the hinged door of the phone booth waving in the balmy breeze and flying away into the darkness with a chipmunk laugh. Laughing at me. What a nutcase I am! Where is this craziness coming from?

  “Marlboro Lights,” I say to a cartoon character of a youth sporting bright red hair, an apple green shirt, and yellow shorts that expose the beginning of a butt crack and a pair of graying boxer shorts. I’ll bet a father is raising this boy, someone who’s never heard of Clorox.

  He acknowledges my nonexistence, and I stare at the dazzling confectionary of tobacco delights. Oh, the packs line up so pretty with all their colorful boxes and sleeves. The glittering cellophane, too. Of course, the red on the pack of frill-strength Marlboros catches my eye. It’s usually the first to do so anyway.

  Should I?

  I haven’t smoked these things since I met Joey. He just didn’t seem to be deserving of a paramour who smoked full-strengths. Surely, it’s one thing to smoke—that’s bad enough, however fun and relaxing and sociable—but Reds? That points its finger right to a precipice of death. In point of truth, I can hardly imagine classy, willowy women like Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn or Cyd Charisse lighting up a Marlboro Red as they’re sitting at The Carousel Club or The Florida Room. Or maybe I’m wrong. After all, I love them from my childhood. And those childhood loves can’t be trusted. That’s what makes them so wonderful.

  Now Mae West holding a fired-up Red? Absolutely. Marlene Dietrich, too, or these days, Madonna or Pink or another one of those attention addicts. Well, Madonna I’m not, but I’m going to buy them anyway.

  “Marlboro Reds,” I say. So there. I look around me. No one present but cartoon boy to witness my crime. “I haven’t smoked one of these since I was nineteen. But you see, my husband just died, and I thought—”

  The phone rings. He lifts the receiver and tucks it under his jaw and ear in one swift motion. “Oh hey, Brian.” He slips a pack out of the overhead rack. “That’ll be $3.65,” he mouths, designating me the unimportant one in this trio of communicating humanity.

  I pay with a five.

  He hands me a one spot and slides the change down long, sensitive looking fingers into my outstretched palm. I curl my own fingers around the coins, feeling his warmth. I hold my fist to my face. He doesn’t notice, for he’s saying, “I’m back. So how’d it play out with Tiffany?” He turns his back, and I drag myself past the cheese nips, the pink hairy snack cakes, the fifteen thousand flavors of bubble gum, the beef snacks, and the jerky bags.

  He must not have heard me, that boy. Or perhaps I only imagined I spoke.

  Outside now, I light up the full-strength smoke, inhale a deep, lung-sanding drag, sucking it into each individual sac of alveoli. Shoot, if I’m going to die eventually anyway, I might as well go whole hog. I decide to start collecting little tar beads deep inside myself, willing each drag and its black tailstream to absorb another saline tear, another day of my life. Maybe the insides of my lungs will glimmer as though lined with hematite, hardened and unable to sustain the body of my dead soul much longer.

  I sit on the hood of my car as the final strands of autumn beach traffic slide by, weighed-down cars of late-going, thrifty vacationers bound for Ocean City.

  Eleven o’clock already. I can’t believe it, but my stomach rumbles. I find the next all-night drive-through, a Burger King not far from the Bay Bridge. But looking at the backlit menu, nothing sounds appealing. I figured I’d have a sporting chance with the flame-broiled aspect in play.

  “Can I take your order?” the voice questions me.

  I freeze. Not good. Too much pressure. Too much, too much. How can I possibly decide in less than thirty seconds? Not only does the sandwich need selecting, but beverage options, dessert options, condiments, and side dishes remain as well. Onion rings or fries? I blurt out the first words I read, “A milkshake? Chocolate?”

  “What size?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “You pick.”

  “But—”

  “Pick one!” I scream at her. This is not good. I gun the accelerator and whiz by the window, hiding my face behind the flap of my left hand. My wheels screech as I pull out onto the blacktop of the highway, barely missing a tractor-trailer.

  He flips me off.

  Don’t you know? I think. Don’t you know I’m dying inside? Can’t you see the last thing I need tonight is somebody giving me the finger?

  Of course not, Pearly. You’re just another stupid woman driver to that guy.

  The tollbooths of the Bay Bridge span the highway, and I pull out four dollars as I brake in front of the window. “Here you go.”

  “Have a good night,” a pillowy man says. He smiles sadly, and I wonder if he has lost something precious too. I wonder if I’ll develop a skill enabling me to identify other lonely halves. And yet I do not feel lonely, exactly. I was alone quite frequently in my life with Joey. I feel lost. I suppose that’s it. Lost and insignificant, like a hairpin behind the sink cabinet, easily replaced, too unimportant to fish out with a coat hanger.

  Despite this thought, I smile at the tollbooth operator and raise my eyes to the Bay Bridge, that five-mile span connecting Maryland to its better half across the Chesapeake Bay. Its lights stutter, red blinkers flashing up top where the birds soar, swaying in the arms of the winds. Closer to my comfortable range of vision, the other lights speak directly to me, green Xs over the open lanes, red Xs over the others.

  Cables, horribly big, alarmingly small, disappear into each of four stretching towers, four mountainous harps holding up a roadway upon which the tires of the cars hum a tune, my tires providing the bass line.

  Once across I pull off to the side, exhausted. Joey always drove across the bridge.

  I rest on my hood once more, chain-smoking half the pack of Reds, hoping to join Joey all the sooner. I have the feeling he was holy enough for the both of us. Or at least I hope so. With him gone, I see myself for the wretch I am, for I cannot hide behind his glory any longer.

  By my thirty-eighth birthday, I realized we’d already have adopted if we really intended to. We talked about it from time to time to time, and I even secreted away two pairs of booties, one set blue, the other pink, at the back of my
underwear drawer. I still wonder why we never did. Maybe Joey didn’t possess my ache. Or maybe I feared that Joey, ever throwing himself into his interest du jour, not to mention his position at the school, would transfer his affections from me to the child.

  As if I knew then that he’d land face down in the Jell-O salad! And even if I did, that would hardly be a noble motive for adopting. No child deserves that much responsibility.

  It’s past eleven now, dark and cool. But I cannot drive any farther. Guilt creeps in through my opened tear ducts. I left Joey alone to die, to be buried. I hate myself more than usual.

  I wonder what they’re doing with his body right now? They’ve scoured the hospital looking for me, I’m sure, have called my home and left several messages. No doubt they’re wondering right now which funeral home to call.

  In Cambridge I pull over into the parking lot of the HG Restaurant. Joey and I always stopped here on our way back from our vacation home, a cabin we built on the shores of the family farm. Home cooking. And decoys for sale in every nook, on every shelf, beside every window. Although darkness shrouds the distance, I know the landscape has ironed itself out by now, that trees and fences outline level fields, and chicken farms spread their arms every few miles. Produce stands stagger in drunken construction down either side of the road leading east, and here I stand now, outside my car, unable to turn around and, upon thought, less able to simply disappear.

  Wouldn’t that be lovely? Poof! Pearly is gone, like some character in a Twilight Zone episode who fades from view at the same rate her dead husband’s body cools. Maybe I should have been the popular fiction writer! I’m probably more delusional than most novelists.

  I run across the highway to a phone booth at a closed gas station. I call the doctor’s beeper number and then punch in Maida’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Maida, it’s me again.”

  “Are you all right, Pearly?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I need you to take care of some things for me. I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.”