CHAPTER II - Raphaella and Me
I was born in Pittsburg, California, the back side of the bay, the California where cities bleed together, amalgamate; where low flat malls serve as land markers and cars are modified to bounce up and down. We moved twice when I was growing up, to San Francisco and back again. I remember the hills of San Francisco because I used to walk them on my way to grammar school, a little private school with red doors and blue window shutters. My mother said it used to be Lutheran, a Lutheran church, but now it was just a school. She said that even if they still taught Lutheran doctrine there it was okay. Her mother, after all, was an Episcopalian, and so were we, and well, Lutherans and Episcopalians are pretty much the same thing anyway, and anyone who tells you differently is probably just unsure that God even exists. She’d say nobody needs to go to church to love God and nobody was ever saved from talking to the gossips in the pews of Christ the Savior Concord. She said it like that too, flat, forcefully. My mother runs the English department at De La Rue, the high school I attended. I remember seeing her stand outside the B building, under the rain runners, herding kids in and out of their classes, saying things like, “I love you, Tom Ellis, but you’re still late for math class,” or, “Who wants to fail today, I’ve got to fail somebody, who’s it gonna be?”
She was pretty standing there, my mother. Blond, brownish blond, tall and stylish. She always spoke her mind, and that, my father always said, is what made her beautiful. My school friends thought she was beautiful too, but not for the same reason as my father. They told me they liked her style, her stockings, her skirt. They wanted to say she was sexy but they thought I’d fight them if they did, if they said “nice legs” and “sexy” in the same sentence. I did fight a kid once who said “nice legs” and your mother in the same sentence, a sentence that ended with me pounding him with a furious fist to the forehead. I was suspended for two weeks instead of one because the kid’s stitches wouldn’t close over his eye and he had to wear a big gauze bandage with a little red blotch the shape of New Jersey continuously bleeding through. He looked like a veteran of the Civil War. My mother didn’t think he looked so interesting however, and she recommended that a week be added to my sentence. So, that didn’t help my cause much either. My mother was just that way.
John Higgins is my father. He is a very good lawyer. In fact, my mother says he’s the best lawyer in the Bay Area. He works in San Francisco for Roberts, Higgins and Such, a job that has landed him in his big black Mercedes every morning and every evening for fifteen years, an hour and a half each way. When I was a kid my father told me San Francisco was a friendly city for gay men, and that more people should be friendly to gay men like the city was friendly. My sister and I would always laugh when he said this because we never knew how a city could be friendly to anybody.
I look up to my big sister Ella. She is pretty like my mother, with long black hair that curls at the end. It’s black because she dyes it, but it doesn’t look like she dyes it; it looks like she is a chic model type from Cosmopolitan or Mademoiselle, two magazines she hooked me on when I was still in high school. We’d read them together, she asking me which girls I thought were prettiest or stylish and I asking her which clothes she preferred, which cut, which colors. These conversations were always private and I’d make her promise not to tell anyone on the track team that I’d looked at Cosmo with her. I ran track because I was fast and I played lacrosse because I was agile and the coach told me I could be as good as I chose to be. But what I enjoyed most was Cosmo, and fashion, and reading and listening to my mother tell me why Hemingway was a revolutionary and why he’d be the one we’d all remember in the end, even if he were a boor.
My mother loved to read to me. The first good book she ever read to me was Zorba the Greek. She’d read to me when I’d come home from running the 400-meter relay at track practice, in the car while I learned to drive and while I wrote poetry on the computer. It was her way of killing two birds with one stone: She re-reading for her classes, me listening to great literature, to great movements in the soul of Nikos Kazantzakis. She would point out how his words glide through the mind; the effluvium of their flight gently licking and lapping at the subconscious of the reader, kissing and tickling them in places they did not know existed. And she taught me how words could be like drums in the night, how they could sound out tears and emotions and colors and the hemlines of a beautiful woman’s beautiful skirt. She and Nikos are why I still write poetry, why I ever wrote poetry at all.
And because my mother loved men, and their books, I loved women. Very much. When I was twelve, turning thirteen, I fell in love with the daughter of my father’s secretary. I saw her at one of my father’s parties, leaving. I saw her turn and look at me as she closed the door, her gold hair switching from one side of her face to the other, her smile spreading out white, and her skirt, pure Cosmo, her skirt. I didn’t know her name when I bought the tulips from my father’s favorite florist, the florist right around the corner from his office in the city, the city I was forbidden to travel to alone. I trudged up the big hill and gave them, yellow and red and white, to my maiden’s mother, a bead of sweat rolling down my cheek. And then I read my poem, aloud, with my father standing at the door, half sheepish, half peeved.
San Francisco is kind to gay men
It is filled with hills and bad car clutches
It is home to Roberts, Higgins and Such
And now it is home to the girl I love
And her mother too
What is your daughter’s name?
My name is David Higgins
Her mother told me that Carol was her name, her daughter’s name. My father told me I’d get grounded if I ever came to the city alone again, and then he laughed, uncontrollably. I kissed Carol three months later at her fourteenth birthday party. She told me I was cute and a good kisser. I told her I loved her and she blushed. Her blush was deep crimson and innocent and I loved looking at it, watching it come and go with each I love you I could muster. Carol moved out of the Bay Area when her mother divorced her father and moved in with a volleyball player from Ventura. When she left I told her I loved her again, and I really did; I really, really loved her.
And then a girl named Heather invited me to her house so that I could lose my virginity. She was older than I was, a college girl, and I didn’t like that she didn’t blush when I told her I loved her. I did like that she was so pretty, strong pretty. So I went to her house—what would Zorba do after all? We made love and my head spun, and I sweated, and I shook and we laughed. I found my underwear in odd places all night, but put them on again in the morning. My father never knew I wasn’t at Jim’s house and my mother never bothered to ask. My sister did though, and when she asked what Heather looked like I told her she looked like page 126.
When I was eighteen I got a job working for a publishing company in the city. It was more like an internship really, my mother arranging it with a former colleague of hers. I’d just finished my senior year and would go to college, a top flight graduate, at least in the humanities. I’d gotten straight A’s in English and History and my mother had talked me into attending NYU, my sister’s school now and my mother’s alma mater. Going away meant I’d have to break it off with my girlfriend, the lovely and talented Lisa Sutherland, cheerleader supreme and popular girl ad nauseam. We started our short-lived affair when I saw her crying at a boring party one rainy Friday night.
It was Al Almonte’s party, the one he had every three months when his parents went on a cruise to some Caribbean island. It was the kind of party where people turn in unison and watch TV whenever an overexposed and utterly talentless pop star appears in a glossy music video. And why didn’t anyone ever dance at Al’s parties? I mean there was dancing, but only if you count the grisly couple making out to their own rhythm in a shadowy corner. Al always had enough liquor for everyone, including the real angry muscle-bound guys who inevitably showed up after boring conversation with one another, on the strip, in their cars, or in the mall parking lot.
Lisa Sutherland sort of sobbed over a coffee table full of empty beer cups, her hands on her brow, breasts heaving. I watched her. Her head bobbled. What could it be? I looked at her eyes, mahogany almonds glittering in their sea salt sadness. Beautiful. Beautiful, because for a moment they weren’t hers. Not cheerleader eyes, not popular eyes, not student body chairwoman eyes, just marvelous, miraculous, wet, round orbs into which a man falls amorous, through which the male world accounts for itself, knows itself. They were Lisa Sutherland’s eyes but I loved them because they were everything not male, not man, and not me. Cosmo. I took her hand and we danced a slow dance. For a long time we danced and she never asked me to explain why. We danced until she became my girlfriend and I her boyfriend. And things went on like that, until I decided to ship off for NYU where I’d find other girlfriends, other dances, and I told her as much. She understood because, well, she cried. We hugged and I left for New York, a new life, a new metaphor.
My father is the kind of man who measures his paternal love by calendar. First day of kindergarten. First big lacrosse tryout. First day of high school. First day behind the wheel. The Junior Prom, the Senior Ball, graduation, and of course, move-in day, freshman year in college. Is he current, was he there, has he shown that he cares enough to be my father? That’s the barometer. He was there dammit, and he would be there for moving-in day, too. I’d hoped my mother would come to New York as well; after all, she had made me for this day, the first day of manhood, the first day out on my own, a poet, a New Yorker. But she would defer to my father. I think he told her he wanted to pat me on the back, share a beer at the college pub, tell me a story concerning drunken coeds, introduce me to an old partner of his, Bill Bert. Bill Bert took us both to lunch and that is when I learned that his daughter would be living not more than two blocks from me. With that, my father had found his reason to pat me on the back, and to wink the fatherly wink. I swigged and smiled back.
“Call her, Son,” he said.
Bill Bert nodded.
And I did.
I loved Tabatha Bert. She was tall, handsome and sleek. Her hair was black as crow. She was the first girl I loved who had short hair, shorter than my own, and I wrote this down. She said she liked my soft eyes, but I think she liked the way we made love. She was gregarious and often held my hand in public, even in front of her father, Bill. We went to Central Park and walked her dog Frankie, we studied together and wrote poetry together. I wrote her a poem that I thought was the best poem ever written. I read it in my English class one day, in the small seminar section where our professor was, in fact, a graduate student.
Capsize! Capsize good doubt
Find the bottom of the sea
Where the cold will still you
the dark will keep you
Capsize good doubt
That lovers may live unencumbered
Alive, willing to do what lovers do
Love
No one clapped. Nobody even did that little finger snapping thing, but I still loved that poem. Tabatha said she loved it too, but looking back, I think she loved my muscles when we made love.
My sister hated Tabatha Bert. She said she was “overdone” and that if I dated her for a while I’d know what that meant. My sister would come over during that freshman year, to my dorm, my apartment on 5th Avenue and chat. She and I would laugh together while Tabatha brought us fancy coffees made with a cappuccino machine she’d given me. She gave me lots of gifts, expensive gifts, and I always said thank you. She was good to me, but Ella never relented. Ella was two years older than we were, and she made sure Tabatha knew it. She talked about internships that she’d planned for her senior year and she talked about her boyfriend, a musician with a goatee and a penchant for flunking classes. I’d tell her how Mom wouldn’t approve and she’d say how not everyone needs to be an A student and then look at me as if I knew that already, as if I knew that Tabatha was dumb like an ox. And she was dumb, but her hair, with its black sheen and velvety lines, well, she wasn’t that dumb. However, in the end, my sister was right. When I told Tabatha Bert, she cried and we went our separate ways, but I loved her then. I really, really loved her.
It went like this for two years. My mother calling, my father patting me on the back, girlfriends coming and going. I wrote. I had books filled with poems and half-written novels, short stories that always won fourth prize and essays filled with sentimental notions about world politics, disease, people in love. I had good friends with good looks like me, athletic types who didn’t try out for the team, guys whose loyalties lie with bands that nobody else liked, lead singer types who didn’t articulate; in short, borderline artists who did school because they didn’t know how to risk their art, really risk being an artist. We took refuge knowing we’d make it one day. Cool, chic, relevant.
Then I became irrelevant. Raphaella. She would make me forget my piddling dreams, she would make me doubt myself, make me look in the mirror and change my clothes, make me wander about thinking of how I looked wandering about. I met her in the night, at a bar known for its good music and lack of accommodations, an alley with a roof. She was alone, standing there, and we all knew it. We’d been watching her all night, wondering how one woman could be so beautiful. I stared, oh yes I stared, because I couldn’t help myself. I was writing poetry like a jazz musician, riffs staring through the air, sent manic in the hope they would reach her, her lips, her hair, her beauty. She did nothing, just stood there, watching the lead singer, a friend of mine, as he mumbled through a set:
How you gonna know when knowing ain’t seeing
No more
What you gonna do when being ain’t breathing
No more
How you gonna live when life ain’t worth living
No more
Not real romantic I thought. And dumb, sure. A friend tapped me on the elbow and shouted. “Bro, you’re looking like a stalker. Just go on over there.” I smiled and nodded, but I didn’t go. This was not Tabatha Bert, I wanted to tell him, this was a whole new world. She was older for one thing. Or was she? She was smart as hell, clearly. I could just tell. It was in her brow and her taught, trim posture, it was the way she listened as if digging through the sandbox for a lost toy, or a golden earring. She seemed like she’d been burned, ruined by bad love. I liked thinking that because, I thought, I could offer her something for that, something pure and light and easy. I almost waved at one point, but my wave collapsed when the music stopped. She applauded airily. I looked at my friend, the lead singer. He looked at her and then at me, and then he winked. I needed that microphone that he held like a miter, the king’s miter that he tried to make into a sex wand, a magic sex wand. He’d done it before, and now I could see he was trying it again. He bowed. The whole band gave that little nod all bands give at the end of a set and I wondered what would come next. She stood still, still.
Poetry
Love
Beauty
I went to the stage where another friend was fiddling with the microphone, getting ready to introduce the band members. I grabbed the microphone and squinted out into the little crowd, then quickly at my friend. “Hey, Andrew, you look good in my shirt, bro.” I looked at the band. “Nice job fellas,” and then I looked at her. “I wonder if we could end the set with a little muse?” My friends wondered if I’d drank too much. “Great then,” I said, responding to no one in particular, smiling a lost smile. With my palms still sweaty I recited the first real poem of my life, sent with the hint of fear and a swath of desire for the woman who’d become the mother of my child:
Why are we given beauty? How do we know what it is?
This is beautiful. This is not. How do we know?
What happens within that moment when
we are touched by it?
Why are we given the ability to know?
Beauty.
When we see it what should we do?
Fall down and cry, remain still, afraid
Timid? I don’t know. I need help to know.
Why are we given beauty?
I let the microphone go limp in my hand as one of my friends yelled, “It’s the sex stupid!” Another shouted, “My mommy said it’s so we can see God!” Laughter. The beautiful woman just smiled. My emcee friend took the microphone and said, “Poetry night’s tomorrow Dave, but thanks anyways.” I got down to mock applause and looks of discomfort.
Then she came over. She, to me. I waited with sweat now staining my armpits. A mess.
“That was a good one,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yep, it sounded like a confused nursery rhyme. What’d your baby brother write it?”
“Yeah, he’s two. A genius, huh?”
She snickered, one side of her mouth curled invitingly.
“So what’ya want me to do now, lick your boots?”
“That’s a start,” I said.
“Yeah,” she looked at me, head, toe, head. “That’s a start.”
We danced. The palm of her hand stayed in the small of my back even as I began to perspire. She led, all night long she led. The next morning, I had no regrets, none. She smiled too but this was all very wise, different from anything I’d ever experienced and in the light of morning my poetry seemed pithy and cheap. I told her as much as she buttoned her blouse.
“Well, at least you wrote it.” She grinned, “You did write it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I wrote it.”
“You believe it? I mean do you care about beauty and all that shit?”
“Yeah,” I said looking away. “I care.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. Lunch.”
And we began.
One month into it all I took her to a restaurant called Carmine’s, an Italian place with giant oak tables and a young, yuppy clientele. At least six of my friends joined us. “Everyone,” I announced standing, “I want you to meet my girlfriend, Raphaella.”
Under the table I felt a crack on my shin and a tug at my shirtwaist. I looked over and saw my “girlfriend” nodding and smiling a broad smile while stabbing at the ground with her index finger, all out of sight of the others. I couldn’t decipher the motion, which was short and agitated and real quick, too quick, ticked-off quick. I must have looked at it too long, because I got another whack on my shin. It became clear she wanted me to get up, now.
“My boyfriend,” she said, emphasizing the boy part while wagging her head, “forgot to order the right cake for all of us so I’m going to go and show him which one would be best, excuse us for a minute.” She simpered and pulled me up by my bicep, walking me like this to the dessert counter. Like a child waiting to get spanked, I dreaded the coming moment. Not looking at her and instead fixing a fearful stare on the cakes, I felt her spittle while getting an earful of short, choppy, baleful words. “You know the deal, David. I don’t have boyfriends. And if I did, you wouldn’t be one of them. Commitment starts with a big C David, and I don’t like when people use it for me, like I was a coward. Capiche?” She made a hard coughing C sound when she said coward and capiche. I was humiliated but I didn’t leave her. Leaving her would be like quitting ice cream or getting rid of DirectTV. I was too young, undisciplined and too dependent on the image of me with a sexy, tough, uptown woman. She didn’t leave me either. I always thought how she kept me around for a sense of normalcy. I thought about how I was that glint of common suburban sense that every girl from the city longs for. But when I asked her why she never left me, her answer was always the same: “Well I haven’t decided yet, David. It’s either one, you’re a good fuck, or two, you’re just a really good man without a clue.”
And what do you say to that?
We went on, repeating similar scenes, one or both of us blowing our tops in public, but never totally splitting. We subsisted, sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, often just confused, together, breathing.
As time went on I learned about her past. Mostly I learned while watching paid programming in the darkest hours of the night. She’d start talking then, a little trickle of pain slowly turning into a river of stories about things past. I’d listen, laying on the rug, on my back, while she sat on the couch above me, looking down into my eyes only now and then, mostly watching big-haired people sell kitchen equipment to insomniacs.
“He hit her with an open fist at first, a bitch slap. Then after a year he ended up just beatin’ her regular, like a boxer.” That was Tommy I learned, her mother’s first man. “Momma was never too willing to call the cops, or anyone really.” Still looking at the television, she went on as if far away, “One time I held on to the biggest, meanest of them all, a red-haired Indian black who they called Freck. When he felt me on his back, scratching and wailing, he laughed and said, ‘You skinny little stupid bitch,’ and then my ear bled for whole day after he cuffed me upside my head.”
I asked her if she hated her mother for being so weak and she said, “Well, I just couldn’t tolerate my mother’s beatings as well as she could.” When I asked her if she hated men, she said, “My momma said they loved her, and besides us, I never knew anyone that loved my mother, so what was there to hate?” Down on the rug I’d lose sight of her when she’d sit back to explain. When this would happen I’d put my head in my hand, prop it up on my elbow, catch a glimpse again, and keep on listening. “You know I said I never hated my mother when I was a kid, but now I wonder if I didn’t hate her weakness, you know, her willingness to turn the cheek and all?”
There were also the little bits about her love life before us. “Loveless life,” she’d say. “Loveless except for Jimmy in tenth grade. Jimmy never wanted to have sex and that made me feel weird, but not bad, just weird. I was afraid for the longest that he had some sort of problem, like a parts problem and that’s why he didn’t ever try anything with me. But turns out he was just shy. He was cute. I loved Jimmy.”
When I sat up and asked her what happened she just said, “His aunt sent him to Arkansas, then the army. Jimmy was southern and simple, and she figured he belonged back down south. He wrote me once and said he was learning to throw hand grenades,” she wavered. “He was good to me.” She told me about a man who said he loved her, at least until she got pregnant. She was fifteen. “He sent a letter with two hundred bucks in it, and signed it, Good luck, Jarel.” She snickered, “I wasn’t even old enough to go on my own so my mother took me to get it done. I got it done alright, and with his money. That was the worst part. I used his punk-ass money.” On the way home Raphaella asked her mother if she should start taking the pill and her mother said, “That’ll just make you more willing, more rabbitty. Stay away from that, hear?” She paused and then added, “And that’s all she ever said to me ever again about that day. It. The end.”
One night, the two of us covered in the blue, muted glow of late night television, I learned about her father. She’d gone into her jewelry box and brought me a business card that lay wrapped in red velvet beneath a coiled mess of rings and necklaces. “See, says right here he was a baker, from Romania. See?” She pointed to the card, “Adrian Cristescu, right there. How would you pronounce that last name, my last name?” I tried once or twice but it came out sounding French somehow. “He left the card after their big weekend together, said he’d call soon and that she should write him at this address. Ever heard of Transylvania?” I nodded and she said, “Well there you go, now you know about as much as I do. Next.”
What came next, well, it was the biggest news of all. Sitting on the windowsill sipping coffee, she said, “I figure you should know something about me that I haven’t told you yet.”
I sat up. “What?”
“I’m divorced.”
“Divorced?”
“Yep, it was finalized about six months before I met you. It’s over. Completely, and thank God.” She sipped. “He was an asshole.” She paused and looked at me. “No, he was worse than that. This guy had serious problems, but of course, like they say, I picked sickness, so doesn’t that make me sick too?”
I just sat there, nodding. In time I managed to speak. “Divorced, huh? At twenty-two years old. Wow.” I gathered myself. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Well, what if I end up really liking you, you know, a lot? You are a gentle man, I wouldn’t want to hurt you.” She paused and averted her eyes, “What can I say, I’m a divorcee.”
His name was Dan, he was a graduate student at City College, and he was ten years older than Raphaella. “Ten years?” I said and she didn’t flinch. His field was Zoology and he came to New York from Los Angeles, citing something about how City College offered fieldwork at the Bronx Zoo.
“He was sort of a hippie, a grungy guy before it was cool to be grungy,” she said. They met at a City College house party in Hamilton Heights, a party Raphie had crashed with her crew of high school miscreants. Her friends were asked to leave soon after their arrival, but this guy Dan made sure Raphaella got to stay. And she did stay, not caring a damn that she was alone with an older crowd, people she didn’t know, people that could hurt her. She liked being different, and she liked being noticed by the right people, and Dan apparently was right people. Anyway, as she told it to me that day, they fell madly in love. They married the day after her graduation from high school, in front of a city judge, Dan having met her family just the day before at graduation. She showed me pictures and sure enough, there he was, wearing a casual seersucker jacket, jeans, leather loafers and long hair. She wore a white graduation gown and I thought how ironic that was, a two-for-one wedding picture. When they got married the next day everyone was in total dismay, “Pissed off,” she said pointedly. “They thought I’d at least marry a black man, and maybe actually introduce him to the family. I wasn’t having it though.”
They lived together just off campus in a married residence hall. Right away it began.
“He changed, or maybe he just got tired of me not listening to every little thing he said.” She shifted in her seat. “David, he tried to control everything I did. Coming and going, everything. He was always complaining that we didn’t have enough sex and, David, believe me, we had plenty of it. He was very fussy, very clean in ways that weren’t normal.” She spoke with a hint of shame. “He changed toothbrushes every week, every Sunday he’d throw one brush out and get another from this giant box of brushes he kept under the sink. He was nuts and he was my husband.” Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Mrs. Daniel Duncan was in some real shit.”
I simpered an incredulous, “Yeah, how ‘bout that.”
“Anyway, I got pregnant in less than three months and, oh shit, I thought, can we do this? He, of course, wanted me to have an abortion. But hell, no, that wasn’t happening, I was tired of that road and plus, shit, I was married now. I mean, what is that? I told him no and he got up on me, real close, and said ‘Yes’. ‘Yes,’ he said, real flat and short. ‘Yes.’ It was creepy. Then I had the miscarriage,” she paused. “Well, he sort of helped with that one.”
Oh boy, I thought. She was a piece of work with one helluva story to tell. In a boy’s voice I plunked out a, “Helped how?”
“He was rough with me, you know, during sex, and I know he did that on purpose. Over and over, I hated it, throwing me around like that and just being nasty, trying to beat me so I’d lose the baby.” Her lip curled, involuntarily. “And I did, I lost the baby.”
Her mix of sorrow and anger evoked the same emotions in me. But I was also amazed at how nasty and loveless her marriage had been. I was seized by how brutal this man was, and how scary it was that Raphaella had chosen him. Amid these thoughts all I managed that morning was to sort of play along. “Dang, that’s a rough story, Raphie.” She concurred with a nod and a sip of her cool coffee, and that was the last thing I heard about Dan for a while. It wasn’t until the winter of that year that I was reminded of this past. We were walking together in Central Park and she leaned over and kissed my cheek, clenched my hand and said, “I love you David, you’re so gentle. So gentle.” Then she burrowed her head in my chest as we walked. I felt warmth and hope for us, and I remembered Dan.
And there was her book.
One night instead of a little chat she went and dug out a thick, glossy, voluminous book scattered with rich pictures, hundreds of photos of paintings from every age. “My senior year I got an internship working at the Met.” She opened the book. “Just a stupid little internship for my senior work credit. But that’s where I met Ms. Wells.” I asked her and she told me that Ms. Wells was the most wonderful woman she’d ever met, filled with life and an insatiable, infectious love for the classics. The book had been a gift from Ms. Wells to Raphaella. It was a homemade history of art scrapbook. A magnificent leathery thing, with pages and pages of pasted-in reproductions and short blurbs of interesting information on each. “Now I have a hobby. It’s my own little hobby, my little love, and I don’t tell too many people about it, so...” She put her forefinger to her lips and I nodded, putting my finger to my lips as well, only without the aplomb and style. Grinning slightly she called me off the floor and up to the couch where we sat close and took in her book, together, just like my sister and I used to do with Cosmo. Laughing. Carefree. Home. She knew every inch of her book, and soon I would, too. I loved how she got lost in the paintings, how her book suspended her anger and suspiciousness. “Let’s get the book,” I’d say sometimes in the middle of an argument. “Let’s just get the book.” And sometimes she would, sometimes she did.
***
Mitkin is tired, but not irritated. It is the end of our first day together and I’ve managed to keep him for almost three hours. The prison hierarchs like me for some reason. Mitkin looks directly at me and says, “Did you hate me?”
“Hate you,” I say. “No, I didn’t hate you. I was enthralled with you.”
“That seems stupid,” he says.
I think about it.
“Did you think I was going to steal your girlfriend?”
“Yes,” I say. “But maybe she’d already been stolen. Or maybe she was never mine.”
He looks at the ground. I think that he is embarrassed for me, but he is not. He is remembering.
CHAPTER III - Stirrings
Mitkin ran fast. Knowing the West Side best, he immediately headed for Riverside Drive and the comfort of the Hudson River. He picked it up after traversing the north end of Central Park and its dying brownstones with their massive granite stoops and crumbling tracery. As he ran, he thought. His mind did not flutter from one image to the next; he did not, for example, see a homeless person and immediately contemplate the plight of the poor, American power politics and encroaching, enraged individualism. He did not run by the Harlem Meer and think about fish heads or the Creature from the Black Lagoon as, let’s say, I would do. His mind was steady. As he ran he focused on his father and specifically their life together.
Mitkin had always been in love with his father. In ninth grade his father showed him how to make a perfect fit for his physics project. It was a great project, one that tested his ability to construct the perfect causal relationship. Mitkin’s was a mishmash of falling rocks, flittering balloons and flying helicopters. The whole ramshackle thing was built on a big, twelve by fifteen feet piece of plywood—twice the size of any competitors’. Two towers of bolted-down tennis ball cans rose higher than a man, making the project dreadfully imposing. The point of it all was inertia, and Mitkin’s study was indubitable. He knew he was the winner when the last of his fourteen sequences sent a large, toy helicopter into the sky, landing softly on his teacher’s desk. His father had given him the idea for the helicopter; in fact his father had given him all his ideas.
Martin Mitkin would often bring his son into the operating room, into his classrooms, into his board meetings, into every aspect of his adult life. Most of all, Martin Mitkin exposed his son to medicine and life lived inside a hospital. And Mitchell loved it. As a child he had walked among the patients, eaten lunch with his favorite doctors, giggled with his favorite nurses. He had traveled with his father too. By the time he was ten Mitchell had been to Jerusalem, Calcutta, Istanbul and Caracas. He’d accompanied his father wherever he went, and his father accompanied him whenever he thought, wherever he thought, whatever he thought. On this day, jogging alongside the gray-blue Hudson, Mitkin stayed focused on these good things. Just beyond these thoughts, however, lay the imposing matter of death, a matter that Mitkin had not yet decided to entertain.
“Hello Francine. Did they move my father?” Mitkin was topless, having removed his sweat-soaked T-shirt during his run. Standing in the hospital’s atrium, a giant room with budding greens and distant echoes, Mitkin’s nakedness was not unnoticed.
“Not that I know of,” said Francine, a candy striper. “I saw your mom hanging around earlier. She told me she’d been here all night. I was looking for you. How are you, Mitchell?” She smiled.
“Me, well, you know…”
“Actually, I don’t know,” she replied flashing a look. Mitkin smiled insouciantly and resumed a brisk walk. Near the elevators he turned and walked backward raising his voice so the girl could hear over the din. “I’ll be better when I find out why my mother was here all night.”
He didn’t take the elevator but instead ran up the stairs, lunging two steps at a time, like a kid at play. When he reached the second floor he saw an old friend of the family, the doctor who was supervising his father’s treatment. Doctor Jim Wagner was a tall man with plenty of folds on his face. He had soft eyes and well-kept gray hair, big teeth and big hands. His voice was a melodious baritone. Wagner had studied with Martin Mitkin at Columbia and then worked with him overseas. Now he was together again with his old friend, treating him and worrying about him. He had known Mitchell as a baby, and since the onset of Martin Mitkin’s cancer had dedicated himself to seeing Mitchell Mitkin once a week. He loved Mitchell, but spared him nothing. He would often tell Martin that the only thing tougher than finding a cure for cancer would be finding his son a wife. “Mitch,” Doctor Wagner would joke, “is already married to his mind, a wife he’ll never be able to divorce, or even take a business trip away from.” Doctor Wagner saw Mitchell in the hall and opened his arms invitingly.
“The prodigal son is here to see his daddy take tests, and only twelve hours late.” They hugged. Wagner looked Mitchell up and down and said, “Put your shirt on, you’re making the visitors sick and the patients sicker.”
“Not Francine,” said Mitkin.
“Is it true? Have you really given up your one true love for a woman?”
“You are senile,” said Mitkin. Wagner laughed and put his arm around him. Walking through the sterile hall, the sounds of vapid midday television and squeaky chrome carry carts all around, Mitkin felt at home. The big arms of Doctor Wagner and the caress of hospital sterility affirmed Mitkin. He was as far from doubt in this environment as one could be. He celebrated life most when he walked through this house for the dying, and the irony of it eluded him, or perhaps it is better to say, he eluded it.
Room 232 was bleach white, and it smelled that color too. It contrasted greatly with the glowering face of Mitchell’s mother, Cassie Mitkin. Her eyes were gray with worry, and her face was a pewter hued dusk. Her hand gripped her husband’s forearm as he sat upright in his bed, seemingly unperturbed. Glimpsing this as he came in, Mitchell thought how his father must be at least a little irritated with a doting wife so suffocatingly close.
“Hello Father, what have you done to yourself? I told you not to eat the cancer cantaloupe.” Mitchell laughed at his own joke. Doctor Wagner laughed too, but Mitkin’s mother only laughed halfheartedly. She smiled peculiarly at the end of her laugh. Everyone in the room felt her angst and there was silence.
Mitkin plowed in, “Mom, what’s with the staring? Dad’s going to be fine. Right, Doc?”
“Well—” Doctor Wagner began but was cut off by Martin Mitkin.
“Mitchell, that was cruel. Greet your mother properly.”
Mitkin sighed, “Hello, Mom. You look tired. Francine told me you were here all night. Are you panicking again, Mom?” He tried to sound comical, but it just came out as penurious. An embarrassing noiselessness sat between mother and son. Cassie Mitkin was plump, and soft, and huggable, and she was short too. Mitchell waited for his mother to answer but she just stared up at him, glassy-eyed. Doctor Wagner stirred the thick mood of the room.
“Well, it looks like this, Martin.” He turned and faced everyone. “The cancer’s there, and it’s spreading. The liver function test was elevated, and I think the biopsy will show the same thing. That’s what I want to do next, now.” The scuffling of an elderly patient could be heard outside the door, while a faraway nurse dropped a bedpan. Mitchell Mitkin reached to take Doctor Wagner’s clipboard, and Martin Mitkin did not move much except to rearrange himself under the lightweight blanket which covered him up to his midsection.
“And then?” said Mitkin.
“We’ll have to see, Mitch, but I’ve seen this before, and you too, probably, if there is a micrometastasis outside the lung we must go with chemo. Just have to.”
Cassie Mitkin began to sob. Her head bobbed up and down slightly. Mitkin tried, but could not muster sympathy for her. He disliked her ignorance about chemotherapy and was disgusted by her lack of faith. Hadn’t her husband worked his whole life in pursuit of better medicine? Didn’t that count for anything or was it just a waste? It seemed to Mitchell that this illness was an opportunity. Sure it was sad, but it wasn’t over. Mitkin had what his mother did not: faith. He believed in the religion of reason, rationalism, concrete thinking and the principles of science.
At the age of nineteen there were answers to all the questions of death and suffering, and though we hadn’t discovered them all, we would if only we cared enough to, and worked hard enough to, and employed the right minds. Mitkin believed he was one of those hard working minds, and he was; he was a little genius. But he was also a young man of little tact. His mother continued to sob, even as Doctor Wagner walked her out of the room for tissues, looking over his shoulder with a kind expression. Martin Mitkin nodded back knowingly, while Mitchell took his mother’s seat and put his chin in his hand. He hunched his back and took on the posture of Rodin’s Thinker. He looked at his father whose face was staid and whose eyes were clear. A quiet glinted there. Learned lines rumpled his face. His lips, thin and red, formed a sorrowful smile. “She’s afraid Mitchell, let her be afraid.” Mitkin nodded slightly.
“You don’t want chemo, do you Father?”
“Yes, I’d love it. Could I box some leftovers for you?” He grinned sheepishly. “No, Mitchell, I don’t want chemo. Nobody wants chemo. The question is, do I need chemotherapy? If Jim is telling me I need it, then I do.”
“No you don’t,” said Mitkin.
“Oh really? Let me quote what Jim said before you got here, when it was just the two of us in the room. He said, ‘Martin, without chemo you’re toast.’ If Jim Wagner says I need it, I need it.”
“But he’s wrong, you don’t.” The younger Mitkin stared directly into his father’s eyes. “There are other ways of dealing with this Dad. Have you heard of antibody therapy? They extract a tumor cell, monoclone it in a surrogate and then reinject it, and it fights for you, it fights the cancer. There are new ways like this, ways that change the whole paradigm of cancer treatment.” Mitkin was serious. “I’ve been studying them, because I knew that one day you’d be sitting right here, I knew that chemo would come up and that Mom would cry. Seriously, I’m not some half-wit.” He was getting stirred up. “Dad, I want to talk to Doctor Wagner.”
“Why?”
“He should change his therapy.”
His father breathed a laugh. “Well, for now you will speak with me. Mitchell, you are a smart boy who is bound to be great. But I am a sick man, and soon I will be a dead man. In the meantime, I expect you to rule out rushed judgments and schemes that come from your heart and not your head. Don’t be afraid for me Son. Don’t fear death so much. The body, like all things, just gets old, changes, fights and ultimately dies. Mitchell look at me.” He looked at his son forcefully, gesturing with his index finger. “When you are afraid, you must face your fears, not succumb to them by shouting everyone down and trampling on an entire room full of opinions.” He finished, still looking directly at Mitkin.
“But Father, I am not trampling. I just believe—”
“What, that you know more than old Jim Wagner? Is that what you believe?” asked his father.
“No. But I believe that what I know is more important in this situation than what he knows. I don’t know more, I just know more about this.”
Martin looked at Mitkin wearily. He shook his head silently and that chaffed his son. Mitkin did not move but inside his mind worked overtime: “My father,” he thought, “has lost respect for me.” He felt his throat tighten. “He doesn’t need chemotherapy, I know he doesn’t need it. It will just kill him slowly, and he’ll be in pain.” He spoke aloud to his father, but through a quivering voice.
“Dad, I’ve got a feeling on this.” Mitkin removed his hand from his father’s hand and balled it into a fist. “Think about it, Dad, please, just think about it. I don’t want to challenge Doctor Wagner, but there are other ways and he knows it.”
“Well if he knows it, then why doesn’t he recommend these ways? Does he want to see me suffer, Son?”
Mitkin wagged his head no. “Why do some old men choose to live when their life is nothing but pain and suffering? I mean why don’t they just ask their doctors to assist them, reduce their pain forever? You know what I’m saying Dad. Why don’t their doctors do it themselves, finish it for them, or at least encourage it?”
His father began to respond.
Mitkin interrupted, “Dad, it’s because they are set in their ways and still slaves to ridiculous claims about ‘dignity’ or ‘nobility,’ or whatever. Doctor Wagner is a good man but he’s like those old men and their doctors; he knows what he knows he knows, and that’s all. In our case he knows chemo. That’s it.” He stood up and looked down kindly on his father, a regnant, willful prince still in love with his dying king. “Dad, he’s one of those dinosaur doctors down deep. He is.”
“Don’t pull this crap, Son, you know how I feel about that. We agree. But I don’t think those doctors are anything like Jim Wagner. Mitchell, he just doesn’t believe the other therapies will work.” He struggled and sat up even further in his bed. “Isn’t that clear?”
“No, it’s not.”
Martin Mitkin’s eyes narrowed to an exasperated squint, his lips straightened and his forehead wrinkled. Slowly, he leaned back and ensconced himself in the bed. He never took his blue eyes off of his son, however. He sighed and drew in a deep breath, letting it out as he pointed profoundly to a little white paper cup. Mitkin handed it over and he sipped some water, and then, as if taking back the conversation, he pointed at the chair and spoke softly. “Have a seat, Son.” Mitkin obeyed. After some time spent in silence, Martin Mitkin spoke again. “Is it possible that you are scared, Mitchell? Are you acting this way because you are afraid for my life?”
Mitkin shifted in his chair.
“No Father, it’s not that.”
“I don’t believe you,” replied Mitkin’s father.
“But—”
“Son,” Martin Mitkin broke in again, “what do you think death is?”
The look on Mitkin’s face changed from a flat and fixed confidence to a corrugated confusion. “Death?”
“Yes, what is its significance? What happens when we die, when I die?”
“Why do you ask?” said Mitkin evasively.
In a baritone, Martin repeated forcefully, “What is death, Son?”
“Well,” he glanced straight up at the ceiling, nervously. “I guess what happens is what you’ve always told me happens. Our body loses its resiliency due to one trauma or another. Next its inability to repair itself leads to secondary and tertiary malfunctions and eventually to a massive breakdown in all systems, including the heart. Without fuel, the body collapses. If it remains in this collapsed state for too long it will remain in it forever, or at least until it is no longer what we recognize as a body. Then it is nothing but material fodder for other organisms. Essentially we become nothing.”
“Good,” said his father. “And does this nothingness scare you?”
“It’s natural.”
“But does it scare you? Does it make you want to believe in something more?” His father spoke with solemnity.
“Dad, I don’t get all of this. First of all, you’re not dying and won’t die. If you would just take a look at some options and not just accept Doctor Wagner’s chemo diagnosis, well, you might just live another fifty years. I mean, what is all this morbid talk for?”
“For posterity, for your future son. I want you to realize that an enlightened mind faces a grim reality. Our lives as we know them are no more than a series of titillations where the body reacts to stimuli. When we no longer register any titillation, we are dead, Son. There are no fantasies to look forward too, no afterworlds full of magical immortality. This is the way it is Son, and believing this, as I know you do, I do, is courageous. See, we choose the tougher road, the cold but true road, and we must understand this. Don’t cop out, Son.
Copping out is what brings delusion; it’s like a drug that makes life easier. We’re more heroic, like warriors, because we choose empirical truth, grim or not.” Mitchell Mitkin looked at his father. His bottom lip hung low on his open mouth. His father continued. “Death is the end of an organism, don’t make it more than it is. And if you have to, realize you do so to succor your weakness.”
The sun slid behind a rogue cloud. The room went a shade darker and Mitchell Mitkin was dumbfounded. How could his father think he was going to die? Worse, how could he think that his son would be scared if he did? Scared? He at his father. “That’s not it at all, sir,” he said aloud, eyes narrowing. “I just know I’m right on this. I know.”
His father watched him, then looked away and nodded. “Fine, Son. Fine.” A long silence followed, and then the sun again moved back into place, out from behind the clouds, bright and glaring outside the window. Cassie Mitkin and Doctor Wagner returned. Cassie was smiling again.
Mitkin would tell me how for two years this moment hardened him. His father’s challenge to remain committed to scientific materialism in the face of death had hidden him from the subtleties of the soul and things unseen. This repression, he would go on to say, led to his looming miasma. But for the time being, the battle in which the enemy was his father’s physical pain would serve as a means for survival.