You stand up. Michael stands up.
"I'm getting out of here," you say. You turn away. You can hardly see your way to the door. Your eyes are dim and cloudy. You hit your knee on a chair.
"You're not going anywhere."
Michael grabs your arm as you reach the door. You yank it away. He slams you against the doorframe and bangs your head against the metal. He's got you pinned. You jam your elbow into his belly and he lets go. You turn and punch him in the face. You punch him hard. You hit him with the hand the ferret bit and it hurts like hell. You fall backward into the hall. You get to your feet and look to see what's happened to Michael. He is on his feet. You remember thinking. He's going to hit me.
When you come around, you are stretched out on the couch. Your head feels truly awful. You can feel the point of contact just below your left temple.
Michael comes out of the kitchen holding a paper towel to his nose. The towel is stained with blood.
"You all right," you ask him.
He nods. "That kitchen faucet needs a washer. Drips like crazy."
"Amanda isn't shopping," you say. "She left me."
"What?"
"She called up from France one day and said she wasn't coming home."
Michael scrutinizes your face to see if you are serious. Then he leans back in the chair and sighs.
"I don't know what to say," he says. He shakes his head. "Goddamn. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
Michael stands up and comes over to the couch. He crouches down, then says, "Are you all right?"
"I miss Mom," you say.
THE NIGHT SHIFT
Michael is hungry and you are thirsty; a foray is proposed and seconded. All of uptown seems to be headed downtown for Saturday night. Everyone on the sidewalk looks exactly seventeen years old and restless. At Sheridan Square a ragged figure is tearing posters off the utility poles. He claws at the paper with his fingernails and then stomps it under his feet.
"What is he, political?" Michael says.
"No, just angry."
You walk down into the Lion's Head, past all the framed dust jackets of all the writers who have ever gotten drunk here, heading for the back room where the lights are low. When you sit down, James, long-haired and black, jumps up on the table; the house cat.
"I never really liked her much, to tell you the truth," Michael says. "I thought she was fake. If I ever see her I'm going to rip her lungs out."
You introduce Michael to Karen, the waitress, and she asks you how the writing is going. You order two double vodkas. She tosses down a couple of menus and ducks around the corner.
"At first," you say, "I couldn't believe she left me. Now I can't believe we got married in the first place. I'm just starting to remember how cold and distant Amanda was when Mom got sick. She seemed to resent Mom's dying."
"Do you think you'd have married her if Mom hadn't been sick?"
You have made such a point of not dwelling on the incidents associated with your mother's death, almost denying that it was a consideration at all. You were living with Amanda in New York and marriage wasn't high on your list of priorities, although on Amanda's it was. You had your doubts about in sickness and in health till death do us part. Then your mother was diagnosed and everything looked different. Your first love had given notice of departure and Amanda's application was on file. Mom never said it would do her heart good to see you married, but you were so eager to please her you would have walked through fire, given your right and left arms… You wanted her to be happy and she wanted you to be happy. And, in the end, you might have confused what she wanted with what Amanda wanted.
Before it happened you couldn't believe you would survive your mother's death. Torn between thinking it was your duty to throw yourself oft her pyre and her wish that you should not waste time mourning, you knew no reaction that satisfied both conditions. You spent so much time in anticipation that when her death came you didn't know what you felt. After the funeral it seemed as if you were wandering around your own interior looking for signs of life, finding nothing but empty rooms and white walls. You kept waiting for the onset of grief. You are beginning to suspect it arrived nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda's departure.
Michael orders the shepherd's pie. You wave the menu away. You talk about the past and the present. You ask about the twins, Peter at Amherst and Scan at Bowdoin. Having already discussed your travails at the magazine, including your recent ferret gambit, you ask Michael about his business-restoring old houses-and he tells you it's going well. He's working on a derelict carriage house in New Hope.
"I'm going to hire out some grunt work. Maybe you'd be interested. At least it's a change of scene. Say, three or four weeks of work."
You tell him you'll think about it. You are surprised that he would offer. Michael has long considered you incompetent. By the time he was twelve he was bigger than you. He shaped an ethic of engagement with the physical world under which your aptitudes and accomplishments were suspect.
You drink and talk. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede. You and Michael and Peter and Scan and Dad stand against the world. The family has been fucked over, but you're going to tough it out. Forget that slut Amanda. The doctors who couldn't save your mother's life and wouldn't tell you what was going on. Clara Tillinghast. The priest who, at your mother's deathbed, said, "We've seen some beautiful deaths with cancer."
After many drinks Michael says, "I need a little air." On the way back to the apartment, you stop in on a friend who happens to have a spare half for the low, low price of sixty dollars. You feel that you are basically through with this compulsion. This time you just want to celebrate crossing the hump. You are a little drunk and you want to keep going, keep talking.
You should have told us, Michael says, sprawled out on the couch in your apartment. "I mean, what's a family for?" He bangs his hand on the coffee table for emphasis. "What's family for?"
"I don't know. You want to do a few lines?" Michael shrugs. "Why not?" He watches as you get up and take the mirror from the wall. "What was bad for me," he says, "is at first I'd see her the way she was toward the end, all wasted and thin. But now I have this image I keep with me. I don't know when it was, but I came home from school one day-this was after you'd gone to college-and Mom was out back raking leaves. It was October or something and she was wearing your old ski team jacket, which was about six sizes too big." He stops. His eyes are closed and you think maybe he has passed out. You shake some coke out onto the mirror. Michael opens his eyes. "I remember the way the air smelled, the way Mom looked in that jacket with leaves in her hair, the lake in the background. That's the way I remember her now. Raking leaves in your old ski team jacket."
"I like that," you say. You can imagine it. She wore that jacket for years. Once you finished high school you didn't want any part of it and she took it up. You'd never really given it a thought, but now you feel good about it.
You cut eight lines. Michael begins to snore. You call his name and then you get up and gently shake his shoulder. He turns his face into the cushions. You do two of the lines and sit back in the chair. A year ago tonight you were up until daybreak, sitting beside your mother's bed.
You thought you would faint when you came home the last time, three days before she died, and saw the ravaged form. Even the smile had shifted. After months of waffling, the doctors had admitted there was not much they could do, and agreed she could stay at home if the family would attend her constantly. When you got home, Michael and your father, who had traded twelve-hour shifts for a week, were exhausted. For the last seventy-two hours, you took the night shift, midnight to eight. You gave her the morphine injection every four hours, and tended as best you could to the symptoms of the disease.