I’m not sure.
Then I’ll tell you a little more, since I’m the only one you’ve kept up with who’s gone through it. At first you can’t do anything but fight it; you keep trying to protect yourself against further injury and agony and degradation. The first day they gave me chemo, they put the needle in, and I started vomiting right there at the hospital. I vomited for four days straight; my husband almost went mad. I lived for almost two years after that, although for awhile I did get better, but that was just the beginning. You feel that it’s unbearable, but you have to bear it. Then it gets worse, and then much worse. You go into shock, but somehow you still know that this truly is unbearable, and you’re getting so hurt now that nothing can fix you. Then you start breaking into pieces. It’s like that point in childbirth when you realize you have no control and you’re irrelevant. Some people never come back together; they go straightaway into the same condition as that lady next to me who can’t do anything except chew on dirt. But for me… well, after a long time my pieces flowed back together like mercury. I think that all of me is back, but I don’t know. What do you think? Tell me! I can’t ask anyone else. Do you think any part of me is missing?
No.
You’re not just saying that? Promise—
I promise. To me you seem the same.
You know, dying hurt so much that for a long time I kept expecting to keep hurting. And at first I was changing so quickly, but now… How long have I been dead?
Thirteen years, I think. Well, let me read your—
You mean you don’t know?
How would I? You didn’t exactly tell me! And I didn’t ask your husband. But I always read your headstone when I visit you. What does it say now? It’s so dark. Anyway, when it comes to arithmetic—
That’s right. I always got better grades than you.
That must have been one of the reasons you looked down on me.
Of course! But I don’t now. You’re so nice to come here, especially at night. I’m getting used to not having anything.
I can imagine.
But when I was getting chemotherapy, I learned to like having no hair.
Such beautiful hair…
Not having to toss it out of my face… My eyes seemed larger and more intense. That was nice. But it was humbling, of course, and being in the ground is so much worse. Did you know that lovers often come here at night?
I’m not surprised. After all, he remarked bitterly, here I am, with you.
Disregarding this, she said: When I see a very female female, with cleavage and long hair, flirting with somebody at the side of my grave, it makes me sad. Last summer, or maybe the summer before, a couple made love on top of me, and I was a little titillated, but mostly I was angry. At them. For being alive and showing me no consideration. But why should they?
You can flirt with me.
I did just now, a little. But I don’t feel anything.
You never did, with me.
That’s true. How stupid that you’re the only one of us two who cares! Or do you? Aren’t you just going through the motions?
Aren’t we both?
Look, I’m not with anyone! Certainly not with you. The way you act toward me reminds me of how it was when the baby was crying or my husband wanted me back the way I used to be. Believe it or not, I have no desire to feel sexy. I’d rather feel alive. I’d like to heave this marble slab off my chest and breathe! I—
Victoria?
What is it? Oh, is it time for you to leave? Well, goodbye.
Victoria, do you want me to get you out of here?
You asked me that.
But if I—
And put me where?
Maybe in a fancy flowerpot. We can grow whatever you like on top of you, some black roses or—
Let me think about that. I like making you come to me. Maybe that’s the best I can expect now.
I’m not feeling well. I’m going home.
Run along then, said Victoria, and he almost hated her. At least this was not the same misery she had caused him when he was seventeen.
Of course their doings had not brought him misery alone; that was why he remembered her so fondly, or gratefully, or something. They had kissed and caressed several times, and once it went farther. He remembered her in his bedroom on that summer afternoon — where had his parents been? — and they had drawn the curtains. She stood nude before him, the blonde locks licking down around her nipples as she smiled unreadably, doubtless prepared to withdraw herself at any juncture, as was her right; and he fell to his knees, burying his face in her bright blonde crotch. Then somehow she was in his bed with her legs open. It was his first time, although from what she later intimated, perhaps simply to push him away, it might not have been hers; he’d neglected or declined to ask, as was his policy on so many subjects. So he adored her, and it was all perfect. He would have given anything to keep it from ending. It did, and Victoria, triumphant, alarmed or simply cool, dressed and rapidly departed; he was not to call her without further instructions. That was the day of his great joy. Not until he was twenty-one did he penetrate a woman; but what Victoria had allowed him was no less intimate than that. That was his glory; she was forever his, at least in a certain seventeen-year-old kind of way. And in the painfully lovely brightness of his last summer, Victoria was whispering to him almost like the wind, or perhaps like a rotten tree rocking in the wind. She had opened her legs, and then… His belly ached. In the west, two silver dragon-continents faced off upon the moon’s yellow disk, the sky’s red gashes bleeding orange and a pair of raptors taking wing — dew on every railing and plaque, and outside the wall and across the street, doorknobs and porches wet in the country of the living. — Victoria said: When I was seventeen and I got a sunburn, I liked it because it made the hidden me look so white… — And his old penis nearly stirred, to remember her white parts. She had been like the moon, or like a concert singer’s voice alone in the darkness, living and altering. He seemed to recall her sitting at the next table at the high school library, turned slightly away from him as she studied for her chemistry test, her handsome legs bare above the knee, the creases behind her knees calling upon him to lick them, her plump, pale buttocks, which he was to see and touch only that once, announcing themselves to him within the paisley dress, her arms alive with pinkness, her hair a brilliant straw-blonde: all these attributes were hers; this was her, but, being seventeen, he never thought to inquire what else might be her. And her breast, or some other woman’s, green and hard in his mind as a half-made acorn, it dazzled him, as when one has sat in the sun too long and wishes to pass into the shade. Then came that maddening tenderness in his sides, nausea in his throat, and he forgot to breathe when he saw her.
In high school they took mostly different classes; she nearly might as well have been IN MANSIONS ABOVE. They used to pass in the hall, and exchanged notes. Who would have supposed that this beautiful girl named Victoria would actually write to him? He knew he would keep her letters forever.
What might he keep of her now? Had his life-horizon continued to roll indefinitely forward, like a planet’s so called “terminator” where night gives way to dawn, then he might have wished, “forsaking all others” as the wedding vow put it, to lead her past the ruined angel whose marble hands would never come unclasped, then through the gate, for he most certainly lacked any wish to dwell here with her, eating dirt — but the rules have little to do with our wishes. Nor, it seemed, did Victoria yearn to abide with him. Wouldn’t she rather flitter around her abandoned children? And why shouldn’t she? Wouldn’t that be the best, most loving thing, to reincorporate her with them? But if that wasn’t practical, and if Victoria grew fonder of him, and therefore he of her, and could he but live aboveground awhile longer — or for that matter dwell in death with her — where should they abide? In the years when Luke and his wife used to quarrel, they had maintained separate residences, she not being above locking him out of the bedroom in the middle of the night, for which cause he discouraged her from selling her place and moving into the house whose mortgage he had finally almost paid off — what if she evicted him from his own bedroom? When his last illness softened their wills, they removed to a new home, where indeed they must have lived happily ever after, for the widow still remained there. At this stage what could one hope for but the mitigation of loneliness? He had to confess, it hurt his heart to think upon Victoria lying alone down there in the dirt, forever, no matter what she said about the neighbors. For all he knew, they might be one of her sad caprices, and whenever he quitted her she lay isolated and helpless, spinning out her skein of inventions just to kill more years and hours. The way she spoke mainly of herself, and then so inexactly (one shouldn’t say evasively), conveyed nothing. He pitied her for being dead. Goodhearted, thinking merely to save her, in much the same way that Isaac ought to have rescued him from his needs and griefs, he sometimes, as you know, imagined carrying her far away from both their pasts — for example, to the moon, which might be the place to which her neighbor’s tomb was referring when it asserted: IN MANSIONS ABOVE. In one of her letters from when they were seventeen, she had written: I am what I pretend to be. Do pretend, Victoria. Come to the moon with me; pretend away.