Bemused, Luke used to ask why the fat one needed so many women whispering in his ear, like a crush of cottonwoods around a sulphur spring; although Luke loved his moody but affectionate wife sincerely, he detested depending on her, or, worse yet, her expecting him to take care of her as if she were a child. — If I choose to be with her, he said in those last years, then I need to allow her to modify me. — Hence Luke sought to learn from his Stephanie how to be cheerful, at which she intermittently excelled, especially in the morning; and how to be effective with strangers by being social; that came easily to her. He admired her beauty even as she aged. Truth to tell, Stephanie was a fine-looking woman. In shape and deportment she partially exemplified a certain tall ex-ladyfriend of my neighbor’s named Angeline, who had jilted him more cruelly, since with greater awareness, than Victoria; but Angeline’s signature characteristic was treachery, while Stephanie adored her husband desperately even when she raged against him. They were both loyal. After he moved out, the marriage appeared to lack what a young person might call a “future”; then it got better year by year; and the month before his death Luke calmly reported (which seemed impossible) that it was improving day by day. Whenever his surgeries, chemotherapies and radiation treatments reduced him to that state of dependence which he so greatly feared, Stephanie ruled him with great love, showing his oldest friends the door when he tired, hounding the doctors to be less absent, sleeplessly spoonfeeding him her heart’s best blood. Stephanie and the moon-gazer invariably got along well, because the latter respected her authority. She told Luke that she loved this fat friend of his; she was sweet that way.
Even while praising Stephanie, Luke occasionally used to invoke another woman. Long before Stephanie, he had loved an Eve with commendable seriousness, admiring without knowing her, barely revealing his interest, perhaps to prevent her from disdaining him. Before Eve lost her youth she moved away and married someone else. Her name came sweetly to Luke’s lips. After uttering it he’d say: And then I realized that what I thought I remembered was just pieces of a dream.
What would have happened if you’d married her instead of Stephanie?
Oh, nothing. Stephanie’s perfect for me.
For our dying moon-gazer, as for Luke, the Eves, the Angelines and their sisters were heavenly dreams; through them his life might be infinitely multiplied. Just as he grew better acquainted with his father after the latter’s death, once he knowingly began to die he came to know his bygone women better; they could no longer save him, but their images comforted him; it might have been that way for Luke with his dream-Eve, who was one of his dearest secrets — not to be exposed to others.
Asked whether he might find Eve after death, Luke, as so often when she came up, changed the subject. Perhaps by then he had managed to lay aside his dream of her, for even before he met Isaac, Luke had always wished to depart an empty house, carrying the fewest necessities on his back. As for Isaac, he had certainly left nothing behind! He might still be alive in the stillness of rock-crowds in some dry wash, alone in the desert where it becomes practical to listen to life and death. As for Luke, where he had gone was unknown. He had always been stronger than this fat friend who survived him. To the southwest the gibbous moon remained high over the snow-corduroyed rock-hills, while the sky grew orange over the sharp blue ridge behind which the still unseen sun was approaching. Luke and Raymond planned out their climb, while the third one, the fat one, sat by himself. Raymond sought to persuade him along, kindly assuring him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t make it, but he preferred not to be the cause of failure on what might and did prove to be Luke’s sole chance to reach the summit; so he sat alone, his incapacity (which scarcely humiliated him at all) as glaring as the line of a salt lake on the horizon at noon. To be sure, he would have liked to keep them company — for much the same reason that he later wished that there might be a way to reach the cemetery through the drawer of his father’s desk — or instantaneously to traverse the Straight Wall of the moon.
In the summer after Luke’s death he had walked to the shore of a certain high lake and sat on the rocks for a long time, watching the cattails trembling and the clouds pressing as tightly upon the mountains as hands smothering someone’s face; and the water altered from ultramarine to turquoise to milky grey as he sat there with the tears coming so easily and silently that he felt healthy while the wind carried off his tears as quickly as they appeared; and he sat in a kind of ease, listening to a bluejay, waiting for the tears to cease, so that he could return into the sight of others without embarrassment. On the far side of the lake rose a saddle between snowy mountains, too far and high for him to aspire to, although perhaps Luke could have reached it. At last a cold wind arose from the lake, and overcame his remaining tears; as he sat shivering, he couldn’t help but wonder how the smallest birds stayed warm. Sometimes in his boyhood he used to see frozen sparrows in January; how did the others get through to summer? That might be one more thing which he used to know. His teeth chattered. A robin darted on the gravel beach, seeming to play with the waves, chasing them out and flying back when they came in. He felt chilled now, so chilled! Then he began to get dizzy. He sat for a long time, until the sun returned, and the wet rock took on color.
Stephanie, greyhaired and crushed, still worked (and kept an ageing quarter horse); once or twice a year he phoned her and they spoke of Luke, not for more than twenty minutes. What Luke had left in her heart was, of course, the couple’s secret.
It was the anniversary of Luke’s death. He telephoned her. She asked how he was. — No complaints, he said. What about you?
She was in debt. Luke’s estate resisted liquidation; it tired her so; she didn’t know how to go forward. — To this he didn’t know what to say.