I don’t know how many times, during the early winter of the year my mother died, I marched — typically by myself, though whenever possible with R. or one of those other aforementioned friends — into the Duxiana store on East Fifty-eighth Street (conveniently adjacent to Bloomingdale’s), where I pulled off my shoes and hopped from bed to bed and read and reread the brochures and harassed Pamela, the manager, with every kind of question about this model versus that. I arranged the goose-down pillows. I settled in. I turned onto my side. I turned onto my other side. Wonderful. You could choose mahogany or metallic legs that would elevate the bed to a great height, or you could leave the bed low to the floor, in the manner of beds in sleek European hotels. You could tuck the sheets in this way, drape them that way. Cotton top pad? Or latex? I began to sense, during afternoons reclining at the Dux store, that all the decisions I might make from here on out could flow naturally from the purchase of the right bed. Though I already had my new (returnable) bed in my bedroom, I didn’t especially like it. I lacked sufficient desire to like the bed. It is true that the bed was large, but in every other respect I found it pedestrian and a letdown, because it was not saving my relationship with R. It was not making my apartment feel like home. It was not writing my book. Worst of all — and this was the failing that hurt the most — it was not allowing me to carry on indefinitely in my search for a bed.
How badly did I want a Dux? I wanted one in exactly the manner and proportion that was appropriate with regard to the product.
I wanted one enough to want to buy one.
It was in this way that a novelist with literary-level sales and a talent for remorse came to lay out close to seven thousand dollars for a mattress.
— Almost.
In the year preceding my mother’s death, a year that was characterized by the kind of mood oscillations that accompany the routine progress toward failure of medical therapeutic interventions in advanced cancer cases — the tidal-seeming, almost manic rising and falling, with every piece of news, every stressed-out conversation with Mom or her doctors, of hope and depression, hope and depression, hope and renewed hope and more hope, followed by distracted euphoria and a deeper despair and the weird, impulsive anger that can be directed at practically anybody at any time, the continuum of fear and volatility that is familiar in some form or another to just about anyone who has watched a parent or a child, or a husband or a wife or a lover or a friend, get a little better, then a little worse, then a little better, dying according to the program, as it were — during this year, I more or less stopped working, and I stopped exercising. I read less, went out for dinner with friends less, made love less. I am a cyclist, and for years have had a routine of riding training laps around the park near where I live. My body has been accustomed to this regimen in which a great amount of physical information is available to me, information in the form of sensations that come with deep inhalations and exhalations as I walk down the street or, while riding, stand in the pedals to climb a hill; or in the awareness I might have of a gain or a loss in my weight; or in the excitement I can feel when touching another person, or when being touched; information in the form of, I suppose, myself, proprioceptively living in space. Little by little, that information disappeared. In the dull absence of myself, I did what my mother had done throughout her life. I sat up nights in my kitchen, smoking.
People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing? I could not imagine life without my mother. And it was true as well that only without her would I feel able to live. I had had enough of Louanne Antrim and was ready for her to be gone. I wanted her dead, and I knew that, in the year of her dying, I would neglect her.
I would and I did. In this, at least, I can claim I was faithful to her — to us. I was, after all, her man. It had been my impossible and defining task to be both like and unlike all other men — more specifically, like and unlike her father and her errant, excommunicated ex-husband, my father. What does this mean? I’m not sure I can clearly say. I was, I suppose, never to leave her for another woman. I was never to lie to or deceive her. When I first began to write and publish novels, it was understood by my mother, and hence unwittingly by me, that I was exhibiting, in whatever could be called my artistic accomplishments, her creative agency, her gifts.
“I’ll come down soon and stay a few days, Mom.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I want to come.”
“I’m not expecting you.”
“I’ll come.”
“Don’t if you don’t want to.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t wait too long. I’m going to die soon.”
“How do you know?”
“Dr. McCarrick is trying to kill me.”
“Excuse me?”
“He won’t take my calls.”
“He’s a doctor.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It’s a joke. Sort of. He’s busy. Doctors are busy. Never mind.”
“Everyone is against me. You’re against me.”
“Mom, he’s not trying to kill you. No one is trying to kill you. No one wants to kill you.”
I put off the visit. I put it off. A dog in the apartment next to mine started barking, and for a while I lost my mind. Then the dog stopped barking and a year had passed and my sister and I were boarding flights from opposite ends of the country to stand beside my mother’s bed in the little house near the bottom of the hill that pitched down to the parking lot beside the town lake. It was our practice, my sister’s and mine, to fly into Charlotte, rendezvous at the airport car-rental desk, get the car, stop off at Bridges, in Shelby, North Carolina, for barbecue, then head west over the mountains, past Chimney Rock, up around Old Fort, and down into Black Mountain. The drive took three hours. We could have flown to Asheville, thirty minutes from our mother’s house, but Terry and I traveled this roundabout way, I think, in order to give ourselves time to prepare for the ordeal of being — for one last time, in this case — Louanne’s children in Louanne’s house. That day, we managed to be in a hurry and to drive slowly at the same time. Terry talked about her children and about a neighbor who, like our mother, had refused nutrition in the final stages of a terminal illness. It was late on a late-summer afternoon. The farms and weathered churches alongside the two-lane highway had never seemed to me so lonely or so lovely, so beckoning, as they did that afternoon. This was our grandfather’s country; and it was his father’s, and his father’s father’s; and it was our mother’s and, for that brief time — looking out the car windows at the sights along the way, at touristy Lake Lure and the rocky stream descending the grade in low waterfalls beside the road; at the forlorn houses surrounded by irregularly shaped fields planted with corn and beans; at the kudzu that devours more and more of the South, forest and field, every year — it was ours, too. I remember thinking that, after she died, there would be no one left to bind me to this part of the world, and I wondered what might lead me, in the future, ever to return.