And what will you do now? How will you live?
SON: As birds do, mother.
L. MACD.: What, with worms and flies?
SON: With what I get, I mean; and so do they.
L. MACD.: Poor bird! thou’dst never fear the net nor lime,
The pitfall nor the gin.
SON: Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for.
My father is not dead, for all your saying.
L. MACD.: Yes, he is dead. How wilt thou do for a father?
SON: Nay, how will you do for a husband?
And:
SON: Was my father a traitor, mother?
L. MACD.: Ay, that he was.
SON: What is a traitor?
L. MACD.: Why, one that swears and lies.
SON: And be all traitors that do so?
L. MACD.: Every one that does so is a traitor, and must be hang’d.
It is but a moment before the killers enter. The stage directions call for Young Macduff to be murdered first, crying out, “He has kill’d me, mother: Run away, I pray you!” and for her to flee into the wings, crying “Murther!” In our production, both deaths occurred onstage. First I went down, stabbed in the back and in the stomach. My pretend mother ran to my side and knelt beside me. Then she was killed. She fell across me and lay dead (though breathing heavily). It was in this way that I came to fall in love with Lady Macduff. I mean that I fell in love with Janice, the college girl playing Lady Macduff. The lights dimmed to end the scene. Each night, I watched from beneath my mother who was not my mother, as the lights’ filaments faded; and, when the stage fell dark, I whispered in Janice’s ear, which was practically in my mouth, “Okay, get up,” because the smell of her, and her hair falling across my face, and her ear in my mouth, and the pressure and heat of her body pressing down on mine became too intense to bear.
It seems to me that some of the archetypes for my adult life were introduced during the period of the play: the man who appears and withdraws, appears and withdraws; the woman who is both my mother and a girl on whom I have a crush; and the real mother, who dies for want of the love and protection of a man, her husband. These are rudimentary formulations; nevertheless, they point to a fact of large consequence, the fact of my precarious victory over my father and my attainment of my mother. Like Young Macduff in the moments before death, I became my mother’s confidant. In doing so, I became her true husband, the man both like and unlike other men. And, in becoming these things, I became sick.
My main ailment was a debilitating asthma that required trips to hospitals and doctors’ offices. I swallowed drugs that kept me awake nights, struggling to breathe mist from an atomizer that hummed away on the table next to my bed, while my mother sat at my side. She had a way of sitting beside me on the bed — at a certain angle, leaning over, maybe touching my forehead or holding my hand, perched the way mothers everywhere perch on beds beside sick children — that I will never forget. This was our intimacy. In later years, after she and my father had remarried, and her alcoholic deterioration had begun in earnest, the image of her in the Tallahassee days, serving tea in china cups, or sitting up nights with me on the edge of my bed in the little house on Eighth Street, would be supplanted by the more violent image of the increasingly damaged Lady Macbeth she was to become. When we say about something or someone that we are dying for that thing, that person, we may miss the more literal meaning hidden in the metaphor. I was a boy dying for his mother, angrily, stubbornly doing her work of dying, the work she had begun before I was born. In this version of the story of my illness — the story of our collusion in illness — I was not merely bringing my mother to my bedside, not simply bringing her close. Rather, I was marrying myself to her, learning to speak the language of her unconscious, which, as time would bear out, was a language of suffocation and death. In sickness, we were joined: she was I and I was she.
I bought the Dux. Of course I bought top of the line. If you’re going to buy a brand-new rest of your life, why go halfway? The guys who brought it in and set it up were not only deliverymen; they were true believers, real aficionados. One of the men was large, the other less large. The large man did the talking.
“This is the bed I sleep on.”
“Really?”
“Best bed I ever slept on. I’ve slept on every kind of bed. Take a look at me. I’m a big guy. Most beds, I’d get two, three years and the things wear out. Not this bed.”
“Really?”
“I’m telling you. I sleep on this bed. My mother sleeps on this bed. My sister has one of these beds. My mother’s sister sleeps on this bed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sleep like a baby.”
Like a baby? What if I wanted to sleep like a man? It didn’t much matter either way, because I wasn’t going to get any sleep at all. Not that night. Not the following night. Not the night after that.
“Hey, come over. I got the bed.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. It’s here.”
“I can’t believe you got the bed.”
“I got the bed. It’s here.”
“Have you gotten on it?”
“Kind of.”
“Have you put the sheets on it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is my pillow on it?”
“Of course.”
“Is it as tall as the other bed?”
“Just about.”
“You got the bed!”
“I got the bed!”
Talk about up all night — however, not for reasons one would anticipate or wish. It was a bad night on many counts. In the first place, the bed felt too soft. In the second place, it was too springy In the third place, it seemed too transmissive of vibrations caused by movement. In the fourth place, it was too final. It represented the end of the quest for itself. And now, here it was. The bed was mine. It would be the place not of love and rest but of deprivation and loneliness. All during that first night, I lay awake and felt the bed. I felt myself sinking into it. I felt, sinking into the bed, the absence of familiar pressures against my shoulders and hips; and, without those familiar pressures, I felt adrift. If R. moved even an inch, I felt that. If she turned over, the effect was catastrophic. In the morning I was wrung out, and so was R.
What followed over the next few days was a workshop in hysteria. I called the store. I phoned other stores, in other states. I wanted to know from the Dux community what I could do to join in, to make myself on my bed feel the way they said they felt on theirs. Pamela, the manager of the store on East Fifty-eighth Street, lost patience eventually and told me that she would take the bed back — immediately! Against company policy! She’d make an exception in my case! Though not for a full refund! Did I want the bed? Did I want the bed or not? Alone at night, I sank into the bed and tried to want it. And the farther I sank into it the closer I came to knowing what the bed was. It was the last bed I would ever buy. It was the bed that would deliver me into my fate. It was the bed that would marry me again to my mother, the bed Louanne and I would share. When I moved, the bed moved, talking back to me through the echoing of coiled springs, telling me that there would be no rest for me. The bed was alive. It was alive with my mother. I sank into the bed, and it was as if I were sinking down into her arms. She was not beside me on the bed, she was inside the bed, and I was inside the bed; and she was pulling me down into the bed to die with her. It was my deathbed. It was a coffin. It was a sarcophagus. I didn’t want to die. Did I? If only I could get the bed to stay still. Why wouldn’t the bed leave me alone? Why wouldn’t the bed be my bed?
In the daytime I worked the phones. A woman in a southern state referred me to a man in the same southern state who had sold these beds for twenty years. This man knew everything about the beds.