“Listen, Monty, I’m going to leave.”
“Wait, wait. Let me just give you this.” And then it was that I reached into my pocket, my breast pocket, because I was wearing an old thrift store jacket, because I wanted to look reasonably elegant on such a day, and in the pocket of my old thrift store jacket, in a wax paper envelope, was, as you would have guessed, a McClintock original issue baseball card. Signed. As I have said, I had more than one. I managed to acquire a great wealth of them, and with these I financed a number of things in life, the down payment on our house, my wife’s surgery, some of my publications. I was down to four of the cards, before this day. This made it three.
You wouldn’t have believed the look etched on Tyrone’s face! He had expected no such thing. He had confronted the fact that he lost the contest fair and square. And giving him the card, of course, contradicted my very belief system! There were principles in the fetishistic world of collectibles. Things were worth what they were worth, and you needed to abide by prices and values. It was not wise to go allowing emotion to rule my business transactions. Normally, I adhered to these rules.
“My God,” Tyrone whispered, gazing on the card. “I’ve never actually seen one. He really was a handsome guy. And you really can’t see the arm at all.”
“I don’t approve of them covering up the arm. I think people should see the arm.”
With a mute satisfaction, we both gazed at the picture of McClintock.
Tyrone said, “Are you sure? This is really generous of you. And unexpected. I’m tempted to refuse, you know, but then something in me just doesn’t want to refuse.” He smiled. Not an easy smile. Not an uncomplicated smile. “And now I really do have to go get on the plane.”
I said, “I know you do.”
There was some settling up, and this was methodical. Two men who were not without respect for each other but who were otherwise not close. The time of their acquaintance was over. Tyrone muttered something conciliatory as he figured a tip, but by then I was distracted myself. I stood. I shook his hand; he heaved his overnight bag up onto his shoulder, and he turned and made for the door.
Try and raise
The county coroner
And then call my wife—
I’m liable
To be up all night.
It is true, readers of my afterword, that I had not told Tyrone that I’d just lost my wife, Tara Schott Crandall. Not one week before. You may wonder why I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell him about my loss, though I had meant to find a time to do so. But then it became impossible to remedy my silence. Now I will tell you, instead, because it’s important to tell someone about it. Had she not passed away, it is possible that I would never have completed the chess game with Tyrone. Nor would I have attempted to write the novelization of The Four Fingers of Death, nor would I have felt as I feel now in this mitigated night of my middle age.
It is true that there is a consciousness of things, and then there is the unconsciousness of things, and generally we recognize that these are the two ways of living in the world. We think of consciousness as the essential prerequisite of daily life, enabling us to do what needs to be done, to negotiate the paperwork, to heat the hot water, to recycle the recyclables, to julienne the vegetables, but in fact we spend much less time conscious than we think we do, and this I know now from the weeks in which Tara’s new lungs began to succumb to their fungal infection, and she began to get sicker and sicker. What I mean is that my attempts to stay awake and alert throughout her illness were marred by my own eruptions of unconsciousness. I tried to stay awake through nights, so that I could watch her as she slept, as she kicked off the sheets and blankets again, so that I could say to her such sentimental things as she wouldn’t tolerate when awake; for example, I reiterated that I had mostly floundered in life, didn’t consider myself very good at life, until I’d met her, when she came to sit in on my writing class, and though — I said to her — I didn’t immediately apprehend, back when she audited, that she was going to be the reinforced shipping container of my future, containing every good thing that would happen for the next years, I did recognize the fluttering in my heart, as I ought to have, because I am just smart enough to be able to identify the advent of affection, I told Tara. I had come to know, I told her, that I was a man of some delusion and some inability to assess dew points and leading economic indicators of the heart, but, I told her, I did better in this case because of her, and it was perhaps true, as I held her hand in mine, and she stirred briefly, that she didn’t really want the responsibility of making me a better man, I was one, and this was not to be construed as requiring obligation on her part, unless she counted the obligation of accepting my gratitude. I should have known when she came into the class that something was bound to change in me, a selfish and preoccupied guy who taught the class mainly for the cold, hard green, though the money wasn’t great, and the students worse, and I was about to finish this thought when I found that, indeed, the distractions of exhaustion could overtake even myself. There was only so long I could sit up with her, so many days and nights.
At the beginning of the end there were moments when she was wide awake, and miserable, tired of antibiotics pumped into her through one of many stents, tired of being a body connected to technologies, and she complained mightily and she reminded me that I needed to lose weight or no one was going to take an interest in me after she was gone, and, she said again, I shouldn’t look at her with those mooning eyes, and I replied, “If you think I am hanging around here thinking about what’s going to happen after you are gone, you certainly don’t know me very well. My kind of steadfastness, let me remind you, Tara, is the kind that doesn’t waver, the kind that is true, even when it is wrong to be so steadfast, or even if I am harmed in the process. Even if steadfastness is unfashionable, or not borne out by the facts, I will be steadfast. I believe that you are going to get better, and if you want me to lose weight because you want me to look better for you, then I will lose weight to look better for you, but not for whoever comes after you are gone, if anyone comes at all, which I doubt.”
Tara was weeping, I remember, after I spoke, and she apologized, even though she said that I wasn’t taking seriously what the doctors were already telling her, and the oxygen tank wheezed, and Tara wheezed, inhaling from the oxygen tank, and she coughed up something that must have had some blood in it, because of the awful color, and I wiped some of this away.
Accordingly, Tara came to inhabit a space that was between the bright, airy consciousness that is central to human life, and the dark, opiated abstraction that is close to death, in which Tara was known only to Tara through the mechanism of nightmare. I no longer appeared to have complete conversations and interactions with her — there were just excisions from time and life, after which she vanished intermittently. What happened in her middle place? What did Tara think of then?