Then I showed her the missing barn floor and the squashed-flat canoe, which was still out on the grass. She surprised me by starting to cry.
“It moved so smoothly over the water,” she said.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said, holding her. “I’m sorry the barn failed. I’m sorry about the canoe. I’m sorry things turned out this way. Come inside, let’s not look at this anymore. I’ve got a bottle of blackstrap molasses for you.”
She looked up at me. Then she gave me the shock. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t about Harris the doctor.
• • •
“I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” she said. “It technically doesn’t affect you, but it does.”
“What?” I steeled myself. If she was going to say she was engaged, I simply wasn’t going to accept it.
She said, “I think I’m going to have a hysterectomy.”
My mouth opened and closed. “You mean they’re going to—” I didn’t finish.
“Remove it,” she said. “Not my ovaries, just the, ah, uterus. Just the center of it all.”
I stared at her, horrified.
“I told you it’s not cancer, it’s really not,” Roz said. “Sweetie, don’t look at me that way. It’s not malignant, and I’m not going to die. I have uterine growths called fibroids. Lots of women have them and they’re usually not a problem. But I’ve got, it turns out, a whole bunch of them, in a knot — like a baobob tree. You know that big tree in Avatar? That’s what it feels like I’ve got in me.”
“How absolutely awful.” I clutched her arm. “And there’s no other way?”
“We’ve tried several things, they were a waste of time. The gynecologist has been telling me I should have the hysterectomy right away, but I’ve resisted it. She says I’ll feel ten times better if we go ahead — the bloodletting will stop, the pain will stop, the anemia will go away. The fibroid is giving me the horrible periods, because it’s so big and gnarly. It means well, but it’s killing me.”
“You poor dear thing.”
“My last hope was that I’d hit menopause and it would disappear on its own. But no luck. It loves estrogen. It just keeps on growing. And it aches.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. I put my arms around her. “Have you told Harris?”
“Harris is a minimalist and he’s been telling me I should wait and exhaust every alternative — he’s been a bit rigid on the subject, actually. But now even he’s saying I should do it. I probably should have had it done a year ago.”
“Come on inside,” I said. “Let me make some tea.”
We walked into the house. “I know I’m really too old to have a baby,” she said, “but to lose your own womb — the place where little babies grow—” She held back her grief. “It’s just so final. Sorry.”
“Sh, sh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. As I stroked her arm I was seized by a paroxysm of remorse. This was my fault. I put some water on the stove, thinking furiously. “Can I feel it?” I said.
“No, Paul. Please. It’s private.”
“I know, forget it, I’m sorry. It’s just that we should have had a kid. We’d be together now if we’d had a kid, and you wouldn’t have this horrible feeling of finality. I’m so sorry.”
Roz said, “I’d probably still be facing this whether or not we’d had a child. You didn’t want to have a child when I wanted to and so we didn’t. That’s just what happened.”
I put a tea bag in a mug. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, probably nothing. I just have to face up to it, and I thought you should know.” She smiled at me through tears. “You could hold me.”
I held her and stroked her back. I felt the wrinkles in her shirt and the slight thickness of her bra clasp.
“And I’ll take that bottle of molasses,” she said.
Twenty-three
OH, ME. That good, good woman. I spent all morning reading the message boards in hysterectomy support groups. A lot of women said that having a hysterectomy was the best decision they’d ever made. Others were unhappy because they’d wanted to have a second child, or a third child. Or just a child.
Once on a hot night when Roz and I were watching a documentary called Dark Days, I got the big square fan and plugged it in and said we could cool our loins with it. Then I asked her whether women had loins, as men did. Was it a gender-neutral term? She said, “I think so, technically. It’s anything in the upper thigh area and anything that is carried or tucked away between the thighs.” Then she said, “When I was little I always misread ‘loin cloth’ as ‘lion cloth.’ I thought Hercules killed the lion and then wore the fur over his privates. The dyslexic mistake is part of the meaning.”
“He girded his lion,” I said. I turned on the fan. The documentary was about people living in shacks in an underground rail tunnel in New York City. It was a very good movie, but it made Roz sad. Here is a world with so much disparity and so much striving and suffering, she thought, and what am I doing with my life? I think that movie was part of what got her to apply for the producer job at the radio show.
• • •
I WORKED for several hours today on a new song called “Honk for Assistance.” I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now, that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slight percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhythms made with the Funk Boogie Kit. And then I wondered idly whether somebody had already made a song out of “Honk for Assistance.” Yes, they had. The composer’s name was Tom Clark and it was on an EP called Nervous. It’s pretty good. No words. Foolish me: You must never look anything up on iTunes while you’re working on a song. Otherwise you’ll stop and you’ll say it’s all been done.
I need money. Money always helps. I called Gene and told him that my book of poems, formerly called Misery Hat, was turning out to be something different. It was now a book about music.
“Ah, okay.”
“It seems to be about trying to write dance songs. Also protest songs and love songs. Pop songs in general.”
“Maybe we could do an enhanced ebook and include the songs.”
That depended, I said, on whether the songs were any good or not.
“Whether they’re good doesn’t matter,” Gene said. “Process not product, as they say about schoolchildren. Just give it the Chowder spin. And stay away from the misery hat.”
When that check comes from Allstate I’m going to buy Roz a new canoe. That’s the least I can do.
• • •
WHEN DEBUSSY WAS YOUNG he wanted to write music for women to sing. He wrote love songs and he wrote erotic songs. He set some of Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis to music, Louÿs who late in life wrote a poem called “The Trophy of Legendary Vulvas”—what a title! When I was young and wanted to be a composer like Debussy, I paid no attention to any of his songs. I couldn’t listen to them. I listened only to his piano and orchestral music. The only vocals of his that I could stand were the wordless vowels that the sirens sing in the Nocturnes, and even those I wasn’t sure about. I still can’t listen to his songs with any pleasure. The words seem pushed and pulled and crowded by the music. But that’s my loss.
Everything for Debussy was really about sex and smoking. Sex, smoking, the grand piano, and the English Channel. Those were his mainstays. He fell in love with his singers all through his life. One of his earliest songs repeats the line “The sea is deep” several times — it’s dedicated to Madame Vasnier, a singer. He may or may not have had an affair with Mary Garden, the woman who sang in his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. In her memoir, Mary Garden says nothing happened between them, but she’s not convincing. Debussy liked Scottish women with gentle voices who hung around wells, and he liked women who had flaxen hair — he wrote a lovely piano prelude called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” which was inspired by his first wife, Lilly, who wounded herself with a handgun after Debussy took up with the brown-haired woman who became his second wife. He liked brown-haired women, too. He just plain liked women. Women and moonlight and vers libre and smoking strong French cigarettes. And then he died broke and miserable. His new wife’s father had disinherited her.