“Hm,” I said, “shall we skip ahead?”
“Maybe.”
We skipped through several songs. “Slippery People” was a bit of a disappointment — more of the musicians were on the stage, including two backup singers who helped a lot, but it didn’t sound as good as the recorded version, with Tina Weymouth playing her clean thumpity-funk bass. There wasn’t much humanity in what David Byrne was doing. It was all too arty, too knowingly ironic. Maybe at a different time I would have liked it, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of thing to watch if you were with a person who was having a hysterectomy the next morning.
“I really don’t know what to say,” I said. “Let me see if I can find ‘Take Me to the River.’”
“Okay.”
I skipped to the end, where they all did an extended version of “Take Me to the River.” It was good. They were sweating now, and the beat was phenomenal, and a percussionist named Steve Scales was malleting away on an array of gourds, and the audience helped them with the chorus. I looked over at Roz, who was rocking, to my immense relief. The Talking Heads had come alive, and it was pure river-bathing genius. Even David Byrne was smiling, finally.
When it was over the audience went wild and the Talking Heads did an encore, which we fast-forwarded through. The stage crew, in black, filed across the stage, and he thanked them. The credits came on. Fifteen minutes had elapsed for Roz and me.
“Well, well, well,” said Roz. “All you need is one great song.”
“It’s true,” I said.
We were a little at a loss. “This was fun,” said Roz.
I flung a piece of popcorn to Smack, who caught it in his mouth. “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “Shit. I wanted to make you feel better. I don’t want to be a person who plays ‘Psycho Killer’ to his lifelong friend before her operation.”
“That’s okay.”
“What kind of movie would you really like to see right now? What’s your very favorite movie these days?”
Roz said that honestly her favorite film of all time was The Philadelphia Story. “But I know you have a prejudice against black-and-white movies.”
“No, I’m different now. I’m broadening my horizons. I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s a marvelous comedy. Katharine Hepburn is tremendous.”
“If it’s your favorite movie, then we should watch it right now.”
• • •
AND THAT’S what we did. We watched The Philadelphia Story. Roz found it on Netflix. We were transfixed. We laughed and we cried. It was two hours of total delight. Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant were all brilliant, and so was the younger sister in her ballet slippers. Halfway through, Roz put her head on my shoulder like the old days.
“Now that’s a movie,” I said.
“It is,” said Roz. “Thank you for watching it with me. Phew! I feel better.”
“I’m glad. I—” I trailed off. “I don’t want to overload you with gobs of raw emotion.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I could use some raw emotion. Harris’s bedside manner has been a little lacking. He’s being chilly about all this.”
“He is, is he? Why are you dating this awful man?”
Roz thought about this for a moment. “Because I admire his courage. He says things that make his colleagues very angry at him, but I think he’s right a lot of the time. And he’s funny and smart, and attractive.”
I grunted.
“And he courted me and fussed over me, and that felt really good,” Roz said. “But he’s being strange about the surgery. I think he’s disappointed in me for needing a hysterectomy. There were so many hysterectomies done in the past, unnecessarily — it’s a real scandal — and he’s been such an opponent of that. And now here I am going under the knife.”
“But that’s life,” I said. “That’s the way life is.”
“I guess so. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Harris.”
“Okay, well — I just want to say I love you very much, whatever my legal status is, ex-boyfriend, jilted lover, picnic partner, future husband, whatever.”
“Husband, whoa, whoa. Philadelphia Story really did a job on you. But I love you, too, Pauly. I’m scared. I don’t like anesthesia. I’m really scared.”
“I know you are, but it’s going to be okay,” I said. “You’re doing what you need to do, and you’re going to be fine.” Roz looked like she was beginning to droop. I said, “Should I go back now so you can get some rest, or should I sleep on the couch?”
“Cary Grant would probably sleep on the couch,” she said. “Lucy’s picking me up at six a.m.”
“Boy, they start early at hospitals.”
Roz went off to get a pillow and a blanket. When she handed them to me, she said, shyly, “Do you still want to feel my fibroid?”
“Yes, if you want me to.”
She sat back down next to me. “I think I do. Anyway, this is your last chance. It won’t be there tomorrow.” She took my hand and placed it on her stomach.
“Hm,” I said. “I definitely feel something hard and knotted, but I think it’s your bathrobe. You know, the sash.”
“Oh, it’s lower down than that.” She undid her bathrobe. Her pajamas had narrow light blue stripes.
I touched her warm, soft, private pajamas and now I could definitely feel it. I held my hand there for a moment. “I feel it,” I said. I felt a sadness and took my hand away. “So that’s it.”
“That’s what’s causing all the trouble,” she said. “What a word, ‘fibroid.’”
“Sounds like a new kind of cellphone.”
“The Verizon Fibroid,” she said. “With an unlimited monthly data plan.”
I laughed. “I sure wish this didn’t have to happen to you.”
“But it does,” Roz said. “It’s bleeding me white. It’s got to go. Thanks for the molasses, by the way — it helped.”
“I’d like to be at the hospital tomorrow,” I said.
“No, please, it’s just too complicated. Lucy will be with me. I’ll be very out of it, anyway. We’ll talk afterward. Thank you for coming over. It was very nice of you.”
“I’m going to buy you a canoe,” I said. “I really am.” I cleared my throat. “Can I, uh, ask a rude question? What does your doctor say about marital relations afterward — is it all, you know, Tyrconnell and pussy licking and hand jobs?”
“My doctor assures me that everything will work fine afterward. In fact, she claims that sex will be better. My cervix will still be in place.”
I threw my hands up. “Ah, your cervix will be in place!”
“You wicked man.” Roz smiled at me. “Good night, sweetie.”
Smack trotted behind Roz into her bedroom and I slept on the couch. I left at five-thirty the next morning — Roz was nervous and hungry and seemed to want to avoid having to explain my presence to Lucy, which I understood. I drove home and sprinkled some cracked corn for Nan’s chickens.
Twenty-eight
I SANG MYSELF HOARSE THIS MORNING, working for two hours on the harmonies in “Marry Me.” I had that strange mental clarity you get sometimes when you haven’t had a shower and you haven’t had enough sleep. Right now it’s noon and very hot and I’m parked in a bit of shade at the edge of the hospital parking lot. Roz is probably in surgery at this moment. This is awful. The only thing I can compare this to is scenes in old movies where men are waiting to hear that their wife has had a baby. But we’re not having a baby. That’s just the way it is.
You hear a lot about the poet’s voice. Swinburne’s voice as opposed to Wallace Stevens’s voice, as opposed to Hopkins’s voice, as opposed to, say, Tony Hoagland’s voice. There’s an anthology called The Voice of the Sea, filled with sea poems. But what does it mean to say you have a voice when you’re a poet? When you have deliberately melted away your voice, and you’re left with nothing but the wire armature? All the wax, all the bones and muscle of the sound, are gone. There’s a moment in The Fly, David Cronenberg’s movie, toward the end, where the big humanoid fly squirts some acid on a man’s arm. It burns away the man’s arm down to the bone.