Permanence Page 2

  The cigarette is tight between my pressed lips. Doctor emerges with fire from his Zippo lighter. He does this, I imagine, without thinking.

  Listen: Doctor is not the type of doctor who will tell you to quit smoking. Doctor is a doctor who smokes cigarettes. His one-room office smells of stale tobacco and cologne. These are the mild aromas I will forever associate with doctor.

  I take a long drag of the cigarette and exhale through my nose. I breathe the smoke and feel the familiar nicotine rush. For a moment I am a million miles away from doctor, a million miles above the solid earth.

  I close my eyes and drift away.

  I open my eyes and I am back.

  I look at the top of doctor’s desk and see the soaking, ink-stained now nameless papers. The papers will never recover from the affects of water. Doctor will never recover. His notes are destroyed. These are six months’ worth of conversation and observation. Doctor and I will have to start over again.

  And what about doctor’s mahogany desk?

  There will always be dark, gray water spots on the wood. I am convinced of this: the water stain will be forever. I know the power of water because baby and I know about the things water can do.

  Touch

  We touch.

  We touch the way I have come to expect touching and being touched. Doctor runs his hands through my straight, dark hair. He runs his hands slowly down the length of my back when we lie together on our sides, facing one another on the cool leather of the patient’s couch. I feel the sharpness of his fingernails, smell the acrid aroma of his breath. This is nearly an hour after I should have left doctor’s office and after we have wiped away the water that spilled onto his desk and destroyed my file.

  But I know this: the water persists.

  We could not eliminate the dark gray water stains that appeared on doctor’s desk. Doctor does not blame me for the damage. But I know this: part of doctor’s job is to separate me from my guilt. The destruction of my guilt is what I expect to receive from doctor. The destruction of my guilt is why I need to be with doctor.

  My stomach constricts, twists itself in knots.

  We could not save the now nameless papers that belonged to my file. But I am still me.

  “The files,” says doctor, “can be replaced.”

  Perhaps doctor can reshape my past. He can fill out new papers. He can transcribe his notes from memory. But can he erase the memory of baby? Can he eliminate the memory of my husband, Jamie? Can he write a new life for me? A new past? A new life is all I want, safe from the memory of baby and Jamie.

  The past is permanent.

  I am holding doctor to my body, tightly. I do this with passion. Doctor’s familiar gray suit and underwear are neatly folded and resting against a black captain’s chair with the name of doctor’s college printed upon the backrest in gold lettering. PROVIDENCE COLLEGE is barely discernible against the black background, the letters nearly worn away with age and use. My miniskirt is pulled up over my hips. My underwear is tangled around my ankles. My bra is pulled up over my breasts, loose around my neck.

  This is the way doctor likes it when we touch. I know this is the way doctor wants it to happen. He is my saving grace. I trust doctor. I have no choice but to believe in him. I need him.

  The cool air in doctor’s office surrounds my bare breasts. My nipples rise and stiffen, become tender. The cold is neither a good nor a bad feeling. It is feeling, pure and simple. It is awareness and sensation.

  “Listen to the rain,” insists doctor, from where he is kneeling on the floor, his hands poised against the leather patient’s couch, his face hidden entirely between my thighs.

  “Isn’t the rain romantic?” he asks, raising his face so that I might see it and so that he might see me. I know this: he wants me to feel good. And I do.

  “Concentrate,” he says. His voice is not like doctor’s normal voice at all.

  This is a voice I can feel inside of me, with the motion of doctor’s mouth and tongue.

  I feel that I cannot possibly spread my legs any farther. I can feel the slow, patient motion of doctor’s mouth—the fluttering, moist, lapping motion of his tongue.

  I concentrate while I tightly grip two small throw pillows, one in each hand, my fingernails digging into the fabric. I try to forget that doctor is the person performing this operation. I close my eyes, lay my head back against the couch, arch my back, and release a breath.

  I think about Jamie.

  I see Jamie’s face in imagination.

  I want to remember it—the thick lips, the short brow, the thick black hair cut well above the ears, the day-old beard. And then it happens between my legs, below my belly, into my thighs. I close my legs but my legs will not close completely with doctor’s head between them. I feel my body tremble—convulse—until the intensity stops. I try to push doctor away. I can’t take the feeling anymore. But he only moves his face farther into me. I breathe exaggerated breaths.

  I open my eyes and stare up at the hospital-white ceiling.

  “I am listening to the rain,” I tell doctor. But this is a lie. What I do not tell doctor is that I listen to nothing. Though I hear him, I do not listen to doctor speak. Though I feel him, I pretend that what I feel does not come from doctor. I close my eyes so that I do not have to see him. Not like this.

  We do not talk about love.

  We talk about healing.

  What I want is for doctor to touch me the way I remember being touched by Jamie. I want doctor to touch me the way Jamie used to touch me before baby was born; the way Jamie would sometimes touch me after baby was born; the way Jamie refused to touch me once we lost baby.

  I am dead tired.

  Doctor rises to his knees and brings his moist, bearded face to mine. I feel the sharp stubble of his beard, smell my smell against his lips and face.

  I do not forget about my baby.

  Here’s what I do: I release the pillows and raise myself up on the couch. I have no choice but to do this. I kiss doctor hard, his teeth smacking against my teeth. I use both hands to bring his body closer to mine. Our teeth chatter. I slide out from beneath doctor, roll over onto my knees. Doctor lies back onto the couch. Using my knees, I position myself on top of doctor, his torso between my legs. I reach for doctor and guide him into me.

  I close my eyes.

  I want to forget about Jamie, but I can’t help but see him. I see his face as clearly as the morning he left me so many months ago. I hear Jamie’s mild, soothing voice. I feel his smooth hands against the back of my neck and his solid, compact body against my own. Jamie was older than me, but only by a few years. Jamie was an engineer and a designer of dams and bridges. He used to say he performed God’s work, not because he could make a child with me, but because he had the ability to reshape the earth. We used to laugh when Jamie said that, but there was truth to it and he believed it, I’m sure. “God and mechanics,” Jamie used to say. “Mechanics and God.” He was my husband before we lost baby.

  I listen for the sound of rain, but the rain is not romantic.

  I open my eyes. I keep them wide open. But doctor keeps his eyes closed while we begin the familiar hip motions. This is motion and emotion. We move together. I feel doctor inside of me and I swallow my breath. I do this to forget about baby. But trying to forget about baby makes me think of him all the more.

  Outside, the rain falls to the pavement.

  As I take doctor into my arms and bury my face into his neck, I am remembering baby and Jamie in a way that breaks my heart.

  God, fate, and Jamie

  Jamie was a logical man. He understood machinery—auto engines, turbines, and computers.

  “Mechanics is control. Control is mechanics,” Jamie used to say like a small prayer. And he believed.

  Jamie trusted mechanics and engineering like a religion. As though God and mechanics were the same (“God and mechanics,” Jamie used to say. “Mechanics and God.”)

  Listen: I don’t trust machines or me
chanics of any kind. I don’t like anything that takes control—anything that does not live or breathe. I ride over a bridge, I picture its collapse. I see a dam, I imagine the water breaking through. I see a jet plane taking off, I imagine disaster.

  All this is not ignorance. I am a college-educated, self-sufficient woman. A woman who, before the death of baby, had a terrific career as a travel agent. My job was to help others seek adventure and to see the world. My job was to make sure other people got far away from it all. But the escape to “Sunny Florida” or to “Beautiful Paris” or to “Rugged Africa” was for other people. Not me.

  Once baby was born, I never went anywhere.

  Despite my education and my career, I have some problems. I have these fears. For instance, I am frightened of riding in elevators. I am scared to death of being lifted into midair inside a small box. I’m scared to death of hanging by a relative thread. So tonight, like any other night, I climb the concrete and plaster stairwell that leads to my apartment, step by step. This is after my twenty-fourth Friday afternoon session with doctor. I climb the staircase slowly, patiently. I cling to the metal railing. I place each step carefully against the treads.

  I am in control.

  I listen to my footsteps echoing inside the stairwell. There is a sour fish smell that comes from the rainwater that has soaked into my wool coat. I climb by sight, by touch, and by sound. I live and breathe.

  This is a harshly lit staircase. The staircase has been freshly painted since baby died—white-washed of the dark, gray stains that seeped through the floor of the bathroom to the plaster ceiling of the stairwell beside it. This is the water that ran and stained in streaks against the plaster walls the night we pulled baby from the tub. This is no longer a familiar staircase. But this is the same staircase Jamie and I climbed once upon a time, before baby left us.

  Once upon a time, Jamie would have asked me this question: “Do we have to take the stairs, Mary? We have a perfectly good elevator.”

  I would continue climbing as if Jamie hadn’t said a word. I knew he considered my fear of elevators a silly fear. My fears, he insisted, made little sense for the wife of an engineer and for a person with a career as a travel agent.

  “But I’m not expected to go anywhere,” I would tell Jamie, laughing. “The beauty of my career is that I can send people away while I stay at home, safe and sound, on the solid ground.”

  “Sometimes you have to trust in fate,” Jamie would tell me, lifting his eyes to an imaginary sky. “I mean, if you can’t trust the control of man-made mechanics, at least trust in destiny. You have to open up, allow destiny to take control. I mean, the probabilities of an airplane losing an engine or an elevator cable failing are millions to one. The people who die because of these accidents are not dying at the hands of bad mechanics. They’re dying at the hands of fate. I mean, the person who enters that one-in-a-million jet plane or that one-in-a-million elevator never to see the light of day again is a person whose fate has been sealed in bad luck.”

  How’s this for luck?

  Now I determine my fate. Not Providence, not technology. Only me, because I am alone. But alone is not the way I planned my life.

  Boxes

  My apartment is as dark as deep night.

  I feel for the light switch against the wall with my fingertips. I find the plastic switch and flip it up. The apartment becomes bright with light. I see the movement of the curtain that covers the open window.

  I go to the window. I see the rain falling steadily against the trees, the orange light from the parking lot lamps reflecting off the leaves. I close the window and stand in the quiet of the night.

  I step away from the window.

  I stumble over the box, but manage to regain my balance by extending my hand to the dining room table. I do not fall. I look down at my feet and at the box. This box is not a small box. Maybe two feet high by two feet wide. The box has been closed with duct tape. The box is marked JAMIE in bold, black Magic Marker letters.

  There are four boxes scattered about this apartment. Each one just like the other. The boxes have been here since Jamie left me over six months ago. The boxes contain the last of Jamie’s things—engineering books, blueprints, sketches, and drafting tools. The boxes also hold the rest of Jamie’s socks and underwear. One box holds his shoes and another houses his cassette tapes and CDs—Steely Dan, Beatles, XTC, Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” and others.

  I make the best of having the boxes around. I have been using them as impromptu tables until a time when Jamie comes home again to get them. I set newspapers, ashtrays, dirty dishes, soiled laundry, and even used wine glasses on them. The boxes are an eyesore. They don’t belong among the furniture. But they have become a part of my life now. My routine. The boxes are a part of what is left of my ex-husband, Jamie.

  I remove my coat. It is soaking. I wrap it around my arm and carry it into the bathroom. I toss the coat over the curtain rod above the bathtub and allow gravity to take over.

  Eventually, the rain falls away from the coat and into the bathtub basin. I stand there in the bathroom, watching the little droplets of water fall out of the coat and into the bathtub, drop by single drop.

  There is the drip, drip, drip.

  The water falls droplet by droplet, collecting in the basin. The water forms a tiny stream that runs downhill to the drain. The water disappears inside the drain. But the water that falls away from my coat also misses the basin altogether. The water falls to the ceramic tile floor and collects inside the spaces between the tiles.

  I do nothing about the rainwater.

  I see the rips in this shower curtain that I have not replaced since the night baby died. I see where the plastic fabric tore away from the thin metal rings that are supported by a long metal rod that extends from one end of the bathtub to the other. The curtain was pulled away when baby was pulled away from the tub.

  I have no plans for replacing the curtain.

  I walk away from the bathtub, out of the bathroom. I walk into the dining room only a few steps away from the bathroom. I sit on one of the four boxes marked JAMIE in big, black Magic Marker letters. From there I can listen to the steady drip of the rain that seeps out of my coat and into bathtub basin and onto the floor. The steady drip, drip, drip combines with the rhythm of my pulse. The noises are strangely alive.

  Seeing me would not be difficult

  Now, I rarely leave this place.

  I leave for my weekly, one-hour visit with doctor. I leave for food. I no longer leave this place on Sundays to see God. I do not leave for work at the travel agency anymore. I do not have the heart to book “Open Adventure Cruises” or “Relaxing Beachside Getaways.” After I lost baby I could only handle the inland vacations, far away from water. I preferred hotels without pools or bathrooms spas. I preferred booking trips that no one preferred: Arizona desert hikes or long drives through Nebraska, where it’s safe. The travel agency has given me some indefinite leave time to “sort things out.”

  In other words, I’ve been fired.

  Life insurance

  Now I do not work.

  Now I live on life insurance.

  But the life I live on is no longer with me.

  The dream that occupies my sleep

  The time is seven thirty-five on this Friday evening. I have been home now for twenty-five minutes after having left doctor’s office at six-fifty, far later then I should have. I am dead tired.

  My limbs seem to struggle with the weight of my body. I feel as though I am walking in a slab of mud a foot thick. I lie down on the couch in the living area of my apartment with the now empty bookshelves and the fireplace with the black, cold embers and soot. There are several store-bought, fake logs stored in a wooden crate intended to hold real wood for the fireplace. The fake logs will be left unused. I still store the matches in a mason jar on the window sill above the kitchen sink where Jamie and I kept them so that baby could not get to them once he became a toddler. I keep the matc
hes there out of habit. I turn off every light.

  I lie down on the couch in the darkness of my apartment. I am fully clothed. There is the drip, drip, drip of the rain falling away from my coat and into the tub basin. I can hear the sound from the living room. Like a metronome, the water has a steady rhythm to it. The rhythm puts me to sleep.

  Now mother comes to me only in my dreams. This is the familiar dream, the dream that has occupied my sleep since baby and Jamie left me. In my dream I can smell the smoke. I can see my mother. She is standing over me. Her face appears through the smoke and the haze, like a ghost. She says nothing. She only slides her arms beneath me, inside the covers of my bed. I see myself as the child I once was through the eyes of the adult I have become. I begin to cough. I choke on the smoke. I feel the smoke in my throat. My head rushes from the burning paint, wallpaper, and carpet. Mother cradles me like a baby. She pulls me away from my bed with both arms. I am not a baby. I am ten years old. I try to speak. “Where are you taking us?” Mother does not answer me. She will not speak. There is the rustling sound of her nightgown, the familiar aroma of the fabric that smells more like mother than her own skin. I feel her hair with my fingertips behind her neck. Her hair is loose and tangled. Mother has been sleeping. In the second-floor hallway of my childhood home, the smoke rises from the first floor, through the stairwell. Mother holds me in the hallway, cradles me like a baby. We have nowhere to go in this, the home my father burned.

  I wake up from the dream the way I always do: with the sight and smell of my mother as if she were by my side. My mother is nearly twenty years dead, as is my father. I do my best to forget. I convince myself that the dream is not real. I say it out loud: “The dream is not real.”

  I know this: the dream will be repeated in my sleep. But I must sleep in order to live. When I sleep I dream.