“How’s Big Dick?” I ask Susan, my ex-wife, as we take a seat at a small, unromantic table for two in the starkly lit hospital cafeteria. I don’t understand why people talk down hospital cafeterias so much. In the past two weeks I’ve visited here, I’ve found the staff makes a wonderful breakfast burrito, their cappuccino isn’t half bad, the salad bar’s always fresh, and I’ve developed a strange affection for their gelatin parfait that’s always topped with fresh whipped cream.
“His name’s Richard,” Susan says, “and he’s fine.”
“Richard.” I pronounce the name as if I am sampling it for the first time, although I am not, and yet again I note its utterly detestable flavor. “You mean as in Rich. Dick. Big Rich Dick.”
My former wife rolls her eyes in a way I’ve seen her do before many times, then jabs a fork into a medallion of glazed beef, lifting the meat to her mouth and chewing it. I can’t help but see an analogy between the way she’s spearing her dinner, and the way she’s impaled my heart, slipping my still beating organ between her lips and masticating over and over. It’s a metaphor, you see. I’m a writer.
“Good,” I say.
“Good what?”
“It’s good he’s fine.”
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
I shrug. Since our divorce a year ago, I’ve found it difficult to lie to Susan. Unfortunately, it was much less so while we were still married. Was it because I didn’t yet realize how easy it would be to lose her? But I did—lose her—to a loping, bespectacled jerk with a double MBA/Physics masters, Richard Masterson, a.k.a. Big Rich Dick.
“Are you chilly?” Susan asks, most likely because I’ve slipped back on my jacket, zipping it to my chin. I haven’t done so because it’s cold in here. I’ve closed my jacket over my chest because I am scared, scared of Susan, scared of the way she knows how to peel back my heart and peer right into it, a thing no other woman since has known how to, and, trust me, if we speak of women, there have been many. As Susan waits for me to answer, she digs into her dinner again, piercing yet another bit of meat with the five tines of her fork, sliding the flesh between her molars. Chewing. My heart hurts.
“So how’s Tanya, Tina, or whatever her name is?” Susan asks.
“Tita.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“She’s Peruvian.”
Again I watch as Susan rolls her eyes. She makes me feel like I’m somebody’s ne’er-do-well child— like I’m her ne’er-do-well child. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am in dire need of a good spanking. While we were still married, I tasted fame and couldn’t fight its allure – the sycophantic literary panderers, the women. Perhaps all it would have taken were a couple of good, hard swats to the side of my head, and I suddenly hate Susan for not punishing me earlier, before it was all too late.
“Denise and Margie told me about her,” Susan says, referring to our two daughters.
“Ah, yes,” I say.
“Yes?” she says.
“Yes, fine,” I answer.
“I don’t understand you,” she says.
“I don’t understand myself,” I say.
A third eye roll from Susan. Am I extra-naughty tonight?
“I mean I don’t understand what you are saying right now,” she says. “Are you seeing Tita anymore or not?”
What does she care if I’m still seeing Tita? I’m not cheating on her. Not anymore at least. Besides, she already left me—left me for Big Rich Dick and his successful tech start-up and his patents and his Porsche.
A minute passes. Neither of us speaks. I listen to the sounds Susan makes as she chews, finishing her dinner, the mouth noises—lips smacking ever so slightly, a clearing of her throat after she swallows. They are the sounds that used to drive me crazy while we were still married. Little did I know I should have cherished every noise Susan ever made. How long did our marriage last? Fourteen years? I often fantasize that if my literary success could have just come a little earlier, before Denise and Margie were born—before I met Susan. We could have made it. But instead I was left with the ever-present sentiment that I was missing out on something, fearing I had rushed prematurely into marriage, fatherhood, when so many opportunities still abounded.
How wrong I was.
Susan sets her fork and knife down, and I watch in awe as she moves a hand across the tabletop to touch mine. It’s an unprecedented act of kindness, love even. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“The beef stew’s great. Don’t you agree hospital cafeterias don’t get half the credit they deserve?”
“I’m asking about you. How are you, Ben?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
She frowns and releases my hand. I’ve disappointed her. Already. I am once again unable to live up to her expectations. I watch as my ex-wife closes her eyes. Is she counting to ten? It’s a trick we learned during our many marital therapy sessions together, a practice Susan took to more than I. Eyes shut, her breathing is measured, deep, and I notice now the hint of metallic blue eye shadow she has on, which makes her eyelids look like two sparkling scarab beetles. My heart races. Could she have possibly worn the makeup for me?
Susan’s opened her eyes again. They shine. “Just a couple of hours ago… Your mother…”
Ah, yes—it’s the reason for this hospital visit after all. The reason Susan and I are seated here right now. The reason we are speaking to one another after a year of almost complete silence. The reason she reached her hand across the table to clasp mine a moment ago. The reason she released it.
Must it always take a tragedy to bring the estranged back together? Could there not have been a more prosaic reason for our meeting tonight, for our dinner in this utterly lonely hospital cafeteria? Just a few years ago, our girls could have easily been playing with blocks on the floor beneath us. Or reading picture books. Or playing with their dollies. I would have lifted one of my daughters to my lap, sung to her. Susan would have been happy, throwing her head back in laughter to expose the thick tendons in her neck I always thought made her look like a ballet dancer. But, no, it’s only tragedy as to why Susan and I are together tonight. It was hard enough to contact her as it was. At one point, when the respiratory physician arrived to remove my mother from life support, I grew so insecure that Susan was avoiding my calls that I asked Charlotte, the nurse, if I could use the hospital phone, if only because Susan wouldn’t recognize the number. Oh, Charlotte, and her soft, young skin, which was hardly done justice to under the harsh, florescent lights of the critical care ward. So supple, Charlotte, with her smooth curves and contours, visible even beneath her mauve hospital scrubs. Why a pretty nurse like Charlotte sentenced herself to working in the critical care unit of this hospital, with its rotten smells and death-rattle sounds? No wonder they kept the air so frigid, they continuously had to cover my mother’s comatose body over with blankets. The soft whirr of the freezing air as it filtered in and out of the ward… The ward was as cold as death and even then the cold couldn’t mask what everyone was there to do, to die.
Susan glances at me sadly, her long, black lashes fluttering as she blinks. For a moment I let my mind wander back to the day we were married, how Susan stood across from me in the church, her white veil obscuring her face. I could only see the tips of her long, black eyelashes pressed up against the diaphanous fabric. Her long lashes, black like spider’s legs. What was it that Charlotte said earlier today? The spider taketh hold with her hands and is in kings’ palaces. Somehow a spider found its way into my mother’s room. Charlotte shuttled out the small insect without killing it. “Only a few types of spiders will ever harm you,” Charlotte said, “and even then, they must usually be provoked.” I watch now as Susan’s hands fidget, her hands like spiders’ legs, spinning into being a dazzling web, trapping me there, sucking me dry, slowly… slowly…
Why is it now that Susan’s eyes gleam with such remorse when it was me who ordered my mother to be removed from life support today? Again I watch as Susan reaches a hand across the table. “Ben, get remarried, for godsakes. Find someone to take care of you.”
How I wish she would release my hand and kiss my lips instead…
“I’m sorry,” Susan says. “I don’t have the right to say that.” She nervously plays with one of her long, blond tendrils. “It’s been a long day for all of us.”
“Not for all of us,” I say.
Susan shudders. “Ben…”
“You heard what the doctor said. She was already brain dead.”
As Susan runs her hand over her forehead, the new diamond engagement ring Big Rich Dick gave her shimmers under the cruel lighting. “There will always be a part of her that lives.”
Now I’m rolling my eyes. “Please don’t talk to me about souls and afterlives.”
I haven’t seen Susan look so grief-stricken since the day we met to make our divorce final. That day, she said to me, “Let’s not be strangers,” and I responded, “I’ll see you every other weekend, to receive the girls,” and she said, “I mean, let’s never stop talking.”
Cut to one year later. How many times have we spoken since our divorce? If I call and Susan answers, she immediately puts the girls on; she doesn’t even speak to me.
A sound like coins falling against couch cushions hisses inside Susan’s purse. She frowns, digging into the soft, darks folds of her bag, withdrawing her cell phone. “I really need to take this call,” she says, turning away from me, a hand over her mouth, whispering. But why? She has no secrets to hide. Does she not know I’ve already seen her secret places? When Margie was born, it was by Cesarean. I watched as the doctor made the incision into Susan’s belly, peeling back the skin to reveal the pink inner flesh of her womb.
I’ve seen inside of you, I want to say, I’ve seen your dark places, your covert wounds.
My ex-wife drops her phone back inside her purse. “That was Richard,” she says.
“Dick?”
“Yes, Dick.” She cracks a smile.
See, I still please her! If only she would let me back inside, let me show her how alike we still are. But instead I watch as my former wife stands. “I’ve got to go,” she says. It’s all I can do to force myself to smile. To not frown. To not weep.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” I say.
“I didn’t drive.”
“Big Rich Dick dropped you off?”
“Richard.”
“Right.”
Susan pushes her purse back over her shoulder. I fight back the tears.
“Till the next time my mom kicks the bucket,” I say.
Susan gives me a look like she’s sincerely worried about my mental health. She should be. I am not well. My mother just died. We just took her off life support. I just watched as Charlotte administered morphine into my mother’s bloodstream, listened as my mother’s breathing became more and more shallow, witnessed the veins beneath her skin become bluish and her skin greenish and her lips as white as death as death sunk in. No, I should not be left alone tonight. I should not be left alone to call Tita or Brenda or Genesa or Kat, or any other of the women I’ve used to numb myself with since Susan left. There is only one thing that can comfort me tonight, and that is Susan, and she is gone.
+ + +
After I leave the hospital, I do not want to go home. I drive out to the cliffs that are not so far away from where Susan and I used to live together, in a house we purchased with one of my first book advance checks. The cliffs overlook the sea. I heard the other day they found a body there, thrown to the rocky beach below. At first, people thought it was a dead seal. Only later did they learn it was suicide. This is not untypical for this area. Every so few years, someone throws themselves over the palisades—someone young, someone with promise, wealthy parents and good grades. Usually Christian. They write in their suicide notes that they’ve done it because they want to see God’s face so desperately, they can’t wait till old age. I used to not be able to understand it, but maybe now I do. I also want to see God’s grand mouth grinning at me. “Gotcha,” I imagine He might say. Perhaps He’d call me “little prick.”
“Your mother can feel you,” Charlotte would tell me every time I held my mother’s comatose hand, and her heart rate increased. “She knows you’re here.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” Charlotte would answer. “I have faith.”
Is that why it ended between Susan and me? Because I didn’t believe hard enough? I didn’t believe our marriage could not weather the stress of my success, of my infidelities, my lies, that Susan’s love for me might actually have a limit, there might eventually be a number to the months and years that Susan would put up with me?
I don’t see Susan again until the funeral a few days later. From my position near the altar where my mother lies in her open casket, I see Susan enter the church, accompanied by my two beautiful daughters, Denise and Margie. How they have grown. I can almost smell their sweetness from here, the honey milk scent of their skin, hair. Soon, Denise will enter high school. Margie is two years younger, in sixth grade. Big Rich Dick does not deserve them as step-daughters, or Susan as his wife. But Susan will be that soon – his dearly beloved. The thought sickens me.
When the priest is done with his words, Big Rich Dick approaches me. To pay his respects? “I’m so sorry about your loss,” he says.
“Are you?” I say.
“Let’s not do this at your mother’s funeral.”
I scoff. “Let’s not play all high and mighty.”
“I should have known better not to bother.” He turns to leave, but I call out after him.
“Are you sorry for stealing my wife?” I say. “For destroying my family?”
He is a dark, thick obelisk on the glistening lawn, dressed in his best black suit. He readjusts his thin, wireless glasses on his nose.
“I didn’t destroy your family,” he says. “You did.”
I watch him return to my wife and daughters’ side. Under the sun’s brilliant glare, they all look as if they are all anointed with halos. My daughters bury their heads into Big Rich Dick’s chest as he wraps his arms around them. Shouldn’t that be me consoling my daughters? Why am I over here, and they are over there? I am finding it hard to retain my composure, my posture, my stance. My legs wobble. I now realize this day not only commemorates the death of my mother, but of my entire family as well.
It’s almost four o’clock, and I am driving back toward to those cliffs, near that house I used to occupy with my wife and two daughters, who are no longer mine, but Richard Masterson’s. Beneath the all-encompassing light of the day, it’s even more terrifying here. The savage noise of the waves hitting the rocks…. All around me, the air is sodden with the smell of a maggoty death. My death. The death of my soul. Where will my soul go after it has fled my body? Will it go to heaven? When? When did my mother’s soul depart her body? After she entered her coma and was pronounced brain dead? Or did it only happen after we pulled the plug? Did her soul float above me beneath the severe luminosity of the critical care ward? Did she see what I had done to her? Did she hate me then? Did she want to flee from me, flee like my wife and daughters did today, ushered away from me by Death itself with the name of Richard Masterson?
Standing on the cliff’s edge, gazing out at the interminable sea, I feel more alone than I ever have before. The wind whips through the air, and I call out into it—to anything, anyone who is listening. “Hello,” I say, and I hold my breath. And I whisper: “I am sorry.”
