CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Please just leave me. Melanie will be here at one thirty.”
“Shut up.”
In the pause that follows, the last kicks and screams of their mutual dread settle into surrender. They’re in Richard’s bathroom. She could leave him here. But for some reason that she doesn’t yet understand, she’s not going to, and so it’s not worth discussing.
She unclips a device labeled BlueAnt from his coat collar, lifts his phone up and over his head, and places both on the vanity counter. She then unzips his winter coat, unsealing the stench that had been trapped beneath the insulating layers of down and weather-resistant outer shell. She covers her nose and mouth with her hand, an utterly ineffective shield against the noxious odor that is quickly saturating the air in the room.
She flashes to a summer afternoon when Grace was two. Armed with nothing but the innocent intention of retrieving a beach chair from the car, she popped the trunk and was assaulted by the putrid, violent stink of a forgotten diaper filled with poop, baked in eighty-degree weather for several days. The smell emanating from Richard right now is similar but far worse. She removes her useless hand from her face and gags.
About to take a deep breath as she would before attempting anything potentially painful or scary—striking the first key of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a recital a million years ago; pushing in concert with the labor contractions that delivered Grace; picking up the phone today, knowing it was Richard calling—she thinks better of it. Taking a deep breath now would mean consuming more of this aerosolized cesspool. Instead, she lifts the top of her sweater and hangs it over her nose, creating a mask, and breathes short, timid breaths through the woven fibers.
She looks up and finds herself accidently eye to eye with Richard. His thin, clean-shaven cheeks are wet with untouched tears, and his eyes, ever formidable in her experience, submit to her gaze, humiliated, apologizing, holding an expression so stunningly uncharacteristic of him that she can’t look away. He closes his eyes and keeps them shut, likely unable to bear being seen like this, and she’s grateful for the curtain between them, that he’s not able to see the tears welling in her eyes.
While music, especially live music, can easily overcome her—the swell of the notes, an overwhelming awe of the artistry before her, the sorrow in the story of the song—she never cries for the crying. Raised under Russian oppression, she’d seen more than a lifetime’s worth of weeping before she could tie her own shoes. At a young age, she learned to pretend that nothing bothered her, to dam up any tears of pity or compassion with great, impenetrable walls. She watched dry-eyed as scrawny toddlers wailed in the bread line where she stood dutifully for over two hours every day after school; as Mr. Nowak, who lived across the street, was hauled off to prison in front of his hysterical wife and six crying children for stealing a pig’s head from a neighboring farm; as her mother wept while Karina packed her suitcase, leaving for a six-month job as a nanny in Switzerland, knowing that six months was a lie and that the nanny job was simply the plausible excuse necessary to obtain a passport, a way station on the way to school in America, and that she might never see her daughter again.
So it unnerves her that Richard’s tears have somehow found a wormhole. She clears her throat, attempting to shake it off, reorienting her focus toward the task at hand. She unbuttons and unzips his jeans, grabs the waistband of his pants and boxers at both hips, and, in one hard yank, pulls them down to his knees.
It took her longer than five minutes to get to Richard’s front stoop. She was only about a mile away when he called, but parking took several additional minutes. Some of the wet, runny shit that had dripped down his legs has already dried, his coarse black hairs poking through like weeds in droughty earth. A substantial heap is in his underwear, and the rest is stuck like cake frosting to his ass and balls. More than she bargained for.
“Okay, can you balance on one foot?”
“I’m too tired. I don’t want to fall.”
“Hold on to my shoulders.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, right. Here, lean against the wall behind you.”
She holds him firmly by his bare waist, and he shuffles back a few steps until he’s flush to the wall. She squats down in front of him.
“Lift.” She taps his left shin with the palm of her hand.
His shoes already off, she tugs the pants and boxers down and off one leg. In doing so, she slides his leg through the soiled clothing, and now his entire leg is smeared with shit. A substantial hunk of it falls out of his boxers and onto the bathroom floor. The white wall behind him has been painted brown by his rear end. Good God.
“Switch.”
He lifts his right foot, and she drags the pants and boxers down, threads them over his socked foot and off. She looks at her hands and wishes she hadn’t—Richard’s shit on her right thumb, across her knuckles, beneath her freshly painted nails, pressed into her neatly trimmed cuticles. Her sweater mask has fallen off her nose, but she doesn’t want to touch her sweater with her contaminated hands, so she leaves it. The stench, the mess, her hands. She wretches twice.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She can’t pause now to clean herself up or she won’t be able to finish. She has to keep going.
“Lift.”
She peels the left sock off, then the right. She stands and grabs the bottom of his crewneck and tries to pull it up and over his head, but his arms won’t cooperate, and he’s stuck, a puzzle she can’t solve.
“You have to go one arm at a time,” says Richard.
She wrestles his left arm through the hole, then the right, then his head. He’s now totally naked, smeared with shit and tears and shame.
She runs the shower. Richard steps in. She grabs the sponge on the tub’s edge and saturates it with liquid soap.
“I’m good like this. Melanie can do the rest.”
“Shut up.”
As she begins to wash him, to touch his shoulders and chest and stomach, she has the split-second recognition that, although much bonier than she remembers, this is Richard’s naked body before her, a body she has loved, kissed, hugged, held, spooned, sucked, fucked, avoided, despised, resented, cursed, hated. A comprehensive menu of memories and feelings related to this body, inappropriate to this bizarre situation, scrolls across her consciousness. She refuses it, ignoring his body’s history, and focuses instead on the impersonal job in front of her. The sponge, the bum, the soap, the leg, the water, the penis, more soap, the balls, the sponge, the other leg.
Finally, the water circling the drain is clear. She leaves him there, goes to the kitchen, finds a trash bag, and returns to the bathroom. She locates a clean segment of his pants and, fashioning her hand like a pair of tweezers, transfers his trousers into the trash bag. She does the same to the socks, boxers, and shirt, then knots the top of the bag to seal off the smell. Even though she’s sure she didn’t touch any poop, her hands feel contaminated again. She washes them thoroughly in the sink under the hottest water she can stand and then washes them again.
She returns to the shower and shuts off the water. Richard steps out of the tub, and she dries him with a clean towel. They then walk wordlessly to his bedroom. Without input or direction, Karina finds his clothes and dresses him.
There. It’s done. They look at each other now.
“Holy shit,” says Karina.
Richard laughs. She didn’t mean to be funny, but she’s too adrenaline buzzed to remain straight-faced and joins him. They laugh deep, hard, sighing cackles, and the release feels good. It’s been a long time since she’s been on the same side of joy with Richard.
“I’ll wait until Melanie gets here,” she says, realizing that it’s now almost 1:30.
“Okay.”
She follows Richard into the living room and sits next to him on the couch. He turns the TV on by stepping on a remote control taped to the floor. He surfs a few channels, finds nothing of interest, and shuts the TV off. They sit side by side in silence, waiting for Melanie, and the lack of anything to say or do stretches on well past uncomfortable, feeling somehow more awkward than the shit show they just endured in the bathroom.
“So what were you doing in Boston?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t ask what for or if she’s okay. She doesn’t blame him. Pandora’s box is better left locked shut.
“I was just leaving the parking garage when you called.”
She was at her annual gyn physical, not due to be in that office again for another year. What are the odds that she’d be barely over a mile away and available when he called? She looks around the room—the piano, the wheelchair, the desk and chair, the TV and coffee table. She looks at him.
“How long does Melanie stay with you?”
“About an hour.”
“Does anyone else come here to help you?”
“Someone comes in the morning, usually Bill, for an hour and a half. Then another person comes at night to help me with dinner and get ready for bed.”
“So about four hours a day?”
“Yeah, about that.”
She thinks about the twelve or so waking hours in each day when he’s alone with no help and all the trouble he could get into. What if he falls? What if he’s hungry? What if he chokes? What if he shits his pants on the front step and is locked out of the building?
“You need a lot more help that that.”
“I know. I don’t work anymore. I can’t afford it.”
She thinks about the stairs and that wheelchair. This situation is untenable.
“You’re selling this place.”
“My realtor says I have it priced too high, but I don’t want to come down or I’ll lose money on it. Suppose it doesn’t matter. I have a huge mortgage. It won’t free up enough cash.”
She doesn’t point out that leaving here might be more about living somewhere without stairs than the potential for liquidity. She knows his father and his brothers. His father won’t help, and his brothers can’t. It’s too bad his mother isn’t still alive. She would be here for him. His agent is in New York City.
“Is there a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You can’t go on like this.”
Isn’t that exactly what she said to him when she finally asked for a divorce, but with an I instead of a you? She pinches her mouth shut, trying to withhold what she’s about to say next, thinking that maybe if she makes it past this moment, if Melanie walks through the door and takes over the conversation, then she won’t say what she’s about to say.
She looks at Richard, and he nods, and she can’t tell if he’s agreeing with what she said or what she’s thinking, believing suddenly that he can read her mind. This is nuts. She can’t do this. She can’t say what she’s about to say. She’d have to be a masochist, an idiot, insane. Elise will call her crazy for sure. She can’t undo all that has happened by saying what she feels compelled to say.
Just as she’s sliding down a slick hill to panic, a sense of calm settles over her instead, leveling her tilted inner landscape, and she realizes that it doesn’t matter whether she says it now or not. She sighs. She looks at Richard and his lifeless arms and the wheelchair and his piano, and it’s already true and done, as if this moment, this whole day, her entire life, were fated, and she agreed to say what’s next before she was even born.
“You need to come back home.”
“I know.”