The Time Traveler's Wife, Page 42

  At that moment:

  HENRY: My mother is sitting on the foot of my bed. I don't want her to know about my feet. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.

  "Henry?" she says. "I know you're awake. C'mon, buddy, rise and shine."

  I open my eyes. It's Kimy. "Mmm. Morning."

  "It's 2:30 in the afternoon. You should get out of bed."

  "I can't get out of bed, Kimy. I don't have any feet."

  "You got wheelchair," she says. "Come on, you need a bath, you need a shave, pee-yoo, you smell like an old man." Kimy stands up, looking very grim. She peels the covers off of me and I lie there like a shelled shrimp, cold and flaccid in the afternoon sunlight. Kimy browbeats me into sitting in the wheelchair, and she wheels me to the door of the bathroom, which is too narrow for the chair to pass.

  "Okay," Kimy says, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips. "How we gonna do this? Huh?"

  "I don't know, Kimy. I'm just the gimp; I don't actually work here."

  "What kind of word is that, gimp?"

  "It's a highly pejorative slang word used to describe cripples."

  Kimy looks at me as though I am eight and have used the word fuck in her presence (I didn't know what it meant, I only knew it was forbidden). "I think it's 'sposed to be disabled, Henry." She leans over and unbuttons my pajama top.

  "I've got hands" I say, and finish the unbuttoning myself. Kimy turns around, brusque and grumpy, and turns on the tap, adjusts the temperature, places the plug in the drain. She rummages in the medicine cabinet, brings out my razor, shaving soap, the beaver-hair shaving brush. I can't figure out how to get out of the wheelchair. I decide to try sliding off the seat; I push my ass forward, arch my back, and slither toward the floor. I wrench my left shoulder and bang my butt as I go down, but it's not too bad. In the hospital the physical therapist, an encouraging young person named Penny Featherwight, had several techniques for getting in and out of the chair, but they all had to do with chair/bed and chair/chair situations. Now I'm sitting on the floor and the bathtub looms like the white cliffs of Dover above me. I look up at Kimy, eighty-two years old, and realize that I'm on my own, here. She looks at me and it's all pity, that look. I think fuck it, I have to do this somehow, I can't let Kimy look at me like that. I shrug out of my pajama bottoms, and begin to unwrap the bandages that cover the dressings on my legs. Kimy looks at her teeth in the mirror. I stick my arm over the side of the tub and test the bath water.

  "If you throw some herbs in there you can have stewed gimp for supper."

  "Too hot?" Kimy asks.

  "Yeah."

  Kimy adjusts the faucets and then leaves the bathroom, pushing the wheelchair out of the doorway. I gingerly remove the dressing from my right leg. Under the wrappings the skin is pale and cold. I put my hand at the folded-over part, the flesh that cushions the bone. I just took a Vicodin a little while ago. I wonder if I could take another one without Clare noticing. The bottle is probably up there in the medicine cabinet. Kimy comes back carrying one of the kitchen chairs. She plops it down next to me. I remove the dressing from the other leg.

  "She did a nice job," Kimy says.

  "Dr. Murray? Yeah, it's a big improvement, much more aerodynamic."

  Kimy laughs. I send her to the kitchen for phone books. When she puts them next to the chair I raise myself so I'm sitting on them. Then I scramble onto the chair, and sort of fall/roll into the bathtub. A huge wave of water sloshes out of the tub onto the tile. I'm in the bathtub. Hallelujah. Kimy turns off the water, and dries her legs with a towel. I submerge.

  Later:

  CLARE: After hours of cooking I strain the kozo and it, too, goes into the beater. The longer it stays in the beater, the finer and more bone-like it will be. After four hours, I add retention aid, clay, pigment. The beige pulp suddenly turns a deep dark earth red. I drain it into buckets and pour it into the waiting vat. When I walk back to the house Kimy is in the kitchen making the kind of tuna fish casserole that has potato chips crumbled over it.

  "How'd it go?" I ask her.

  "Real good. He's in the living room." There is a trail of water between the bathroom and the living room in Kimy-sized footprints. Henry is sleeping on the sofa with a book spread open on his chest. Borges' Ficciones. He is shaved and I lean over him and breathe; he smells fresh, his damp gray hair sticking up all ways. Alba is chattering to Teddy in her room. For a moment I feel as though I've time traveled, as though this is some stray moment from before, but then I let my eyes travel down Henry's body to the flatnesses at the end of the blanket, and I know that I am only here and now.

  The next morning it's raining. I open the door of the studio and the wire wings await me, floating in the morning gray light. I turn on the radio; it's Chopin, rolling etudes like waves over sand. I don rubber boots, a bandanna to keep my hair out of the pulp, a rubber apron. I hose down my favorite teak and brass mold and deckle, uncover the vat, set up a felt to couch the paper onto. I reach down into the vat and agitate the slurry of dark red to mix the fiber and water. Everything drips. I plunge the mold and deckle into the vat, and carefully bring it up, level, streaming water. I set it on the corner of the vat and the water drains from it and leaves a layer of fiber on the surface; I remove the deckle and press the mold onto the felt, rocking it gently and as I remove it the paper remains on the felt, delicate and shiny. I cover it with another felt, wet it, and again: I plunge the mold and deckle down, bring it up, drain it, couch it. I lose myself in the repetition, the piano music floating over the water sloshing and dripping and raining. When I have a post of paper and felt, I press it in the hydraulic paper press. Then I go back to the house and eat a ham sandwich. Henry is reading. Alba is at school.

  After lunch, I stand in front of the wings with my post of freshly made paper. I am going to cover the armature with a paper membrane. The paper is damp and dark and wants to tear but it drapes over the wire forms like skin. I twist the paper into sinews, into cords that twist and connect. The wings are bat wings now, the tracing of the wire is evident below the gaunt paper surface. I dry the paper I haven't used yet, heating it on sheets of steel. Then I begin to tear it into strips, into feathers. When the wings are dry I will sew these on, one by one. I begin to paint the strips, black and gray and red. Plumage, for the terrible angel, the deadly bird.

  A week later, in the evening:

  HENRY: Clare has cajoled me into getting dressed and has enlisted Gomez to carry me out the back door, across the yard, and into her studio. The studio is lit with candles; there are probably a hundred of them, more, on tables and on the floor, and on the windowsills. Gomez sets me down on the studio couch, and retreats to the house. In the middle of the studio a white sheet is suspended from the ceiling, and I turn around to see if there's a projector, but there isn't. Clare is wearing a dark dress, and as she moves around the room her face and hands float white and disembodied.

  "Want some coffee?" she asks me. I haven't had any since before the hospital. "Sure," I reply. She pours two cups, adds cream, and brings me one. The hot cup feels familiar and good in my hand. "I made you something," Clare says.

  "Feet? I could use some feet."

  "Wings," she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor.

  The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. The dreams of hovering, of flying as though gravity has been rescinded and now is allowing me to be removed from the earth a safe distance, these dreams come back to me in the twilit studio. Clare sits down next to me. I feel her looking at me. The wings are silent, their edges ragged. I cannot speak. Siehe, ich lebe. Woraus? Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft/ werden weniger... Uberzahliges Dasein/ entspringt mir Herzen. (Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller... Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.) "Kiss me,"
Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.

  FEET DREAMS

  October/November, 2006 (Henry is 43)

  HENRY: I dream that I am at the Newberry, giving a Show and Tell to some graduate students from Columbia College. I'm showing them incunabula, early printed books. I show them the Gutenberg Fragment, Caxton's Game and Play of Chess, the Jensen Eusebius. It's going well, they are asking good questions. I rummage around on the cart, looking for this special book I just found in the stacks, something I never knew we had. It's in a heavy red box. There's no title, just the call number, CASE WING f ZX 983.D 453, stamped in gold under the Newberry insignia. I place the box on the table and set out the pads. I open the box, and there, pink and perfect, are my feet. They are surprisingly heavy. As I set them on the pads the toes all wiggle, to say Hi, to show me they can still do it. I begin to speak about them, explaining the relevance of my feet to fifteenth century Venetian printing. The students are taking notes. One of them, a pretty blonde in a shiny sequined tank top, points at my feet, and says, "Look, they're all white!" And it's true, the skin has gone dead white, the feet are lifeless and putrid. I sadly make a note to myself to send them up to Conservation first thing tomorrow.

  In my dream I am running. Everything is fine. I run along the lake, from Oak Street Beach, heading north. I feel my heart pumping, my lungs smoothly rising and falling. I am moving right along. What a relief, I think. I was afraid I'd never run again, but here I am, running. It's great.

  But things begin to go wrong. Parts of my body are falling off. First my left arm goes. I stop and pick it up off the sand and brush it off and put it back on, but it isn't very securely attached and it comes off again after only half a mile. So I carry it in my other arm, thinking maybe when I get it back home I can attach it more tightly. But then the other arm goes, and I have no arms at all to even pick up the arms I've lost. So I continue running. It's not too bad; it doesn't hurt. Soon I realize that my cock has dislodged and fallen into the right leg of my sweatpants, where it is banging around in an annoying manner, trapped by the elastic at the bottom. But I can't do anything about it, so I ignore it. And then I can feel that my feet are all broken up like pavement inside my shoes, and then both of my feet break off at the ankles and I fall face-first onto the path. I know that if I stay there I will be trampled by other runners, so I begin to roll. I roll and roll until I roll into the lake, and the waves roll me under, and I wake up gasping.

  I dream that I am in a ballet. I am the star ballerina, I am in my dressing room being swathed in pink tulle by Barbara, who was my mom's dresser. Barbara is a tough cookie, so even though my feet hurt like hell I don't complain as she tenderly encases the stumps in long pink satin toe shoes. When she finishes I stagger up from my chair and cry out. "Don't be a sissy," says Barbara, but then she relents and gives me a shot of morphine. Uncle Ish appears at the door of the dressing room and we hurry down endless backstage hallways. I know that my feet hurt even though I cannot see them or feel them. We rush on, and suddenly I am in the wings and looking onto the stage I realize that the ballet is The Nutcracker, and I am the Sugar Plum Fairy. For some reason this really bugs me. This isn't what I was expecting. But someone gives me a little shove, and I totter on stage. And I dance. I am blinded by the lights, I dance without thinking, without knowing the steps, in an ecstasy of pain. Finally I fall to my knees, sobbing, and the audience rises to their feet, and applauds.

  Friday, November 3, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)

  CLARE: Henry holds up an onion and looks at me gravely and says, "This...is an onion."

  I nod. "Yes. I've read about them."

  He raises one eyebrow. "Very good. Now, to peel an onion, you take a sharp knife, lay the aforementioned onion sideways on a cutting board, and remove each end, like so. Then you can peel the onion, like so. Okay. Now, slice it into cross-sections. If you're making onion rings, you just pull apart each slice, but if you're making soup or spaghetti sauce or something you dice it, like this..."

  Henry has decided to teach me to cook. All the kitchen counters and cabinets are too high for him in his wheelchair. We sit at the kitchen table, surrounded by bowls and knives and cans of tomato sauce. Henry pushes the cutting board and knife across the table to me, and I stand up and awkwardly dice the onion. Henry watches patiently. "Okay, great. Now, green peppers: you run the knife around here, then pull out the stem..."

  We make marinara sauce, pesto, lasagna. Another day it's chocolate chip cookies, brownies, creme brulee. Alba is in heaven. "More dessert," she begs. We poach eggs and salmon, make pizza from scratch. I have to admit that it's kind of fun. But I'm terrified the first night I cook dinner by myself. I'm standing in the kitchen surrounded by pots and pans, the asparagus is overcooked and I burn myself taking the monkfish out of the oven. I put everything on plates and bring it into the dining room where Henry and Alba are sitting at their places. Henry smiles, encouragingly. I sit down; Henry raises his glass of milk in the air: "To the new cook!" Alba clinks her cup against his, and we begin to eat. I sneak glances at Henry, eating. And as I'm eating, I realize that everything tastes fine. "It's good, Mama!" Alba says, and Henry nods. "It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other and I think, Don't leave me.

  WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

  Monday, December 18, 2006/Sunday, January 2, 1994 (Henry is 43)

  HENRY: I wake up in the middle of the night with a thousand razor-toothed insects gnawing on my legs and before I can even shake a Vicodin out of the bottle I am falling. I double up, I am on the floor but it's not our floor, it's some other floor, some other night. Where am I? Pain makes everything seem shimmery, but it's dark and there's something about the smell, what does it remind me of? Bleach. Sweat. Perfume, so familiar--but it couldn't be--

  Footsteps walking up stairs, voices, a key unlocking several locks (where can I hide?) the door opens, I'm crawling across the floor as the light snaps on and explodes in my head like a flashbulb and a woman whispers, "Oh my god." I'm thinking No, this just can't be happening, and the door shuts and I hear Ingrid say, "Celia, you've got to go" and Celia protests, and as they stand on the other side of the door arguing about it I look around desperately but there's no way out. This must be Ingrid's apartment on Clark Street where I have never been but here is all her stuff, overwhelming me, the Eames chair, the kidney-shaped marble coffee table loaded with fashion magazines, the ugly orange couch we used to--I cast around wildly for something to wear, but the only textile in this minimal room is a purple and yellow afghan that's clashing with the couch, so I grab it and wind it around myself, hoist myself onto the couch and Ingrid opens the door again. She stands quietly for a long moment and looks at me and I look at her and all I can think is oh, Ing, why did you do this to yourself?

  The Ingrid who lives in my memory is the incandescent blond angel of cool I met at Jimbo's Fourth of July party in 1988; Ingrid Carmichel was devastating and untouchable, encased in gleaming armor made of wealth, beauty, and ennui. The Ingrid who stands looking at me now is gaunt and hard and tired; she stands with her head tilted to one side and looks at me with wonder and contempt. Neither of us seems to know what to say. Finally she takes off her coat, tosses it on the chair, and perches at the other end of the couch. She's wearing leather pants. They squeak a little as she sits down.

  "Henry."

  "Ingrid."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry. I just--well, you know." I shrug. My legs hurt so much that I almost don't care where I am.

  "You look like shit."

  "I'm in a lot of pain,"

  "That's funny. So am I."

  "I mean physical pain."

  "Why?" For all Ingrid cares I could be spontaneously combusting right in front of her. I pull back the afghan and reveal my stumps.

  She doesn't recoil and she doesn't gasp. She doesn't look away, and when s
he does she looks me in the eyes and I see that Ingrid, of all people, understands perfectly. By entirely separate processes we have arrived at the same condition. She gets up and goes into another room, and when she comes back she has her old sewing kit in her hand. I feel a surge of hope, and my hope is justified: Ingrid sits down and opens the lid and it's just like the good old days, there's a complete pharmacy in there with the pin cushions and thimbles.

  "What do you want?" Ingrid asks.

  "Opiates." She picks through a baggie full of pills and offers me an assortment; I spot Ultram and take two. After I swallow them dry she gets me a glass of water and I drink it down.

  "Well." Ingrid runs her long red fingernails through her long blond hair. "When are you coming from?"

  "December, 2006. What's the date here?"

  Ingrid looks at her watch. "It was New Year's Day, but now it's January 2. 1994."

  Oh, no. Please no. "What's wrong?" Ingrid says.

  "Nothing." Today is the day Ingrid will commit suicide. What can I say to her? Can I stop her? What if I call someone? "Listen, Ing, I just want to say..." I hesitate. What can I tell her without spooking her? Does it matter now? Now that she's dead? Even though she's sitting right here?

  "What?"

  I'm sweating. "Just...be nice to yourself. Don't... I mean, I know you aren't very happy--"

  "Well, whose fault is that?" Her bright red lipsticked mouth is set in a frown. I don't answer. Is it my fault? I don't really know. Ingrid is staring at me as though she expects an answer. I look away from her. I look at the Maholy-Nagy poster on the opposite wall. "Henry?" Ingrid says. "Why were you so mean to me?"