Ode to Lata (7 page)

THE GIFT

The years have nothing to do with aging. It is the heart that governs that process. It etches out its infliction upon your face like a sketcher dribbling carelessly on unsoiled paper, leaving irrevocable histories of the wars and wounds endured.

I see old people, and I wonder about their wars. I try to read their faces, their lines of countless frowns and laughs – an attempt to extract some wisdom.  I am sometimes left wondering if someday my hull will reflect my stories but be accompanied by the placidity I see in these people.  That dovish, enlightened quality that only comes late in life, that allows the thought of love to elicit a melancholy smile rather than to crush my heart.

Sitting at my desk, displaced by my need for Richard, such nirvana seemed inconceivable.  Although corporeally I may have been perched there, everything that lived in me, every single atom in my body was in that physically inaccessible realm where Richard thrived. I called my machine for the ninth, maybe tenth, time that hour, hoping that Richard had called.  There were messages from Salman and Adrian, which I skipped over without even listening to, cutting them off in mid-sentence, but not one word from him.  The rest of the time, I just stared into space, reliving every moment from my night with Richard, trying hopelessly to change the ending of a movie I had seen one too many times.  I was past caring if the people around me witnessed my dementia.

Love, I reminded myself, didn’t just make you blind.  It also made you repudiate those who didn’t yield to its vertigo.

A voice from somewhere: “Excuse me, young man.  Can you help me?”

Startled, I looked up to find an older man with his cane, holding bank brochures in his hand. I would’ve made some excuse and passed him onto someone else, so that I could have remained in my world, but it was too late.  He had already started settling into the chair across from me.  After the perfunctory questions had been answered, we began opening an account.  I tried to focus on the task I was being paid for but ended up asking about his life.  Maybe he would say something, impart some pearl of wisdom, that would bring about an epiphany.  The broken-hearted are a desperate breed looking for signs in everything.  It turned out Mr. Newman had been to Kenya.

In his thirties, he had taken his late wife on her dream vacation to Tsavo where she could experience the wildlife that she loved so much in their natural habitat.  They had even ridden the railway.  In his wallet, speckled with the dust that had managed to get under the plastic, was a sepia-toned picture of them together, which he proudly showed me.

“That’s my Naomi,” he said, smiling down at her with undying love and placing the open wallet in my hands.  “She’s beautiful!” he said, as if she were waiting for him at home or in the parked car outside.

I was astonished at the metamorphosis.  I looked at the picture and then I looked up at him, an old and shriveled reconfiguration of the strong, young man in the picture. But not on the inside. Inside he was still 10.

“If Naomi had her way, she would even outlaw zoos,” he said, laughing heartily.  “Nobody should live in a prison.”

As he slowly and diffidently stretched out of the chair, having made an investment he would probably never live to reap, he lamented about his arthritis; but in his voice was a vigor undefeated by the unjust crippling of his shell. A spirit that felt completely diminished in me.

“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Newman,” I said, rising to my feet, and suddenly thinking of my grandmother. “I’m so sorry you’re in such pain.”

“That’s life,” he said, smiling warmly. “Enjoy your youth.  It will be a long time before you have to worry about such things.”

I smiled at him, ingratiated in the reminder of how wonderful it must be to be so young and have a whole lifetime ahead of me. But my face began to ache and my smile, I was convinced, came across as a contrived failure.  My heart felt tight and sore.  And I found myself suddenly running to seek cover in the bathroom, as I had been doing frequently, where I could perch over the basin and cry.

When curdling, love was a bastard child noxiously debasing from within. So I hunched over and put my arms around myself until tears were pressed out from my eyes. To expel it was the only true remedy. If I could only learn to live with the vacancy ensuing its procrastinated abortion, but I was no longer sure I knew how to be happy alone. Six years had gone by. They told me I was still only a child and yet I felt I was a child only when I had first met him. Not since then. Not ever again.

I felt afraid. Terrified of imagining life without Richard. Without this madness to contend with for everyday of my life what would I do? Who would I be? Ali had become the obsessor of Richard. My every conversation. My every thought. My only ambition.  When awake, I spoke of him. About him. As only I could see him. What promises he had made to me. And where he had failed in them.

And in my sleep, he came again. And most of the time we were both silent. He held me close, and nestled within him, I felt safe and assured again. Sometimes he made love to me. And in rousing myself from bed and discovering my semen marked on the sheets, I would enter into the day consumed by a tumult of arousal and shame.

Take all that away and what would be left of me? It was a death in itself to walk away from the Ali I had so distastefully helped create. And loathe him as I might, it was the only Ali I knew now. How would happiness embrace me after all this time of adulating misery?  I didn’t know how the door would open up. But I knew I had to get out. Nobody could love their jailor forever.

I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the basin. I didn’t see someone in his twenties. I saw a man much, much older. More ravaged than he should be. The skin around my face was still tight. There was only the hint of dark circles around my eyes. My lips were firm and full. My hair dark and thick. But it all felt like shellac filming a decaying core.

Is this why Mummy struggled to raise me? So I could learn such pain?  Is this why I was doted upon, bundled from the cold in blankets and kept from grazing my knees on the ground?  Force-fed and fussed over?  So that I could grow up and in losing my heart, trip and break it into a million fragments?

I felt cracked. Broken. Bits of jagged edges stuck outwards from within me and poked me until I winced. It must have been apparent from my eyes, this bungling collapse of my spirit. The self-loathing. My disappointment in myself.  That must be why I meet no one else. Embarrassed by my insufficiency, I averted my eyes from others in fear that they would catch glimpses of my worthlessness. I looked away before they did. Sometimes I may have stumbled upon the hope that maybe someone would be persistent enough to scale the walls that I had cloistered myself in. But in Los Angeles that doesn’t quite happen. Apparently, we were all waiting for our saviors.

Instead I stood there and looked into the mirror, freshly doused but unable to eliminate the glassiness in my eyes or the swelling around them. A soul in dire need of absolution from its demons, waiting for an absentee messiah. Nobody was coming anytime soon. I might as well face up to it. I was going to have to wake up and realize the task had to be accomplished on my own.

I splashed cold water on my feverish face, unable even to drink it as it gushed forth from the faucet – not like Kenya, no. The sweet waters that I could cup in the palm of my hands and drink. Straight from the tap. 
Oh, God, help me find a way.…Lift me out of all this.

Like so many times before, I took a deep breath, hoping that when I got back out there something would be different, Richard might have called.  On my desk, I did find an urgent note waiting for me. But it was a message from Richard’s mother, asking me to call her right away.

Something had happened. 

I found him at the I.C.U. in a cold, sterile room, the steel efficiently humming away around his sleeping body.  Slowly I took the chair next to him, not removing my eyes from him for even a second. Looking down at his face, I felt as if I was looking into my own. That’s how much I’d lost myself in him. Nights of forging his features out of the darkness and frantically stitching them together in the absurd hope that he would materialize had left me with no recognition of any other face. 
I don’t know where you end and I begin.

There was something else in that face. A subtle quality that I could not quite put my finger on but I recognized as being the same as in my father’s pictures. Both had that timelessness about them. The kind that would elicit a soft gasp from a picture that escaped from an old box and skittered to the floor. The topography of handsomeness. Plains and curves in a face that stirred the eyes that looked at them. One could not help but hope when looking at such a face that Nature had been benevolent enough not to stop right there. A face this beautiful had to have been blessed with a disposition just as gratifying. But I knew from experience that Mother Nature never did have a reputation for being quite so generous.

In the waiting room, his mother, surprisingly steeled, had told me that Richard had jaundice. Worry was written all over her face, but if she had cried any tears, no one had been witness to them. Her strength both angered and awed me.

Looking down, I realized that the pallor in his face had done nothing to discredit his looks. And this, much to my guilt, embittered me. Maybe it’s because I’d always considered his looks a weapon that he had been able to use against me. He had always been undefeatable there.

Jesus! Just thinking about all those times that I had to stand by him and listen to everyone – from my own friends to other hopefuls – coo about how cute he was, completely glazing over me. And him, immodestly basking in their compliments and brazenly undressing them with his eyes while I had stood right there, right next to him, dissolving within.

Their memory made me want to claw at his face and rip away those features from it like some mask he might have been wearing. To demonically mutilate the attributes in his face that he, and others like him had held up as a mantle over the likes of me.

And then there was that conflicting, simultaneous urge to touch him with every ounce of tenderness I possessed. Always this war within me.  Part of me wanting to hit him. And part of me just wanting to cry. Most of the time, it was that later urge that overcame and suppressed me – I was back in for the haul.

I was tempted to run my finger down his stubbled face, to touch his closed eyes and feel the unusually long curl of their lashes against my fingertips. The bridge of his nose and the curves of his lips. But I hesitated for fear of waking him, disrupting the moment. There had been so much chaos. So much anguish. The arguments. The public scenes.  I just wanted to stand there with him in front of me and for there to be some peace. No words. No promises. No defenses.

Six years had gone by and I was there still standing at his bedside in some hospital because he just might have literally fucked his life away, while I had spent nights with nothing more than my fantasies of him. Nights when my body had cried out for him, ached, as if every nerve ending had become a gaping mouth. Nights when I had felt something much deeper than a yearning.

Where were all those people he had fucked now?  Only I stood there. Devoted. Praying. Stealing a few moments that his mother and siblings had been kind enough to allow me as they waited outside. 
Everybody uncertain. Still running tests. Hard to say how long they would have to keep him here.

What if he tested positive?

I went through the motions, questioning and yet uncertain if I wanted to hear the answers.
How many times have you fucked without a condom? When was the last time you did that? Who was he? Did you even know him? God! What were you thinking? Oh, no, never mind, don’t tell me.

The anger festered within me again. I started to feel sick. In my mind, I could hear his answers and I wanted to drown him out and vociferate. 
Fuck you!  You did this to yourself! I told you so, and now see what you’ve gotten yourself into! Should have stuck with me. Let me love you instead of fucking, fucking, fucking every goddamn slut like yourself! You deserve this, and I hope that you suffer just like I have for the past six years. I hope you feel scared, and I hope you cry and regret.  Yes, regret! Regret that you have been so unappreciative of me. Regret that you never wanted to fuck me. This is your punishment.

But I started to cry instead. It was I that was starting to feel scared. There, lying in front of me, had been not just Richard but the last six years of my life. Seeing him like that made mortality shockingly believable.

And I wondered, if Richard never woke up again, what would all those years have been worth? Feeling the way that I still did for him, how could I fathom life without him?

And all this for what? What had he given me to show for those six years? How, without looking absurd, would I express my grief over someone who had been known to boast of my obsession over him? All this over someone who had not seen fit to give me one day of total commitment, never mind the lifetimes.

It was then that it started to occur to me that perhaps this was not about Richard at all. My whole relationship with him was suddenly being questioned with a kind of objectivity completely lacking in such turbulent relationships.

This hospital room, his illness, these were only props for something much more profound evolving in our lives now. Perhaps this is all about me. My lesson at his expense. A chance for a long-sought redemption.