Mudwoman Read online

  May–June 2003

  “I want to die.”

  Or was it: “I need to die.”

  Shameful to her, to betray so many!

  Three months, she would be away. Three months, banished.

  This is not a mental illness, they assured her. This is a physical illness.

  There is no shame in physical illness.

  Three months’ medical leave. More crudely phrased, sick leave.

  For she was so very tired. She’d collapsed from exhaustion, malnutrition, anemia. Her lymph glands were painfully swollen. Her vision was blurred. Her blood contained an abnormal increase of mononuclear leukocytes, infections had entered her bloodstream. Her skin was burning with fever yet she could not stop shivering.

  Try! You must try! Try harder.

  She had ceased trying. She hated those who wished such effort from her.

  “ . . . time to die.”

  This was ridiculous! Self-pity of the mewling sort M.R. most despised.

  Konrad would be shocked at her, if he’d heard such words.

  Poor Agatha! Agatha would be spared such words.

  “I certainly do not want to die.”

  Three months to rest, recover. To become herself again.

  Three months banished from Charters House, Salvager Hall.

  Those places she’d come to fear. The high pit sides, she must claw her way to daylight.

  Those places she’d come to loathe.

  “No! I’ve been very happy. . . . I want to return to work.”

  An infection of the left ear canal and the “inner” ear—so violent the throbbing, she’d thought it must be an infection of the brain. In the nineteenth-century Russian novels, brain-fever.

  Equally virulent infections of the throat, the lungs.

  Antibiotics were fed into her veins, to wage war against the enemy.

  And in the hospital, another infection would enter her bloodstream.

  Sickness, and convalescing. But first, the sickness had to be overcome.

  She had lost nearly twenty pounds. How this had happened, she seemed not to know. She seemed not to have noticed.

  Her bodily self, her ontological being-in-the-world—she had seemed not to notice its condition.

  Or, she had noticed but wished not to see.

  It was a time of shame. A season of shame. As in Carthage and the surrounding countryside there were seasons of bagworms—hideous writhing things in feathery pearl-colored cocoons, in trees.

  Almost, you would think How beautiful! Large white blossoms in the trees.

  These small shames surfaced in her consciousness, like raging bacteria.

  For instance, that final meeting with the trustees! She could recall only flashes of it, like a broken mirror. She could recall a man’s face contorted with dislike of her, repugnance. The shock, embarrassment, alarm of others. And the priggish self-righteousness of her daring to quote Kant to the captive audience—Kant, the German racist.

  This individual was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.

  So much for the moral transcendentalism of Kant!

  Shame, her Mudwoman dreams. Of which she could recall just fragments.

  Most shameful, she was missing commencement.

  The pinnacle of the University president’s year—and M. R. Neukirchen was missing it.

  So shameful to M.R., she could not tell anyone. Never would she tell anyone.

  The glossy commencement program had been printed before—before the president’s collapse. And so on the morning of June 1 there would be an insert in each of the programs, noting that the commencement address originally to be delivered by President Neukirchen would be given by the former president of the University, Leander Huddle.

  The very person she’d imagined she was so superior to. Way better than that cynical shameless old man!

  M.R. would not see this. M.R. would be spared this humiliation.

  Three months—June, July, August—the University would provide for the convalescing president financially, during which time the provost would serve as acting president.

  The great sailing ship, the Cutty Sark of Universities, would scarcely falter, in M.R.’s absence.

  Three months! A terrible void in which she might drown.

  Three months! It felt like the rest of her life.

  He was incensed: by the sight of her in the hospital bed, and by her surprise at seeing him.

  “Of course I’m here! Where the hell else would I be?”

  Yes he’d known of her breakdown for bad news travels swiftly.

  “Schadenfreude’s law—the worst news of the best people travels most swiftly.”

  She’d tried to laugh, hearing this. It was not the first time Andre had made this joke but each time was funny to her, for Schadenfreude’s law was so very true.

  The distance between the University in quasi-rural New Jersey and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was no more than a nanosecond. Andre had known what had happened to her within hours—the rudiments, at least—and at once he’d left his home with what excuse to his suspicious wife M.R. was never to know, flew to Newark airport, rented a car and drove sixty miles to the hospital, to discover her in the Telemetry unit.

  He hadn’t been able to contact her, first. She had not made any attempt to contact him for she’d been too ill.

  “Why are you so surprised? Of course I’m here, I love you.”

  I love you was not a phrase Andre Litovik uttered easily. You could see the man’s jaw muscles straining, not to amend I love you with a joke.

  You could see the man’s eyes—thin-lashed, large and frantic and always just slightly bloodshot—filling with moisture, to be wiped away with the back of his hand.

  Difficult for M.R. to keep her own eyes open. She was so very tired.

  Better to be spared the shock in her lover’s face, at the sight of her.

  He will cease loving me now. Whatever love he’d imagined.

  By her bedside he sat, but not quietly. It was not possible for Andre Litovik to sit quietly for more than a few minutes. When nurses entered M.R.’s room, he interrogated them. What medications, what quantities of medications. He was brusque, bossy, comical. At the nurses’ station he learned the names of M.R.’s several doctors and these doctors he tried to contact for he had questions to ask them and he had much to say to them. And to M.R., whom he scolded as if she were, not an adult woman of forty-one, but a wayward and willful child: “This ridiculous job of yours! I warned you not to accept it! The University will grind you up as in a meat grinder, swallow you and excrete you and if you’re as passive a patient here, as you’ve been as ‘CEO,’ or have not anyone informed to intercede for you, you, you will die. These places are teeming with infections and the staff—the doctors especially—are too God-damned lazy to wash their hands.”

  She was trying not to laugh at Andre’s words, the slightest jolting of her body caused such pain.

  She was trying to keep her eyes open. Not to sink into sleep lapping just below the bed’s surface like black mud-muck.

  She was trying to speak to him, to move her lips that were parched, and cracked—Andre thank you for coming. Andre don’t leave me. Andre I am so frightened, so . . . tired. I love you.

  Often when she spoke in such a way, Andre seemed simply not to hear.

  This time, he squeezed her fingers in reply.

  He told her that whoever had admitted her to the hospital had requested no visitors except relatives and so he’d identified himself as a relative—“Litovik, an older cousin. Doctor Litovik, from Harvard.”

  Now she did laugh, wincing with pain.

  “D’you want me to contact your parents? Maybe they should know about this.”

  Numbly M.R. shook her head No! />
  “Aren’t they Christian Scientists?—They could pray for you. The shape you’re in, you could use all the help you can get.”

  M.R. tried to explain: not Christian Scientists, Quakers.

  “Whatever—Christians. The belief is, the Messiah has come and gone.”

  He was joking but she understood that he was upset, by the way in which he stared at her. They had known each other for nearly twenty years and in all those years he had not looked at her quite like this.

  Nor was it typical of Andre Litovik, to look at another person so closely, at close quarters. A chronic revulsion for his own species—a perverse sort of shyness, social awkwardness—had exiled him, he’d said, to the farthest reaches of the Universe, at an early age.

  So long and so far had Andre traveled, on obsessive and solitary journeys in the nighttime sky, his presence in a singular place, his physical being, exuded an air of surprise, whimsy. No astronomer—cosmologist—astrophysicist—can take the immediate world seriously, Andre had told M.R., even as he’d held her in his arms, and rubbed his rough face against hers: it just feels so fleeting.

  As if all things visible and tangible are but screens, or images on screens—if you reach out, your hand will go through them.

  If you reach out, your hand will dissolve to bones, dissolving flesh and evaporating blood.

  Andre’s skin was roughened, ruddy as scraped brick, as if in fact he’d been a mariner, on the high seas. His teeth so often bared in a grimacing grin were uneven, the color of stained piano keys. In his heavy-browed broad forehead—(a clear genetic link, Andre said, to his Cro-Magnon ancestors)—were curious dents and puckers and his hair was coarse and stiff as the quills of a wild creature. His eyes were gray-green, chill with frost or suddenly, unexpectedly crinkled with warmth, passion—you could not predict. When they’d first met Andre had been careful to tell her, as if to define the perimeters of their relationship from the start, that he was married and the father of a “difficult” son—the consequence of a profound and irreversible mistake he’d made in believing that he could map his life as he’d set out to map the Universe; he’d told her that he was further disqualified for reasonably normal human relations by a numbing coldness—“like ether”—that ran in his veins.

  Not 100 percent of the time, this “ether.” But some of the time.

  Naively she’d thought But I will change that!

  And often afterward she’d thought, both ruefully and defiantly I can love enough for both of us. More than enough.

  Nineteen years. In all that time he’d remained married, and a father—and a mariner in distant nebulae.

  Regions to which M.R. could not follow him. Regions from which he might return, following some indecipherable logic of his own need, to her.

  “Where the hell else did you think I’d be? Soon as I heard about my darling ‘M.R.,’ I’m here.”

  He remained with her until the hospital closed for visitors at 11 P.M. He spent the night in a motel near the hospital and in the morning returned at 9 A.M. bringing with him the New York Times from which he read passages to her, with extended commentary.

  How happy M.R. was, that Andre Litovik had come to her!

  Though still very tired, and easily confused. For it had seemed to her—from time to time during this visit—that her astronomer-lover was but a film, near-transparent, for all his animation and the heat of his skin, the bristling steel-colored hairs on his head, the low wide lined forehead, the wide dark nostrils like eye sockets and the way in which, at her bedside, he sucked up much of the oxygen in the room.

  Several times she opened her eyes—the man was still there.

  Several times he assured her—he would remain with her until she was out of the woods.

  They were walking together, in a forest—or rather, if you looked closely, they were walking in the idea or concept of a forest: for the trees were sparse and their foliage niggardly like a child’s drawing of a forest. With his myopia for things that were immediate and tangible—the curse, Andre liked to say, boastfully—of the theorist as distinct from the empiricist/pragmatist, Andre put out his hand to touch the bark of one of the trees and seemed not to notice that his hand passed through it.

  She laughed at him, the man so delighted and perplexed her.

  He was telling her something very complicated, as often he did. If she asked him about his work he would usually shrug and say it was too abstruse for her, too abstruse for him, and in any case it wasn’t going well; and in any case, if it were going well, it was probably misguided, misbegotten—he would wind up like one of his great cosmologist-mentors, who’d slipped so gradually into senile paranoid schizophrenia, it was “a very long time” before anyone noticed.

  Funny! M.R. laughed and winced.

  She opened her eyes. There was one of the nurses, rousing her—“This might pinch just a little, it’s a little little vein”—and whoever had been in the chair beside had gone.

  Newspaper pages scattered about the floor. And the chair shoved close to the bed.

  She was feeling better suddenly! She laughed, for how simple life was—she had only to stop thinking and her life would sweep back over her, buoy her aloft until she was safe onshore.

  “That man who was here—was there a man here? Where—”

  Barely could her parched lips manage these awkward words. Even as the nurse smiled at her asking please would she repeat her question there came Andre through the doorway—bull-necked, bull-shouldered, and his eyes fixed eagerly on her.

  “Hey. You’re awake. Damn time.”

  Definitely she was feeling better. Her fever had subsided, the jolting pain in her ear and the scraped/scratched sensation in her throat had faded, or nearly; she was able to eat some of whatever meal this was which was so unappetizing to Andre, he didn’t even taste it—which ordinarily Andre did, when they were eating together; sometimes eating off M.R.’s plate until there was very little remaining for her.

  Hey! Sorry! Did I really eat all this?

  And M.R. would laugh, for truly she didn’t mind. Truly!

  He’d harpooned her, he liked to say. Saw the strapping young Amazon with the braid down her back bicycling on Garden Street and he’d thought That is the girl for me.

  Except he hadn’t been young. Not as the girl was young. And he hadn’t been free. As he’d needed to be free.

  This tale so frequently told between them, the very words had worn smooth as stones. Nineteen years!

  In Earth-time, a considerable span to live through.

  In galactic-time, too minute to be measured.

  And another time opening her eyes: the man was not there.

  Yet still, the scattered newspapers, as well as a crumpled paper bag from a deli where Andre had bought sandwiches for himself, and the chair at an angle beside the bed; and there was the TV high on the wall, on mute, for he’d been watching closed-caption BBC news. And so she’d thought He has just stepped out of the room. He will be back.

  In the interim: cards, flowers.

  A continuous stream of wishes for a speedy recovery that made her frightened, so many knew.

  Frightened and resentful and ashamed: so many knew.

  But no visitors, for M.R. had a dread of visitors. Not even relatives—if she had relatives.

  Her eyes stared and squinted at the cards, many of which were affixed to cheery tinsel-wrapped potted plants with crimson cluster-flowers—the names of these flowers, Agatha would know—would have known. You have broken our hearts, I am not even sure if you are our daughter. Still we will always love you. That is God’s wish and that is our vow.

  He’d had a call, she knew.

  Or, he’d made a call. She knew.

  (It was not the first time. Nineteen years!)

  At the first he’d told her—he’d confided in her—in the way in which you might conf
ide in someone whom you didn’t—really—think would figure in your life. I am married not to a woman but to a domestic situation. I am married to the child thus to the mother of the child.

  And, plaintively, or defensively: You can’t divorce a child. At least, I can’t.

  After nineteen years the child was no longer a child but in fact thirty years old but in fact still a child—“difficult”—“brilliant”—“never satisfactorily diagnosed.”

  And there was the wife—also “difficult”—“brilliant”—a Russian-born translator of Gorky, Babel, Pasternak, Mandelstam—who suffered from mysterious ailments to which tentative diagnoses were affixed: chronic fatigue, anorexia/bulimia, bipolar disorder, intermittent rage and unremitting depression, envy and jealousy of her (professionally, sexually) successful husband.

  Because the husband isn’t faithful?—M.R. could never bring herself to ask.

  Because the husband is a prisoner of fidelity! A God-damned fucking martyr—Andre claimed.

  And now he was saying—(was this what the man was saying?)—(the woman sitting up in the hospital bed had to listen through a sudden fast-pulsing in her ears)—that he wasn’t certain how long he could remain with her right now.

  Right now.

  At this time.

  But maybe—another time . . .

  He’d hoped—and maybe he still could do this, or at least expedite it—to help her move from her on-campus residence to—wherever she intended to live. . . . For there were, in his life—obligations, commitments . . . Not just his domestic situation—of which by custom he rarely spoke—(and of which by custom M.R. had learned not to ask)—but he’d reserved observational time at Kitt Peak in early June, the plan had been to take two of his post-docs with him to Arizona for three weeks, this was the project he’d told M.R. about numerous times, he was sure—measuring distances via redshifts for twenty thousand bright galaxies. . . . Observatory time was very limited, and for the post-docs a crucial opportunity. . . .

  The way in which Andre spoke, mildly stammering, in a rush of words, shoulders hunched as in a strong wind and the wide low brow furrowed above eyes fixed upon her with a look of pained sincerity and regret, M.R. understood that yes, he’d certainly had a call from home; or, guiltily, he’d called home; and the “difficult” wife, or the “difficult” son, was summoning him back.