Chapter 3. An Afternoon and a Morning
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The day after Thanksgiving Arthur had an appointment at the Family Practice Clinic at the University. The doctor was going to carve a basal cell carcinoma off his right arm, a routine procedure, and Arthur also intended to ask him about his still swollen leg. Lee walked with him the six blocks to the clinic. Their past two nights had been dreary. Last night he had touched her tentatively, falteringly, and then, undriven, his hand had lain still on her breast. He had tried again to let desire kindle but again had drifted away. He thought his tentativeness must drive her mad.
"You make me feel unsexed," she had said this morning. "Undesirable."
"I know,” he said. “I'm sorry."
“You know?”
“I believe you, I was afraid I did. I don’t know why I'm acting like this.”
“Is it Rusty?” she said.
“I don’t think so, Lee. I don’t think it’s anything about you. I just know it sucks. I can’t think of a thing that either one of us can do to snap me out of it.”
True? Not quite. He knew that his cannabis abstinence might be a factor in his and Lee’s difficulties, that a few hits before bed might dissipate his moodiness and let them make love. He wasn't smoking because he had been sick and thought not smoking helped his recovery, but his healthful refusal carried risk. He also knew that he seemed angry at Lee. Was he? Was it her relationship with Rusty? He really didn’t think so but he knew he might be wrong, was not so foolish as to believe he truly understood himself. If he were wiser would he have his chart done, see what the stars might say?
“Oh Babe," Lee said. She hugged him and rolled out of bed.
Arthur's doctor at the clinic was in his late twenties, bright, interested, and thorough. He had finished stitching Arthur’s arm, on which he’d done a poor job though he was usually quite skillful, and he had no idea what was what with Arthur's leg. He, Arthur, and Lee had chatted and then Lee’s mind had drifted and she’d been abstractedly enjoying the doctor's dark good looks, not listening, when she heard Arthur say, ". . .sperm."
''What about it?" the doctor asked.
"Well," said Arthur, "if I ejaculated, which I haven't, don’t--but I'm always catheterized--would my sperm, do you think, be viable?"
"It could be tested. And if you aren't ejaculating because of the catheter, the sperm could be going into your bladder and be recoverable."
"And then put in me?" asked Lee.
"If that's what you want, yes," the doctor said. "I have a urologist friend I could call."
"Honey, you're wild," Lee said excitedly when the doctor left them alone. Arthur hadn’t planned to ask about his sperm and had felt no emotional response to the doctor's answer. He grinned at Lee but knew that his smile was a mask behind which he was concealing both confusion and the anger that dismayed him.
When the doctor returned a few minutes later he said, addressing Lee, "Take out the catheter. Use a vibrator at the base of his penis, and come back and see me." He masturbated in the lavatory after Lee and Arthur left, came, and washed his hands.
Lee glowed in the afternoon sun as she and Arthur wended their way between the hospital buildings toward Adams Street. She wanted to use a vibrator on Arthur, soon. Arthur hid that he was fighting back tears. She could feel herself and Arthur coming together again, and she was thankful. Soon Rusty would be gone to Mexico with Bjorn and life would return to normal!
“Would you like a baby?” she said. “With me?”
“We can barely touch each other. We're hardly talking!”
Each was shocked by his tone's hostility. He had brought the subject up; how would he have liked her to respond?
“But . . . ,” she said, and said no more.
“I know. I brought it up, not you. And now I can’t talk about it. I’m not being fair." He was ashamed and swiped at his eyes; her brief excitement was gone. “I don’t know about trying to take the catheter out for very long,” he said. Neither Arthur nor the doctor he had just seen had ever heard of autonomic dysreflexia, but Arthur knew that his catheter changes were uncomfortable and that leaving the catheter out even a minute more than usual markedly increased the likelihood the discomfort would become actual pain. Home, neither he nor Lee spoke of experimenting with a vibrator, but they did soon seem easier with one another and, though again that night they did not make love, Lee imagined the distance between them was diminished.
The next morning Lee had Arthur up in his chair by eight; they were in the sunlit living room and she was squatting on top of the steamer trunk talking about the annual Street Fair, the final day of which was today. She was happy; he felt that he was about to cry.
“I’m miserable babe,” he said.
She was stunned; she had thought last night that the worst between them might have passed. Arthur cried at intervals as they talked, but he was honestly trying very hard to communicate, and as he tried his spirits began to lift. As he talked, her spirits fell. Who was this man? What was happening? What had happened?
"I don't know what we are anymore," he said. "Are we in love? Why aren't we making love? Are we roommates? If we were 'just roommates' and I expected nothing of either of us, it might be easier. But I feel like we should act some certain undefined way towards one another, and we aren't." She wanted him to be quiet, stop talking. "Maybe we should split up," he said.
She felt punched.
"But we can't," she said. "Who would take care of you?"
"We could arrange it."
"People think I'm bad enough now without that," she said.
"Fuck 'em," he said. "We love each other, we trust each other. Anyway, they'd understand.
"It might," he said, "even be fun to split up."
Rusty wasn’t the problem, Arthur thought, but he also thought Lee loved Rusty more than she knew, might, if she let herself, even find she was in love with him. It now seemed to Arthur that he believed she was; he didn't think she knew it yet and didn’t know exactly when or why he had decided it was so, but he thought that if she could be whole-heartedly with Rusty she would still be sad but also very very happy. He felt she would feel set free, was sure of it, and was glad that he felt no self pity. He also thought of himself being single, driven by singleness, a sperm seeking salvation in an egg. He had played the egg the entire decade between his accident and Lee’s approach, but his time with her had changed him. He thought of the barroom and wondered, not without accompanying guilt, if unbeknownst to himself he wished to be uncoupled.
"Fun?!” she said, and now there were tears in her eyes.
They talked two hours. It was not fun. As they talked they moved to the kitchen. Lee opened the kitchen door and sat on the ramp down to the yard and Arthur sat in the open doorway. Each cried, hurt, and tried unsuccessfully not to hurt the other. At least, Arthur thought, by talking we're making love, trying to be good and to understand.
A bit past 10 Lee went into the bathroom to take a shower. Arthur buzzed into the bedroom, found his shirt, sweater, and hat, put them on his raised extended legrests, and returned to the open kitchen door. He positioned his chair with its front wheels at the top of the 8-foot long, 3½-foot wide ramp; made sure he was centered, and hit the power. The ramp was neither as long nor as wide as would have been ideal, but it served. When the chair slid to the right, he pushed left on the throttle to arrest the skid; it slid further toward the edge, and further, but then the wheels caught and carried him back toward the center. He skidded to a full stop at the bottom and then headed out of the yard and into the street. He had never before taken to the street alone, and his unannounced and sudden exit was melodramatic, but he hadn't wanted to stay and wait idly for Lee to come out of the shower and help him. He drove to the corner and took a left onto Tyndall Avenue. He wanted to be out of sight on Helen Street, which paralleled Adams, by the time Lee came to the door and looked for him.
He sang dispiritedly to himself as he rolled toward the Fair, which would be packed with people. Once there, he scarcely looked at the booths up and down the middle of the avenue. He had been so involved with his own unhappiness that he had not realized how badly giving tongue to it would make Lee feel. She had been crying as she'd left the room to take her shower. Her last words had been, "I thought it was good between us last night but now I know how wrong I was." She whom he loved and needed most had been happy, his effort to hide his ongoing moodiness successful; she had been happy and he had hurt her and driven her away.
At the Fair he soon met Jan, his lover the previous spring.
"I have so much work to do on myself," she said, "it seems I'll never be ready to help anyone else--but, helpful or not," and she nodded at the stage in front of them, "I wish I could do that."
They were watching three women belly dance and Arthur smiled, but he found the dancers dull. No woman he had seen this morning had interested him, which was unusual, and, while its unusualness did interest him, he remained glum. He wanted to be alone; he wanted to be in love with Lee.
"Dancing like that would help me," Jan said.
He left Jan, drove about a block through the crowd, and stopped to listen to a band playing blue grass; he felt again that he might cry. He looked for Lee, not caring if he found her but unable to think of doing anything else. By the time he got home she, as he expected, had left, and after reading a few chapters of Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt he went to a local grocery store and bought lunch, something else he hadn’t done before. He was used to a lot of help, needed nearly as much as he got.
It was late afternoon when, as he was returning from lunch, he saw Lee in front of him. His heart lifted and he shouted; she heard him and turned to wait. She had looked for him at the Fair and bought him a ceramic bowl. She could not believe that he had said it might be fun to split up.
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover