Just Like Suicide pt. 11

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Twenty Two
The nurse very clearly heard him say, “I am a monster.” He was sitting on a hard metal chair next to her bed, cupping her hand in his, as he waited for her to slip into death. Their daughter, Lisa, had to be forced out the door to attend a recital by her young son, his first professional violin performance. Larry had told her that he would sit with Doris and she should go be a good mom and join her family. Doris wouldn’t want to be remembered by her grandkids as the woman who made their mother miss this important concert.
Every few minutes he would shift his hands, stroking her face through the thicket of tubes, murmuring to her. The cadence made the nurse think he was reciting poetry but the only words she heard clearly were “I am a monster.”
The nurse wondered why. Surely he didn’t hold himself responsible for her cancer?
He stared at his wife the entire time, blinking as seldom as he could for fear of missing her last breath. He had to lean almost on top of her to hear. Even just inches away, he saw and felt more than heard each small gasp, barely perceptible with the background noise of pings from the machines attached to her and the incessant announcements on the intercom. He later wrote, “I watched the pinks turn into mauves to ochers and then finally to chalk, all of the palest hue. So pale for a woman who always prided herself on having the perfect tan. How quickly that vanity vanished.” Later in the chapter he wrote, “I understood Monet, using the preoccupation with colors, the alert recording of every nuance to keep his wife’s death at a professional distance. As long as I could see the subtle shifts, she could not leave, she could not die. Yet it wasn’t as simple as this.” Critics would later describe this scene as the best thing he’d ever written.
“He was always so gentle with her,” the anonymous nurse was quoted in the tabloid. “Maybe he did have affairs, maybe he was an awful husband, but he was there constantly, always talking to her, always holding her hand. That counts for something.”
That night as their prodigy grandson played Mozart in his first public concert, Doris Cotter died in her drug-induced sleep with her husband holding her hand. Doris had wanted to die at home surrounded by her family and the art she loved, but when she lapsed into unconsciousness, Larry called an ambulance over Lisa’s objections. Doris wandered in and out of consciousness for a long week before this death, filled with drugs to reduce the pain.
When the machines attached to her finally stopped pinging and rang out a solid tone, the monitors were straight lines of green, he did not cry, did not call out for nurses and doctors. He simply sat there watching the last of the color leave her face. He stood by the bed as the doctor pronounced her dead, wiggling his toes because his foot had fallen asleep during his long vigil, stood there until the nurse asked him if she should call somebody for him. He shook his head no and left for home.
As he pulled out of the parking structure, the streets in every direction were clogged with cars. Apparently it had rained heavily while he was inside and the water had backed up, flooding the lower lanes, as it always does. He felt impervious to the bustle, impatience and rage around him. For once, he was a courteous driver.
He drove slowly up the narrow road, hydroplaning a bit on one curve, and eased into the driveway. He sat for a while in the car with the windshield wipers madly pushing rain from one side to another and then parked in the garage, the door slow to open. It seemed fitting, he thought, to enter through her kitchen. It was her house, filled with all the things she bought. She was a homemaker, she had told the interviewer from the architectural magazine years ago, proudly showing off the space, and this was the home she made for them. It was her home literally. In one bout of guilt, he signed the title over to her, intimating that he did it for tax purposes. She had surprised him by accepting it without hesitation.
On the counter by the dining room door was the twenty pound soapstone walrus from Alaska she’d picked up while he was researching for his third novel. She always patted the head as she entered the kitchen, leaving a rich patina of hand lotion to darken the soft grey stone along its back. He shook his head. Actually, while she shopped for it, he was exploring his first assistant, an intern who had thought his first two novels were so incredibly wonderful and strong. He couldn’t remember her name or her face, just the fact she had long slender legs which she could stretch back, hooking her heels behind her head, giving him an interesting entry angle. While she wasn’t his first lover after he married Doris, she was his first prolonged affair. He really should at least remember more of her facial features than her heavily plucked eyebrows. After all, she worked for him for the eight months it took to write the novel. What he remembered best now was the silky texture of her long legs and his descriptions of their sexual encounters embellished in the novel, details which helped catapult the sales to number one. His first best seller. Doris got the walrus and later a lovely emerald necklace with a bouquet of pale green orchids. Over the years, she accumulated jewelry boxes full of expensive baubles, a collection of expensive paintings, two houses.
He really was a monster.

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