Marianne Rogoff

Word Count 890

James was out of touch for over a year after he died on the operating table. Learning this reason for his sudden disappearance makes me pay more attention to all the sirens I hear every day, in the distance then closer.

Back from the dead,  he informs me that a rogue blood infection has left him almost blind and without erections. He is pretty sure this is no way for a man to live. All he knew was that, in the middle of working on his brilliant screenplay, the whole right side of his body had seized with paralysis and the nerves of his spine experienced the kind of pain that some writers would call excruciating. Then he was in an ambulance, then prone and immobile on a hospital bed on wheels, then in the OR, spine cut apart, infrastructure rebuilt, nerves tranquilized, genitals catheterized, for days, weeks, months.

He heard voices: “Dead on arrival.” 

Voice in his head: Death is tranquil; I could stay right here. 

But during each moment of his medicated coma his body kept summoning the will to live, against that chorus of tranquility. He came-to, forty-two days later, himself, still in his body, seemingly grateful, his loving wife Sara at his side through all the gory details. 

This is the first I learn that he has a wife, for which he apologizes. 

He tells me that he feels ashamed living with her now. “She knows too much about the ugly intricacies of my inner anatomy.”

He wants to “reconnect” with me. 

“Do I look different?” he asks.

I look him over and think, Well, we all age a little in the course of a year, but yes, you do look different, can’t put my finger on it, but I like it. 

He appears less arrogant. His masculinity is present but there is no muscle tone and his pastel blue eyes, wide open, soulful, plead for me to answer the question (Do I look different?) by saying, “You look better than ever. You must be living well. Your karma must be awesome. What did you do to deserve to look so good?” 

His spine has been disassembled and put back together; he might go blind and he can barely walk.  

“Do I look different now?” he repeats.

He is assessing himself through my eyes, because I am as good as a stranger.

I go with, “Did you always have gray hair?”

He laughs. “Yeah, it’s been like this for a while. A little worse since I died.”

He’s more bent over, careful with his balance. He had to learn to walk again, literally, like a baby.

You totter, is what I want to say, but that is not the best word. 

“You seem sweeter,” I say, and consider whether this might be true.

He can barely stand and now I know that he’s married, and still, I am nearly willing to love him.

*

Yes, we meet again. I lean his way, the “other woman” I never thought I would ever be.

He barely knows me; for him, this is the sexy part. 

But then, next time he invites himself to my place I appear wifely in the way I offer him peppermint tea with honey and cover his lap with a blanket, then snuggle under it with him, my long legs draped over his, blanket on top of us both, sipping tea from sake cups on my couch. 

I picture him going home to his wife, who will look to him like the mistress now. Surprise! The wife greets him as if they are strangers, dressed in a silk kimono, nothing on underneath, candles, cold vodka, etcetera. With no hard-on James will have no idea what to do. The would-be infidel will just feel tired so he will go to sleep.

*

“Am I different now?” I ask.

“Stand up,” James says, “Let me look at you.”

We stand in my living room, facing each other like dance partners. The sun is going down and I have not turned on lamps; there is lingering daylight and leaves are dropping from tree branches all over town. I move my hands up under his green flannel shirt. We are standing in front of my big picture window on the top floor of my three-story building. Autumn outside is perfectly colorful, still-green treetops moistened by rain. James is taller than me and I like this, as I slide my hands under the shirt across the contours of his chest and back and shoulders. He is wearing shiny silver gym shorts and I position my hips to press my whole self against him, wrap him all the way up in my arms, his chin on my hair. 

That’s all we do, stand there in the semi-dark like that. Great moment, if no one thinks about anything else, everything else we might want from each other, from life.

“Am I different now?” I ask again.

Suddenly, James is pale, crumbling. 

“Are you okay?”

I drop my hands from under his shirt, walk him back to the couch, lay his body down, lay a blanket over him, look at him closely.

He is not okay.

9-1-1 and I want to go along in the ambulance but the person to call in case of emergency is the wife. He grasps my hand, still conscious, and tells me with his clear blue eyes to stay where I am. Don’t come any closer.

Marianne is the author of the Pushcart-nominated story collection Love Is Blind in One Eye, the memoir Silvie’s Life, and numerous travel stories, short fictions, essays, and book reviews.