Today Will Be Different(60)
A stage manager had arranged the choir on risers. People were muttering, looking for Joe.
“Our marriage and me finding God?” Joe said. “They’re not connected.”
“Prince of Peace!” a voice said from the stage. “We need one more.”
“What if I convince you they are?” I said to Joe.
He thought about it for a moment, which made his answer all the more devastating. “It would make no difference.”
In an exit worthy of Christ himself, Joe stepped through the plant wall and vanished.
I was alone, pulsing with sorrow and bewilderment.
Humor hadn’t worked. Smarts hadn’t worked. Brinkmanship, nastiness, insight, self-criticism, desperation, threats: none had worked. The Trick had failed.
The Trick had never failed.
I took a seat.
The stage manager placed Joe in the back row, one in from the right.
I had an almost physical reaction that Joe hadn’t been given a spot of greater prominence. Granted, I didn’t know who these other people were. But he was Joe Wallace.
My husband. As soon as he wakes up, he jumps right out of bed, showers, and gets fully dressed. Tucks in his shirt, puts on a belt. He never steps out of a cab until the driver has finished telling his story. We still sleep in a queen-size bed because our first night in a new king he said he felt too far away, and we sent it back. He does the Friday and Saturday crosswords in pen. He’s my answer man. How many cups in a quart? How long would it take to drive to Yellowstone? What’s Zaire called now, or is it called Zaire now but used to be something else? Even better? He puts up with my crap without seeing it as crap.
A young couple stood to the side. The man strummed a guitar; his wife conducted the chorus.
Morning has broken like, the first morning, Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Joe’s face grew serious as he began to sing. Joe the choir boy, returned to the flock…
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning, Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.
A spotlight hit the group. Someone from the rafters adjusted it.
That still August day on Violet and David’s lawn. The fawn sand, the bottle-green ocean. Joe in a navy suit with a grape-purple tie and a snowy gardenia in his lapel. The vow I took, looking into Joe’s eyes with Ivy at my side, was to help him become a better version of himself.
This was the best version of Joe. I saw it with my own eyes. I’d always assumed his becoming that better person would involve me.
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven, Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Perhaps it was the pool of light. Perhaps it was Joe’s closed eyes. Perhaps it was his blossoming smile. Perhaps it was that Joe was literally on a higher plane than I was. But a river of light seemed to flow over his head; it was made of love, and Joe could dive in anytime he chose, with or without me.
Praise for the sweetness, of the wet garden, Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
My eyes pooled with tears. My lungs were butterfly wings. A seed had been sown in the pit of my belly. It grew speedily, blackly, like a Fourth of July snake pellet, a grotesque crinkly thing, filling me up something terrible. I had to look away.
On the empty chair beside me, sticking out of my purse, was my folded-up “Skunk Hour.”
a mother skunk with her column of kittens
swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
I looked up. The choir had shifted, so Joe was blotted out by these others.
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning, Born of the one light Eden saw play.
The African American woman with the purple blouse? She too could have lost her mother to lung cancer when she was nine. The man with the Michael Landon hair? His sister might have mystifyingly turned against him too. Simon? His father could have been a drunk, abandoning him and his brother to fend for themselves, neither knowing when he’d be back, if he’d be back.
And Joe? We had a child together.
Praise with elation, praise every morning, God’s re-creation of the new day.
Joe, who will not scare.
“How dare you!” I shrieked, hurtling over chairs, knocking over coffees, sending purses tumbling to the floor.
“This isn’t a fair fight!” I said. “Leave me for another woman, don’t leave me for Christ!”
I tripped on the stage steps and crawled the rest of the way. The choir, the stage crew, the guy hanging in the air on a rope ladder, the man holding a foam-core happy person: they all froze.
“Where’s the man I bought?” I said, rising to my feet. “I bought a surgeon who thinks for himself and knows things! I bought Joe the Lion. I didn’t buy some comfort-seeking sissy boy!”
As I charged Joe, I heard the squawk of a walkie-talkie.
I turned. My friend the security guard.
The words: PLEASE DO NOT PET ME.
Before the dog clamped down on my forearm, I remember thinking, That’s something you rarely see… a German shepherd flying through the air.
I opened my eyes.
I was in one of Joe’s examination rooms in a padded reclining chair. Beside me was a blue paper screen through which my left arm poked. Joe did this for patients he didn’t put under general so they wouldn’t look down and reflexively move their hands during surgery.