Necessary Lies(20)
Spring is late in Montreal. The ground is still frozen, and the wind makes Anna shiver. William has been dead for thirty-six days and she has felt the weight of every single one of them. At his grave she crosses herself, just as she crossed herself at the hospital. Wieczne odpoczywanie racz mu da Panie, she whispers — grant him eternal rest, Oh Lord — the only prayer she remembers for the rest of the soul.
“But he was always so strong!” He played tennis, he swam, he lifted weights. She hadn’t imagined all that. There were proofs, indisputable, solid. His tennis rackets in the closet, his exercise bike still standing in their bedroom.
“There was nothing we could do. It was a quick, merciful death,” the doctor said. “Like a stroke of lightning … Believe me, I know.” He was a young man, nervous, unsure of how to talk to her, where to look. He couldn’t have done that sort of thing too many times, she thought, not enough to develop a procedure, to detach himself from death. “Please, believe me.”
She wished it for William, such an absence of pain. In a private hospital room on the first floor, she had leaned over his body hidden under white sheets and a blue blanket, trying not to look at the livid tips of his fingers, the purple frames around his nails. These were the signs of struggle, and she wanted to remember the peaceful stillness in his face.
Death made him look older. It must be the lips, she thought, frozen into a rueful smile, so cold when she kissed them. “Why have you done it, baby?” she murmured her reproach, smoothing his silver hair, half-hoping for a reply, for his eyes to open and wink at her, delighted at the success of this incomprehensible joke.
When the doctor took hold of her wrist, to check her pulse, she just kept staring at the assortment of objects in his little office. A jar with cotton pads, another full of tongue depressors, a box of latex gloves with one half pulled, a model of a human ear with the red and blue cords representing veins and arteries. She registered it all, but hazily, as if an invisible cottony gauze was thrown between her and the world. Outside the narrow window of the doctor’s office, a woman in a pink dress walked by, her head crowned with an unruly mop of dreadlocks, a folded cardigan over her arm. Stopping, she looked around as if deciding where to go, her soft, overweight body wobbling on the pointed heels of her black shoes.
“I didn’t know,” Anna said. “I didn’t notice anything was wrong.”
She had missed the signs of danger. On their last evening together she let her mind drift away, her eyes grow heavy. What was she thinking of? Laundry. The croissants she would buy in the morning. Student essays she would have to mark. She could have looked at him, instead, at his chin pressing the violin to his neck, at his right hand so perfectly in tune with the vibrations of the strings. His fingers, she often thought, possessed their own intelligence, quite separate from him, inexplicably fast, free of false moves. It wasn’t just the violin; he was like that with everything he touched. Rolling up phyllo pastry, fixing the cylinder pins and vibrating teeth of the musical boxes he brought home from auctions to restore. “Little miracles,” she used to think, but even miracles wane and pale with time.
She liked the piece he played that night, Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, an ancient dance, its slow and solemn melody transformed each time it is repeated. But, unlike his, her mind could never stay long with the sequence of sounds alone. It was slipping away, unaware of what was already taking place. For there was still time to get him to hospital, to keep him with her. If only for a few more years, months, or even days.
“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.
She nodded.
“He flinched as he was getting up in the morning,” Anna’s voice cracked when she started to speak and she swallowed to soften the lump in her throat. “Then he rubbed his left shoulder.” The numbness that started around her heart began to spread. It crawled down her spine, to the soles of her feet. Like fear, it made her shudder.
“It’s nothing,” William had said, annoyed by the concern in her voice. She didn’t have to mother him all the time. He could take care of himself.
“It’ll go away.”
She believed him. He was so proud of his own strength. He had never had the flu in his life, never knew what back pain was. He could still beat younger men at tennis. She went out to do the shopping, took her time chatting with Pauline, her neighbour, who was shovelling snow next door, her morning exercise, she said, her cheeks rosy from the cold.
Back home she didn’t suspect anything. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and baked apples, and she thought that William got tired of waiting for her and must have warmed a slice of pie in the microwave. She opened it and the pie was there, forgotten, enveloped in a shroud of plastic wrap. This by itself was not unusual. When he was composing, William would often leave things mid-way. He didn’t like to be interrupted. “By anyone,” he had told her once and she had learned to deflect telephone calls, avoid stepping on a squeaking board.
The kettle was still hot. His mug was beside it with a tea bag steeping inside. She put a brown paper bag filled with groceries on the kitchen counter and only then she noticed that the door to his study was half opened. That was unusual. “William?” she asked softly, half expecting an angry grunt of warning, but he didn’t answer. “Your tea is getting cold, Darling,” she said softly, and started unpacking the brown paper bag as quietly as she could. Cold cuts and cheeses went on the top shelf of the refrigerator, red peppers on the bottom. She was still in her coat, her purse over her arm. He would laugh, if he saw her like that. “Why can’t you ever finish one thing before starting another?” he would ask, and help her take off her coat.