Talk Before Sleep (2 page)

S
o now it is ten-thirty in the morning, and Ruth is in the bathtub, and I am straightening out her bed. She has a white eyelet dust ruffle, white sheets with eyelet trim, a blue-and-white striped comforter, Laura Ashley. There are four fat goosedown pillows, each covered with beautiful embroidered pillowcases, white on white. There is a stack of magazines piled high on the floor and a collection of crystals on the bedside table: rose quartz, amethyst, and a clear white one with a delicate, fractured pattern running through it. They are not working. She is dying, though we don’t know when. We are waiting. She is only forty-three and I am
only forty-two and all this will not stop being surprising.

I hear her calling my name and I crack open the bathroom door. “Yes?”

“Could you come in here?” Her voice is a little shaky and I realize this is the first time I have heard her sound afraid.

I sit on the floor beside her, rest my arms along the edge of the tub to lean in close, though what I am thinking is that I ought to get in with her. She has used bubble bath and the sweet smell rises up warm and nearly palpable between us. Tahitian Ginger. The label on the bottle features happy natives who do not believe in Western medicine. The bubbles have mostly disappeared; I can see the outline of her body in the water. She is half swimming, turning slightly side to side, hips rising languidly up and down. Her breasts are gone.

“What’s up?” I say.

She squeezes her bath sponge over her head. She is almost bald, but not quite. Dark strands of hair cling to the bottom of her head and her neck. Duck fluff, we call it. I told her to shave her head and she’d look great, like a movie star, like a rock singer. It’s the latest rage, I told her. “Nah,” she said. “What’s left, I want to keep. It has sentimental value.”

“I was wondering what happens when I die,” she says now. “I was thinking, how are they sure? Are they really sure? I mean, what if I get buried alive?”

“They’re sure,” I tell her. “You sort of … shut down. Your heart stops, and your breathing. Certain reflexes disappear, you know, like the pupils in your eyes
don’t react.” She watches me, holding absolutely still, looking like a colorized sculpture of herself. I sigh, then add, “And you get cold, you get real cold, okay? Your skin doesn’t feel warm anymore. They’re absolutely sure.”

“Oh,” she says. “Okay. Just checking.” She is relieved; you can see it in the uncreasing of her forehead, in the loosening to normal of the area around her mouth. “Wash my back, will you?”

She sits up and rests her forehead on her raised knees. I bump the washcloth over newly revealed bones, the delicate scapulas, the orderly line of vertebrae. “I’m becoming exoskeletal,” she says, her voice muffled. “I’m turning into a lobster. Maybe when we die we go back incrementally. You know, a little to the sea, then on to the heavens.” She thinks a moment, then says, “I was just lying in here and I felt kind of tired and … weird, and then I thought, wait—is this it? I mean, how will I know?” She leans back, frowns. “Is that the same question I just asked? Am I making any sense? Do I keep asking the same goddamn question?”

I’d been making dinner. I had
The Oprah Winfrey Show
on the little kitchen TV. The phone rang and I wiped my hands on my apron and answered it and she said, “It’s in my brain.”

“No,” I say, “it’s not the same question. It’s different. First you wanted to know how
they’d
know; now you want to know how
you’ll
know. Different question entirely. You will know, though. You won’t be the same person you are now when it happens. You’ll be, I don’t know … wiser.”

“Okay.” She stands up, asks for a towel, tells me she’s done.

“I should think so,” I say. “You’ve been in there for an hour.”

“Have I? Jesus, I thought it was about five minutes.”

“That’s okay. I was having a good time waiting for you. I was reading your diary.”

“Find anything good?”

“The sex stuff. That’s good. But it’s all bullshit.”

“You wish.”

I help her into a nightgown: white, white-lace trim, thin strands of ribbon hanging down the front.

She climbs in bed, pulls the covers up. She is tired, so pale. But her blue eyes are still beautiful and her face such a perfect shape you could walk into the room and see her and first just be jealous.

“I suppose it could be tonight, couldn’t it?” she says. “God, it really could.”

I was with her, sitting in the corner of the examining room, while she read questions off her list. She was pushing to know exactly how and when. She’s that way: if she’d ever had to go to confession, she’d have torn down the curtain separating her and the priest. “Hey! Look at me when I’m talking to you,” she would have told him
.

Her oncologist was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a beautiful Italian silk tie and a gold Rolex watch. He was handsome and very sad, leaning up against the little sink in the room with his arms crossed over his chest and one leg crossed over the other, too. Obviously, this was too much for him. I think when he first met Ruth he fell in love with her and, guiltless, stayed there—though at an antiseptic distance Ruth regretted
.
Falling in love with her was a liability that came with being a man around her. Finally, he said, “All right, yes. It could be any time. Depending on how it happens. If it’s from brain metastasis, it could be at any time.”

Of course she has other options. Respiratory failure, say, from lung metastasis. Liver failure from the metastasis there. Think of those cartoons where people are run over by steamrollers and then get up and walk around. You’ll be seeing Ruth. She put a new message on her answering machine the other day—she thought the old one sounded too sad. I stood behind her and watched her do it, her back so straight. The only thing that revealed what was really happening is that one of her feet rapidly tapped the floor the whole time she was talking. “It’s me,” she said. “I can’t come to the phone right now. But leave me a message and probably you should make it a good one, okay? Okay, ‘bye.” She says “okay” all the time, Ruth. Before, we’d be making plans to go somewhere. “Okay, okay, so I’ll meet you there at seven, okay?” she’d say.

“Will you stay here tonight?” she asks now.

“Of course.” I hope my face doesn’t reflect any of the ambivalence I feel. Another night away. I haven’t paid bills. I need to call my mother. Joe and I haven’t had sex in over six weeks. I feel sometimes as if I’m opening a too-full closet and shoving something else in, then leaning against the door so it won’t burst open.

Later, when she is asleep, I’ll call home. “Please understand,” I’ll say.

Ruth pats the bed. “Here, take a load off. Should we watch a movie?”

I stretch out beside her. “I’d rather talk.”

“Okay,” she says. “But mostly you. I get too short of breath. It’s getting worse. Have you noticed?”

“Yes.”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“What should I talk about?” I ask.

“Me,” she says. “Tell me a story about me. If I seem to fall asleep, make sure I’m not dead. I think you have to call somebody if I am, right?”

“Right. The coroner.”

“Yes. And call Michael, too. You be the one to tell him. I don’t want his father to. He’ll fuck it up. But if I’m just sleeping, don’t get offended, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “All right: the story of Ruth. So to speak. Well, the first time I saw you, you really pissed me off.”

“You were jealous,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Everybody was. But also you were being a pain in the ass.”

“Exactly wrong,” she says. “You’re projecting again.”

“Exactly right,” I agree.

I
don’t like parties. I hate parties. They make me nervous and irritable and slightly nauseated. And they make me feel exposed in a terrible way, as if I’m walking around with the back of my dress missing and everybody knows but me. But of course I go to parties. You have to, sometimes, the way you have to go to the dentist. At a party is where I met Ruth.

She was sitting in a corner of the living room, surrounded by people, and she was saying things that were making them laugh. She was irritatingly beautiful: raven-haired, blue-eyed, neatly petite. She had perfect teeth and she was wearing expensive-looking boots with a gorgeous blue skirt and sweater. I’d heard about her, about how talented an artist she was, how interesting, how much fun. “I hate that woman,” I told my husband, pointing in her direction.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Ruth Thomas. Can’t stand her.”

“How do you know her?”

“I don’t. But I know about her. Can’t stand her.”

“So don’t talk to her,” he said, and I said fine, I wouldn’t. But when I went into the tiny downstairs bathroom to hide, she came bursting in the door.

“Oh, sorry!” she said, and started to leave. But then, seeing that I was sitting, legs crossed, on the closed lid of the toilet, drinking my martini, she stopped. “Are you—have you finished?”

“Finished what?”

“Do you need the toilet?”

“I’m sitting here,” I said.

“Yes, I can see that. However, you can sit a lot of places. Whereas someone who has to take a piss needs to sit right here, okay?”

I got up, started to squeeze past her. “You can have it back when I’m done,” she said. “This is the best place at this party.”

I waited outside, finished my drink. I heard a flush, then her voice saying, “You can come in now.” I waited for her to exit and when she didn’t, I went in
with her. She was washing her face at the sink, splashing cold water on herself. Obviously she didn’t worry about her mascara smearing. When she looked up, I saw why: she wasn’t wearing any. It wasn’t a good political statement, though, because she didn’t need any. “Hand me that towel, will you?” she asked, and I gave her a paper guest towel. “I hate these things,” she said. “Makes you feel they believe their guests are diseased.”

I shrugged. I was warming up to her a little. I’m afraid I like critical people when they rag on others because it makes me feel exonerated.

She threw the towel away, looked at it lying in the white wicker trash basket. “Jesus,” she said. “Little pink hearts!”

I extended my hand. “Ann Stanley.”

She shook it firmly. “Ruth Thomas.”

I held up my empty glass. “Would you like a martini?”

“I’ll mix, okay?” she said. “No one can make them like I do.”

I leaned against the kitchen counter, watching her while she made our drinks. She had a flask in her purse, a lovely silver thing filled with gin. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“A Christmas present from my husband,” she said. She nodded in the general direction of the living room. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “It was an attempt to bring us closer. See, we can now, at a moment’s notice, get drunk together. Isn’t that romantic?”

We sat at the kitchen table and got through the what-brings-you-here material. And then it was on to
movies. She asked if I’d seen
Sophie’s Choice
and I said no and she said I should, it was terrific, ripped your heart out and flung it onto the floor. “I’ll go with you and see it again,’” she said. “You should see it with a woman.”

My husband came into the kitchen, looked at me sitting there with Ruth. I gave him a slight raise of eyebrow, a tiny defensive shrug. He sat down and introduced himself, then had the good sense to leave.

“All right, how long have
you
been married?” she asked, sighing, and I knew we had a lot to talk about. I could forgive her good looks. She was capable of a scary kind of honesty I was ready for, although until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.