Bright Lights, Big City

THE NIGHT SHIFT

Michael is hungry and you are thirsty; a foray is proposed and seconded. All of uptown seems to be headed downtown for Saturday night. Everyone on the sidewalk looks exactly seventeen years old and restless. At Sheridan Square a ragged figure is tearing posters off the utility poles. He claws at the paper with his fingernails and then stomps it under his feet.

"What is he, political?" Michael says.

"No, just angry."

You walk down into the Lion's Head, past all the framed dust jackets of all the writers who have ever gotten drunk here, heading for the back room where the lights are low. When you sit down, James, long-haired and black, jumps up on the table; the house cat.

"I never really liked her much, to tell you the truth," Michael says. "I thought she was fake. If I ever see her I'm going to rip her lungs out."

You introduce Michael to Karen, the waitress, and she asks you how the writing is going. You order two double vodkas. She tosses down a couple of menus and ducks around the corner.

"At first," you say, "I couldn't believe she left me. Now I can't believe we got married in the first place. I'm just starting to remember how cold and distant Amanda was when Mom got sick. She seemed to resent Mom's dying."

"Do you think you'd have married her if Mom hadn't been sick?"

You have made such a point of not dwelling on the incidents associated with your mother's death, almost denying that it was a consideration at all. You were living with Amanda in New York and marriage wasn't high on your list of priorities, although on Amanda's it was. You had your doubts about in sickness and in health till death do us part. Then your mother was diagnosed and everything looked different. Your first love had given notice of departure and Amanda's application was on file. Mom never said it would do her heart good to see you married, but you were so eager to please her you would have walked through fire, given your right and left arms… You wanted her to be happy and she wanted you to be happy. And, in the end, you might have confused what she wanted with what Amanda wanted.

Before it happened you couldn't believe you would survive your mother's death. Torn between thinking it was your duty to throw yourself oft her pyre and her wish that you should not waste time mourning, you knew no reaction that satisfied both conditions. You spent so much time in anticipation that when her death came you didn't know what you felt. After the funeral it seemed as if you were wandering around your own interior looking for signs of life, finding nothing but empty rooms and white walls. You kept waiting for the onset of grief. You are beginning to suspect it arrived nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda's departure.

Michael orders the shepherd's pie. You wave the menu away. You talk about the past and the present. You ask about the twins, Peter at Amherst and Scan at Bowdoin. Having already discussed your travails at the magazine, including your recent ferret gambit, you ask Michael about his business-restoring old houses-and he tells you it's going well. He's working on a derelict carriage house in New Hope.

"I'm going to hire out some grunt work. Maybe you'd be interested. At least it's a change of scene. Say, three or four weeks of work."

You tell him you'll think about it. You are surprised that he would offer. Michael has long considered you incompetent. By the time he was twelve he was bigger than you. He shaped an ethic of engagement with the physical world under which your aptitudes and accomplishments were suspect.

You drink and talk. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede. You and Michael and Peter and Scan and Dad stand against the world. The family has been fucked over, but you're going to tough it out. Forget that slut Amanda. The doctors who couldn't save your mother's life and wouldn't tell you what was going on. Clara Tillinghast. The priest who, at your mother's deathbed, said, "We've seen some beautiful deaths with cancer."

After many drinks Michael says, "I need a little air." On the way back to the apartment, you stop in on a friend who happens to have a spare half for the low, low price of sixty dollars. You feel that you are basically through with this compulsion. This time you just want to celebrate crossing the hump. You are a little drunk and you want to keep going, keep talking.

You should have told us, Michael says, sprawled out on the couch in your apartment. "I mean, what's a family for?" He bangs his hand on the coffee table for emphasis. "What's family for?"

"I don't know. You want to do a few lines?" Michael shrugs. "Why not?" He watches as you get up and take the mirror from the wall. "What was bad for me," he says, "is at first I'd see her the way she was toward the end, all wasted and thin. But now I have this image I keep with me. I don't know when it was, but I came home from school one day-this was after you'd gone to college-and Mom was out back raking leaves. It was October or something and she was wearing your old ski team jacket, which was about six sizes too big." He stops. His eyes are closed and you think maybe he has passed out. You shake some coke out onto the mirror. Michael opens his eyes. "I remember the way the air smelled, the way Mom looked in that jacket with leaves in her hair, the lake in the background. That's the way I remember her now. Raking leaves in your old ski team jacket."

"I like that," you say. You can imagine it. She wore that jacket for years. Once you finished high school you didn't want any part of it and she took it up. You'd never really given it a thought, but now you feel good about it.

You cut eight lines. Michael begins to snore. You call his name and then you get up and gently shake his shoulder. He turns his face into the cushions. You do two of the lines and sit back in the chair. A year ago tonight you were up until daybreak, sitting beside your mother's bed.

You thought you would faint when you came home the last time, three days before she died, and saw the ravaged form. Even the smile had shifted. After months of waffling, the doctors had admitted there was not much they could do, and agreed she could stay at home if the family would attend her constantly. When you got home, Michael and your father, who had traded twelve-hour shifts for a week, were exhausted. For the last seventy-two hours, you took the night shift, midnight to eight. You gave her the morphine injection every four hours, and tended as best you could to the symptoms of the disease.

When you first saw her, even after Michael had warned you, you wanted to run away. But the horror passed, and you were glad you could do something for her. You were glad you could be with her. But for those last hours you might never have really known her. The last few nights she was not sleeping at all, so you talked.

"Have you ever tried cocaine," she asked that last night.

You didn't know what to say. A strange question from a mother. But she was dying. You said you had tried it.

"It's not bad," she said. "When I could still swallow they were giving me cocaine with morphine. To ease the depression. I liked it."

You mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, who got loopy on two drinks.

She said the morphine was good for the pain but made her drowsier than she wanted to be. She wanted to be clear. She wanted to know what was happening.

Then she said, "Do young men need sex?"

You asked what she meant by need.

"You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don't have much time and there's so much I've always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated."

You always thought your mother was the last Puritan.

"Have you slept with a lot of girls?"

"Mom, really," you said.

"Come on. What's to hide? I wish I'd known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could've gotten to know each other a lot better. There's so much we don't know."

"Okay, there have been some girls."

"Really?" She lifted her head up from the pillow.

"Mother, I'm not going into details."

"Why not?"

"It's, well, embarrassing."

"I wish people wouldn't waste their time being embarrassed. I wish I hadn't. So tell me what it's like."

You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.

"Do you really enjoy it," she asked.

"Sure. Yeah, I do."

"You've slept with girls you're not in love with. Isn't it different if you're in love?"

"Sure, it's better."

"How about Sally Keegan? Did you sleep with her?"

Sally Keegan was your high school prom date. "Once."

"I thought so." This verification of her intuition pleased her. "What about Stephanie Bates?"

Later, she said, "Are you happy with Amanda?"

"Yes, I think so."

"For the rest of your life?"

"I hope so."

"I was lucky," Mom said. "Your dad and I have been happy. But it hasn't always been easy. One time I thought I was leaving him."

"Really?"

"We were human." She adjusted her pillow and winced. "Foolish." She smiled.

The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why. You talked about your first day of school. You cried and clutched her leg.

You even remembered how her plaid slacks felt, the i scratchiness on your cheek. She sent you off to the bus – she interrupted here to say she wasn't much happier than you were – and you hid in the woods until you saw the bus leave and then went home and told her you had missed it. So Mom drove you to school, and by the time you got there you were an hour late. Everybody watched you come in with your little note, and heard you explain that you missed the bus. When you finally sat down you knew that you would never catch up.

"Don't you think everyone feels a little like that?" Then Mom told you she knew all along about the hot-water-on-the-thermometer trick, but let you pretend you were sick whenever you really seemed to need it. "You were a funny boy. An awful baby. A real screamer." Then she grimaced and for a moment you thought it was the memory of your screaming.

You asked her if she wanted the morphine and she said not yet. She wanted to talk, to be clear.

The window behind the headboard showed a glimmer of gray. In the other rooms your three brothers, your father, and your Aunt Nora were sleeping. Amanda was in New York.

"Was I worse than Michael and the twins?"

"Much worse." She smiled as if she had just conferred a great distinction upon you. "Much, much worse." The smile twisted into a grimace and she clutched the sheet in her fingers.

You begged to give her some morphine. The spasm passed and you saw her body relax.

"Not yet," she said.

She told you how unbearable you were as an infant, always throwing up, biting, crying through the night. "You've never been much good at sleeping, have you? Some nights we had to take you out in the car and drive around to get you to sleep." She seemed pleased. "You were something else."

She winced again and groaned. "Hold my hand," she said. You gave her your hand and she gripped it harder than you would have imagined she could. "The pain," she said.

"Please let me give you that shot."

You couldn't stand to see her suffer much longer, felt you were about to collapse. But she told you to wait.

"Do you know what this is like?" she said. "This pain?"

You shook your head. She didn't answer for a while. You heard the first bird of morning.

"It's like when you were born. It sounds crazy, but that's exactly what it's like."

"It hurt that much?"

"Terrible," she said. "You just didn't want to come out. I didn't think I'd live through it." She sucked breath through her teeth and gripped your hand fiercely. "So now you know why I love you so much." You were not sure you understood, but her voice was so faint and dreamy that you didn't want to interrupt. You held her hand and watched her eyelids flicker, hoping she was dreaming. Birds were calling on all sides. You didn't think you had ever heard so many birds.

In a little while she started to talk again. She described a morning in a two-room apartment over a garage in Manchester, New Hampshire. "I was standing in front of a mirror as if I'd never really seen my own face before." You had to lean down close to hear. "I felt strange. I knew something had happened, but I didn't know what."

She drifted off. Her eyes were half-open but you could see she was looking somewhere else. The bedroom window was filling with light.

"Dad," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Mom?"

She was silent for a time and then, suddenly, her eyes were wide open. Her grip relaxed. "The pain is going away," she said.

You said that was good. The light seemed to have entered the room all at once.

"Are you still holding my hand," she asked.

"Yes. I am."

"Good," she said. "Don't let go."