Joseph Caldwell: Lazarus Rising

The flesh of the leg had begun to warm from the friction. To give it a chance to cool, Johnny said, “Now the other one. ” The calf began to unknot. Johnny continued his rubbing, but more gently now, up, down, from the ankle to just below the knee , feeling the smooth skin, the soft flesh.

“Better,” Dempsey said.

“You’re sure?”

She smiled. “I never lie unless it’s convenient.” She lifted her foot from his shoulder, moved the leg out to the side, then slowly lowered the foot onto the floor. “Thanks,” she said. “You did good.”

Johnny put his hands on her lap. “I think I’d better stick around.”

“Why? I’m cured.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“Then watch.” Dempsey slid sideways on the chair, got up and started walking toward her worktable at the other end of the loft, where she’d already laid out the paint tubes she expected to use that morning. With her head held high, her arms loose at her sides, she walked like a model on the runway making an exaggerated display of her wares—in this case a terrycloth bathrobe. Slowly she moved her head from side to side as if to acknowledge the spectators gaping along the runway, favoring them all with more than just a profile.

She was being stubborn; she was being dishonest. She would contradict Johnny at any cost: she would make her point no matter what degree of pain she might have to endure. Johnny would have to relent; he would have to accept Dempsey’s claims of full recovery. But when he prepared himself for the exasperation he knew would come, when he’d made himself ready to accept defeat, the expected annoyance failed to arrive. Instead there had come a stab of pity that sent its ache from the bones of his toes to the back of his skull. A rush of love would weaken him, and for a moment he feared he might have a seizure. He might fall to the floor: he might writhe and twitch. He might mutter the gagged words of sorrow that he could never speak in his conscious state. But he steadied himself instead against the back of the chair where Dempsey had been sitting, took two short breaths, and said, “All right. I’m convinced.” He picked up his hat from the table, gave the medal on the ribbon around his neck the obligatory brush with his sleeve, put the hat on his head, tapped it into position, straightened the visor, and flexed his knees as if to demonstrate to himself that he was capable of locomotion.

When he was leaving the loft, Dempsey was carefully and with the utmost control squeezing on to the pane of glass she used for a palette some paint, the color of which he couldn’t see.

Seated in his pew, Johnny thought of the early days of his return to Dempsey, to living with her again in the loft when not at the firehouse. He had expected—in consideration of her illness—that their lovemaking would be tentative, even hesitant. Dempsey’s body was unreliable, unpredictable. Anything could happen at any time. He would be easy, gentle, and careful. But Dempsey required none of it. If anything she was even more active, more challenging, more eager than in their time together those years before when she’d been perfectly well. She seemed determined that her illness not be allowed to dictate the limits of her desire, that her fervor be given full range. If the illness chose to intervene, in whatever inconvenient or sloppy manner, it would be dealt with in its own time and in its own way. Beyond that, it was to be disregarded. Anticipation of its intervention was not only discouraged, it was forbidden. Johnny had been duly instructed in the necessary protections, beginning with the condom, the strict avoidance of body fluids or discharges. If she were to bleed or throw up or have a sudden attack of diarrhea, he must not touch her until he’d donned the surgical gloves kept in ready supply at the bedside and in the bathroom. The only time the gloves became an issue was when he had scratched her neck with a toenail. It did little for their ardor that—at Dempsey’s insistence—all enthusiasm ceased. The gloves were donned and a Band-Aid was applied to the scratch after it had been thoroughly irrigated and an appropriate salve rubbed into it. It took them a little while to renew their fervor, to regain their momentum, but the effort proved to be well worth it. The spectral intrusion, the reminder of death’s presence in their lovemaking, made their intimacy even more precious, more passionate than before. This was their acceptance and they reveled in it with increased strength and even more tender affection. And a healthy dash of giddiness was thrown in for good measure.

Encouraged by Dempsey’s undaunted participation, Johnny was able to dismiss the possibility of intrusion, the potential for interruption. But while the illness itself could be ignored when it wasn’t actively present, death was never distant. If the illness could have become a deterrent, death had become quite its opposite. It was a defining force. And so, with death as an admitted participant, they had formed a workable ménage à trois, the added partner a goad to greater need, to deeper satisfactions.

Only once had the balance between them been threatened. Johnny, desperate, anguished in Dempsey’s arms, had vowed that he’d protect himself no more. The condom was torn away; he’d forbid himself nothing. Nothing that Dempsey had to offer would he refuse—including death itself. All protections were to be discarded. He wanted his surrender to be total—and if that meant a surrender to death as well, the more triumphant was his determination, the more exultant his resolve.

Dempsey had settled the matter swiftly and simply. “Stop being competitive,” she said, kindly but firmly. “One of us dying is enough. Put another condom on. I have no intention of getting pregnant again and I have less intention of putting myself on the pill. Here, let me. I’ll do it for you.” She had kissed the shaft of his penis as if placating a distraught little boy, reassuring him that he was cherished and esteemed. She slipped the condom on and said, “I know you love me. You don’t have to prove it. Now come on.”

And so the balance was restored, the ménage reinstated. None of the trois could presume supremacy. The old goads were reinforced: the working arrangement resubscribed.

Someone was waving at Johnny from a pew directly under the window of St. Joseph. Actually, two people were waving, one a woman, the other a little girl. The woman had taken the child’s hand and was flapping it at Johnny. He recognized the woman. She had come to the firehouse to kiss his hand. This would be the child he had rescued a year and a half before, the rescue that had earned him his medal. How much the child had grown! She must be four by now.

The mother nodded at Johnny, smiling. Johnny nodded in return. The fire had been in the Bronx when he’d still been stationed there—a tenement, the flames heavily “involved” in the second and third floors. He had just been relieved by Finelli on the nozzle, and none too soon. The second alarm on his facepiece had sounded. His oxygen was out. He lowered the mask and backed down the hallway, careful not to inhale too deeply. The windows in the rooms to his left had blown out and the smoke was being pulled toward them, clearing the way in front of him.

A few steps past an axe-shattered doorway, he thought he heard a whimper. It was the rush of water through the hose snaking along the hall and up the stairs to the apartment where he’d just handed over the nozzle. He took another two steps and stopped again. He had definitely heard a whimper. Johnny went into the room and quickly took off his glove. He raised his hand to gauge the heat level, to see how hot it was closer to the ceiling. How near the fire might be. It was hot. The walls, the ceiling hadn’t been opened and the fire could be there, ready to flash the room. He dropped down and began his crawl, sweeping at his sides as if he were swimming. He had less than a minute to find whoever it might be. After that, they’d both be gone. An arm is what he found first, then the skinny little body. Without even checking for a pulse or for breath, he hugged the child underneath him, against his chest, and made his crawl for the door, the child’s arms and legs dragging beneath him.