Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

Taking her time, catching her breath, in spurts and segments, with sips of cool lemon water now and then to refresh her, Alice told Tilda that she’d been reading, when she could, and there was another koan — this one about a mother monkey and her baby. The mother monkey swings through the forest, while the baby monkey clings to her. In this way the baby monkey is taken care of by her mother. “I’m supposed to be the mother and the baby. I’m supposed to let go of my worries, cling to the knowledge that the earth will take care of me. Which sounds all well and lovely. But maybe it’s just giving myself an excuse to not fight?

“Theory is theory,” Alice continued. “Every day I do try to believe there are all kinds of ways the earth can take care of me. But there’s still this black box, always pressing on my chest: the possibility that I’ll never know my child, that she’ll never know her mother. I’ll be leaving helpless little monkey alone in the world. I try to live by these — but I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m small. I’m selfish. I won’t give up my husband. I won’t give up my baby. I can’t. ”

Tilda had risen from her seat, was on her way around the table, sitting next to Alice, visibly exhausted, ignoring her own tears. Tilda dabbed at the river flowing down Alice’s face. Alice did not have to give up anything. They were going to find a donor. The transplant would happen.

Alice murmured, placed her head on Tilda’s shoulder. Downy hairs were alight, standing along the length of her wan neck. Tilda stroked, down their side, pressing with a feather’s pressure.

“We live in categories,” she said. “You’re a mother. A wife. A patient. Lots of things, right? But categories don’t bring you to your soul, do they?”

Alice’s breaths arrived — each lighter, softer.

“Religion doesn’t have an answer for what’s happening to you. Maybe you really will end up being one of those impenetrable Zeny paradoxes. What I know is this: we can be here for you. We can love you. That is all we can do. You still have to go through this. You’re the one on the spiritual pilgrimage.”

Spent, Alice murmured again, nestling further into the safety of her friend’s bosom. Tilda kept stroking. Alice’s eyes stayed shut. She made a blissful, dreamy sound. Dishes clattered in the background, table conversations carried on. Undisturbed, Alice nodded off to sleep.

THE BATHROOM DOOR was ajar in case she needed to call for help. He could see plumes of steam, mirrors gone smoky. The effect was dreamy, almost mystical; a half-concealed, shimmering creature, her oval head ungainly, precariously balanced on the pale cord of her neck. She was looking down. Along the top of her head, nubs were nascent, rebirthed. No way she knew he was watching; otherwise she wouldn’t have remained so exposed, naked, absorbed in her private ritual: two spiderish fingers scooping into a tin, emerging with a viscous cream.

Oliver had traversed the terrain of her body more times than he could count; presently it was almost unrecognizable — alien in the sense of foreign, but also otherworldly: smooth, oddly shaped, glowingly pale; broad shoulders gone hollow. In the wiped-away streak of an otherwise steamed mirror, her breasts were still impossibly gorgeous with poisoned milk, her nipples lipstick pink. And then her leftover pregnancy weight, still somehow unaffected by the chemo; her papoose of a stomach jiggling, just a bit, while she placed the cream below the jut of her clavicle, a bright white smear now covering the cigarette burn of a bruise, where her intravenous port had been.

The skin hung loose across her buttocks, sallow flour sacks — he’d once loved spanking them, sinking his teeth into them. The sight unsettled him and he couldn’t look for long. In the mirror’s reflection, he caught her absence of pubic hair. Even after all this, he was shocked — both drawn to her cleft and repulsed by it.

She kept rubbing, smoothing the cream with her fingers until the white glop disappeared and her chest glowed. Flits of loose dead skin shed with her touch, flakes lifting into the steamy, wet air. Alice hardly noticed.

He came up behind her and nuzzled into the delicate architecture of her nape, resting his head on the safe side of her shoulder, where there had been no ports or surgery. Oliver planted a butterfly kiss on the middle of the back of her neck. Alice made a shocked, satisfied noise, let her head rest against his.

—

The phone kept ringing. She steeled herself, remembered that good old Doc Glenn had checked his service from the Burlington airport. She told herself her red-balloon-pig features had receded. For reasons logical and comprehensible and for no reasons whatsoever, every single time, improbabilities had indeed broken in her favor, a forged trail. Near and perilous misses. Improbable if minor successes.

Each ring was an opportunity; the chance to face that terror, to do something better than pee on herself. Alice exhaled, reached, and lifted the cool molded plastic. Bringing the receiver toward her ear, she managed a greeting, felt herself tensing, tried to relax her shoulders. Alice confirmed for the caller her date of birth. She then listened, and learned that her five percent mystery cells had come back decidedly clean. Her upcoming chemotherapy would no t be reinduction.

The first molecules of air rushed into her lungs. Once again if became had became will . I will survive. We will find a way.

“There’s more to it,” Beth said. “Let me double-check the notes.”

A tandem of pigeons had landed en masse on the sill across the way from the apartment’s eastern windows. The wash of soot outside the window was substantial enough to make gray birds look mottled and filthy. Alice watched their little heads bob, their beaks peck; she listened.

—

Vintage board games dug up from obscurity; metal lunch boxes celebrating science-fiction shows; odd dolls manufactured to monetize a moment’s quirky breakout star. Each item miraculous, preserved against time. Love Saves the Day. Alice and Oliver let the window display distract them. The passing sounds of the East Village vague behind them, the air thick and cold. She laid her head against the warmth of his shearling. From the stroller, the child reached toward the finger puppets and stuffed animals on the other side of the glass.

Doe would be every bit as entertained by the tumbling clothes in the dryers of the launderette next door, and the family would continue — meandering on the lightly frosted pavement of Second Avenue, passing into the junkies, hoodlums, and creative entrepreneurs who’d started laying out a veritable thieves’ market. Oliver picked through record albums and cassettes that lay next to a disemboweled car stereo. Alice enjoyed guessing at the logic behind a tapered leather jacket with hugely padded shoulders, a lining of cowboy fringe. “The eighties,” she said.

Their trek was incremental, but steady. Doctors’ orders be damned, she wanted her last meal outside to be special. And no way Oliver was going to stop her from sitting at the common table at the vegetarian restaurant where she’d been ordering since freshman year. Soon, long deep breaths allowed Alice to ingest the steamy swirl of hot green tea. She managed to down the entire cup. For old times’ sake, she and Oliver shared a dragon bowl of piping hot tofu, sea veggies, and rice.

Without prompting, she asked: “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

—

One immediate way to provide an answer was to satiate an appetite. Another was to walk, unwind your thoughts along the way. And, too, there was home, wrapping yourself in the safety of dim conical lighting, the refuge of a boxy sofa sectional, designed with the elegance of fifties modernism. The little one may have been months away from possessing the balance to stand, but she was giving it her best shot, grabbing at the couch, using its far arm to pull herself vertical, wanting to get up there with Mommy and Daddy. Such a good sport.