station, facing your partially closed door, hugging my purse to my chest and reciting Hail Marys to regulate my breathing. I could catch glimpses of her moving efficiently back and forth from bed to sink to waste container, cleaning up after the crash cart exertions. Then she said I could come in.
“Your skin was still warm. Your cheeks and chin were stubbled with fresh growth and there was a bandage around your neck with a trace of dried blood. Your body in the blue-and-white patterned hospital gown was more rotund than before, obviously swollen, as was your face, which gave it the fullness of complacency.
“You weren’t there, anybody could see that. But you had left behind an expression of . . . how to describe it? Superiority? Bemusement beyond caring? A distanced, tranquil amusement? Satisfaction at a task completed?
“The nurse went out, and I touched your face and then your hands, which could bring forth such complicated sounds, and which, for the first time, did not respond to my touch with a squeeze or a grasp. I looked away, then back, half expecting I could surprise you into a change of expression.
“It was my first experience of looking at you when I couldn’t influence how you looked back at me.
“Now I have to make the crossover between image and presence. The funny thing is, I can still
hear
the essential you, though I miss having you in my sight. I, the visual one, now have to rely on sounds.”
Coda
I used to try to be original,” you said about your work, not long before you died. “Now I try to be clear and essential.”
About Bach, you remarked, at the end of a day when you’d had another transfusion, “He has order and stability, qualities one doesn’t always have in one’s life. Yet he’s not predictable, sentimental, or personal.”
And then there was the night, in our last months together, when I sat over there on the sofa and regaled you at length about all my fears: about my work, about the future, about my fear of losing you.
Later, after I was upstairs in bed, and you were in one of your commutes between the refrigerator and a late movie in your study, you called up to me:
“Hello? Are you still awake?”
“Yes,” I called back. “Why?”
“Bud is sitting right outside your door. He’s protecting you from all evil and danger.”
By Gail Godwin
NOVELS
Evenings at Five
Evensong
The Good Husband
Father Melancholy’s Daughter
A Southern Family
The Finishing School
A Mother and Two Daughters
Violet Clay
The Odd Woman
Glass People
The Perfectionists
SHORT STORIES
Dream Children
Mr. Bedford and the Muses
NONFICTION
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group
Text copyright © 2003 by Gail Godwin
Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Frances Halsband
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-46363-0
v3.0
“Your skin was still warm. Your cheeks and chin were stubbled with fresh growth and there was a bandage around your neck with a trace of dried blood. Your body in the blue-and-white patterned hospital gown was more rotund than before, obviously swollen, as was your face, which gave it the fullness of complacency.
“You weren’t there, anybody could see that. But you had left behind an expression of . . . how to describe it? Superiority? Bemusement beyond caring? A distanced, tranquil amusement? Satisfaction at a task completed?
“The nurse went out, and I touched your face and then your hands, which could bring forth such complicated sounds, and which, for the first time, did not respond to my touch with a squeeze or a grasp. I looked away, then back, half expecting I could surprise you into a change of expression.
“It was my first experience of looking at you when I couldn’t influence how you looked back at me.
“Now I have to make the crossover between image and presence. The funny thing is, I can still
hear
the essential you, though I miss having you in my sight. I, the visual one, now have to rely on sounds.”
Coda
I used to try to be original,” you said about your work, not long before you died. “Now I try to be clear and essential.”
About Bach, you remarked, at the end of a day when you’d had another transfusion, “He has order and stability, qualities one doesn’t always have in one’s life. Yet he’s not predictable, sentimental, or personal.”
And then there was the night, in our last months together, when I sat over there on the sofa and regaled you at length about all my fears: about my work, about the future, about my fear of losing you.
Later, after I was upstairs in bed, and you were in one of your commutes between the refrigerator and a late movie in your study, you called up to me:
“Hello? Are you still awake?”
“Yes,” I called back. “Why?”
“Bud is sitting right outside your door. He’s protecting you from all evil and danger.”
By Gail Godwin
NOVELS
Evenings at Five
Evensong
The Good Husband
Father Melancholy’s Daughter
A Southern Family
The Finishing School
A Mother and Two Daughters
Violet Clay
The Odd Woman
Glass People
The Perfectionists
SHORT STORIES
Dream Children
Mr. Bedford and the Muses
NONFICTION
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group
Text copyright © 2003 by Gail Godwin
Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Frances Halsband
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-46363-0
v3.0
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