My husband has told me that this summer he will retire. Right now he is in the library holding X-rays up to the light and dictating. I do not know how his secretary understands the things he mumbles. In our bedroom, through the wall, I hear only his endings — period, paragraph, salutation, document. And now, as I lie here listening, I imagine his final dictation: document, career, life. And that will be that.
This summer, in August, he will turn sixty-three. Two years ago, standing over the exposed shoulder of a motorcycle-wreck victim, he felt his heart — as he explained it — do the tango, slow to a waltz, and then decide to sit out the rest of the dance. The assisting resident revived him, and two months later he was back at work.
I tried to stop him. I told him enough was enough — he’d had a good career, a lucrative one, but it was time to give it up. “Stay home,” I told him. “You’ve earned a few years of peace. We’ve both earned a quiet life.” But he refused. He said what only men can say without recognition of how pathetic it sounds, how hurtful: “My work is my life.”
But now, two years later, he has changed his mind. He says it’s the insurance companies that have defeated him. He says it’s no longer worth it to do surgery, and an orthopedist, he says, is nothing without his knife.
Of course, I don’t believe him, not for a second. He has made this same complaint for thirty years. He’s said, “Christ, don’t I deserve to keep some of what I earn?” Then he gets out his checkbook, pays his quarterly taxes, his monthly insurance premium, and forgets all about it.
And it’s not age that’s making him quit either. It’s not concern about health or heart or a hand that might start shaking just before a crucial cut. I may not know what it is, but it isn’t any of that.
I admit I don’t really know, but this is my suspicion: my husband has decided that during our thirty-eight years of marriage he has never had the opportunity to love me enough. Our lives were too full — his with his profession, mine with our five children — for the sort of love he feels he has to give.
My husband is, and has always been, fond of grand pronouncements. “Love,” he will say, “knows no occasion,” and he will offer me a present two weeks after Christmas or three weeks before my birthday. He will move the refrigerator to its new spot in the kitchen, saying, “Love requires effort. Love requires brute strength.”
“It does not,” I tell him, “require hernias or heart attacks.” But my point does not sink in. He will move the sofas for vacuuming, haul boxes of books to the attic, carry five bags of groceries at once from the car to the kitchen.
He will go with me to North Carolina or Washington, D.C., or Chicago — wherever our children and their children may be — and I will say, before he gets the chance to say it, “Love requires mobility, flights to strange cities, postponed elective surgery.”
“Correct,” he’ll say, smiling, and will add whatever new maxim he has come up with: Love requires gardening at noon. Love requires candy bars. Love requires the biannual physical even though he feels fine, better than ever.
“What is it? I want the truth,” I ask him now. His dictation is done, and he’s changing into his pajamas. “Love,” I tell him, “requires the truth, so let’s have it.”
“We’ve been through that,” he says. “The decision has been made. What we need to do now is discuss our future.” He sits down on the bed and swings his left leg over to me so that I can remove his sock. This leg has been paralyzed since my husband was fourteen years old. He fell off a bike, cut and bruised himself, and the infection got into his hip. In those days, of course, there were no antibiotics, and surgery had to be performed. Nerve damage occurred for one reason or another, and the leg went dead. Years later we were showing the film of our wedding to our children, and the last shot was of us driving off for the honeymoon. Because of his leg, my husband couldn’t drive the car, so I was sitting in the driver’s seat and he was leaning over so the camera could catch him, too — his bright smile and white linen suit. When we showed this to our kids, my husband whispered to me, “Love requires humiliation,” and although he laughed, I knew he meant it.
Now, as we lie together in bed and listen in the dark to a Debussy piano piece on the radio — love, of course, requires music — my husband reaches over and touches my one breast and says, “We are going to have a wonderful summer. Just imagine it. We’ll do whatever you want to do. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.” And the moment he moves toward me I feel, as I always feel, his struggle to make his bad leg follow his body, and I think what I have thought for years, ever since we watched that film with our children — that love requires, over and over, certain miracles, never less one moment than any other.
This story previously appeared in Yellow Silk.
— Ed.
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