Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [236]
He remembers her blouse, damp with his tears—no, both their tears.
He remembers clinging to her, pressing his face to her bosom, sleeping, waking, clinging, weeping, sleeping again. She asks again and again, What is it? What is it that has come over you? For hours, days, who knows how long, she stays with him as he holds on for dear life, the storm raging, battering him, trying to pry him out of her grasp.
He remembers a lull, a startling silence which is a change in the pattern. Her blouse has opened.
Like a surgeon working to develop a tissue plane under the incision, he wills the blouse to open farther, and perhaps his nose, his cheeks, help it along. Her nipples stir from the coins on which they lie, and now her breasts escape her blouse to meet his lips. Her face must be a mirror of his because what he sees in it is fear coupled with desire.
She hovers over him, naked, her breasts full and reassuring, tears of relief on both their faces, their kisses devouring each other to make up for time lost. Then he is above her, and she looks up at him as if he is the Savior. When he enters her, he is anchoring himself to her goodness, a goodness and innocence he lost so young, from which he has drifted away, and which he vows never to let go …
Sitting on his bed in his New Jersey exile, the world outside muted in a canopy of snow, his heart is racing, a dangerous tachycardia, his shirt soaked with sweat despite the cold. There is a dull ache under his breastbone. How he wishes that he could recall the exact feel of her lips, of her breasts.
But he recalls this (and he prays it is a true image):
He recalls how he loses himself in her, pulling her like a soft lamb coat over him. She settles on him, smothers him like nightfall over a meadow. In their coming together they thwart the demons, his and hers, and when his cry of release comes it punctuates her soft exclamations. Order is restored. Proportion returns. Sleep comes as a blessing.
HIS CURSE IS THIS (and he weeps in New Jersey at the recollection, he beats his head with his hand): when he wakes from his Missing Period, he senses only a perturbation in space, a gap in time, a deep embarrassment and shame, the reason for which he cannot recall, but which he can only heal by throwing himself into his work anew. He has blocked out what came before.
How cruel it is that this memory should surface in a winter storm so long after she is dead. How cruel to have this fleeting, fragmented vision, seen through an ice-crusted window, then to wonder if it is real, or if it is the perturbation of a brain undone by alcohol. He has reassembled the memory like a shattered relic, and it is finally whole; and still he has doubts. He will never see her more clearly than that night at 529 Maple. When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, thatforms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.
“You saved my life,” he says aloud to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, seated on his small bed in New Jersey “And my stupidity, my indecision, my panic, caused you to lose yours.” Though it is much too late to say it to her, he knows it must be said, and though he is a nonbeliever, he hopes that somehow she is listening. “I cannot love any human being more than I love you.” What he cannot bring himself to mention is the children; he feels he can do even less for them than he can do for Sister Mary Joseph Praise; they exist, two boys, twins, he knows, he remembers, in a universe even more removed than the one in which Sister resides.
But it is too late to