Chronotope

Excerpt

She and Leo sold up and settled finally, as so many do, in Florida. They retired finally, as so many do, to where the grandchildren are.  The house is a rambling yellow clapboard on the narrow spit between the San Sebastian River and the Intracoastal Waterway. Much too much house for a pair of septuagenarians, too many dust-catching crannies, too many stairs. But it has stained glass sidelights, shade in the breakfast room and sunset over the river. To the east, the distant pulse of surf. The bedrooms are all upstairs, so he is dying in the Florida room, which is a generous rectangle of windows and overweening plants, now reconfigured for the high tech bed, the non-slip rugs, the army of plastic bottles. Little yellow squares yap out instructions from the doors and mirrors. How people died before Post-it notes she can’t imagine.

The pitcher is still full because he drank nothing yesterday. Nevertheless she takes it to the kitchen and changes old water for new. Pours herself a cup of coffee, glances at “The Living Arts” (Christie’s withdraws Gaughan forgery; Tate Modern opens; two documentaries and a docudrama on the murder of JonBenet Ramsey). Now, knuckles on the pine table, she stops briefly for a pain of her own, which is either colon cancer or diverticulitis or flatulence. The old are not hypochondriacal, they are prescient. This slicing at the ribs is heart attack, though perhaps not now. This swelling in the lymph nodes is cancer, just perhaps not here. She takes the coffee and the paper and heads back.

He’s awake. His eyes follow her, and when she says, “Good morning, love,” he rises to “G’morn,” a gift. But it has cost enough effort to make him gasp for breath. If he starts to become restless he may try to get out of bed though he is too frail to stand. He may make accusations and demands. He might claim the need to change the oil or fetch Eudora home from school. If he tries to get out of bed she won’t be able to stop him or hold him up. Therefore she will give him the Ativan, but not until she must, because it will make him spacey, alien. She wants him with her. She reaches under the cover to massage his calves. There is nothing there. Ten years ago—yea, six months—she knelt naked in the shower and soaped these calves in which the muscles plumped like chicken breasts. Now the flesh is flimsy as a stocking from which the leg has been removed. He is disappearing bit by bit. Where is he disappearing to?