The Illumination

She and John Catau took an empty table in the center of the shop and sat across from each other sipping their drinks. While he spoke, she covered her mouth with her palm, trying to usher the coffee past her lips without visibly wincing. He was offering another one of his meandering narratives, about a rock concert where the crowd was “so raucous” that it spilled out onto the sidewalk and he had traded jackets with the guitarist. Every so often she would punctuate the story with an mm-hmm or a right, thinking Make me better, Take me home, while he nodded and stroked the stubble on his chin. He must have been talking for nearly fifteen minutes when he made a remark that caused him to laugh, a quiet little two-beat arrangement, as if he were exhaling once through each nostril. “You know, like in ‘Sunset Studies,’ ” he continued. “Remember, that bit you wrote about the door hinges flapping loose from the house like butterflies?”

“Where would you have seen ‘Sunset Studies’?”

“The Lifted Brow began archiving its old issues online.”

“Hmm.” A group of teenagers in crowlike black clothing had stationed themselves by the graphic novels, their faces irradiated with patches of cruel red acne. “This place”—she gestured at the stiltlike columns, the vista of windows—“it reminds me of a bead shop I used to visit in college. Not that I had any interest in beads. I went because it reminded me of this art gallery where my friends and I spent all our time in high school. Freestanding counters everywhere. Polished white pine floors. It made me feel like I was reliving my past.”

“Mm-hmm. Very esque-ish.”

“What?”

“Esque-ish. It’s a word me and Coop came up with. First esque and then ish. Something that reminds you of something that reminds you of something.”

“That’s good. I like that.”

“Yeah? You think it will catch on?”

“John, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-three. And a half.”

She made the mistake of smiling. One of her teeth snagged her lip, and there it was, that unsparing light, a spasm of pain that spread across her mouth as if a metal barb had punched through the skin, tugging it outward so that a living pink tent rose up from the tissue.

“Jesus H.,” said John Catau. “I absolutely did not realize. I’m so sorry.”

She waited until she was sure she could speak. “It’s okay. I app—I app—I thank you for your concern.”

“Will you show it to me? Your ulcer?”

“No. No. John. God. It’s not pretty. You don’t want to see it.”

But the look he gave her was full of such humble curiosity, with his eyes lingering on her mouth and his hair dangling over his creased forehead, that she placed her fingers on either side of the sore and slowly everted her lip for him. He inhaled sharply. In the space of that breath, between one second and the next, he understood. She didn’t have to tell him, didn’t have to explain or apologize. She didn’t have to combat the impression that she was undergoing some kind of joke ailment, like a hangnail or an ingrown hair, the kind of thing that could be remedied with tweezers or a topical cream. A canker sore, yes. I had one of those myself a few years back, people liked to say. Grin and bear it, that’s my motto, and they would clap her shoulder and wait for her to chuckle along with them at the human body and all its darling haplessness. And now here was this boy, this ridiculous boy, and he seemed to know everything about her. Make me better. His fingertips and the base of his palm were resting lightly on the table, creating a shadowy little hidden cove, and she found herself resisting the impulse to slide her hand into it.

“I’m so sorry,” he said a second time. “That’s terrible. Terrible. You really don’t want to be here at all, do you?” And then, before she could answer, he added, “You know, I read that there are more nerve endings on the lips and the tongue than anywhere else in the body. Were you aware of that? Genitals included. Which means that your mouth is the most sensitive place you’ve got when it comes to things like hot and cold and pleasure and pain.”

“Mm-hmm. I know.”

“Okay. I’m going to drive you back to your hotel now.”

“No. Please. It’s not far. I can walk.”

“Right,” he said, “I understand,” and she believed he did somehow. “Nina? How long before you’re better, do you think?”

“I wish I knew. Not tomorrow. Two days, I hope.”

“Two days.” He made it sound like a fact he was memorizing for a quiz. “Listen, this bruise on my arm, on my biceps?” He notched the contusion with his thumbnail. “I got it from punching myself after your Bellingham reading. I kept saying, ‘Catau, you’re going to ask this woman to dinner.’ I was mad at myself for chickening out. That’s all. I was just embarrassed to tell you before.”

And then his hand was on top of hers, and he was saying goodbye, and she felt that old carnal tightening in her knees, that flush of heat in her chest, and suddenly, in her imagination, she was sinking into bed with him and his caresses were covering her body in babyskin. How long had it been since she was well enough to unbutton someone’s shirt and dot his stomach with kisses? And did she have to be well enough? Maybe she was sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn’t she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts?

In her hotel room, she cried and then set her clothing out for the next day, turned her blanket down, and called Wallace. For half an hour, she lay in bed debriding her mouth with hydrogen peroxide, letting the watery chlorine taste spread down her tongue and into her throat as she wondered what had happened.

She switched on the TV. A sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were assembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest gestures set off waves of swirling photons.

There was a woman, not quite old but not quite young, whose fiance had died unexpectedly. It was barely a month into their engagement and the two of them were attending a chamber music concert when he began coughing into his sleeve and excused himself from his seat. Because they had quarreled earlier over the cost of the wedding, she did not worry about him when he failed to return. Instead, with exasperation, she thought, What could possibly be keeping him?, little realizing that what was keeping him was death.

When she went to the foyer to look for him, she found a ring of ushers clustered around his body as if he were a spill for which no one wanted to accept responsibility. She would never forget the sight of his tongue pressed to his teeth, struggling to form some word he had just missed his chance of saying.

More than a year had gone by since then, a terrible year of ill health, sleeplessness, and rainy days that layered themselves over her like blankets. Who was she? Who had she become? Her skin was paler than it used to be, her hair grayer. Recently she had noticed creases lingering around her eyes in the morning, and also across her forehead, as if she had spent the night squinting into a harsh light. The lines did not go away when she rubbed them, vanishing only gradually as the hours wore on, and she could foresee a time when the mask of age that grief had placed over her face would simply be her face. She missed her fiance terribly. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was only a beautiful story she had told herself, so quickly had she fallen in love with him and so quickly had he left her. It was hard to believe that that man who refused to button his collar, whose kisses began so shyly and ended so fervidly, who never once looked at her as if she were foolish or tiresome or even ordinary, was the same man she had found splayed across the theater’s staircase like an animal pinned to a board.

Frequently she had the feeling that he was standing just behind her, his breath tickling her ear like it used to when he came prowling over to seize her waist while she was cooking. All the same she did not speak to him.

Instead, like everyone, she accumulated letters that would never be answered. I don’t understand how this can be my life, she wrote, and What am I going to do? and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard—that’s how it feels. So I want you to tell