In Wilderness: A Novel

1

The Woman

In advertising, she has learned, you live and die by the Rule of Three: “Less tar, less nicotine, same great taste.”

It’s the same in life: “Third time’s the charm.” The gray-haired gastroenterologist seated across from her behind his cluttered mahogany desk is Dr. Third Opinion, her last hope, who was supposed to sally forth and save the day.

But Dr. Third Opinion has not sallied forth, has chosen instead to betray her, to align himself with doctors one and two in his assessment that her pain and suffering come from her body’s failure to assimilate her food. Not to put too fine a point on it, she’s starving; soon her organs will start shutting down; she’s got at most six months.

And there you have it: “Three strikes, you’re out.”

Assimilate. Good word, that. Significantly more abstract and intellectual than digest, which might far too easily lead to overcontemplation of actual physical functions. She nods to indicate she knows the word’s import, knows the import of all his words. Which she does, her mind’s eye picturing each in a contrasting typeface—Garamond, Bodoni Bold, Helvetica—as if they are a dummy print ad sent her for critiquing. Dying. D. Y. I. N. G. She can get no closer to the thing than metaphor: exiting early from an unproductive meeting in some new office high-rise, into an empty hallway with harsh lighting, where she will wait alone for an elevator that never comes. This is not particularly satisfactory.

“What’s its name, this thing that’s killing me?”

Names matter. For a while they were her specialty, extracting from thin air the perfect single-word descriptor for a suburban subdivision, line of carpeting, or processed sandwich spread. Before names she specialized in graphic design—logos, illustrations—and married her boss. After names she got promoted to creative director. This doctor, like the other two, tells her he does not know the name of what is killing her. Among all the colleagues, laboratories, scientists, and sorcerers her physicians have consulted, not one has come up with an answer. She is dying of a lack of information.

If she opens her mouth to scream now, she will never stop.

By her count she’ll make it through Christmas into 1967. Maybe see the trees leaf out, but that’s less certain. Thirty-eight seems young to die. But maybe if you’re ninety-six so does ninety-seven. She has disciplined herself these past four years to give no outward sign. Of anything. Except she can’t quiet her trembling hands.

“I see.” She doesn’t, it’s just what one says. Or maybe not; she’s got no idea what one says, she’s never died before.

The doctor frowns, delicately clears his throat. “If you’ll forgive me, there’s one question I try to ask all my patients. For my own edification, really, so if you’d rather not . . .”

“Oh, no, it’s fine.”

Truly, it is. He looks so earnest, the doctor. He seems a kindly man, in his white coat; she hopes his gray hair is premature and that he can look forward to a long career.

“Can you recall for me the last day that you felt completely well?” The doctor pauses. “There’s no hurry. Take all the time you need.”

All the time she needs would be six decades, although right now she’d be quite satisfied with five. Or four. Yet answering his question needs no time at all. The last day she felt completely well was May 24, 1962, a day she still remembers for an incident of such transcendent beauty she mistook it for a foretaste of all her life to come.

With her belly gloriously swollen, she was seated on a red stepstool in the baby’s room, or what would be the baby’s room in two more months, drawing pictures on its robin’s-egg-blue walls. A kite, eyes closed in rapture, rode the blowing wind; a rabbit in a frock coat and monocle had just popped out of his rabbit hole; a library table frowned beneath its load of books. Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, Little Women, she was lettering their titles when there came a loud commotion from the peaceful residential street—brakes grinding, men shouting, and a strange hissing sound. She flung her brush onto the canvas drop cloth, can still see it there in a faint spatter of black paint, and ran down the hall into their bedroom, hers and Tim’s, to see what was the matter.

Outside the open window, a city truck was spraying the runtiest of the ginkgoes in the grassy strip beyond the sidewalk, the tree with all its fan-shaped leaves eaten to filigree. The window framed a tracery of leaves and branches in a pearly mist shot through with rainbows. She remembers thinking she did not deserve to come upon such beauty, that she already had her child inside her, which was far and away beauty enough. Nonetheless, she stayed there, nose pressed against the rigid metal screen, for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, filled with too much gratitude to move. Stayed until the spraying was completed and the truck lumbered off down the street. A small collection of leftover rainbows lingered as drops of consolation on the screen—along with an oily film inside the draperies that, Tim said the next morning, stank like a cheap Florida motel and gave him tropical dreams.

When she is finished speaking, the doctor gazes past her with so great a sadness she experiences a moment of confusion, unsure if she has also told him how, only a day or so later, the headaches started and her energetic child quit moving. She never spoke of it, but even that unyielding denial did not save him. Tim couldn’t face it, made believe it never happened, left her to grieve alone. Became first a shadow and then slipped away, under the door or something. Left her controlling interest in the agency, an unwanted guilt offering, began another someplace far away—Milwaukee? Minneapolis?—she never can recall exactly where. Sometime in there her illness got its start and grew without her knowing, like gossip you don’t hear until too late.

Dr. Third Opinion sighs. He leans back in his creaky chair, stares past her into some middle distance to her left. “A hundred, hundred-twenty years ago, we used to tell patients like you, patients we had no hope of curing, to go west, move to the country, take the Grand Tour of Europe. Anything. A change of scene. After all this time, we can’t do any better.”

“Were they healed? The ones who went away?” Hates her voice’s horrid, hopeful whine.

He shrugs. “Who knows? I doubt most of their physicians ever heard from them again.”

He writes in his prescription pad, tears out the page. “This is for Valium. Refillable as long as you need it.”

She squints at it, can’t read his writing, bets it cuts off in six months.

“And don’t hesitate to call me if you need to.”

“Thank you, Doctor, that’s most kind.” What good would calling do?

After he leaves, she checks her reflection in the mirror by the door. Dull dark hair, hollow eyes, drawn mouth; the glen plaid suit hangs so loose on her now. She regrets not keeping her religion after high school. As things stand, she’s got no idea of what’s wanted, no chips to bargain with, nothing to trade. If she believes in anything, she believes in Sartre: Death is nothingness, silence under a bleak sky.

Absence of pain, one hopes. Not much help otherwise.

She touches the pearl earrings she put on earlier that morning, her gold watch. She wants to cry and doesn’t dare, for the same reason that she didn’t scream. The sure knowledge she will die descends upon her then, not unlike that earlier mist, and cloaks her in its shimmering protection. From that moment, she becomes a different person, never certain anymore what she will do.

What she does first is unremarkable. Drives straight home, gathers all the Valium bottles from her medicine cabinet and dumps their contents out onto her bedside table. She’s not sure why, except they’re pretty there against the dark, polished wood. She pushes them around with an index finger, the five-milligram yellow tablets toward the center, the two-milligram whites into radiating petal-lines around them, the ten-milligram blues stretched out to make a single leaf and stem. Doctors always prescribe Valium for you when they don’t know what else to do. She always dutifully filled her prescriptions, as if each new bottle might include some fresh, heretofore undiscovered healing charm. The pills always only made her feel peculiar, so she never took more than one or two from any of the bottles. Her finished flower is quite large.

A daisy. Have a happy day.

Slowly, deliberately, she licks the tip end of her finger, picks up a white petal-pill, brings it to her tongue like a communion wafer.

“He loves me.”

Licks her finger, brings up another petal-pill.

“He loves me not.”

“He loves me,” from the bright yellow center.

From the blue stem, “He loves me not.”

“Who loves me? God?”

Blue pill. “He loves me not.”

Rakes the remaining flower into her left hand, gulps it down with water from a glass on the night table, and—mildly surprised, one rarely knows at the outset where any choice might lead—stretches out on her brass bed to die.

Considers pulling up the covers should her feet get cold, decides it won’t be necessary.

She has always loved this bed, one of the few items of furniture in the house that she herself picked out and paid for. The rest Tim brought home, leftovers from his redo of the agency. Bauhaus in agencies was trendy not so long ago; now it’s dated. Poor Tim. Some things about him can still make her sad.

She raises her head, looks around the familiar room. How long has she been lying here? Shouldn’t she at least be feeling drowsy? Except for a slight swelling, a slight itchy swelling, in the roof of her mouth, nothing has changed. Children are playing in the street, riding in those little pedal cars. Pleasant sound, children’s voices. Girl and boy from two houses down, she’s seen them often. Her own child, had he lived, would be about the boy’s age.

What if these children are who find her body?

How awful that would be.

The itchy swelling in her mouth has spread into her throat, begun to gag her. She runs for the bathroom, heaves up colorful Valium sequins into her bright white toilet.

Stands up, rinses her mouth—should have known pills wouldn’t work, she vomits everything—then goes into the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee, brings in the morning paper off the porch. It’s Friday, the paper comes rolled in its want-ad section. She pours her coffee, sits on a stool at the kitchen counter, stares down vacantly at the lines of tiny type. Reads them because they’re what’s in front of her.

1961 Corvair, excellent condition, 8,000 miles. She has no use for a second car.

Free kittens, 10 weeks old, guaranteed cute and sweet. There’s a phone number. Maybe she should have a kitten; sweet, fuzzy kitten to take her mind off dying.

Don’t be stupid. Poor little thing’ll starve beside your corpse.

She shakes her head to clear the image.

For sale: Splendid forest isolation. Rustic mountain cabin adjacent to national forest and sizable private wilderness preserve. Outbuilding; acreage with meadow, garden spot and pond. Three-hour drive. Nicer to think of than a starving kitten.

She sighs, drains the last of her coffee, gets up and takes the otherwise unread paper to the den, drops it atop a stack of newspapers in a copper bin near the fireplace. She needs to get to the office before people start to wonder where she is. Bright, creative people with their whole lives ahead of them—people who, if they knew what she was facing, could not comprehend it.

During the two weeks she’s been dying, which is how she’s come to think of them, she’s turned into a master at delegating. It’s what she does best. Doles out pieces of responsibility—one here, one there—until they’re all gone and she can stare out over her uncluttered desk to her office door that’s always closed these days and try to think of nothing. It’s all she has stamina for anymore. She’s begun to feel much weaker, and her everything’s-just-fine charade has grown harder to maintain. She gets to the agency later in the mornings, leaves by early afternoon. Has said she’s “working on a project.” No one asks her what it is. No one asks her anything; the agency evidently runs quite well without her. Amazing how one can attain a status so high he (or she) is of no use at all.

At home, as in the office, she mostly spends her waking hours sitting in the den and staring straight ahead. Nights, she’s learned sufficient sleeping pills and Valium will, by God, take her where she wants to go: into oblivion. It’s late November, turning cold. The heat that blows through the floor registers is never enough this year to keep her warm, no matter where she sets the thermostat. Probably something to do with her dying—the next phase of the process has to start somewhere. She’s taken to building evening fires in the den’s stone fireplace. Then she lies on the sofa and tries, or at least pretends to try, to read—that age-old prescription that’s supposed to take one’s mind off things. Thrillers. The only books fast-paced enough to stand a chance at holding her attention. Books filled with characters who die, often violently, which for some perverse reason she finds comforting.

Tonight’s a good night; she actually kept down a little food. She twists up several pages from her stack of newspapers to get a good fire going. Used to gather pinecones for this purpose; there are always lots of pinecones in the backyard. Front yard, too—one more thing she and Tim had loved about this house was all the trees. She doesn’t gather pinecones anymore. So much easier to just use newspapers, watch them catch the fatwood, watch the logs begin to burn. Her stack is dwindling. The pages in her hands are weeks old.

For sale: Splendid forest isolation. Rustic mountain cabin adjacent to national forest . . .

A ring-shaped coffee stain puckers the page. She remembers how it got there and the first time she read the ad. Reads it again. The words, the picture they create, leave something peaceful in her mind. Later, for a while at least, she will think how easily she might have missed seeing the ad, and will feel then, for an instant, as if she is free-falling from some great height.

What she does the next day in her office—behind her closed door, at her uncluttered desk—astounds her: She phones the listing agent and asks if the property is still available.

She’s buying it as an investment, won’t need to look at it, she tells him. At her insistence the closing comes immediately, the week before Christmas. If she’s lucky, she still has five months—or what portion of that time she can endure.