THE SAND HILL REVIEW http://www.sandhillreview.org 2003

The Rest Of Your Life

by Henrietta E. Mosley

The most beautiful day God ever made and Sarah wants to putter around in the garden. Ralph leans back in his chaise and looks up at the sky, bright blue now with the morning’s last cloud shreds drifting away behind the swaying eucalyptus. He’s already checked the sea on his morning jog up the hill: blue-green crinkled cellophane stretched to infinity. A perfect day for the boat.

“Mornings like this don’t turn up that often,” he tells his wife. “Not on a weekend.”

“We’ll get out this afternoon,” Sarah says. “Time enough for a day sail. There’s just this bit of light pruning I need to see to.”

“The roses look fine to me.”

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Sarah straightens up and stands a moment taking in the big picture. “I take good care of them. To keep something nice you have to tend to it. If I didn’t feed them regularly and take off the spent blooms they’d get scraggly in no time.”

“If we left now we could even make a run to Catalina.”

“We’ll be in Catalina next week,” Sarah says. “With the Swensens.”

He’d forgotten. He frowns and calls up an image of the Swensens. Midge Swensen and Sarah know each other from some cause or other. Child abuse? Whales? The husband might be a college administrator. Tolerable company, as he recalls . . . or are they the ones with the daughter?

“They bringing that girl of theirs? The one that upchucks?”

“No-o-o. Remember? She’s at Santa Cruz, with Trisha.” Sarah grabs at a renegade rambling rose cane, winces, drops it. “Ouch!” She pulls off her glove and sucks at the ball of her thumb. “I don’t knew if they see each other, though. Different dorms.” She examines the thumb, puts the glove back on and reaches into the plant again, more cautious this time. “Kind of like Jason with his buddy Keith--just had to go away to the same school, or Jason would have been right here at UCLA But now Jason never mentions Keith at all when he calls. It’s a whole new life they lead once they leave home.”

Still brooding over the empty nest. He wishes she’d get over it.

“Whadaya bet we get fog next week?”

“Not likely.”

“Overcast, then.”

“If so, we’d better make sure the Swensens slather on plenty of sunscreen. They’re both so fair-skinned. People who don’t sail don’t realize how burned they can get under an overcast.”

He could come up with something about Vikings and boats, Ralph thinks. But why bother? Sarah doesn’t appreciate his bons mots anyway. “So how long ya gonna be?” he asks instead. “How much of this can wait?”

“There, there.” Sarah’s squinting up at a riot of runaway spikes from the potato vine. She brandishes her nippers and takes it on. “Surely that bulging briefcase--snip! snip!--you brought home--snap!--can keep you entertained for a while.”

Bulging briefcase, bulging briefs--he could make a joke of that, all right, one that Sarah definitely wouldn’t appreciate. Not that he’d necessarily want her to.

But Audrey . . . Ralph stops himself. Don’t think about it. Not now.

Of course Sarah’s right about the pile of paper he’s facing. You don’t make it as a TV producer by taking weekends off. Sometimes he even takes the work along on the boat, one hand on the tiller, another holding a script, a set of projections, ratings. Better to have it out of the way before casting off. And yet . . . such a day!

Audrey would sail off with him in a minute on a day like this. Cold and choppy it was that first afternoon on the water, but she loved it. You never knew with women. For some it was all about sunning on the deck, a chance to put it all out on display. Then there were the ones that were heaving over the rail as soon as you were outside the breakwater, and that was the end of that--end of the sail, end of the attraction.

But Audrey, now, she loved the whole package. The erotic surge (her words) of the water beneath her, the wind on her face. Wanted to know all about the Nereid -- the ropes, the sails, the winds, the swells. How to steer by the compass, the tell-tales. Wanted to take the tiller. “Keep both hands on the tiller,” he told her when they were ’way out there on a running sea, and then he began to . . . but he won’t think about that. Not right now.

The great thing about a boat with a woman you want to get close to is being away from interruptions and prying eyes--although much good that privacy is if you can’t drop anchor! Sometimes Ralph wishes he lived on a different coastline--the San Juans off Washington State, for instance--all those little inlets and islands.

Not that he seeks out these women that keep appearing in his life. It just comes with the territory. Show me a married man in the entertainment industry that never plays around, Ralph would say if anyone asked, and I’ll show you a guy that’s got some hangups he’s not telling himself about.

Still, he’d planned to keep it at home, after that ugly episode a while back. Some women can’t keep things in perspective. Audrey can, though. It’s been clear as can be from the start.

“I’m married,” he told her, that first time she saw him eyeing her and grinned to let him know she saw. Why wouldn’t he eye her? Long legs, slender torso, creamy décolletage set off by teal green silk. The reddish blond float of hair that framed what seemed to be a child’s face until you saw the knowing eyes, the saucy mouth. “I’m very married,” he said, “and I’m planning to stay that way.”

“So? Is that a problem?” The taunting angle of her hips in the leather miniskirt told him it would be no problem at all. He looked away, though, that time. He kept to his work.

But not long after, when she shyly slipped a video with her film school project onto his desk, he took the time to look at it. It was a twisted little piece of suspense, something she’d written and directed while acting in a minor role. All in all, it was a lot better than he’d expected.

“You’ve got something special,” he told her later, and he meant it. “Talent. Enough talent and then some. If you’ve got the stomach for this business.”

She was standing next to him, very close. She smelled of flowers and a hint of musk. He could feel the warmth radiated by her body. Leaning back in his leather chair behind the thick rough-cut slab of opaque glass that was his desktop, Ralph watched her face light up with his compliment and then go serious.

“I’m tougher than I look,” she said.

Which somehow led him to add, tapping his finger on the videotape box, “You look good too, Audrey honey . . . for that matter.” And drawled, the irrepressible performer in him--the mimic, the clown--emerging: “You got it, baby! Dat certain somethin’. Somethin’ da camera sees and loves.”

She laughed and tossed her head back, green eyes and dangling silver earrings gleaming. “And you like it too?”

It wasn’t the response he expected and it scared him, so he grabbed at the coattails of his dignity. “Just why do you want to work on the other side of the camera?” he asked, immediately hearing that he sounded like a goddamn recruiter and feeling foolish. “Why hang out in the front office?”

“To learn the business.” She held his gaze a moment. “It’s where the real action is, isn’t it?”

He looked away and didn’t answer.

Audrey walked around to the front of the desk and sat in one of the chairs facing it. She crossed her long legs, tucking one beneath her as she leaned forward and rested both hands, fingertips together, on the shiny glass surface. Her eyes locked onto his like couplers in a yacht’s rigging. “I know where I belong,” she said.

How old could she be? Ralph wondered. She looked like a kid, but he’d bet she was in her mid-thirties.

“Can you teach me what I need to know?” The green gaze never wavered.

“I dunno,” Ralph stammered. Then, “Yeah, sure. I’ll try.”

He still kept some space between them for a while after that. He resisted getting closer, even while making Audrey his protégé. He resisted for Sarah’s sake and also because Audrey scared him. She got to him in a way the others hadn’t. So he kept it a game, the old man flirting with a young girl, too young for anything serious. Secrets. Innuendoes. Little gifts. Sweet, frustrating games. But strictly hands off.

And she played along, until one day the sweetness and the warmth between them got too sweet and too warm to resist. So then you had a tangle of bodies where you’d already allowed a tangle of feelings to spring up.

He was like an adolescent. He gave her a music cassette--one of those customized collections of love songs they’ll put together for you at some music stores. The selections weren’t original, of course--chosen from a playlist the store provided. But she acted as if they were sprung from his deepest, most private imaginings.

“Anything you want,” she’d croon in response to some mundane request, “You got it!” Her eyes held a wicked gleam.

She’d brush against him, ostensibly by chance, and he’d hear her humming, “You Do Something to Me.” Private jokes, little tricks that set his blood pulsing, especially when others were near. He told her she had to quit this stuff, but she did it anyway because she knew it drove him crazy.

“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” It was one of the cuts he’d chosen, without thinking much about it. It was a song he’d always liked, that was all. But hearing her hum it at the office one day brought him acute discomfort, a sharp stab of guilt.

He knew he should have set a straight course at that point, brought the thing around to a conclusion. Except that even seeing where Audrey was headed he couldn’t condemn her. She was a player; so was he. They were players, playing.

“Okay to pick up dinner from the ribs place?”

Ralph glances up to locate Sarah’s voice.

“We can warm it up in the galley when we get back. Eat on deck and watch the sunset.”

She’s gazing at him from on high, above a trellis supporting an unruly jasmine. She’s climbed up on that rickety wooden stepstool she uses for pruning.

“Sure, fine.” He should go to her, he thinks, but then again, if she needs help she can ask.

Time was when Sarah would be cooking up a storm right about now to stock the galley. A new form of playing house--that was the Nereid to Sarah. Curtains for the portholes, nautical needlepoint below decks. And food, lots of food. She got her feelings hurt when he told her she overdid it.

Not like Audrey, with her hands on the ropes, the shrouds, the tiller -- her slender hands with the manicured nails grasping . . . .

There’s a loud crash and a thump. Sarah cries out and Ralph’s papers scatter as he runs to where his wife lies moaning on the ground.

“Don’t sulk.”

“Who’s sulking?” Ralph shifts his gaze from the outside world to the high, white hospital bed and Sarah’s tired face sunk in crumpled pillows. “Me, I’m just sitting here looking out the window. What’s wrong with that? You wanna make conversation?”

“Not really.” She sighs, pulls at the neck of the hospital gown with her one good arm. “What’s going on out there?”

“Not much.”

As far as he can tell with all the divider curtains blocking his view, Sarah’s cubbyhole is the only one with an outside window. At least that much of the day has been returned to him. Better than the hour they spent in that antechamber to Hell outside Emergency, the double doors whooshing open every so often to admit more of the bright Sunday’s backwash. Limping, lamenting weekend athletes. Empty-eyed old folks sagging in wheel chairs. Nervous ethnics clutching feverish tykes in dirty quilts, their runny-nosed siblings fidgeting alongside. And Sarah, looking more pale and pained with each passing moment.

He hates to see her like this. She’s a strong woman, his wife, and he adores her for all that he’s a lousy husband. He knows he is. No one knows it better.

He looks out at the ripened afternoon. Three young male Japanese, heavily laden with texts, notebooks and laptops, converse with great seriousness as they trudge along together. Suddenly they fall out of step and double over laughing. Ralph watches as one boy feigns a punch at his friend’s shoulder.

“What were you doing up on that ladder, anyway?” he asked Sarah back in the waiting room. “You can’t trust a step ladder on soft soil.”

“And if you knew that,” her pained eyes sought out his, “why didn’t you come help steady it?”

“You didn’t ask.”

She looked at her lap.

“I wish you’d asked.”

Silence, then, “You were busy. . . . Anyway, I’d used that same ladder in that same place a million times before.”

“Well, then.”

Finally it was her turn. Some young doctor, unlucky enough to be on call that lovely day, examined her. Right away he shot Sarah up with painkillers and sent Ralph back out to the lobby, thank God, while they “adjusted” a dislocated shoulder. Then a scan to make sure she doesn’t have a broken rib, on top of everything else. And now they’ve been parked here, in this recovery area, for an eternity.

Ralph checks his watch again. How can it take this long to get the results of a simple x-ray? A university hospital, supposedly one of the best. He and Sarah have helped support it . . . not that their names will ever be on that donors wall out there, but all the same . . . this is what they get.

There’s a squeak of rubber soles and a nurse pokes her head in, chirping, “We’re going to take you for another ride!”

“Whatever for?” Sarah’s voice sounds weak and weary.

“Doctor wants another picture. Just to make sure!”

“Sure of what?” Ralph asks, but the curtains are closed and the nurse is already squeaking away.

Sarah sighs.

“Shit!” Ralph says, then jokes, “No one in this town wraps with a single take.”

But Sarah’s tuned in to the rumble of an approaching gurney. A burley Latino with a gold earring slings the curtains aside and executes a quick docking maneuver. “Slide over,” he tells Sarah and braces her with strong arms as she obeys. They wheel away.

Outside Ralph’s window a kid with spiky pink hair throws his skateboard to the ground at the top of a parking lot ramp and leaps aboard. He glides down the long, smooth downslope, tacks neatly around a corner and disappears from sight. Ralph doesn’t recognize the insignia on the sweatshirt the kid’s wearing over his baggy pants. He wonders if the backpack affects your balance.

“Amazing how they do that,” a voice says.

It’s the young doctor carrying a chair under one arm.

“A stealth doctor,” Ralph says.

“Excuse me?”

“Your athletic shoes don’t squeak.”

The doctor frowns.

“I mean I didn’t hear you come in.”

But the doctor has plunked his chair down and settled in so he’s facing Ralph, knee to knee. “I want to explain the need for the second x-ray,” he says.

Ralph shrugs. “I told my wife nobody in this town settles for a single take.”

It doesn’t fly this time either.

“There’s no problem with your wife’s ribs,” the doctor says. “But we saw something else. On that first film? Something we weren’t expecting.”

Ralph nods. Alien implants?--that’s what he’s thinking. Alien implants transmitting signals to the mother ship . . . . He’s cursing his own perversity even as he’s starting to brace up.

“We wanted to look at another resolution,” the doctor continues. “To make sure it wasn’t a mistake, like a flaw in the film, or . . . something.”

Ralph realizes the doctor is stalling. He waits, fascinated, stunned.

“But it showed up the second time, more clearly.”

Ralph notices the doctor is making sure to look him straight in the eye.

“A mass.”

In Ralph’s imagination a tableau appears: priest, acolyte, an altar, smoking censers.

“A fairly large mass in the chest cavity,” the doctor continues, speaking more rapidly now. “Probably originating in the left lung, though it could be a rapidly developing breast tumor that metastasized to there. Has she been coughing? Losing weight? Not a smoker, is she?”

Ralph shakes his head. Sarah doesn’t smoke. Not for a long time now. As for the rest, he can’t think. No words come. No words, and no more distracting fancies. Ralph shakes his head again.

“We’ll set her up for a consultation with an oncologist. Tomorrow, if possible. I thought I’d speak with you first, while your wife was dressing.” The doctor waits for a response. “You understand what I’m saying?”

Ralph nods, numb and still wordless.

In Ralph’s image of a terminal disease consultation the stricken pair sit side-by-side holding hands. Seated across the desk from them, a gray-haired bespectacled doctor in a white coat and bow-tie breaks the news.

In real life, it’s a middle-aged female oncologist with a shadowy male colleague in the background. She wears a long purple linen sheath topped with a plaid oxford-cloth shirt and the guy’s in a Hawaiian sport shirt over khakis. The lady oncologist perches on the corner of her desk and leans forward, getting her face as close as she can to Sarah’s, speaking softly and directly, establishing intimacy. Ralph and Sarah don’t hold hands, and the doctors seem surprised to learn Sarah is ignorant of all that Ralph already knows.

It’s the beginning of a very long year.

Later, looking back, Ralph will wonder when everything went wrong. What was it that kept him from Sarah’s side during that time? Did she conspire with her friends to drive him off?

His intentions were good. The discovery of Sarah’s illness chastened and sobered him. He avoided Audrey in those first days like a bird of ill omen. “It’s okay,” she insisted when they inevitably met. “I understand. Just know this--if you ever need me, I’m here for you.”

He couldn’t sink that low. He was going to make it up to Sarah for every betrayal. Now, finally, before it was too late. If she’d only given him the chance.

Was there a critical link in the chain of events? All he remembers later is a series of disjointed images.

Jason and Trisha summoned home. Sarah giving the briefing, matter-of-fact as always. Trisha’s tears. Jason’s endless questions. The kids out drinking together that night while Sarah lay awake worrying about them. Trisha’s announcement the next day that she was dropping out of school to care for her mother. The effort it took to dissuade her.

The surgery, the chemo. Midge Swensen organizing a support group to provide rides, groceries, household and nursing support. Their insistence that positive energy, in conjunction with conventional medical practice, would pull Sarah through. Sarah, under her headset, listening to meditation tapes, irradiating her diseased cells with blasts of positive energy.

The relentless determination to bar all negativity from the house. God forbid that Ralph should be the one to sound a sour note. He played his assigned role, departed early for the office each morning, came home when expected.

The unavoidable discordances. Trisha and Jason’s worried faces and nervous tics on unannounced weekend visits. Sarah’s fretting about the hundreds of miles they’d driven through tule fog and drizzle. Midge’s unspoken annoyance at the negativity they tracked in.

Jason’s mission--his frantic web-search for experimental programs. His conviction that a specialist at Johns Hopkins had the answer. His astonishment when an hour-long harangue failed to budge Sarah from the adopted regimen. Midge, stopping by, put Jason on the phone with Sarah’s doctor. He spent the rest of that weekend watching sports on television, kept on web-crawling afterward.

Trisha’s poem in blank verse containing the words she felt she needed to say to her mother. Her bad timing, right after a chemo session. The poem asked Sarah to keep mobilizing her life force, visualizing the good cells’ conquest of the bad, just as Trisha visualized Sarah being there, someday, at her graduation, her wedding, the birth of her first child, as Grandma to a large brood.

Sarah listened through mounting waves of nausea, had to interrupt to use the basin at her side.

“Why couldn’t she mail the damn thing?” Ralph asked later.

To which Sarah said, “Oh, for crying out loud. You just don’t get it, do you?”

Trisha had little tolerance for the sickroom. She tried, but the sights, sounds and smells drove her out crying, retching.

“It’s all about you, isn’t it?” Ralph heard himself shout. “What about your Mom?”

Then he hated himself for losing his temper, just as Trisha doubtless hated herself for being selfish and useless.

Sarah’s friends comforted Trisha. “It’s more than you can deal with at your age,” he heard them say. “You need to be good to yourself.” “Your mother knows how you care.” Trisha departed for school looking relieved.

Ralph wished someone would throw him a kind word. The support group members were on hand all the time now, an occupation army in residence, closing ranks. Sarah described her ‘sisters’ as a wall of love and support crowding out her pain. Ralph felt he was outside that wall, pacing the perimeter.

When he arrived home from work one day he interrupted a group meditation. Another day he smelled patchouli and wondered if they had Sarah smoking pot. They called it aromatherapy.

At last he was assigned a mission. “Make sure Trisha and Jason stay in school and on track,” Sarah told him. “I can’t stand to have them moping around. That’s the worst thing they could do--mess up their future because of my illness. Tell them that. Keep them company and keep tabs on them, but encourage them to stay away from the house for the most part. That’s what I need you to do.”

It was a task within his capacities. From then on he spent as much of his free time as possible at the kids’ end of the state. He stopped by their campuses, rounded up Trisha’s friends and took them out to big-ticket entertainments, rooted for Jason’s college teams and fed him and his pals afterward.

Always he provided updates on Sarah’s condition, casting his reports in a favorable light. He didn’t tell them that Sarah spent her days listening to recordings of water sounds and bird calls, that she seldom left her room and wouldn’t eat . . .or how guilty he felt when he did.

Jason was still hunting experimental treatments on the web. He couldn’t see why Ralph wouldn’t whisk Sarah off to Houston or Baltimore for a consultation. He didn’t know about Sarah’s pale skin and frail bones, the drip feeders. Trisha, for her part, started questions with “Do you think . . . ,” then didn’t finish.

Ralph felt like he should tell the kids when Sarah refused further treatment with her doctor’s concurrence. He felt he should tell them when she couldn’t walk without assistance. But Sarah wanted them to finish the quarter and get through finals. Ralph didn’t dare depart from the script.

Feeling powerless against what was happening, of course Ralph had long since turned to Audrey. Audrey was his haven when he couldn’t take any more--Audrey, forever waiting--young, warm, invulnerable. She listened with sympathy as he told her about the treatment decisions and wellness regimens, helped him laugh about the tyranny of the crones. As a near contemporary, she provided insights into Trisha and Jason’s reactions. He hated himself for turning to her, but what could he do?

One Sunday night, after a stop-off at Audrey’s place on the way back from visiting Jason, he came home to find Sarah so medicated she was out of her head, a stranger. At the sight of him she became agitated, mumbling rambling complaints and accusations. He hated seeing her like that. He shouted at the home health nurse, called her a stupid incompetent who’d turned his wife into a drug addict.

Sarah died the next day.

Then there was the memorial service, with Jason’s moving, dry-eyed tribute to his mother that dumbfounded everyone. The testimonies by Sarah’s women friends to her grandeur of spirit and inspirational presence. His own mute immobility as he sat holding his weeping daughter’s hand.

“Dad, will you be okay?” Trisha asked later. She was packing to leave while he leaned in the doorway of her room, watching.

He nodded.

“Just call me if you’re lonely.”

“Thanks, Punkin.” He noted the odd expression on her face and realized he’d never called her that before. It was just one of those terms you were supposed to use, like honey or baby. He wondered why this cast couldn’t deliver their lines with more conviction.

Finally it was over. The kids were back in school. Life went on.

It’s the most beautiful day God ever made. Stretched out in the sun on the chaise, Ralph checks the stack of papers at his side and finds he’s only about a quarter of the way through.

He hears the screen door slide open and says without looking up, “We can head on down to the Marina in about an hour.”

There’s no reply.

“I need to coat the new handrails,” Ralph adds. “After that we can take her for a little run up the coast.”

Still no answer.

“Coming along?”

“What about my regatta?” Audrey says. “You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”

“Regatta?”

“It’s the third Sunday of the month. I have to be at the buoy at two sharp.”

He’s forgotten, all right. For a moment he wishes he’d never taught her to race, or given her the little Hobie Cat. But he knows that’s not fair.

“Okay. No problem.”

“I’m heading down now,” she says. “To get ready.”

He looks up at her, squinting into the sun. “Dinner?” he asks. “On the boat? At the yacht club? Or shall we go someplace else?”

He can see her in silhouette as she assumes a too familiar stance, hand on out-thrust hip, head to one side.

“What?” he asks. “What now?”

Audrey gestures at the stack of papers. “You brought all that home.”

“So?”

“So I went ahead and called some of the crew for the Baja run. We’re getting together for dinner.”

Ralph shades his eyes to get a better look at her face.

“The race is just a month off!” she says. “And we’re not a team! Not yet.”

Ralph gazes up at her still saying nothing.

“I mean, yes, we practice together, but we hardly know each other!”

“Yeah.”

He can hardly see her face but he can tell it’s in a pout.

“I mean--it’s not like you ever actually sail the Nereid! As in, race . . . or even take her out on a cruise up the coast! Just day sails, that’s all you ever want to do.”

Ralph watches her performance, his hand still shading his eyes.

“For that matter, anymore, you hardly take her out at all. Most times when we’re on board, you just want to fix stuff. Just sit around the damn slip and tinker with this or that. Sand, paint, tinker--my God!”

“To keep something nice you have to tend to it,” Ralph says. He wonders at his own words and at the sudden pressure behind his eyelids.

“Well that’s fine,” Audrey says. “You tend to your tending, then, while I do my race.” Turning to leave, she hesitates and faces him again. “You taught me to sail! As it turns out, I’m good at it. This race is a hell of an opportunity.”

Ralph has no answer. In all truth, no one ever asked him to crew on a major race. “Yeah,” he acknowledges. “It’s a hell of an opportunity.”

“So okay,” Audrey says. “That’s it.”

They both know it’s not the point. Ralph realizes it doesn’t matter to him, though. It just doesn’t matter.

“See you later,” he says.

“Yeah.” Audrey hesitates another moment, as if wanting something more--a kiss? a promise? an apology? But Ralph’s gone back to his stack of papers. “Okay,” Audrey says. “I’m off, then.”

He hears her departing footsteps, the slam of the big front door.