Arrogant/insecure. Stubborn/withdrawn.

  In fact the other writers respect Simon, though they exude little warmth in his company. When his work is discussed he is stiffly polite, typing away compulsively on his laptop, resisting even praise as if he can’t trust it; he rarely smiles. Yet he thanks each person for having read his work and offering criticism; he never fails to thank you at the end of the workshop; with a shy sort of aggressiveness he has shaken your hand—“Thank you, Mrs. McManus.” (He has never called you “Michaela” as the others do.)

  A handclasp, a stranger. A faint shudder has run through you, dismissed in an instant.

  You have seen Simon on his way to class walking slowly and with deliberation, with a cane, while younger, more agile and indifferent students bypass him.

  He has not missed a single class meeting.

  You have seen his eyes drift upon you sidelong, inscrutably.

  Does he imagine a special rapport with you? Does he imagine that he is in love with you?

  Not possible! He has no idea who you are.

  By the end of this final workshop two other memoir chapters have been presented and critiqued in detail, sympathetically but rigorously. Most of the party food and drink has been consumed. The festive air still remains, like a party balloon just slightly deflated.

  Three hours of intense discussion leave you exhausted but exhilarated, enlivened. You feel as if important work has been accomplished. Your mind has not drifted off as it has sometimes done. You realize that for these three hours you have been too concentrated on the class to feel sorrow, anguish, dread.

  You have not had a single thought of Gerard.

  COMFORT OR SELF-TORMENT?—rehearsing what you will/would say to Gerard about this final class of yours, that has meant so much to you. As any befouled air would mean much to a person desperate to breathe.

  How you will report to Gerard. Bright chattering news, the exchange between spouses. For your life will fade into oblivion if you don’t report it to the husband.

  Wanting to tell Gerard, not boastfully but with an air of hope, that your memoir students have brought presents for you, quite surprising you.

  Not just the vase of flowers but also cards, a stack of cards, and an elaborately wrapped object kept in hiding beneath the table until the end of class—oddly shaped, large as a watermelon with something protruding at the top, covered in silvery paper that makes a crackling sound as you unwrap it.

  And what is this?—you stare, too stunned to smile.

  Pueblo Indian, it’s explained to you.

  From the reservation at Cases Grandes, renowned for its artists . . .

  The thing is a (life-sized) stag’s head ingeniously fashioned out of myriad layers of worn leather strips, held together by staples that resemble tiny glittering seeds. The eyes are opaque glass orbs while the battered and discolored horns appear to be “authentic.”

  Hear yourself thanking the students for the gift in a bright appreciative voice. Hear yourself admiring the sculpture for its originality, ingenuity. Your voice gives out, you swallow hard to keep from choking.

  “A memento from New Mexico. To take back home with you, Michaela.”

  “Some of us drove out to Cases Grandes, last weekend . . .”

  You stammer thanks. Oh, sincere thanks!

  Your fingertips are tingling. You glance down and see to your horror that the tiny glittering seeds in the leather stag’s head are in fact ticks—living ticks. Awakened from their slumber by the heat of your flesh several have crawled onto your hands.

  Surreptitiously you try to shake off the tiny insects no larger than mites. You don’t want your students to see—you don’t want to embarrass them or disappoint them even as you are thinking with a part of your brain how crucial it is not to allow ticks to burrow into moist, hidden parts of the body—armpits, crotch, inner ear. The nape of a neck beneath thick damp hair.

  You open the cards now, before the students depart. You are touched by several cards that are handmade, in bright primary colors, cheery, affectionate—Dear Michaela, Thank you for changing my life!—the words shimmer in your vision, like tears.

  Briskly then the oval table is cleared, cleaned. These are adult students who pick up after themselves; several are mothers, accustomed to cleaning up after everyone. Paper plates, plastic cups, napkins and leftovers, emptied Coors and Diet Coke cans are gaily tossed into the trash. Final farewells, handshakes and hugs. The women students hug you—“Thank you, Michaela!” You are dazed by a vision of the glorious Michaela who has changed the lives of others even as her own life has collapsed like a punctured balloon.

  Keep in touch—you tell them.

  And—I will miss you. Send new work.

  Soon, all have departed. Simon Khraw seems to have been the first to leave, perhaps before you’d even unwrapped the leather stag’s head. He had no part in the folly, his indifference indicates.

  Nor has he left you a card. Good, you think.

  Of the writers Simon is both the one whose manuscript is the most promising and the one from whom you hope not to hear in the future.

  Manage to cover the leather stag’s head with the crinkling silver paper for you cannot bear to look at the ugly thing. As soon as the corridor outside the seminar room is totally empty you will carry it into a restroom to drop into a trash container.

  (But—are the ticks swarming? Feel something crawl rapidly up your arm. A tingling sensation in your armpit.)

  (A tingling sensation in your left inner ear.)

  The vase of daisies, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace and hollyhocks you will bring back with you to Santa Tierra. A challenge to position the vase in your car, on the floor in the backseat, buttressed by books so that it won’t tip over and spill its contents. But you will try because the wildflowers are beautiful and you cannot bear to leave them behind.

  BLINK IF YOU CAN HEAR ME.

  Blink if you are (still) alive.

  Stare into a restroom mirror to discover—your face has been restored!

  Parts of your body that have been missing for months appear to be missing no longer, a shoulder, a finger or two, the left side of the mouth.

  A swath of hair, an earlobe white as the petal of a daisy. Cautiously you take a deep breath. Is the spell over?

  Reasoning with yourself: you’d been a man’s wife and you’d loved your husband very much but now you will be living without him.

  “You can live like this, Michaela—exactly as you’ve lived today.”

  So Gerard might counsel her. When he realizes that he has died and that you have not (yet) died.

  “Yes you are broken—defeated . . . But you will not seem so to others and so you must not reveal your heart to them out of mercy—for them.”

  Not a whole life. Never again a whole life. A half-life. The widow’s half-life.

  “But it can be your life from now on.”

  Your heart is suffused with warmth, hope. A sensation small, delicate and fleeting as a moth’s wings.

  You can. You will.

  You vow.

  55

  Half-Life

  Shaky-legged, leaning on a cane, he is making his way to a bus stop bench on Ascension Drive at the outer edge of the campus.

  Sitting heavily on the bench as if his knees have given out.

  And the cane, slipped from his fingers striking the sidewalk, rolling.

  He is very tired, or dazed. Such fugues come over him after periods of intense concentration. With difficulty straining to retrieve the cane on the ground for no one is coming to help him, no one is nearby.

  If he dies this very hour, he will die alone. Slumped on the bench at the bus stop, a cane clutched between his knees, useless.

  LEAVING THE PARKING LOT YOU recognize the slumped figure on the bench at once: Simon Khraw. White shirt, chino shorts.

  You have a choice of exits from the lot. Easily you can avoid Ascension Drive if you wish and exit onto another, smaller roadway.

  So much easier to pretend that you don’t see Simon Khraw, as he hasn’t (evidently) seen you. But you feel sorry for the man with the young-old face and so (against your better judgment) you take the exit that will bring your vehicle close beside him at the bus stop.

  Lower your window, call to Simon—“Simon? Hello! May I give you a ride home?”

  May. Not can. For it’s a delicate matter, you understand, offering a “challenged” person help he hasn’t indicated he wants.

  Simon glances up from his laptop, startled. For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognize you in your vehicle, and you wonder if his eyesight is poor. Then, embarrassed, or annoyed, Simon quickly shakes his head No thanks.

  If you looked closely perhaps you’d see that Simon’s parchment-pale skin has darkened with blood. Or perhaps his face remains impassive, semi-paralyzed.

  “No? Are you sure, Simon? Really, it’s no trouble . . .”

  Simon. Calling the man by name seems aggressively teacherly, proprietary.

  No idea how far away Simon Khraw lives but you don’t intend to give up so easily. This is the widow’s half-life—making yourself vulnerable to others, offering help that might be rejected out of pride.

  As you’d offered assistance to Letitia Tanik, whatever came of it in the end. Try. You must try.

  It isn’t pity you feel for Simon Khraw. You don’t think so. Sympathy, perhaps. And the way he has looked at you.

  So matter-of-fact are you in offering Simon a ride, so sensible and without a hint of doing a favor for a person who looks as if he could use one, as if you’d driven Simon home in your car many times and this evening is nothing out of the ordinary, you are able to overcome the man’s (seeming) reluctance, and soon Simon is limping to your vehicle, hoisting himself inside with a pained grimace.

  Winded and wheezing from struggling to walk just a few yards. Has to be grateful for the ride though he is also chagrined, chastened.

  You know from Simon’s memoir that his form of bronchiolitis is incurable but not “progressive” as lung cancer would be. He has good days, and he has bad days. He has days when he has to breathe pure oxygen from a portable canister, and exertion is difficult, and he has days when he can breathe more or less normally, and walk without a cane. (You have seen this “mature” student striding along the walkway almost gaily—once, twice this term.) Hot gusts of wind are bad for Simon, bearing grit and pollutants; cool clear air is good for him. You gather from his memoir that he is estranged from his family and has acquired an attitude of “stoic indifference” toward them—not very convincing, you have thought. Though Simon’s painfully candid and unsparing memoir doesn’t reveal whether he lives with anyone, or has any “intimate” relations with anyone; not even if he has a caretaker, someone responsible for his well-being.

  His breathing is a sound like thistles being shaken. You are hesitant to ask if he is all right, such a question might offend him . . .

  Curtly Simon informs you that yes, he is all right.

  “When I get tired some kind of ‘spell’ comes over me. But only for a few minutes. It isn’t crucial.”

  As if he has been reading your thoughts, and has not liked them.

  Giving you directions to his house three miles away Simon speaks tersely as if under duress. In such close quarters you feel shy of each other: the instructor and the student.

  In an academic setting there is no physicality. The understanding is—minds, not bodies.

  In the front seat of your car entirely different circumstances prevail than in the seminar room. Suddenly, Simon Khraw is close. Impossible to ignore the man’s labored breathing, his nervous proximity. Wavy chestnut-colored hairs on his legs that are lean, not obviously muscular.

  And—what are your (relative) ages? The aura of authority hovers about you, unavoidably. As an older student Simon might naturally resent an instructor who is younger than he, as well as female.

  You think—He is uneasy with me, as a woman. This might be a mistake.

  Yet once begun, the scene must play out. As you drive, Simon gives directions. He is careful to keep his voice level, neutral.

  No escaping what you have impulsively set in motion out of loneliness and the perversity of loneliness which is a terror of being alone and being not-alone like the systolic beating of a single heart.

  Even as you are aware of the (tense, excited) stranger beside you, you are thinking of how you’d first come with Gerard McManus to his house on Monroe Street. Feeling between you had quickly strengthened, within a few days. He’d purchased your books and read them both overnight and wanted to speak with you about them. Which had frightened you for such a reaction was not like other men you’d known of whom one or two had never troubled to read a word you’d written as if in knowing you intimately they knew you in a way that bypassed your books and rendered them redundant. Invited by (smiling, excited) Gerard to step inside the gaunt handsome old brick house and a wave of panicked vertigo came over you as if you were stepping into your own future, helpless to resist.

  The gravitational pull of the future—is it? Swept up in a great seething wave, tossed and spun and deposited a distance away, spent and gasping on the sand.

  I am here. I am here. But—where?

  The first surprise is that Simon Khraw lives in a house in a neighborhood of single-family residences and not in a duplex or an apartment building. The house at 227 Armand Street is a small wood-frame bungalow like others on the street, near-hidden behind wild-growing cacti and sagebrush, with blinds drawn to the windowsills. The front lawn is thinly covered with raked gravel and storm debris. In the waning light it appears that the bungalow has been painted an eerie bluish color that glows just perceptibly, as if radioactive.

  “Thank you, Michaela. It’s very kind of you . . .”

  Michaela sounds unnatural in Simon’s mouth, as if he has forced himself to utter a taboo word.

  Eyes averted Simon struggles to get the passenger’s door open and maneuver his legs out without dropping his cane. He is also carrying a book bag that thumps against his knees. His breath comes quickened, harsh and petulant. But you are not about to leap from the car and come around to the passenger’s side of the car, to assist him.

  Prepare to drive away but no, Simon is leaning down to peer back into the car at you through the lowered window. Asking with a pained grimace if—maybe—you’d like to come inside for a few minutes before driving back to Santa Tierra? He can offer tea, coffee, wine . . .

  You are touched by this invitation, so awkwardly uttered. By the grimace in Simon’s face, and the hope in his eyes.

  Of course, you quickly decline. Thank you Simon, but—no. I can’t.

  In fact you hear yourself say, “Well. I guess—for a few minutes . . .”

  WHEN THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO. No one awaiting you patiently or impatiently.

  No one wondering where you are. If you are alive, not-alive.

  For the room on the seventh floor of the hospital has been cleared and cleaned and disinfected and there is a stranger now in the bed that had been your husband’s for so long you’d have thought the mattress had shaped itself to his mortal body.

  * * *

  TEETH CHATTERING WITH COLD. Except it is not cold but ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit.

  Though this is a harmless decision, you are thinking.

  Impulsive, heedless—harmless.

  Visiting a student. An adult student. Officially, when grades are handed in, a former student. For only a few minutes. A person you will never see again.

  As if entranced. You are entranced. From a distance Gerard is observing his widow in disbelief, disapproval.

  What on earth are you thinking, Michaela?

  I am your husband. I am waiting for you . . .

  Once out of the car cannot change your mind foolishly and climb back into the car! Not while Simon Khraw is watching you.

  Once out of the car and boldly following Simon along the walkway of colored faded finely cracked concrete there is no retreat. The scene must be played out.

  Fact: terror of the empty house in Santa Tierra awaiting you has overcome a lesser fear of this lesser house as terror of the deceased husband has overcome a lesser fear of Simon Khraw with his ravaged young-old face gazing at you with squinting adoring eyes.

  Someone to adore you, again. A tawdry transaction.

  Following the man as in a trance. Such weakness, the impulse of a moment. Thrill of dread, exultation. Certainly you can have no (genuine) wish to follow a stranger into a bungalow with drawn blinds.

  Slovenly cacti, overgrown sagebrush and lavender exuding such a sweet smell, you feel a moment’s faintness.

  Odor of recklessness here, confused with the odor of lavender.

  Worse, odor of desperation.

  But now, you are inside the house. The door has been (quietly) shut behind you.

  Nervously Simon apologizes for the condition of his house. He hasn’t had a visitor in—how long?—possibly a year . . .

  The interior of the bungalow shimmers with filtered and refracted sunshine. You are made to feel vertiginous as if finding yourself in the interior of a body amid the heat of living body-organs.

  Blinds have been drawn over the living room windows to keep out the oppressively hot New Mexico sun. Low-thrumming window-unit air conditioners, not central air-conditioning, operate minimally.

  Stale air, a smell of—can it be birds? Parakeets, parrots? Cockatoos?—you see a scattering of feathers, some of them bright-colored green and red, others filmy-white, on the carpet. You hear excited bird-chatter from another room.

  Simon, your awkward host, has set his book bag down on a table. He rubs his thin hands together, unconsciously. Stares at you with glassy-green narrowed eyes as if you inhabit a blaze of light overwhelming to him. The improbable has happened, has it?—and now what?