Dedicated to the Game

When I came back from the emergency call, I expected to find her drinking. She had been upset with me, with her job, with something big and shadowy which I had been trying to get her to describe for the last year. Actually, I hoped to find her drinking. Sometimes she got drunk and wandered, or drove, off and I had to go looking for her. I couldn’t afford to do a search that morning; I was on call.

Her car was in the driveway, but she was not asleep in our room. That late, there was one other place in the house to check. In the early hours, she liked to sit downstairs and watch the fire when she was feeling agitated. I walked down to the basement and there she was, sitting on a cushion in front of the wood stove. But her posture was wrong, and then I noticed the rope and saw that she was not sitting on the cushion, but was suspended a few inches above it. I ran to her and slipped a finger through one of her belt loops, but the stitching popped loose as I began to lift. When I did manage to lift her I heard no in-rush of air. In that moment, I knew that we had lost, me and her. I couldn’t accept it right away though; I had to try to get her back. I dithered for a for a few moments. To cut her down, I would have to let her weight come back on the rope. I knew I would not outlive that act. It took every speck of my mental discipline to let her hang again. I severed the rope and went through the motions of resuscitation, with the expected results. I’ve been going through the motions ever since.

I spent seventeen and a half years with her. We met in medical school during an Ob./Gyn. rotation. After a prolonged reconnaissance, she talked a mutual friend into approaching me. The friend, a traditional woman who’d immigrated from Vietnam as a child, had been instructed to ask me if I was: 1) gay 2) married 3) in a relationship. All that came out was the question about marital status, mumbled quickly with eyes averted. Though it lacked the impact of the full set of questions, the inquiry was strange enough. It was strange to have any woman show any interest in my relationship status, period. I’m not exactly what most women would consider a “catch”. I cut my own hair. My nose has been broken on several occasions, and let’s face it, the thing sticks out enough in the first place to be at risk. Attempts at orthodontia undertaken during my childhood were not entirely successful. And although I’ve suffered from loneliness, much of it has been the consequence of a solitary temperament. Besides, I’m a climber, and so quixotic. Maybe my wife recognized a shared vision in that last quality, but if so we were probably ill-matched. She may have been better off had she chosen Sancho.

She was an artist. At the age of five, her parents caught her in the garage coloring in the fender of their new car with a crayon. The car was the wrong color, and she intended to fix it. As an adult, she spent a year trying to paint a scene from a photograph of Mt. Columbia. I tried to talk her out of it. The intriguing things about the photo were its detail and flatness. The brain could see different depths in the scene because the camera didn’t commit to any one perspective. The conventions of painting did not permit the same insouciance. She kept at it until she had a damaged trochlear muscle in her eye from looking back and forth from the photo to her painting. When she finally gave up, it was with a sense of bemused fatalism. Failures and frustrations brought up a black bile in her. My bile was always yellow.

When I had to forego climbing opportunities or persist in a profession which I have always considered ethically bankrupt, I boiled. I never got angry at her. On the contrary, she was my solace. But living in the same space as a whistling kettle begins to wear on a person. She finally set me straight. I got the parts of my life teased apart, once I realized that they must be kept apart or else destroy each other. As a climber who values climbing’s unitary action, the admission was difficult. I had to concede that, despite my wishes, all was not climbing, and acknowledging that all was not climbing did not invalidate anything.

She accomplished the turn-around by convincing me that some sentiments are irreconcilable. Feelings of frustration with everything, and so nothing in particular, real expectations based on our ideal desires of other people – and the same feelings toward ourselves – must be accepted as absurdities about us and byproducts of conflict within each of our identities. We cannot bring those feelings into line and make them reasonable in context of anything that we signify. She convinced me, but I could not do the same for her.

Since her death, I have had two dreams about her; the first, two days after I found her and the second, the day after I came back from the undertaker. I usually don’t remember dreams, but these were bad enough to intrude into waking memory. The first was a straight forward nightmare. She was sitting on the cushion in front of the fire with her eyes closed, crying. The tears were black and she just kept on crying them though they ate into her eyes and face.

In the second, I had just walked into the house and she was standing in the kitchen. She was older and taller than she had been in life, and she was smiling. She began to explain that she hadn’t really died, she had just staged an elaborate ploy to get away and sort things out for herself, and it had worked. She said she was sorry for the trick; there was just no other way. I started to forgive her and asked what she wanted to do now, what she wanted to do differently. But as I spoke, I noticed that she was standing partly inside the counter and her eyes were sad. My arms felt heavy then, and I looked down to see the box of her ashes in my hands.