Moonglow (2022)

"Don't be sarcastic..."

"Sorry, but I'm not being sarcastic."

"What? You can't be serious...!"

"Liz? She asked me to teach her to ski. That's all there is to it, okay?"

"Do you expect to bring her up to the house for Christmas?"

"If you want to invite her, fine."

"Would you come without her?"

"Absolutely."

She stopped in her tracks and shook her head. "Robert, you are an impossible human being. I mean...you know that, don't you?"

And you looked down into the inky black water, then you pointed at a passing leaf. "See that? That leaf?"

She turned and looked. "The leaf? Yes. What of it?"

"That's me, Liz. That's me, just passing through."

And she came close and took your arm in hers. "Oh, poor Robert. What are we going to do with you?"

But you didn't hear her just then. You were too busy staring at the leaf while images of Heidi danced about like sugarplum fairies around the Christmas trees you never shared.

+++++

Sarah Bergstrom had until quite recently, literally only seen snow from the window of an airplane. An orphan, she'd never known anything about families, except that she'd never had one and quite probably never would. Because she wasn't, she liked to say, date bait. Men didn't ask her out because men were, generally, afraid of her. A priest had tried to rape her once upon a time, when she was about fifteen — or so she said — and she'd beaten the poor bastard quite literally almost to death. Even the boys in the orphanage didn't pick fights with her, and that had suited her just fine.

Alabama, near Mobile Bay. Hot, humid summers and dusty winters. An ancient Catholic orphanage, older than old. A big, wide open dormitory had been her only home, and you could see the pain in her eyes when she talked about that place. And she'd gone from frying pan into the fire, enlisting in the Army as soon as she could. Fighting her way into college because she had unusually good language skills. She's gone to Notre Dame then went through officer's candidate school. She did it the hard way, but she fought and scrapped her way through, around, and over every obstacle put in front of her — and she always managed to come out ahead of the pack. And, oddly enough, she'd spent most of her career in the Middle East. Now she was teaching at Harvard; she had finally seen snow up close.

She told her story the next evening at dinner, at Elizabeth and her husband Christian's home, and all their many children sat around the huge dining room table absolutely enthralled. And Elizabeth looked at you all through dinner, still absolutely mystified. Her children had spent the day with you and Sarah, riding up to the Sphinx, the observatory and restaurant nestled in a notch between the summits of the Eiger and the Jungfrau.

Sarah had of course never seen anything even remotely like the view she enjoyed there, and do you remember the simple pleasure you felt sharing this moment. Her red hair and her sprinkle of freckles, the round sunglasses that looked incongruously hippyish on her, and very much out of character — or so you thought at the time.

You took her skiing the next day, all of you. Elizabeth had one Olympic silver and two bronzes and two of her kids were headed for the national team, yet they were all home for Christmas and everyone got into the act. It was, you soon realized, teaching by committee — but Sarah was game, the consummate 'good sport' — and by the end of her first day on the mountain she was plowing her way down intermediate slopes. It wasn't, you mentioned to Christian, just her Army training. She was a gifted athlete, very coordinated and strong as an ox, yet she was determined to learn and that made all the difference.

Ody had spent the day with his own family, with his mother and father, and when you picked him up after your long day on the mountain he seemed rejuvenated. He pulled you down to the snow and wanted to wrestle, and even Sarah joined in then, everyone laughing so hard it hurt.

You had planned to have dinner with her at the hotel that night but everyone decided to join in the festivities. It had to be fondue, for Sarah's sake, and by the time you got back to the hotel she was snockered and Ody was humming along in high voltage bliss and maybe that's why, when Sarah kissed you, the room began to spin and spin. You put your arms around her, you held onto the feeling because you knew the moment was something precious, something to hold onto and to cherish before it too faded in the moonglow.

+++++

Winter. Snow falling past bare limb and yet little by little piling up on thin little edges, waiting for an errant breeze before the last fall. Classes are more difficult to prepare for; as your hair thins and turns whiter and whiter you realize that you too are waiting for an errant breeze, waiting for the fall. Everything is the same but now everything is so different.

Sarah fell in love with you. Like a heat seeking missile she had homed in on you from the beginning, and she was a patient strategist, a sturdy practitioner of the Art of War. You, on the other hand, could never reciprocate, not now. Not after Margaret, and certainly not after Heidi. You'd fought your war and fallen about as low as you thought a person could only to get back on your feet just in time to get slammed down hard again.

You weren't just suspicious of love, now you were afraid of it. Afraid that there was nothing left of love but pain. You weren't crazy and you certainly never had been a glutton for punishment, so Sarah Bergstrom and all her impossible little diversionary tactics simply made no sense to you. Not to you, and not now. Who knows...maybe a few years ago you might still have been willing to try.

Yet skiing with her had been fun. Your family loved her, they took her in and for the first time in her life Sarah knew that feeling. And yes, it was all a trivial cliché but so what? Maybe for a few days she'd restored your...oh, wait...what were you going to say? Your faith—in humanity? Yet, in the end, reason won out one more time. After you returned, once again on that tired old ocean liner, you'd precipitously drifted away from all her impossible expectations. All her maneuverings. After a while she stopped calling you.

You took long walks in the snow with Ody and he was finally in his element. He was happy now, happier than he'd ever been, and for some reason — yeah, some reason — that was enough for you. You were working on your new book, something about JFK and Cuba, writing taking up every waking minute of your day that wasn't spent in the classroom. Running down obscure references. Scheduling appointments with the few remaining survivors of the Kennedy administration. Recording these interviews, graduate students helping to transcribe all your erudite questions, and then winter turned to spring.

And one Saturday morning Elizabeth called and when she asked you about Sarah all your pithy evasions were all she needed to know. She didn't ask again. She did, however, want to know if you were coming home that summer. You were writing a new book, you explained, and she didn't need to ask about that again, either.

Maybe looking back now you can see you were adrift, that you were ill. You'd cut yourself free from your obligations to everyone but your work and your new best friend, the puppy who never, ever left your side. Except he wasn't a puppy now. Ody weighed more than you did now, and recently you'd needed a real shovel to pick up his turds in the backyard. Still, when you crawled in bed at night there was something about the way he plopped down beside you, resting his chin on your chest as you scratched the top of his head.

Margaret called that summer. She was back from LA. Couldn't stand it out there, too weird with all those wide open spaces. No traditions and suddenly all alone, she'd felt herself...adrift.

"Me too," you said. Isn't that funny?

"Think we should take a chance and go out for drinks?" she asked, and you could feel the tender wounds in her voice, the hesitation born of panic induced loneliness.

"Why not?" you just managed to say. "You doing anything tonight?"

+++++

She moved back in three weeks later, and by the time classes resumed in August all the old routines had taken root again. Like when she said "I love you," as she headed out the door and you replied "Love you too" and it was like your life was on autopilot now. Again, with time off for good behavior.

Ody got along with her. A good thing. And when Elizabeth called and you told her about all that, you could hear the catch in her voice, the hesitation. Kind of like 'are you out of your fucking mind!?' Except those words really weren't necessary between the two of you. She could still read you like the open book you'd always been—to her, anyway.

"So, will you be coming home for Christmas, or will you still be writing?"

"No, no, if it's alright with you we'd like to join you."

Yet the routines that had, once upon a time, bound you to Margaret were your undoing. By mid-autumn she couldn't take it anymore. "You haven't changed!" she cried as she packed her bags again.

"I didn't know I needed to," you mumbled as you hooked the leash up to Ody to take him for a very, very long walk. When you got back to the house she was gone, though she'd left a note telling you that someone would be by for the rest of her things.

It was about that time that you began to think that maybe there was something wrong. With you. You found a highly recommended shrink and made an appointment, and both of you — Ody and you — went to all the appointments. All four of them. The shrink was a pill-pushing idiot who apparently had no interest in talking to his patients. Take this pill now. In two weeks add this one. The pills made you sleepy. You couldn't get it up. You flushed the remaining pills down the toilet and hopefully the micro organisms down there would be happier and more content as they went merrily on their way to the sewage treatment plant.

You ran into Sarah a few weeks before you were due to leave on the QE2 and she asked how you were doing.

"Horrible," you said. "How 'bout you?"

"The same."

"What's been going on?" you asked.

"Nothing, Robert. I think I realized that somewhere along the way through summer I wasn't going to make it without you, then I heard your ex had moved back in with you."

And you nodded. "She found her broomstick and flew the coop again."

"Are you okay?" she asked. "You've got dark circles under your eyes."

"I feel like shit. Other than that, I'm just ducky."

"Like shit?"

"Like a ping-pong ball, bouncing around all over the place."

"Emotionally?"

Remember how you nodded?

"When's the last time you had a physical?"

"Right about the time Reagan was worn in. Though suicide seemed the more logical choice."

Then she'd put her hand on your forehead and you felt that little electric feeling. She felt it too, but then again that had never been her problem. "I'm taking you to my internist," she told you in this weird take-charge voice that reminded you she'd been through Ranger training.

Her doc made it to your groin. One of your testicles, the left one, was the size and texture of a golf ball. A tech with an ultrasound machine appeared and the next thing you knew the internist was asking if you knew a good oncologist.

There are few moments you've faced before like this before. You're naked but for the little open-in-the-back gown you have on and your emotions are already on the jagged edge, but when a physician asks if you know a good oncologist? That takes the cake. You tell her about your ex and she makes the call while you get dressed.

Surgery is scheduled for five in the morning. Tomorrow morning. Sarah stays by your side, she gets you home and in the door. She calls your academic dean then she calls Elizabeth. No one asks questions. Everyone, she says, will be praying for you. And you know—on some unconscious level, perhaps—that Elizabeth is on the phone right now making reservations.

The urologist Margaret set up to do the operation meets you in the pre-op ward before surgery. He tells you that when you wake up, if it's before seven in the morning no spread to the cord was found and it would be clear sailing. If it was around, or later than that, then he would be performing a so-called retroperitoneal dissection, and that would be bad news. The worst possible outcome. That would mean months of chemo and radiation. Possible urinary incontinence. Sex would more than likely become a memory, a thing of the past.

And oddly enough, as cavalierly as you've treated sex all your life, it is that possibility that hits you hardest. You will no longer, that little voice in the back of your heads says, be a real man. You will be...what? A eunuch? The castrated court jester? That oddity people whisper about when you aren't looking?

You are given something to "take the edge off" before you're wheeled to the OR, and you look at the lights passing by overhead and they are almost like the lights on the subway. Until you are lifted onto the operating table. Those lights don't go away. They are there to help trained eyes peer inside your guts, to help them see whether you will spend the rest of your life in relative normalcy, or if you will become the freak, the court jester.

You see the light being aimed at your nuts just as your eyes close.

+++++

Your eyes open and after the confusion falls apart they seek the big silver clock on the wall and it is eleven thirty and there is nothing left to do but cry for the passing of the man you used to be.

+++++

Elizabeth is there with you when Sarah pulls up curbside and an orderly helps you into the front seat. You drive home inside a silent snowfall but you really don't care what time of year it is anymore. In a way you almost feel like the old you, but that's just modern biochemistry at work. Doing its thing. Making the pain less painful.

After the surgeon handed your nuts and cords over to the waiting pathologist the surgeons and nurses waited for the technician to make slides from your tissues. You know, the cancerous tissues in your nuts. They stood there, waiting, waiting for the results while you waited on the table, kind of almost but not quite dead to the world. The pathologist with his microscope pronounced the verdict in the court of such things, but he had then pronounced you guilty of cancer in the first degree.

So the surgeons gathered over your belly and sliced you open. They moved your very own sewage treatment plant out of the way and set about removing all the lymph nodes deep inside the tissues of your lower back, and then they put everything back where it was theoretically supposed to go and sewed you up.

So now you either took a handful of pain medications every four hours or your midsection felt like an uncontrolled forest fire. You were not yet allowed solid food. Worst of all, Ody was not allowed on the bed—and he had no clue why he'd been pushed out of your life. Sarah took him for long walks. Elizabeth stayed by your side. She never left you unless it was to go to the restroom.

Margaret took care of the rest. The lab work. Setting up chemo. Pain management. In a way, she did all the heavy lifting, the stuff that counted. The things that saved your life, or at least postponed your death. Then again, she'd done all this before, with Tom. Before it was his turn to go to the basement and dissolve. So she knew the score.

Yet she was hopeful. So Elizabeth grew hopeful, then Sarah did too. The Christmas tree went up in your living room and almost everyone that wasn't racing for the Swiss national team came over to break bread and open presents. And despite it all, Christmas that year didn't turn into some kind of morbid death watch. It was just Christmas. Candlelight around the big table, Sarah still mesmerized by the comings and goings of family. Ody stealing the show and carrying the day, the center of everyone's attention. Even yours. Margaret's too, because she was still a part of this thing Elizabeth called "our family." When Margaret gave you a gilded nutcracker to open for Christmas even you laughed.

You had a light load scheduled that winter, just two graduate seminars, and you secured permission to have your students come to the house for class. There were only a half dozen students in each, so it promised to be fun. Elizabeth wouldn't think of returning home just yet, not until you were back on your feet, and Sarah usually came to these seminars, at least when she could. Ody was still the star of the show, but by the time the term was at an end your students were complaining that they'd never had a more grueling academic experience. C'est la vie, you explained with a shrug. You gotta learn to roll with the punches.

You started your sabbatical one term early because the worst of your chemo was just ahead and you didn't want to put your students through that. No one, Margaret told you, should go through what you were about to go through.

+++++

You were bald then, and very frail. In and out of Mass Gen, depending on how low your white count dropped. The idea of food was merely nauseating; when Margaret forced you to eat you cursed the gods for allowing you to be born. Deep ridges appeared on your finger nails and the whites of your eyes just didn't look right. When they started to turn a little yellow Margaret cut back on the chemo, but as soon as they cleared she resumed with a different elixir.

Then came radiation. Which, surprisingly, didn't hurt. Until it did, usually a few hours later. Same results. Nausea, vomiting. Then the good news; the radiation blew out your pancreas and we're so sorry about this but you are now an insulin dependent diabetic. Hope you don't mind giving yourself shots in the belly twice a day for the rest of your life.

Margaret didn't drop by as usual one afternoon but she called you that night. She was going under the knife in the morning. Ovarian cancer.

And she laughed. Long and hard. Until she started to cry.

"We always did everything together, Bobby. And now this. We get to do this together, too."

You didn't know what to say, did you?

All that blather about faith and reason now sounded trivially meaningless.

"Where are you?" you asked her.

"My condo."

"Pack a bag. Bring it over. We'll take care of each other now."

Funny the way Elizabeth accepted that decision. Like...she's family. Of course we'll take care of her.

And so you did. At least you tried.

+++++

Nine months later and you're back on the QE2. Sarah is there by your side, yet so to is Margaret, only she is dead now and you have her ashes with you. And some of Tom's too, because she wanted a little of him to remain with her. Elizabeth and Christian are here too, and so are her youngest kids, those not skiing on the circuit. Christmas at sea. That was what Margaret wanted. And she told you both as much as long ago and as far away as last summer.

She saved your life, yet you couldn't save hers. That doesn't seem fair now, does it? There was no reason behind this outcome, and no faith could help you make sense of the emptiness you feel. It is midnight now and the stars so far out to sea shine so brightly they almost make you forget why you are here.

She wanted you to do this by yourself, out here in the star-shine, away from the moonglow. Open two urns and let the wind do the rest.

You promised to set aside a little of her, and of Tom, so the three of you could be together again, but now, out here in the starshine it only takes a few beats of the heart and they are gone. They are together again. You thank her for your life, for the life she shared with you and the lifes she saved, and you apologized for not being a better friend.

You looked down into the passing sea and you could feel her stretching off into infinity and you wondered, for a moment, what nothingness really feels like.