!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Mike arrived in Cambridge the Friday after the Moratorium march, looking completely drained. “My father called this morning, I’m going back to Cincinnati tomorrow evening.”
“Wait, What? You have to go back now? Can’t you wait until Thanksgiving?”
He slouched down in the director’s chair Bev had appropriated from the movie shoot on the second floor, the one with “Ryan O’Neal” boldly silk screened on the back rest. “It’s my mother. She found a lump under her tongue, got it biopsied on Monday. It’s cancer, some kind of skin cancer.”
“Oh my God! What’s going to happen? Not G! That’s…that’s…I don’t know, it’s scary.” I plopped down on my bed, wondering if I should reach out and stroke his leg. He looked numb.
“Surgery. She’s having surgery first thing Monday. My father wants me there, he thinks I should be there.”
“Shelly?”
“She just drove out to Idaho with her friend. She’s going to live in Sun Valley, at least this winter. There’s a guy there…”
I interrupted, “What kind of surgery, where? Oh, Mike, I hope she’s going to be all right!”
“Christ Hospital. He said they have to cut off part of her tongue, make a skin flap from her neck to rebuild the floor of her mouth, dissect the lymph nodes. She’ll have to learn how to talk again, he says.”
My mind whirred with anxiety. G had been a calming, encouraging force for me the past three years, a beacon for what I could become. The thought of her brought low like this at the start of her career as a clinical psychologist, unmoored me. I shunted that worry aside, knowing Mike needed support, not fear, from me.
“My mother’s strong, she’s the strongest person I know. She says she will not be stopped by this, she has grandchildren to harass.” He sniffed, shook his head with a half-hearted smile.
Two weeks later, Mike drove back up. I met him on the porch, saying, “We have to be quiet, they came back for some re-takes up there. Take your shoes off when on the stairs.”
“Are they here, now?”
“Just the crew, they’re trying to get the lighting right I think. We’ll be gone when they start filming.”
I showed him the book review James had written about Anais Nin’s latest diary installment, Volume III, 1939-1944. “She’s speaking tonight, after they show a Henry Miller documentary. “We’ve got to go, I have to see her, to hear her.” I bubbled with excitement, forgetting to ask about his mother. “Listen to what he wrote, ‘After a terse notation of atrocities (“Bali invaded. Java invaded. Paris bombarded by the English, India rebelling against the English”) Nin wrote: “And what can one do but preserve some semblance of human life, to seek the not-savage, not-barbaric forms of life.” I’ve been reading her stuff ever since that class with Shulmeister last year. She’s so smart, so willful, doing what she wants, holds her own with men.”
Mike, distracted, nodded, “Sure.” Then, “What about after? I need to get some sleep tonight.”
I’d forgotten about the MIT swim meet tomorrow. Somehow he had cajoled the coach into letting him drive up by himself, not on the team bus. “I told him I was a senior, wasn’t coming back after January, what difference did it make. And that I had to see my girlfriend, could stay with her. I guess he thinks I’m a lost cause anyway, so why not?” He looked a bit sheepish as he said this.
Suddenly, I remembered his mother, her surgery. “Anything new about G? How’s she doing.”
“She looked pretty weak when I left, that neck tube thing is…weird. She gets it taken out in two weeks. Then my father wants to take her with us out to Snowmass for Christmas. Doctor said she had to wait six weeks before she could ‘resume’ her normal activities. It’ll only be four or five when we drive out. J insisted she had to go, said he would carry her everywhere if he had to.”
“Sounds like he needs her as much as she needs him,” I mused.
Nin looked smaller than I’d imagined. With her braided hair curled high in back, she exuded an intriguing air of prim, elegant sensuality. We arrived just as The Henry Miller Odyssey began screening, and had to stand in the back of the overflowing crowd of students. Afterwards, asked about publishing her private diaries now, she replied, “ I felt there was an affinity , a connection between the thirties and the sixties, and that the past can often inform the present.” She sounded suspicious of dogma as a solution for one’s problems, saying “Self-knowledge and self discipline result in freedom.”
In response to a question about her role as a woman in the salons of the thirties, surrounded by Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Otto Rank, she asserted, “Women must be every bit as independent as men. In their art, in their life. You know, we do have sexual feelings apart from love. I like the Dionysian movement, it’s a recognition of expression through the senses and the joyfulness of relationships.”
Energized by seeing her, hearing her speak of women’s freedom to choose and direct our lives, our loves, our futures, I took control of Mike that night in bed. At first reluctant, perhaps remembering his swim meet the next day, he soon caught the spirit, coming back for a second, slower coupling. Finally we slept, huddled close in my narrow bed, but I soon found him on top of me, waking me up once more with undiminished fervor. Exhausted, we both slept until the winter’s sun weakly sparkled through the naked branches outside my window. We shared a smile, wordlessly shaking our heads in satisfaction, which led to one final effort, in which we both succeeded.
“I hope you can still swim today. Don’t you have to get at least a third place for you letter this year?”
“Haven’t you read about what opera singers do before a performance?”
“I haven’t, but I can imagine.” I felt fulfilled and free, knowing I was in control of me, at last.
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