House of Feasting

   (The New Quarterly, Spring 1999)

I rise early these days because Janna wakes with the first light, wanting coffee and morphine and a kiss.  Her hospital bed sits in the centre of our living room facing the wide window so she can see the bird feeders in the perennial garden and the stone walkway in case anyone comes to visit.  With the top of the bed cranked half-way up, she lies on her sheepskin, wearing only her pajama top.  She’s paralyzed from the waist down, catheterized, her crumbling hips no long able to support her legs, so they’re propped against each rail of the bed with a pillow.  Last year, her breast cancer metastasized to her bones, where it gnawed and chewed until she became as brittle as a ninety-year-old.

This past week she’s drifted between staring out the window and re-reading Le Guin’s Earthsea books.  She’s given up writing.  It’s too hard, she says.  Sometimes she watches television or videos, but usually they’re too busy, too noisy with movement for her.  And she complains a lot.  About the pain, about needing to move again even though it’s not going to help.  About not feeling hungry anymore.

We spend so much time together, we don’t have much left to talk about.  We plan the vegetable garden, and the pond that I’m going to dig this summer so that she can watch the sky reflected in the water.  I need the time outside, away from her. 

Sometimes I can get Willow to come sit with her while I drive to town or just go have a coffee and read The Province at the Hungry Wolf Cafe across from the Mini-Mart here in Winlaw.  But mostly old friends are consumed by their own lives and pains. Janna reminds them too much of the things they’re afraid of.

There’s a sudden flatness in the room when she stops breathing.  A stillness.  My coffee cup’s half-way to my mouth.

I set the cup on the pine end table.  Waiting for her to breathe again.  Sometimes she does that.  Stops breathing for several long seconds, then starts again, dragging down another breath.  It’s the morphine.

I go to her.

Her mouth is slack.  I kiss it.  Her lips are warm, but flaccid.  Even in her drugged sleep, her lips move a little when I kiss them.  Not this time.  No breath sneaks out from between her lips.  I kiss her again, tasting nothing.

I’ve often dreamed of  this exact moment.  We’ve talked about it many times. 

I open my mouth and say out loud the words I have rehearsed for her in my mind:

“The end of a matter is no better than its beginning.

The waning moon no brighter than the waxing

and the day of death no better than the day of birth.

for the death of each one is destiny

It is as good to go to a house of mourning

as to a house of feasting.

The living should take this to heart.”

My voice fills our small living room.

I stroke her face and hair, her smooth neck.  Slowly, I unfasten the big white buttons of her flannel pajama top, stroke her collar bones, her small breasts, the mound of her belly.  Her pubic hair, her labia, her long, thin legs.  Her swollen feet.  I touch the soft hair on her arms, run my  fingertips along the backs of her hands and her fingers.  She has such long, piano-player fingers.

As a little girl, though, the piano was the least of her desires.  She wanted the stars instead.  And the earth.  And the moon and dinosaurs and magic.  With those long fingers she typed a hundred or so short stories and two novels.  She dug foxglove and baby’s breath into the dirt.  She jabbed at the air with them when she was mad, and wrapped them around jam-jar lids that wouldn’t come off.  Cleaned the carburetor in the chainsaw that never ran smoothly.  Stroked the underside of my penis with a slowness that made me crazy.

I lift her hands and kiss her fingers. 

It’s over now.  Falling asleep in this chair at night so I could be near her.  Sponge-bathing her while she crabbed at me for pressing too hard on her ribs, which had been gnawed off her spine. Watching tears squeeze out from between her eyelids.

Tired, I slump into my easy chair and put my feet up on the hassock.  My coffee is cold now. 

The house seems so quiet with only me breathing in it.

In half an hour or so I’ll call Helen, our doctor.  Then I’ll call the local burial society we belong to.  They’ll come and we’ll wash Janna’s body together, then they’ll arrange to have her taken away.

And she’ll be gone.

Last month, Janna and I joked about how I could have her around for as long as I wanted.  Get her glazed like brandied chicken breasts at a culinary art show.  Or maybe just buy a bigger freezer.  Or have her stuffed.

“Do you think Rob’d do me?” she said, her laptop pulled up in front of her on the swing-away arm bolted to her hospital bed.

“Why not?  You’d be a change from all the usual deer heads.”

“So, where would you put me, Evan?”  She pushed her long bangs out of her eyes.

“Well--”  I looked around the room “--probably by the window, standing, you know, like you were looking outside.”

“You could put me out in the garden, bending over working,” she said.  “A good view of my ass.”

“I’d like that.  But you’d probably just go mouldy in the rain.”

“Yeah, that’s true.  Okay, so standing beside the window it is.  But you’re not allowed to have him make my tits a 40-double-D.”

“I like your tits just the way they are.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only the ones who’ll listen,” I said with a laugh.

I wrestle to my feet, and go into the kitchen.  My bones ache, and there’s a tightness in my chest.  I know it’s just the hurt crouching there, chewing on me.

Together fifteen years, her and I.   Fifteen years.  What is that, really?  Just a number and handfuls of memories.  It’s not like I can recall every minute of those fifteen years.  But there’s a flavour to them, to us.  Warm and salty.  We taste like popcorn, with butter and engevita yeast.  And a shared can of Coke right out of the fridge.

I dump the cold coffee down the sink, and pour myself a hot refill.

Now Janna knows what’s on the other side.  All the wondering, all the questions about death, and being dead--she has the answers to them all.

“Do you think there’ll be strawberries dipped in sour cream and sugar?” she’d asked.

I’d shrugged.

“Well, I hope so,” she’d said.

I hope so, too. 

After they take her away, I’ll go down to the Winlaw Mini-Mart, buy a couple of bottles of Chivas Regal, and get puking drunk.  I made that promise to myself a month ago when she began needing me to spoon-feed her the morphine.

It’ll be easier to face all those people at the wake after a three-day drunk.

She was only forty-four years old, they’ll say.  So young.

I wish I had that Chivas now.

I know grieving is a slow process, and eventually the rawness will heal over with scar tissue, and I’ll go on with my life, go back to work, maybe get a new job, move out of this house, maybe even meet someone else.  I know that someday I’ll be hungry again.

I remember when I told her what I feared most.  She cried.  I was afraid, I said, really afraid, that the only thing I’d feel when she died would be shameless relief.

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.  “And I’m afraid,” she said quietly,  “that my dying will take so long you won’t miss me when I’m gone.” 

I cried, too.

I go outside and stand on the wet lawn.  The coffee mug warms my cold hands.  The air is fresh from the overnight rain.   

The Steller’s jays chatter in the old neglected plum tree.  Light fog, the colour of bone, sits easily among the spruce and fir trees that surround our house.

Slowly the tightness in my chest spills out, and a part of me rises into the sky.  Looking down, I see myself standing on the lawn in front of our house, coffee mug in my right hand.  A piece of flesh has been bitten out of my left breast.  Janna is standing there, chewing, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my wrist.  She cranes her neck to reach the ragged edges of my chest, takes another bite of me, and chews.

She teases the coffee mug out of my hand and drinks, washing down the mouthful of flesh.  She holds out her other hand.  Your turn, she says.  I bring her arm to my mouth and bite down.  Her flesh comes away easily.  She smiles at me and sips coffee as I chew.

I take another bite.

The End