Page 34 - WTP Vol.IX #3

Matt’s love for his son Kevin has never been so fierce as it is at this moment. As he’s pulling up the drive he can see, through the kitchen window, the stricken expression on his teen son’s face.
So, he’s been apprised. He knows. ~
Those earliest intimations . . . that morning, months ago, as he was driving Kevin home from his orthodon- tist’s appointment and they were coming down the hill toward the Fairway in Rydal. He’d been shocked by the sight, at the bottom of the hill, of the wide lawn fronting the Buick dealership: it had been burned away, seared, every single blade of it, leaving a sea of scorched earth in place of green grass.
His vision had tricked him, just for an instant. Matt had blinked, he recalls, and lifted his hand to his face to excavate webs. Looking again, he had seen, not a lawn blistered red in the glare of morning sunlight but the expected pelt of lawn, as neatly kept as it nor- mally was. It was, after all, a Buick dealership.
A similar thing had happened a couple of nights later when, in a dream, he’d awakened for the day to dis- cover all the grass on their ample side lawn scraped raw, burned away. When actual morning came, he had rushed to the window, Meg still asleep.
Green lawn. No change.
~
It’s a struggle for Matt to lift himself from the car given the heaviness of his limbs. These symptoms (how he’s fought them!) that have held sway for . . . how long has it actually been? How much time has elapsed since he first allowed himself to accept, see, realize what was happening in his marriage? No,
to his marriage. Those first concussive findings, unbearably painful: Meg turning to another man—
a doctor, no less, her mother’s physician, the one who’d attended the failing old lady. Then the endless mutual blaming; the storms of grief and outrage;
the long trust lost. Time has become, like so much
in his life, an altered universe, his body performing its unwelcome feats of merciless transformation. He can barely lift his legs from underneath the steering wheel, and his bloodless arms, in turn, are of almost no use in extricating him. This is how it is: bloodless arms, bloodless legs. And all of the skin on his back flayed away.
His wife is first to join him. She has stepped from the kitchen onto the patio by the driveway just as he’s pulling the car up the drive. A quick glance tells him there is purpose in her aspect.
Shutting the ignition, he sits for some seconds while she makes her approach. Drawing in a breath, ready- ing himself for what’s ahead. That he is able—has been able, since the onset of this crisis—to drive across the city to get himself to work and manage to function, give lectures, meet his students, interact with his colleagues; manage, even, in the evenings, to steady his mind enough (though sometimes, just barely) to read his students’ work and comment upon it: the preservation of these abilities has been essential to his enduring this startling transforma- tion. His very existence, he knows, has been at stake, has been at issue. His professional survival: If I gave that up—then . . .
That is, until today. Until today. This afternoon. ~
As his wife is walking toward him, Matt makes it from the car and stands there on the gravel, his briefcase still in the middle of the backseat. He’ll have to fetch it later. No wish to do it now given the weakness in his limbs.
They face each other, air separating them. Meg wears a beige skirt and a gray mottled mockneck—dressed, it would appear, for whatever might follow.
“I’ve explained it to Kevin,” she says in a low voice, at first not looking into his eyes, not directly, but then lifting hers, as though to have him understand.
All his life, Matt has suffered from this body-image
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