Some Hands

It was a Spring long on rain, short on flowers, mud everywhere, and one morning I started to shave and a bright red mole had sprouted overnight on my left cheek. No warning, no sensation, just there like a puffball arisen from the driveway. It was the size of a piece of confetti, and I touched it dumbly two or three times to confirm the obvious: it existed, it hurt when pushed hard into my jaw, it was in the way of a razor blade. Other than that it might be cancerous, it did not bother me much, but I called to my wife for a second opinion.

“Well,” she said, “at least something has decided to spring forth. That was definitely not there yesterday.”

She too confirmed its existence by poking at it with the nail of her forefinger, then stuck her face up close to mine, too close so her face was a blur, and I could smell the peppermint shampoo in her hair. “Big sucker,” she said.

I went to the doctor and he sent me to a dermatologist who said it was not cancerous but that its sudden appearance was unusual to say the least. She asked me what I wanted to do.
“Nothing."

I returned from the dermatologist and Clara was unhappy with me. “What do you mean nothing? You cannot just let it stay there and do nothing.”

It had not occurred to me that it would offend her and yet something about the sudden ugliness upon my face made my wife irritable, nervous, and for the next several days she could hardly take her eye from it. In turn, I decided the strange eruption did not bother me and I took a perverse delight in her dislike of it. It was the kind of small battle an old couple sometimes fights when their senses of individual vanity become too inextricable, when it must be recaptured in petty skirmishes. In the same way, my wife had recently asked whether I cared for a particular pair of turquoise earrings. I did not, and thereafter she wore them constantly. We had entered that portion of a long marriage where to retain our own identity we fought small, suffocated attempts at rebellion from the other. My face was not otherwise particularly ugly nor was it very attractive. At least that was how I thought of it, but who can say?

The next day I found myself having to shave around the mole with an inordinate amount of dexterity and decided to acquiesce. The thing was taking up too much energy and if I had derived some childish satisfaction in flaunting a disinterest in my own appearance in front of my wife, it was time grow up a little.

The procedure took all of half an hour, and when it was over I left the office with a thick wadding of gauze on my cheek. The doctor, a woman with the plain spokenness and humor of a plank of oak, explained it had bled a little more than expected but not to worry. My wife was relieved and despite having been a persistent irritant over the blemish, insisted on changing the bandage herself. She took a cotton ball full of alcohol and rubbed around the crater. I asked her why this had been so important to her. “You don't take care of yourself,” she said. “You've got to take care of yourself better.”

A week later she was driving across the train tracks towards St. Johns when an oncoming truck lost control and hit her little red car so hard that it spun around twice and landed in the ditch along the tracks. The first person who stopped said she extracted herself from the rear door, appeared to be okay, and then simply dropped dead. The car was full of bags of compost, spilled everywhere, and I cannot imagine the scene without black dirt arising like a cloud and crushing the wind from her lungs.

What followed was an long swim through waves of shock and grief. Our friends and family gathered around me for a month or so then slowly receded away. In the second month I contemplated suing the delivery company who the other driver worked for, as my in-laws suggested, then forgot about it. And then time was a flat, dull weight passing very slowly until I felt like going back to work.

It is my occupation to restore old trucks, mostly Dodge Power Wagons, and work means opening the door to my garage and picking up a wrench or a grinder. When Clara died I had been in the process of replicating a well-drilling apparatus that once came from the factory and fitted onto a winch driven by the engine. It is a remarkable contraption, a giant auger affixed to the front of a vehicle and capable of drilling shallow water wells, setting power poles, and so on. A remnant from a rural past.

One day I opened the garage and felt like bangin and welding on it again and so I did.

As I came back to the use of my hands, I found myself shaving in the mirror one morning and realized that the hole in my cheek was not healing. I removed the bandage and where there should have been a slight scar, according to the dermatologist, two parallel welts came together but did not close. Pressing them apart with my fingers, I could actually see the moisture from the inner skin of my mouth. In my grief I had not noticed this occurrence, had simply kept replacing the bandage day after day out of habit. But where a minor thing should have been was now a major thing, a hole in my face.

I was reminded of a man I had met years before in the mountains of Nicaragua. He was standing at a tienda holding a chicken in a string bag and wearing a Yankees hat. When he saw me he started talking in a thick east coast accent and telling me how he had lived for many years in Pennsylvania. There was a rather enormous hole in his throat, big enough to see a shocking red cave of flesh and sinew beneath the skin. As he babbled excitedly, declaiming upon the depth of snow in Pittsburgh, he lit a cigarette. Small whiffs of smoke puffed from the hole in his neck as he talked. This did not embarrass him and when he was done I left with a carton of beer and the perverse awe one feels after visiting a circus side show.

I called my dermatologist and explained the situation. She was as baffled as I was and told me to go to the doctor straight away. If it turned out to not be a sign of anything medically serious, she could provide a referral to a good plastic surgeon. But it did not hurt and I was happy to be amongst my tools again with no one to notice the scar. Eventually I stopped wearing a bandage.

As the work on the old Dodge progressed, I became happier. Several floor panels had rusted out of the cab over time and once I had cut them out and replaced them, the project was past its apogee. From there on out it was a matter of refining the outline of the whole rather than of solving its puzzle. I found myself spending more time sipping coffee in the morning and making forays into rehabilitating my wife's overgrown garden. The idea of picking up some compost no longer had the morbid overtones it had had six months before.

She had died in the spring and over time the vegetable beds had become filled with mummified tomato plants, bean stalks, corn grass that had died at six inches of height. As I pitched their dead bodies out of the ground with a spade, I wondered if perhaps I was doing this too soon. If while her clothes still hung in the closet and credit card bills still came in the mail I should be taking on metaphorical tasks of this kind. Yet it was irresistible and when the morning was slow or a parts order had not arrived yet, I cleared a different bed and scattered clover seed to sprout in the coming rains.

That she remained most alive to me in the garden was testimony to how strange and gentle a transformation she had made in the second half of her life. Prior to moving to Portland, she had been a rocket scientist, a physicist specializing in highly theoretical examinations of gas dynamics which were applied more concretely by others to the construction of booster rockets at a NASA facility in San Jose. It was demanding and lucrative work though it meant living in an expensive and stressful place. As her work progressed, so did the ephemeral nature of her physical life, making six figures but spending much of it on an apartment, vacations, and vehicles. It was, she said, the very embodiment of the rat wheel cliché.

Before she attempted to completely jump ship, she came to a method for ameliorating her disjointed life. One weekend, a friend invited her for a long road trip to go camping in the desert. It quickly became apparent that the friend wished to seduce her and that the camping trip was to be amongst a group of people indulging in what they called The Lifestyle. The Lifestyle was a coded term—one which I have always imagined capitalized— for people who were swingers in the 70s sense of that word. A loose affiliation of mostly couples who spent time together in various silly forms of recreation which arced, over the course of a night or a weekend, toward a sexual free for all. When she would tell me of this time in her life, I pictured an endless succession of naked people manning barbecue grills, playing volleyball, planting petunias.

It was impressed upon my wife that she was free to join or not join, by means of telling others whether she was On or Not On (Yet again, I imagine the terms in capital letters, as one imagines the terms of any cult. You're probably just going to have to get used to it.). But of course, after a long day of romping around in the sun, or drinking gin besides some high Sierra lake, it was assumed everyone would be softened into the state of On-ness which was the only real point of the excursion.

The idea struck her as more silly than anything else, but then she realized silly was what she wanted. The shape of her life—paying $2500 a month for a small apartment, chasing hydrogen molecules across computer screens, running to make busses, was in need of some bending. What could be sillier than a puppy pile of lawyers, human relations directors, language scholars, rolling around the Ikea tones of some Cupertino mansion?

When she first told me of this year of her life, obviously, it was more interesting to me as a kind of appetizer to our own coitus than anything else. She was an adventurer and I was not and each remembered day of bike riding or berry picking that became a night of sweat and laughter, ended with picking pubic hair from her teeth, was recounted in the before and after of our own rutting.

Such stale titillations came back to me as I tossed the dirt to and fro trying to fix in my mind the point where she had become my wife. Not the calendar date where we had been married. But the point where such exotica was no longer proximal to the heart of our life, was packed away in a trunk belonging to that other person, the pre-wife.

When finally she had wrested herself and moved to Portland for something completely different, Clara mostly left The Lifestylers behind. But one weekend before she had made many friends here, she attended a Gathering put on by a friend who had also just moved from San Jose. Clara told the people at the dinner that she was Off for the time being and left after dessert as the others retired to the host's bedroom. Before she left, her old friend pressed a business card into her hand and said, “You have to meet The Doctor, even if only for one of his massages.”

Why was all of this old history coming back to me as I dug out vegetable carcasses and turned in never eaten peas? I was remembering what I had loved in my wife. It was that long dormant sense of what a fearless and frenetic presence she had once been and the way in which I had admired her. Some of it, yes, was a carnal counting of coup in which a rather naïve, shy young man felt himself to have struck gold by wooing a beautiful, self-contained woman with a rich past. But that had long ago husked away, and it was remembering that she had had a past, rather than the particulars of it, which I now savored.

We had met about six months after she had come to Portland and I was still repairing Subarus and Toyotas for the outdoorsy and liberal people of southeast Portland. I had saved her a bundle by correcting a bad diagnosis of a slipped timing belt and charged her only to advance her distributor. I explained that the first mechanic she had been to had only been trying to scam her for an expensive repair, during which he would have simply fixed the ignition timing and she would have been none the wiser. This struck her as somehow indicative of the honest, no-nonsense character of her new city and she invited me to dinner in return.

As I spent more time wandering her garden, my Power Wagon project hit a snag. In attempting to fit a new front axle, I realized that I had welded the frame up out of square. An inexplicably stupid and fatal mistake, it robbed the project of life for me. The garage door stayed closed on mornings and the compost flew into the vegetable beds instead, turned it in with the stainless pitch fork I had bought for her birthday last year. When I ran out of beds to clear, I started a new one, and then there was nothing more to undue, I planted autumn crops; kale and cilantro, red lettuces, broccoli.

A week after receiving his card, my wife found herself lying naked atop a massage table in the house of The Doctor, who was in fact a well known and popular local Naturopathic MD. She said the room was dedicated to nothing but his massage table, the tiny sounds of gamelan gongs floating out unseen from a corner. The doctor himself was a tall, gregarious man who had fixed a delicious dinner for Indian curry for her and then offered her the expertise of his hands. She had the distinct sensation of a medical consultation and was not aroused. The Doctor told her there was no need for anything other than to receive a massage.

But after giving just that, he had cleared his throat and asked, “Would you like to sample some of my toys?” She was in that relaxed state after a good rub down where even the voice feels becalmed of speech and she felt drugged by her own visceral pleasure. The air smelled of lavender and mineral oil. The Doctor set a plain hardwood box on the table next to her and unclasped the hinges.

Inside was a velvet swaddled collection of blown glass dildos and vibrators arranged in relative length. The most elaborate was of two pieces with the head gasketed to the shaft by a piece of dense latex. In the clear crystal she could see a battery and wires, some mechanism for vibration, in the see-through style of an iMac computer. He explained that they were made by another Lifestyler whose day job was crafting elaborate pot smoking apparatus for medical marijuana users. They were quite expensive and sought after for their aesthetic beauty alone. The box even had a wire protruding from it to warm the otherwise cold glass to body temperature.

She took pains to try and explain to me that there was something kindly and deferential about the doctor, though he was quite handsome and by no means forlorn or dispossessed of charm. He really did seem to be offering up a medicinal technique with no sense of his own participation in the event. And so she said yes.

Yes. She said yes and he proceeded to slowly and expertly stimulate her in all sorts of pleasure producing ways. I could not help, upon hearing the story, but imagine gleaming chromatic stirrups arising mechanically from the table. Such was the weird, high priest imagery of the whole story.

Afterwards they drank cold Chardonnay on his porch and he explained, his jocularity regained, that he was part of a subset of Lifestylers who thought of themselves as something like worker bees. “I realized long ago that the whole point of all this sucking and fucking was the mystery and power of the female orgasm. Everything else is just frivolous, just selfishness.” I picture my wife, you see how memory reaches back and makes her my wife even then, quivering in post-coital pleasure watching the sun set toward the Coast Range. He told her that she was welcome for “worship”, that's what he called it, any time she wished.

But by the next day she had become creeped out. Whereas everything leading to that point had been a kind of frolic, a dangerous intoxication, the doctor and his friends had perfected a methodology, had extracted and reduced pleasure to a boring mechanical operation. She had found the limitation of separating herself into more than one person and wished to leave any destination that led to unvisited.

Standing in the back yard, poking at the fresh pile of black dirt with nothing on my mind, it was time to do something about the whole in my mouth. Clara had been right—you can't go around with a pointless problem hoping it will just manifest itself as some kind of character, some slight incidence of rebellion. I was not a peasant with no health care and a rooster in a bag. Yet what was there to do? It did not hurt and I could not conceive of my appearance mattering in any way other than attracting a mate, something of no interest to me at the moment.

So I stood there worrying the back of the hole with my tongue and realized what troubled me was only the notion that there might be something more deeply wrong. A small, discrete mole on one's face does not turn into a major health problem for no reason. Perhaps I had AIDS from all those vicarious partners of hers, perhaps my fundamental immune system was trying to send me a message. Was it not from similar puzzling complaints that eventually AIDS had been discovered?

“No,” said my doctor, when I finally made it in. “It's unusual, yes, but it is not cancer and it is not AIDS. Trust me, it was just a really, really well-rooted something or other like a patch of bamboo. When it came out its roots went further than were first apparent.”

My regular doctor is an amiable Jewish guy with a flop of longish hair and a habit of clicking his pen or thumbing his stethoscope as he talks. “My advice though is that you see a plastic surgeon and figure out some way to cover it up before you start drooling out of it. Or worse yet get a carrot stuck there.” He found this greatly amusing and was still chuckling when he left the room.

And this is where my wife's old pillow talk stories and my present predicament start to relate to one another. Though the Doctor had quickly dulled as an enhancer of sexual chemistry, he lived on for many years as a running joke. He had become well known for his success in treating immunity disorders and other marginal ailments through alternative means. It was hard not to see his face every now and then in local weekly papers. And when one of us would do so, it would be enough set in motion running gags about pony-tailed orgasmic therapy healers. We suspected that perhaps he had figured out how to capture female orgasm in his wooden box and apply it later for the banishment of lethargy, fibro-myalgia, depression, and so forth.

In retrospect, I wanted this small thing, this hole in my mouth where little wisps of spit met tiny zephyrs of air, to mean something more than it did because I had not let my wife let it mean anything. That is as clear as I can put it, and I know it is not very clear.

His office was on a quiet street in southeast Portland. The yard was landscaped with bamboo, there were white kids with dreadlocks at the corner coffee shop down the street. Somewhere chickens clucked in an invisible yard. The receptionist handed me a very long questionnaire which started with age and weight, proceeded through self-assessment of my bowel movements, ran through significant life stresses, and ended with a few blank lines for stating my desired health outcome. I had not used a pen for so long my wrist was cramped by the time I was ushered into the back room.

After taking my vitals in the Chinese way, recording the multiple wrist pulses, the doctor finally peered at the whole in my mouth with a small flashlight, then sat back on his stool. He was not who I had expected, this pale-skinned, tall man with dark eyes and a white lab coat like a regular doctor. He did not have the bland, unworried smile I associate with the term “alternative practitioner”. He asked specific questions, did not have a ponytail, there was nothing condescending about him. He was profoundly likable, though I did have to stop myself from looking for his wooden box. “I don't think there is anything I can really do for you,” he said at last.

“No?”

“No. It's just a little hole there for some reason. If there is some systemic reason why it healed in such an atypical fashion, it does not seem to indicate anything worth worrying about. You could look at it like your body is trying to tell you to pay more attention to it. Not much bad could come from starting there and proceeding outward. Eat real food, sleep well, don't let anything get stuck in there.”

I left with a sensation of contentment. He had told me nothing I did not know, but I knew why I had gone there. It was to make some kind of contact with someone linked to my wife from before she was really my wife. I wanted to make some random connection to her by letting the doctor's once infamous hands pronounce upon me in some way. I don't know why that should have comforted me but it did. I felt I could go back to digging in the garden then and be assured of mourning my wife, the person, rather than my wife, the habit.

On my way to the car I stopped and got a tall cup of coffee. The counter was covered by cases of pies— apple rhubarb, peach cobbler, ginger apple. The sounds of laughing boys, music like aqueous, pulsing starfish on the stereo. In the midst of handing over my credit card, I stopped to look at the person taking it. I had not watched a woman closely in a good long while. The epicanthic folds of her eyes said Asian, and the slouchy green tee shirt with a faded duck on it said Oregon. She tossed a pen on the counter for me to sign the chit rather than handing it over. Beneath the minor details of this woman standing across from me, down through the stratifications of whatever might be settled underneath, was someone who existed without role or reason. What a vast and improbable multitude of persons.