The Wide Circumference of Love Page 9

Chapter Nine

  2011

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Gregory didn’t remember who had said that. He’d tried to, but he didn’t, or couldn’t. And he was sick of searching the Internet for all the things he used to know. If the past is never dead and not even past, then their three decades together would outsmart the forces aligned against him. Against them. Massive, mercurial, but precise, the thing that had upturned his life wouldn’t win. But it still felt like it had crossed the finish line, like it was already smiling, holding the trophy aloft.

  He and Diane had been together all these years. Together through his battle with cancer. Together through the diabetes he now had. A warm-up? A trial run for this? Together. Not until Diane had he known the real meaning of the word. Marriage wasn’t a contract. It was a bond of caring. Caring. Another word she had made him know, deep, inside and out. All those words that had joined them, made them: Wife. Husband. Ally. Friend. He was afraid one day he would forget them, too. They weren’t afraid to talk about anything. But this? She, the litigator, the judge. He the designer, the builder. He hadn’t figured out how to draw a blueprint for this. He still remembered reading his father’s poetry, about broken bodies he struggled to heal, about life and death, and what those he saved and those he could not bequeathed him. Those poems had given his father something, added dimension to what appeared to be a full-to-the-brim life. Now he was using words, writing to himself what he did not want anyone else to hear or know.

  FEBRUARY 10, 2011

  I keep getting lost when I’m driving. Forgetting where I’m going. Arriving somewhere and not knowing where I am. So far, I’ve managed to keep it from Diane, from Mercer. But these days I’m always running late. Running behind. Running to catch up to where I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what is happening to me. I should want to know. I do want to know. But if I find out I am afraid of the cost I will pay for that knowledge. Losing my company. Everything I’ve worked to build. Shattered.

  MARCH 3, 2011

  I don’t feel the earth is assured anymore beneath my feet. This must’ve been how my father felt. I cared for him. I pitied him. I loved him. But I never asked how he felt, how it felt.

  APRIL 16, 2011

  I have two jobs now. The second being the work of masking this thing. Extending my business card to people I think I know but don’t recognize. I’ll offhandedly extend my card saying with as much casualness as I can muster, “Give me all your information; I think I lost it.” If I’m lucky, they have a business card. If I’m not, I’ll say, as I extend the back of my card, “Oh and write down everything, to make sure I spell your name correctly.”

  JUNE 20, 2011

  There are two of me. Which one is real? I’ll go days where I’m fine. Living the way I used to, not thinking about my thoughts, not wondering if around the corner of the next moment, I’ll run into myself as a sham and a fake. Days when I’m fine. But the memory loss always come back. It comes back to take a little more than last time.

  JULY, 2, 2011

  Writing about it makes it better. Writing to whomever I am writing to, suddenly, I am not alone. But the writing makes it real.

  So this is how it begins, Gregory thought. Forgetting over and over. All day long. Forgetting and then remembering, and because you suddenly remembered, convincing yourself that the forgetting was a lapse, a series of lapses, not your soon-to-be-permanent mental state.

  He and Mercer were reviewing plans for a retail and condominium complex, sitting elbow to elbow at Gregory’s cluttered desk. He sat listening to Mercer talking about the cost overruns and constant calls from the owners, staring at the squares on the whiteprint, the lines, the boxes, the squares that he knew, yes, he knew were rooms, doors, light fixtures, stairs, skylights, windows, floors. He knew that even though there were moments, sitting beside his partner, when he had no idea what he was looking at, what the lines meant. This in and out, this feeling of being insubstantial, a breathing question mark, had his armpits drenched in sweat.

  “When we go to the meeting, you talk about the changes in the design. I’ll cover the new costs, okay?” Mercer asked, looking at him.

  “Where is the meeting again?”

  “What’d you mean? Where we always meet, in their offices.”

  “I’ve been swamped with emails, distracted. Where is it again?” He asked this with a nonchalance he was certain Mercer heard as utterly false.

  “Mount Vernon Square,” Mercer snapped, his brows clenched in concern. “Across the street from First Congregational Church. Don’t tell me you need the address. Damn, Gregory, we’ve been going there once a week for the last six months.”

  “Gimme a break, I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Well, clear some of that shit out of your brain, so you can think. And remember the meeting’s at four p.m. I’ll meet you there.”

  When Mercer left his office, Gregory pulled out his cell phone and searched for First Congregational Church on the phone’s GPS. The map of the city popped up, and he could suddenly read and understand these lines. He saw Mount Vernon Square on the screen. Then he searched the pile of what looked like rubble on his desk and somehow found amid it a card with the address of the company. Finding the address stalled his fear. He now knew the name of the company. He knew the address. But as he recalled the landscape of the city, when he said out loud, “Mount Vernon Square,” when he whispered, “Mount Vernon Square,” there was nothing. His mind was hollow and bereft. Empty.

  Gregory fingered the blueprint, a design done on crisp white paper, the kind he had been looking at all his life. His office wall cases were stacked with rows and rows of the paper, rolls and rolls of it, overflowing. All those lines and squares on the paper were now buildings where people worked, played, and lived. Those lines were the bread and butter of Caldwell & Tate, but there were days when the lines meant nothing.

  How would he get through the meeting this afternoon?

  He could still access his passion for talking about design, master all the jargon when needed, the language of his calling. He’d get through it, he’d muddle through. He hadn’t blown a meeting yet. But the forgetting, the dislocation that plagued him, promised, he was sure, an awful day of reckoning. On that day, he would lose himself. On that day he would lose his thoughts. Would he lose Caldwell & Tate a contract?

  Through the glass door to his office, Gregory watched Mercer heading toward the elevator. He saw the young designers they had hired in the last year—Martin Kim, Darren Jackson, Josh Watson—lounging in the kitchen over coffee. This was his company, his and Mercer’s. Mine to lose, he thought, as he stealthily reached into a bottom drawer for a flask full of bourbon. With his head below his desk, he took a swig. The taste, so familiar, steeled him, erased the edge off of his terror. He returned the flask to the drawer and opened a pack of gum, cramming two sticks into his mouth.

  Gregory leaned back in his high-back swivel office chair and closed his eyes. He hadn’t designed anything in two years. After more than three decades together, he and Mercer now devoted their time to bringing in contracts and managing them. Looking for money to pay the staff. Slaying dragons. There had never been enough time to design, to feed his appetite for art and math. It got lost, so much of it, in the minutiae of keeping Caldwell & Tate afloat.

  Odd things, things he knew by heart, he couldn’t now recall. But he could somehow always remember the shame, the screw-ups. Last week at the Department of Regulatory Affairs solving a series of bureaucratic mix-ups on permits for the complex on Mount Vernon Square. When the site manager had no luck, Gregory himself had gone to the office.

  He had walked up to the Plexiglas window when his number was called and the woman behind the window with a short blond haircut and light brown eyes began joking with him.

  “How’ve you been?” she had asked, with a broad and inviting smile. “Been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen you down here. I met your daughter; she looks just like you. She’s sharp. Your son still w
ant to be a contractor?”

  The steady, jocular stream of questions had assumed a relationship he had no knowledge of. He was certain he had never seen this woman before in his life. Yet she knew about Sean and that Lauren worked for his firm. And that would be like him, within ten minutes, to know her life history, to have shared his. But because he was polite and all-business in response to this onslaught, the woman had taken offense, making him stand before the Plexiglas window for forty-five minutes while she “researched” the problem in a back area where he could see her at work, leisurely and begrudgingly, stopping to chat with coworkers, nailing him to an unseen crucifix every few minutes with a bruised and bitter stare.

  Gregory opened his eyes and saw Lauren in the outer office, her arms filled with blueprints as she headed upstairs. Next year she would take the licensing exam. She would be one of only three other female African American architects in the city. Smart, ambitious, focused. His twin.

  She witnessed his days, his increasing mistakes. He explained them with a shrug and an excuse of a sleepless night, but Lauren had seen the flask in his desk and said nothing, out of love. She had slipped him a bottle of Visine for his red-rimmed eyes and interjected in meetings when she heard the faltering of his voice and sensed the flight of his memory. From bulwark to burden, that was the trajectory Gregory feared he was on, all that was left for him to bequeath his daughter.

  Had his father given him this illness? He carried his father’s awful journey within him. First there was the forgetting, the confusion, the day he had accused Gregory bitterly, shouting, spittle hitting Gregory’s cheeks, of stealing his wallet. And the skeptical, long, and untrusting look that preceded the first time his father asked him, “Tell me, again, whose boy are you?”

  “Dad, it’s me. I’m your son, Gregory,” he’d tell him.

  Gregory’s own muddy emotions had sunk him down into a soup of despair, until he learned that just telling his father his name momentarily cleared the gloaming fog choking his father’s mind—for a half hour, fifteen minutes, until he asked him again: “Tell me whose boy are you?”

  The dementia made a victim of his mother, too. Did she and his father make love during all that? Ever jointly revisit a past that was coherent and beloved for them both? He’d witnessed her stoic care of his father, knew the love was still there, but just like David and Bruce, Gregory never asked how she bore his father’s day-by-day vanishing act. He never asked because he could not fathom how he would handle it if Margaret told him the truth.

  Gregory had seen close up who and what he feared he could become.

  A decade ago, cancer had been harder to fight, harder to beat than he had ever been able to tell anyone. He’d had a team of talented doctors, the love of his family, and the will to live, but his body never recovered from the brutal efficiency and side effects of the chemotherapy and radiation.

  The cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, went into remission after ten months of treatment. He’d been in remission ever since. He had told Diane everything he could, but there was no way to describe the pain of cancer, how it depleted and deformed every ounce of fight and resilience, how it felt some days as if he were being devoured. After he was “cured,” he developed diabetes. He had it under control, but still it was a new, invasive, and unsettling element of his body and health.

  But he’d made it, kicked cancer’s butt. Had even told friends that it had been a blessing because it reminded him how lucky he was to be alive, how gratified he had been by the outpouring of love and concern and support for him and Diane from colleagues and friends.

  Cancer had quenched any dread he had of death, but this loss of memory, its stubbornness, its resilience, if it was what he feared … he could not even name his trepidation.

  Gregory sat in the cafeteria of Washington Hospital Center waiting for his brother Bruce, a general practitioner. He had left the office early. As he stood outside the offices of Caldwell & Tate, he realized he would have to pretend he was a tourist and ask a stranger on the street how to get to Mount Vernon Square, a ten-minute drive from their offices. On his way to Washington Hospital Center, he’d gone out of his way and found the Mount Vernon Square office and thankfully it all came back to him. All the meetings with the investment company. All of it. A comforting tidal wave that baptized him in confidence.

  He was facing the entrance so Bruce would see him. He was ravenous and had already filled his tray with a turkey sandwich, potato salad, a large cup of coffee, and a slice of apple pie. He’d need the energy for the meeting. He felt more in control, less fragile when he’d had a good meal.

  Gregory gazed at the doctors and visitors wolfing down lasagna, soup, salad, and throwing their heads back to drain cans of soda, bottles of water. Which of them, he wondered, was there waiting for someone to die? Which of the doctors had a patient for whom they could do no more?

  Gregory saw Bruce enter the cafeteria, look around, and nod to him. He then headed to the food court. His brother was at least thirty pounds overweight and had just stopped smoking a year ago. His black hair was thinning rapidly, leaving strands of sheer white covering his balding pate. Bruce arrived at the table with a cup of lentil soup and a vegetarian casserole on his tray.

  “I’m finally taking my own advice,” he said, pointing to his meal.

  “About time,” Gregory chided. “How’s Aaron?”

  “Coming home from rehab next week. It’s costing us a small fortune.”

  “What do they say, third time’s the charm?”

  “Hell, it better be. My son is killing my retirement fund.” Cutting into the casserole with a plastic fork, Bruce said, “Fucking drugs. Why would a kid like Aaron, with all his advantages, need to take drugs?”

  “It’s an equal opportunity curse. Diane says 80 percent of the cases she hears are rooted in drug abuse.”

  “So what’s up?” Bruce asked, his eyes weary and indifferent, contradicting the intent of the question. Bruce could never wait for the end of a story, was nearly allergic to eye contact, a doctor with the world’s worst bedside manner. Gregory watched his brother stuff the vegetable casserole into his mouth, studying his plate, avoiding Gregory’s querulous stare.

  Gregory wished then that David were alive. Their brother David had died three years ago in a small plane crash, returning home from a medical convention in Philadelphia. That’s who he would have rather gone to with these questions. David might have given him some hope. But Bruce would have to do.

  “Do I seem different?”

  “What do you mean?” Bruce looked up, apparently finally interested. “You don’t seem different to me,” he concluded with a shrug.

  “Do you see forgetfulness in your patients much?”

  “What?”

  “Symptoms of dementia, Alzheimer’s.”

  “Why do you ask?” Now his gaze was riveted to Gregory’s face, those brown eyes taking stock of him with a new intensity.

  “I wonder if I’m getting what Dad had. I can’t remember things. Addresses and people.”

  “I haven’t seen any changes in you.”

  Of course not, Gregory thought silently, bitterly. We’re brothers who see each other four or five times a year.

  “I wonder if I have Alzheimer’s. Dad had it. Dementia. That means it’s in our DNA. My kids, your kids.”

  “But we don’t know that’s what you’re experiencing.” He paused. “Alzheimer’s is a bitch. We can’t screen for early symptoms. Even if we could, there are no treatments that make a significant difference. Patients come to us for answers and there is nothing we can do. What medications there are relieve some of the symptoms but can’t stop the progression of the disease. Alzheimer’s erases all our education and training. It renders the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spent on becoming doctors useless. We hate Alzheimer’s more than cancer. David used to say, ‘Cancer fights fair compared to Alzheimer’s.’ And African Americans? We’ve got a 50 to 70 percent greater risk of developing it than anybody else, b
ecause of our higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.”

  Gregory laughed uneasily, looking around to avoid the resignation—or was it defeat?—he heard in his brother’s voice. He looked anywhere but at the man who had just spoken those words.

  “Still, I can give you the name of a specialist if you’re concerned. Shit, man, Alzheimer’s. Dad also had that stroke, diabetes, and high blood pressure. How’s your health?”

  “Fine. Diane and I are in the gym regularly. My diabetes is under control. I bought some software online to help my memory, but Bruce, I’m scared. I haven’t said anything to Diane, but she notices all this and I don’t know what to say.”

  “Yet you still drink?”

  “Sociably.”

  Bruce shook his head dismissively.

  “And you’re still a pompous ass. Look I came to you—”

  “For answers and for encouragement, I know, but you just asked me about a disease that won’t allow me to offer you any of that. Bullshitting you would be worse than dashing your hopes. But you may be overreacting, Greg. You’re still young. Hell, we both are. Haven’t you heard sixty-five is the new forty?”

  In response, Gregory stood up, reached for both their trays, and took them to the conveyor belt. He sat down again as Bruce leaned forward across the table, preparing to say more. Thrusting an armistice into the bloody campaign of truth his brother had waged, Gregory asked, “Do you remember the summer Dad took us to Mississippi?”

  “Hell, yeah.” Bruce’s smile broke open his face. “The summer I decided to be a doctor.”

  “You mean the summer you almost got killed and not by the KKK?” Gregory laughed. “That night the three of us snuck off to that black juke joint on the edge of town.”

  Bruce blushed, his eyes lighting up in merriment. “Yeah, and I almost got cut by some crazy nigger named Blade for dancing with his woman. A fact I didn’t know till he came out of the bathroom and saw us slow-dragging in the middle of the floor. Damn, she was all over me.”