We Have To Stop Here

by Kirsten Lee Soares

At first, I saw him only two days out of seven. During a more interesting period, I saw him five in a row. For the better part of a decade, it was noon on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Uptown, Sacramento Street, not a shabby address.

I ended my psychoanalysis formally in 2002, when I really knew my mind. Then I was on my own until I fell down the steps, literally. My clavicle separated from the top of my shoulder. Apparently not beyond martyrdom, I refused painkillers, visiting the orthopedist only under threat of atrophy.

“Get. In. Here,” my shrink said. We talked about being manic. We talked about me thinking that not only was I omnipotent, but also that I could fly. I told him about how once in college I had written a kind of university guide and that, when I saw my name on the spines of the books piled floor to ceiling in the campus bookstore, I walked out of the newsroom later that afternoon on deadline, went home, and didn’t eat for three days. “I think,” he said, “that you should stay with me until your novel is finally published.” So there we were striving to go public with my writing, with my heart, with my great big life.

We were very close. Just before I went to Africa last October, I told him I thought we could set an end date for the spring and for only the second time in all the many times I’d tried to leave him, he agreed. I was doing the work.

The second- or third-to-last day I saw him, he said, “You’ve done the work.”

And then he died on a Thursday morning in January, less than 24 hours after I had last seen him, looking fine. The morning he died, I was at the courthouse in Hayward reading a civil complaint as part of my work as a private investigator. That night I saw a play at the Magic.

I don’t remember how I spent the next two days. Sunday, I arrived home to a message on my answering machine. One of his colleagues says benignly, “Please call me. I’d like to be in touch.”

I thought she needed a private eye. No one reporting a death would say nicely, “I’d like to be in touch.” I call him before I call her. His machine picks up. “It’s me,” I said. I had given up identifying myself to him years ago. I am cut off before I can finish saying tartly, “I’m just calling to make sure you’re not dead.” After that, the phone only rings and rings.

On December 18, he had knee surgery. He described his impairment to me as a kind of crater that needed to be filled. A donor had been found. I asked him how he felt about taking the minutia of another person’s body into his own, what that might mean on a cellular level. He didn’t answer. He rarely, if ever, answered my questions, but I knew by a sound he made that he had considered this himself. Still, it wasn’t a heart, it was only a joint, and the surgery went fine. The Christmas holiday came and went without him. His stitches were taken out a few days after New Year’s. On January 8, 9, and 10, he met me at his office door on crutches, in his navy suit, with good color in his face.

I always loved his skin, a light, Mediterranean brown with hues of honey in the cheekbones. His hair was black like mine. His crown was bald, but there was a time when the hair curled a little, endearingly, like a small tail down the nape of his neck. He wore wire glasses just slightly too large for his face, and when I first met him I said to myself that I wasn’t attracted to him at all, even as I was doodling his melodic name in the margins of my legal pads.

From the couch, I could only look at him askance, but sometimes, when I was feeling coy, I would turn my head to the side to shoot him a look. Then I’d catch a glimpse of him sitting sideways in his chair, open to me, dangling his legs over the side of the arm, swinging his feet. My elegant Italian doctor with his Tuscan name and tasseled shoes.

Perhaps there had been some complication. A swelling. A fall. I called a new friend I had referred to him the year before, maybe two. If something had happened, her appointments, also, would be postponed. She said, “He’s gone.”

Something about a blood clot. Something about a blood clot making good time on its way to his lung. I hung up. I called his office phone again. I called my boss. I called my friend back. She knew about death. She had lost people, quite a few. Obviously, she needed a shrink to study death. I needed a shrink to study love. Her shrink had died. Mine hadn’t. Mine would marry me. Mine had married me, in my home town, even. He’d insisted.

I called a friend. I made jokes about the money I’d save.

I said, “You should never take cartilage from a dead man. There’s a reason he’s dead.” I laughed alone. I called another friend. I was not yet hysterical. I called to reserve the City CarShare Scion xA from the Nob Hill Crocker Garage. And at nearly 11:00 that night, I drove to his house.