Tangent

"Yeah," Mike continued, "I'm moving in with her next week."

"Really? Doesn't that seem kind of sudden to you?"

"No, no, not at all. She's getting out of the scene, not going to be doing it professionally anymore..."

"She's a...professional?" I think I asked.

"Yeah man."

"Is that how you met?"

He nodded maniacally. "She's great. I can't wait for you guys to meet her."

I turned and looked at the crusty old civil war veteran flight engineer -- who was literally laughing so hard he was crying, only he had his fist in his mouth so he could laugh silently, and I don't know why but I envied the old guy right about then.

"Yeah, you know, a few weeks ago she did me with a strap on and..."

And that was it. Crusty old dude burst out laughing so hard he started cutting cheese right there in the cockpit. In case no one ever cued you in on this, you can't just roll down the windows on an airplane, not even upfront, and cockpits are already nasty, confined spaces that smell of coffee, sweat, and spilled chicken-a-la-king -- so adding old man fart to the mix just ain't cool. And anyway, now I was laughing my ass off as I tried not to picture Mike on all fours with some leather-clad whack-job set to give him a colonoscopy on a No-Tell Motel bed. And it weren't working. Not at all.

Then the head flight attendant called and wanted to know what was going on up here and that people in First could hear us laughing.

That put an end to the party and I told Mike we'd have to finish this conversation once we were on the ground.

C'est la vie, right?

So after we got to Gay Paree Mike told us all about this chick. All the whips and chains shit you'd ever want to hear, and then some. It was kind of funny, but then again it wasn't. Having my ass paddled is not my idea of fun. Paying someone to paddle my ass seems like the height of insanity, yet Mike was full of so much love for this girl even I could see it.

Still, I had no clue, not really. I didn't know the guy, not well, anyway, so about all I could do was laugh it off. Which is exactly what I did.

+++++

The next time I flew with Mike he had indeed filed for divorce and he had moved in with the dominatrix. I also learned that, surprise, Mike and Isabel had a...wait for it...a fifteen-year-old daughter, and now that kid was mixed up in this affair, too. I was, in a word, speechless. Did she realize what her father was into? Really...speechless.

Mike's situation smacked -- to my puritanical way of looking at the world, anyway -- of a full-blown middle-aged crazy outburst of somewhat more or less epic proportions. Mike was in his forties and had a fifteen-year-old daughter and he'd been married to an absolute hell-bitch control freak and so what does he do? He hooks up with a professional dominatrix, and excuse the fuck out of me but isn't a professional dominatrix a professional control freak? A paid mercenary control freak?

Man, I was confused.

Yet, well, my own life on the home front was already confusing enough.

Joyce was indeed sick, sicker than even I imagined in my most pessimistic imaginings. She'd be lucky to see June, at least that was the word her oncologists laid on me. My parents were doing their best to keep Tracy from falling apart -- because, let's face it, I was away on average four days a week, sometimes five or six, and Joyce wasn't strong enough to handle treatments and raising a daughter.

Oh yes. Treatments. Surgery. Chemo. Radiation. All with the hope of giving Joyce an additional six months to a year. Tough call. After seeing what she went through I'm not sure I could do it, not sure I'd make the same decision, but when the sand is running through your hourglass at that speed time becomes a seriously interesting issue. As in: what would you do if you were almost forty and someone told you that six months was it. The party is going to be over and the lights are going out. Wouldn't an extra six months to a year seem like the most important thing in the universe right about then?

And here's one more piece of this little ever-expanding puzzle.

I'd begun falling in love with Joyce all over again. Whatever had brought us together back at Berkeley was still there. It was a palpable thing. My mom saw it first, then Tracy did. I felt it, or at least the beginnings of that resurgence when I saw her sitting next to the window by the gate at CDG. Maybe because I'd only been with a few women since leaving the Navy, and nothing really serious had ever come along. Sorry, Jill, but I tried to be upfront, ya know?

And, oh yeah, I can talk all about her now so let's get it out in the open - right now. Let's talk about that which we've ignored so far. Destiny. As in: Joyce was my destiny, right? And that some mysterious force brought us back together, right? La forza del destino, nes pa? I'm still not sure I buy into all that stuff but there it is, hanging out there in the air apparent, just waiting for your casual refutation. Or mine, for that matter.

The thing is...I can't.

I held her in the shower before her surgery, and that was the night she asked me to shave her head. I always loved her hair so the idea of cutting that away from her really hurt us both. But there it was, reality. And sure, yeah, reality is a close cousin to destiny. I get that. And at times reality is inescapable, a weight on your chest you can't shove aside, so with scissors in hand I cut her hair and placed the strands in a big zip-lock baggie to we could drop them off at a place that made wigs for chemo patients to use later on in their treatment. Later on, when those lucky souls were well on their way to a remarkable recovery. Only Joyce wasn't on that road, and that was about all I could fathom as I put a fresh blade in my razor and began lathering her skin, then shaving her head smooth.

After I finished I just held her. No words came. No words could possibly suffice. Standing there under the hot water all I knew is I wanted to hold on to her for something like forever. I hated myself for ever leaving her. I loved her for finding me again, for trusting in me enough to pass her future on to me.

I thought about destiny a lot those days. Mine and, oddly enough, Mike's.

I know. Circles are funny. Yada-yada-yada...

+++++

Because about a month later I learned that Mike had, quite literally, bought the farm. Well, he and the (ex-)professional dominatrix -- and I wish I was making this up -- along with her ten-year-old daughter (!) moved into an ancient farmhouse in the hills not all that far from my place. Isabel, his now ex-wife, and their fifteen-year-old daughter moved into an apartment in Boston and that was, I reckoned, that.

Oh, yeah. That. What a word.

But there's that whole destiny thing lurking around out there, ya know...? That old saw about not counting your chickens before they've hatched? Yeah. As in: don't fuck around with Destiny, because she'll kick you in the ass every time.

+++++

I guess it was April. Joyce was not doing well and Tracy was acting out both at home and in school -- and even my parents were struggling to keep up with Tracy's constantly shifting moods. Joyce helped when she could, which was more than I managed on my two days a week at home, but Tracy was foundering and we all knew it.

Then late one night the phone rang and of course I picked it up...

...and I heard screaming in the background and a girl trying frantically to talk to me...

"Hello!" I said.

"Hi, it's Angela. Is this Jim?"

"I'm Jim," I said between gales of screaming insanity I heard in the background.

"I'm Mike's daughter, he told me to call you."

"Oh?" Why is it that whenever destiny calls your first reaction is to say something clever like 'Oh?'

"He's in London and he said I should call you when I need help!"

"What's wrong, Angela?" I think I said, molten steam seeping from my ears.

"Something's going on with my mom. She's not acting right..."

"Is that her screaming?" I asked.

"Yes, she's acting really weird..." and then she stopped talking -- and I'd assume she did so when the sound a smashing glass cut off her train of thought.

"What's your address?" I asked, pen in hand.

When I hung up my dad was standing there looking at me with that "What Now?" look in his eyes.

So I told him and off we went, the Lone Ranger and Tonto off to save another damsel in distress one more time and I think the entire time I was driving into Boston Little Miss Destiny was laughing her fucking ass off.

+++++

The apartment was in tatters. So was Angela. As in bruised and battered.

Isabel was a whirling dervish and somewhere completely off this planet. One look around and dad grabbed Angela and took her down to the Land Rover; I talked Isabel down from wherever the hell she was and got her to Mass General.

One of the ER interns, probably fresh from a psych rotation, wanted to put her in a straight jacket and into a rubber room -- but calmer heads prevailed. Angela helped provide a decent history, some of which I could verify, and it turned out that Isabel had started acting weird about six months ago. So as fast as you can say magnetic resonance imaging Isabel was off for some pictures of her brain and just wouldn't you know it...?

"That's a glioblastoma..." the attending neurologist said -- about two hours later. "They're really quite rare."

"Oh, really?" I sighed as my gut pulled another barrel roll. "Imagine that..." Actually, that was about all I could manage at the time. Maybe because I was too busy getting Destiny's foot out of my ass.

+++++

This whole Circle of Life thing sometimes leaves me a little flummoxed.

You're born, you live, then you die. I get that. Your life is just one small part of a larger circle, like an arc...or a segment, if you will. If you don't have kids the circle ends with you. If you have a bunch of kids then a whole bunch of new circles spin-off of the original, yet somehow all these new circles are a part of the original, like fused atomic nuclei. Like planets orbiting their home star over eons of time.

Only Isabel and Joyce were fusing now. United by cancer, united in fighting the good fight.

And Tracy? Wild, unmanageable Tracy?

She became Angela's new best friend, her coach and savior. It all came together naturally enough after that night. Those two teenage girls decided they'd get through this whole cancer thing together, and just like that -- problem solved. Cosmic tumblers?

Don't get me started.

When Mike got back he surveyed the carnage he'd let slip under the door and I think he took stock of his life and found himself wanting. So...Mike being Mike and all -- he moved Isabel and Angela into the farmhouse with the (ex-)professional dominatrix and her ten-year-old daughter. But as mentioned Isabel and Joyce were now on the same trajectory and Mike, overwhelmed -- or overrun -- with feelings of guilt could hardly keep up with his own feelings. So we -- Mike and I -- took turns taking the girls to the oncology clinic for their chemo, then their radiation, and Mike and I -- now picking our way carefully through the same jagged, heart-stopping terrain -- grew closer and closer as death itself came closer and closer to our respective circles.

And that's when Destiny decided to come in for one more kick, this one aimed squarely at the heart of the matter.

+++++

The (ex-)professional dominatrix -- Sybel was, I believe, her nom de guerre -- called me at the house one morning, but Dad took the call.

"Jim," he called out a minute later, "I think you'd better take this one."

Mike was flying that day and Sybel woke up with a bad pain in her pelvic area and would I mind taking her to her doctor in the city? And, oh yes, her daughter Sadie would need someone to look after her.

"Mom?" I called out in desperation.

I mean, really, wouldn't you?

So...I picked up the (ex-)professional dominatrix and drove her to her clinic in the city and she asked that I stay with her in the room when her doc did an ultrasound. Then her doc asked that I wait outside while they did a quick colposcopy to get a tissue sample. An emergency procedure was scheduled for five the next morning, and I learned then that Sybel had a high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer. Stage 4, by the way, as we soon found out. The surgeon told me that this was a very rare cancer and I'm sure by now you know exactly what I said next.

"Oh really? You don't say?"

When I picked up Mike at Logan later that afternoon I got to explain the known and unknown intricacies of high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer to him -- while he broke down and apart and crumbled into a million shards of thin glass -- as I drove him through the city to Mass Gen and to the crumbling remains of his passion play. Little was known about this cancer at the time, I think her doctor mentioned to him in passing, only that it was invariably fatal. No, he didn't say that. Doctors really are not that obtuse. Anyway, Sybel soon started on some sort of generic chemotherapy but again, little was known at the time about this type of cancer and it was just a shot in the dark. She started sinking fast by early summer, and so too did Mike.

For the life of me, I can't really remember why I bought that little house on Saw Mill Circle. I was single at the time and if you'd asked if I planned on getting married I'd have shrugged off the question as the deranged musings of a lunatic. Maybe, I told myself, five bedrooms and four baths were great for resale value. The house had three main floors, too, with a big master on the ground level, four on the next, while the third floor was finished out as a great room, but which, thankfully, as it turned out included a full bath.

The third floor turned into the hospice floor by that summer as one by one our gathered arcs drew to a close. Marco busily went over contingencies, with Sadie's real father the first real unknown we had to confront. Also, as it happened, Mike's divorce wouldn't be finalized while Isabel was still alive so Angela would remain with him regardless. Yet by early summer Sadie and the other two girls were doing well together -- and this is where all that talk about circles and atoms and planets comes into play.

Who knows what pulls us together, what tugs at our orbits or what comes along and tears us loose, pulls us into new orbits, new ways of being, new lives out of the old. My father could see all this at the time but maybe that was because his own arc was closing. We didn't know it at the time, of course, and even though death didn't come to him for a few years, he still knew. He was always wise about those kinds of things, and maybe that's why Joyce reached out to him in the first place. Of all the people in the universe, she reached out for his warm, steady hand and he pulled her back into our orbit, kept her stable until she could find her way back to me, to her real place in the world.

Mike? Who the hell knows. I sure don't know how to reconcile what went down with him. Sometimes middle-aged crazy sounds about right, but not others. Still, if he'd never left Isabel and if he'd never found his new orbit around Sybel's little star we'd have never had Sadie join our own circle. So...see what I mean? This whole circle of life thing is pretty daunting and none of it makes the slightest sense -- until it happens.

+++++

Joyce was a wisp of herself the last time we drifted into the shower -- together. Standing there as one under the water it finally hit me: I couldn't let her go. No way. She was confused all the time by then, and some days she hardly knew where she was, or even who I was for that matter. Still, there's something about warm water, something almost amniotic, womblike and comfortable. I loved to hold her there, smell her hair, even as short as it was. Her skin on mine, an attraction stronger than gravity, the pull of what was meant to be. How could I let go? How could I ever? Even when I did so many years ago.

Some mistakes you can never make right, no matter how nice the water feels.

Tracy couldn't do it. She'd come up to the third floor and the smell would hit her and she'd start to cry as she turned and fled to her room. The last few days it was sheer will that pulled her up there to her mother's side. Her fear was palpable. So was mine.

Joyce stayed those last days in a blue recliner with an IV hooked up to a port in her chest, and she was receiving fluids and nourishment through that line. The hospice nurse came by one day and dropped off some morphine and instructions on how to do it -- and when, but there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell I could pull that trigger. And I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Tracy or even Mike to do it, so when the time came, when Joyce was slipping into that place you might charitably call agony, we called the hospice agency and waited -- no longer knowing how or what to feel. I sat with Joyce as she passed, but Tracy couldn't do it. My mom stayed with her. My father stayed with me. We held her hands and it was all so easy. So gentle. So final.

As human beings, we really have no words to say goodbye in moments like these. You do the best you can knowing words will never be enough.

But Joyce had figured that one out a long time before she grew ill. The song I wrote for her, the music we made together? All of it now on a scratchy old vinyl record hastily transcribed to binary bits on a shiny silver disc, and she asked that I slip headphones on her head when the time came and so I played that music, our music, while she slipped away. It was music we'd made together so many years ago -- yet I could see those moments unfold in her eyes as the crystalline notes made their way to the place where memories hang on the longest, and I could feel all the stories of our life come together again, all right there in one last sigh.

+++++

I'd gotten used to sleeping with her, to sleeping with someone in my bed, and the loneliness I felt after she left us was unbearable. The cold sheets, the utter quiet of night without her breathing next to me. Tracy, of course, felt pretty much the same way and so she decided she just had to have a dog.

So...why not get two dogs? One for her bed -- and one for mine?

Only someone should have talked us into something more practical than Bernese Mountain Dogs. I mean, really...

Anything other than Bernese Mountain Dogs. Bernese Mountain Dogs know how to do one thing really well: they know how to drool. Drool by the bucket load. They eat a lot, too -- which means they shit small Volkswagens all over your yard. They are, however, terrific cuddlers...and frankly, that was all that mattered.

Because Death still had a grip on our little house.

Sybel and Isabel went next, and they passed on the same day. Don't ask me the how or the why of such things because I do not know. Never have and never will.

Mike went up to the farm the day after his love died and he cleared out all his belongings and put the property on the market. Then he didn't even ask, he just moved in with the rest of us. I called the guy who built the house and we converted the third floor into an apartment for him. And that, as they say, was that.

Marco had a little sailboat and we carried all our ashes out into Mass Bay. A few minutes after the deed was done a whale and her calf scooted by so close we could hear them breathing and there it was again, that whole circle of life thing. It was everywhere that day. In the air, in the sea, in the eye of a passing whale. Like there was more to life than mere survival. I could feel the love in that whale's eye, the love for her calf, her love of life. Who knows, maybe she felt what was in our beating hearts, and yet maybe I was looking into the beating heart of that truth when I stood looking down into an aircraft carrier's churning wake.