The Spur Ch. 17-18

A flash of lightning:

Into the gloom

Goes the heron's cry.

Matsuo Basho.

JILL

It wasn't anything like television or the movies. No cold-storage drawer sliding out of the wall, no ghastly fluorescent lights, no sheet pulled dramatically back to reveal the disfigured corpse.

An assistant coroner, who seemed very young, led us into a private room, where a kind police detective talked us gently through the events of the previous night.

Doug, after trying without success to re-establish his pony-girl training business in Ohio, had driven to Philly earlier in the week. After cutting out and removing the glass from the east window of Jamila's apartment, he pulled himself in through the frame and waited. Moments after Jamila entered, he shot her once in the forehead. She died instantly. Then he shot himself.

Jamila had listed Steve and me as her next of kin, so after showing us several post-mortem photographs, the assistant coroner said, "I'm very sorry for your loss." I don't remember much else, including the drive back to Steve's place--except that his face was a horrible gray color, and a muscle in his jaw twitched intermittently.

I now understand why custom demands that the bereaved have so much to do; keeping busy keeps your mind in the here-and-now. There would be time to grieve later; right then, there were guests to take care of and casseroles to warm up. The next time someone I know dies, I told myself, I am taking tissues and coffee to their loved ones, because those were what we kept running out of.

How could Jamila be gone? She was so *much*; how could she simply disappear? It didn't seem real yet. I dreaded the time when it would.

STEVE'S JOURNAL

The weather is finally getting warm again. Jill had a vase full of tiny purple wildflowers in her apartment. She told me she found them growing out of a wall. You just have to look for them, she said.

CHAPTER 18

Let us divide - with skill -

Let us discourse - with care -

Powder exists in Charcoal -

Before it exists in Fire --

--Emily Dickinson

We were driving to the Thursday Night Contradance. Lately, Steve had been sitting out more and more dances; sometimes we even left after dancing one or two of the waltzes they played during the interval. However much he worked out, however strong he kept himself, it was impossible not to notice his illness now.

One stretch of the road on the way to the Community Hall is like a strip mall for churches, and by reading the signs out in front of some of them I figured out that it was Maundy Thursday. That meant Sunday was Easter, right? Boy, that came up fast.

"What does 'Maundy' mean?", I asked. He pointed to a church sign that said, "I GIVE YOU A NEW COMMANDMENT: LOVE ONE ANOTHER."

"It's from the Latin 'mandatum novum', he said. "'New commandment.'"

"I've heard that word all my life, and never really wondered where it came from." A pause. "How are you feeling tonight?"

"Pretty good, actually; I'm ready to dance!"

"Have you heard back yet about those tests you had Monday?"

"Not yet." We drove along in silence for a while.

Steve was a sweaty guy; he always took a small gym bag with a washcloth, deodorant, talcum powder and a clean shirt to change into during the interval. When we arrived that evening, he parked his bag on the floor at the end of the row of folding chairs as usual.

The caller introduced the first dance and we joined one of the sets. This dance was an "improper" dance, meaning partners stood next to, rather than across from, each other. (This will be important later.) So each line is arranged lady, gent, lady, gent. (In a "proper" dance, partners stand across from each other in two long lines, one line of ladies and one line of gents.)

Attendance was good that night, so the lines were long, making each dance take a long time; the goal was for every couple in each set to dance with every other over the course of the dance. We had started at the bottom of the set, and by the time we had danced halfway to the top, I noticed something was strange. It took me a moment to figure out what it was: Steve wasn't sweating. At all. His face was bright red, his body bone dry, and his movements--always more deliberate and less fluid since his symptoms began to worsen--were labored. He looked awful.

When we finally got to the top of the dance, we switched sides, so as be ready to rejoin the dance in the right places, and sat out one round of the dance, since at this point we had no other couple to dance with. In the middle of the crossover, I took his arm and hissed,

"Steve, you look terrible! I think you're having a heat stroke. Let's go outside and cool you off."

"I'm fine," he answered.

"You are not 'fine'!" I shot back. "You're beet-red and you aren't sweating at all!"

"Jill, I promise I do not have heat-stroke. Please let's finish the dance, and then I will tell you everything."

After what seemed like forever, the dance finally ended. While the others applauded the band and found new partners for the next dance, I made a beeline for the door while Steve retrieved his obviously unnecessary gym bag.

Outside, he walked right past the car and across the lot, to a lightly wooded area with a playground nestled in it. When he finally turned and faced me, I resisted the urge to say, *Now will you finally tell me what the hell is going on?* He'd promised he would, so I just stood and waited.

Dropping his gym bag on the merry-go-round with a sigh, he told me. The foot cramps on the treadmill, the loss of fine motor coordination that had made typing such a chore, the gait disturbances that sometimes made him look drunk, and that had turned the partner who lost himself in the dance to one who executed every figure, every step with intense concentration. The faintness upon standing up. The constipation and sudden bowel and bladder urgencies, both of which he had managed to hide from me, and the impotence, which he had tried to. The cognitive decline he was likely to develop eventually. He told me it was degenerative and incurable, and that he probably had three to five years left to live.

There are so many things could have felt, and I would feel them all very soon, but my first feeling was rage--red, raw, scorching anger at this man who had lied to me about being terminally ill.

"You're dying?" I asked incredulously. Then I erupted. "You're DYING? Why the FUCK didn't you tell me?" I shoved him savagely. "You selfish asshole! Do you think I'm STUPID?" I shoved him again. "Do you think I don't have eyes? That I can't tell when something's wrong?" All the months of anxiety, of pain at not being confided in, of uncertainty and fear, welled up like a torrent of lava. "I've been worrying myself crazy! I kept asking you and asking you, and you kept brushing me off." He looked too stunned to speak, so I went on.

"When were you going to tell me? The first time you bought diapers? The first time you fell at a dance? How much time were you going to give me to figure out what *I* needed to do? Why did you keep this from me? Why?"

"Jill," he said, with an air of helplessness; "my job is to protect you, not to burden you."

That put me over the edge.

"GOD DAMN IT, STEVE, I AM A GROWN WOMAN!" I shouted. "I am not a child! And this," I said, tugging at his collar, "means I surrender my power to you; it doesn't mean I don't care about you! It doesn't mean you're not my problem! What were you thinking? And don't you dare say you were 'protecting' me by shutting me out of your life! If that what a dom's 'protection' is, I DON'T WANT IT!"

"You put yourself into my hands!" he said, despairingly. "I'm responsible for you!" I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and answered, calmly,

"I'm here because I want to be. I put this collar around my own neck; I locked it into place with my own fingers. If you're afraid that, once I know everything about you, I'll no longer want to belong to you, then you haven't known me all this time." He opened his mouth to object, but I went on.

"Oh, you know what turns me on, pushes my buttons, makes me defenseless, makes me wet, makes me want you inside me badly enough to beg you for it--but you have never known WHO I AM." Feeling suddenly spent, I stopped to catch my breath, while he looked on helplessly. At last, in a level tone, I said,

"Promise me you won't ever lie to me again, even to 'protect' me. Especially to 'protect' me." Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath before nodding his head and answering,

"I promise."

I never cried so hard in my whole life as I did then.