You Too Are Dead in The Circus Heart Alone
What do you do when you learn the whore who’d been fucking your husband is actually your cousin? The things you learn when people are on the verge of expiration. Three months before Helene made her final curtain call, her aunt’s lawyer flew in from Connecticut with a bundle of papers he needed her to sign.
“Everyone’s booking a one-way ticket to the casket,” Gene said, his face arranged in a permanent dour expression.
“You know me, Gene. I like to be ahead of the trends.”
“You’re really dying, Helene.”
“Yes, I’m really dying, Gene.”
“Your aunt would’ve visited but toward the end it was hard. Getting her out of bed was a victory.”
Helene nodded, tearfully. “I know. You know they say you can tell if someone’s about to drown because they’re still in the water. The only movement they can make is rising above the surface to breath. People always think it’s the people screaming and flailing their arms who are in danger, but no, it’s the ones who’ve gone quiet you have to rescue first.”
“I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to read in the paper that you overdosed on pills.”
“That would kill Kevin more than I’m already killing him. Besides, I have some loose ends that need tidying up.”
“Speaking of loose ends, I know this is rather sensitive but I’m here to talk about Esther’s will and Yuli,” Gene said, shuffling papers.
“Yuli, who’s Yuli?”
Gene closed his eyes. “Of course she didn’t tell you. When your mother came to the U.S. she changed her name.”
“Of course, she had to,” Helene said.
“What she neglected to tell you is that she came with her sister, Alina. Alina was…not right, if you know what I mean. They never got along, really, and they were all too happy to part ways when they got to New York. Alina remained and your mother came here.”
“Gene, I’m dying. Advance the plot.”
“Alina had two children, Yuli and James; Yuli named after their mother and James after James Cagney. Anyway, Alina’s husband was a worthless drunk who beat her as often as he took out the trash, and one day our Alina decides to plunge a knife in his neck just as their children are coming home from school. Alina was killed resisting arrest because she wasn’t all there, and the children got sent to a foster home. Yuli changed her name before she moved to California. Yuli Kravinsky became Phoebe Basquait, your cousin the shitty soap star. She doesn’t know about you or your mother, of course, but you know how your aunt lives for the melodrama. Left with only the help, she gets her kicks where she can.”
“Hand me the Xanax.”
“I realize this might come as a shock.”
“Shock? Shock doesn’t even begin to cover it. Gene, you just dropped Nagasaki in my fucking lap. Is Esther competing with me in the game of who will die first?” Lately, it had become hard for Helene to walk. Setting one foot in front of the other was a Herculean task, and Helene leaned against the wall as she walked the perimeter of her bedroom. Gene knew better to not offer his hand. Helene was closer to death than he’d seen her and still she was stubborn. Still, she was fine. Just fine, save for the 24-hour pharmacy parked by her bedside and the oxygen tank. “Is this Esther’s idea of a game? Who will die first?”
“This may come as a shock, Helene, but this bullet isn’t about you. Your aunt hated her sister and this is payback through progeny. This is about dumping a truck of salt into an open wound, giving that woman hope and then snatching it away. Phoebe won’t be in the will, of course.”
“Phoebe Basquait? Phoebe fucking Basquait, you’ve got to be kidding me. Can you hand me the damn pills already?” For the first time in Helene Gray’s life, she felt off-kilter. The only memory she has of her mother is a plastic shopping bag tied tight around her neck. Helene remembers her mother’s face swelled like a balloon and a young police officer shielding the scene by covering her eyes. “You shouldn’t see this,” he said, to which Helene responded, “Why? It doesn’t change anything. At least I know she’s done trying.” Helene was ten. By then, she’d been an adult for years. She never understood life or love, but death she knew well because she’d been in its proximity for the whole of her life. Shuttling her mother to the hospital after a pill overdose, Helene could barely see over the steering wheel of her mother’s car as she drove. No one ever pulled over the child who learned to drive when she was eight. Impossible, Ben had said when she repeated the story. That was the moment before their wedding when she knew she would never love this man. She stared at him until he began to shift uncomfortably in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes he drove, and said you’d be surprised at what I can do. But Ben gave her Kevin, the only time she had felt anything resembling love for another human being. Ben took her away from a house where her aunt spent her days hating the two sisters who would die decades before she did. Helene never loved Benjamin Gray, but she had to admit he had his uses.
Gene handed her one of fifteen tan prescription bottles and she promptly opened it and tongued two pills. “That woman, my supposed cousin, is sleeping with my philandering shitbag of a husband.”
“Oh, Christ,” Gene said.
“Yeah, Christ.”
“You should’ve never married that man.”
“This coming from a man who’s been divorced seven times.”
“Some would interpret that as relevant experience. Esther hasn’t forgiven you, you know, for marrying him. She’s named Kevin as the sole heir.”
“One barrel, two shots — my beloved aunt quenching that thirst for revenge when she’s two feet from the grave. I’ve never wanted her money, she knows that; this is about getting to me through my son. I guess it’s comforting to know that the threat of death hasn’t softened Esther. What do you want from me, Gene?”
“I just wanted you to know should it get out, should things get messy.”
“I’m dying, Gene. Things are messy.”
“I’m telling you all of this now, Helene, so you can get ahead of it.”
“When are you seeing her? Phoebe?”
“I’ve been instructed not to say anything until after Esther’s will has been read.”
“She was never one for confrontation.”
Before Gene left, he took Helene’s hand in his and apologized. “I wish there was more time.”
Helene fought back tears as the new nurse entered her room and started her shift. “There’s never enough time,” she said. “Give her my love although I know she’ll refuse it.”
*
Toward the end, it was rare that you’d find Helene and her husband in the same room. Helene would often joke that Benjamin colonized every space he entered, so much so that she had to turn up the oxygen tank. A few days before the doctors gave the go-ahead on liquid morphine, before the days when Helene was still Helene, only a sicker version of the woman they all knew, Ben sat next to her, in the dark, at the edge of her bed. The act of speaking strained her, so perhaps Ben picked this one time to say what he had to say because he knew Helene wouldn’t have the strength to argue, maybe this was the one he could speak his piece; possibly it’s the one argument he could win.
“I know about your aunt, about Phoebe Basquait.”
“How does that not surprise me?”
“I think we should tell Kevin; he deserves to know.”
Helene laughed, which was painful to her than speaking because it required deeper breaths, time for the laughter to begin and complete. She gripped the light switch for the lamp next to her bed and she kept turning the lights on and off. Benjamin’s face in yellow, false light, or his face in darkness, with only the slice of light from the window to form an outline of his body and face — Helene couldn’t determine which was more tolerable. “Of course that’s what you would think,” she said. “Do you also plan on telling him that you’re fucking his aunt? Because he deserves to know.”
“Helene, I don’t know what you’ve heard…”
“Are you really going to sit here, on my bed, in my room, in the house my aunt bought, and lie to my face?”
“Helene.”
“Stop, just stop. I may be sick but I know a few things. I know that you’re wiped out, financially. I know that our prenuptial agreement states that you get nothing, not a dime or a cent, if you’ve committed adultery. I also know that our son is 18 in a few months and I can’t imagine what would make him happier than to see you bankrupt and suffering.” Helene coughed. “So you might want to consider your options because I can have my attorney here in minutes. You tell me, Ben, what court would refuse a woman dying of cancer?”
Ben rose and leaned against the door watching the woman he’d been married to for nearly twenty years, the woman who’d always had the upper hand in their relationship — he was never her equal, she always surpassed him and he knew this and he knew she knew this — and the wife he wished he could love but couldn’t. He couldn’t love anyone. When everyone you love dies or leaves you start to think that love and loss are the flipside of the same coin. Why bother to have loved Helene? Here she lay dying, a woman not yet 50, her life stolen from her. Why bother with Kevin, who regarded him with more disgust (was it possible?) than his wife? Benjamin remembered himself at Kevin’s age, crawling into his mother’s bed while she was passed out from one of the many drugs she took, after his father’s third wife took her own life in a cabin in the woods. Don’t love, don’t come close to any feeling that could possibly make you feel complete, his stepmother Clémence had said the morning she committed suicide. And he took her words for truth and the only two feelings he had were want and shame and neither were ever fully satisfied.
“I’m trying to do the right thing for once,” Ben said. “After you’re gone it’ll just be the two of us.”
“And you thought you’d invite that low-rent whore to shack up in my house, wearing my clothes? Do you think, for a minute, I would ever allow that to happen? Don’t you know I would do everything in my power to stop that from happening? Let me be clear here, Benjamin, I care only for Kevin. You are background, scenery, an unfortunate annoyance that has to be considered.”
“Fine, have it your way. You know when Kevin finds out he’ll hate you for it, for not being the one who told him the truth.”
“No more than he hates you, I imagine.”
“You don’t care; you’ll be gone.”
Helene coughed out her laugh. She felt drained. There was so much left for her to do, calls she had to make before they eased her away from consciousness. Until she was no longer Helene, but a pale, mute version of herself. “Now there’s the man I love. There’s still some fight in your left,” she said, and shut off the light. They were alone in the dark and Ben looked at her and she out the window, and any kindness they had for one another withered in that room as Helene’s breath became labored.
“I tried,” Ben said.
“I’m sure you’d like to think you did,” Helene said.
*
Do we talk about the time Helene slipped off her top at a party without a word while the women who lunched, brunched, summered, and wintered gawked at her? Do we not talk about and say we did? Or do we say what everyone thought — had cancer made Helene crazy? It had been a month since Helene was diagnosed and this. Who was this wild woman who walked in wearing black and left wearing nothing at all? Do we mention that Celeste tried to offer her a jacket, a shirt, a towel, or an Ativan? Do we recount all the calls made to husbands that went directly to voicemail? Better to cover her up, they thought. Better to say nothing at all. Still, they watched her dance. They watched her break dishes in front of their feet. She stepped on cracks; she bled. They watched her point and laugh at everyone in the room: fuck you, fuck you, and oh my dear god, fuck you. She spoke a language unfamiliar to them — one they had only heard uttered by housekeepers and women who removed hair from their bodies. Did they know, she said, that the Dani people in New Guinea would sever their own fingers after their loved ones passed? Brutal expressions of physical pain meant to drive away harmful spirits but to also demonstrate their own sorrow and suffering. Some women in India threw themselves into the fire. Tibetan Buddhists practiced “sky burials” –the art of feeding one’s body to the birds, literally. What should I do? Helene asked. I can’t go quietly. Or do I go quietly? Helene said somberly. Do we erase the fact that when Celeste carried Helene to the bathroom, Helene took a plastic bag out of the garbage, pulled it over her head, and cackled as she tied a knot? Who am I? Come on, Celeste; tell me — Helene taunted her friend, her enemy, and a woman who occupied the space between the two — who am I? Celeste shook her head in terror. I don’t know, she said. What the fuck is wrong with you, Helene?
Helene opened the door and glided down the stairs. She shouted loudly for the house to hear, maybe you should ask yourselves what the fuck is wrong with you?
*
Do I compulsively repeat the story of my sickness over and over again to anyone would listen? Or do I tuck it away silently; do we use different words for the ones we’re frightened to say? Should we say complete instead of dead? Or do we create a new language divorced from the one we can no longer bear? I am the thing no one wants to talk about. Helene speaks aloud to the nurses who don’t hear her. The words come out disfigured, no longer recognizable from their former state, consonants stuttered out and mangled. Helene was here, in parts, but not completely. She could still think, barely, but the act of translating thoughts to spoken words had vanished. Where had it gone off? Why had the edges softened in the room? Why was her son cloudy? Why did her husband appear to her as an albatross, her bedroom an abattoir?
Helene remembered a poem from her youth, the only one she had memorize because she loved the tortuous nature of it, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. She thought: Do I hold the guests at the threshold of their happiness with my sad story? Do I tell them the storm that was my mother’s death by hanging, or do I allow them to join in on the merriment and applaud the blushing bride? Do I explain how the ice rose up all around me, and remained for all time? The morphine promised to ease Helene’s physical pain and it did, but she felt as if she were gliding toward sea wreckage, her inevitable doom on the horizon. She couldn’t move her arm to hold her son as he wept next to her. She couldn’t reach for him under her bed where he slept until the end. Until the moments that faded to blue, gray, and black, when the world as she had known it was a stranger.
Helene fought hard to open her mouth. She wanted to tell Kevin to run. Don’t stay here; you’d freeze to death from the arctic that was this house. She parted her lips, she took in a breath of air, and said run, run, run, but it came out as uh, uh, uh, and her only comfort was her son wiping the tears away from her cheeks.
Helene died before Esther, which broke the old and bitter woman in ways she hadn’t imagined. On the day of Helene’s passing, Esther called her lawyer Gene and instructed him to say nothing to this Phoebe Basquait; Esther honored her niece with silence. If only Helene had been alive to witness this final and sole act of her aunt’s generosity. But that’s the thing about death — you end up missing everything.
This is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Women in Salt. Click on my profile to read more excerpts! — FS
