Westin

'What's brown and smelly and comes backwards out of cows?'  British schoolboys, several eras ago, knew the naughty answer was the Isle of Wight ferry leaving the harbor at Cowes, and and why this occurs to me backing out of my California apartment is anyone's guess.  Except that I'm going in reverse, and now I'm not going at all.  To close the door, I need to grab a cord tied to the door knob.  There's no other way.  I cannot lean forward far enough to reach beyond the footrests of my wheelchair, but with my landlord's old shoelace tied to the knob, I can back, pull the door shut, and all is splendid.

'I have had this since Vietnam,' my landlord told me 12 years ago when he tied his old boot lace to the brass doorknob.  

It's gone now.  Crews of movers and carpenters, not to mention a small battalion of personal assistants, have been coming and going from our apartment.  And someone grabbed the boot lace, yanked it off the door while we were gone.  Vietnam, the use of the word "our" losing its appropriateness, backing out the door...everything has acquired layers of meaning, two, sometimes three.  This has been the longest week of my life.  No, the first week of June, 1968, when I was shot, that was long too.  But this one has been close.

It began with the ocean.  The Pacific, rolling and vast and stretching from the harbor at Valparaiso, to the Marianas Trench, to the San Diego sewage outflow to Half Moon Bay.  I wanted to spend a few days at the latter.  Marlou said we needed a hotel with room service.  There's one at Half Moon Bay.  More important, there's a bay at Half Moon Bay.  And I was into baying.  At the moon, at the front desk, I didn't care.  I was at my wit's end.

The carpet, or more precisely, the choosing of the carpet had stretched well beyond anything in the great Pacific basin.  Marlou had spent two months, more or less, going over colors, calling the decorator, inspecting samples from as far away as India.  This was too much of this, too little of that, and on and on it went.  We are running out of time, I told her as gently as I could.  Marlou does not like to be rushed.

When I fully grasped that to install the carpet we would have to uninstall ourselves for at least three nights, something in me swooned.  My life has had enough upheavals.  Since her oncologist pulled the plug on treatment, Marlou's cancer has been a runaway train.  It has sailed off down the tracks, rumbling out of sight, but always within earshot.  And now my terminal wife, having finally settled for the wool/synthetic blend with the ridged texture, has set dates with the movers, and the installers, and God knows who else.  And, no, we are not going to spend three days by the sea, by the vast, blue rolling mother of destiny.  Never mind that Half Moon Bay is only 30 minutes away, and there's not a fucking thing we can do while the carpet crew has a go at our place.  Marlou is set on staying in town.  Close to the action.  Where?  Right on El Camino Real, the north-south main drag of the Peninsula suburbs, in the Palo Alto Westin.  This will be like staying in one of those motels composed of old boxcars.  We might as well be sleeping in the Queen Mary drydocked at Long Beach.  The idea is as mad as it is expensive.  Oh well, Marlou assures me, at least it's close to the Palo Alto Medical Clinic.

It's unfortunate in one sense that the Vietnam era has ended, for there was a draft in place, and conscription is what it takes to get a quadriplegic and a weakening cancer patient packed.  Movers move.  Packers pack.  Marlou does her best to fill boxes, but the strength is draining from her.  She collapses on the sofa in the middle of packing.  We've hired one helper, but we really need another.  The helper phones a friend.  At the end of the day, one angry cripple and one very ill woman drive the mile to the hotel.  I wave away the parking valet, and dock my enormous Ford van in the disabled space.

The Westin is sold out.  I got a room here, only because someone canceled at the last minute.  The tone of the place is silly and pretentious, haute executive.  Businessmen are coming in from their evening jog, and a man in the lobby welcomes each, asking how the run went, and would monsieur like a bottle of water?  Marlou is already in the room, having stepped out of the van at the front door.  I collapse on the bed, stare at the ceiling and wonder about dinner.  Why is it called dinner?  It sounds thinner than diner.  If you order some diner, you'll put on a few pounds.  But not some dinner.  Backwards out of Cowes.  We head for the restaurant.  

There's only one.  No one in his right mind would eat in a restaurant in a hotel like this one.  But no one in his right mind would undertake carpeting, propped up like Evita.  The restaurant is true to character, French provincial stuffy.  The place is rather empty.  The waiter ushers us to our table with great fanfare.  The menu is overpriced and over sauced, but there's no kidding ourselves.  We have no other option.  Marlou walked here with some difficulty, a little over 100 m from room to table.  She looks weak.  We quickly order.  Marlou's appetite has waned.  What she orders is more or less an hors d'oeuvres.  I go for the swordfish.  While I'm waiting for the entrée, I demolish the bread and garlic spread.  The latter is quite wonderful.  

Our plates arrive.  I tuck into the fish.  Marlou has a shrimp.  Sorry, she says, see you back at the room.  She grabs a napkin, positions it over her mouth and rushes away.  I stare at my plate.  I don't know why we aren't home.  Home is where you live.  It's where you die.  We need to do both right now.  I am, like all the other traveling executives in the dining room, alone at my table.  Most of my companions are reading.  The waiter keeps coming by to ask if everything is okay.  I sign the evening over to room 54, add a tip and point my wheelchair toward sleep.  Back in the room, Marlou is throwing up.  

'I think she's doing this carpeting for you,' a neighbor explained.  Marlou has learned that wheelchairs get better traction on certain tightly woven carpets, and this has become her obsession.  I nodded to the neighbor thanked her, and wondered if there maybe was a God of Floor Coverings who, with enough prayer, travel allowance and dental package, would intervene.

In the morning, it was hard to get Marlou awake.  She finally rose to use the bathroom, threw up again, and returned to bed.  I wanted to call her doctor.  She rolled her eyes.  Could we call the clinic nurse in oncology, I asked?  Marlou said she had an appointment in five days, and that would do.  She was tired, she said, of taking care of my anxiety.  And would I change my sweater?  I smelled like a Mediterranean soup kitchen.  Marlou fell asleep.  

At my wits end, exhausted from a bad night, I stretched out for a morning nap.  I fell asleep.  When I woke, it was after 10 AM, and Marlou wanted to check on the movers.  Was the furniture out?  Were the carpet guys already at work?  Groggy, I drove the one mile to our apartment.  Marlou stepped out of my van and made her way, wavering and sinuous, to the stairs.  While she visited her parents in our upstairs, I had lunch with a friend.  Later, in the apartment parking lot, Dick and Joan, Marlou's parents said hello.  We stood in the late winter sun, watching battered remnants of the old carpet pad emerge from our downstairs place.  Paul smells like a Mediterranean soup kitchen, Marlou said.

We head back to the hotel.  Even in traffic, the ride takes all of four minutes, barely long enough for me to feign spontaneity and surprise.  You know, I say, why don't we just pull into the clinic?  Maybe we can grab a nurse and have a little chat about how things are going.  Marlou says okay.  She seems weak, beaten down, defeated.  A nurse wanders out to the waiting room of the clinic.  She kneels before Marlou.  My wife's speech seems to grow more slurred by the moment.  The two speak quietly.  I want to know what is being said, but Marlou needs what in California we still call space.  Marlou needs to go to Urgent Care, the nurse says to both of us.  We set out for the short walk to the elevator.  Marlou slips into the women's toilet.  I can hear vomiting.  The oncology nurse appears beside me.  Your wife may need to go to the hospital, she says.  The nurse takes Marlou's hand.  They stand together in the elevator, still holding hands.  This is one of those moments when human kindness and connection strike like a torpedo.  I'm trying hard, very hard, not to cry.

Marlou is given a bed, a succession of intravenous bags containing much needed fluids, a dash of electrolytes and another nausea medication.  I have another dinner alone.  Our domesticity became a pleasure over the years and now it is over.  And there is this, fluorescent restaurant lights and chicken enchiladas and the brink of solitary living in middle-age.  

By the time I return to Urgent Care, matters are no longer urgent.  The doctor discharges Marlou and squeezes her in for an early morning appointment in Oncology.  We head back to the hotel.  It's only a two minute walk, for the Westin is right next door, as Marlou pointed out when I booked.  I understand now.  I understand everything.  And I know nothing.  I want this day to end.  Marlou walks slowly, holding onto one of the handles of my wheelchair.  Leaving the vast clinic, there are two footpaths.  I head down the low one, and Marlou wants the upper.  There's no traffic light, she says.  I hesitate.  Marlou says I never listen to her, never value her opinion.  I take the upper path.

In the room, we quickly undress.  No, that is overstating it.  No quadriplegic quickly undresses.  While I take my one-handed time about it, Marlou tells me I have got to get rid of my sweater.  I smell like a soup kitchen, a Mediterranean one, of course.  If that is the case, I tell her, stay away from me.  Marlou tries to help me unbuckle my leg brace, a nightly ritual for years.  Forget it, I tell her.  She bursts into tears.  Don't push me away, she says.  Please.  

Her pain cuts to the soul, and whether her soul or mine, I cannot say.  I am an achey old man with a wheelchair and one poorly functioning hand, and the day has been full of rejections and humiliations, and Marlou seems to be behind it all.  She is crying, or trying to.  But in reality she is too weak to cry.  I am a cruel person.  And this is the truth.  And this is the end.  Marlou slips into bed.  Her eyes shut.  I know she will be asleep in seconds.  I sit on the edge of the bed.  There are certain things to say at such moments, and I know about these things, having read a book about them.  

I sit on the edge of the bed.  I touch her face.  Please forgive me, I say.  This has been very hard for me.  Marlou, too tired to even open her eyes, her speech even more slurred than when the day began, pats my hand.  It's okay, she says.  We have other things to worry about.  I love you, I say.  There are some other things to say in these extreme moments, according to the book, but they elude me now.