Martha Weinman Lear

“A nurse, smiling wordlessly and bobbing her starched and stoic little cap, ushers me into the coronary-care unit.

“This place is so hushed, like a church or a funeral home. It smells of danger. Everything here is hearts. Men, all men, I can see them, lying on the brink, hearts freshly broken, arteries long rotted, vital passages plugged, God knows what.

“I follow her past the open cubicles and look into each and away, fast, as though from shameful sights. In each, a small tableau. The deathbed scene from countless old movies. That high holy hush, the stricken one motionless in his bed, the haggard-faced relatives grouped about him, just so, the whole scene framed by some kitchy and cliche-ridden director. And here, in this last cubicle, a tableau as unreal to me as all the rest.

“Hal? Oh, come off it. What baroque bullshit is this? Hal is my healthy husband who, when last seen, picked me up at a London airport and twirled me around, I being no insignificant weight, and we gave each other a fine big kiss and a grab or two of the butt and said, So long, see you in two months, and he went off to America waving. So what does this charade have to do with him? With us?

“He lies in that bed and plastic tubes are feeding oxygen into his nose. Needles are feeding some colorless potion into his arm, I can see it dripping slowly from a bottle that hangs upside down by the bed. White discs are stuck like suction cups to his chest, and wires run from these discs to a big black machine, medical surrealism, that flashes lights and makes buzzing sounds and sends yellow blips racing across a small gray screen. His heart, the rhythms of his heart, blipping like unidentified objects on a radar screen. Danger out there in inner space.
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“Preposterous. Come on, Hal, disentangle yourself from those gadgets. Get up and give me a hug. You know I hate discontinuities. Why, we were just at that airport and you…You know I can’t cope with shifting planes of reality. You’ve given me little lectures in the past, haven’t you, eh? When my father dropped dead, when Billy dropped dead, when Phil jumped off the roof, when your mother lay in the morgue, when Fanny, who always had more marbles than anybody, smiled up at me out of her arteriosclerotic mists and said, Who are you? – you gave me those neat little reasonable Hal lectures abut ebbs and flows, births and deaths, natural cycles, here today gone tomorrow, and you know I rejected every word of it, you know all those natural cycles are unnatural and barbaric to me. Listen, Hal: If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings. If God had meant us to die he would have given us different song lyrics. No Forever and A Day, no Our Love Is Here To Stay, no Yours Till The Stars Have No Glory…I have been inculcated with faith in immortality. It is so sweet and American. I am so sweet and American. I have learned all my lessons. You are supposed to be here when Gibraltar tumbles, when the mountain crumbles; you are supposed to last at least as long as the moon over Alabama. So get up, damn it, and give me a hug.”