We Are Gathered Read online

  We are supposed to be hardwired to decide what is beautiful and what is ugly. I read a study somewhere that even infants responded more happily to pictures of what we consider beautiful faces than to ugly ones; they cooed and clapped and smiled for Angelina Jolie and burped and wailed and farted for the Elephant Man. But as I force myself to look at Zayde Albert and Jeffrey, admitting to myself that I don’t want to really see them any more than Carter Graham or Evan Elkins or Marco Hunter really wanted to see me, because in those two are all the mistakes of the universe, all the wars we lose, all the deaths, all the rot, the seaweed that strangles the mermaid, the crusted semen on the thigh, Venus squatting on the toilet—the longer I look the more they seem to sparkle and glow—I think the time may come that my dystopian future may turn out to be utopian when we evolve to see the beauty in the stroked-out and the misshapen, the one-eyed and the cleft-lipped, the swollen and the stained. Innocent babies will smile at what was once considered hideous; electrodes will record their joy. I dream that it will be empathy, not beauty, that will stir our souls and make us fall stupidly in love. After all, there is much more that is imperfect than is perfect in this old world.

  The two wheelchairs face off for a moment before the women behind them lean forward, air-kiss cheeks, and weave to the side, one right, one left, pushing their respective albatrosses (albatri?) ahead of them. Onward.

  The summer between junior and senior year of high school, Elizabeth and I volunteered for a week at a camp for disabled children. Larry Wolf, the other Jewish guy in the quad at the University of North Carolina when our dads went to college, had a son with muscular dystrophy. Jeffrey. We all knew Jeffrey. We saw him at synagogue on High Holy Days. His wheelchair blocked the aisle. His mother always sat next to him, sharing her prayer book with him and running her finger over the Hebrew, ignoring anyone who seemed annoyed by the inconvenience of the wheelchair in the narrow aisle. My dad used to go over to their house in the middle of the night to help with emergencies. I didn’t know the details of these emergencies, but I used to imagine them, my dad reaching into Jeffrey’s chest to restart his heart, attaching electrodes to his brain, fishing things out of his throat with his bare hands. After my week at that camp, I knew better what he was doing, changing a catheter, bandaging a bed sore, suctioning yellow-green mucus from the dark cavern of his throat. I was a terrible sleeper, so I always heard him go and heard him return, and I listened hard to hear the things my parents said to each other, that there was no greater tsuris than a sick child, nothing worse than watching your child suffer. I used to think they were talking about me, and I would stare at the dark dots that danced around my room at night and wonder what they weren’t telling me until one day I realized they were talking about Jeffrey Wolf, not me.

  “The mountains of North Carolina take your breath away. In the morning, clouds float waist-high over the emerald-green fields; black-eyed Susans and violets grow wild around turquoise-blue lakes. It is here that the disabled children come to feel a soft breeze on their faces.” That was how my earnest and exploitative college application essay started, for what high school senior volunteers at a camp for the disabled without intending to put this horizon-expanding experience on the application? Prose too purple for Harvard. Maybe I would have done better with realism: for example, I could have described the red draining sores that developed on the limbs of the kids who, having lost their motor skills, were a smorgasbord for the horseflies and mosquitoes. The camp was equipped with special swings, but we were so graceless loading the kids in, hauling up their stiff limbs, and clamping each leg into place that I doubted the feel of the wind on their faces could make up for the discomfort of getting there, and then swinging lopsided and crooked because we could never get the balance right. The kids grimaced and moaned, but they grimaced and moaned even sitting still, so it was impossible to know if we were hurting them. I was assigned to a little girl named Janie. I say little, but she was actually only a year younger than I. Janie was only four feet tall, eighty pounds, and scrunched up like a wadded tissue. My job was to try to stretch out her contracted limbs, and I would hold her in the swimming pool under the merciless southern summer sun, balancing her on my thigh and tugging at the stiff rubber of her fingers that were clamped shut as if she were holding the secret of the universe in her sweaty palms. I didn’t make much progress with her, but the doctor told me there wasn’t much progress to be made. The concept of progress with these kids was all wrong. Stasis was the only goal, she said.

  The last night at Camp High Mountain, I woke in the middle of the night. It was hot and the fans must have shorted. Elizabeth was sleeping in the bunk above me. She and the other counselors combined to make the quiet hum of the sleep of the just and youthful. I tossed around for a while before giving up and leaving the cabin. The cabin where the crippled kids slept was air-conditioned and electrified since many of them could not control their body temperatures and could die from overheating. I wasn’t planning to go there. I walked around the lake in the moonlight. We could not understand the things the campers said to us, though sometimes the nurses got it, and their parents could translate their rumblings into whole sentences, lectures even. The cabin for the campers had a faint glow, red and blue, from the instruments that sustained their lives. Moths papered the screens on the windows. I stood on the stairs and listened to the technology.

  The doctor had also told me that the camp wasn’t really for the kids; it was for their exhausted parents. Sometimes the kids smiled, but that could be a reflex. So too their frowns. They were locked in their bodies and who they were, who they were becoming as they grew up—well, not grew up but grew older, aged, and advanced through time—no one could ever know. I went into the cabin where it was blissfully cool. I could tell that a lot of the kids were not sleeping, and when I stopped at the first bed, I saw Jeffrey. He had curly hair, almost white blond like you see only in little kids; his skin was burned red, and his nose was peeling. He stared right at me with the bluest eyes, bluer even than Carter Graham’s. His lips were parted, and the inside of his mouth was black and deep and dark, bottomless. His arm trailed on the floor, and a fuzzy green caterpillar was inching across his hand. I brushed it away and picked up his hand and held it. If I could love this boy, I could love everyone. It could be universal, general, a love freely given, born whole and fully formed with no expectation of return, a love that could perfect the achingly imperfect world. I kneeled and looked into his eyes; he stared back at me, unblinking. I asked, “Can I touch you?”

  He shifted, and I think he nodded. I touched his cheek, the curve of his neck. What is it that makes us want to kiss—not just things of beauty but also the vulnerable, puppies, children, the ones we love? To touch our mouth to their skin? The caterpillar returned. I brushed it away again and kissed his hand, his warm and human hand. Then I tucked it next to him under the covers. He was so beautiful that I thought my heart would explode with empathy and sorrow. I stayed next to him and we looked at each other for a while. Then his eyes started to slowly close, then open, then close again, giving into sleep. The doctor told me that they felt pain; every day of their lives they felt pain, but they could also learn and imagine and dream like all the rest of us. In the semidarkness, I couldn’t make out the faces of the other children; there were moans but also sighs, grunts but also songs. The nurses slept there, and I thought I would be in trouble if I was discovered. At my foot, I saw the green caterpillar, and though I do not like bugs, I scooped it up in a fit of exuberant goodness and carried it outside to release it.

  The wedding is starting. I must line up with the seventeen other bridesmaids. If I stare at them long enough, I think I might be able to see the future, when they have double chins, saggy breasts, twenty unlosable pounds around the middle, disappointment creased into their foreheads. I can see their husbands, chosen from among the handsome groomsmen, gone bald, atherosclerotic with broken blood vessels on their coarse faces, bunions on their feet. We will walk down the gar
den path—it’s literally a garden path, with gardenias and rosebushes lining the aisle—and with each step, we will be carried into the future, closer to decay. Debbie Shapiro steps forward, and she marries, divorces; halfway down the aisle she loses her left breast to cancer; her second child hates her, but her grandchildren give her joy until she slowly expires in her nineties. The college roommate, there she goes, steps out bravely. She will have true love all her days. Her husband will adore her through the thyroid condition that makes her gain thirty pounds and lose most of her hair; he will love her C-section scar and tolerate her bitterness at not getting the respect she deserves as a second-grade teacher. The lovely girl from France—I remember her name, Therèse, one dainty foot forward, and all that time in the sun in Marseille begins to wrinkle her skin. Eighty steps to the front, and by the time she gets there and turns to face us, her skin has turned to leather and her cheeks are cavernous, sunken. When she smiles, yellow teeth and bleeding gums fill her mouth. She has never married. She ends her days in a nursing home where she receives no visitors. But the law school roommate, she becomes a judge. She has four children, and one goes to the Olympics, wins a silver medal for the heptathlon. We’re going to walk through life with a soundtrack, Pachelbel’s Canon. I might have picked something else, Beethoven’s Fifth or maybe something by the Sex Pistols. It’s my turn now, and seeing what has happened to the seventeen that have gone before me—the groomsmen not excepted; they are all up there, decrepit, leaning on canes, one in a motor scooter, in varying stages of baldness, with scars, stooped, half blind—I should be scared, but if anything, I am thrilled. The road indeed rises to meet you and smacks you in the face, and the end for all of us is the same whether sudden or a quiet erosion. Squinting again, I see that there are now actually gaps in the line of bridesmaids and groomsmen. In the minutes that have passed, a few have died and been borne away, and one or two didn’t make it at all. I, the bottom-rung bridesmaid, link hands with the bottom-rung groomsman. We will stand at the end of the entourage, the last stragglers in the parade, and if everyone wasn’t waiting for Santa Claus to come, they would have left long ago. He doesn’t look at me. I accept that. By the time we reach the end of this garden path, he will be ugly too.

  I step forward and resolve to quit my ridiculous job and do something, anything else, leave LA, abandon the screenplay, and write a novel or go to medical school or convert to Catholicism and die defending the rain forest. To my great shame, I am in love with a movie star. I have been enchanted by his eyes, spellbound by his body, and though he is not good, I love him simply because he is beautiful. I am shallow and vain; the reflection of his beauty will not bring me light. I walk forward, resolved. I must leave Los Angeles and change my life. I will never be Elizabeth Gottlieb. Even if I never have a day like this or marry a man like Hank or assemble two hundred people in one place to wish for my happiness, I will try for something different. I will try to make people see the world—and all the people in it—in all their tragic ugliness and pain, see them and love them. I will dedicate my life to creating something that will inspire us all to touch our lips to the crippled and the maimed and the sad and the cynical and the malformed and the moth-eaten.

  I reach the end of the path and walk all the way down the line to take my place and turn to face the guests. The music switches to Mendelssohn. Everyone rises. Elizabeth appears out of nowhere, as bright as the sun, pristine in white, the colorless color. I am standing here, a hundred years old, remembering this day.

  To be a king, you have to be born a prince

  What is the name of that girl standing there? What is her name? The ugly one, Elizabeth’s friend who used to come and swim at our house. You’d think medical science would have figured out a way to treat that birthmark by now. But then they haven’t figured out a way to fix my brain, so doctors aren’t so smart after all. Don’t deserve all the money they make. It’s a sham, medical science; they give us pills—how do we know they work? I can tell you what doesn’t work. Everything they’ve tried on me. Now they’ve left me here, parked under a Japanese maple that is doing nothing to keep me cool, and I’m staring at that girl, the ugly one with the purple face.

  This morning, my wife dressed me in one of my best summer suits, an expensive tan linen from Italy. Ida knotted a green and white silk tie around my neck, pulling it a little too tightly, as usual, and hammered my feet into a pair of new leather shoes. She wet the brush under the faucet and combed what is left of my hair directly off my face. The brush was too wet, and drops of water slipped down my cheeks and fell onto the lapel of my coat where they left dark spots like teardrops. I could see the spots, but I could do nothing about them. I could not point them out to my wife, nor could I complain that the tie was choking me and that the sock on my left foot had fallen down and was folded uncomfortably inside the shoe. Some time ago, months, years, days, I had a stroke and lost the power of movement and the power of speech. No one but me knows that none of my mind was lost. None. Not knowing what is left of my mind, the same people will treat me, at various times, like an imbecile, like the man I was, like a fragile child, or like an insensible lump of flesh. When my wife dressed me this morning, she was silent until she had finished the task. Then she stepped back to examine me. Almost done. The catheter bag was full of urine; she clamped the tubing, detached the bag, and seconds later, I heard the toilet flush. She left me there, trousers around my knees, limp penis, useless now though once it gave her pleasure; now it flopped against my thigh, boneless, a dog’s ear, a dead eel. Ida returned with the bag, hooked it up, pulled up my trousers, zipped the zipper, wiped off imaginary lint, and folded my hands in my lap. Then she sighed and declared, overarticulating, “Albert, we are going to Elizabeth’s wedding today.”

  My wife is still an attractive woman. She was a beauty when I married her, and I won her over the efforts of almost every other Jewish man in town. When she was younger, she had long blond hair that she piled up on her head in ringlets. I loved to watch her take it down a curl at a time. She was slender, like a young tree, and her body was smooth and cool to the touch. Not many people knew I was unfaithful to her, but all those who did, at one time or another, expressed their dismay. There is no such thing as a woman who is prettier than my wife when she was young, but only simple men are driven to infidelity by lust. As she stands before me now, only slightly heavier than the day I married her, her hair still blond but dyed now to an unnatural margarine yellow and her eyes framed with puffs of pinkish-gray skin, I try to assess whether I love her, whether I have ever loved her. I provided for her; I protected her. She has never known fear or want or hunger. It would have been my job, in the event of war or famine, to sacrifice myself for her, but love? Love, to me, belongs in the realm of the philosophical where pale, weak men contemplate their navels and other things that never change the world. This is the reason that I have declared my love for my wife only a few times in the sixty years that we have been married. I almost never spoke those words to my two sons. Thinking about it now, as my wife balances with one hand on my wheelchair and adjusts the strap on her high heel, I think it is possible that I never said it to them at all.

  Our colored gardener, Mitchell, has to help load me into the van that Ida uses to shuttle me back and forth to the hospital and family events. More than anyone, Mitchell treats me like a child, and I cannot help thinking that this is a form of revenge and that he is having fun at my expense. Good for him. I would like to ask him if this is his intention, but, of course, I cannot speak. Mitchell is always cutting flowers from the garden and bringing them into my room in overfilled vases, splashing water. As he sets them down, checking to see if they are in my line of vision, he declares, “There, Mr. Gottlieb. I brought you some roses. Aren’t they pretty?” Mitchell has worked for me for more than twenty-five years. I am not a prejudiced man, never have been. A few years ago, I decided that he knew me well enough to call me by my first name, but since the illness, he has returned to a formality that has no
t existed since the earliest days of our association. Why, I do not know, and I suppose I never will. Considering all the things I will never know is one of my primary occupations as I sit here, very still, waiting to die. Mitchell snaps my wheelchair into place, talking while he works. “I’m going to get you locked in here, Mr. Gottlieb. Good and safe so you won’t slip around.” I am facing forward, and Mitchell is working behind me. Occasionally, his hand brushes my face, and he apologizes. Ida climbs into the driver’s seat. Driving makes her tense, and I am amazed and impressed that she can maneuver this large van. Before the stroke, I always drove, even when my eyesight began to fail and my reflexes slowed. Mitchell sits up front in the passenger seat. My wife finds me in the rearview mirror, and I hear Mitchell murmur, “He’s okay. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Elizabeth is my oldest son’s youngest daughter. She is a pretty, intelligent girl, and I suppose she is my favorite grandchild, though she doesn’t have much competition. Her older sister, Katie, is a lesbian. She never wears dresses, and her hair is cut shorter than a sailor’s. Katie has called me, at various times, a reactionary, a chauvinist, a bigot, and even a Nazi. We do not like each other. Ben is the only boy, a son like everyone wants. I am fond of him, though I do not think he is as bright as Elizabeth. When he was younger, he was a fine athlete, and I had a few proud moments watching him on the baseball diamond and the tennis court. At some point, however, he decided that he did not like competitive sports, and he took up jogging and cross-country skiing. He tried to explain his reasoning to me once, but it struck me that he was investing too much meaning in what are essentially games. I believe he gave up competitive sports for the same reason that I did: because he reached a point where he began to lose. My younger son, Eddie, has only now started a family, though he is on his fourth marriage. His wife, Sharon, is a cold woman with the long face and wide-set eyes of a horse, but she is strong, and she keeps Eddie in line, something that his previous three wives, all more attractive and weaker willed, were unable to do. They have one child, Matthew, a hyperactive little boy who tries my patience. Even Ida finds him exasperating, and she loves almost all children. Sharon is pregnant with another child, a girl, and we are all hoping that she will have Eddie’s face and Sharon’s mind. This will not make her beautiful or brilliant, but the reverse combination would be worse.