December 1 - December 24, 1998

CHAPTER XI

SLOGGING THROUGH JELL-O

"I’ve tried everything I can think of!" Jay said abruptly popping up from his desk in Paco’s old office at the Studio, as though he was considering a hasty exit. Instead, he picked up his basketball, began throwing it against the wall and catching it on the bounce.

"I'm not blaming you," said Steve Quinn from the doorway. "What I'm saying, is I think this is more than a one-man job."

"Your sneakers don't match" Jay noted.

Steve glanced down. The sneakers were similar but definitely not an exact match. "I think she's going down for the last time."

"I'm in contact with her family; her sister, Renee, mostly," Jay said. "Jules has pulled away from them, too. They want her to come home; at least for the holidays. She won't hear of it."

"Maybe she should go and stay with Paco's dad and wife. They're usually back in the country this time of year, aren't they?"

"Forget about it, pal," Jay said and laughed bitterly. "It seems she especially doesn't want anything to do with them."

"Why not?"

"That's the mystery, Steve. I know losing Paco cut her to ribbons, but this is nuts. She's behaving like…I don't know what she's behaving like."

"She's behaving like she's done something horrible and she's trying to hide it. If she keeps everyone at arm's length, then no one will find out."

Jay nodded.

"What Jules needs is professional help. Some kind of therapy," Steve said.

"No kidding," Jay said. He threw the ball harder against the wall. This time he didn’t catch it. As it rolled toward Steve, Jay said, "How do we get her there?"

***

Ten days later, on a bright but chilly Saturday afternoon, Jay knocked on Julia’s front door. She didn’t answer until he started pounding.

"I’m tired," she said after she opened the door. "I don’t want to do anything today." She was wrapped in Paco’s old bathrobe. It was nearly two-o’clock in the afternoon.

"Okay, didn’t mean to bother you," Jay said. "Don’t really have a plan. I was driving by. I just kind of wanted to check on you."

She nodded. "I’m okay."

"Good," Jay nodded. "So I got the tickets to the Messiah sing-along at the Music Center I promised I’d get."

Julia and Paco had attended the Sing-along each holiday season for years. She had no desire to go this year without Paco. "I told you not to do that. Take someone else. I’m going to go back and rest now." She tried to close the door, but Jay’s foot was in the way. "Jay . . ."

"I don’t want to be a nuisance or anything," he said, "but can I use your bathroom?"

Annoyed, she stepped back and allowed him in.

Once in the bathroom, he loitered at long as he could. When he came out, he edged along the hallway, then glanced into the spare room, the one Paco and Julia never got around to really decorating, and saw Julia stretched out on the bed with several of the cats. She was watching the Home Shopping network on TV. "See you," she called from the rumpled bed without glancing away from the television.

"See you," he responded.

Instead of leaving the house, he walked quietly to the kitchen. The sink was full of at least a week’s worth of cups, saucers, mugs and spoons. There was a red net bag, bright on the white marble counter, with navel oranges spilling out and a great quantity of orange peel spread around that. She seemed to be existing entirely on oranges and tea.

Jay rinsed two cups, then opened the dishwasher to put the cups in the rack. Julia’s cat, the brown and white one, Zoey (he could never keep their names straight), was howling at him from the top of the stressed-pine dining table. He turned to rinse more cups, but stopped midway because Julia was standing at his elbow. He didn't hear her come in. She abruptly turned off the water. She didn’t say anything.

Eyeing the orange peels on the counter, he said, "At least I can rest assured you’re getting enough vitamin C." Julia didn’t respond. The look on her face made him close the dishwasher and leave the house. It wasn’t her anger that made him go. There wasn’t any anger. But there was a weariness, the kind of weariness he had only seen in the faces of the very old.

When Steve Quinn pulled up in his old pickup a short time later, Jay was standing on a tall ladder leaning against the front of Julia’s house, cleaning the dead leaves and debris from her gutters. Jay didn’t recognize the man who got out with Steve, but Jay knew who he was.

The man was past middle age and had a very red nose. He was wearing a rumpled and baggy tweed suit, and curiously, black velvet slippers rather than shoes. The man blinked nervously around. As Jay came quickly down the ladder, the man followed Steve up the front walk. Steve volunteered to be the one to knock on the door. Jay elected to remain on the lawn, a safe distance away near the sidewalk.

From the room at the back, Julia heard the knocking on the front door. Thinking it was a renewed attempt by Jay to pry her out, she ignored it. A moment later, she heard footsteps on the driveway outside the window. "Come on, Jules, open up. It’s me," Steve said through the screen. "I’ve got to talk to you."

Without being rude beyond her new capacity for that, she couldn’t ignore him.

"What is this?" Julia said a few minutes later when she opened the door and Steve came in followed by the man wearing the velvet slippers.

"I'm Dr. Inkster," the man said. "Your friends asked me to come. They believe you’re in trouble. From what they described, I think they’re right."

Julia stepped back and scowled past Dr. Inkster at Steve. She couldn’t believe he--of all people--would betray her this way.

Dr. Inkster sneezed. "I don’t suppose you could spare a tissue, could you?"

Julia reached for the box of tissue on the coffee table and handed it to him. Dr. Inkster pulled out a sheet, blew his nose then looked at Steve and sniffed again. "It’s okay for you to go now," the doctor said.

Paco Berelli
General Delivery
Just This Side Of Nowhere

Paco,

I’ve agreed to see the grief therapist they brought over. I’ve agreed to it just to shut them up. I can’t tell you how much I resent this ambush. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but why can't everybody just leave me alone?

Dr. Inkster was here for an hour. Jay and Steve sat outside on the porch the whole time he was here. In a few days, I start in Dr. Inkster's grief group. I can't abide Dr. Inkster, and for the flimsiest reasons.

In any case, today he ordered me to write letters to you. He says the letters are a way to organize and clarify the jumble of things I've been thinking and feeling since you died, which I think is probably unnecessary, because I don't really feel much of anything. The good doctor wants me to keep a copy of each letter, make a copy for him, and also--get this--mail one to you. While I can almost see the point of the writing the letters, even of letting Dr. Inkster read them, copying you, seems to me, just plain daft. Paco, if you even have a zip code now, I can't imagine what it would be. But Dr. Inkster claims mailing the letters, dispatching them to the cosmos without a return address, is an act of faith (something I ran out of completely, a long time ago). This faith is supposed to be my bridge back to reconnecting with you, which is supposed to reconnect me to myself, and whomever I used to be. (Remember that man on the subway? Remember how for a time after the incident we speculated about the turns his life might've taken to bring him to that awful nothingness? I feel like life has turned me toward that, too.)

The only thing that will happen to this letter is that it's destined for the dead letter box at the West Hollywood post office.

Jules

***

"I can't get anything accomplished," said the man in the red corduroy shirt. Julia noticed that as he spoke, he couldn't meet the eye of the others in Dr. Inkster's grief therapy group. They were seated in plastic chairs, arranged in a semi-circle around the doctor.

The man in the red corduroy shirt continued: "Each morning I make these lists: Things I've just got to get done." He sighed. "But it's like I'm slogging through Jell-O."

Julia knew the feeling well. Had the man in the red corduroy shirt experienced the unpleasant and insensate euphoria she had, when for weeks after Paco died her feet hadn't touched the ground? What about later, when the numbness wore off and she was about as vigorous rag doll? She studied him as he studied the pair of hands twisting in his lap as though they couldn't be his.

Her focus shifted to his face as she heard him say: "I can't sleep . . .If I'm hungry, it's for food they haven't even invented yet."

Precisely. Julia knew all about that, as well. So did they, she speculated, surveying the faces of some of the other group members.

"I'm out of step with everybody," the man continued. "Or maybe--they're all out of step with me. Everybody talks and moves too slow--sometimes too fast."

Yes.

"Sometimes," he continued, "I feel just like I did when I got shipped back from Nam. I was in the infantry. I saw a lot of action. So much action, that once I got home, I had a lot of trouble getting back into the life I left behind. It took more than a year to learn how to fit in."

Great analogy, Julia thought. She felt that way, too.

Then the man said, "But something else happened to me when Martha died . . ."

Julia looked at him.

"My courage is gone." He finally looked around at the faces of those watching him. "I'm afraid of everything now."

About Rob (? She hadn't been listening when he'd introduced himself), Julia had thus far gleaned that his wife Martha had died in September after a long battle with breast cancer.

"I'm scared of stuff I never even gave a second thought to before her death," Rob said. "The most mundane things. It's short-circuiting my activities. I don't know how and why it happened, but my world has shrunk to the size of a pea."

"A smaller world is easier to manage, Rob," Dr. Inkster said. "What happened to Martha was beyond your power. It's made you realize there's so much that is. You probably have a lot of control issues you'll need to deal with now."

"I think what happened to Rob happened because fear gobbles soul." The assertion was out of Julia's mouth before she had a chance to check it.

Everyone looked at Julia; Dr. Inkster over the rims of his glasses. "What (sniff) do you (sniff) mean, Julie?" He sneezed mightily into his handkerchief.

The doctor's cold/allergies/sinus problem was just as moistly offensive now as it had been the first time she met with him at the house, and later in private session. Was he always sickly? She stole a glance at the doctor's feet. Yup. There they were: the swishy black velvet slippers he seemed to favor instead of normal shoes.

"Still with us, Julie?" prompted Dr. Inkster. "I think we'd all be (sniff) interested in hearing you elaborate on what you said (sniff)."

But Julia, it seemed, did not care to elaborate. Not then, anyway. Her pronouncement was the sole contribution she made to the group that morning.

Rob covered his face with his hands and sobbed. The woman sitting next to him, the one wearing the dark blue watch-cap, who had two tiny gold rings in her right nostril (she lost a brother to a heroin overdose), passed him one of the several strategically-placed boxes of Kleenex. As he wiped his eyes, she put her arms around him. Julia could tell he appreciated the comfort.

In that moment, Julia felt optimistic for Rob; optimistic, and full of envy. Time, as Dr. Inkster had said to Julia at least a half dozen times during their private session, was the great healer. Time would ease Rob's pain.

Time, however, Julia believed, wasn't going to help her one bit. In the end, the march of time had been Julia's undoing.

***

Paco Berelli
c/o The Supreme Being
Kingdom Come

Dear Paco,

My life without you: Keys forgotten in the front door. Misplaced reading glasses. Missing trains of thought. Missing the parts of me that seemed to go missing when you did. My life is a blur of nights passed longing for you. Most mornings, I wake up late and disoriented. I mistake the warmth coming from the other side of the bed for yours. Instead, it's a sleepy pile-up of cats. In those first few moments each morning, it all rushes back: this isn't a nightmare. This is all true. The one curious mercy in all this, is that since you died, I don't dream anymore. Not ever.

Because the powers that be showed no mercy when they selected to remove you from the planet, I'm left with no mercy to show anyone else, not to mention my former nerve, confidence, self-respect, much of my humanity, as well as most of my social skills. I'm saying this because the hatred I feel for Dr. Inkster stems completely from his post nasal drip and his eccentric black velvet slippers. Hardly solid justification to reject an entire person, but that's what I'm doing, and I can't seem to help myself.

I remember a time when I loved people because of their eccentricities.

I said something in group today to Rob (one of the members) about "fear gobbling the soul." Dr. Inkster asked me to elaborate, but I didn't feel up to it just then. I could elaborate here, I guess. I could reveal that shortly after you died I saw the remaining shreds of my soul slip slimily down the fear monster's maw. Then I saw the thing lick its lips. That’s the thing that began waiting in the dark for me since the very moment we got your diagnosis. I might also have pointed out to Dr. Inkster and the others that although, for centuries, poets, lovers and daydreamers have romanticized the human heart, made its four chambers the repository of all emotion and sensibilities, the heart is just a muscle moored behind the sternum, a nifty little compressor that sucks in oxygen, forces blood through the arteries, then back through the veins to keep us alive. I read somewhere that even the primitive anatomists understood that, and their rudimental autopsies were searches conducted to determine the location of the soul (which they expected to find somewhere between the liver and the lungs). But the soul, I think, like DNA, is imprinted on every atom of the organism. It's the soul where the finer feelings dwell . . . like courage.

I've also learned that it's possible to live without a soul. But it's an existence I endure in the confines of neither here nor there: an uneasy and wakeful sleep-state, where it's always chilly, and my heart pounds with cold dread at the monsters--imagined and real--lurking just out of sight. I guess I was so used to fear as our star boarder before you died, now that you're gone, I've replaced it with being afraid of everything else, and I do mean everything.

I feel so envious of Rob. He's already improved since last week, if only infinitesimally.

Jules

"She just slumps there in that chair not talking to anybody," said the watch-cap-wearing girl from group, entering the ladies room with another of the group's female members. "She's so aloof. An aloof lump."

The group session had ended five minutes before. It was Julia's second meeting with them. She had come into the Pepto-Bismol pink ladies room and was just about to leave the stall she was in when the two women entered. She knew right away she was the "aloof lump" they were talking about. To avoid an embarrassing scene, she was going to have to stay where she was.

"You're right. She hasn't interacted at all except for that 'fear eating your soul' crack," said the second woman. "Even when Dr. Inkster presses her." Julia didn't recognize this one's voice.

"She's bad for the rest of the group," said the watch cap wearer. "She makes us all feel inhibited. She's really screwing up our Gestalt."

"You've got to want help to be helped," said the second woman.

Julie, wait!" Dr. Inkster called as Julia was about to enter the elevator after the uncomfortable situation in the ladies bathroom. Julia turned and watched Dr. Inkster lumber toward her. The absurd black velvet slippers made no sound on the linoleum in the corridor. Behind her, the elevator doors whispered closed.

"I'm glad you're back," he said as he came to a stop before her. "We missed you Thursday and Friday." The exertion made his nose run at more than its usual rate. "I was worried about you. When you didn't return my calls over the week-end, I was ready to call your friends."

She shrugged. He blew his nose. "So, how do you like the group?"

"I don't really feel it's for me."

"That's too bad, because I felt you'd sort of connected; with Rob, anyway. He went through exactly what you went through with your husband. Only for a year longer."

The corridor smelled of disinfectant, or was that the doctor's aftershave? Whatever it was, it was making Julia's stomach lurch. "Dr. Inkster," she said, " I don't know how you handle all this. This steady diet of other people's sadness and loss."

"Because I can help some of them."

Julia looked away. Not me, she thought.

"That's because you're not open to it," he stated with alarming telepathy. "Not yet, anyway."

Julia hit the elevator down button again.

"What are you doing (sniff) for the holidays?" the doctor asked. "There will be group sessions every day but Christmas Day and New Years Day."

"I'm going away."

"I see. Not alone, I hope."

"No."

The elevator doors opened. Julia stepped in, but Dr. Inkster stuck his hand out and inserted it between the doors to stop them from closing.

What now?

Although Dr. Inkster stood with one hand at his side clutching the handkerchief, one hand stopping the elevator doors, she felt him reaching out to her so palpably it was almost an actual embrace.

"Julie, may I make an observation?"

"I guess." She rammed her hands into the pockets of her old, rust-colored suede blazer, a gift from Paco the Christmas before they moved to Los Angeles.

"Sometimes when an individual is going through the grief process, they make the mistake of falling in love with their misery."

"I'm not in love with this. Believe me."

"Hear me out."

Inside the pocket of her jacket, thumb and finger of her right hand worked at a tiny hole in the acetate lining, making it larger.

"They hold on hard to it in the wrong-headed belief it will keep them in closer proximity to the person they lost." He coughed. "If it's not that, then they somehow feel that picking up the pieces, going forward, is a betrayal . . . I suspect you have a foot in both camps."

There was a time not so long ago when she would've have been deeply touched by Dr. Inkster's humanity, by his kindliness, by the unquestionable empathy he felt for her, indeed, for all his patients. But in that instant, she could barely resist the mighty impulse she felt to snatch his glasses from his face and twist them until the lenses popped.

He seemed to sense that and stepped back.

The light from the overhead, florescent tubes were making two-way mirrors of his lenses. Instead of his eyes, all she could see was a reflection of herself with her features compressed but at the same time expanded. She looked like a turtle.

"I really want to help you," he said. "I can't do that unless you open up to me. I feel like there's more to your situation than meets the eye, and I'm missing it. You've got to confide in me, fill in the blanks. Once you do, you'll start to heal."

Like Rob is going to do, Julia thought, and again felt envy because in a matter of months, with Dr. Inkster's help, with the help of the group, he would begin his comeback. He would taste food again. Sleep . . . Live.

Julia was certain that no amount of confiding in Dr. Inkster, despite the aid and comfort he seemed so prepared to supply her, even in conjunction with the full support of the group (if she ever managed to get it), and even if the doctor eventually got her name right, unlike Rob, would she ever be rescued. But then Rob didn't have his deceased wife apportioning punishment from the grave, the way Julia believed Paco was punishing her.

October 1, 1960

When a woman wants to marry, she arrives early in the morning or late at night at the family home of her intended, with a gift of corn meal she has, herself, ground.

Well, early this morning Juanita arrived with the corn meal. The wedding ceremony of Juanita and Dewey is underway. In light of that, I have been moved from the lean-to to a pallet in the main room near Dewey's. Juanita is now ensconced in the lean-to in a state of semi-seclusion, grinding more corn meal for the family. This will continue for three days.

Dewey is more subdued than I thought he would be. When I questioned him about why he doesn't seem happier, he said that the responsibilities of marriage are grave and shouldn't be taken lightly.

On the morning of the fourth day mothers of the bridal pair will wash the couples' hair, sometimes knotting it together (symbolizing union). When their hair is dry, Dewey and Juanita will pray to the sun at the eastern edge of the mesa. Afterwards, they will return to Dewey's house where Juanita will make piki (fried bread) for her mother-in-law for breakfast. Dewey and Juanita will be considered man and wife at this point but the ceremony isn't over. The bride remains in the groom's household, doing the lion share of the cooking for the groom's family, until the household's family males (along with others in their clan in the village) weave the cloth for, and fashion, Juanita's ceremonial wedding costume (which, in observance of tradition, she'll eventually be buried in). As a prospective novitiate into the fold and into Dewey's clan, I will be helping to make Juanita's wedding clothes . . . I feel like dying.

I stood, partially concealed, in the doorway this morning watching her grind the corn. Shafts of sun from clefts in the lean-to's roof shooting everywhere, bathed in ethereal light her face and strong, sure hands. There's an economy and a quiet confidence in every move she makes. She didn't meet my glance, or acknowledge my presence in any way. Maybe I'm mistaken about her feelings for me.

(to be continued)

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