Alison Maeser Brimley
Thin Walls
I.
Close up she looks every bit as put together as she does on television; it’s not some trick of the camera. Connie Crofts from the local news is now Connie Crofts in his bedroom. It’s what he might call the third official date, and she flicks her feathered hair away from her rosy face and neck to leave the buttons on the front of her blouse fully graspable. She is reclining and he’s coming closer with eager hands and then suddenly she’s sitting up and touching her forehead. I’m sorry, she says—it’s the weirdest thing. She’s squinting, and then she stands up like she can’t see and stumbles into the bathroom, so he leaves her a minute to figure it out.
A wall, thin and getting thinner with each pump, bracing under the weight of blood, bracing all its tissues till it gives up. The wall contorts itself to make room for the flow, bulges and twists into a bulb, two then ten then twenty millimeters across, hanging like a poison berry off a vine of artery. A berry growing fat with blood, waiting to stain the brain with juices that will drown it from the center out, a berry aching to burst. Foolish blood. It pumps because that’s the only thing it knows to do. But tonight the little fruit is overfull and breaks itself. Blood runs over brain, runs until it reaches skull.
Twenty minutes later when she still hasn’t come out, Lee goes to the bathroom door and knocks and hears nothing. Connie was smart enough or frantic enough to leave the thing unlocked. He swings the door open in an arc of only a few inches before it meets resistance from the body piled in its way.
Lee had been close to in love with Connie. He had told Jeff over drinks just the night before that he knew it sounded stupid but he could really see himself marrying her. “Connie Crofts from the news?” Jeff said. “Is that where I know that name from? Yeah, I could see myself marrying her too.” He patted his friend’s back.
But it turns out that the first time Lee meets the parents of the woman he could see himself marrying is at the coroner’s office. Cause of death having been determined, there is no suspicion in their faces, though maybe there is jealousy that Lee had been the last to see her alive, maybe a vicious hunch that he valued her so little, or at least valued her for the wrong reasons, that he didn’t give her any of the proper sort of love, that instead of looking in her eyes in the last minutes of her life he had just inelegantly held her breasts.
In the subsequent two years he attempts sex only two more times and both end in failure, since his hands in these moments feel only Connie, and he goes limp. Then he is set up with the friend of Jeff’s new girlfriend Jenna, and since he doesn’t like being set up and because he has become impotent he doesn’t look forward to the date, and then because he is confused rather than eager to have the woman—her name is Astrid—in his apartment drinking coffee at the end of the night he ends up inside her before he can prepare for the worst, and then the worst does not come. She is not a woman he can really see himself marrying, but three years and four months after Connie Crofts died he does marry her. Astrid. At the wedding, Jeff’s ex-wife shows up, looking older but with a better haircut than he remembers, and she looks happy for him.
His sons, when they come to stay in the summer, like Astrid. She gives him one more child, too, a boy, and later, she dies a year after Lee does, she of pneumonia and he of colon cancer. They are old.
II.
Close up she looks every bit as put together as she does on television; it’s not some trick of the camera. Lee has thought this many times, from their first time in bed until today, when he is supposed to be in another room not seeing her but she has beckoned him in, scoffing that she does not believe in that tradition. He does not believe in that tradition either, of course, but still, while he stands looking her full in the face, he can’t shake the feeling that he is sinning against some higher power. He hasn’t felt sin since he was maybe fifteen. He feels that someone knows his thoughts and disapproves. He would compound the sin, complete the indiscretion by taking her right there in the hotel room, but she’s too done up, crowned in hair and makeup that took hours, and really he would feel bad spoiling that. Something real to be guilty of. Even her body is encased in brocade, too thick and sharp for him to feel any of what’s beneath it. She seems to want him to feel it anyway. He kisses her on the cheek and leaves, meets her an hour later over the (figurative) altar.
In twenty-two years they find themselves at the hotel again, watching the wedding of the child of Connie’s longtime co-anchor. The room is done in different colors; it looks bigger. “It looks bigger, doesn’t it?” Lee says to Connie, who nods.
“Do you remember our wedding day?” Connie says quietly, because Pachelbel’s is playing and any minute the bride will turn up at the back of the room. “Remember how I called you in your room and asked you to come and see me? I’d hoped we could skip the wedding and just . . . butter the biscuit. Right there. And everyone would wonder where we’d gone. I was mad when you didn’t get the hint.”
Lee is choking on a laugh. Connie, for all her progressive politics and women-in-the-workplace stuff, is awkward about sex. Not in the act, but in the talking about it. She prefers euphemisms, alliterative ones especially. So it was Lee who’d given the talk to their two children, even though both were girls, because he couldn’t trust Connie to let anything useful out of her mouth on that topic. This isn’t the first time they have relived the story. It is fun to speak of it every two years or so. Usually her phrase of choice is “do the do.” I’d hoped we could just do the do, you know. Sometimes “jingle the jangle.”
“Oh, I got the hint,” Lee says. “Anyway, you were not mad.” “I was!”
“You were not. You would have been mad if we’d skipped the wedding. Looking back, you would have regretted it. You only get one wedding day, you know.” And then he feels the regret of having misspoken, because while it is true that Connie only got one wedding day, he himself had gotten two.
She doesn’t seem to catch the error. She purses her lips in mock anger and keeps her face forward.
“And we can butter those biscuits any day,” he says, mouth at her ear, and Connie elbows him to shut up when all the heads turn back to see the bride appearing at the door.
III.
Jonas is going to be six next week, too old to be waking the adults in the next room with his midnight crying. Connie never did have a baby of her own, but she starts to feel like the overtaxed mother of a newborn, growing jealous of her husband’s ability, or determination, to sleep right through the sound.
She doesn’t actually want to go back to sleep. She wants to be able to comfort the child, she wants Jonas to let her rock him. But she knows what will happen: she’ll cross the hallway and push his door open, Jonas will pause his noise for a moment at the prospect of his father entering the room, and when, instead, he sees Connie’s mussed bob in the doorway, he’ll start right up again. Sudden as muting and then unmuting the TV, quick as the push of a button.
Lee’s sons, when they come to stay in the summer, don’t like Connie.
“I want my mom,” he’ll tell her, and the line feels so cliché to Connie, like something a television writer has crafted specially to break her character’s (the second wife’s) heart and make her realize with an awful profundity I am not his mom. She almost rolls her eyes. She’ll try to talk him through his nightmare and reintroduce him to the safe room he’s sleeping in and he’ll get frustrated until his anger dispels the fear that woke him and she’ll go back to bed.
Connie’s trouble with Jonas is noise, at night. Her trouble with Michael, the older son, is silence, by day. He is thirteen, so she tells herself his reticence is general and not specific to her. This is what Lee tells her, too, when they’re alone nights and she rehearses to him some fresh rudeness Michael has unleashed on her. But she suspects the truth is that it’s personal—Michael does not like her. And she suspects that Lee knows this.
She is right about both. Michael does not like that she is noticeably prettier than his own mother, though he can’t understand why. He doesn’t like that his friends recognize her newscaster’s face in the car window when she comes to pick him up from school. He doesn’t like her cutesy midwestern slang, the way she casually uses these phrases that no one’s heard before as if they’re common knowledge and should be understood, but at the same time she’s waiting for someone to stop her and comment on how silly and adorable she is. Which his dad does. Every time.
Some years later, when Michael is twenty and the berry bursts and blood runs over her brain, he will sit in the backseat of his Ford Fiesta and admit to a girl who is making a good show of sympathy for his loss that he feels bad he never let himself warm up to Connie. She wasn’t so bad, he’ll tell the girl, though he has an idea that even though she’s only been dead a week he is letting his memory smudge out all her rough edges.
I think it would be easier on my dad if he thought I was sadder, he’ll tell the girl, and she’ll run her hand up and down his arm.
IV.
“It’s like I can break my life into four stages distinguished by my relationship with the six o’clock news,” Lee is saying. They are at Jeff’s watching the aftermath of the first game of the NBA finals, the only one of the series the Lakers will win. They’ve seen the end of the game and are now watching postgame interviews, muted. “From about 1976 to ‘80 I watched casually, for no particular reason other than it was on, and I must have noticed Connie when she started but it was never, Oh, God, I’m in love with that woman, you know? Then after I met her—1980—I started watching very purposefully, I would make sure I was home from work and sitting in front of the TV with my microwave pizza at six o’clock just so I could see her. It was a way to break up that feeling of I-wonder-what-she’s-doing-right- now, I-wonder-if-she’s-thinking-about-me, because for that hour I could look in on her, I knew what she was doing without having to call. Then, Stage 3, 1981 all the way through this year, really: things got serious and then we were engaged and then married. I would tune in to watch the way you go to watch your kid’s soccer game, because it’s her job but it’s also like a performance, at least it felt that way to me. I liked being able to tell her she’d done great, she looked great—whatever.”
There is silence while Lee drinks his beer like he’s quenching a great thirst, but even when he sets it down he is quiet. Jeff sits watching Michael Jordan’s lips move on the screen, like he’s forgotten there’s no sound coming out. Finally, he turns to look at Lee. “And Stage 4?”
“Stage 4 was from March until now, when I’d watch to try to catch a glimpse of Brian—to try to catch a glimpse of her catching a glimpse of Brian, more likely—which of course I wasn’t going to do. It’s pathetic. Masochistic. She could have made it easy on me and just slept with her co-anchor instead, right? I mean then at least I could watch them together and just fume at their stupid jokes they make to each other and his shitty toupee—”
“Is that a toupee?”
“But she couldn’t even give me that. She went for the sound guy. Brian the sound guy.”
Brian the sound guy has worked at the station since 1978, the same year he graduated with his degree in broadcasting, the same year he lost his virginity to Connie Crofts (which of course he didn’t tell her, and which, to his relief, she did not ask about). And so it was that in March of 1991, just months before the Los Angeles Lakers met the Chicago Bulls in the NBA playoffs, Connie told Lee that she’d been sleeping with someone else (but not that she’d gone back to sleeping with someone else, which in fact was the case). Connie had at first been reluctantly attracted to Brian’s oddball vibe, and sleeping with him felt like a needed vacation from more serious pursuits. And then, though Connie married, Brian never did. He stayed comfortably out of the picture, where Connie would sometimes notice him and smile, having forgotten, unless she reminded herself, that she had had a crush on him. Until one day, after the camera was shut off and her mic went dead, she really looked at Brian and noticed that he had come into himself— his neck had grown substantial beneath his head, his eyes were focused behind his glasses instead of darting around—and by this time she had again come to feel, acutely, a need for a vacation. Going back to his apartment made her feel twenty-seven again. The furniture was different now, nicer—he had a couch instead of a futon—but there were the same Talking Heads posters on his bedroom walls. There may have been one or two more. By the next year’s playoffs Connie and Lee will no longer be married, but she will not frequent Brian’s place either.
V.
It’s 1995 and Lee is in the garage with his table saw and thirty soon-to-be fence posts when something from the direction of the mini TV he’s bought to keep him company snatches his attention. It is the matter-of-fact voice of the news, with a morsel of matter-of-fact bad news, though not about local crime or political scandal: “Tonight we mourn the loss of one of our longtime anchors and friends, Connie Crofts.” Lee snaps toward the screen and squints to see the image more clearly: it’s the woman he knows, smiling whitely in a professional newsperson’s headshot, her face familiar but heavier, or more wrinkled or something. Behind the image, those who have replaced her at the news desk are still talking: “Connie was an incredible reporter, a loving wife and mother, and one of the most genuine and friendly people here at the studio. All of us will remember her fondly and miss her dearly ”
As her headshot disappears and the news desk fades back in, Lee wants to reach out and retrieve the picture.
“Connie died Wednesday of a brain aneurysm—” they continue, naming the killer with a special, rehearsed emphasis—“at the age of 45. What many Americans may not know is that brain aneurysms are responsible for over 30,000 deaths annually. While aneurysms are notoriously unpredictable, Dr. Marianne Quayle is here now to discuss how you”—pause—”can recognize the symptoms, right after this break.”
No, Lee thinks. He doesn’t want that. He wants her headshot back, he wants them to tell him who she married, what her children will do now. He is married himself. He has no remaining desire for Connie Crofts, with whom he went on three or four dates fifteen years ago. He carries no torch for her. He only wants to look at her face again, on the screen, to see in it everything that’s happened since 1980. But instead there’s a commercial for the childrens’ hospital, a commercial for Joe’s Crab Shack. And then the newspeople again, telling him that 40% percent of aneurysms are fatal, about two-thirds of those who survive suffer permanent brain damage, and he is trying to whip his diaphanous memories of Connie back into something of substance, but he can’t. Why did he stop seeing her? He doesn’t remember.
Astrid is framed in the doorway now, with a sweating lemonade in hand. “How’s my handyman doing?” she asks, and Lee gives her a thin smile.
VI.
“Connie Crofts, from the news?” Jeff had said when Lee made his admission. I could see myself marrying her. “Is that where I know that name from? Yeah, I could see myself marrying her too.”
Now, alone in the antiseptic space they’ve dedicated to her, where the only sounds are of machines beeping an external heartbeat, Lee feels a strong desire to physically eat his words—to gag himself on them. He can’t see himself marrying her. Or he can’t see her marrying him. He can’t see her doing much of anything.
It’s been a month since their last date, a month since Lee himself had called the ambulance that delivered her to her new home in the hospital. So it was more than lust—that much he could testify to anyone who cared to know—because yes he had liked her body quite a lot, but the body lying before him now is the same one. Thinned, maybe, because she does all her eating by tube now, but essentially the same body. It’s only the brain that’s changed. And the head, shorn of its blondness to clear the way for a quilt of incisions. And he feels nothing for any of it. Nothing except some sharp regret at something he couldn’t have helped.
Though his intentions are to show support, keep an eye on her progress, encourage the family, he will visit her hospitalized body only twice. The second time her parents are there, and there is nothing to say except to ask them buoyantly to regurgitate every observation and prediction the doctors have made, and he gets the impression that already they’ve done this more times than they’d like. He will add a small bouquet to her bedside collection. He will mean to go again.
More than it made him sad, visiting her made his head feel fragile. He’d sit and look at her and try to feel with his skull, feel for any traitorous blood in there, pooling where it shouldn’t. For months the most minor headache will send him into a panic. For months Connie will be comatose. By the time she starts blinking her eyes—once for no, twice for yes—and moving one finger, Lee’s visits have stopped, but no one faults him for it.
VII.
For their twentieth anniversary Lee and Connie treat themselves to a trip to Rome. It has been Connie’s dream for decades, and though Lee is less interested, Connie started to plan the trip two years in advance and he did not stop her.
On the plane, Connie suffers a headache she diagnoses as her first migraine. She takes Advil in twos. The pain comes back every few hours for the rest of the trip. In an Italian drugstore she stocks up on Excedrin, which helps little. Two or three times a day—at St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, on the Spanish Steps—they have this conversation:
“God, my head is killing me.”
“When we get home you should see a doctor.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
She refuses, though, to rest. She has every moment of the trip planned and she will not skip a thing. Lee doesn’t think of suggesting they go home before the scheduled two weeks are up.
But then they are home. A week passes during which Connie medicates herself with American Excedrin, which she reasons has to be stronger than the Italian stuff, and still the headaches have not stopped. She goes through an MRI machine “just to rule out the possibility that it’s a tumor,” as the doctor says, and Lee finds it an odd choice of words. “Well, they ruled out the tumor,” Lee will tell people later, when the whole thing has become a minor scare, with details they can laugh at, “and ruled in the aneurysm.”
“Finding the aneurysm is really the best thing that could have happened to you,” the doctor says, and again Lee questions the word choice. Images appear on the computer screen of how the operation will go. It shows the balloon of artery, bulging against Connie’s brain. The clip, like a little wire clothespin, that will choke off the blood flow and starve the bulge. “And that metal thing will just stay in my head forever?” Connie says.
“Yes,” the doctor says. “How long have I had this?”
“No telling. Many people have aneurysms that never burst.
Chances are yours never will. But you can’t be too cautious.”
For their thirtieth anniversary, Connie takes them back to Rome. “I got robbed,” she says. “I want to enjoy it this time.” They visit the same landmarks and Connie acts as though she’s never seen them. They are less spry than they were ten years ago. They spend a lot of time sitting, at sidewalk restaurants mostly. Their time for international vacations may be drawing short.
On the last day of the trip, they sit in a café eating gelato out of paper cups, one cioccolato and one limone. “You pick where we’ll go for our fortieth,” she says with a clip of metal in her head.