ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter 159: Locked Up
I saw Ernie in my dream last night.
The three of us had rented a tiny space for two-fifty a month, and I follow him from living room to bedroom. As he walks, I reach out to feel his right leg, showing beneath his thick red robe. My hand wraps completely around his calf. “My legs are skinny,” he says, looking back at me. I say to him: “It’s so awful to be dying.”
In real life, we rarely talked of death — his or anyone else’s. Once, when he was still up and moving, and we were crossing a parking lot, headed to the grocery, he said: “I don’t have much time left. Two years at the most. I don’t want to spend it doing what I don’t want to do.” I didn’t ask: “What do you want to do, Ernie? How do you want to spend your time?”
The first time he uttered the word dying to describe himself, he lay in a hospital bed. I was in a chair across the room, revising a graphology article based on Christy’s handwriting. I was talking about Christy when Ernie stopped me. “I don’t want to talk about Christy. Christy’s not dying. Christy will be okay. I’m dying.”
He was dying, and I knew it, too, and I didn’t speak of it, not to him. Finally, to Joshua. To my sister Jude, I would only say: “We’re enduring the unendurable.”
I’ve been reading lots of books on emotion. I know now frustration is a form of anger. So are feelings of restlessness, irritation, boredom, helplessness — all levels and variations of anger. I’m just now becoming aware of this. So strange, this person I was. So incapable of recognizing my feelings or anyone else’s. So incapable of responding.
Was Ernie scared I didn’t love him? Was he scared to be alone? Was he scared of dying? Was he scared to tell me how he felt because that might make me think less of him? Or cause a fight?
Was I too scared to feel? Scared he would leave me all alone? Scared to be all alone?
That summer night long ago when we kissed for the first time, Ernie gave me the key to a secret garden, but neither of us knew how to unlock the other. I didn’t even know how to unlock myself.
