The doctors said the pig’s heart wouldn’t change him, but from the moment he arrived home from the hospital, I began noticing signs. He snorted in his sleep, and when he slept, he no longer had dreams. He exclusively cooked pastas, taking big bites straight from the pot; soon, he refused to cook at all. It seemed like every day, we were reaching new compromises: I washed the dishes so that he could wash the floors. I drew him lukewarm baths and rewatched episodes of Girls and Love Island so he could submerge himself in peace. And when I brought up my concerns to him, he quoted the doctors at me: “Our hearts and pigs’ hearts are anatomically the same. They have the same four chambers, they’re roughly the same size, and they play the same role in our bodies. Any behavioral side effects are purely coincidental.”
Even this was a cause for concern. My husband never used to be so scientific. It wasn’t long before our fights reached a breaking point: “What would you rather I be, Kelly?” my husband cried, pink in the face. “What’s the alternative?” It was true, we couldn’t have gone on much longer as we had before: his old heart was damaged beyond repair. Some nights, I would find him hunched over his desk, clawing at his chest, gasping for air, and all I could do was cry because I was so afraid.
After the procedure, I still found him hunched over his desk at night, but now it was over spreadsheets of our finances instead of collections of poetry. He paced the limits of our cramped apartment, gesticulating wildly with his arms: “Some serious restructuring needs to happen around here!” (‘Restructuring’ was a term he had picked up from one of the self-help books he was now so fond of).
One morning, he traveled from room to room, stuffing our vintage novels and sentimental tchotchkes into a plastic bag that we could sell to make our loan payments.
“Which one is more meaningful?” he asked me, holding out a tee shirt from an artist’s initiative in New York and a box of oil paints my favorite professor gifted me. And when I cried on the drive over to the pawn shop, my husband reached over and squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll buy you better ones.”
Pig hearts, just like human hearts, are made of fallible, organic material. They are a temporary fix, made to be worn out and replaced after a couple decades of wear. But the years collected under our belts, my husband’s transplant never showed any signs of giving. His was a radical success story: shortly after the procedure, he found a new job with a boss he adored; he would come home squealing with delight over the insightful conversations they shared about ROIs and SWOT analysis. We moved out of our old apartment and bought a condo in the suburbs; our home, once cluttered with papers, was now filled with expensive things: sectionals and console tables and sleeper sofas and ottomans, all arranged in flavorless and inoffensive shades of beige. I switched to part-time at my teaching job, then, at my husband’s suggestion, became a private art tutor, charging high school students exorbitant fees to learn the basics of form, color, and composition. My husband was the first test subject for my assignments; I watched him scribble meaningless lines and shapes down on the paper, increasingly impatient: “Why don’t you just follow a lesson plan online?” he finally suggested. “Those kids are only doing this for their college apps, anyways.”
Even our fights grew increasingly devoid of passion: “My transplant gave us a new life,” he would say, gesturing – always gesturing – at the floor-to-celing windows and name-brand furniture. “Do you understand how much pain I was in before?”
“I used to understand,” I would retort, “back when you still wrote poetry.”
One night, in a fit of hysterics, or maybe it was dramatics, I threw myself barefoot into the street, desperate beyond desperation to feel that cold, unbearable sting against my skin. Overhead, the stars settled like a blanket – not an afghan, or a shawl, or a throwover – across the night sky. My husband stood in the doorway, holding my shoes.
“You should put these on,” he said in his misery voice. “You’ll catch a cold.” I ignored him, still looking at the sky. There were fewer stars up there than I remembered. I wanted badly for a plane to come by, or a shooting star, or a meteor shower; something amazing to rip me from the comfortable apathy we had spent the past twenty years building for ourselves. My husband – my once sad, sensitive husband – sighed a long sigh, and I remembered, then, something that I had read in one of his poems long ago: it is impossible for pigs to look straight into the sky. “Isn’t that sad?” he told me then, tracing a circle around a freckle on my shoulder. “Most of them have never seen the stars.”
Slowly, wordlessly, I walked over to my husband, seized the back of his head, and forced it towards the sky.
“What are you doing?” He tried to pull away, but I kept my fingers planted firmly between his temples.
“Look,” I said, pulling the skin around his eyelids so tight he couldn’t blink. For a long time, he was quiet.
“Honey,” he said finally, “do you ever think you would be happier if you didn’t do things like this?”
“You used to love the stars.”
He paused. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe I did. To be honest, I can’t really remember. It was so long ago.”
Overhead, a satellite drifted past, blinking its message down to Earth in invisible signals. “Look,” I said, and he replied, “What am I looking for?”
His face was soft beneath my hands. His eyes were empty and black. The satellite disappeared behind a cloud. We relaxed.
