Groundwork, p.46
Groundwork, page 46
* * *
Your birthday has come and gone. Sixty-four years old now, inching ever closer to senior citizenship, to the days of Medicare and Social Security benefits, to a time when more and more of your friends will have left you. So many of them are gone already—but just wait for the deluge that is coming. Much to your relief, the event passed without incident or commotion, you calmly took it in your stride, a small dinner with friends in Brooklyn, and the impossible age you have now reached seldom entered your thoughts. February third, just one day after your mother’s birthday, who went into labor with you on the morning she turned twenty-two, nineteen days before it was supposed to happen, and when the doctor pulled you out of her drugged body with a pair of forceps, it was twenty minutes past midnight, less than half an hour after her birthday had ended. You therefore always celebrated your birthdays together, and even now, almost nine years after her death, you inevitably think about her whenever the clock turns from the second of February to the third. What an unlikely present you must have been that night sixty-four years ago: a baby boy for her birthday, a birth to celebrate her birth.
* * *
May 2002. On Saturday, the long, highly spirited conversation with your mother on the telephone, at the end of which you turn to your wife and say: “She hasn’t sounded this happy in years.” On Sunday, your wife leaves for Minnesota. A large celebration for her father’s eightieth birthday has been planned for next weekend, and she is going to Northfield in order to help her mother with the arrangements. You stay behind in New York with your daughter, who is fourteen and must attend school, but the two of you will of course be traveling to Minnesota for the party as well, and your tickets have been booked for Friday. In anticipation of the event, you have already written a humorous rhyming poem in your father-in-law’s honor—which is the only kind of poem you write anymore: frivolous bagatelles for birthdays, weddings, and other family occasions. Monday comes and goes, and everything that happened that day has been obliterated from your memory. On Tuesday, you have a one o’clock meeting with a Frenchwoman in her mid-twenties who has been living in New York for the past several years. She has been engaged by a French publisher to write a guidebook of the city, and because you like this person and feel she is a promising writer, you have agreed to talk to her about New York, doubtful that anything you say will be of much use to her project, but nevertheless you are willing to give it a try. At noon, you are standing in front of the bathroom mirror with shaving cream on your face, about to pick up the razor and begin the job of making yourself presentable for the interview, but before you can attack a single whisker, the telephone rings. You go into the bedroom to answer it, awkwardly positioning the receiver in your hand so as not to cover it with shaving cream, and the voice on the other end is sobbing, the person who has called you is in a state of extreme distress, and little by little you understand that it is Debbie, the young woman who cleans your mother’s apartment once a week and occasionally drives her on errands, and what Debbie is telling you now is that she just let herself into the apartment and found your mother on the bed, your mother’s body on the bed, your dead mother’s body on the bed. Your insides seem to empty out as you take in the news. You feel dazed and hollow, unable to think, and even if this is the last thing you were expecting to happen now (She hasn’t sounded this happy in years), you are not surprised by what Debbie is telling you, not stunned, not shocked, not even upset. What is wrong with you? you ask yourself. Your mother has just died, and you’ve turned into a block of wood. You tell Debbie to wait where she is, you will get there as quickly as you can (Verona, New Jersey—next to Montclair), and an hour and a half later you are in your mother’s apartment, looking at her corpse on the bed. You have seen several corpses in the past, and you are familiar with the inertness of the dead, the inhuman stillness that envelops the bodies of the no longer living, but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away. The blue-tinged pallor of her skin, her half-closed eyes fixed on nothing, an extinguished self lying on top of the covers in her nightgown and bathrobe, the Sunday paper sprawled around her, one bare leg dangling over the edge of the bed, a spot of white drool hardened in a corner of her mouth. You cannot look at her, you will not look at her, you find it unbearable to look at her, and yet even after the paramedics have wheeled her out of the apartment in a black body bag, you continue to feel nothing. No tears, no howls of anguish, no grief—just a vague sense of horror growing inside you. Your cousin Regina is with you now, your mother’s first cousin, who has driven over from her house in nearby Glen Ridge to lend you a hand, the daughter of your grandfather’s only brother, five or six years younger than your mother, your first cousin once removed and one of the few people on either side of your family you feel any connection to, an artist, widow of another artist, the young bohemian woman who fled Brooklyn in the early fifties to live in the Village, and she stays with you throughout the day, she and her grown daughter, Anna, the two of them helping you sort through your mother’s belongings and papers, conferring with you as you struggle to decide what to do about someone who left no will and never talked about her wishes after death (burial or cremation, funeral or no funeral), making lists with you of all the practical tasks that must be dealt with sooner rather than later, and that evening, after dinner in a restaurant, they take you back to their house and show you the guest room where you can spend the night. Your daughter is staying with friends in Park Slope, your wife is with her parents in Minnesota, and after a long talk with her on the phone after dinner, you are unable to sleep. You have bought a bottle of scotch to keep you company, and so you sit in a downstairs room until three or four in the morning, consuming half the bottle of Oban as you try to think about your mother, but your mind is still too numb to think about much of anything. Scattered thoughts, inconsequential thoughts, and still no impulse to cry, to break down and mourn your mother with an earnest display of sorrow and regret. Perhaps you are afraid of what will happen to you if you let yourself go, that once you allow yourself to cry you will not be able to stop yourself, that the pain will be too crushing and you will fall to pieces, and because you don’t want to risk losing control of yourself, you hold on to the pain, swallow it, bury it in your heart. You miss your wife, miss her more than at any time since you have been married, for she is the only person who knows you well enough to ask the right questions, who has the assurance and understanding to prod you into revealing things about yourself that often elude your own understanding, and how much better it would be if you were lying in bed with her now instead of sitting alone in a darkened room at three in the morning with a bottle of whiskey. The next morning, your cousins continue to prop you up and help you with the tasks at hand, the visit to the mortuary and the selection of an urn (after consulting with your wife, your mother’s sister, and your cousin, the unanimous decision was cremation and no funeral, with a memorial service to be held sometime after the summer), the calls to the real estate man, the car man, the furniture man, the cable television man, all the men you must contact in order to sell, disconnect, and discard, and then, after a long day submerged in the bleak miasma of nothing, they drive you back to your house in Brooklyn. You all share a takeout dinner with your daughter, you thank Regina for having saved your life (your exact words, since you truly don’t know what you would have done without her), and once they have left, you stay up for a while talking to your daughter, but eventually she marches upstairs to go to bed, and now that you are alone again, you again find yourself resisting the lure of sleep. The second night is a repetition of the first: sitting alone in a darkened room with the same bottle of scotch, which you drain to the bottom this time, and still no tears, no cogent thoughts, and no inclination to call it a night and turn in. After many hours, exhaustion finally overwhelms you, and when you fall into bed at five-thirty, dawn is already breaking outside and the birds have begun to sing. You plan to sleep for as long as possible, ten or twelve hours if you can manage it, knowing that oblivion is the only cure for you now, but just after eight o’clock, when you have been sleeping for roughly two and a half hours, and sleeping in a way that only the drunk can sleep—profondamente, stupidamente—the telephone rings. If the phone were on the other side of the room, it is doubtful you would even hear it, but there it is on the nightstand next to your pillow, not twelve inches from your head, eleven inches from your right ear, and after how many rings (you will never know how many), your eyes involuntarily open. During those first seconds of semiconsciousness, you understand that you have never felt worse, that your body is no longer the body you are used to calling your own, that this new and alien physical self has been hammered by a hundred wooden mallets, dragged by horses for a hundred miles over a barren terrain of rocks and cacti, reduced to a heap of dust by a hundred-ton pile driver. Your bloodstream is so saturated with alcohol that you can smell it coming out of your pores, and the entire room stinks of bad breath and whiskey—fetid, noxious, disgusting. If you want anything now, if one wish could be granted to you, even at the cost of giving up ten years of your life in exchange, it is simply to shut your eyes again and go back to sleep. And yet, for reasons you will never understand (force of habit? a sense of duty? a conviction that the caller is your wife?), you roll over, extend your arm, and pick up the phone. It is one of your cousins, a female first cousin from your father’s side of the family, ten years older than you are and a contentious, self-appointed moral judge, the last person on earth you want to talk to, but now that you have picked up the phone, you can’t very well hang up on her, not when she is talking, talking, talking, scarcely pausing long enough to let you say a word, to give you a chance to break in and cut the conversation short. How is it possible, you wonder, for someone to rattle on as quickly as she does? It is as if she has trained herself not to breathe while she talks, to spew forth entire paragraphs in a single, uninterrupted exhale, long outrushes of verbiage with no punctuation and no need to stop for an occasional intake of air. Her lungs must be enormous, you think, the largest lungs in the world, and such stamina, such a burning compulsion to have the last word on every subject. You and this cousin have had numerous battles in the past, beginning with the publication of The Invention of Solitude in 1982, which in her eyes constituted a betrayal of Auster family secrets (your grandmother murdered your grandfather in 1919), and henceforth you were turned into an outcast, just as your mother was turned into an outcast after she and your father divorced (which is why you have decided against a funeral for her—in order to avoid having to invite certain members of that clan to the service), but at the same time this cousin is not a stupid woman, she is a summa cum laude college graduate, a psychologist with a large and successful practice, an expansive, energetic person who always makes a point of telling you how many of her friends read your novels, and it is true that she has made some efforts to patch things up between you over the years, to nullify the damage of her vicious outburst against your book two decades ago, but even if she professes to admire you now, there is nevertheless an abiding rancor in her as well, an animosity that continues to lurk inside her overtures of friendship, none of it is purely one thing or the other, and the whole situation between you is fraught with complications, for her health is not good, she has been undergoing cancer treatments for some time and you can’t help feeling sorry for her, and because she has taken the trouble to call, you want to give her the benefit of the doubt, to allow her this short, perfunctory conversation and then roll over and go back to sleep. She begins by saying all the appropriate things. How sudden, how unexpected, how unprepared you must have been, and think of your sister, your poor schizophrenic sister, how will she cope now that your mother is gone? That is enough, you feel, more than enough to demonstrate her goodwill and sympathy, and you hope you will be able to hang up after another sentence or two, since your eyes are closing now, you are absolutely miserable with exhaustion, and if she would only stop talking within the next few seconds, you would have no trouble drifting off again into the deepest of slumbers. But your cousin is just getting started, rolling up her sleeves and spitting into her hands, as it were, and for the next five minutes she shares her earliest memories of your mother with you, meeting her as a girl of nine when your mother was still so young herself, just twenty or twenty-one, and how thrilling it was to have such a pretty new aunt in the family, so warm and full of life, and so you go on listening, you don’t have the strength to interrupt her, and before long she is on another subject altogether, you don’t know how she got there, but suddenly you hear her voice talking to you about your smoking, imploring you to stop, to give it up for good, or else you will become sick and die, die a horrendous early death, and as you die you will be filled with remorse for having murdered yourself in such a thoughtless way. She has been at it for nine or ten minutes at this point, and you are beginning to worry that you will not be able to go back to sleep, for the longer she goes on, the more you feel yourself being pulled toward consciousness, and once the line is crossed, there will be no turning back. You can’t survive on two and a half hours’ sleep, not in your present condition, not with so much alcohol still in your blood, you will be destroyed for the whole day, but even though you are feeling more and more tempted to hang up on her, you cannot find the will to do it. Then comes the onslaught, the barrage of verbal cannon fire you should have been expecting from the instant you picked up the phone. How could you have been so naïve as to think that kind words and quasi-hysterical warnings would be the end of it? There is still the question of your mother’s character to be dealt with, and even if her body was discovered only two days ago, even if the crematorium in New Jersey has scheduled her body to be burned into ashes this very afternoon, that doesn’t prevent your cousin from letting her have it. Thirty-eight years after she left your father, the family has codified its litany of complaints against your mother, it is the stuff of ancestral history by now, old gossip turned into solid facts, and why not go through the list of her misdeeds one last time—in order to give her a proper send-off to the place where she deserves to go? Never satisfied, your cousin says, always looking for something else, too flirtatious for her own good, a woman who lived and breathed to attract the attentions of men, oversexed, whorish, someone who slept around, an unfaithful wife—too bad that a person with so many other good qualities should have been such a mess. You always suspected your mother’s ex-in-laws talked about her in that way, but until this morning you have never heard it with your own ears. You mumble something into the telephone and hang up, vowing never to talk to your cousin again, never to utter a single word to her for the rest of your life. Sleep is out of the question now. In spite of the supernatural exhaustion that has clobbered you into near senselessness, too much has been churned up inside you, your thoughts are sprinting off in myriad directions, adrenaline is surging through your system again, and your eyes refuse to close. There is nothing for it but to get out of bed and begin the day. You go downstairs and prepare a pot of coffee, the strongest, blackest coffee you have made in years, figuring that if you flood yourself with titanic doses of caffeine, you will be lifted into something that resembles wakefulness, a partial wakefulness, which will allow you to sleepwalk through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon. You drink the first cup slowly. It is exceedingly hot and must be swallowed in small sips, but then the coffee begins to cool down, and you drink the second cup more rapidly than the first, the third more rapidly than the second, and swallow by swallow the liquid splashes into your empty stomach like acid. You can feel the caffeine accelerating your heart rate, agitating your nerves, and beginning to light you up. You are awake now, fully awake and yet still weary, drained but ever more alert, and in your head there is a buzzing that wasn’t there before, a low-pitched mechanical sound, a humming, a whining, as if from a distant, out-of-tune radio, and the more you drink, the more you feel your body changing, the less you feel that you are made of flesh and blood. You are turning into something metallic now, a rusty contraption that simulates human life, a thing put together with wires and fuses, vast circuits of wires controlled by random electrical impulses, and now that you have finished the third cup of coffee, you pour yourself another—which turns out to be the last one, the lethal one. The attack begins simultaneously from the inside and the outside, a sudden feeling of pressure from the air around you, as if an invisible force were trying to push you through the chair and knock you to the ground, but at the same time an unearthly lightness in your head, a vertiginous jangle thrumming against the walls of your skull, and all the while the outside continues to press in on you, even as the inside grows empty, ever more dark and empty, as if you are about to pass out. Then your pulse quickens, you can feel your heart trying to burst through your chest, and a moment after that there is no more air in your lungs, you can no longer breathe. That is when the panic overwhelms you, when your body shuts down and you fall to the floor. Lying on your back, you feel the blood stop flowing in your veins, and little by little your limbs turn to cement. That is when you start to howl. You are made of stone now, and as you lie there on the dining room floor, rigid, your mouth open, unable to move or think, you howl in terror as you wait for your body to drown in the deep black waters of death.
