Groundwork, p.52
Groundwork, page 52
* * *
Eleven years later, the death of your mother’s mother was a different story. You were grown then, the bolt of lightning that had killed your friend when you were fourteen had taught you that the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment, that the sky is full of lightning bolts that can crash down and kill the young as well as the old, and always, always, the lightning strikes when we are least expecting it. This was the grandmother you cared about, the prim and slightly nervous woman you loved, the one who stayed with you often and was a consistent presence in your life, and now that you are thinking about her death, the nature of her death, which was slow and dreadful and anguishing to watch, you realize that all the other deaths in your family have been sudden, a series of lightning bolts similar to the one that killed your friend: your father’s mother (heart attack, dead within hours), your father’s father (shot and killed before you knew him), your father (heart attack, dead within seconds), your mother (heart attack, dead within minutes), and even your mother’s father, whose death was not instantaneous, who made it to eighty-five in good health and then, after a swift decline of two or three weeks, died of pneumonia, which is to say, died of old age—a death to be envied, you feel, full-bore life into your ninth decade and then, rather than electrocution by lightning bolt, a chance to absorb the fact that you are on your way out, a chance to reflect for a while, and then you go to sleep and float off into the land of nothingness. Your grandmother didn’t float anywhere. For two years she was dragged over a bed of nails, and when she died at seventy-three, there was little of anything left of her. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. You have seen people’s bodies consumed by the autocannibalism of virulent cancer, have watched the gradual strangulation of others by emphysema, but ALS is no less ravaging or cruel, and once you have been diagnosed with it, there is no hope, no remedy, nothing in front of you but a prolonged march toward disintegration and death. Your bones melt. The skeleton inside your skin turns to putty, and one by one your organs fail. What made your grandmother’s case particularly hard to bear was that the first symptoms appeared in her throat, and her speech functions were attacked before anything else: larynx, tongue, esophagus. One day, out of nowhere, she found it difficult to pronounce her words clearly, the syllables came out slurred, slightly off. A month or two later, they were alarmingly off. Several months after that, rattles of phlegm occluding her sentences, choked-off gurglings, the humiliations of impairment, and when no New York doctor could figure out what was wrong with her, your mother took her to the Mayo Clinic for a full workup. The men in Minnesota were the ones who pronounced her death sentence, and before long her speech had become unintelligible. She was forced to communicate in writing after that, carrying a little pencil and a pad of paper wherever she went, though for the time being the rest of her seemed well, she could still walk, still take part in the life around her, but as the months passed and the musculature of her throat continued to atrophy, swallowing became problematic, eating and drinking became a permanent trial, and in the end the rest of her body began to betray her as well. For the first week or two in the hospital, she still had the use of her arms and hands, could still use the pencil and pad to communicate, even though her handwriting had deteriorated badly, and then she came under the watch of a private nurse named Miss Moran (short and efficient, a rictus of perpetual false cheer glued onto her face), who kept the pad and pencil from your grandmother, and the more your grandmother howled in protest, the longer that pad was kept from her. Once you and your mother got wind of what was going on, Moran was fired, but the battle your grandmother had fought with the sadistic nurse had depleted whatever strength she had left. The gentle, self-effacing woman who had read you Maupassant stories when you were ill, who had taken you to shows at Radio City Music Hall, who had treated you to ice cream sundaes and lunches at Schrafft’s was dying in Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and not long after she became too weak to hold the pencil anymore, she lost her mind. Whatever force she still had in her was subsumed by rage, a demented anger that made her unrecognizable and expressed itself in constant howls, the throttled, dammed-up howls of a helpless, immobilized person struggling not to drown in a puddle of her own sputum. Born in Minsk, 1895. Died in New York, 1968. The end of life is bitter (Joseph Joubert, 1814).
* * *
Things were the way they were, and you never stopped to question them. There were public schools and Catholic schools in your town, and because you were not Catholic, you attended the public schools, which were considered to be good schools, at least by the standards that were used to measure such things at the time, and according to what your mother later told you, it was for this reason that your family had moved to the house on Irving Avenue in the months before you were scheduled to begin kindergarten. You have nothing to compare your experience with, but in the thirteen years you spent in that system, the first seven at Marshall School (K–6), the next three at South Orange Junior High School (7–9), and the last three at Columbia High School in Maplewood (10–12), you had some good teachers and some mediocre teachers, a handful of exceptional and inspiring teachers and a handful of lousy and incompetent teachers, and your fellow students ranged from the brilliant to the average to the semimoronic. Such is the case with all public schools. Everyone who lives in the district can go for free, and because you grew up in a time before the advent of special education, before separate schools had been established to accommodate children with so-called problems, a number of your classmates were physically handicapped. No one in a wheelchair that you can remember, but you can still see the hunchbacked boy with the twisted body, the girl who was missing an arm (a fingerless stump jutting from her shoulder), the drooling boy who slobbered down the front of his shirt, and the girl who was scarcely taller than a midget. Looking back on it now, you feel that these people were an essential part of your education, that without their presence in your life your understanding of what it means to be human would have been impoverished, lacking all depth and compassion, all insight into the metaphysics of pain and adversity, for those children were the heroic ones, the ones who had to work ten times harder than any of the others to find a place for themselves. If you had lived only among the physically blessed, the children like yourself who took your well-formed bodies for granted, how would you have ever learned what heroism was? One of your friends from those early years was a plump, nonathletic boy with glasses and a homely, chinless sort of face, but he was much loved by the other boys for his sharp wit and humor, his prowess at math, and what struck you then as an uncommon generosity of spirit. He had a bedridden younger brother, a boy suffering from a disease that had stunted his growth and left him with brittle bones, bones that broke from the slightest contact with hard surfaces, bones that broke for no reason at all, and you can remember visiting your friend’s house after school on several occasions and going in to see his brother, who was just a year or two younger than you were, lying in a hospital bed rigged with pulleys and wires, his legs in plaster casts, with his large head and impossibly pale skin, and you could hardly open your mouth in that room, you felt nervous, perhaps a bit scared, but the brother was a nice kid, friendly and affable and bright, and it always struck you as absurd, altogether outrageous that he should be lying in that bed, and every time you saw him you wondered what idiot god had decreed that he should be locked inside that body and not you. Your friend was devoted to him, they were as close to each other as any brothers you have ever known, and they shared a private, two-person world, a secret universe dominated by a mutual obsession with the fantasy baseball game they played, a board game with dice, cards, complex rules, and elaborate statistics, meticulously keeping records of every game they played, which evolved into entire seasons of games, every month or two another season, season after season of imaginary games as the years rolled on. How perfectly right, you realize now, that it should have been this friend of yours who called you one evening in the winter of 1957–58, not long after the Dodgers had announced their move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, to tell you that Roy Campanella, the All-Star catcher, had been in a car accident, an accident so terrible that even if he pulled through, he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Your friend was weeping into the phone.
* * *
February twenty-third: the thirtieth anniversary of the day you met your wife, the thirtieth anniversary of the first night you spent together. The two of you leave your house in the late afternoon, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and check into a hotel in lower Manhattan. A bit of an indulgence, perhaps, but you don’t want these twenty-four hours to slip by without doing something to mark the occasion, and because the idea of throwing a party never came up (why would a couple want to celebrate its longevity in front of others?), you and your wife eat dinner alone in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, you take the elevator to the ninth floor and enter your room, where you polish off a bottle of champagne together, forgetting to turn on the radio, forgetting to turn on the television to investigate the four thousand movies that are available to you, and as you drink the champagne you talk to each other, for several hours you do nothing but talk, not about the past and the thirty years that are behind you but about the present, about your daughter and your wife’s mother, about the work you are both engaged in now, about any number of things both pertinent and trivial, and in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met. Outside, another cold winter night, another burst of freezing rain lashing against the windows, but you are in bed with your wife now, and the hotel bed is warm, the sheets are smooth and comfortable, and the pillows are positively gigantic.
* * *
Numerous crushes and flirtations, but only two big loves in your early life, the cataclysms of your mid-teens and late teens, both of which were disasters, followed by your first marriage, which ended in disaster as well. Starting in 1962, when you fell for the beautiful Belgian girl who lived in a neighboring town, you seemed to have a special talent for chasing after the wrong person, for wanting what you couldn’t have, for giving your heart to girls who couldn’t or wouldn’t love you back. Occasional interest in your mind, flashes of interest in your body, but none whatsoever in your heart. Half-crazy girls, both of them ravishing and self-destructive and deeply exciting to you, but you understood almost nothing about them. You invented them. You used them as fictive embodiments of your own desires, ignoring their problems and personal histories, failing to grasp who they were outside of your own imagination, and yet the more they eluded you, the more passionately you longed for them. The one from your mid-teens was brilliant and pugnacious, at odds with everything American, which no doubt enhanced her allure in your eyes, but there were family difficulties, a mother who had hanged herself four years earlier in Brussels, and the girl’s subsequent battles with her father’s second wife, needless to say an American wife, which led to some frantic experiments with vodka, solo binges in her room that eventually landed her in the hospital. You remember trying to visit her there and being turned away, every afternoon turned away, out of your mind with love, with fear, and after they released her two months later, she called you to say good-bye, and then her father shipped her off to Belgium and you never saw her again. The second story began in the winter of your first year of college, when you fell for another unstable girl who both wanted you and didn’t want you, and the more she didn’t want you, the more ardently you pursued her. A sick troubadour and his inconstant lady, and even after she slashed her wrists in a halfhearted suicide attempt a few months later, you went on loving her, the one with the white bandages and the fetching, crooked smile, and then, after the bandages were removed, you made her pregnant, the condom you were using broke, and you spent every penny you had to pay for an abortion. A brutal memory, another one of the things that still keep you awake at night, and while you are certain the two of you made the correct decision not to have the baby (parents at nineteen and twenty, a grotesque thought), you are tormented by the memory of that unborn child. You always imagined it would be a girl, a girl with red hair, a wondrous firecracker of a girl, and it pains you to realize that she would be forty-three years old now, which means that in all probability you would have become a grandfather some time ago, perhaps a long time ago. If you had let her live.
* * *
In the light of your past failures, your misjudgments, your inability to understand yourself and others, your impulsive and erratic decisions, your blundering approach to matters of the heart, it seems curious that you should have wound up in a marriage that has lasted this long. You have tried to figure out the reasons for this unexpected reversal of fortune, but you have never been able to come up with an answer. You ran into a stranger one night and fell in love with her—and she fell in love with you. You didn’t deserve it, but neither did you not deserve it. It just happened, and nothing can account for what happened to you except luck.
* * *
From the very start, everything was different with her. Not a figment this time, not some projection of your inner fancy, but a real person, and she imposed her reality on you the moment the two of you began to talk, which was one moment after the single acquaintance you had in common introduced you to each other in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y following a poetry reading, and because she was neither coy nor elusive, because she looked you in the eye and asserted herself as a wholly grounded presence, there was no way for you to turn her into something she was not—no way to invent her, as you had done with other women in the past, since she had already invented herself. Beautiful, yes, without question sublimely beautiful, a lean six-foot blonde with long, magnificent legs and the tiny wrists of a four-year-old, the biggest little person you had ever seen, or perhaps the littlest big person, and yet you were not looking at some remote object of female splendor, you were engaged in talking to a living, breathing human subject. Subject, not object, and therefore no delusions permitted. No deceptions possible. Intelligence is the one human quality that cannot be faked, and once your eyes had adjusted to the dazzle of her beauty, you understood that this was a brilliant woman, one of the best minds you had ever met.
* * *
Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that you saw eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance. Your politics were the same, most of the books you cared about were the same books, and you had similar attitudes about what you wanted out of life: love, work, and children—with money and possessions far down on the list. Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was warmer than you were, and yet, all the way down at the bottom, at the nethermost point where you were joined together, you felt that you had met another version of yourself—but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being. You adored her, and for the first time in your life, the person you adored adored you back. You came from entirely different worlds, a young Lutheran girl from Minnesota and a not so young Jew from New York, but just two and a half months after your chance encounter on February twenty-third thirty years ago, you decided to move in together. Until then, every decision you had made about women had been a wrong decision—but not this one.
* * *
She was a graduate student and a poet, and in the first five years you were together you watched her finish up her course work, study for and pass her oral exams, and then go through the arduous slog of writing her dissertation (on language and identity in Dickens). She published one book of poetry during that time, and because money was scarce in the early days of your marriage, she worked at several different jobs, editing a three-volume anthology published by Zone Books for one thing, secretly rewriting someone’s doctoral dissertation on Jacques Lacan for another, and also teaching, most of all teaching. The first class was for low-level employees at an insurance company, ambitious young workers who wanted to improve their chances for promotion by taking an intensive course in English grammar and expository writing. Twice a week, your wife came home with stories about her students, some of them entertaining, some of them rather poignant, but the one you remember best concerns a howler that appeared on the final exam. Midway through the semester, your wife had given a lecture on various figures of speech, among them the concept of euphemism. By way of example, she had cited pass away as a euphemism for die. On the final exam, she asked the members of the class to give a definition of the word euphemism, and one vaguely attentive but challenged student answered: “Euphemism means to die.” After the insurance company, she moved on to Queens College, where she worked as an adjunct for three years, a grinding, badly paid job, two courses per semester with classes in remedial English and English composition, twenty-five students per class, fifty papers a week to correct, three private conferences with each student every semester, a two-hour trip from Cobble Hill to Flushing that began at six in the morning and entailed two subways and a bus, then another two-hour trip in the opposite direction, all for a salary of eight thousand dollars a year with no benefits. The long days wore her out, not just because of the work and the travel but also because of the hours spent under the fluorescent lights at Queens, the rapidly flickering lights that can induce headaches in people who suffer from migraines, and because your wife had been saddled with that condition since childhood, it was the rare evening when she didn’t walk through the door with dark circles under her eyes and a head bursting with pain. Her dissertation was advancing slowly, the weekly schedule was too fragmented for concentrated periods of research and writing, but suddenly your finances began to improve somewhat, enough for you to persuade her to quit the teaching job at any rate, and once she was free, she knocked off the rest of her Dickens thesis in six months. The bigger question was why she was still so determined to finish. Graduate school had made sense in the beginning: a single woman needs a job, especially if that woman comes from a family with no money, and even though her ambition was to write, she couldn’t count on writing to sustain her, and therefore she would become a professor. But things were different now. She was married, her money situation was becoming less and less precarious, she was no longer planning to look for an academic job, and still she battled on until she had earned her doctorate. Again and again, you asked her why it was so important to her, and the various answers she gave you all go straight to the heart of who she was then, who she still is today. First: because she couldn’t bring herself to quit something she had started. A question of stubbornness and pride. Second: because she was a woman. It was all very well that you had bailed out of graduate school after one year, you were a man, and men control the world, but a woman who wears the badge of an advanced degree will gain some respect in that man’s world, will not be looked down upon as much as a woman who does not have that badge. Third: because she loved it. The hard work and discipline of intense study had improved her mind, had made her a better and more subtle thinker, and even if most of her time would be spent writing novels in the future (she had already started her first), she had no intention of abandoning her intellectual life once she had her Ph.D. These were discussions you had with her more than twenty-five years ago, but it was as if she had already begun to squint into the future and see the outlines of what lay in front of her. Since then: five published novels and a sixth in the works, but also four books of nonfiction, for the most part essays, dozens of essays on an enormous range of subjects: literature, art, culture, politics, films, daily life, fashion, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of perception, and the phenomenology of memory. In 1978, she was one of a hundred students who entered the graduate English program at Columbia. Seven years later, she was one of only three who had made it all the way to the end.
