by Jim Harrison
* * *
The flight to Detroit went well though I missed some of the lavish northern Michigan scenery when I dozed with my forehead against the window. On the Detroit-La Guardia leg I listened to a man in a not-very-well-cut pinstripe suit talking about his marital problems. Social work makes you able to at least affect being a good listener. In the beginning he was flirtatious, probably a habit he couldn’t break. He slowed down when I announced that all five of my children were quite happy and without problems. I might have flirted back but he kept looking critically at his fingernails, a tip-off to an anal compulsive. I don’t normally fly first-class but Nelse had booked the flight. Stan’s wife didn’t appreciate how hard he worked, a common enough complaint. He lived in a place outside of Detroit called Bloomfield Hills and when he handed his suit coat to a stewardess to hang up he asked her not to “squash” it as if she were in the habit of doing so. He was such an egregious prick that there was a lump of fascination in my throat. When he told me about his elaborate plans for his daughter’s surprise eighteenth-birthday party I felt sorry for his daughter. Finally I began to sweat with his banality and feigned sleep to get away.
Charlene’s face looked much younger and as we walked up the concourse she quickly admitted to a face-lift and an “enhancement” of her lips. We laughed at this and I felt dowdy indeed walking along beside her in my Levi’s and leather jacket. I felt even more homely in the lobby of the elegant hotel on Madison in the upper Seventies though when I said so Charlene told me I was wearing what movie stars wore to differentiate themselves from yuppies. She had brought along a lot of extra clothes which I looked at while she made us a drink in our rooms. When I came out of the bedroom holding one of her simpler dresses she handed me a whiskey and water, then fell totally apart in a weeping fit. I put my arms around her and saw myself in the mirrored armoire that doubled as a liquor cabinet. To be frank I didn’t look all that well, but what could I expect? It was a full hour before she was sufficiently calmed down so we could talk normally. The worst thing she said was that she wished she was sick instead of me. There’s really no way to respond to such nonsense other than to recognize the depth of friendship. Thirty years before we had won the polka contest at the county fair with Charlene dressed as a boy and now we were here in an eighth-floor suite surrounded by Audubon first-folio prints and unlikable, expensive furniture. Finally she asked me what I was going to do and I said, “Probably drown myself, why not?” and laughed. We found some inept music on the radio and did a few polka steps like we always did when we met again, but then she slumped to the sofa weeping. I said, “Charlene, cut that shit out,” and she did. We sat on the sofa holding hands and then I fell asleep for a while. When I awoke I felt badly and took a Percodan from the bottle Charlene gave me and we ordered a room-service dinner. The pill made me woozy, what we used to call “high,” and I loved my seafood salad and a white wine I had never had before but which was Charlene’s favorite called Meursault. I thought I might take a case of it home with me for consolation but when I asked Charlene the normal cost the price made me sweat. I said that someone from Nebraska would be ashamed to spend that much on wine and she said, “Fuck Nebraska,” adding that my grandfather hadn’t hesitated to do so. After dinner we got dressed up and went to a café downstairs and heard a wonderful singer and pianist. This was scarcely the New York I had known and loved but then it was too late and I was too fatigued to go downtown. None of my old friends would willingly go uptown except to a museum. There were two double beds in our bedroom but we slept together holding hands. I had to get up at four a.m. for a pill which I took with a glass of brandy. I couldn’t hold it down but water worked the next time around.
When I woke again at first light to the sound of rain and faint beeping I rehearsed a very sweet dream wherein I was a whole school of lovely fish I didn’t recognize. How could I be more than one I thought recalling the way the sun filtered splendidly down through the clarity of the water.
I was at Sloan-Kettering from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon. It was originally intended that I stay overnight for additional tests, and start again early the next morning, but the last doctor of the day said it wouldn’t be necessary though I should come in at midmorning to talk to a doctor counselor. At first I was puzzled but then deduced that I was a rather hopeless case. While I was getting dressed the doctor friend of the one back in Lincoln came in glancing at my folder which he seemed to grasp overtightly. He reassured me that I’d hear “all my options” the next morning and I replied that I bet there weren’t many. Composure is always difficult when there is even the slightest personal relationship. He said there were actually a couple and then by luck his beeper went off. Some of the tests were indeed invasive but the staff and doctors were gracious, so unlike the often wretched treatment my welfare clients received at hospitals which were really medical assembly lines. I’ve always been aware that smiles are available if you can write the check. This wasn’t a bad reflection on places that were the best in their fields like Sloan-Kettering or Mayo but an ordinary comment on the nature of the world.
I was surprised that Charlene was waiting for me in the lobby but then suspected they must have called her. I was quite wobbly but wanted to try to walk the fairly long way back to the hotel. It was such a relief to be away from being probed or connected to machines, inserted into high-whirring metal tubes, that I was almost merry. In fact I gained a measure of strength with every step, and our only rest stop was the Frick Museum where I wanted to sit awhile by the pool and look at the portrait of the Duke of Arentino. He reminded me of my grandfather.
Back at the hotel I didn’t have the energy for a drink and slept several hours hearing intermittently Charlene’s voice on the phone in the living room. When I got up and showered I had a martini that seemed to scorch my innards but I held it down. While Charlene was in the shower a concierge named Dwight called to say that he had managed to get two tickets to a sold-out B. B. King concert and I was thrilled senseless. Afterward I wondered about the progress of life wherein things grow smaller then finally quite larger. Other than God I couldn’t think of anyone who could make me feel better that evening than B. B. King. When Charlene came back into the room and heard the good news she pranced around in her towel whooping and singing. We would try our damnedest to avoid acting our age, not to speak of my condition.
It worked fairly well. The concert was splendid to the point that I had two hours of total forgetfulness which has be part of music’s intention, the essence rather than the details. Charlene had secured a car and driver for the evening and ignored my disapproval. After dinner we went down to the SoHo-Tribeca area to what Charlene described as the “hottest” French restaurant in the city and had a mediocre dinner for five hundred dollars (Charlene paid in cash which made me wonder about her current husband’s occupation as a “producer”). There was a large table of stockbrokers in a far corner who were horridly noisy including singing college songs but then a waiter told us they had ordered “thousands and thousands” of dollars’ worth of wine. It all made me mournful for New York in the late sixties and early seventies when the city was far shabbier and more neighborhood oriented. We talked about this and corrected ourselves to the degree that each generation coming to this fabled city has its own New York and is intolerant of the next generation’s, and each previous generation will always tell you that you should have been here years ago.
We went far over the line by having crème brûlée, a cheese course, then a bottle of Château d’Yquem which I paid for: I loved this wine though it was attached to the questionable memory of a Brazilian who had given me a bottle. All of this was far too rich for my system, mentally and physically, and I had the sudden sweet but melancholy memory of my fifth-floor walk-up on Second Avenue, eating Chinese food out of a take-out carton, listening to music and reading whatever until nearly dawn.
We took a pointlessly sentimental drive around our old neighborhoods then went back to the hotel
well after midnight where Charlene had another nightcap and I passed when I suddenly wondered why I was drinking so much. What were the options given the situation? We don’t get much training in how to die but then what could be more ordinary? That word kept coming back and I didn’t recall using it much until the past year. Perhaps at forty-six it was the onset of the menopause that I wasn’t going to have.
And then we had an unbearable quarrel, however short, that began when I rejected the nightcap and also told Charlene I didn’t want her flying back toward Lincoln with me late in the afternoon the next day because she was only going to turn around when I changed planes in Omaha, fly back to New York, stay at an airport hotel and take the Concorde the next day (the idea of flying faster than the speed of sound repelled me). I called this whole plan “crazy bullshit” since she couldn’t bear to go all the way “up home” as she called it. She then flipped and went into a prolonged crying jag about which I could do nothing except take a pill and go to bed. When I woke in the night to take another pill she was sprawled on the sofa in bra and panties and I covered her with a blanket. At dawn she crept into bed beside me and that was that. When we finally got up with scant time for me to reach my appointment not a single word was said about the sad end of our last evening together.
My doctor counselor was an older woman with a striking resemblance to Naomi around the eyes, nose and forehead. This was a little unnerving at first and gave her the impression that I was on the edge of my chair waiting for news while in actuality I already knew to the last, banal, subordinate clause. I was well into “Stage IV” and the ovarian cancer had spread to my liver, lungs, lymph glands, bones, wherever. My single option was radical chemo and radiation therapy that might keep me alive from six months to a year, perhaps more but that was unlikely. I told her calmly that in my social work I had known three welfare clients who had endured such therapy and had decided for myself that I’d opt out. It had been worth it for one of them who had been long estranged from a daughter and needed time to make repairs but that scarcely was my situation. This all took place in the first ten minutes and then there was the sense that we were both exhaling with relief. She tried to give me Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying and I said I’d already read it and underlined the best parts. We both laughed at my little joke. Oddly, she then asked me about where I lived in Nebraska and I got carried away in a description. of the Sandhills. Only then did I cry a bit, saying, “I’ll miss it so but then maybe I won’t.”
Charlene was in the lobby wearing sunglasses as protection against the cloudy skies. We joked about this on our longish walk over to the Museum of Modern Art where it turned out that the lines were too long to be endured. The mild depression of a hangover, assuming that you’re an occasional drinker, can be quite confusing if you’re forced to be resourceful, say, take a plane, or talk to your best friend for the last time. We had, however, been friends long enough to overcome our garden-variety hangovers or at least most of the bad aspects, though when we turned up Fifth Avenue into the rush of the noon-hour sidewalk crowds Charlene pressed against a building and fairly shrieked, “I don’t get it.” It turned out that what she didn’t get was the mystery of why we must live without the foggiest notion of what it all means. I couldn’t help her out with that one. When I would ask my grandfather a hopeless question like why cows and horses didn’t have six legs he had several times said that answers are always acorns while questions are the largest oaks possible. I was still mildly pissed that MOMA had been too crowded to get into for a last visit even though my old favorites of Picasso’s Guernica and Monet’s waterlily series were now elsewhere.
It was lovely to cross Fifty-ninth to the Central Park side and leave the crowds behind. Charlene had become much more animated the moment the sun made an appearance and when a very attractive Latin couple passed us going the other way she said she’d like to sleep with both of them. I felt a slight jolt when it occurred to me I’d never make love again. Once I had eaten in a Hungarian restaurant over on First Avenue where they specialized in duck and when I raised a shot of slivovitz, a plum brandy, with friends I was overcome by the smell and taste because plum wine was the taste of Duane’s lips the one and only time we made love. Nelse was a pretty big accomplishment.
When we reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was also too crowded with buses lined up releasing kids on field trips. I really didn’t mind because I had spent virtually weeks in the museum and had many of the rooms memorized. We thought of heading further up Fifth to the Guggenheim before we had our good-bye lunch but abandoned both plans for simply sitting there on the steps in the sunlight and eating two franks with sauerkraut and mustard. We amused ourselves by watching young couples mooning over each other, and we talked about our high school days without much sentiment. When the time came nearer I insisted that Charlene go back to the hotel first because I wanted us to say good-bye sitting there in the bright sunlight with schoolchildren playing tag on the steps. I looked at a dollop of mustard I had dropped on the toe of my shoe rather than watching my dear friend cross the street.
The flight home was pleasant enough. I caught myself being concerned about the number of pills required to keep me mobile but quickly let it go in favor of falling asleep, waking as the plane crossed the Mississippi. Even from a plane the twilight was wonderful. I regretted packing my steno pad rather than carrying it in my purse because I wanted to add to my list. When I changed planes in Omaha for the last, short leg into Lincoln I bought another tablet. I wasn’t sure of the number but what could matter less?
52. barncats, feral but friendly
53. Duane’s buffalo skull in his hideout
54. The grass dance at powwows
55. rivers from the air
56. my father leading the horse on my first ride
57. my childhood Airedale Sonia
58. red moon rising in Arizona dust
59. The Edward Curtis photo of Judith, the Mojave girl
Nelse and J.M. met me at the gate looking as if they had already been to my funeral but then airport lighting is stupidly garish. We embraced and I was so groggy I stumbled which gave them the wrong impression. We picked up my luggage and drove to their apartment with me trying to describe New York as a wonderful time. Nelse had a fresh collection of new pills from my Lincoln doctor who had already talked to the Sloan-Kettering people. I joked that I was becoming Elvis Presley when I looked at the pill bottles and Nelse and J.M. tried to force a look of amusement, after which Nelse broke down sobbing. We comforted him, then J.M. heated me a bowl of posole she had made which I ate with a tortilla and some ultra-fresh radishes. My father had loved the first fresh radishes and green onions of spring, eating them with butter, salt and a chunk of bread while I sat on his lap deciding which one he should eat next. I was thrilled to see that J.M. was wearing my grandmother Neena’s ring and while we talked about it Nelse sat there as if trying to catch his breath. It occurred to me quite strongly that once the death sentence is given and there are no possible appeals it is then up to you to comfort others. You have accepted the sentence but others whom you love have not yet been able to internalize the fact and it keeps re-occurring to them with fresh energy. Charlene would be fine for a while and then there would be a sidelong glance, while I on a second-by-second basis had the pain as a reminder, and if not the pain, the soporific effect of the pills. Nobody gets off earth alive and it was simple bad luck that my own leaving was to be premature. The doomed give up thinking about actuaries and it certainly meant nothing at all that the statistics said that I should have had thirty-two more years. The “back wall” is a more effective phrase that the “bottom line.” Our bodies live a separate life and generally speak to us in the simplest phrases of cold, hunger, heat, desire and we are slow to accept a fatal message. Sitting there with Nelse and J.M. I had exhausted all of my sympathy for myself and did my best to offer some to them in the diffident guise of simply planning for a metaphoric road trip.
I fel
t fine when I awoke soon after dawn in Lincoln to bird sounds every bit as loud as back on the ranch. Nelse had told me a horrid series of facts about the immense number of birds that died running into windows especially over at the university where the buildings are intermixed with dense greenery. There was the sweet odor of desiccated lilacs from outside the open window and on the night table a bouquet of dried flowers and indigenous grasses from back home. In the bunkhouse in the small freezer compartment of his refrigerator Nelse kept a small collection of dead birds he had found including my favorite, a yellow-headed blackbird that if properly warmed you thought might again take flight. Long ago I’d sometimes knock on the screen door and Duane would be sitting there at his bare table with his back to me and he wouldn’t turn around or answer the door. He knew that he was likely my half brother but I didn’t know that I was his half sister.