I hadn’t done any serious drawing since the early days of our marriage when I’d thought I might switch horses and become an artist instead of an art historian. That night Gilbert helped me bring my old four-post drawing table down from the attic. We carried the storage drawers down separately, then the frame, then the top. I set it up next to the bed and pulled up a chair. Olive parked herself on the Omani rug and Simon sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her with his feet.
I went out to Dick Blick on Saturday morning and came back with pencils, erasers, rulers, stumps, torchons, a pencil box, small sketch pads, large drawing pads, a pencil sharpener, a sandpaper pad, a glue stick, masking tape, a light box, a fixative spray, double-ended Prismacolor markers in every shade of gray, which I distributed among the six storage drawers. And half a dozen books on cartooning. Mort Gerberg, Bob Mankoff, Polly Keener, Steve Whitaker, and others.
By the time I got back Simon had located images on the Internet—images for me to imitate—drawing prompts, suggestions, jungle cartoons, trees, explorers with pith helmets, photos of funeral homes. I printed them out in Simon’s office.
How hard could it be to draw cartoons? I thought.
Harder than I thought. I started with some warm-up exercises—scribbles and gesture drawings. In two minutes I could turn out a gesture sketch of a young girl reading or an old woman leaning on a cane or an old man trying to tie his shoe. But “the lost funeral home of the elephants”?
“By crikey, Wilson, it’s the lost funeral home of the elephants.” That was Simon’s caption.
It took me two days just to get the perspective right. I went through dozens of sheets of paper and used up two of the Prismacolor markers shading in the jungle trees. I went across the street and studied our own Italianate funeral home with its five square bays, its wide overhanging eaves, its octagonal belvedere (from which, once upon a time, the farmer had been able to observe his workers in the fields), its open verandas and the guest rooms over the elaborate porte cochere on the west side. But it was too complicated, and in the end I decided on a more urban model, like the old Foley Mortuary over on Broad Street, which had been turned into apartments. We both liked the idea of an urban street running through the middle of the jungle.
I drew sketch after sketch till I got something workable. After a while it became easier, though never easy.
Simon liked heroes. “How about Beowulf picking up his steel grip,” he said, “at an airport carousel?”
I had a lot of trouble getting the carousel right and finally worked from an image Simon had downloaded from the web.
“How about the windshield of Achilles?”
I drew Achilles getting the windshield of a little sports car repaired at the Hephaestus Glass Company. We didn’t caption either of these cartoons, but we added banners: BEOWULF’S GRIP OF STEEL and THE WINDSHIELD OF ACHILLES.
“How about hell freezing over?”
I drew Satan out ice fishing with one of his devils. Ice shacks all over with more devils. The devil fishing with Satan said, “Well, I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.” A lot of people didn’t get this one; Gilbert didn’t get it; neither did Marge, but I guess that’s the way it goes with New Yorker cartoons.
“How about an old-fashioned carnival midway? But instead of the world’s fattest woman and a two-headed baby and the incredible five-legged calf, the barkers tout ‘Plato’s Cave’ (‘Experience the thrill of a lifetime’); ‘The Ding an Sich’ (‘See things as they really are’); and ‘The Veil of Maya’ (‘See Swami Krishna lift the Veil of Maya’). A little boy standing with his father says, ‘Daddy, You promised we could see the Ding an sich.’ ”
I thought I did a pretty good job with that one.
Simon liked elephants. “How about an elephant artist at an exhibit of his works. Draw a couple of women drinking white wine. One of the women says, ‘They say he studied with De Kooning.’ ”
I liked the idea but never got the drawing right.
Simon didn’t have many friends in the ordinary sense, except Paul Childs, our lawyer, who’d gone to school with him. “Keep your chin up,” Paul would say. “You’ll beat this thing.” And he was full of stories about people who’d made miraculous recoveries, had “beaten” angina, survived double and triple bypasses. No comfort there. But comfort came from an unexpected place: families Simon had helped, families whose kith and kin he’d buried. They read about Simon on Gilbert’s blog—which had become locally famous (or infamous)—and sent cards, notes, e-mails. Some of them even stopped by to thank Simon and to see how he was doing. Simon pretended not to be affected, but in fact he could remember all the details of every funeral, all the particulars, and he was deeply moved. And he was looking better. He was in good spirits and had dropped his opposition to bypass surgery. At the same time, we grew closer, more trusting; we opened our hearts to each other, and our arms too, as if we were young lovers. We paid attention to each other the way some artists pay attention to the leaves on a tree, noting their individual characteristics. And Simon started to take more of an interest in my work. He asked me to bring down a Rembrandt self-portrait from the tower—Rembrandt as a young man, from Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, which I’ve never seen—and he read the first two chapters of Marginalia and offered some sensible suggestions. And one night he told me—it was a kind of confession, really—that actually he’d been happy in Vietnam in the morgue at Da Nang, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. Not exactly “happy,” but happy that he’d confronted his worst fears and had mastered them, that he’d made the mythical journey to the underworld and made it back safely.
“And I thought I knew everything there was to know about you,” I said.
Sally sent Simon one of those drinking birds that you used to find in gas stations. The bird dips its beak in a glass of water and then swings upright. The water evaporates from the felt on the head, which lowers the temperature of the head … We never did figure out how it worked, but we enjoyed watching the bird dipping and bobbing on the top of Simon’s dresser, and Simon asked me to get more. I found them in a catalog and ordered a case, a dozen, and we set six of them up on the dresser. He had another idea for a cartoon, and I was sketching it, following his directions. Birds in a long row, stretching all the way to the horizon, were hooked up to electric power lines—the great towers that carry electricity around the country. The whole area is surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. A pickup truck has pulled up to the gate. The driver and a man in a guard’s uniform stand facing each other. The driver of the pickup is asking the guard, “What happened to all the wind turbines?”
Simon had been pushing me to submit some of our best efforts to The New Yorker, but I didn’t have a very clear idea of how you submitted cartoons to The New Yorker, didn’t have any idea, in fact (though I’d looked through all my cartoon books and searched the Internet), so I put it off. Until it was too late.
He was lying on the bed, looking through some of my sketches, sorting them into yes, no, maybe. I was working on the last idea he’d come up with—“The Truth About Death.” I was sketching rapidly, trying not to overthink the conceit. I nailed God’s face with a few strokes of my pencil, and then with a few more strokes a dog emerged out of nothing. I’d been looking at Harry Bliss’s dogs, and Matt Diffee’s too, but this dog was my own. But when I stood up to show it to Simon, the room was quiet. Simon’s breathing had stopped. The little tremor of excitement I’d felt when the dog’s face appeared out of nowhere was Simon’s heart giving out. A last flutter. I didn’t realize it till I’d finished the drawing. It was over; he was dead. He was still sitting up in the bed, not even slumped over, my sketches scattered around him like autumnal leaves on the comforter. It wasn’t what I’d expected. Maybe it never is.
I didn’t dial 911, but I called the hospital, whose number was on the table next to the bed on top of a copy of Simon’s living will. Simon was an organ donor. You can’t donate your organs if you die at home—organs need a
continuous blood supply—but you can donate corneas and tissue (including veins and bones) within twenty-four hours of death. The hospital would notify the eye bank and MTF (the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation). I told them I’d have Gilbert bring the body, and then I sat down for a few minutes on the edge of the bed and massaged Simon’s feet. Olive paced up and down the Omani rug. I called Gilbert and asked him to take the body to the hospital. In a few minutes I heard him coming up the stairs with the Med Sled. When I tried to stand up, I almost fell over. I had to push my feet down hard against the floor to hold steady.
I helped Gilbert wrap up the body. Then I lay down on the bed, and Olive jumped up and lay down next to me. After a while I called Jack and Sally in New York. They said they’d be here the next afternoon at the latest.
Gilbert brought what was left of Simon back from the hospital the next morning, which was sunny and cold. I told him I wanted to be there when he prepped the body. I wanted to get it done before Jack and Sally arrived. Gilbert had always been opposed to organ and/or tissue donation. They’re messy and make the undertaker’s job a lot harder. “His body’s been terrorized,” he said. “You know what they do … The organs are in a separate bag …”
“Is this why you let Simon do the tough jobs, even when you could see he was worn-out?”
“You really don’t want to see this.” We were standing outside the door of the prep room.
“Gilbert,” I said. “I’m the boss here. If you don’t want me here, I’ll find somebody else to do the prep.”
“I’m just saying. It won’t be pretty. The body’s a mess, like a gunnysack full of packing peanuts and plastic tubes, the eyes …”
“Gilbert,” I said. “You’re not a very kind person, and right now I need kindness, not your bad temper. I’m just going to hold his hand while you do what you need to do. You’re getting an extra hundred and fifty dollars from MTF for your trouble.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I loved him too.”
What was left of the body had already been washed in the hospital, but I held Simon’s hand while Gilbert washed it again and did what needed to be done.
Jack and Sally arrived that afternoon, and the next day we pushed the coffin to the cremation chamber, located in what had once been the paddock for Grandpa Bart’s horses, Stormy and Salty. Sally read a poem by Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
I pushed a button and the cardboard coffin rolled into the fifteen-hundred-degree Matthews oven.
Two nights later—a week before Thanksgiving—we had a small reception at the funeral home. Simon’s cremains were in an urn that rested on the mantel over the fireplace, where a pyramid of oak logs was crackling. The small reception turned into a big reception. Families Simon had helped through difficult times came to pay their respects and to see Olive too. Olive in her uniform greeted everyone, but she was bewildered. She kept looking around for Simon. And then she came to me and extended the paw of affection.
The visitation room was full of bright colors—our new gallery of local artists—and Sally read another poem. I could hear the first line—“How hard to take the trail as it comes”—and then everything shut down.
That night Olive spent more time than usual patrolling the house, like an old-fashioned cop on an old-fashioned beat, a cop who sensed that something was not quite right but couldn’t figure out what it was.
Dr. Johnson (Sam Johnson, that is) was right when he said that attempts to divert grief when it is fresh only irritate, and yet the conventional wisdom—most of the things we say to people because we don’t know what else to say—is in fact wise: time is a great healer, take it one day at a time, write in your journal, acknowledge your feelings, don’t pretend you’re just fine, eat well, get plenty of exercise, get plenty of sleep, and be kind to yourself. This is good advice. I hadn’t taken it after Hildi’s death, and I didn’t take it after Simon’s. No one does. I didn’t want people asking me how I was doing in the special voice that is usually used when addressing the newly bereaved—“How are you?”—or asking if there was anything they could do. I didn’t want any more casseroles, didn’t want any more lasagna or trays of peeled pink shrimp. I admired my good friend and colleague in the art department Alice Duncan, who had proclaimed her own grief from the rooftops and forced everyone to acknowledge that no one’s grief had ever been as profound as her grief, who went over and over the details of her husband’s death—where she’d been sitting when she got the phone call from the hospital, how many minutes it had taken her to get to the hospital, the delay at the tracks on Seminary Street, where she had waited for an endless train to pass—as if she’d have been able to prevent the death if only she’d made it to the hospital five minutes sooner. I admired Alice, but I soon found her tiresome. I did things in my own way, defended myself in my own way. I sat up in Simon’s tower, looking at the pictures that covered the walls—Monet and Matisse and De Kooning and the rest—or looking out the windows, watching the shapes made by the clouds, watching the sun coming up in the southeast in winter, the northeast in summer. Through the sixteen windows in the octagonal belvedere I could watch it rise and set without moving my chair. Simon’s chair. I sometimes imagined it was just the two of us, and … and what?
We had few regrets. We had not embarked on great adventures. We’d had some romantic entanglements that at the time had threatened our marriage, but that was long ago, and those entanglements had become part of the fabric, part of the warp and woof of our lives, rather than stains on the carpet. We’d lived the lives we’d wanted to live, done most of the things we’d wanted to do, though I never got Simon to go to Italy with me except after Hildi’s death.
About a week after the funeral I started to think about that trip as I was sitting quietly at the library table up in the belvedere. I closed my Clairefontaine notebook and went down to the office to get a note card with a picture of the funeral home on the front. I refilled Simon’s pen and went back up to the tower and started to write a note to the impresario in Rome to thank him for his kindness, and for the cacio e pepe he fixed for us our first night in Rome. “Caro Guido …” I wrote. But then I put down the pen and just sat, listening to the familiar sounds of our old house as it settled into a November evening, no longer thinking of myself as the protagonist of my own story but as an extra in a larger story, a part of a pattern. But what is the pattern? Could I see it myself? I thought maybe so, out of the corner of my eye. But it was only Olive flicking her tail.
PART II: OLIVE
I didn’t draw any more cartoons after Simon’s death. November tenth. Most of the leaves had already fallen and would have to be raked—by someone else. If I worked hard at other things, it was because I didn’t know what else to do. I proposed a new course (Varieties of Visual Experience) at the college; I agreed to chair a session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.
Olive and I stayed put in our apartment—the two upper floors on the west side of the house—and Gilbert and his family moved into the apartment on the east, which had originally been Bart and Louisa’s. Jack and Sally wanted me to move to New York, but I didn’t want to give up my teaching. Not yet. Besides, I’d always thought of the funeral home as home. I didn’t want to live anywhere else. There was plenty of room, and it was convenient for everyone. I didn’t mind babysitting the phone for Gilbert every now and then or helping with a funeral.
I kept busy—teaching, securing permissions for the thousand and one images I wanted to include in Marginalia—and Olive kept busy too, looking after me, keeping me company, patrolling the house at bedtime, “working” visitations for
Gilbert and even going along on removals. I walked her three times a day, letting her loose in the park by the train station. I never got the hang of throwing the Frisbee, but Dr. King, our vet, said that jumping up in the air to catch the Frisbee was not good for her back. She was satisfied with a ball, which I threw underhand. We went everywhere together. To my office in the Fine Arts Center, to the grocery store, to the library, to Cornucopia, to Innkeeper’s for coffee—Guatemala Antigua coffee at the drive-up window, where there was always a treat for her. And when I walked her past Hawk’s Tattoos on Simmons Street, there was always a baby carrot for her on the window ledge.
Olive and I had a year together—not quite a year, actually—before she started to leak. I noticed damp spots on the Omani rug in the bedroom. She never squatted down to pee in the house, she just leaked a little when she was snoozing on the rug in the afternoon or sleeping in her bed at night. I didn’t notice it at first. It didn’t really smell. Dr. King said that this was because she wasn’t concentrating her urine. I started giving her Proin and bought a spray to clean the rug. The Proin worked for a while. Several months. But then the leaking started again. Dr. King examined her. She was eight years old, the healthiest dog he’d ever seen. Apart from the leaking.
But sometimes she missed her footing on the stairs. It was hardly noticeable, but I noticed, and at the end of September I took her to a specialist in Peoria. It was a beautiful day for a drive, the trees starting to turn. It took an hour to get there, then half an hour for the paperwork. The lovely doctor reminded me of Checco, Hildi’s friend and Nana’s doctor in Rome. Open, warm, friendly. Olive took to her right away. A good sign. She said the same thing as Dr. King in Galesburg. Olive looked like the healthiest dog she’d ever seen. “She must have some English stock in her,” she said, “because you can see waves in her fur.”
The Truth About Death Page 10