She rolled up a sweater, put it next to the window, closed her eyes. I leaned over, kissed her on the cheek.
A MISSING YEAR
Dearest Charlie,
If you are reading this, wherever you are, it will mean, of course, that I am no longer here (there?)—a shame, since when all is said and done, and here I paraphrase Orwell, I find that this world does suit me fairly well. And wherever I am, and unless we’ve both arrived simultaneously in some universe designed by Calvino or Borges, what I’m certain of is that there is no ‘I’ there. I never thought to persuade you of that—that when we’re gone, we’re gone and that’s all there is to it, so that the only immortality, as our people (mostly) believe (Jews, but not only Jews—cf. Shakespeare’s sonnets), lies in our children, in the memories others have of us (flawed and self-serving as they may be), and in whatever work we may have left behind: literary stuff, of course—poems, novels, plays, essays, stories—but anything made by one’s mind or hands that has tangible existence: music, furniture, boats, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, clothing, houses…
Consciousness is fine—much studied and celebrated in recent times—but much overrated too, in my opinion, for even were it to survive in some way—were we, as in typical tales composed about such after-lives, to wake from death and find that, detached from any bodily being, mind and thought are, miraculously, still ongoing, I would doubtless spend whatever timeless time this ‘I’—this consciousness recognizably me and no one else—had been given, lamenting the loss of senses. Taste, touch, sight, sound, smell—smell above all!—how ever, ever, ever undervalue them?
I.e., the grave’s a fine and private place, as Marvell famously wrote, but none, I think, do there embrace. Other articulations of this notion, along with its innumerable carpe diem corollaries about preferring the sybaritic, now accelerate within, creating a rather sweet traffic jam, yet I banish them at once, even as I ask forgiveness for my literary excesses, references, and airs, yes? These vague, indulgent musings are—of course, of course—my somewhat arch way of avoiding telling you what I’ve decided to tell you about what I’ve always thought of as my ‘missing’ year—and also a reminder (to me) of how often in this life I’ve used words on paper to avoid other things. Through most of my life, that is, I’ve had the largely benign habit of passing whatever I experienced, in mind or flesh, through the filter (lens?) of what, other than you, my son, was the great love of my life: stories.
I tested (tasted?) all I did—my writing, teaching, wives, romances, friendships, pleasures, losses, memories, feelings—all, all, all—through stories I’d read, and people, places, and events I’d come to know in them. More: I often gave myself up as fully as I was able to the imagination of others—let myself believe I was part of the mind—the sensibility—that had conjured up these worlds so that, I suppose—vain hope!—my own imagination, like theirs, might find objects and tales equal to my desire to find them…
But to the missing year itself: My great fear, you see, was that I would kill you, Charlie. I wanted to kill you. The idea of killing you thrilled and pleased in a time distinctly bereft of thrills or pleasure. For a year—fourteen months and three days, to be exact, as I wrote earlier—I thought, every day, of killing you. The thought arrived, as you might guess, attached to my desire to do away with myself, and this desire arrived shortly before your mother left us both (nor, I note quickly, did I ever stoop, to keep her from leaving us, to blackmailing her with the threat that I would kill the two of us if she did leave us). But the desire to kill the two of us came—this dark, unwelcome guest—and it stayed for more than a year, yet could occasionally, when most robust, bring with it (paradoxically?) an exhilarating feeling of liberation.
The possibility of leaving this world, and taking you with me—of being in a place or non-place where consciousness was forever non-existent—this became balm to my pain, and the pain, let me tell you—and I hope you never know it in its dreadful particularity—was decidedly physical. During those fourteen months and three days I read a good deal about depression, which, I discovered, had a distinguished history, beginning at least 2500 years ago with Hippocrates, and though the reading taught me much about the melancholic disposition, about trauma and grief and their contributions to the deadly mood, and about suicidal desires and the pernicious ways they can take hold and take over, I found little about the sheer bodily pain that, as in my case, can accompany the affliction.
Though I experienced most of what have become the standard symptoms that now make major depression certifiable and reimbursable (sleep disturbances, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of suicide), I experienced no weight loss, or loss of sexual desire, no headaches or flu-like symptoms, no sharp internal blade-like grindings. Instead, my lows were accompanied by constant nausea (even—especially!—during love-making), along with a vise-like pressure throughout my upper body, front and back, as if I’d been saturated with something heavier than blood—inhabited by a beast that was trying to suck and squeeze breath and life from me. When it came to rising from a bed or chair, the heaviness would at times paralyze me, as if the sheer weight of my body were the palpable equivalent of my spirits.
I.e., I despaired of being able to lift either. If you’ve ever been drunk out of your mind, or sea-sick in the extreme, so that rather than endure any more of the lethal whooshing, you preferred to die—nothing seemed worth another moment of the swirling desolation—you will have a tiny intimation of what this cafard was like when it filled—drenched!—all cells of body and soul.
Aware, however, that what I was experiencing might merely (merely?!) be advanced coronary artery disease (from which my father passed away at 49 years old—a massive heart attack while waiting in the evening rush hour for the downtown IRT subway at the Rector Street station in lower Manhattan), I did go to my physician, who forwarded me to a cardiologist, who—hope dashed again—found nothing wrong with my heart, or the arteries that fed it and were fed by it.
Well, I told myself—much as the host of the annual sadomasochist convention is said to have announced—‘The good news this year is that we seem to have lots of bad news!’ For the cardiologist’s evaluation meant that what I was experiencing was, in fact, what I believed it to be: the great black bile itself—melancholic depression.
So there we were, Charlie, abandoned by mother and wife, you having just passed your first birthday—the most beautiful, clever babe ever—and me relieving my newly acquired distress by imagining how sweet it would be to do away with you, and after you—my guilt now boundless!—with me (I spare you details of my how-to fantasies while assuring you that swiftness and lack of suffering for you were paramount in my considerations).
Did I consider murdering your mother? Of course, though not for long, and not at all after I received a kind offer from a former student (an advisee who went on to considerable success both as novelist and screenwriter-director), a young man from an Italian family in Springfield, Massachusetts, who, learning of my situation, told me he could have ‘a man with a bent nose’ (his phrase) take care of things. All I had to do was nod once and it would come to pass in a completely risk-free, cost-free manner (again, his language).
A mother abandoning a child, he said, was a mean-spirited and irresponsible act that went against both nature and biology, and it would be more than irresponsible—how I adored his repeated use of the word!—not to repair this flaw in the fabric of the world by cleansing it of its perpetrator (again, his language).
The offer was more than moderately attractive, for among the wealth of evils in human character, meanness-of-spirit and irresponsibility had always, as you know, ranked high in my private catalog. But so, alas alas, did the siren call of a beautiful woman chanting ‘I love you… I love you… You’re wonderful… You’re wonderful…,’ which, more in my youthful years than later on, made easy prey of whatever judgment and reason I possessed. Still, no matter my former student’s assurances (or my desires), I declined the offer. What I fe
ared, you see, was error. I was, that is, afraid of being caught, for being caught—whether for having committed the deed, or having assented to it—would have resulted in your being left to the care of others, and to coping not only with the sequelae of abandonment by a mother (a dead young mother, to boot), but with the burden of having been orphaned by a convicted murderer.
There were comic possibilities here, for sure (think: the ingeniously enchanting tales of John Cheever, the wonderfully mischievous films of Pedro Almodóvar!), though at the time so constant was the animal ache in mind and body that, as with cracked or broken ribs, the mere thought of laughter was enough to lay me out for hours (hmmm: did you know that—sweet memory—you and I shared afternoon nap-time back then, you in your crib, me on my office couch?). The only way I found to escape the constant pain—as undeserving, worthless, wretched, banal, dull, hopeless, lazy, mean-spirited, stupid, vain, and homely shlep of a man as I’d become—was by imagining the prospect of being somewhere else, and of having you there with me.
Yet there was something else at work in the bowels of my gloom—a fear that arose from my hunger for vengeance: that should I fail to nail my courage to the sticking point in the act itself, she would come marching triumphantly back into your life, my deed confirmation of everything she wanted to believe and to have others believe. Plus, a dividend: she’d be the recipient of large quantities of cash, for she’d be seen as the long-suffering mother who’d fled an unhealthy situation—marriage to a dangerous, despicable, deranged man, the proof in the pudding of my murderous intent and botched self-annihilation.
But consequences, Charlie—let us consider consequences. As I would often remind students: if they kept two principles in mind—that character was fate, and that there were no acts without consequences—they could begin to find their way into the workings (and delights) of all tales worthy of attention. When we were home alone, and I pictured our resident would-be Humbert Humbert (me!) mocked by her, I saw, too, the consequences of my inevitable bunglings. Insurance companies do not pay out for death-by-suicide, but her likely appeal—that I was not in my right mind when, at the eleventh hour, I changed beneficiaries (assigning all to charities)—would surely have carried the day. (Actually, I realize, despite a multitude of resolutions, I never did get around to changing anything in my will that year, which tells you something about melancholy, and how it can cause a lasting rupture between the desire to act and the ability to act.)
Still, a question: Why did your mother leave us? You were probably hoping—how not?—that in this note you’d find answers, or at least the beginnings of answers. Why she left me—why any woman leaves a man—is rarely, on an overt level, mysterious. There are the usual suspects: She didn’t love me, she didn’t want to be married to me, she found me impossible, she wanted her freedom, she fell in love with somebody else, she experienced a sudden change-of-life, she was on alcohol and/or drugs, she found motherhood less than it was cracked up to be, she had a severe, debilitating post-partum chronic depression…
But why she left you—ah, to that conundrum, I plead ignorance. While it’s true (and sad) that people hardly blink when men leave wives and children, I tend to agree with my Springfield student that when a mother does so, it would seem to go against nature and biology, and therefore, like a miracle—a miracle!—be beyond human understanding. For what defined God and God’s miracles in the Hebrew Bible—from the great flood that covered the earth to the burning bush, from the ten plagues to the sun standing still in the heavens—were occurrences that, by definition , went against nature and the natural order, and could, thus, have been brought about only by a god who was transcendent and (also by definition) beyond our understanding.
When people asked why she left you, as ask they often did, and would suggest, thinking this would console me, that perhaps she’d suffered some kind of mental breakdown, I’d nod knowingly, as if the suggestion had merit, and say that perhaps what troubled your mother could be found in the psychiatric encyclopedia of mental disorders—the infamous DSM—under the letter ‘A.’ Under ‘A?’ they’d ask. Yes, I’d say: ‘A’… for Absence of Character.
How else respond to such a foolish question? Still, you must wonder—we never spoke about this, did we?—about what she (this woman you never truly knew) was like, and, allied to this question, what-I-saw-in-her that led to love, marriage, and bringing you into the world.
And the answer?
Simple: We were young, she was beautiful, and she told me—insecure, neurotic, young Jewish city boy that I was—that she loved me. You’ve seen pictures, of course, but they don’t begin to capture the seductive wholesomeness of her beauty: a blond-haired, blue-eyed, corn-fed Midwesterner (from Iowa: the heart of corn country)—a cheerful cheerleader with a perfect gleaming American smile and a perpetual blush in her cheeks, crossed with a full-bodied, voluptuous Scandinavian (think: Liv Ullman, Anita Ekberg)—a young, exquisitely desirable woman who, after she’d told me she loved me, said two additional things that sealed the deal: first, that she believed—she knew, she just knew!—I was going to become a truly great writer; and second, that I was the most wonderful lover she’d ever known.
And let me tell you, son, as I discovered too late in the game, when it came to the latter, she knew whereby she spoke. But (sigh!) even irony and distance can not keep away the return, in memory, of the excruciating feelings of hurt, shame, and helplessness that came with my discovery of her several (serial?) lovers, which news was soon followed by her leave-taking, which act itself (the better miracle, for it gave us our years together, you and me) was preceded, as I noted above, by the arrival of a constant, gnawing pain, along with sensations of a kind I’d never before known: I kept falling, falling, falling into a darkness more terrifying than the absence of the dimmest light—into a hole that was at the same time somehow a hollow within me, so that I felt I was disappearing into myself again and again, and without any clue as to how to stop—or name!—the falling…
To give you an inkling (ink link?) of how my baleful innocence was destroyed: we were to meet for lunch at the university’s Faculty Club—a rather poor excuse for same: more like a student cafeteria, but with waitstaff—and I arrived early (to have twenty minutes or so in which to rework a lecture I was preparing on Henry James-the-Irishman), went to the men’s room to wash up, heard a strange guttural sound, found the stall where the sound was coming from, opened the door, and there was your mother, skirt up around her waist, sitting astride a young man—he worked as a busboy at the club—who was himself sitting on an open toilet, his pants gathered around his ankles. ‘Good morning, Professor Eisner,’ he said. ‘Sorry to see you here so early today.’ And your mother, over her shoulder, her eyes filled with lust-fulfilled bliss, ‘Oh Max, we really do have to stop meeting like this…’
I hurried home from the Faculty Club and when she joined me, and when I wept and said the obvious—bad enough that you were doing it, but you knew I would be there—We had a date!—she said of course she knew—that was the point, after all, for didn’t this non-coincidence answer the pertinent questions? But I was a helpless, wounded beggar—distraught, destroyed, disabled. The rage, and its faithful companion, clinical depression, were to come later, though I don’t think she sensed this, or ever gave such possibilities much thought. On that afternoon, however, she did for a while sit beside me, stroke my hair, lift my hands from my face, and wipe my tears away. What I think, she said before she left, is that I was trying to get your attention.
The rest—what I knew and when I knew it—is theme and variation, and my conclusion is that it turned out to be our great good fortune that once she left, she never returned. Her life, such as it became, is a void too—a mystery—though of decreasing interest. Out of sight became, literally, out of mind. Another conclusion, perhaps a trifle too generous on my part: that her intention was not to humiliate me, but more simply (mindlessly?) to please herself. The shameless narcissism—the unthinking sense of entitlement of a
n unusually beautiful, and, then as now (pace Orwell’s warning about double-negatives), not unintelligent woman, seemed a not unnatural phenomenon.
There were annual birthday cards from her to you, the last when you were twelve, but the envelopes were without return addresses, and I chose not to give you the cards. Why stir up unanswerable questions, or feelings that were beyond gratification? I myself had several New Year’s cards from her, with uncharacteristically bland greetings: ‘with love’ or ‘kind regards’ or ‘wishing you a year of health, happiness, and adventure’—and also a letter congratulating me on the publication of Prizefighter, hoping it would be the first of many successes (as of this writing, there has never been a successor—her hope, then, become a curse that I embraced?), and noting that the scene in which the protagonist discovers his girlfriend has cheated on him suggested to her that I had not yet gotten over what she saw as inconsequential dalliances of a kind that occurred in most—her word—mature marriages. ‘Grow up, Max,’ she advised.
Once she left, she never inquired about you. But if she had, I might have informed her that instead of killing you, or her, or myself, I had decided to live, and that it was you, Charlie—her son—who, unwittingly, saved all our lives. You didn’t know that, did you?
Shortly after your homecoming from Singapore, while you were sleeping off your jetlag, I shared some of this with Seana, who responded to my tales of woe with what she said was an old Irish adage: ‘Ah family, family—can’t live with ’em… can’t kill ’em.’
The Other Side of the World Page 20