They are stationed there to call attention to a display of secondhand Chevrolets. Their trainer (keeper?), who wears knickers and a jungle shirt, flips his whip in the direction of the parked lines of dingy automobiles. We do not stir, so fascinated are we by the boxed-up captives who look as though they may be dying. He tries to enliven them by poking at their legs with a pointed stick. They do not stir. He flashes his whip across their faces. They stare back at him, understanding perfectly but too weary, too sick, too wise to obey.
Two children standing near me scream with delight at the sight of the six princes of the jungle now reduced to proletarian paupers. Children love animals, I think, even stuffed ones. These prisoners, locked into their coffers, especially delight them. The children are free; these poor guttersnipes are down on their luck, recumbent, enslaved. What a pleasurable turnabout, I imagine they are thinking.
The children move away, toward the cars, holding their parents’ hands. I stand still, enclosed like the abject lions in the unreasonable quarters of my old body, confined to the bars and sawdust of a future that can end only in the black light of oblivion. What remains of their lives is a dirty joke, told with a snicker by an obscene keeper in cowboy boots, holding a taunting whip. What remains of mine is not much more elevated: There are too few years left to make another life. My age is my cage; only death can free me.
Or:
My friend, the editor of two of my books, dies. His death is not a solitary phenomenon; many others are dying of the same irrevocable disease. The tragedy of his death, and the death of others, is that they are all young. Their talents have been blasted away by a God seemingly blind to their value and deaf to their prayers and the prayers of their friends. Feeling older than ever, I board a train at seven in the morning, a shining silver bullet aimed at a straight shot up the East Coast from Washington to New York, depended upon by this aging body to get me to the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street in time to bid my friend goodbye, to tell him how much I will miss him, how I despise the irrational fate that determined it.
Would I have said these things? I will never know. Arrived at the door to his apartment, I find he is not there. His friend, Tony Blum, tells me he died three hours ago. Bill, a man at the height of his physical and intellectual powers. A young man (to me) who understood the value of full friendship with this old writer. I rage against my own survival in the darkness of his disappearance, I hate being an age he will never see, I detest his leaving before I can bid him farewell.
Oddly, I cannot cry. I am too angry with the God I trusted to save him, to lift his affliction. All the way back to Washington tears press against my eyes, but they never come. Two weeks go by. I do the ordinary household things to ready our home for the winter. I sweep leaves and bag them into fat plastic sacks, I store the lawn chairs and drain the hose. I wonder what to do about the pair of black goldfish who live, against all lack of care and expectations, in the small pond in the garden.
I note the temperature. They must be brought into the house before the frost expected this evening. I scoop them up into a wide enamel basin (all I have on hand), fill it with water, and leave them on the deck while I go uptown to buy (at a place called Think Tank) a bowl for their winter housing.
When I go to transfer them to their new abode, one is not there. I cannot believe it. Where can he be? The mystery of this absence overwhelms me. And then, looking down, I see his bloody body on the deck. He has committed suicide, I decide, leaping out of the basin onto the destructive wooden floor. Stuck into the wound on his head is a dead wasp. I put the survivor, whom I now name Lazarus, into the new tank, take the body of the suicide into the garden, and bury it, placing a cross made of matchsticks over the grave.
And then I cry. For half an hour without being able to stop. For the dead, nameless fish, for Lazarus now left alone and lonely, I believe, for my carelessness which allowed the nameless one to die, dashing against the slanted side of a merciless washbasin to his solitary death.
I am amazed at my free-flowing tears (I do not cry easily, perhaps five or six times in my adult life, which now stretches to half a century), at the depth of my grief, at my obliviousness to the true cause of my sorrow. Now I know: I am crying for my dead friend, not alone for the newly dead fish. At last I am able to flood his memory with my hot, resentful, furious, contrite tears. I realize I am trying to wash away my guilt at having, at this late age, survived his youth, my remorse at my health in the light (darkness?) of his undeserved disease. I place crossed matchsticks over the memory of my love for him, my vision of his bright face and endearing young smile. I surrender to the inevitability of all death and the injustice of his early one. I mourn my late arrival at his door, my unspoken words of farewell and love.
I mourn the fish. The moribund Florida lions. The odium of growing old, the perversity of not growing old: the whole inexplicable condition of life and the illogic of its termination.
I read over this record of what I felt. At the time I thought putting it down on paper would assuage my suffering. Now I know nothing will do that. I used to believe confession (in the dark upright box with the sound of the priest breathing on the other side of curtain) would take away my sins and guilt. No. Nothing will, except time, age, forgetfulness. Even then …
We drink champagne with Peggy, and Ted and Bob, our Washington friends who now live most of the year in East Blue Hill, Maine. Someone says something about seventy being young these days. I smile and say nothing, thinking of three-year-old Emily Galvin’s birthday party in Iowa City. Her mother, poet Jorie Graham, read to her after the feasting. When Jorie went to answer the telephone, I asked Emily if she wanted me to finish reading the book to her. ‘Oh no,’ she said, withdrawing in horror: ‘You’re too old!’
Sybil and I have a quiet dinner together at a restaurant in Blue Hill overlooking a small stream and waterfall. We talk about everything but this day. I am grateful for her tact. I don’t know how much more celebration I can bear. We have wine, but no toasts. I think how wise she is not to propose one.
All day I have been doing what we do each end-of-year period in the bookstore: I ‘take stock,’ a curious phrase. For books it means counting what we have on the shelves. For me, today, it meant looking at what I had and have and was and am and did and do, what I no longer wish to be and do and keep and acquire. I try to find some sound philosophical basis for what I have been, and fail. All I can conjure up is bits and pieces, nothing solid, nothing whole. My lifelong, hard-held views: where are they now in this reexamination? What do I believe? What have I done? The time I have been granted: what has it all come to?
I look across the table at my friend, who is happily paying the bill for our good dinner, as a final gift for the terrible Twelfth, and wonder, under the confusions of the day and my amazement at having survived this long without being aware that all this time had passed: Who am I? At the end of this hard, dismaying, and only occasionally heartening day, Sybil and I talk of someone we have heard about who, it was reported to us, died, ‘leaving nothing.’ The phrase stopped me. Its ambiguity is interesting. Does it mean money, property, goods, books, ‘belongings,’ as they say? In a different sense, perhaps it is more accurate to say we die leaving everything: what is left of the beauty of the natural world, the familiar faces of those we have loved, the music we have come to know so well that it plays in our ears without the use of technology, the paintings engraved on our eyes, the interior vision of dancers who perform brilliantly in our heads while we sit inert in our chairs at home. All this we ‘leave.’ It is never nothing. It is everything.
As I fall asleep, I remember that I have not spoken to Richard Lucas in many days. I feel the need to be close to him now, to be part of his suffering and his courage, to see his dying. Am I being honest, or is this feeling accentuated by the impossibility of gratifying it? We are three thousand miles apart.
This desire is something new for me. When I was a child I would not look at the dead, would not accompany my mo
ther into a hospital to see a sick friend (in those days children could visit their friends without hindrance). ‘I’m afraid,’ I remember saying. ‘Of what?’ she would ask. I could not tell her, I did not know.
During most of my life I walked away from the sight of an accident, sickness, suffering, as if, by my not witnessing them, they would cease to exist. Forced, by chance, to look upon an old man who had been shot through the head in front of his cigar store at the corner near my apartment house in New York, I am unable to forget the sight, in my dreams, and awake: a piece of the shell of his skull was left on the sidewalk after the ambulance had taken him away. As a young girl, all of death, dying, suffering, and pain coalesced into that glimpse of a section of a dead old man’s head.
I could not bear to look upon anyone who was less than perfect for a long time.
My grandmother took great pleasure in the spectacle of death. She used to attend funerals regularly, most often for persons she did not know. The Frank Campbell Funeral Home was three blocks from where she lived. As I recall, she had no particular sympathy for the living, except for her close relatives, whom she loved devotedly. But she was proud of her own survival to a great age—ninety-three. The longer she lived the more she seemed to enjoy funeral ceremonies for strangers.
Clearly she was comforted by the number of deaths she had survived. I can still see her, dressed in her decorous black caracul coat, her black fur cloche set firmly on her white head, a matching muff over one gloved hand, in the other hand the Union Prayer Book, walking slowly from the Hotel Milburn, where she lived for many years, towards Amsterdam Avenue.
Once I walked with her as far as the door to Campbell’s. We stood among the mourners, waiting for a plain pine coffin to be carried into the building.
‘It must be an Orthodox Jew,’ she said. Of most of the rites of her faith she was ignorant; she refused to attend Temple Rodelph Sholom, which her mother had helped to found, because it had begun the practice of charging a hefty fee for the use of the pews. But from her constant funeral-going, she knew, and much admired, the frugal Orthodox practice of using a pine box instead of an expensive ‘casket.’
She added with evident pleasure, ‘It will be a long and very sad event. A lot of crying. All in Hebrew, the prayers I mean of course.’
She went in. I went home.
The day after. I have survived the twelfth. It is a clear and lovely early morning. I am, kindly, left alone on the deck. In my nightclothes I sit here and watch the light grow stronger. I too grow stronger as I drink coffee and consider this new day. The day after. I have survived that day, I have made the turn.
I begin to read galleys of a novel I brought with me, The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. It is an account of gay life in Britain in the sixties, when sexual activities were free, joyous, unshadowed by the specter of fatal disease. The characters are cultivated young upper-class men who speak affectionately about well-known homosexuals and go to baths seeking constant stimulation with young boys, handsome blacks, other beautiful young men of their own class.
Hollinghurst describes their unending sexual adventures most graphically, in pickup motion-picture theaters, in salons of great private houses, at pools and body-building spas. The narrator, William Beckwith, is the grandson of a judge-aristocrat, Lord Denis Beckwith, for whom he has great affection. At a bath, William saves the life of aged Lord Nantwich, and thus becomes involved in his life and the proposed editing of his diary.
His grandfather tells William about being at the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, and hearing E. M. Forster criticize some of the music, especially Claggart’s monologue:
‘He wanted it to be much more … open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think soggy was the word he used to describe Britten’s music for it.’
Years later, the young narrator, his lover, James, and Lord Beckwith see the original tenor of the opera at a performance: ‘Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle toward the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head.… James and I were mesmerized, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved.’
Hollinghurst manages to suggest in this passage a parallel between Pears and Britten, Captain Vere and Billy Budd. This performance of the opera, ‘an episode in his [Pears’s] past,’ is somewhat like the elderly captain’s memory of the blessing of Billy Budd. But I may be reading this into it; Hollinghurst may not have intended the suggestion. More than this, the portrait of sick and aging Pears being almost carried to his seat by aides is as poignant for the reader as the opera must have been for the tenor.
The old, gay lord’s diary contains a moving portrait of dying Ronald Firbank: ‘I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what might well have been a discreet maquillage gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were upon him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flower-like a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands.’
I suppose these tender, intense portraits of the sick and the aging through the eyes of young men (the young lord goes with his friends to join Firbank for the evening) strike my sympathies now as they might not have twenty years ago. I read on, further than I intended this morning, compelled by the force of these portraits.
Absorbed by the poignancy of these scenes, I suddenly remember sitting in the orchestra of the new Metropolitan Opera House (it will always be the new one to me), watching the aged Maria Jeritza being brought to her front-row seat by two stalwart, handsome young men. She leaned heavily on their arms; but her majestic head in its customary white fur hat was held erect. Her face was so heavily powdered it was almost unlined, ‘whited out,’ it seemed. She wore dark sunglasses, her body was small and soft. She seemed ageless and frail. The young men deposited her carefully in her seat, the patrons around her applauded. She bowed her head from side to side in gentle acknowledgment of the recognition she seemed grateful for.
From time to time I looked her way during the performance of Der Rosenkavalier. She never moved her head, she seemed to be absorbed in listening. I could not see her eyes behind the dark glasses.
‘Doesn’t Jeritza look wonderful?’ I asked the man in the seat next to me during intermission. ‘She always does,’ he said. ‘That floppy hat, that wonderful face. You’d never know she was blind.’
Radio up here is a movable and most uncertain feast. After an hour of National Public Radio, a music commentator with a delivery even slower than mine takes over. He occupies long minutes with his tortoiselike news report, so plodding that I cannot bear to hear him out. A nuclear explosion could have taken place somewhere. At the rate his announcements are made, I would never listen long enough to learn of it.
Turning off his news in the middle makes me feel unaccountably free. No news is good news, the old saw goes. On the air, on TV, in the
newpapers, good news is an oxymoron, an impossibility, since so little good is happening, and what there is does not make for interesting ‘segments.’
In our time, ‘news’ means tragedy: car accidents, rapes, murders, robberies, train and airplane wrecks, deaths from cancer, heart attacks, and AIDS, criminal acts in the high places of government, academe, the Church, highly-placed-family feuds, and lost, stolen, or battered children. Mistreated wives. The homeless and mad who freeze on the streets. The unemployed and desperate lower middle class. The hungry poor. Wrongly discharged mental patients. Drug addicts, dealers in coke, heroin, crack, and smack: what hard, almost vicious names for the false escapes that the displaced lower and unhinged middle and upper classes indulge in. Corruption. Bigotry. Revenge. Terrorism. Rebellion. Nuclear threats, leaks, breakdown, wastes. The breakdown of the environment: polluted water, air, destroyed forests, reduced ozone layer. The greenhouse effect. All news.
At the same time, when we are told about them, these catastrophes are so common and expected that they pass along the semicircular canals of the ear to the auditory nerve without creating a single tremor in the heart or the mind. It is not that they are bad news, they are hardly news at all. They are. We hear and read about them, see them on the screen, and accept them as accompanying, almost unnoticed, the act of being alive in a bad time.
The absence of TV and radio and the ten miles we would need to drive to town for a newspaper are no deprivation. They are a respite, a lull in the customary, numbing avalanche of human misery and despair, the decline, perhaps the imminent destruction, of the race.
We have dinner with our friends up the road. There is kiwi fruit in the salad. I had always thought kiwi was a long-beaked bird to be seen in New Zealand, but recently I have learned it is a fruit with a rough brown skin and tart green interior. Very fashionable. I have tried it before but cannot develop an affection for it.
Coming into the End Zone Page 5