Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the red suede sandals with four-inch heels that I had always preferred.

  I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the gold hoop earrings on which I had always relied, the black cashmere leggings, the enameled beads.

  My skin would develop flaws, fine lines, even brown spots (this, at seventy-five, was what passed for a realistic cosmetic assessment), but it would continue to look as it had always looked, basically healthy. My hair would lose its original color but color could continue to be replaced by leaving the gray around the face and twice a year letting Johanna at Bumble and Bumble highlight the rest. I would recognize that the models I encountered on these semiannual visits to the color room at Bumble and Bumble were significantly younger than I was, but since these models I encountered on my semiannual visits to the color room at Bumble and Bumble were at most sixteen or seventeen there could be no reason to interpret the difference as a personal failure. My memory would slip but whose memory does not slip. My eyesight would be more problematic than it might have been before I began seeing the world through sudden clouds of what looked like black lace and was actually blood, the residue of a series of retinal tears and detachments, but there would still be no question that I could see, read, write, navigate intersections without fear.

  No question that it could not be fixed.

  Whatever “it” was.

  I believed absolutely in my own power to surmount the situation.

  Whatever “the situation” was.

  When my grandmother was seventy-five she experienced a cerebral hemorrhage, fell unconscious to the sidewalk not far from her house in Sacramento, was taken to Sutter Hospital, and died there that night. This was “the situation” for my grandmother. When my mother was seventy-five she was diagnosed with breast cancer, did two cycles of chemotherapy, could not tolerate the third or fourth, nonetheless lived until she was two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday (when she did die it was of congestive heart failure, not cancer) but was never again exactly as she had been. Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments. When she came to visit me in New York for example she pronounced St. James’ Episcopal Church, the steeple and slate roof of which constitute the entire view from my living room windows, “the single ugliest church I have ever seen.” When, on her own coast and at her own suggestion, I took her to see the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she fled to the car, pleading vertigo from the movement of the water.

  I recognize now that she was feeling frail.

  I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now.

  Invisible on the street.

  The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene.

  Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door.

  Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party.

  “Estrogen actually made me feel better,” she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it.

  Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better.

  This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us.

  And yet:

  And still:

  Despite all evidence:

  Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have:

  Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply:

  Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity:

  Despite all that:

  Nonetheless:

  That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me.

  27

  Something happened to me early in the summer.

  Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon.

  I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was “syncope,” fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on “pre-syncope symptoms” (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply.

  I had been alone in the apartment.

  There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach.

  I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room.

  I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time.

  This was dangerously soothing.

  I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me.

  I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head.

  I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up.

  At which point I called a friend.

  At which point he came over.

  At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital.

  It was I who said Lenox Hill.

  Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill.

  Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem.

  “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying.

  Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes.

  I countered.

  I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem.

  She countered.

  “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.”
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  I had no answer for that.

  I tried to pretend I was home.

  I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.

  Only shifts.

  Only waiting.

  Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.

  Will someone please take the catheter out.

  That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening.

  “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”

  Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy.

  With effort, I managed to convey this point.

  I got released from Lenox Hill.

  My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg.

  After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned.

  An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell.

  Many tests were scheduled and done.

  A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes.

  There had not been.

  A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs.

  There had not been.

  A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery.

  There had not been.

  And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body.

  I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner.

  Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen.

  I lay motionless on the scanner.

  It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean.

  It would be one more version of the bed in the cardiac unit: a full-body PET scan had been ordered, ergo, as night follows day, there would need to be abnormalities for the full-body PET scan to show.

  A day later I was given the results.

  There were, surprisingly, no abnormalities seen in the scan.

  Everyone agreed on this point. Everyone used the word “surprisingly.”

  Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.

  Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to tell me why I was afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street.

  Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice.

  What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others?

  Can you evade the dying of the brightness?

  Or do you evade only its warning?

  Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?

  “Have you ever had a moment where everything in your life just stopped?” This was the way that this question was raised by Kris Jenkins, a three-hundred-and-sixty-pound Jets defensive tackle, after he tore, six plays into his tenth NFL season, both his meniscus and his anterior cruciate ligament. “So fast, but in slow motion? Like all your senses shut down? Like you’re watching yourself?”

  I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: “I exist very nicely between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ ”

  And even a third way: “It doesn’t present as pain,” I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.

  28

  I find myself thinking exclusively about Quintana.

  I need her with me.

  Behind the house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood in which we lived from the day we left Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates until the day we moved into the beach house, a period of some four years, there was a clay tennis court, weeds growing through the cracked clay. I remember watching her weed it, kneeling on fat baby knees, the ragged stuffed animal she addressed as “Bunny Rabbit” at her side.

  Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in.

  In a few weeks she will have been dead five years.

  Five years since the doctor said that the patient had been unable to get enough oxygen through the vent for at least an hour now.

  Five years since Gerry and I left her in the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell.

  I can now afford to think about her.

  I no longer cry when I hear her name.

  I no longer imagine the transporter being called to take her to the morgue after we left the ICU.

  Yet I still need her with me.

  In lieu of her presence I leaf through the books on a table in my office, each one a book she gave me.

  One is called Baby Animals and Their Mothers, and is just that, black-and-white photographs of baby animals and their mothers: mostly comforting favorites (not unlike Bunny Rabbit), lambs and ewes, foals and mares, but also less common baby animals and their mothers: hedgehogs, koala bears, llamas. Stuck in the pages of Baby Animals and Their Mothers I find a French postcard showing a baby polar bear and its mother. “Colin sur la banquise,” the caption reads in French, and then, in English: “Cuddling on the ice floe.”

  “Just a few things I found on my travels that reminded me of you,” the note on the card reads, in printing less careful than it once was but still recognizable.

  Still hers.

  Beneath Baby Animals and Their Mothers is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an account, by a former editor in chief of French Elle, of what it had felt like to have a cerebrovascular accident on a date he knew to have been the eighth of December and next wake at the end of January, unable to speak, able to move only by blinking one eyelid: the condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” (Did anyone use the word “syncope”? Did anyone use the words “pre-syncope symptoms”? Can we find any clues here? Any clue to Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation? Any clue to my own?) For reasons that I did not at the time entirely understand and have not since wanted to explore, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly had been when it was published extremely meaningful to Quintana, so markedly so that I never told her that I did not much like it, or for that matter even entirely believe it.

  Only later, when she was for most purposes locked into her own condition, confined to a wheelchair and afflicted by the detritus of a bleed into her brain and the subsequent neurosurgery, did I begin to see its point.

  Beginning
to see its point was when I stopped wanting to explore the reasons why it might have been so markedly meaningful to Quintana.

  Just let me be in the ground.

  Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep.

  I return The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to the table in my office.

  I align it with Baby Animals and Their Mothers.

  Colin sur la banquise.

  This business of the ice floes is familiar to me. I did not need Baby Animals and Their Mothers to bring the image of the ice floes alive. In the first year of Quintana’s hospitalizations I had watched ice floes from her hospital windows: ice floes on the East River from her windows at Beth Israel North, ice floes on the Hudson from her windows at Columbia Presbyterian. I think now of those ice floes and imagine having seen, floating past on one or another slab of breaking ice, a baby polar bear and its mother, heading for the Hell Gate Bridge.

  I imagine having shown the baby polar bear and its mother to Quintana.

  Colin sur la banquise.

  Just let me be in the ground.

  I resolve to forget the ice floes.

  I have thought enough about the ice floes.

  Thinking about the ice floes is like thinking about the transporter being called to take her to the morgue.

  I walk into Central Park and sit for a while on a bench to which is attached a brass plaque indicating that a memorial contribution has been made to the Central Park Conservancy. There are now in the park many such brass plaques, many such benches. “Quintana Roo Dunne Michael 1966–2005,” the plaque on this bench reads. “In summertime and wintertime.” A friend had made the contribution, and asked me to write out what I wanted the plaque to read. The same friend had come to visit Quintana when she was doing therapy in the neuro-rehab unit at UCLA, and after she saw Quintana had a cafeteria lunch with me in the hospital patio. It did not occur to either of us on the day we had the cafeteria lunch in the hospital patio at UCLA that Quintana’s recovery would end at this bench.

  So we still thought of that year.