When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. . . .”
THE SCHOOL YEAR ENDED as it had begun, with tears. This time they did not come from Michaela, but from Taly and me. On a bright Wednesday in June, Elijah received his kindergarten diploma. The next day Michaela finished her first year of preschool. Proudly she marched with her class across the schoolyard, into the next year’s classroom.
I, too, had a graduation; the following week I went in for my follow-up cancer scan. I lay there, completely still, listening to the machine beep as I moved forward, a millimeter at a time. Then the nurse unstrapped me and I went down the hall to the radiologist for the results. I found him sitting behind a desk covered with X-rays and charts, a soft-spoken Chinese man with big wire-rimmed glasses.
“Mr. ben Izzy?” he said. I nodded, waiting. “Well, I have good news. The test came out negative. You’re squeaky clean.” Hard as it had looked, the radiologist explained, the machine had found nothing at all—there was no trace of cancer. Nor was there any reason to believe it would return.
I couldn’t respond, but merely stood there, staring at him. He seemed to think I didn’t understand, so he cleared his throat and said, “The cancer’s gone.”
I nodded, but still could not react. I realized that the news meant nothing until I could share it with Taly. I rushed home where I found her waiting, anxiously. When she saw my face I didn’t have to say a thing. She broke into tears and we held each other for a long time, and I wondered how it could possibly be that we felt close to one another. It was all strangely paradoxical; our lives had turned upside down, the glass was still broken, but there we were.
We felt especially close two weeks later when we reached the next milestone—Elijah’s sixth birthday, a year to the day since I had learned of my cancer. There was reason to celebrate, to be sure, but also a sadness, as I felt my mother’s absence. She had always sent birthday gifts for the kids, usually books that followed their interests, along with cards that had pictures of rabbits, clowns, and balloons. I thought of her every day now, forcing myself to believe that she was actually gone. Over time I have managed to convince myself of this, though to this day I still have trouble accepting the fact that she never calls.
As we ate Elijah’s birthday dinner, I looked at my family, thinking of all that had happened in the past year. Elijah’s interest in flags had faded away and then returned, and there were, once again, flags all around the table. He had grown several inches, and his head full of curls had turned from blond to brown. He had also become a terrific storyteller. Always a little shy, he told his stories only to Michaela. True, most of his stories were about Beanie Babies, but in time his repertoire would broaden. For now they were just right, and as he told them, she sat listening, looking at him as though he were the sun in the sky.
While she watched him, Taly and I watched them both. Children are miracles—something we realize when they’re born, but must struggle to remember each day. And though Taly rarely told them stories, I noticed something I hadn’t heard from her before—singing. They were beautiful, soft songs, and I would listen from outside the kids’ door on nights when she put them to bed. Some were tunes she made up on the spot, improvising words, while others were favorites from musicals, like Fiddler on the Roof. The kids would learn the songs and sing along. One night, long after Elijah should have been asleep, I walked by the door to their room and heard his little voice singing, “If I were a rich man, yidle-diddle-didle . . .”
I listened to him, thinking of our own finances. I had begun to find work here and there as a freelance writer, and though it was a struggle, we were managing. Even so, I felt like a rich man, not in terms of money, but as described in the Talmud, where it asks “Who is rich?” and answers “The one who can appreciate what he has.” The line from the Talmud reminded me of the experts’ expert and how he had said the silent rabbi in my throat perhaps knew a secret. Maybe that was the secret—and the lesson I’d needed to learn.
Although one can never be sure where one story ends and another story begins, it seemed to me that this story had come to its ending. While it may not have been the simple, happy ending that I had craved, in its own way it was better. I had arrived at something more enduring than happiness, a feeling that only comes with time and loss—and wears no shirt.
TOWARD THE END of summer I received one more gift. This one came in a large cardboard box, bearing the return address of a law firm in San Jose, whose name I did not recognize. The box was very light for its size, and sure enough it was filled mostly with Styrofoam popcorn. At the top was a manila envelope, addressed to me.
“Dear Mr. ben Izzy,” the letter inside began. “Pursuant to the will of the late Dr. Leonard Feingold, we are sending you the enclosed . . .” A wave of shock washed over me as I sifted through the popcorn, finding only a delicate pink wineglass. Looking again in the envelope I saw another letter, on yellow legal paper, written by hand.
There was once a Zen master of great renown. He lived in a monastery, and had rid himself of all worldly possessions except one—a magnificent wineglass, which he treasured. Each day he would marvel at the glass, commenting on its beauty as the light shone through it. He always showed it off to visitors who came to the monastery.
This surprised the other monks, who were angered to see their master so attached to a material object. One day they confronted him.
“Great master,” said one. “How can you take pleasure from a thing such as this? Can you not see that it is merely an object—something transitory? A thing that can be easily broken?”.
The master looked at the glass and smiled. “Of course. In fact, in my mind the glass is already broken. And so I enjoy it all the more.”
Lenny
STORY ORIGIN: JEWISH, ROMANIA
The Fox in the Garden
Ahungry fox wandering through the woods came upon a high wall. He walked along it for some time, until he discovered it went in a huge circle.
Curious as to what was inside, he searched for an opening. Finally, he found a small hole. Through it, he spied a most magnificent garden, filled with sweet-smelling flowers, succulent melons, and bunches of ripe red grapes.
He desperately wanted to go inside, but the hole was too small. After trying again and again to squeeze in, he realized it was useless. Yet, so great was his desire to enter that he came upon an idea.
He would fast until he was thin enough to pass through the hole. With that plan, he waited there for three days, starving himself, until he barely managed to slip in.
Once inside, he found the garden to be more wondrous than it had seemed from the outside. He feasted on its fruits and had the time of his life.
All went well for some time, until he heard someone else in the garden. It soon became clear that they were hunting for him.
The fox realized he must escape, but he had grown too fat to fit through the hole. So, once again, he had to fast. This time, it was all the more difficult, for he was surrounded by all the foods he craved. After three very long days, he managed to squeeze out.
Once outside, he stopped to look back through the hole. “Ah, life,” he said, “your simple pleasures are too much for me—but worth it, just the same.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Fox in the Garden
AS WE GO THROUGH LIFE, each new loss recalls those that came before it. Lenny’s passing left a hole in me, and I ached from its hollowness. Yet there was a fullness as well, for each time I thought of him, another of his stories
would come back to me. Those stories seemed to weave into my own, a tale whose twists, I believed, I finally understood. Once again, I was wrong.
In Liberia they have a saying: You cannot unsneeze a sneeze. Similarly you cannot stop a story from unfolding, once it begins. Storytellers talk about the “rule of three” that runs through stories—three bears, three sons, three wishes, and so on. So I suppose it was destined that I should receive a third phone call, from a third doctor. It came in September, coincidentally enough, on my birthday.
“Hello, Mr. Storyteller? How are you?” It took me a moment to recognize the accent of the experts’ expert. He had been thinking about me, he said, and wanted to see me. In truth, though I liked him, I would have been quite happy never to see another doctor as long as I lived. But he was adamant, so I made the appointment and went in.
When I arrived he introduced me to another doctor, who asked if he might examine me. From the moment I met him, this doctor struck me as different from the others I’d met. He was a soft-spoken Latino man, and he reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t exactly say whom. He spoke with great patience, as if he had time—a rare quality in doctors, especially surgeons, which is what he turned out to be. He felt my neck and peered down my throat, as so many others had done before. Finally he said, “Perhaps I may be able to help.”
His words shocked me, not just for the content, but for the lack of arrogance. He’d said “may.” It was then that I realized what he reminded me of—a doctor. Not one I’d ever met, but one I’d only imagined. He told me about a strange procedure called a “thyroplasty,” which involved sticking a piece of a plastic—which he described as an oddly shaped Lego—inside my neck, thereby pushing my paralyzed vocal cord back to the center, so the other could vibrate against it. While it would not bring the vocal cord back to life—nothing could do that—it might offer some improvement in the sound.
“The difference,” chimed in the expert, rather poetically, “would be like that of an oboe and a clarinet. One has two reeds, the other has one, but both can make beautiful music.”
Though I’ve always loved the sound of the clarinet, and I appreciated the metaphor, I was wary of the surgery. A permanent Lego in my throat did not sound appealing. It was not hard to imagine the possibilities of having my voice return—indeed, I had spent months dreaming of just that. But before moving forward, I desperately wanted to know what would happen if it went wrong.
The surgeon nodded. Of course, he said, the procedure did not come with a guarantee. While it might improve my voice, it could also make it worse. If it failed, I could lose my whisper. I would then be entirely mute. Then there were “possible complications.” I remembered reading the list of “possible complications” before my first surgery, which spanned the gamut from slight discomfort to sudden death. I didn’t just want to see a list—I wanted to hear from someone on whom this procedure had failed. He gave me the name of another patient—a former high-school basketball coach. Like me, he had lost his voice due to a paralyzed vocal cord, in his case caused by a rare viral infection. He had undergone this same procedure, but the results had been less than satisfactory.
It was only after several weeks of procrastination that I mustered up the nerve to call the number.
“Hello?”
I thought it was the voice of a young girl. “Is your . . . father home?” I asked.
There was a long pause. “He passed away . . . twenty years ago. May I . . . help you?”
I couldn’t believe what I had done. I blurted out seven or eight apologies before he stopped me. “That’s alright . . . it happens . . . all the time.”
I finally managed to explain why I was calling, and he told me his story. I had to push the phone against my ear, as his words were barely audible. The operation had been a failure. “. . . a delicate procedure . . . there were complica . . .”—his voice trailed off, and I could hear him gasping for breath—“. . . cations.”
“Will you . . . try again?”
There was another long pause. “No, it’s . . . a mess . . . down there. Scar tissue. I had . . . one shot . . .” He trailed off. A few seconds later he said, “I’ve learned . . . to live . . . with it.”
I finished the conversation, hung up, and a chill ran through my body. The operation would mean rolling the dice all over again, and the thought was very scary.
THOUGH I WAS FRIGHTENED, Taly was terrified. “The day you lost your voice, I began hoping against hope that it would return.” It was a Sunday afternoon and the kids were with a baby-sitter while we hiked through the Presidio in San Francisco. The former army base is one of the greenest parts of the city, leading down to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. “You have to understand how much I wanted your voice to return. I prayed for it, and it didn’t come back.
“Finally, after so many months, that hope died. It was a slow, awful death. And then I buried it. I had to. There was nothing else I could do.” She was quiet for a time, shaking her head.
“And now, you’re asking me to exhume it?” She was crying. We had come to a place under the bridge where a cold wind surrounded us, drying her tears in their tracks. “It’s too painful. I already feel like a burnt forest.”
There was no point in arguing with her. For all the ways poets and storytellers have sung the praises of hope, the truth is that it stings. Hope, the Greek myth tells us, was brought into the world by Pandora. It lay at the bottom of the box that she was not supposed to open. Of course, she did open it, releasing any number of horrible things into the world. And afterward, all that remained in the box was hope. I had always thought of this story as extolling the virtues of hope—the great consolation prize. Yet now, as I thought of what I’d been through, and listened to Taly, hope seemed like another one of the horrible things Pandora unleashed, perhaps the cruelest among them. We had both been burned by the hope that my voice might return.
“How can we open that door again?” she asked, and waited for an answer. When one didn’t come, she went on. “But I can’t close it either. It’s your voice. And your decision.
“But I want you to know something. And this isn’t easy to say.” She took hold of my hands. “Joel, I love you. And I’ll love you no matter what. But I like you better now. I like who you’ve become.”
We stood in silence for a long time, as a wind blew in from the bay and indecision whirled around inside my head. I had no idea what to do. I looked at a sailboat passing under the bridge and then into Taly’s eyes, which were smiling.
I AGONIZED FOR several days, and it was then that I really began to miss Lenny. I found I had questions I wanted to ask him; for one thing, I had read through the entire book of Job, three times, and could not find where God laughed. I had written the law office after I’d received the package with the glass and was informed that he’d died suddenly at the start of the summer, of a second heart attack. At Lenny’s request there had been no funeral, and he’d been buried in the cemetery in Santa Cruz, beside Pearl.
Yet, even with Lenny gone, I could still hear his voice, and imagine what he’d say about my dilemma were he alive. First he would laugh, a long, hard laugh. Finally, when he finished, I could hear him say, “And you came here to tell me, once again, that I was right, right?”
“Right?”
“Right,” he would say again, this time nodding, and pointing upward. “I said that your story was in the hands of a masterful storyteller.” I would push him for advice, as to whether I should get the operation or not, and he would say, “As I see it, either way you have to lose something—and that’s good. As I’ve said before, you are one lucky man.”
THE SURGEON HAD EXPLAINED that I would need to be awake for the procedure, so that he and the expert could “tune” my voice. They would try out various pieces inside my throat to see if one would work. “But do not worry,” he assured me as nurses strapped me down to a table and filled me with drugs. “You will feel no pain.”
I heard two nurses talking about their pl
ans for Thanksgiving the next day and then the sound of a clarinet, playing a familiar tune. I finally recognized it, and my own voice, which followed, from the tape of stories I had given to the expert. “Alright,” he said, “this is how we want him to sound.”
It didn’t take long for the drugs to take effect; a few minutes later I found myself marveling at how brightly the lights in this operating room glistened off the blade of the scalpel, just so. Someone covered my face with a folded towel, and I felt as if I were in a spa. There was a lot of fiddling around my neck, and then I heard the surgeon’s soft voice say, “Alright, let’s try it,” to which the expert responded, “Mr. Storyteller, please count to five.”
I tried to oblige—and nothing came out. Absolutely nothing. Not my whisper, not my croak, nothing at all. Instantly I felt something else surge through my veins, and my drug-induced sense of ease vanished.
“Not that one,” said the surgeon. There was sudden action around my neck, during which I could hear my panic approaching, like a far-off train. Finally I heard the expert’s voice say, “Alright, let’s try again. Count to five.”
Again I tried—nothing. But it was worse than before. Not only was there no sound but I couldn’t breathe. “He’s pulling at the restraints,” someone shouted. There was some rapid fiddling and the sound of footsteps, and I was able to breathe again, which I did in short gusts of panic.
I heard whispers and the sound of hushed arguing. Someone said, “I don’t think so,” and someone else said, “Just one more time.” There was more activity around my neck.
The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness Page 13