In theory, the map Clementine is reading could be a map of any part of France, perhaps of some other place entirely. Are there no blue-clad maps in Spain, in Austria? This idea is present to me but insubstantial in the face of a dreadful possibility. If she goes to Nevers, if she goes to acquaint herself with the small, tattered city where her mother went to school, to locate and walk out on the bridge over the Loire, the river rapid and troubled in summertime, to look down at the place where Miriam died, if she finds where Miriam’s parents still live…well, what then? What will happen?
I cannot say, and yet, even as I write this, I hear my own voice, my clinician’s voice: “You cannot say, Mr. Abend? Or is it that you would prefer not to say? Or perhaps, Mr. Abend, you feel that for some reason you must not say?”
* * *
—
Someone must have calculated the average age when patients begin psychoanalytic treatment, the average age they encounter some major disruption in life or find themselves in the midst of intractable difficulties. Whenever that moment arrives, the future grows suddenly steep, whether by dropping off precipitously and requiring a terrifying leap or by rearing up like a cliff face against the sky. One way or another, the way forward has vanished.
As a young analyst, like so many other practitioners, I quickly and without design acquired an expertise in the paralytic afflictions of affluent graduate students, in the torpor of stalled writers, in the obscure torments and metastatic dissatisfactions of corporate lawyers and investment bankers. However debilitating these passages were for my patients, however dizzyingly steep the future had become, their predicaments presumed that a future was possible, a future that could be, at least in principle, better than the past. This of course was my presumption as well, perhaps the presumption of every analyst. Nothing, therefore, prepared me for the appearance in my office of Arnold Ullman, a man in his mid-sixties who referred himself to me a number of years ago, after reading an article I had published called “The Metapsychology of Death-Anxiety in Patients with End-Stage Organic Disease.”
In my writing and in my clinical work, I had been drawn by the theoretical question of what happens when anxious or psychotic patients are confronted with a real and inescapable threat. My conclusions were wholly inconclusive, but Mr. Ullman in his first session proclaimed himself glad to have found someone who had thought about the things that he, Arnold Ullman, needed to think about, and fast. After asking me my hourly rate, without saying anything further, he wrote out a check and handed it to me. When I said that I didn’t understand, he smiled a mulish smile.
“Look at the amount!” said Arnold Ullman.
I said I had seen it and that unless we decided to work together, he owed me nothing, let alone the enormous sum on the check.
“So look at the date, Doctor!” The date was six months in the future. “That’s my expiration date. That’s what my doctor calls a ‘reasonable estimate’ for how long I have to live. Focuses the mind! Thanks to him I’ve recently discovered the joys of getting squared up.”
“Squared up?”
“In advance! Because something could happen. What they tell me is that one way or another, maybe sooner, maybe later, something will happen. Hard to disagree with that, isn’t it, Doctor?”
Five or six years earlier he had been treated for cancer of the colon. After a partial liver resection, his scans came back clear for several years. “Was I cured? I never knew. I can tell you I was relieved after the scans, and that I dreaded each one like my execution day. And I can tell you I wasn’t surprised when finally one lit up, nodes, lungs, spine, lit up like a Christmas tree.” It was then that a strange thing happened, he said. Of course he hadn’t forgotten how to panic, but the dread of the CT scans vanished, and when it appeared that the palliative chemotherapy was slowing the progress of the metastases more than expected, he felt a strange restlessness. The irony, the “colossal irony,” he said, spreading his arms wide, was that the cancer itself wasn’t what was going to kill him—at least not directly. One of the recent scans had picked up an enlargement of the aorta, an enlargement that proved upon closer investigation to be an advanced aneurysm, the result of metastatic infiltration of the artery. Because of the location and the nature of the vascular involvement, surgery was out of the question. “I had to learn how to do nothing,” he said.
“So you are waiting,” I said.
“That I am,” he replied. “But you doctors, you never say what you think, do you? I had the dickens of a time getting my guy to tell me what to expect.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Well, finally, he admitted that I was likely to die of what he called a ‘CB.’ ”
“What is a CB?”
“That’s what I asked. It’s a catastrophic bleed.”
“A catastrophic bleed.”
“A couple of minutes. Maybe five. And that will be that.”
After a pause I asked, “And what is ‘that’?” though I immediately regretted saying anything. He smiled his mulish smile, as though with no other intention than to alleviate my regret.
“That?” he said. “It! That will be it!”
“It—” I said again in spite of myself.
“So I’ve paid you in advance, in case I go early.”
“But then you will have overpaid me,” I said.
“Who will have overpaid you? Not me! Just some guy named Arnold Ullman nobody sees around much anymore.”
This time I managed to say nothing.
“And anyway, you can buy something nice for your kids. You have kids, right?”
I said I would cash the check only after we had completed six months of treatment.
* * *
—
As for treatment itself, from the beginning Arnold Ullman referred to it as “polishing the car.” He had lived upstate for many years with his partner, Raymond, where they owned and managed an antiques store in Rhinebeck. At a furniture show, he’d gotten a lead on an old Mercedes 220 in reasonable condition, so he’d bought and restored it, completing most of the work himself. He and Raymond drove it nearly a hundred thousand miles through the back roads and byways of New York and New England, before Raymond’s death and his own illness required him to move back to the city. He had no more use for the car, and he’d need the money for his medical bills, so he sold the car to a collector.
“Goodness sakes I made money on that car,” he said. “Eight times what I paid for it, though God knows what I poured into it in the meantime…” Arnold Ullman spent the weekend before the collector took delivery detailing the Mercedes, shampooing the floor mats, massaging lotions into the leather, buff-waxing the exterior to a high gleam. “The happiest I ever was with that car—and believe me I loved that car—was that weekend. I was like a country kid getting his prize heifer ready for the fair.” The collector who had bought it had been so delighted with the condition of the car that he’d sent Arnold a bottle of champagne. “I won’t say I didn’t drink it because I did; summer evenings, Raymond and I had always had champagne in the gazebo, but I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong! That was one beautiful bottle of bubbly. It was just that the buyer had put a little ding in my new acquaintance with disinterested pleasure.”
Since then, he had wanted to speak to someone, to talk with someone, so that he could attend to his life as he had attended to his car, preparing it for a journey without him. “The old carcass is about to change hands!” he exclaimed, evidently pleased with the phrase. “And anyway,” he went on, “where I’m going, you won’t be able to send me champagne.”
In this way our sessions proceeded, serendipitous, breezy, anecdotal. “Ain’t dead yet,” he would say, swinging his legs up onto the couch. “Last I checked, at least!” His stories centered mostly around Raymond, who had died of AIDS some years before. Mr. Ullman had bought a gazebo at an estate sale and had it se
t up in the backyard; they spent Raymond’s last weeks together there, reading the paper out loud to each other or listening to the radio. All summer long that lasted and into the fall, at least until it was too cold to stay outside, and by that time Raymond needed a hospital bed anyway. “I don’t have anyone to find me a gazebo, and where would they put it anyway? In the lobby of my building? So I’m hoping you don’t mind if I use your office as a gazebo. I promise I won’t start reading you the newspaper.”
One day, almost exactly on the six-month anniversary of his appearance, he failed to show for his morning session. Of course I knew instantly what had happened; he had never missed an appointment before. Wondrous, it struck me, that he or his doctors had counted out with such exactitude how many days remained to him. You can, then, imagine my surprise when I played back my telephone messages later that week and heard his voice. “So that was six months, Doc,” he said. “You can go ahead and cash that check you’ve been sitting on!” He’d decided, he said, that if he had any extra time, there were some friends he should visit. He wanted me to know how grateful he was for my help. Maybe he would see me around. “Except probably I won’t. But if you ever think of it, think of Arnold Ullman, will you? He’d appreciate it.” Like some sort of late-night disk jockey, he signed off with a “Thanks for listening.”
That was the last I heard from him. I could search for him in the telephone book or in the obituaries, but I never have. I think: You were a sort of friend, Arnold Ullman. Or could have been, had you not been my patient, had I permitted myself to have friends.
As for the check, it is still in my desk.
* * *
—
It was Arnold Ullman I thought of last night as I lay awake. I must have slept because when I arose I knew precisely what the photograph of Clementine had meant to communicate and how simple a statement it was. When I sit down at my desk to look at it again, I do not pick up my magnifying glass, whose bulging eye looks up stupidly from the blotter. Instead, I open the envelope and remove what I had neglected to remove at first: the Yeats poem, or rather what remains of it, copied out on a sheet of paper and torn off, just above the end of the penultimate stanza:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
I am aware once again, more starkly now, how the poem is a clock ticking down, not hour by hour or minute by minute, but marking its own time in other intervals: letter by letter, photograph by photograph, line by line. What time remains is short, it says, short but soon to be shorter, passing faster and faster. But some time still remains. That is what the poem also says.
My earlier obtuseness mortifies me. (Is it, Mr. Abend, that you did not know, or rather that you did not let yourself know?) After all, the photograph is not badly focused, or out of focus at all, for that matter. It is only that the photographer has bracketed carefully, in the picture’s narrow depth of field, not the map but the cover of the magazine, the magazine resting on the chair to Clementine’s left. The magazine (I can read the cover with ease) is a copy of Elle. The cover model stares upward, eyes violet, skin chalked arsenic white, eyes blackened with a band of kohl applied from temple to temple.
By the time I reach the international news seller on Broadway, I already know what I will find there: the same face staring out at me from the racks, that issue of Elle the most recent issue, the date on its cover in fact still in the future. Yes, says the clerk, it has just arrived. I stare at the face as though it might blink in recognition, but those arsenic eyes fix me from a future held ever so briefly at bay, and reveal nothing.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Do we have to wake up?” Miriam asked.
With a clatter of back-paddling wing-beats, the bird had landed on the sill and set to howling.
Through the hot night we had slept with the windows open. The bird on the sill resembled an American pigeon, though more formal in its markings, neck starkly collared, wings sporting sharp bands, its call—half cry, half howl—startlingly loud. Miriam lifted the sheet from between us and pressed herself against me, adjusting my arm to serve as a pillow for her cheek. “Chéri, do we have to wake up?”
We had made no plans. It was a Saturday.
“No plans?” she said. “That’s not what I mean. When must we wake from our little dream?”
We’d have to wake now, if the pigeon had anything to say about it.
“No, not now,” she said, nuzzling her head into my armpit. “And it is not a pigeon.”
Our little dream. Is that what this was? When did she think it would end?
“Not now,” she said. “The end of August. Not now.”
When I awoke again the bird was gone, and Miriam was folding clothes into a small suitcase. She had to leave for a few days. Back to Leuvray, the convent, to meet with Sœur Béatrice, her spiritual advisor. The visit would be her last retreat before she was to arrive as a postulant. It was important this time that she go alone, so they would know she was serious. “Yes, mon ami. This time I go alone. But you must stay here. Promise me you will stay.” And besides, I hadn’t finished the translations I had promised her. I could work in her apartment; she would be gone only a week. This could be your scriptorium, she said.
A what?
“A place to write, a place to think and write. Heaven, as the Jews sometimes imagine it, is a place where a person can study in peace.”
With a click the door shut behind her, and there I was, deposited in a sudden solitude. The week gaped, suddenly vast. What had been confusion at her abrupt departure changed to anger: to be made to play monk, while Miriam was off playing nun! And here I was still undressed, sitting at the edge of the bed. The remnants of last night’s supper lay in disarray on the little table, some books and papers shoved aside, the wine half-finished, the cheese hardened and cracked at the edges. The objects looked dazed, as though stunned by a flashbulb or abandoned in haste.
It took a long time to rouse myself to make coffee, to shower and dress, but by the time I had fed myself (the bread not entirely stale, the cheese edible if dry), the sourness had departed from me. The bird had returned and scrutinized the crumbs, from first one side of his head, then the other. I swept them onto the ledge and the bird pecked them up, eyeing me with suspicion.
I picked up Miriam’s volume of Herbert translations and began to read the French versions alongside the English, the originals gathered in a loose sheaf of photocopies. Words and phrases had been underlined throughout, and question marks dotted the margin. As for the French translations, they appeared reasonable enough, at least from what I could make out, though prone to archaism and ornament. In English, however, the poems spoke with disarming frankness:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight
For thou must die.
I recognized the tone from the poem Miriam had shown me at the café, its candor a kind of nakedness, communicating an invitation simultaneously seductive and disconcerting:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love,
observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
The cheese and the bread had now disappeared, and the patterned sunlight on the parquet had slid into shadow. Without thinking, I had poured myself a glass of wine and then another; in fact, I had emptied the bottle before noticing I had begun to drink. The wine had warmed the poems to incandescence, as though they themselves produced the light by which I read. That light, it seemed to me, was visible only when I was reading the French translations and comparing them with the originals, pondering what the original English had refused to give up. This light (I thought) was like the corona of an eclipse, visible through the smoked glass of my contemplations. Yes, I thought, uncorking a new bottle of wine, that is what I was doing: contemplating.
I began to take notes, both in the margin of the book and on the photocopied pages, eventually spilling over into the pages of a notebook I found in Miriam’s bedside table. It occurred to me that I must be hungry, and yet I had no desire to leave the table where my papers had spread out around me like the petals of a huge flower.
When I finally dislodged myself to go out, I did so expressly to lay up provisions so that I could continue this new work. I purchased tins of sardines, two bricks of coffee, and a log of goat cheese from the corner épicerie and from the baker next door a round loaf of some dense, brownish bread, thinking it would last longer than the usual slender baguettes. At the wine store, the wine that had made up our now depleted supply was still on sale, so I bought a case, or rather two cases, once I learned that a French case contained only six bottles.
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