I smiled and cried some more when Natasha called to wish me a happy day. After breakfast I answered e-mails wishing me joy for the coming year. Only a few people knew of my plan to read a book every day for a year, and no one mentioned it. Everyone was sure I would have to drop out of the planned year of reading, and no one wanted to make me feel embarrassed if I did. They figured my obligations at school or the kids getting sick or holidays and vacations would force me to miss a day here or there. They thought I would end up scaling back, reading one or two books a week. But I knew I would stick with my books project. I was ready for the discipline. The plan could work around school hours and the driving, cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping, and still meet its goals of escape, learning, pleasure. I was aching for that, needing that comfort of reading and anticipating the pleasure of sitting down in my purple chair with a book and calling it work. By giving it the name of work, I sanctified it.
Reading had always been a favorite thing to do, but now it would become a worthy endeavor. I could excuse myself from coffees, PTA meetings, and exercise by having work to do. Most everyone thought my project was crazy, but that didn’t matter, not too much anyway. It was what I needed. I knew I was lucky to have the time and support to do this, and I wouldn’t waste either. Once I’d made the decision to take on my book-a-day year, I did not question the commitment or the pleasure ahead. I made a plan, and then I stopped debating the pluses or minuses. I would take the time I could have spent debating my choice and instead throw myself into carrying it out.
When Jack and I talked about getting married, and then when we thought about having kids, I had been the same way. I made my choice and followed through with actions taken full force ahead, body and soul. Jack was the one, and I married him, for better and forget the worse. Four kids I wanted, and I had them one after the other, sticking my legs up into the air after sex to ensure fertilization and then, nine months later, using those legs as an anchor during delivery.
Now I had committed to reading a book a day. Not quite like marriage or motherhood but a commitment, nevertheless.
Reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog on the train was tough going at first. The first forty or so pages of the novel have lots of obscure references thrown in here and there about philosophy and music, movies and art. But I soon fell in love with the two narrators, Paloma and Renée. Paloma is twelve years old and mired in existential angst. She hides both her intelligence and her despair behind a caustic wit and manga novels. She’s certain that there is no purpose or meaning to life, and she vows to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Wow and whoa: this kid cannot be serious. But I feared that she was.
Renée, the concierge of the high-toned building where Paloma lives, hides behind the facade of a dull, slow-witted working-class drone so that she can be invisible to the people around her. She wants to be left in peace to secretly enjoy the pleasure and comfort that books, music, art, and good food bring to her. I knew I had found a kindred spirit in Renée when I read her thoughts on books: “When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment, than in literature?” Right on.
By the time my train hit New York City, I was hooked on The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I put it away long enough to have a birthday lunch with Jack and my parents. We sat on a balcony overlooking the Main Concourse at Grand Central and drank champagne. As we ate our meal, I told them about how it had been Anne-Marie who’d first pointed out Grand Central’s magnificent ceiling to me, its golden constellations set into the barrel ceiling of the huge space. I had read about the ceiling in Mark Helprin’s mythical Winter’s Tale (a must read, if only for the ceiling description and the scene of a mighty mother skating triumphantly down the frozen Hudson River, baby on her back), but that was after Anne-Marie first showed it to me. The stars and figures were hard to make out in those days before its restoration, but under Anne-Marie’s pointing finger, I gaped at the scope of the constellations. Anne-Marie had given architectural tours of New York City as a graduate student at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and she knew her stuff.
The ceiling in Grand Central is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but what most people don’t realize is that the entire night sky is presented backward. The artist Paul César Helleu based his sky on a medieval manuscript that represented a God’s-eye view of the universe, seen from above the stars rather than from below. “Or else Helleu just made a huge mistake and tried to explain it away by using the medieval excuse,” Anne-Marie explained. I could tell she thought he’d been a lazy scholar and made the huge mistake. Careful as she was in her own work, there was no question the ceiling would have been perfect under her direction.
Hopelessly late for the high school drop-off, I hopped back on the train after lunch to make it home in time for the middle school bus. I continued reading on the train, any potential sleepiness brought on by the several glasses of champagne beaten back by the story: I read with eyes wide open. Barely glancing up at the ticket collector, I mumbled, “Thanks” and thumbed on through the pages. A new tenant moves into the building where Paloma and Renée live. He befriends the two of them, and the gentle force of Kakuro’s friendship coaxes Paloma, and then Renée, out of hiding. They begin to reveal their inner selves and to find in each other understanding and appreciation. Together, the three of them, Kakuro, Paloma, and Renée, recognize the infinite possibilities of surprise that life offers. Neither people nor life is so predictable after all.
I arrived home in time to dish out after-school snacks. Peanut butter on crackers, apple slices, apple juice. Chocolates given to me by my mother, shared now with the boys. More birthday kisses, and then I took myself away. I planted myself in my purple chair. I had just a few more chapters to go in The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Would Paloma stop fearing her future? Would Renée stop fearing her past? The last pages of the book were brilliant with wisdom. Each moment caught in a lifetime of experience can be brought forward. Sustenance in the here and now is found in the past. Good things have happened before and will happen again. Moments of beauty and light and happiness live forever. Paloma commits herself to finding those “moments of always within never” as a reason to live. She is anticipating moments of beauty because she knows they will come. The proof is in the moments she has already experienced. I could find those “moments of always within never” as a comfort to my pain, and as a promise for my future. I remembered what I had forgotten in my years of sorrow after Anne-Marie died: that I would always have my memories of Anne-Marie to sustain me.
I walked out into the kitchen, slammed the book down on the counter, and said to my kids, “This is going to be a great year.”
The Elegance of the Hedgehog reminded me, bone and blood, heart and soul, of Anne-Marie. It was as if I could hear her saying to me, “Yes, Nina, life is hard, unfair, painful. But life is also guaranteed—one hundred percent, no doubt, no question—to offer unexpected and sudden moments of beauty, joy, love, acceptance, euphoria.” The good stuff. It is our ability to recognize and then hold on to the moments of good stuff that allows us to survive, even thrive. And when we can share the beauty, hope is restored.
People often talk about the importance of living in the here and now, and express envy at how children enjoy their moments of pleasure without dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Fine, agreed. But it is experience—a life lived—that allows us to recall moments of happiness and feel happy again. It is our ability to relive a moment that gives us strength. Our survival as a species is linked to this ability to remember (which berries not to eat; to stay away from the big toothy animals; to huddle close to fire but not touch it). But survival of our inner selves also depends upon memories. Why else do we have such acute noses? I smell an evergreen and swoon with delight. Why? Because of the many pleasant hours passed at the foot of a Christmas tree. And the smell
of popcorn is so seductive because of the movies I’ve enjoyed while eating it. The taste of a good green olive makes me hungry, because an olive or two have accompanied so many delicious meals and flowing wines.
I stood in my kitchen and looked at my children, my birthday cards set out in a standing row, the school artwork on the walls, and the last zinnias of the year picked and stuffed into a pitcher. Past and present melded together. Cards the same as every year and new cards; artwork from when my oldest was still in kindergarten and his latest piece from ninth grade, alongside paintings, masks, and prints made by his brothers over the years; zinnias planted in the spring and now picked for our pleasure in the fall. Past and present together offer hope for the future. Maybe it was my past and present that would provide the glue for the two parts of me, the part that couldn’t leave Anne-Marie’s hospital room and the part that couldn’t get away fast enough. With books by my side, and my past and my present, all together, I would move into a future. Books, past, and present pushing me up and offering hope from what can be remembered. Offering warning of what should not be forgotten. Tamping back the blood from the harsh cuts of living.
Could memories of times when I was filled with peace, or overflowing with love, or resplendent in gratitude sustain me through the horror of losing my sister? Renée demonstrated to Paloma—and to me—that if we are mindful enough to grasp the beauty of such moments, we can hang on to those moments forever. Kakuro showed both of them—and me—that such moments are best shared, either in the moment or in memory. And Paloma showed Renée—and me—how life’s possibilities, future memories to find and grasp, can chisel away at imprisoning sorrow.
I remembered then how entwined memory had come to me before and offered comfort. I spent my junior year of college abroad in Barcelona. One rainy afternoon a few months after I’d settled into life there, I went by myself to the Museu d’Art Modern in the Parc de la Ciutadella. The museum was empty, owing to the weather and the season (not a hot time for tourists), and I took my time walking from room to room. I was thinking about a boy I’d just broken up with. Nico was a sweet boy with a great motorcycle and good looks but not much else. There was no point to my relationship with him, and yet he had been fun to be with. He helped keep my homesickness at bay, and he showed me parts of Barcelona I wouldn’t have found on my own. I had suspected that my entertainment value as the American girl was fading, especially given my reluctance to do more than hold his waist as we weaved in and out of traffic on his motorcycle. We kissed and hugged during our nights out together, but I resisted anything further. I didn’t want to fulfill the reputation of the easy American, and I suspected there was an old girlfriend waiting patiently for him every evening after he dropped me off.
The evening before my solo trip to the museum, Nico had taken me for a ride on his motorcycle north of Barcelona along the coast. We arrived finally at a long pier, busy with other motorcycles moving slowly up and down its long, wide boards leading out into the sea. We rode almost to the end of the pier. We stopped, and I looked out across the black expanse of water.
A shift in clouds let the moon come through. Suddenly the water was alive, glittering and sparkling with a long, undulating ribbon of moonbeam. I can remember still how cold it was that evening, the salty smell of the air, the low hum of other couples as they rolled up and down the pier, and the mesmerizing play of moonlight over the water. Nico tried to get me started on a session of kissing and groping, but I pulled away, climbing off the bike to get closer to the sea. This view was what I wanted; I had never seen anything like it. The water was exploding with lights, like firecrackers in the sky, the light of the moon reflecting and multiplying across the waves. I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay out on that pier until the moonlight settled down. I wanted to be there when the sun came up and a different light, the warming glow of day, came over the water. But Nico was insistent that he had to get back to the city. I climbed onto the motorcycle, and we rode off. We both knew our relationship was over.
As I walked through the museum the next day, I came upon a painting of a sunrise. It was not the sunrise I’d wanted the night before, orange and pink over a long expanse of water. But it was beautiful. The painting was a large landscape of dawn rising over a dark hillside. In one corner of the painting, a hermit is coming out of his cave in the hill. He has raised his eyes and pushed back the cowl of his robe to look out over the countryside. Apricot orange lines of sunrise glow against a pale gray background, lighting up the sky beyond the hermit’s darkened burrow. The grass along the edge of his cave looks frosted with icy dew, but beyond, on the hillside, small flowers unfurl under the sun’s first light. I don’t remember if birds were painted into the picture, but I do remember hearing them. I stood for almost one hour in front of that painting. I heard the birds and I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.
As I stood there, memories of mornings I’d woken early and gone out into a day just starting (the orange-and-pink-stained sky, the damp on the ground and the sharpness in the air, the birds) entwined with the experience of seeing this painting now before me. Layers of memories formed a cocoon around me: the night before on the pier anticipating a dawn, this painting, mornings in my past. Layers of time to be stored and later savored. The memories invoked by that painting, feeling the spring wind and understanding the hermit’s gratitude, smelling the flowers and sensing the icy dew, were memories that, when brought back, sustained and comforted me that cold, wet day in Barcelona. I knew, standing there, looking at the hermit in his hillside idyll, that I would not be lonely in Barcelona. I would awake to mornings and find the same joy shown in this painting. I could go out from this museum and call on my memory of that painting, and of the memories invoked by that painting, and I would feel good. And the memory of the evening before, the ride out to the end of a pier, arms wrapped around a boy I’d never see again, the cold and the salt and then the sudden flashing of moonlight across the water: I would hold on to that memory as well. And over the years, I have.
I hold on to many memories. When my oldest son was just a few months old, I took him out onto the Great Lawn of Central Park. This was in the years before the makeover of the Great Lawn. Now it is a plush stretch of the finest Kentucky grass, interspersed with raked-sand ball fields and cared for by an army of workers (and they are militant). The Great Lawn today is protected by a high fence that stretches around its entire perimeter. The few gates allowing entrance are closed on days when rain has left the ground wet and vulnerable, and on other days for seemingly no reason at all. But that fall, when Peter was a baby, the Great Lawn was a dusty, potholed round of patchy grass and dirt, ringed not by a prohibiting fence but by trees in full autumn blaze. The air was sharp and cold, and dusk was not far off. I sat down on a mound of dirt, took Peter onto my lap, and contemplated what this moment meant. Our trip across uneven ground, amid the bitten-off cold and the smell of pounded earth like leather, the last light of day exploding against fall’s leaves like rust on the circle of trees: I knew I would never forget this moment shared with my son. But would he remember? Years ahead, falls ahead, would his senses tense to the same pitch of cold, light, and smell, and would he know the same exhilaration of waiting for the end of day? I wanted him to feel me then as he did now in my lap, my love a flicker of recognition felt in a future where I might be far away, a bit of warmth against the cold falling fast.
It is a gift we humans have, to hold on to beauty felt in a moment for a lifetime. Suddenly beauty comes to us, and gratefully we take it. We may not be able to recite time and place, but the memories can come flooding back, felt full force without warning or brought on purposefully by a triggering event. The smell of pinecones, the whiff of popcorn, the taste of a cold beer, or the bite of mint: a jumble of feelings, and then a sudden clarity of beauty or joy or sadness. Beauty is in the moments that endure, the moments that enliven us again and again. We stand on memory’s sturdy pilings. We t
hrive on the nourishment provided by the past.
A few weeks before Anne-Marie died, she went for a walk in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park in New York City. The Conservatory Garden is an enclosed garden, the only enclosure in Central Park other than the fenced croquet course by Sheep Meadow, Sheep Meadow itself, and now the Great Lawn. But in contrast to the plain fences of the croquet course, meadow, and lawn, the Conservatory Garden is enclosed by beauty, by overgrown bushes and fawning trees and mossy stone walls and ornate iron gates. The garden is a three-part symphony of color and sculpture, of fountains and benches and shaded alleys and sunny corners. In the springtime ten thousand tulip bulbs bloom, and in the summer riots of every kind of flower, vine, bush, and grass flourish. In the fall, thousands of mums burst forth in shades of purple, cream, pink, and orange. Winter is marked by quiet, by stark branches of trees etched against the sky and stilled and emptied fountains.
The day that Anne-Marie went out for a walk was a sunny day in April. Her last April. In the garden, the green foliage of the peonies and iris gave background to purple and white crocuses, yellow and cream and orange narcissus, and the blues of scilla and hyacinth. Anne-Marie walked leaning heavily on Marvin, but she was glad to be outside. That morning they had received a phone call. A colleague had committed suicide, a young man who had lost all hope and killed himself. Walking through the garden, Anne-Marie and Marvin talked about the death. Anne-Marie looked around her at the spring flowers and up at the blue sky shining through the flowering apple trees preening overhead. As ill as she was, and as certain as she was that her own death would come sooner rather than later, she turned to Marvin and said she could not understand the impulse to suicide, the complete enveloping of gloom that would allow someone to take his own life: “For who can end in despair when there is such beauty in the world?”
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 4