Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  A distinct hush came over the room as we entered. He seemed not to notice, but I did. He steered me to the makeshift bar on the edge of the room, the palm of his hand in the small of my back, and slowly the muted hubbub of the reception began again. ‘Bold,’ I thought of his touching me like that.

  He ordered himself a water and a glass of white wine for me. Soon I became aware of people hovering, trying to break into our conversation to get time with the reclusive novelist. At one point I told him he didn’t have to babysit me, that he should mingle and talk to his fans. ‘I don’t want to monopolise you,’ I whispered to him, leaning in.

  ‘I know where I want to be,’ he said without pause.

  Our game was on.

  I told him that I’d read only one of his books, American Pastoral, and only because I was assigned as the publicist when I worked for Random House Australia in my twenties.

  Since becoming the Sydney Writers’ Festival’s artistic director, my reading had been dictated by writers I knew I could invite to the festival, and Philip was known to be elusive. Roth, the reluctant stage presence, was dead to me.

  To my surprise he laughed, as though I’d told him another hilarious joke, and seemed relieved I wasn’t an adoring fan.

  ‘Come to dinner,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Do you have plans?

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, envisioning my grim evening home alone. ‘I can’t intrude on the New Yorker’s dinner,’ I explained, fearing editor David Remnick’s reaction to discovering I was going to be a tag-along to his literary powerhouse dinner.

  Philip told me the dinner wasn’t a formal part of the Updike tribute, just him and a few friends. After more rebukes, he finally said, ‘You have to come. It’s my birthday.’ How could I refuse?

  We hailed a cab on Forty-Second Street with Judith Thurman from the New Yorker. We all piled in the back seat and headed across town to the Russian Samovar. Three friends were waiting for Philip at the table at the rear of the restaurant, near the swinging door to the kitchen. We ate smoked salmon and caviar in the soft glow of pink and apricot coloured lampshades. The piano player’s tip jar – a glass fishbowl stuffed full of singles – sat on top of the reflective lid of his baby grand. The menu listed more flavoured vodkas than I had imagined possible. It was a lovely evening and all the while I was thinking, ‘How did this happen?’

  Afterwards, Philip walked me to the Fiftieth Street subway. As we approached the stairs down to the entrance he joked that he hadn’t ridden the subway since 1969, when his novel Portnoy’s Complaint had made him a celebrity.

  ‘I want to see you again,’ he said as he took my hand and kissed my cheek. I rummaged through my bag in the glow of the streetlights and, with a shaky hand, scribbled my number on a piece of paper I tore from my notebook. He folded the paper and put it in the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

  The poet Luke Davies was staying on my couch at the time. We sat up late that night as I recounted my extraordinary evening blow by blow. We laid bets on whether I’d get the call and, if I did, how long it would take.

  Luke was still asleep on the couch when Philip called two mornings later, inviting me to see Cleopatra’s Needle and the saucer magnolias, which he said were in full bloom in Central Park. Luke watched as I danced around the room and then he helped me decide what to wear on a date to Cleopatra’s Needle with Philip Roth. After a few false starts – too formal, too conservative, too casual – we settled on jeans, a cotton shirt in baby blue that showed just the right amount of cleavage – a lot – and my favourite Arche brown suede wedges.

  ‘You’re tall,’ Philip said when he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Good,’ I thought.

  The trees were laden with flowers, their branches drooping from the weight of their bright white and pink blossoms. We sat under an enormous arbour of cherry blooms and talked for some time. Every now and then a fan approached. Philip handled these sweet intrusions graciously. He asked the person where they came from and engaged in small talk.

  He was warm and easy company. He seemed interested in what I had to say, but most importantly he made me laugh – doubled-over laughter.

  A few days after our afternoon in the park, he took me to dinner at Eli Zabar’s on the Upper East Side. He asked a question about my childhood and I told him about my father’s polio.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘I’m writing a book about polio.’ I was intrigued by his wanting to write a book about a topic that, as far as I could tell, hadn’t directly touched his life.

  He asked what it was like to grow up with a father in a wheelchair. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t thought a lot about it.’ I realised that, as true as it was, it sounded strange.

  As we looked over the dessert menu – he ordered clementines that came whole and unpeeled in a large glass bowl – he asked if I would read his manuscript and comment on his portrayal of the disease. He insisted on us stopping off at his place on my way home so he could give me a copy of the manuscript. Not long after, he called me a limo and I was on my way home – fare paid – clutching a large manila envelope containing the manuscript of Philip Roth’s final published work of fiction, Nemesis.

  Philip had the disease exactly right. In fact, I learned things about polio from Nemesis that I had not known. I saw in the book a deep and profound humanity, which warmed me even more to its author.

  It also made me think about my parents and their choices. In the novel, Bucky’s sweetheart promises to stay by his side after his paralysis, but Bucky shuns her, believing he should not inflict his suffering upon another human being. He sees himself as unlovable because of what’s happened to his previously athletic body. That single decision, based on the shame and anger at what’s befallen him, those few words he utters to a stunned, devastated, loving girl, dictate the rest of Bucky’s life. He lives alone, isolated and bitter.

  My father did the opposite. He reclaimed his life the moment my mother presented herself as a willing participant at the side of his iron lung. In return, she got to be the saviour.

  In Nemesis, I recognised a cautionary tale my father had avoided. I saw cowardice where my father had been brave, bitterness where he had been hopeful. In the midst of my own great leap into the unknown, my parent’s story still signified nothing to me but wisdom and fortitude. The despair in Philip’s creation could never touch me.

  Thirty-six

  My initiation to New York had been its own special kind of hell on account of my troubles at PEN and Jack deciding to stay in Australia, and I was still recuperating from the festival when my landlord notified me that he was selling my apartment.

  Even though I now knew the city, it was daunting to go househunting in New York. My first apartment was lovely but, best of all, it was in the same building as my now very good friends. It was like Friends, we were always dropping in on each other, sharing meals or having a drink. The thought of losing them and the sense of security in having them close by was scary. But I had no choice. Time was up. I had to stand on my own two feet now.

  I decided to find a two-bedroom apartment. I reasoned that perhaps if Jack had a room of his own when he came to stay, he would be more likely to consider a move. I worried that he felt I had left Australia as a way to escape the responsibilities of single parenthood. He never said or implied such a thing, but it played on my mind. He’d already grown up without his father and I was sensitive to the feelings that absence left in your life, having felt the same myself. I did all I could to make it not so, but you can’t change reality. I had, in fact, left him.

  Of course my desire for him to move to New York was selfish too. I felt whole when Jack was with me. Parenting and being with Jack was never anything but a joy, even when I was working two jobs and we were dead broke, staying with friends on a mattress on the floor. I had always felt he was my reason for being. In a way we had grown up together. I felt ripped apart
having him gone.

  In the first days of my apartment search, I was taken to one hole after another – dark, cramped and noisy. At one there was a dead bird on the back step. I walked straight out.

  In a moment of bad timing Jack had come to visit just when I had to be out of my apartment. Thankfully new friends allowed us to stay in their homes while they were travelling. New Yorkers are like that. It’s a big city but people are staggering in their kindness.

  I got a call to inspect a townhouse in Harlem I’d inquired about. It had looked gorgeous in the photos on the web: a fireplace, big windows, but even so I was suspicious. I’d seen enough to know how much can be done with a wide-angle lens and some lights. I told my friends I was going to see a place in Harlem; they warned me, ‘You can’t live there.’

  When I arrived at the street it was cordoned off by police tape and two police cars. I thought maybe my friends had a point. I clutched my handbag, thinking, ‘I’ve come this far,’ and walked past the flashing lights. A man called out hello from his front stoop. I smiled and waved back even though it seemed like an odd encounter in the midst of a crime scene.

  No one answered when I rang the doorbell of the townhouse. I went downstairs to the basement flat, which had an old bicycle chained to the bars on the windows. The door was beat-up and rubbish had collected in the foyer. My heart sank.

  I was about to leave, but thought I should call the landlord, to make sure I was in the right place. The phone rang out and I thought, ‘lucky escape’.

  I started back towards the subway when someone called my name. I turned around and the landlord was standing on the stoop, waving me back.

  ‘Sorry!’ he yelled. ‘I was outside. Didn’t hear the phone or the door.’

  Reluctantly, I turned back and went inside.

  ‘You haven’t come on the best day,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I thought to myself. ‘There’s obviously just been a murder.’

  ‘There’s a block party about to happen. Once a year the whole street gathers for an all-day celebration, that’s all. That’s why all the cop cars.’ He waved his hand at a pile of wood off-cuts and plaster in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. ‘All this is going as soon as we finish the renovations,’ he said.

  We walked up to the second floor, light shining in through a domed skylight in the stairwell. He opened the door and I knew this was it. The apartment was filled with light. It had pressed tin ceilings and a pretty parquet floor. There was a large fireplace in the living room and another in the master bedroom, which itself was the size of a studio apartment. There’d been no trickery in the ad. This was even better than it had looked in the pictures. I’d found the place where everything could start again.

  Not long after, Jack and I were unpacking boxes. I opened and closed the dishwasher ten times just to look inside it. I hadn’t lived in a place with a dishwasher for more than a decade. We hung up my paintings and I felt like this was an all-new kind of home. A permanent home.

  ‘I’m never leaving. You’ll have to take me out in a box,’ I joked to my new landlord, who looked like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. I felt the tides had finally changed. It seemed Jack was happy too. He said he wanted to stay. My gambit paid off.

  Thirty-seven

  I’d been in New York for three years when I took that run in Central Park and felt my legs go numb underneath me.

  When I called my doctor early the next morning to make an urgent appointment, he told me to come straight in. An hour and a half later I was sitting in his office, recounting what had happened.

  First he ordered an X-ray, thinking I might have a pinched nerve. When the results came back indicating there was nothing to be seen there, he called a colleague and an hour later I was recounting the same story to a neurologist, who then stuck my feet with safety pins. ‘I’m sending you down for an MRI,’ he said when I couldn’t feel the pricks. ‘Wait here, I need to make a few calls to get you in.’

  My emergency MRI appointment was squeezed into an already overbooked schedule and the nurses seemed none too pleased when I arrived.

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ one of them said gruffly from behind the reception counter.

  ‘That’s fine. The doctor warned me it could be a while. I’m grateful to you for fitting me in,’ I said, trying to soften her.

  I sat in the waiting room with its apricot-coloured walls and filled out another of the endless forms. Name, age, symptoms, date of last period …

  I returned the clipboard and sat down again as an episode of ER came on the little television set in the corner. I watched as the patient suffering some acute trauma was rushed in on a gurney, blood pouring out of her, and realised it was making me anxious. Finding entertainment in someone else’s medical ordeal was great at home, but watching it in a hospital in the middle of your own disaster is a very bad idea. It seemed an odd choice and I couldn’t believe no one had changed the channel.

  Eventually I was ushered in to have the MRI. I’d seen coffins up close. The only difference between this MRI machine and a coffin was the MRI had a sound system. No such indulgence for the dead.

  The nurse told me to close my eyes. She put a round cotton pad on each lid and kept them in place with surgical tape. The room went black. She stuck ear plugs in my ears and fastened a cage around my head. Then she told me to relax and slid me into the tube. Beside my right ear was a speaker for the technician to speak to me from the control desk. There was a microphone for me to speak back or call out if I needed to. In my hand I clenched an emergency buzzer. The machine itself pelted out an unrelenting cacophony of very loud clanks and bangs.

  ‘You have to stop crying,’ the technician said through the speaker. ‘You are moving around too much. You are going to ruin the imaging. Calm down and try to stop crying,’ he pleaded from his booth.

  An MRI produces sound between 85 and 110 decibels. An ambulance siren is 120 decibels, a jackhammer 130. A rock concert is about 110. I tried to pretend I was back in my twenties, at a rave, going with the flow of the clanking in my ears, trying to forget that my eyes were strapped closed and my face secured by a white plastic cage so I couldn’t lift my head. This was the scariest day of my life.

  Finally the technician told me the nurse was coming in. I knew it was like failing an exam at school. I was the difficult one, the troublemaker. Always the one who couldn’t sit still, who fidgeted and made trouble for the rest of the class.

  The nurse grabbed my foot and started stroking it. I felt calm again, but then she started massaging my foot with more pressure, moving it forcefully in large circles. I knew she was annoyed with me.

  At one point, her massage became so forceful that she began rotating not only my ankle but my entire right leg. I struggled against her from the knee down, worried that she was moving me too much, that the imaging would be ruined and they’d have to start again on account of her. At least this silent fight with her stopped me from crying.

  They pulled me out of the machine an hour and fifteen minutes after they had begun. ‘I never want to see you back in here without sedation,’ the nurse said sternly.

  How can you relax when you feel like you’ve been buried alive while being blasted with terrifying noise?

  On the other side of the world, almost fifty years after my father’s, I was having a catastrophic moment of my own. Overnight, life as I had previously known it lay shattered around my feet as if I’d walked through a plate glass window.

  I knew from my father that one day you could be a sailor, the next a rag doll in an iron lung. But nothing prepared me for when the phone rang at 8 a.m. the day after my MRI.

  The neurologist and I exchanged the very minimum of pleasantries. ‘It doesn’t look good,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Pack a bag, I’m admitting you,’ he said. ‘You have MS. I want to see you here in an hour.’ He hung up the phone.

  I walked back into the bedroom like a ghost an
d burst into heaving sobs.

  I packed my bag in a daze. I was bewildered. Fear gripped my throat. What could this mean? Why hospital? Sure, I’d had that terrifying incident in the park, but I was functioning. My legs were numb but I didn’t feel sick.

  Some things are never easy to say – there’s no good way to break up with a lover, for example. No softening words that will make the abandoned feel any better. Even so, I wondered if that phone call hadn’t been a fairly callous way to tell someone she has an auto-immune disease that, in a few years, could put her in a wheelchair.

  I pulled my little suitcase up to the neurology ward on the eighth floor of New York–Presbyterian. The words ‘STROKE VICTIMS’ were above the nurses’ station.

  I spent the next five days in a cotton hospital gown having every kind of test the doctors could think of performed on me. I was terrified. My friends visited and Philip, who was new to my life at that point, came too. His father had schooled him from a young age on the importance of paying visits to the sick. Philip often went with his father to the homes of Newark’s infirm, to check in or drop off a meal prepared by his mother.

  Always the dutiful son, Philip came to the hospital and called me a brave soldier. He told me jokes and made me laugh despite myself. When the doctors came on their rounds after his first visit, I commanded a new respect. Doctors who had previously answered my questions with no more than a dismissive wave of their hand were suddenly happy to actually engage me in conversation. Before Philip turned up, it often felt like the doctors didn’t have time for the living, thinking part of their patient. It felt as though what they wanted to say was, ‘Listen lady, just take your medicine. Alright? Trust me, I’m a doctor.’

  Of course, doctors are busy people. There are many more patients like me in all the rooms along the corridor, and then even more sitting in the waiting room once they finish their rounds. And every one of us is needy. Every one of us is terrified. It must be exhausting and exasperating. How many times do you have to explain this stuff, which they won’t understand anyway? I can see it from their side of things, but this is my life and I do have questions. Lots of them.