Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel

by David Rakoff

  Until her thoughts happened to land upon Hannah.

  One Hannah Hint seems to be all that it takes

  For Sloan’s inner Lexus to slam on the brakes.

  Her mind gave a lurch, and Hannah’s place in it

  Was poof! purged and cleansed in just under a minute.

  Instead, she corralled her thoughts only to roam

  On things bright and lovely. For instance, her home:

  Everything perfect, divine, and appealing,

  The pearl-gray luster of the silver-leafed ceiling

  Tamed what most rooms might not easily handle,

  Tassels and chintzes, a screen (coromandel),

  Sofas and slipper chairs, two silk fauteuils

  (out of bounds to her girl and both the boys),

  Framed scenes of hunts on a hunter-green wall,

  A pillow: “Nouveau riche beats no riche at all,”

  Traces of Oberlin, NPR, grunge

  Gone, and instead was a WASP-y mélange

  Of faux Sister Parish, Buatta, and Trump,

  A richness of embarrassments, an opulent sump.

  Every time Sloan sipped her tea there, Hosanna

  She thought, I’ve arrived and then … Hannah.

  (It drove Sloan bananas how seldom, if ever,

  The shit of life didn’t demolish her reverie.)

  She knew it was harsh of her, bordering on churlish—

  She tried, in all things, to seem dainty and girlish—

  But her mother-in-law made her furious and sick,

  Hannah’s decline seemed a purposeful trick

  Designed to wreak havoc, annoy, to be grating

  And, at the worst moments, just plain nauseating.

  Once, during a party—this was early on—

  Sloan looked around when she noticed her gone.

  The very next moment, the elevator attendant

  Was at the front door with a Hannah resplendent

  Her skirt ’round her shoulders, like the cape of a matador,

  Nude and soiled from the waist down, and walking the corridor!

  Josh took his mother straight off to the bath,

  While Sloan tried her best to conceal the white wrath

  That shot through her with such force she thought she might faint,

  Especially when friends whispered, “Josh is a saint.”

  “Yes,” she joked, “just the kind I’d like to martyr.”

  Okay, charade over! It was time now to cart her

  Away. She was no longer fit even to visit.

  (That’s not the mark of a bad person, is it?)

  She felt for Josh, truly. He’d grown up with no father,

  But Hannah was now such an unruly bother

  That Sloan was quite worried that she’d grow to hate him,

  Or soon might resort to some harsh ultimatum

  Like “It’s her or me!” or the wholesale preempting

  Of contact, although it grew ever more tempting

  (Her feelings for Hannah, alas, were too late;

  That vaginal vernissage had sealed her fate).

  Each time she even attempted to air

  The topic with Josh, his face was despair

  Writ so large, deep, and painful she’d had to leave off

  (She’d not known she’d married a man quite so soft).

  And then, the true kicker: Could this be prophetic?

  I’ve read that dementia like this is genetic.

  She thought of the joke she and Josh used to tell,

  Although it fit present conditions too well:

  “If all of the money was gone from my life,

  Would you still love me?” a man asks his wife.

  “Of course,” she replies. “Come here, let me kiss you.

  I’ll love you forever, but boy would I miss you!”

  Enough! There was work to do, one saving grace;

  She felt the old thrill of a three-agent race

  For the exclusive on an absolute jewel:

  Four-bedroom penthouse, two fireplaces, pool!

  And three thousand square feet of wraparound terrace.

  Now that’s what we need, she thought, feeling embarrassed.

  She had windows aplenty, but why shut themselves

  Up like corpses on one of those mortuary shelves?

  Josh might even bid, if she skillfully seeded

  The ground, somehow showing that what they both needed

  Was some sort of shake-up, a change of the scenery,

  Somewhere to swim, with salubrious greenery,

  A respite of peace from the scourge of Alzheimer’s

  And no one could ever dismiss them as climbers.

  She’d get there, but ’til then, she knew it would haunt

  Her. That’s good. It means one’s alive to still want.

  What a difference a day makes. Now times that by twenty.

  Clifford was hollow, a Horn of Un-Plenty.

  Tipping the scales at one-fifteen at most

  He was more bone than flesh now, and less man than ghost.

  The CMV daily lay waste to his sight

  Now, it was all Renoir smearings of light,

  I loathe Renoir, Clifford thought, chocolate-box hack.

  Chuckling, his hacking cough wrenching his back.

  “Renoir is chocolate,” he said, the words hazy.

  Luis, his health aide, laughed: “Cliffie, you’re crazy!”

  Luis was bull-strong, endlessly calm and

  Had magic hands: always cool, smelling of almonds.

  Luis, in place of dead parents, friends, lovers,

  Rubbed Clifford’s temples and tucked in the covers.

  High noon, and yet the light steadily dimming,

  Beautiful Schubert’s trout beautifully swimming.

  Half-thoughts and memories swam through his brain:

  Glass-soled shoes, Burbank, a berth on a train;

  Sally, who’d taught him to make a martini,

  The silk jacquard robe on the Doge by Bellini,

  Helen! With mandarins shielding her breasts,

  Of all his life’s work, this one image was best.

  His father, among the most gentle of men,

  The powdery scent of geraniums, and then…

  The inkwell tipped over and spread ’cross his page.

  Clifford was gone. Forty-five years of age.

  “You look like my Josh, only handsome,” she’d say.

  She said or did one heartbreaking thing every day.

  If Tuesday’s mere hygiene was markedly worse,

  By Wednesday she’d Homerically re-named her nurse

  “that cunt who is stealing right out of my purse.”

  Like a time-lapse filmed flower that blooms in reverse,

  Each day brought some further cruel deforestation

  Of mind, with no hope for one thought’s restoration.

  He’d thought that her being alive would defray

  His sadness, but all this goodbye without going away

  This brutal, unsightly, and cold disappearing

  Was so beyond what he’d conceived ever fearing;

  A stupid, but no less dispiriting coda

  To be slapped by his mother, who wanted his soda.

  This someone he’d loved and so viscerally known…

  It left Josh abandoned and feeling alone.

  More than his mother uncensored, unkempt,

  Was the non-recognition. Her blanket contempt

  Made him feel like they’d never met, wholly a foreigner,

  Meriting no more regard than the plant in the corner.

  This being a stranger was like being dead,

  And brought to mind how, in a book he had read

  That most folks misunderstood one common state:

  The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

  Since Shulamit left with the kids, he had mused

  On all of the ways he had sinned and abused

  Those people a
nd things in his vacuous life

  He’d thought that the money he’d made for his wife

  Was all that she wanted. Turns out he was wrong,

  But his Augustine moment had taken too long.

  It had all come as such a bright bolt from the blue,

  He had no choice but to assume it was true.

  “You’re empty,” she’d said. “A money-drunk fool.

  Neglected your soul for the sake of a pool!”

  To add to this gumbo of guilt, there was Nathan;

  Remorse was a river so deep he could bathe in.

  SusanSloanShulamit told him as much:

  He was venal and shallow and used as a crutch

  All the trappings and nonsense, the things he had bought her.

  She wanted the children and he hadn’t fought her.

  He missed them so much, his sweet girl and boys,

  But he had to allow it, since he was the poison.

  For himself, like some ex-con or monastic novice

  He’d found a small studio right near his office.

  It struck him as fitting, a concrete admission

  Of guilt: one’s apartment as form of punition.

  In such a bare space, he might do some soul-healing,

  With room for the boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling.

  He now had the unwanted stuff of two houses,

  The one of his boyhood, and all of his spouse’s

  Possessions. He’d store them and keep a close eye on

  The boxes, in case she might ever return home from Zion.

  Now here he was, fifty, and starting anew

  On a path he’d attempt to keep virtuous and true.

  He’d found among Sloan’s many things she’d acquired

  A delicate necklace of sterling barbed wire

  Whose points had been rounded with small silver bearings

  Though it still gave some punishing hurt in the wearing,

  And wearing it daily, he was, ’round his waist,

  A constant reminder to keep him abased

  And not tempted by temporal glorification.

  He found that he needed such mortifications.

  A bed, chair, and table were all that he had

  Along with the knowledge (hard-won ): He was bad.

  Friends understood the pained cast to his eyes,

  He’d won the annus horribilis prize;

  Losing his wife and bereft of his Mommy

  2006 was a perfect tsunami

  Of all that the Lord seemed to have in His toolkit

  Of sadism, suffering, spite, pain and bullshit.

  Unpack a box, then an act of contrition.

  Draw one bead of blood, could the Bowery Mission

  Make use of some never-worn cashmere sweaters?

  (Another knife prick: All on earth are my betters!)

  He’d come to depend on these tiny surrenders.

  How does one family end up with three blenders?

  Forty more sit-ups, a stone in his shoe,

  Keep two suits for work, one gray and one blue.

  After eight weeks, he’d grown saintly and lean

  And addicted to his ascetic routine.

  Until late one night he was mindlessly sorting

  Sloan’s shoes when a box he found brought him up short.

  Just two words in marker, but two were enough

  To accordion time. It was labeled, “Ted’s Stuff.”

  Maybe, she thought, even this rocky tor

  Was no random pile, but concealed something more

  Than mere sandstone and lichen, wind-smoothed, sun-bleached;

  Perhaps it was here where He might have once preached,

  Since everywhere seemed to have some place in history,

  All was laid bare and yet shrouded in mystery.

  She’d heard it on late-night shmirah, on guard duty

  Where, taking in all of the harsh desert beauty,

  Starlit and bleak in the hematite dark,

  The words “Son of God,” followed by “Joan of Arc.”

  The news filled her spirit, she felt she might burst

  And for a split second thought, Who to tell first?

  ’Til reason returned and she realized they’d hate her,

  Label her crazy, a perjuring traitor.

  Shulamit knew what they likely would say,

  But naturally saw things a different way:

  She’d needed to be here. No con game, no trick.

  Her life was a cancer, her spirit was sick.

  Her impulse in coming was out of pure love,

  And a spiritual yearning to cleanse herself of

  The secular world that had previously taught her

  To name their girl Dylan, like Ralph Lauren’s daughter.

  (As redress, in part, for her goyische folly

  Chip was now Duvid, and Schuyler, Naftali.)

  The searchlights and razor wire, satellite phones

  The high keening wail of the Hagana drones,

  She’d loved it all, all the belief that it rested on

  But knew in her heart that she had to be moving on.

  Shulamit knew that she’d tell them all how

  Each moment was whole; Then was Then, Now is Now.

  Moving here, loyally calling this place her new home meant

  No more and no less than it did in that moment.

  The settlement would, she knew, find this appalling

  But Shulamit now knew to answer each calling,

  The way that a rocket ship’s solid-fuel stages—

  Sloughed off and discarded—she’d passed through such ages

  And people to one day reach idealization;

  After all, it’s the journey, not the destination.

  “Ted’s stuff.” Nine letters, the moment was fixed,

  A man he’d last seen alive in ’66.

  An integral part of existence and then

  He dropped dead of a heart attack when Josh was ten.

  There was no deep nerve touched, no significant metaphors

  Just a few potent, outstanding sensory semaphores:

  Orange juice poured from a cut-glass carafe,

  Corn Flakes he drowned in some chilled half-and-half.

  And swimming! It seemed he swam a million-and-two laps,

  “Let all you others have spare tires and dewlaps!

  You can be thought of as kindly and honest,

  And I’ll gladly be the local Adonis!”

  Scandalized cries of “You schmuck” and “Oh, Ted.”

  A pitcher of something grown-up and deep red,

  Laughter and drinks on a dark summer lawn,

  A green shirt, a candle … the moment was gone.

  Forty years later, the tape simply shattered

  To bits. Well, the contents could hardly have mattered.

  And yet, Josh’s response, he’d have never dared posit

  Such a strong recollection of the old front-hall closet.

  He was there through some magical olfactory feat!

  Josh’s eyes briefly fluttered, his heart skipped a beat.

  He would hide in there, nightly, crouched down on the ground,

  Until Ted threw the door wide and yelled, “Ha, I have found you!”

  And here it all was, through the strongest of spells,

  That closet brought forth by the myriad smells:

  The forest of coats, an old rolled-up rug

  Gave off a comforting, camphorous fug.

  It almost seemed noisy, the darkness so full

  With the various scents wicking out of the wool.

  Dust that had burned on the coils of a heater,

  Cigarettes, perfume, and nights at the theater

  Mothballs, pressed powder forgotten in lockets.

  A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,

  And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mint

  Had bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.

  Nightly, in p.j.’s, th
e smells would surround

  Him ’til that thrilling moment of “Ha, I have found you!”

  And here, some black oxfords, irretrievably scuffed,

  Some moth-eaten jackets, the pockets all stuffed

  With envelopes—he counted at least thirty-two—

  All scrawled with the message, “Josh, these are for you.”

  Inside each were handfuls of old foreign stamps.

  Some of the packets addressed to the camps

  He’d been sent to the summers of age seven–eight.

  But what were they from? It was now far too late

  For questions: Why keep them? Why weren’t they just tossed?

  From “Ha! Being found” to irrevocably lost.

  He sifted his fingers through the colorful squares.

  They’d been cut and assembled with obvious care.

  To do this then keep them seemed such needless bother,

  Unless the stamps hadn’t been gifts from his father.

  He was getting a headache, he hadn’t intended

  In joining a game that was forty years ended.

  One last scan of the coats to see what else was there

  When his fingers caught hold of a small, rigid square.

  Manila and crisp, with a trace of old grime

  At one corner, but otherwise, sealed all this time.

  And written upon it, a supplicant “T.”

  Just one timid letter, from which Josh could see

  That the script was undoubtedly feminine, tender

  And clearly the stamps and this had the same sender.

  He eased his small finger just under the flap.

  The old glue gave way with a crisp but weak snap.

  Inside, an old photo with old scalloped edges,

  A girl standing, topless, by flowering hedges.

  On the back, a faded almost illegible rune:

  He made out, “Helen, L.A., 1954. June.”

  There was something so present and vivid, alive. It

  Was not classic “cheesecake.” More artwork, more private.

  She was holding two oranges, as though she was proffering