The three women were not solemn. We heard their light, cheerful voices through the door, as if they were dressing a bride. Then we heard a heart-rending aw-w-w-w—the sound women make when an infant does something adorable. Did Luther say something? Or make a gesture of some kind? Then we heard an outburst of laughter that as quickly became consolation: Oh, honey, it’s alright, it’s alright. (Was Luther weeping?)
By and by, the door opened; the women left, their eyes downcast. We filed back into the room. They had turned Luther three-quarters on his side. He was leaning upon a bank of several pillows, as Christ leans upon a rock in paintings of Gethsemane. They had arranged him for his Passion. He was gasping. His teeth were bared. My heart involuntarily pronounced aw-w-w aw-w-w-w aw-w-w-w.
• • •
After a scintillating “Alleluia”—the loudspeakers buzzing with cymbal sizzle—all in the congregation stand as the Easter Gospel is proclaimed in the cathedral. When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices with which to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen.
It was called the Dogwood tree.
I leave immediately after Communion. Outside, a black desert wind. (The forecast for Easter morning is for showers and dust storms. Aren’t those antithetical?) Though he risks a fine for doing so, a cabbie—Pakistani or Indian—picks me up on the sidewalk along Las Vegas Boulevard South. Business has been lousy, he shrugs; he took a chance. He asks why I am in town. I tell him about Luther. He tells me about a cousin of his who is dying of cancer.
All along the bright holiday boulevard, he describes a woman dying alone on the other side of the world, under tomorrow’s sun. He drops me off on the shore of Lago di Como, on the Eiffel Tower side.
Luther Thomas died Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010.
four
Tour de France
A knucklehead fell out of a tree.
The judge had promised us, the twelve of us, a trial lasting no more than two days. It was not until the fifth day that the plaintiff (a flat-voiced teenaged boy) took the stand to explain why he had climbed a tree in Golden Gate Park in the first place, how he ended up on the ground with a broken arm.
Just foolin’ around.
The boy’s parents’ lawyer claimed the park maintenance crew of the city and county of San Francisco should have cut the dead wood out of the tree.
Personal injury. The phrase summons scars more recently sustained, and another summer, when I was lying on a bed in St. Mary’s hospital in San Francisco, thinking about Aix-en-Provence.
My thorax had been unpacked and repacked like one of those fire-hose boxes you see in old buildings. A foot or so of O-gauge track burned down my belly whenever I raised myself, whenever I twisted to answer the phone.
On a television set hanging from the ceiling, Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor extraordinaire, was making a triumphal progress up the lime-leafed Champs-Élysées. I forget which among his victories this was.
Whatever else cancer is, cancer is a story that leads away from home. Even the luckiest stories involve harrowing prompts and trials. Lance Armstrong endured trials so dire I have seen him weep in the recounting of them on TV.
My cancer story began in Paris, also on a bed, where I was watching the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings on television. I had been troubled for several weeks by night sweats. I was due to travel to Spain in two days. The doctors were not initially concerned. Some low-grade infection, perhaps to do with prostate.
No doctor I consulted subsequently ever uttered the word “cancer.” The oncologist told me the X-rays showed a growth two inches long. “Growth” is a word I had previously associated with maturation, even wisdom. The unaccountable burst of inches after a childhood summer. Or the daffodils in Hyde Park after that first lonely winter of graduate school. The oncologist’s growth was some kind of ghostly scallop, a story-eater.
My first impulse was responsible and mundane. Update my will. Get my tax returns in order. Ask a thoroughly unsentimental friend to serve as my medical executor.
My next impulse was to visit a Dominican priest. At this juncture, I entered a second euphemism.
I am a Roman Catholic old enough to have grown up calling the seventh sacrament of the church Extreme Unction. There was no mistaking a sacrament with such a name. One summoned a priest to the bedside of a relative to anoint the care-worn forehead with holy oil. The ceremony was so wedded to death in the Catholic imagination that the concern of irresolute relatives was always that poor old Nonno would wake up to see a priest fussing about him and die of fright.
So as not to frighten Nonno, therefore, the Catholic Church has jettisoned the term and now refers to the “Anointing of the Sick.”
That is what I got. I got oil on my forehead and hands. And then I asked the Dominican priest, who is a friend of mine, to hear my confession.
I had not been to confession for several decades—a sin in itself. You might imagine I left many trash bags full of sins in the priest’s office that afternoon.
Bless me father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession in thirty-two years. . . .
The substance of my confession is the conclusion of the story. I will return to the parish rectory and what I discovered in preparing to confess three decades of my life. But, first, I need to explain why it was that, even as Lance Armstrong rode, like ancient Paris, past cheering crowds, I was thinking about Aix-en-Provence while recuperating at St. Mary’s.
I have never been to Aix-en-Provence. My best friend in college, Ted Mayhew—of course, that is not Ted’s real name—had passed a defining summer there. I was forever pestering Ted about places in the world he had seen and I had not. My curiosity on the subject of Aix elicited from Ted only disparagement of his parents, particularly his mother, with whom he was perpetually annoyed.
When he was sixteen years old, Ted stayed two months with friends of his parents in Aix. He spent that summer drawing and painting. Ted’s ambition was to be an artist. I hadn’t known that. He returned home to New York with three water-plumped sketchbooks. He put the sketchbooks away on a shelf in his bedroom before he returned to his New England prep school in September.
In November, when he came home for Thanksgiving, Ted noticed his sketchbooks were out on the dining room table. He took them back to his room.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, his mother summoned Ted to the living room for a grown-up chat. She had taken the liberty of showing Ted’s sketchbooks and watercolors to an elderly and well-known society painter. The old man had looked over Ted’s work and opined the boy would not amount to more than an amateur. His talent was not large enough.
Ted’s mother had several voices. When she portrayed pragmatism, she had recourse to New England. It was his mother’s bad Katharine Hepburn that killed Ted: Knot. Lodge. Nuff.
Ted never picked up a paintbrush again.
In the years since that summer morning at St. Mary’s hospital, I have sat among bald women in doctors’ offices. We all read—and reread by mistake—the well-worn issues of People magazine. Thus have I attended the idylls of Brad and Angelina and all the remote bright stars.
From those same issues of People magazine I have come to learn the sequence of women in Lance Armstrong’s life—from wife Kristin to Sheryl Crow to someone named Tory, and a much younger Ashley. Most recently, there was an “amicable separation” from Kate Hudson.
I seem to remember it was Sheryl Crow who was waiting for Lance Armstrong on that summer day in Paris. He wore the yellow jersey that represented laurel.
One day, while visiting the Mayhews’ Manhattan apartment, I admired Ted’s watercolor of a rose-covered wall in Aix-en-Provence. His mother had given it a prominent place in the room, surely denoting some pride, I ventured. Only because it matches her peach-colored walls,
Ted replied in Brunswick blue.
The Filipina nursing assistant (half my age, with sorrowing eyes) stood beside my bed, adeptly silencing the alarm of the drip monitor.
Beautiful flowers, she said. She meant on the windowsill.
Take them, I said.
Really, you don’t want them?
I want you to have them, I said. Left unsaid: On so many mornings, dear Filipina-stranger-checking-my-vitals, you have bathed my torso and legs and back. You have brought what clutter and cheer you could to this sterile room. You deserve the flowers on the windowsill, for you are like spring.
Though what I have learned from being around the sick and the dying is that it is one thing to clean a stranger, quite another thing to wipe your father or your mother. Intimacy changes everything.
I would extend this generalization to cover the matter of personal injury. It is one thing to suffer hurt from a tree in Golden Gate Park, but quite another to suffer an injury from a parent, a lover, a best friend, a teacher whose favorite you thought yourself to be.
Strangers drop hydrogen bombs on strangers. But when you were in fourth grade, your best friend blabbed your secret to a cafeteria table of boys. Your best friend did this only to get a laugh.
Though it was Sunday my oncologist came into the hospital room just as Lance Armstrong ascended the dais. The oncologist was leaving the next day on vacation. A doctor with a Polish surname would take over on Monday.
The oncologist pulled back the sheet. Over his shoulder, Lance Armstrong kissed the several hired Graces whose fate it was to bestow his prize. The doctor unbuttoned my hospital tunic. The crowd cheered. “Healing nicely,” he said, admiring the gathering of my flesh. I did not look.
Will it go away? The scar, I meant.
“Nope, sorry,” the doctor said. “But it is my impression that women like men with scars.”
Bulls like men with scars. Mine reminds me of Andy Warhol’s scar after a madwoman shot him in the stomach. Even that is to beg some heroic cast. My scar looks like the seam up the front of a Teddy Bear.
Bless me, father, for I have sinned.
After three unshriven decades, what I discovered, in rehearsing my failures as a human being, was not how many sins I had committed, but how small they were.
Bless me, father, I have lived my life in lowercase.
No Joycean blasphemy. No Miltonic grandeur. Only so many homely cruelties, inflicted without much thought or care.
To summarize: I was the boy in fourth grade who told my best friend’s secret, to get a laugh. I do not even remember what the secret was.
Do you suppose he does? Even small wounds have long consequences. After three unshriven decades, what frightened me most during my examen was the realization that I had nurtured so many small wounds inflicted on me.
That was what I was thinking about as cancer survivor extraordinaire, Mr. Lance Armstrong, coasted up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The boy crashing out of the tree like a lumpen sloth. My best friend in fourth grade scalded by laughter. The sensible Park Avenue matron killing her artistic son as blithely as she would twist a bright bow.
Sheryl Crow bit her lip, turned away as though the sun were in her eyes. Brilliant Lance Armstrong raised thin arms over his head in triumph.
I seem to remember it was Sheryl Crow who was waiting that summer day. Perhaps I misremember. Perhaps it was Tory. Or Helen of Troy.
five
Darling
1. Theatricals
You never met Helen, did you? My younger sister. Helen and I used to pretend. I was Murray Perahia and she was the Duchess of Alba, stepping up to the maître d’, beads of sweat dripping from our credit cards onto the carpets of London, of Paris. People did turn. I was Al Pacino and she was the Duchess of Zuiderzee-sur-Mer and Swansdown. We avoided their stares. I was that Indian tennis star—I’ve forgotten his name. We requested a table in a quiet corner. Helen sold off her duchy; she was Tina Chow or somebody like that; Marguerite Gautier. She was the Countess de Gooch (“Fabulous wealth, the de Gooches!”). Helen spent her youth memorizing Auntie Mame and the Marx Brothers. (“Is my aunt Minnie in here?”) Our desperate drollery snagged on table linens, waggled the ice buckets as we were forward-marched to our table. Not a bad table, either, considering.
I was the lonely gay brother with a fellowship abroad who lived in a bed-sit in Chelsea; who kept a stack of coins on the mantel to feed into a slot in the gas heater; who brought Indian takeout back to my room on Sundays; who read John Milton and Harpers & Queen beneath the lowest cone of a tricolor pole lamp (turquoise, chartreuse, orange) that blinked whenever Mr. Okeke charged across my ceiling.
Helen was my hardheaded disciple, my treasurer, my Galatea. Now that she was grown and had a job working for a bank in California, she thought she might as well drop by London for Easter, pokey little London, she said, whereas the flowers were already out in Paris.
Darling, I would say, as waiters circled us in magic, will you have a sweet? No inflection was too outlandish for Helen; no serve went unreturned: “Why do we leave brown coffee-burble stains on our cups and nobody else does?” Tina Chow looked bemusedly across the dining room; she studied the chaste coffee cups she saw other diners lower from their lips. “I’ll have the Indian pudding, please.”
• • •
“Darling” is a voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen. The noun is overblown, dirigible; strikes the American ear as insincere. Nevertheless, “darling” became a staple of married life on American television in the fifties: Good morning, darling. Remember, darling, the Bradshaws are coming for dinner tonight. What’s wrong, darling?
“Darling” was a most common salutation in letters between soldiers and their wives or girlfriends during World War II. Lovers surprised themselves in the act of portraying themselves with a heightened diction—in that way attempting to convey an awareness that their lives were drawn by Tolstoyan engines of history.
• • •
One night in Boston I went out to dinner with my editor and his wife—this was my first editor, the beloved editor, and I was in awe of him; I still am in awe of him. The editor kissed me on the cheek as we parted and called me his “darling boy,” as if thereby investing me with the Order of Letters Genteel. It was among the happiest nights of my life; I was filled with sadness as I watched the two of them, the editor and his wife, walk away.
In Neo-classical and Romantic poetry, “darling” is an adjective bestowed upon innocence: darling curls, darling buds. Darling boys.
In stage-Irish, “darling” is ironic, yet still a sentiment bestowed: Sure and you’re a darling man altogether, Jack Boyle!
But then the post-lapsarian actress Tallulah Bankhead blared “darling” like a foghorn—fair warning to anyone of sincerity or true affection. By democratizing the endearment, by addressing everyone as “darling”—intimate or stranger, friend or foe—she produced a brilliant comic effect.
You never met Nell, did you? No, you wouldn’t have. Nell never liked L.A. Back then, when Nell and I were Beatrice and Benedick of the graduate division, we were more than a bit much. We were alert to the slightest vibration of irony in one another, of pointed glance or quiver of lip or inflection—those stiff twin compasses had nothing on us. Nell! And she looked the very Hogarth of a Nell, a wine-red laugh and green eyes, curly hair and rollicking shoes—any “darling” I sent Nell’s way was a struck match to an arsenal of pent theatricality: tosses of mane, wreaths of smoke, crossings of leg. At a bacon-and-eggs café on Telegraph Avenue we favored with our presence, we carried on like the Lunts.
“Look, darling, someone’s drunk up all my wine.”
Have some of mine.
“But yours is gone, too.”
And we can’t afford any more.
“Sad. And the sun’s gone down.”
And the Master’s not hom
e.
Just so was “darling” a prop for Cary Grant—as careless a conveyance of cooled emotion as a cigarette case or a fountain pen—an advertisement of his acquaintanceship with ease, ease with life, ease with women, whether he was playing the thief or the playboy or the soldier. The Cary Grant performance was in homage to another lower-middle-class Englishman, Nöel Coward. Growing up in Teddington, Coward imagined a leisured class of world-weary sophisticates whose conversations were rank with “darlings.” “Darlings” didn’t mean anything. “Darlings” were objective- nominative vagaries, starlings in a summer sky. “Darlings” were sequined grace notes flying by at the famous Coward clip—Coward designed his lines to be spoken rapidly and unemphatically.
Something about this personal-classical, asexual, theatrical form of address interested me, pleased me. I studied how to use it.
2. The Garden of Eden
Helen and Nell saw the fun of it immediately. You, on the other hand, were my first unwilling darling. L.A. is a city so full of darlings, I couldn’t understand your resistance at first.
The day your divorce was finalized, we drove up the coast to the Garden of Eden. A right turn off the Coast Highway at the bait-and-tackle shop and halfway up a hill. No view at all. The air was fresh. There was nothing camp about the Garden of Eden but the sign—a neon palm tree bedizened with a hot pink snake. It was a hotel with cabins from the thirties that had been refurbished to sea drift–moderne. The building was badly damaged by a mudslide in the nineties and is no more. But on a weekday afternoon, in 1982, it was the perfect respite from L.A.
On second thought, Darling, I said, surveying the restaurant through the side window, let’s not eat in the dining room; let’s go through to the bar and order club sandwiches.
Fine.
Fine as volcanic ash is fine? Fine as an anvil dropped from the Empire State Building is fine? We were great chums a moment ago. What’s up? You prefer the dining room?
Darling Page 9