A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  It was part of the love my mother and I had for each other to bruise each other, part of my love to plot injuries that, by and large, I did not inflict. But the most terrible injury of all, at the very prospect of which I had trembled, was one I could not help inflicting in the long run. By the time I talked about these matters to my mother, I wanted not to hurt her. I wanted somehow to take the unspeakable vengeance I had early recognized and make it sound like bliss, to show her a love as beguiling as my interpretations of Schubert. I wanted to be as perfect as one of my mother’s holidays or parties, blighted by nothing more than the chance misfortunes of the weather, of a guest’s canceling at the last minute, of a slight argument among friends. If she could not see Bernard as an “A” on a report card in a key subject, I thought she might be able to see such love as a “B-plus,” something far away from her, not quite what one might have wanted, perhaps, but really perfectly all right in the midst of all those other high grades and music prizes.

  I could not—for many reasons—explain to her how much more effort, how much more battle and agony, had gone into what she saw as my great failure than had gone into the many things she saw as my successes, how much harder it was for me to live with Bernard than for me to play Liszt. My relationship with Bernard was a triumph. What might my mother have said to other tales, to the real narratives of loneliness that lay between those angry afternoons when I was fourteen and my discovery of Bernard when I was twenty-four? If I had really wanted vengeance on my mother—but by then, that was the last thing I wanted—I would have told her all the insipid and hackneyed details of one-night stands in which affection was less of a consideration than disease or the grim prospect of attack. I would have narrated the anonymous encounters with strangers in which there was no correlation between pleasure and joy. I would have spoken of meeting men of every class and proclivity, sometimes four or five in a single day, in locations as dangerous and ugly as the Ritz is beautiful, of occasionally being hit, of occasionally hitting someone back. I would have described hiding from the police when their approach had interrupted a fitful spasm in the arms of some aging and mild-mannered sadist in a public park, trembling half-naked behind a scruffy shrub and trying to be as still as in a childhood game of hide-and-seek. I would have told her how unthinkingly and casually I had given myself into the hands of unknown men, how I, though I disliked sharing a glass with a friend, would open my mouth to the chapped lips of a nameless unshaven figure in faded jeans and a torn T-shirt, and give up that self my mother thought she knew to his immoderate hands.

  There were whole embarrassing catalogs, spectacular lists of tedious and uninventive humiliation that I could have provided. I had descended to a level of banality that was so shocking in itself as almost to outweigh, in my mind, the pain of the experiences. If everything that has ever happened to me has happened in the same moment to my mother, then there can be no excuse for what I did to her in those years; the very thought of it all would have made her more violently sick than two years, than twenty years of chemotherapy.

  But in fact, two things remained unsaid when she died, and this was one of them. Why should the tiresome matter of eros have been such an issue between us, when we were otherwise so linked? I blamed her for the ache of those sordid contacts that had stood in for adult love, as much as she blamed me for even imagining them. It ceased to be clear whose fault they were, even whose encounters they were. I have said that my mother never knew of them, but she knew me too well not to guess. I thought then and think now that she guessed everything. Since she thought my life was part of her life, my actions did not so much reflect badly on her as destroy the order she had selected and built for herself.

  “And you’re so unhappy yourself, Harry,” she would say to me.

  “Because of you,” I protested. “If I didn’t have to think the whole time about how unhappy my life makes you, I could have a jolly old time of it myself.”

  “There’s no point blaming me,” my mother said. “I’m sorry if I make things harder for you, Harry. I don’t want to make things harder. I’m sorry that your life, as you now lead it, is not what I would prefer. But”—her voice took on an ironic tone—“you’re a big boy now, and you make your own happiness or unhappiness. You have to take a little responsibility for yourself. You can spend your whole life blaming me because you’re unhappy; you can tell the whole story to a psychoanalyst someday, and say how your impossible mother ruined your life. But that’s not going to make you happier. By then you’re going to be talking about a ruined life. Believe me—I want to see you happy, more than anything.”

  Bernard, whom I wanted so much to love, was caught in the middle of all this—he himself was in some ways of so little significance in my relation to him, except as a convenient line of demarcation, that it was often difficult, when I was in New York, for me to remember what he was like. I don’t know how he put up with it.

  The week my mother became ill, she said to me directly what had been implicit. She played the trump card that by some mutual agreement neither of us had ever played. She said, rationally enough, that her type of cancer was frequently brought on in women of her age by circumstances of stress. And she identified the primary source of stress in her life as my relationship with Bernard. And she finally said out and out what had always been hidden, what I had always feared might be true: that my desire was killing her and would kill her. For her to think as much was perhaps inevitable; we had set that up long before. But for her to say it was so terrible that I could not put it behind me, and will not.

  • • •

  While my mother was in for that first hospital visit, we set in place the rules that would hold for the next two years. Fortunately, I had cleared a long stretch of time without concerts for the holiday in France and for a short trip with Bernard that was to have come afterward, so I could take a few weeks without worrying about work. My mother was never left alone in a hospital room except to sleep. My father would arrive at the hospital at seven o’clock every morning; visiting hours officially began later than that, but the morning guards assumed that seven o’clock visitors had come for some good reason and let him through. His face was marked with so much grief that they perhaps supposed he was already in the throes of bereavement, and were afraid to stop him. Freddy and I would drift over a few hours later. We would all stay until at least eight o’clock at night, often until ten or eleven. It never occurred to us to limit or eliminate this vigil; we went to lunch or to the telephone or to the bathroom in shifts, and none of us ever left the room for more than thirty minutes. My mother had always hated to be alone, and we did not leave her alone, ever, for even a moment; it was as though we, or she, were afraid that she might evanesce if she were in a room by herself.

  We always had private nurses in the rooms as well. In general, therefore, anyone entering the room would find my mother, a nurse, Freddy, my father, and me. There were never enough chairs in these rooms, and there was never enough space, and there was really not enough oxygen for all five of us. Except for the lunch shifts, we sat crowded together. My mother was usually too weak and too depressed and too medicated to come up with anything much like coherence, and the rest of us bit by bit ran out of news and insight to share, and so we would sit in semi-silence, reading books or working, our backs aching from the awkward angles we had been forced to adopt on the plastic chairs, our skin at once clammy and desiccated. We would spin conversation out of each doctor’s visit, each rebarbative hospital meal, each new bowl of flowers, each telephone call. At first, my practicing got squeezed into early mornings and late nights. Later, I brought an electric organ, a portable thing that could be reset to imitate a trumpet or bassoon. The keys were too oddly sprung to work out subtle questions of phrasing and I kept the miserable electric sound turned off, so I couldn’t hear what I was doing. But I could at least drum through scales, negotiate fingering, and memorize new pieces. I sat with my silent music for hours at a time.
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br />   Friends of my parents’ came, the women in attractive day clothes, the men in business suits. They were too animated to be quite believable, as though hospitals made them hilarious. “Concerned,” said my father. “Frightened,” said Freddy. Close family friends came to visit not only my mother, but also the rest of us: later, I would say of certain stretches not, “My mother was in the hospital that week,” but, “We were in the hospital that week.” They sat and joined us and gave us anecdotes, which were fodder for conversation after their departure. There were so many friends; people overlapped for long stretches, and my mother struggled for the energy to be comforted by each one of these many friends, all so eager to give their support; it would have worn out a lesser person to get pleasure from so many visitors. Even now, the thought exhausts me. “You’ve got to be a good listener,” my mother used to say to me when I was little. “It’s more important to hear what other people are saying than it is to get across your own points.” So, now, very little of the conversation was about her cancer; it was about her friends, and their children, and their homes, and their marriages, and their dreams. My father and Freddy and I were struggling for empathy; we did everything but get cancer ourselves.

  Some of the time my mother would drift off to sleep. “What do you think?” Freddy said to me on the third day.

  “She’s suffering. She’s really suffering. Is she just going to go on and on and on and on like this forever until she maybe dies?” I asked. “What are we going to do?”

  “She’s going to have her ups and her downs,” he said. Reasonable as ever, Freddy supplied information from his medical studies. He had called various professors and had got their expert opinions, and those professors were getting other expert opinions. Freddy had discovered a tone of balanced professionalism. “We’re all going to have our ups and downs. Don’t you think, Dad?”

  But my father was lost in reveries of his own; he had followed his mind backward to a happier moment that was buried somewhere deep inside it. When Freddy startled him, he shot us both a look of betrayal: he did not want to be with us in the present. “We’ll do,” he began, and then looked at my mother for a long minute. “We’ll do everything,” he said. “Anything.”

  • • •

  At night, that first week, I would leave the hospital gasping for air. I telephoned friends, and could not bear to come in from the late drinks I had with them, as though I, too, lived in fear that when I was alone I might cease to exist. Helen would sometimes join us at the hospital, but the room got crowded; it was usually after visiting hours that I saw Helen. My mother and father were so changed in this period that I hardly knew them. Helen was the primary evidence that the world goes on. Not that she was insensitive to the developments, not that she was unsympathetic; it was only that she remained distinctly herself. Being in the hospital was like being forever on an airplane with no particular destination, breathing recycled air, hearing the persistent hum of white noise, eating pale approximations of food, feeling the life go out of your hair, your nails, your eyes, straining to read by the flat light of a weak bulb, or to work on the wobbling surface of a folding tray table. Helen was like the one who waits just past baggage claim and customs and runs up to you and hugs you and tells you how late your plane was and where the car is parked and who makes the interminable flight disappear into the here and now of being on the ground.

  Helen and I would meet sometimes at midnight: she would see me through from tension to exhaustion. I did not think much about how Helen felt about my mother, though later on that would prove to be an important matter. I suppose I could see that Helen, though fond of my mother, had her reservations, and that is why I didn’t tell her about the accusations or about my hair; I said, simply, that my mother was depressed and being difficult. Helen talked with insight born of no experience at all about how people respond to illness, and she spent a lot of time telling me how strong I was being. She reminded me that the constant vigil was something my family had elected, and not an obvious necessity. That was good: it made me feel noble instead of dutiful. There was something about the way she would look at me when I saw her, and ask, “How was it today?” that would suddenly make the facts of the day melt away. When I could not love my mother, I could love Helen. She would sip a glass of white wine while I described every flower and every medical report and every detail, over and over. I would try to explain the quality of the fear that washed over me. Helen would hold her head to one side, and look into her wine, and stay so much herself that I was filled with the wonder of it.

  Every day I spoke with Bernard. But the time difference was such that I could not call him late at night, when I was sufficiently awake to have full access to words, and so I would call in the groggy morning, or write letters, or phone from the hospital, or as soon as I got home. But unlike my relationship to Helen, my relationship to Bernard was changed. It was as though all these overwhelming emotions were a gate through which Bernard could not possibly pass. Since my love for him had been called into play as part of the reason for the whole terrible situation in which I found myself, that love of course became suspect and inaccessible. But beyond that, beyond all this explanation, we had nothing to say to each other. I think, I am pretty sure, that that was a change. Bernard told me about the plants in the window boxes and about the cat’s new dish and about dinner with friends of his and about how the car had broken down (again) and about a new shirt he had bought. He described how the painter had redone the front hall and had got paint on the carpet, just around the edges. He told me that the local flower stall had wonderful delphiniums in, and that the gourmet shop had a new kind of very delicious yogurt. I, in turn, narrated to him the events of my days, and asked whether the plumber had been able to fix the washing machine, and about whether Jane was getting on better with her husband. His stories were as charming and as irrelevant as the books of my childhood, and I felt as though I were in my turn performing by rote; it was like playing piano exercises I had memorized for a long-vanished teacher. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to tell him anything; it was that I had nothing to tell him.

  Six months earlier, Bernard and I had taken advantage of chance clear weather and had gone off one Saturday afternoon for a walk in a suburban park that Bernard knew. We had taken a picnic. That day, Bernard’s red-gold hair blew in the breeze like a mane, and the sunlight seemed to be caught in it, almost as though he were the source of the light itself. He had an easy, swinging gait that the uneven path could not frustrate. His voice was soft and relaxed, allegro ma non troppo, as Helen was later to say. “Look,” he would say, “just there,” and point, and I would spot a squirrel, still on the branches. Other visitors to the park smiled as they passed. There were some boys playing cricket and a group of teenagers with Frisbees and one young woman with frizzy hair and big kneepads who was trying unsuccessfully to roller-skate on the uneven ground. Many of the locals were drinking plastic pint cups of beer. Some of them had brought dogs. At last Bernard and I came to a quiet hilly end of things, and found a spot from which we could see no other people, and ate our sandwiches and fruit and drank, between the two of us, a bottle of white wine. Everything Bernard said that day seemed to me to be funny and intuitive, and we talked without thinking, the way I had talked to friends when I was a little boy. So we lay for half an afternoon, side by side, one of his legs crossed under one of mine, and watched the different faces of the park around us. It felt so slight: it didn’t occur to me then that this might be love, though I knew that I had never liked anyone more. The day, like Bernard himself, could not have been less dramatic, less interested in calling attention to itself.

  • • •

  In the hospital, when none of my mother’s friends was on hand, she would stare out the window for twenty minutes at a time. When she spoke, her voice was out of focus, its essential form familiar but its details obliterated. My father and Freddy and I spent long hours discussing what line of treatment she would
pursue and at what hospital, but my mother, in the face of the crisis, became passive; she seemed not to care about these questions. She displayed a lack of interest in how the spots of cancerous flesh were to be eliminated—she, who a few days earlier had had energy to obsess about how a spot on one of my ties might be got out. “What difference does it make which of these punishments you choose for me?” she would ask my father. “You go ahead and decide which is the best way for them to kill me, how gradual to make it. It’s all exactly the same.” And so it was my father who not only made the decisions but also took it upon himself to persuade my mother to move forward. He conveyed to her all the optimism he had extracted from the not-so-very optimistic remarks of the doctors. It was my father who wept at night, when my mother was sleeping a drugged sleep at the hospital, but it was my father who remained calmly wreathed in smiles for fourteen or sixteen hours every day in those hospital rooms. My father produced wonderful numbers: seventy percent of women in my mother’s situation were cured, and if she were chemotherapy-responsive this whole thing would soon pass from our lives like a cold winter. The hospital where we were sitting had statistics twice as good as any other hospital in the nation. Out of the air, my father produced thirty good friends of good friends, women who had had similar difficulties and were now in glowing health; they marched through the hospital room like members of a middle-aged cheerleading squad. My father would meet with the dourest members of the medical professions and come back newly encouraged, bubbling over with all the good news. And he selected a mode of treatment for my mother, a system to cure her, and pretended the decision was as logical as the choice of a car or an investment strategy.