A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  “I think I’ve got everything I need here,” I replied.

  “Well, I’m a bit tired,” said Bernard, after another pause. “I’m going to go back to the flat and get to bed early. I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he added.

  “I hope you do better tonight,” I said. “I must say I’m rather exhausted myself.” We stared at each other for a moment, then kissed each other goodbye much as we might have done if we had been planning to meet for drinks in an hour.

  “I think it’s best that I not come to New York just now,” said Bernard. “But I’ll see you soon. And I’ll call.”

  “You could still come if you wanted,” I said. It was a sentence that cost me impossibly much.

  “Don’t you think that would be a mistake?” he asked, and since I had already given him one opening, I said, “Yes, I suppose it would,” and tried to sound cheerful. We were both much too polite to break up by anything other than mutual consent.

  “I hope everything’s all right with your mother,” he said, and we had another quick kiss goodbye, and then I went into my house and closed the door and gave in to the shock and relief and ghastly sadness. I lay down on the sofa and watched the silhouette, blurred through the soon-to-be-replaced undercurtains, of Bernard’s car pulling out of its usual spot in front of my house.

  • • •

  It was on the plane that it occurred to me that I might as well move to New York. If Bernard was really over, then what was there to keep me in London? The recording was done, and I wanted to start performing more in America anyway. October had been left clear of concerts so that I could have a month in New York; the performances scheduled for the following months could all be negotiated with a bit of commuting. My agent had an American affiliate who seemed easier to deal with, and who had said years before that he would take me on if I wanted to base myself in the US. There were my London friends, but I had, of course, all my New York friends, many of whom I had known for much longer. And there was Helen. “You can’t make a new old friend,” my mother used to say. On the plane I lapsed into reverie, an absurdly happy reverie. A month in New York, unbroken, a month without any planes, without even having to go to the airport to pick up Bernard as planned! If I had never again had to pack a suitcase, it would have been too soon. I have always loved cumulative statistics: in the course of your lifetime, you will spend three years chewing; you will replace your skin completely a thousand times; you will drink as much water as is contained in Lake Huron. I felt that year that if I hooked up all my transatlantic flights I could have joined the voyagers on the Starship Enterprise, and I suddenly realized that I was being given the option of home leave. At that moment, it sounded better than a spa vacation.

  • • •

  I arrived in New York on the day of my mother’s birthday. I had told my mother that Bernard and I would be arriving together, a week later, because I wanted to surprise my mother on her birthday. “If one only knew what was happening,” I had said to Helen. “Then I could decide how much time to give my mother. If I knew that she had six weeks, I would stay by her every second. And if I knew that she had ten more years, I would ration my time a bit, because enough is enough.”

  Helen said to me, “Enough is enough; if you spend every minute with her, you’ll go crazy. But don’t be stingy about it, either; whatever happens, the time you spend with her won’t be time wasted.” And so I had decided to surprise my mother for her birthday again.

  And again she was surprised. But this year, she was truly and unequivocally delighted. Now she seemed to see everyone’s love so strongly and so clearly that she made it solid and colored it in all her favorite shades. She had the whole time that smile she had had when she danced with my father in the hotel on Lake Como, that generous, reckless smile she used to squeeze all the pleasure out of good days. She kept reaching out, through dinner, to touch my arm; I can still feel the almost imperceptible weight of her thin hand on my sleeve. At her birthday a year earlier she had looked worse than I had ever seen her, with her terrible wig and her strange loping walk, and the sight of her had been unbearable; but on this birthday she was as beautiful as I could remember her ever being. It was as though the chemotherapy were purifying her: she had the transparent animated look of medieval saints in ecstasy. I told her about Bernard at dinner that night (though I’d told her a bit before by phone), and she said—not as though it were an insight, but as a matter of simple fact—how odd she found the idea of anyone’s ceasing to love me. “Just when I’d got used to the idea of him, too,” she said, and laughed sadly. “Don’t worry, Harry. The right person is there for you. It . . .” her voice trailed off. “It takes time,” she said, and her inflection reminded me that time was the thing she no longer had.

  • • •

  A few days later, we went out to lunch. I can’t remember how old I was when my mother and I started going out to lunch. When I was little, I remember that she and my father used to banter about whether he was taking her to lunch; they had dinner together every night of their married life, but lunch was a meal through which my father ordinarily worked. I can remember how my mother would get dressed up for the occasional lunches he afforded her; I can remember her leaving the house with the stinging smell of fresh perfume. Later, so confident in their love, they let lunch slide: my father worked during the day, and my mother had so many friends to see that it was perhaps easier all around for them to stick to dinner. At some stage, my mother and I took to going out to lunch together, and we would have one lunch out in every school vacation, maybe two or three in the summer. We would go to restaurants slightly less grand than the ones she visited with my father, and she would get slightly less dressed up, but they were still glamorous places and she still had that aura of perfume around her.

  It was a beautiful autumn day, with the slightest nip in the air, and I was wearing a blazer and a new tie, and the breeze felt good. My mother was very weak by then, and had to wear a long fur coat, which she kept draped around her shoulders throughout lunch. Her very short hair was slightly less short than it had been during the summer, and it had been arranged into a boyish coif that seemed carefree, carefree as my mother had never been. I told her at lunch that I thought I might move back to New York. “You don’t have to move back here for me,” she said. “You come and visit. That’s enough, really, enough.”

  But I told her that now that Bernard and I had broken up there wasn’t any real reason to be in London. I told her that I had finally realized that, in moments of crisis, I myself reverted to American responses, and that it was easier to be in America. I told her about sympathy and empathy, the one so English, the other so American. I told her how alien Britain was, and I told her about the chill I’d had when Bernard had suggested that I go home and try to keep everything as normal as possible. I told her that I didn’t think I’d like to grow old in that slightly-below-room-temperature society. I told her I was ready for an American career. And then I told her—because at that moment it seemed completely true—that when I was in London I felt so far away from her, and that I wanted to be on hand to help her get through this time of suffering.

  “Before I met your father,” she said, “I was in love with a man from Texas. And his family threatened to disinherit him if he married me, because I didn’t come from their kind of family. And he gave in to them, and I cried and I cried and I cried, for months and months and months, and I thought nothing would ever work out again. And when I met your father, I knew that where I came from was where he came from, and that we would never have that argument, and that it made sense for me to be with him, in the world I knew. I thought I was being so practical.” And her voice took on a tone of wonder, as though, twenty-seven years later, she were still incredulous. “It was the smartest thing I ever did, falling in love with your father,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for that boy’s Texas family, it would never have happened, and I might have ended up as one of thos
e displaced people in a world that was foreign to me. In Dallas.” And she paused again. “Harry, I would love for you to be in New York. So long as you don’t move back for me.”

  • • •

  There is a place, along the highway coming into New York from the airport, where they had to build a wall because the view was too beautiful and was causing accidents. In my logical mind, I know that the world offers more startling highway views—that there are mountains in nature before which the New York skyline pales. I like to imagine that it was not so much the sheer majesty of the architecture as the associative value of the New York skyline—which to New Yorkers carries a familiarity made only more meaningful by the likelihood that the streets below will have been transformed. That view is about the way New York changes and stays the same, the way it is always home to the people to whom it is home. I told my mother about this, and she smiled. Then she asked, “Have they set a date for the release of your recording?”

  “They have,” I said. “Finally. It’s going to come out in June. And they are going to include the Rachmaninoff.” There had been some talk of cutting the Rachmaninoff, and substituting early Beethoven. I had not been pleased by this idea.

  “June,” said my mother. “We should have a party to celebrate that. It’s been so long that you’ve been working on it. Would you like to have a party?”

  I always wanted to have a party. So we talked about the party, and I said I would start looking around for fittingly splendid places to have it, and my mother and I selected a date, and I said, “You should be through your chemotherapy by then, shouldn’t you? So we could celebrate that?”

  And my mother said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” and then the waiter brought her salad and my fish, and offered pepper, which she didn’t take and I did, and for a moment we ate. The restaurant was enormous, an old warehouse space that had been converted, with great columns and enormous cloth lanterns. The food was delicious. We had tables near the great back windows, which looked out at a garden, and the last autumn flowers blew gently back and forth in the wind. The sun came in on the diagonal and lit up our food. “Harry,” said my mother. “I’m a little weak right now from the chemotherapy, but other than that, I really feel very well.” She paused, and I nodded.

  “You look terrific,” I said.

  “You know that my second treatments haven’t really worked. And that your father is discussing other options with the doctors, and that they’ll probably start me on something new next month.”

  “The cancer’s not growing,” I said.

  “The cancer’s not receding,” she said. “Please. I know that you have your routine that you go through, and I know you go through it to make me feel better, and I really appreciate that. But I’m not a fool, and I know what’s happening, and you also know what’s happening. It would be lovely if one of these things worked, and perhaps one of them will, and this time will all recede into memory. But it’s not very likely. If the first therapy had worked, I might have been fine, and there was a chance with the second, but once you get to the third and the fourth rounds of treatment, the chances are almost nil. I don’t mean that I don’t have any time left, but I think it’s limited.”

  I could tell that there was something more coming, something terrible. My mother had that calm, rational, radiant quality she had had since Italy. Her blue eyes did not blink. “I don’t want you and Freddy to remember me as an emaciated wreck screaming in a hospital bed,” she said. “I don’t want that. And I don’t want to go through all that pain myself. I hate physical pain; I’ve always hated it. I hate even discomfort. I’m telling you this now, while I’m feeling very well, because if I try to tell you later it will be more difficult, and you’ll tell me I’m out of control and incoherent. Your father and I have talked and talked about this, and my decision is made. I will go on with treatments as long as the doctors say there is a chance of my getting well. But when they say that the battle is lost, that they can only extend my life for a month or two at a time, while I get more and more miserable, then I am not going to go on. I’ve thought about this, and I’ve made up my mind. It’s the right decision, the right decision for me and for all of you. My friend Stella died screaming and contorted and it was horrible for her and it was horrible for her family. I’ve heard Philip say that he will never forget that last week in the hospital with the intravenous painkillers and the sedatives. That’s not life, Harry.” My mother put down her fork and she put her hand on my hand, next to the bread basket. “Harry, I have got the pills I will need to do it. I’m not going to do it now; I’m not going to do it until I have to, and I think when the moment comes we will all know it. But I wanted to explain this to you now, so that you won’t be too shocked then. I am not going to see this disease through to the very bitter most miserable end.”

  My father and Freddy and I had agreed a long time before that we would not cry with my mother, would not let her know that we, too, thought she might be dying; by and large we tried not to admit that even to each other. “But you can’t . . .” I began, without knowing the rest of the sentence.

  “I can,” said my mother. If tears are memories, then there were memories streaming down my cheeks as my mother spoke, memories making my napkin thick and heavy, memories pouring out of me unstoppably and endlessly. We had been so joyful, a whole family almost wholly joyful. And there we were, she and I, in yet another beautiful place, watching the sunlight and the breeze stir the flowers, and my mother was so calm, so suffused with a light of her own, so beautiful herself in her dark blue suit with the high collar of her fur coat coming up around her face, and the easy words coming to her one after the next.

  “And there’s one other thing,” she said to me. “You have to help take care of your father when I’m not here. I know how angry you get at him, and I know how difficult he can be. Of course I know that. But you will have to help him. And you have to encourage him to find someone and get married and get on with his own life. That will be better for you and for him. Whomever he finds—it won’t be me, but it will be someone. He should live for a long time, and he shouldn’t be alone. Try to be nice to her. Try to make her feel loved, and accepted. Try to help your father, Harry, even if you don’t feel like it.” And then with a sudden voice of sorrow, she said across my steady tears, “You are going to be all right. We are having a rough time, but you have a life ahead of you, and it’s going to be a good life. You have to make it a good life. And you will do that, Harry. I know that you will.”

  I was not sobbing or weeping; I just sat with tears running down my face, enough tears to fill the large glasses on the table, to water the garden outside, to make up for the rain that was not falling much that autumn. My mother took my hand in hers again, and squeezed it. “I don’t know how much time I have left,” she said. “Maybe very little. Maybe not so little. But I want us, all of us, to have as good a stretch as we possibly can. I want to get all the joy there is left in my life, and I want to leave you with as many happy memories as I can. I’m sorry I had to tell you all this, right now, but now it’s done. Don’t cry yet, Harry. Wait and cry later, if you have to.” She paused and looked out. “Look at that perfect yellow rose,” she said. “A perfect rose, growing right here, in the middle of Manhattan.” And so I looked out the window at the rose, which was indeed perfect. “And Harry,” said my mother, smiling. “Can we please try not to fight, at least for a while? And would you try not to fight with your father and with Freddy? Would you try, at least, not to fight about nonsense?”

  And so I finally laughed, as, in the end, I always laughed with my mother. “OK,” I said. “No fights. But you have to promise me that you’ll try to get well, really try.”

  My mother laughed, too. “I’ll do my best,” she said. “Now, how many people are you going to try to squeeze into this party in June? Could we manage something elegant that is not a mob scene? Could you restrict yourself to friends about whom you actually have
some feeling?”

  As we ate dessert, my mother described the terrible food at a wedding she’d attended the previous week, soup “like library paste with small chunks of wood” and the meat “which had been put in to roast the same week the invitations were printed” and the cake “with icing you could have roller-skated on.” We began to spin out the plans for my party, and it became magnificent. We both laughed and laughed and everything we were imagining seemed so real to me that I could not hold on to the fact that my mother was planning to kill herself, and had just told me all about it.

  • • •

  I suppose that losing Bernard was my own doing, and I think I did it to practice for losing my mother. I spent the month of October loving my mother, and that love took on a purity because all my rage and hatred were taken out on Bernard. I wrote him a cruel letter about abandonment, and I plotted the terrible things I would do to him. I would go into his flat and smash the set of espresso cups his grandmother had left him. I would smash his Chinese vase. I would smash his Chinese vase over his head. I would find the keys to his windows and throw them away so that he couldn’t get to his window boxes. I would mutilate his cat. I would tell him that I had AIDS. I would go in in the middle of the night and smother him with his own pillow. I wrote him a letter carefully designed to make him fall in love with me, hopelessly in love, so that I could reject him brutally. I would cut the sleeves off all his favorite shirts. I would castrate him with a straight razor.

  Helen was immeasurably patient with this catalog of fantasies, but said very definitively that the most effective revenge was to be charming and blasé, so that he would regret having allowed the relationship to slide. I am not entirely persuaded that this was more effective than some of these schemes of violence would have been, but it was certainly more sensible; and, as Helen pointed out, it was something I would be unlikely to regret later on. It allowed me to keep some dignity, and was not illegal. For a while that October, Bernard phoned every day, but I did not answer my telephone and let him leave messages on my machine. I called his machine during the day, when I knew he would be out. At first, I told him what was happening, but finally I asked him not to phone me anymore.