CHAPTER 28
“WILL HAS STARTED DESIGNING THE WEBSITE FOR THE Buddhist monastery,” Liz announced in a breezy way as she entered the house on Monday morning. With a quick flick of each ankle, she sloughed off her street shoes by the front door and slipped into a pair of waiting flip-flops, whose raised soles were a translucent amber. Over the weekend she’d had her hair streaked sweet-potato red, and she was giving Paul a race in the tan department, hers from dragon-boat practice. “It’s a marketing thing. They plan on selling baseball caps to raise money for the new monastery, and because the Dalai Llama’s coming to town.” “I thought he wore an orange golf visor,” I interjected, but there was no slowing her caffeinated ebullience. Without missing a beat, she grabbed Paul’s electric razor from the counter, whacking it open for its regular cleaning.
“Hey! Remember when Will shaved his head that freezing winter night outside on the porch? I’d banned him from doing it indoors—he always makes such a mess, hair all over the place! He was standing in his sleeping bag, at midnight! And then the shaver broke, so there he was, halfway done with his haircut, dismantling and rebuilding the shaver so he could finish. He is such a disaster!”
Seated at the dining room table, a barely awake Paul began looking confused. This was exactly the sort of direction change that left him in the dust.
“Well, at least he can fix the things he breaks,” I rejoined, trying to sound reassuring.
“Break?!” Paul called out. That word he caught solidly through his morning fog.
“Remember when Will broke his arm practicing kite-surfing in the backyard with Gustaf? And of course he had bought all that equipment. Different kites for different wind speeds. Endless amounts of gear.” She rolled her eyes skyward. “Now in the basement with the ice axes, five bicycles, and six pairs of skis. Good grief!”
“Nooo,” Paul smeared the vowel around the air, managing to give it a Ye gads, talkative women! tone. “It’s an infestation!”
Liz and I laughed at the image of words thick as locusts.
“Need calm. For the . . . the . . . you know, the . . .” He waved a hand at himself impatiently, as if he were fanning the embers in his skull.
“Phone call?” I finally helped.
“Yes! Phone call. I’m not awake.”
“Okay, we’ll be quiet. Promise.” I lifted a hand to my mouth and turned it like a key in a lock; Liz did the same. We knew that telephoning was nerve-racking for him.
Paul avoided the telephone instinctively, the way moles avoid light. His anxiety was understandable, since he never knew if he’d be able to find the right words, and he couldn’t see the other person’s face to gain clues about what they were saying. Worst of all, as wrong words kept muscling in and sabotaging him, his listener would often retreat into a confused silence. Then the common to-and-fro of a telephone call would deteriorate into long spasms of quiet.
All he wanted was to return a call from his friend Brad, novelist and editor of the literary magazine Conjunctions. As we stood in my study, Paul finally gave up trying to dial and sat seething in frustration with the cordless phone in his hand.
“Why do I keep pressing the scurvy button when I know it’s scurvy?! I can’t stop pressing the scurvy one!” Paul snarled. Holding the receiver at arm’s length, he looked accusingly at its dumb gray face. “It’s as if someone else is guiding the machinery, and always scurvy! No . . . scurvy is the wrong word. Wrong is the wrong right word.”
“Shall I dial it for you?” I tried to keep my voice on an even keel.
“I won’t be able to talk anyway,” he moaned.
He was dismal, self-incriminating, feeling the warp of his mental universe. How could he not grow discouraged? My study was safe and comfortable, with the plush purple armchair for him to slouch shirtless in, and a flock of brilliant goldfinches chittering outside the open window, but there was no way for him to relax. And the more stressed he felt, the more difficult talking would be.
“Are you afraid you’ll have trouble finding the words you want?” I offered, hoping to help him make peace with his nerves.
“It’s like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves,” he lamented.
“It’s as if some words loom larger than others and actually repel them,” he then said at half speed, thrusting his arms out, as if pushing words away. “It’s as if a word, the wrong word, clings to my face like an octopus, and then leaves, thank god.”
Sympathizing, I murmured: “That sounds wretchedly frustrating.”
“Frustrating!” he echoed. “The minute I talk into the Plexiglas I’m a goner. . . . not Plexiglas . . . Plexiglas . . .” He paused so long he forgot what he was saying, and threw up his hands in disgust.
Doing my best to tease out his trouble, I pressed on: “What happens exactly? Does a roadblock get in the way? Can you talk around it, you know, make a little detour and find another way to say what you mean?”
Taking a deep breath to calm down, Paul stroked his ill-shaven chin with one hand, smiling absentmindedly when he discovered a tuft of hair missed by his razor.
“There’s a word clamoring to be heard . . . that . . . that . . . blots out all the others. Then all grammar, all verbal structures . . . blow out the window. . . . Sometimes I see a word, spelled right, at the front of my skull, in several colors. But never the word I want. For example, I said ‘Plexiglas’ when I was grabbling for something else.”
“Telephone.”
“Tel-e-phone,” he sighed with the relief of someone scratching an itch.
“Not to say Plexiglas is incredibly hard,” he said haltingly, as if groping for an unknown language. “When this anarchy occurs, there is for me no way of dragooning anything else into the mix. My brain feels like suet.”
“Nice image!”
Paul considered my praise a moment, agreed, and smiled with the pride of ownership. That small achievement, however slight, buoyed his confidence just long enough to risk the perils of phoning once more. This time I dialed, but after all our pre-game warm-up, Brad wasn’t home. I left a message that Paul had called.
Around dinnertime, Brad returned the call and began leaving an encouraging message for Paul on the answering machine. Hearing Brad’s voice, Paul pantomimed that he wanted to talk. I answered the phone just as Brad was saying “I love you, man,” and handed the receiver to Paul. Although I was tempted to leave the room to give him privacy, I knew he might need my help finding words, and several times he did. He stammered a lot, but nonetheless conveyed his feelings and for once he enjoyed the pleasure of touching voices with an old literary friend. I agonized as Paul searched in vain for words, but I was also proud of him for bravely tackling the labyrinth of aphasia.
“You know Rexroth had a stroke with speaking problems, too,” Brad ventured, referring to the poet sometimes called “the father of the Beats.”
Paul’s face seemed to wither from the question on his mind, but nonetheless he asked: “Did he recover fully?”
My heart sank. Cure wasn’t possible, only improvement, and only after unbelievably long, hard work, and even then Paul was bound to feel unsatisfied.
“What hap . . . happened . . . to Rexroth?”
“He hired an assistant and did lots and lots of therapy. But just a year later he published a new book of poems,” Brad replied in encouragement.
Long forgotten, I now recalled how another poet, William Meredith, had visited our home years before with his partner Richard Harteis. Ex-Navy pilot and past poet laureate, Meredith had published ten celebrated books of poetry before a stroke, in 1983, which badly crippled his ability to speak and move for over a year. Assisted by Harteis, he still traveled and “gave readings,” with Harteis reading while Meredith sat in the audience. Afterward, he’d socialize, and let Harteis interpret if need
be. I remembered Meredith’s strange, clogged, halting speech. Yes, it made so much sense now. What a lovely guest Meredith had been, affable and smart, and, after years of speech and physical therapy, able to handle small talk and walking, albeit with great effort. In devastating hindsight, I recalled how Paul and I had felt grave sorrow for him.
Idly browsing my bookshelves while Paul finished his call, it occurred to me that Paul had joined a wretchedly distinguished club. With stroke and aphasia so common, myriad authors, composers, and other creative souls must have suffered similar fates for centuries. Ravel, Rexroth, and Meredith piqued my curiosity, and I resolved to do a little research, a project that might also interest Paul.
As if reading my mind, Paul asked after he and Brad hung up: “I wonder . . . about other writers . . . have aphasia? . . . Proust . . . Joyce . . . Dickens?” He quickly circled one open hand in the air, a motion that usually means and so on.
Despite the day’s highs, as night fell, a savage wistfulness haunted me, as Paul’s words, gestures, and concerns unfolded on a narrow plane, in few dimensions. All that was missing existed offstage, as shadows. Some things are much more present in their absence.
About that Marcel Proust was right. I remembered that like Paul, Proust also had a cork-lined room to shield him from the clamor of daily life, and kept a reverse sleep-wake cycle. Proust’s room was a bedroom chamber where he wrote, and sometimes dined on mashed potatoes delivered by carriage from his favorite restaurant at the Ritz. In Paul’s case, the cork-lined room was his study, also windowless. And for years before his stroke, Paul had had a serious mashed-potato addiction, too. He’d traveled with packets of dried mashed potatoes in his suitcase, and at home he liked to thicken soups or stews with them, a habit I found repulsive and vehemently banned from my own portions.
While Paul watched his nightly television, trying to distract myself, since I was still feeling a bit blue, I hunted through the library and online to find an answer for us about other writers afflicted with aphasia. Sure enough, Baudelaire had been stricken, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Johnson, and C. F. Ramuz. Proust was a strange case. A lifelong asthmatic and neurotic, he hadn’t endured aphasia himself, but morbidly feared it. His physician father had published scholarly papers on aphasia before succumbing to a stroke at the age of fifty-six, after days of altered consciousness. Later on, while Proust was still living with his mother, he experienced its devastation firsthand when she had a stroke that left her aphasic for two years before her death.
Small wonder Proust became alarmed, in his early thirties, by the onset of slurred speech, dizziness, memory lapses, and falls. That constellation of symptoms probably hadn’t come from stroke but from the collision of all the drugs he was taking in excess—for sleep, waking, asthma control, psychosomatic banes, and reappearing streaks of malaise. Paul knew about Proust’s suffering—lucid, addictive, and otherwise—but not his mother’s aphasia. Computer printouts in hand, I trundled out to the living room to share with Paul what I’d found.
When I read Paul this quote of Proust’s—“A foreigner has taken domicile in my brain”—he nodded with empathy.
“But did you know that Emerson also had a stroke with bad aphasia?” I asked.
“No! . . . How did he transcend?”
Paul’s question was serious, but we both smiled at the pun on “Transcendentalist” that had winkled its way around his brain and out through his mouth under its own power.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find many details.”
By the summer of 1871 Emerson had begun losing his memory and braving progressive aphasia, probably part of a degenerative brain condition. The great essayist forgot his own name, and when someone greeted him with “How are you?” he’d often reply: “Quite well. I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.”
“Actually, there’s been shockingly little written about any authors who have had strokes or aphasia,” I told Paul. “Isn’t that odd? But quite a bit is known about Baudelaire. . . . he had a left-hemisphere stroke very similar to your own, only it didn’t turn out so well.”
“Tell me,” Paul said eagerly, and settled back comfortably. He loved to hear about other aphasics who were worse off than he was.
Then, wistfully, he added the single word “flâneur,” pronounced with a good French accent and a hint of tenderness. He had taught me the word when we visited the picturesque medieval city of Tours, for a conference on Paul’s work at the Université François Rabelais, on the lush banks of the wide, myrtle-green Loire. Flâneur is French for someone who strolls or lounges, a word Baudelaire had commandeered to mean “someone who walks or loafs around a city in order to experience it,” because modern life, with its social riptides and cultural bonds, had become too complicated for traditional art. Baudelaire felt that one needed to live as a cynical voyeur on the one hand, and yet a passionate denizen of the meanest streets on the other. Paul’s working-class background and rarefied Oxford education had resulted in a similar outlook.
I dived in. “Baudelaire’s case is very sad. He was only forty-five when he had a left-hemisphere stroke with Broca’s aphasia.” I spoke under easy sail, habitual by now, pausing between parts of sentences, to give Paul time to process what I was saying. “As you know, he caught syphilis in his teens, and it kept flaring up and plaguing him with the usual miseries: pain in all his joints, hair loss, ulcers, god-awful fatigue, fevers, sore throats, rashes everywhere, depression, and bouts of psychosis.”
Paul grimaced silently.
“Yep. The whole bag of tricks.”
“And he was . . .” Paul lifted his thumb and first finger to his mouth, separated and tilted them in a gesture of drinking.
“No, it didn’t help that he was drunk as a fish and took opium. There was this episode in Brussels where a friend found him in his room at the Hôtel du Miroir . . .”
Paul grinned.
“I know. How funny is it for a French poet to live in a hotel of mirrors? Anyway, one morning his friend found him in his room, lying in bed, fully dressed, but unable to move or speak. He recovered slightly, well enough to read proofs and dictate a few letters. But he had another stroke, this one paralyzing the right half of his body and leaving him completely aphasic.”
Looking concerned, Paul asked, “Could they do anything?”
“Not much. One of his friends said that ‘the softening of his brain’ was obvious, and she was afraid that he would ‘outlive his intelligence.’“
Paul’s eyebrows leapt in horror.
“Isn’t it a wretched thought? He really couldn’t communicate at all, so finally he was taken to the Institut Saint-Jean et Sainte-Elisabeth, a clinic run by Augustinian nuns, where, apparently, they found him quite a handful. Not least because all he said was a curse, Cré nom.”
“Cré nom!”
“Which translates roughly as goddamn, right?”
“Goddamn. But a . . . nunnery?” Paul looked positively gleeful.
“Of all places for a perpetually cursing, decadent artist! Listen to this passage about Baudelaire from this book I bought called Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists.”
Paul nodded in assent, so with a deep breath, I read:
With these two words, he who had loved and practiced the art of conversation was obliged to express the whole gamut of his feelings and thoughts—joy, sorrow, anger, and impatience—and he sometimes flew into a rage at his inability to make his meaning clear, and to answer those who spoke to him. . . . [T]hought still lived in him as could be divined from the expression in his eyes, but it was imprisoned in the dungeon of his flesh, and without means of communication with the outside world.
Although I read the passage twice and slowly, I wasn’t sure Paul could follow all of it. But he gestured he wanted me to go on.
“So, the Sister Superior,”
I continued, warming to my report, “wrote to Baudelaire’s mother that the religious hospital really wasn’t the right place for her son, complaining that she didn’t like having such a blasphemous man in the house! Apparently Baudelaire’s mother began to get concerned that the nuns might torment him.”
“How?” Paul asked.
“Who knows. Maybe just engulf him in prayers and demand that he repeat them. It really must have been an awful place for someone who couldn’t speak except for yelling goddamn! I’m sure the constant cursing got on the nuns’ nerves.”
Paul was chuckling to himself, and I could tell he was picturing the scene, with Baudelaire screaming Cré nom! and the kind sisters in wimples and flowing robes circling him with crucifixes and prayers.
“And the sisters said they found him frightening—so maybe he seemed satanic to them? Remember, Baudelaire once said, ‘Men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil!’ I’m sure they must have thought he was totally wicked. Maybe,” I drawled with exaggerated seriousness, “they exorcised him! Apparently he shouted his head off at them. But it was the only clinic in Brussels for patients as bad off as he was. I’ll read you what one of his caregivers said about him.”
As usual, I read the passage to Paul slowly and twice through:
He acts like a quasi-mute, who would articulate one single word and try to make himself understood by varying intonations. I understand him quite often, as far as I’m concerned; but it’s hard.
“Still following?”
He nodded, but that didn’t necessarily mean yes. I wondered if he was just being courteous or obliging or didn’t have the energy to protest, but I continued nevertheless, skipping down the page to a quotation from one of Baudelaire’s friends:
One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir Page 27