Blue Nights (12 page)

“Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying.

Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes.

I countered.

I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem.

She countered.

“Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.”

I had no answer for that.

I tried to pretend I was home.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.

Only shifts.

Only waiting.

Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.

Will someone please take the catheter out
.

That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening
.

“How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”

D
emoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in
Driving Miss Daisy
.

With effort, I managed to convey this point.

I got released from Lenox Hill.

My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg.

After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned.

An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell.

Many tests were scheduled and done.

A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes.

There had not been.

A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs.

There had not been.

A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery.

There had not been.

And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body.

I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner.

Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen.

I lay motionless on the scanner.

It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean.

It would be one more version of the bed in the cardiac unit: a full-body PET scan had been ordered,
ergo
, as night follows day, there would need to be abnormalities for the full-body PET scan to show.

A day later I was given the results.

There were, surprisingly, no abnormalities seen in the scan.

Everyone agreed on this point. Everyone used the word “surprisingly.”

Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.

Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to tell me why I was afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street.

Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice.

What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others?

Can you evade the dying of the brightness?

Or do you evade only its warning?

Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?

“Have you ever had a moment where everything in your life just stopped?” This was the way that this question was raised by Kris Jenkins, a three-hundred-and-sixty-pound Jets defensive tackle, after he tore, six plays into his tenth NFL season, both his meniscus and his anterior cruciate ligament. “So fast, but in slow motion? Like all your senses shut down? Like you’re watching yourself?”

I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: “I exist very nicely between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ ”

And even a third way: “It doesn’t present as pain,” I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.

28

I
find myself thinking exclusively about Quintana.

I need her with me.

Behind the house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood in which we lived from the day we left Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates until the day we moved into the beach house, a period of some four years, there was a clay tennis court, weeds growing through the cracked clay. I remember watching her weed it, kneeling on fat baby knees, the ragged stuffed animal she addressed as “Bunny Rabbit” at her side.

Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in
.

In a few weeks she will have been dead five years.

Five years since the doctor said that the patient had been unable to get enough oxygen through the vent for at least an hour now.

Five years since Gerry and I left her in the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell.

I can now afford to think about her.

I no longer cry when I hear her name.

I no longer imagine the transporter being called to take her to the morgue after we left the ICU.

Yet I still need her with me.

In lieu of her presence I leaf through the books on a table in my office, each one a book she gave me.

One is called
Baby Animals and Their Mothers
, and is just that, black-and-white photographs of baby animals and their mothers: mostly comforting favorites (not unlike Bunny Rabbit), lambs and ewes, foals and mares, but also less common baby animals and their mothers: hedgehogs, koala bears, llamas. Stuck in the pages of
Baby Animals and Their Mothers
I find a French postcard showing a baby polar bear and its mother.
“Colin sur la banquise,”
the caption reads in French, and then, in English: “Cuddling on the ice floe.”

“Just a few things I found on my travels that reminded me of you,” the note on the card reads, in printing less careful than it once was but still recognizable.

Still hers.

Beneath
Baby Animals and Their Mothers
is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
, an account, by a former editor in chief of French
Elle
, of what it had felt like to have a cerebrovascular accident on a date he knew to have been the eighth of December and next wake at the end of January, unable to speak, able to move only by blinking one eyelid: the condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” (Did anyone use the word “syncope”? Did anyone use the words “pre-syncope symptoms”? Can we find any clues here? Any clue to Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation? Any clue to my own?) For reasons that I did not at the time entirely understand and have not since wanted to explore,
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
had been when it was published extremely meaningful to Quintana, so markedly so that I never told her that I did not much like it, or for that matter even entirely believe it.

Only later, when she was for most purposes locked into her own condition, confined to a wheelchair and afflicted by the detritus of a bleed into her brain and the subsequent neurosurgery, did I begin to see its point.

Beginning to see its point was when I stopped wanting to explore the reasons why it might have been so markedly meaningful to Quintana.

Just let me be in the ground
.

Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep
.

I return
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
to the table in my office.

I align it with
Baby Animals and Their Mothers
.

Colin sur la banquise
.

This business of the ice floes is familiar to me. I did not need
Baby Animals and Their Mothers
to bring the image of the ice floes alive. In the first year of Quintana’s hospitalizations I had watched ice floes from her hospital windows: ice floes on the East River from her windows at Beth Israel North, ice floes on the Hudson from her windows at Columbia Presbyterian. I think now of those ice floes and imagine having seen, floating past on one or another slab of breaking ice, a baby polar bear and its mother, heading for the Hell Gate Bridge.

I imagine having shown the baby polar bear and its mother to Quintana.

Colin sur la banquise
.

Just let me be in the ground
.

I resolve to forget the ice floes.

I have thought enough about the ice floes.

Thinking about the ice floes is like thinking about the transporter being called to take her to the morgue.

I walk into Central Park and sit for a while on a bench to which is attached a brass plaque indicating that a memorial contribution has been made to the Central Park Conservancy. There are now in the park many such brass plaques, many such benches.
“Quintana Roo Dunne Michael 1966–2005,”
the plaque on this bench reads.
“In summertime and wintertime.”
A friend had made the contribution, and asked me to write out what I wanted the plaque to read. The same friend had come to visit Quintana when she was doing therapy in the neuro-rehab unit at UCLA, and after she saw Quintana had a cafeteria lunch with me in the hospital patio. It did not occur to either of us on the day we had the cafeteria lunch in the hospital patio at UCLA that Quintana’s recovery would end at this bench.

So we still thought of that year.

Quintana’s “recovery.”

We had no idea then how rare recovery can be.

No idea that “recovery,” like “adoption,” remains one of those concepts that sounds more plausible than it turns out to be.

Colin sur la banquise
.

The wheelchair.

The detritus of the bleed, the neurosurgery.

In summertime and wintertime
.

I wonder if in those revised circumstances she remembered
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
, what it meant to her then.

She did not want to talk about those revised circumstances.

She wanted to believe that if she did not “dwell” on them she would wake one morning and find them corrected.

“Like when someone dies,” she once said by way of explaining her approach, “don’t dwell on it.”

29

    
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
,

    
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone
,

    
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

    
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come
.

    
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

    
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead
,

    
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves
,

    
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves
.

    
He was my North, my South, my East and West
,

    
My working week and my Sunday rest
,

    
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

    
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong
.

    
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one
,

    
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun
,

    
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

    
For nothing now can ever come to any good
.

So go W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” sixteen lines that, during the days and weeks immediately after John died, spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling. I later showed “Funeral Blues” to Quintana. I told her that I was thinking of reading it at the memorial service she and I were then planning for John. She implored me not to do so. She said she liked nothing about the poem. She said it was “wrong.” She was vehement on this point. At the time I thought she was upset by the tone of the poem, its raw rhythms, the harshness with which it rejects the world, the sense it gives off of a speaker about to explode. I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it.

O
n the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season.