Cosmo (22 page)

Now, in these early days of summer and terminal cancer, I find myself sorting through box upon box of those first, earliest volumes, each first page marked by my juvenile signature. Sitting and coughing in my dry crawl space, the hanging bulb a white glow above me, this seems like the best and easiest place to start scanning through my life's lingering effects (only easy because I'm pawing through
my
things, I realize: journals and diaries and albums of life before Katherine, a love affair so tremendous that thinking about her means breaking another bottle in my stomach). I clutch a cigarette in my teeth and tear through taped-up cardboard, looking for my boyhood stuff: the smell of spilled wax, of decaying paper, of old ink and rubber and the hint of grease, all bringing flashes of some irretrievable year when things were almost certainly sweeter. The house rests above me, as silent and still as all these slow-ticking days, and I find so much here, such richness, and it's all about me.

I find a box filled with notebooks and loose-leaf pages. These were my first drafts, my first attempts at writing. At twenty I was willing to plunge my entire life into a pursuit I could barely define. I wrote terrible, terrible stuff, but mountains of it, and it's all here: novels and novellas and spools of poetry, notebooks spilling over with my left-handed scrawl. Where could I not travel with words? I thought. Why not remake everything unsightly, everything blasted by greed or hate or stupidity, with the power and flash of language? I wanted poetry and prose to expand consciousness, to redraw the boundaries of self and subject. I wanted art to be ethics, to replace the remnants of my religion as the real indicator of virtue, of the divine. I saw myself in terms of escape: disentangled from politics, from dogma, from the nets of family. I saw full potential, burgeoning wisdom, and little else.

When you first start smoking, it's all romance and kindness, the sustaining fuel of a new affair. But years pass, and after countless packs the tar and ash take their toll: wheezing on short flights of stairs, the dry persistent hack that betrays a smoker like a scarlet
S
. I scan through these first fledgling notebooks, stained with my unbelievable aspirations, and see only the rush of new love, drunk on possibility, on the strange canyons and crannies of a newly discovered body. Everything was experiment, everything the happy failure writing and art (they say) is supposed to be. But writing and I soon felt the strain of our extended cohabitation. While I was wheezing up stairs and nicking like a maniac, I was also panting with the effort of pushing my art into more complex acts of love. I was embarrassed by my flailing, intimidated by writers who could woo me with a single sentence, and so I dug into the writing life as one settles into a long and unsatisfying relationship.

I'm not sure what happened. I rented an inexpensive apartment (my stupid romantic garret); I got a day job doing manual labour, hefting bags of bread and buns from delivery trucks, dusted with flour and meal, returning home to my cramped quarters to begin tapping away at my typewriter. I did all the things I thought were necessary: going to readings, buying the small magazines, following the small-press publishers, ­discovering the stranger voices I never got in school. All I can say is that I grew afraid – afraid of rejection, perhaps, for all my late-night, malformed births, stained with spilled ash and coffee. Afraid of being discovered as a fraud, an imposter; that all my passion was just the disguise of a middling thinker, born of middle-class parents, fraternizing with the same group of art-oblivious men I'd known since high school. What would the real writers think of me? Rejection letters, returning my long-winded stories and avant-garde poems, merely reinforced the general theme: that I wasn't destined or invincible or immortal, or even notable.

So I came up with a surefire backup plan: teaching. Something to pay the bills, I thought, while I wrote my masterpieces, not knowing how difficult and trying, how absolutely soul-fatiguing such a profession can be. I was twenty-seven by the time I'd trudged through teacher's college, still delivering crusty buns and croissants, occasionally writing and finding a tiny publisher in some distant corner of the country. I was lucky enough to find a job in Burlington when I did, luckier still to find the woman there who would be my wife. Katherine was put in my path by a squad of prescient angels, I'm sure; she was the only person who could at least temporarily alleviate my need to write, who could transport me to a place where writing didn't matter. And so the scribbling urge went on the backburner for a few summery years, filled with Katherine's tender laugh and her own bag of addictive loves. We gardened and took long beachside walks, drove to the States and went camping. We talked about books like readers, not writers: in awe of our betters, jealousy and bitterness all but evaporating in her easy company.

I moved in with Katherine, trying for a baby in two years, only to find us unable to conceive. It was a blow, the news that we had about a 1 percent chance, shaking our little suburban shrine to its stone basement (our shrine to each other, to the future). Miraculously, we were enough for each other – the two of us, complete, compact. We would keep trying for ten years, crossing our fingers for that 1 percent, but if nothing materialized, it was enough to be who we were. And I thought I was better than my stern writer models who warned me never to marry, or have kids. In these days I was careful to smoke only in the mornings and at night, keeping my distance from Katherine, who said the smell gave her headaches, could spoil our chances of becoming parents. And while at night, smoking with abandon (the way lovers must devour each other in adultery, in shadowy motels, emerging into post-coital sunlight in glorious filth), I tried to get back into the swing of writing, tried to pump out a novel-length project every couple of years. By sacrificing sleep, I managed about an hour or two a day, spent hunched over an electric typewriter, watching headlights out the windows and the minute hand stalk by. After midnight or one, I would climb the stairs and collapse into bed, Katherine softly mumbling beside me (heartbreaking nonsense, as if these were last words, oracular messages, mist and divination), my hands still twitching with the thud and click of the keys. And I'd think, lying there after so much exertion and so little result, that I wouldn't have even tried if it weren't for the smokes, or, more distressingly, that maybe the writing was only a pathetic
excuse
to smoke. There was something evil and organic in the way the two passions were linked. Every puff reminded me that I should be at work, erasing and failing. And whenever I wrote, I needed at least a full pack by my side. I began to doubt that I could compose a single, measly sentence without dragging toxins through my lungs.

After Katherine's increasing exasperation over my cravings (and the fear, all too legitimate, that I was killing myself), I felt a swelling sense of shame over my cigarette breaks, over the way my tweed jackets smelled like chalk and stale butts. The commercials were hitting the radio and tv in full force. Smoking was now, almost overnight, unbelievably gauche. As the years passed, I began to toss away each failed manuscript with thoughts of the soothing forgiveness and the guilty release of cigarettes. Every time I climbed the sad steps of our home, huffing and puffing like I was exhausted, I would vow to quit smoking. Only now do I realize that I was vowing to quit writing – to quit and abandon an entire life.

So one day I simply screwed up the nerve. Quitting both the smokes and the scribbling seemed long overdue. After a half-dozen botched attempts, false starts, it seemed done. I felt healthy. I felt energized. I wore the patch and chewed gum, played with an elastic band in my pocket. I also threw tantrums, lost my temper, held my throbbing skull in my hands while thundering headaches forced me to cancel classes or pull over on the freeway. I overate and gained weight, had to avoid all social situations involving alcohol or bars. But I was no longer a failure in the make, a man bereft of respect or achievement. I was now a teacher, a son, a husband, a reader and nothing more. I didn't
need
to be anything more. My entire empty being no longer screamed that no matter what I was doing, I should be somewhere else, working over the ripple and taunt of words. I was free: free from both a burdensome addiction and a destructive ambition. Which was worse, I couldn't tell.

Understandably, my wife was delighted. We were happier than we'd been in years: spending summers travelling through Europe on our childless budget, cultivating a modest flower garden in our backyard, giggling away each squabble before any real hurt could sink in. But Katherine soon developed a tumour much like my own: inoperable, malignant. I kept shaking my head after the diagnosis, muttering
this is crazy, this is crazy
, astounded by how fast the cancer arrived and blew our lives to hell. I'd been careful to smoke outside or away from her; though the doctors pointed to bad genetics, it didn't soothe the guilt. She deteriorated quickly, becoming ever more skeletal and gaunt, a hollowed-out version of someone I knew, could smell, could match in the slow rhythms of sleep. This was the woman whose tears could push out any sliver of anger or upset from me, turn me into a worried mess as I sought to make amends. This was the woman who awoke from bad dreams clutching for me, whom I comforted and held in the dark while she fell back to sleep. Death – this is really happening, happening to us, happening to us now – came with a vicious and staggering speed, ripping out the remnants of her grace and beauty and leaving her a bleating, frightened animal in the pastel wards of St. Joseph's Hospital. I held her hand and tried to tie up what was left of my life. I would go on, I supposed. I would walk down the path that was opening for me: teacher, retiree, reader,
widower
.

If we had a daughter, like we daydreamed and fantasized we would, even past the point when we knew it was impossible, we would have named her Hilda. If Hilda was alive today – say twenty, twenty-five, thirty, let's say living and studying abroad – she would very soon be alone in the world, bereft of both her parents, shuffling home to bury her father.

I wonder what I would say to her now. But it's a stupid train of thought, and I don't linger on it for long.

I light another smoke.

 

At the bottom of a box, creased and folded and coated in dust, I find the last piece I tried to write. I give it a once-over, notice how the words rush and tumble across the page, clumsy and discomfitted. I stumble where I should find footing. But there's a certain admirable flow here, too, and I wonder how much skill might remain after fifteen years of negligence.

I take a long haul and grind a butt against the floor. I sit with my back against the wall in my little underworld and start reading through this last, nameless work. I remember it now – another novel, another meandering narrative tacked on to my ever-expanding chain of abortions. I haven't thought of this – the actual piece – in fifteen years. It seems I was following in the example of a book dear to me –
Zeno's Conscience
(
La coscienza di Zeno
), self-published in the early 1920s by the Italian Italo Svevo. It tells the story of Zeno Cosini, a man forced by his psychiatrist to keep a memoir to help him break the habit of cigarette smoking. It is a book full of lies, full of trivialities, full of familial traumas, much like mine – a domestic and mundane autobiography. It was also roundly rejected by Italian publishers, who forced Svevo to find support abroad (a similar fate no doubt would have awaited my little book, should I have ever completed it). I remember its extended descriptions of Zeno's first encounters with smokes, his inevitable addiction, the mental tricks he attempts to help quit (trying to quit on dates of special significance, for example, or giving some cigarettes the honorary title of ‘last cigarette' – a trick I've cherished and despised, watching that so-called ‘last' smoke, ‘
ultima sigaretta
,' reappear in my hand with each firm attempt to be done). I realize, now, how much we share, Zeno and I: men very much in love with their wives, both of us with an unfortunate obsession with tobacco, occupied completely by the relentless enormity of the past. As I flip through the pages, I reach a sentence that trails off, unfinished. I can't recall how it's supposed to end. Much of it is senseless, garbled, but of all things, I take this ratty pile of papers out of the crawl space, emerging up and into the ruins of my life.

It's gorgeous weather, limpid blue breezes and streaks of white contrails stitching the sky. I endured the last of the semester's exams by being unusually taciturn. Co-workers said farewell for the summer, heading toward their cottages and home improvements and months of babysitting. I lingered in my classroom, Room 225, like I do at the end of every year, relishing the silence, soaking up the nostalgia, the constant sad recycling of generations of students with their renewed boredom and lust and frustration. This time it was the last, my final linger, and it was sad, sadder than I could bear – I rushed back to my car, ashamed of myself, and terrified of the summer ahead.

Now treatment awaits me, the first session scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Is it worth it, what's coming, that chemical wretchedness, being wrenched into something broken and weird? Or is there better work to occupy me, if things are so absolute, so dire, and no one to miss my departure? There are no answers, just the house's strict rule of silence. In response, I decide to forget the doctors, at least for now, and start to make my own noise. I clear off my work desk, manuscript in hand. I dust off the old typewriter, stack up my paper and ink and spare ribbon. I'll try to finish the last piece, even as the streets blossom into heat and lightness, retreating to a darkened office to finish a work destined for my eyes only. To turn it, like
Zeno's Conscience
, into some sort of desperate autobiography. I think of Italo Svevo, of another century, another world.