Daring (52 page)

I was playing God.

But the next morning, while he slept, I ran out to find a blender and bought Greek yogurt and organic eggs, oatmeal and ripe fruit, and came back to the hotel to whip up a hefty breakfast for Clay. I half roused him from sleep and poured a café au lait into his feeding tube. Then, what the hell? I poured in another café au lait.

Clay bolted upright. “Let's go to the Louvre!”

And so we did. But what about dinner? Not in the hotel room. I had noticed a baby bistro on our street. The Rotisserie d'en Face looked informal with high red banquettes, all the better to hide our unusual table manners. I asked to speak to the chef. A young man appeared, eager to please. I explained that my husband couldn't take any food or wine by mouth, and I showed him the blender and what needed to be done.

“
Quel dommage!
” the chef exclaimed with a look of horror. In France, to be unable to indulge the sense of taste was unimaginable. I told the chef that Clay could enjoy the meal through the sense of smell, and the ambience of his lovely bistro. The chef was delighted to help us.

That evening, Clay dressed impeccably. He carried his own strainer in a shoulder bag, not at all convinced that a busy chef would be able to accommodate such an extraordinary request. I ordered escargots and held them under Clay's nose so he could inhale the scent of snails and garlicky butter. He groaned with pleasure.

The chef sent out two waiters with trays held high, bearing two silver pitchers, one for his soup, one for his blenderized main course of chicken, mashed potatoes, and haricot verts. The waiters stood around us to partially block the view while my husband poured his lovely meal into the tiny tube below his waist. I ordered whipped cream for dessert and dabbed a bit on his tongue. Two couples from neighboring tables came over to welcome us to Paris. It was one of the most romantic evenings of our lives.

After that experience, we became fearless about eating out. If we could do it in a Paris restaurant, we could do it almost anywhere, as long as I asked the chef's cooperation in advance. We learned that normal is as normal does.

PARIS WAS THE TONIC WE BOTH NEEDED.
We rejoined social life. Over the years, Clay and I had become great friends with Richard Reeves and his wife, Catherine O'Neill. We'd explored the world together, often invited by Reeves-O'Neill to their rented summer places in France and England. But the ultimate experience came at the end of the 1990s, when America was feeling especially flush. The Clinton presidency had left us with a fat budget surplus and Wall Street was soaring on the Internet bubble and e-commerce boom. The value of equity markets swelled and the technology-dominated Nasdaq index rose from less than 1,000 to 5,000. Richard was riding high on the successes of his presidential biographies. It was Richard and Catherine's twentieth wedding anniversary, so Richard gave Catherine an order:

“Get us a castle!”

We arrived in grand style in a chauffeured Mercedes at the gates of the eleventh-century Castello di Brolio in lush Chianti country. As we gasped at the 140-room brick manse, Catherine assured us they had rented only one wing. It had lots of bedrooms but Catherine warned us that she had invited twenty of their journalist friends and some of us would have to double up. Sleeping rough in a castle was a delicious irony. But looking out on the countryside, preserved in its natural beauty as a living Renaissance painting, we quickly joined in Catherine's fantasy. Playing the part to the hilt, we all dressed for dinner and swanned around the balconies with drinks in hand, while Richard's son Jeffrey affected the role of the young Ricasoli family duke and called a welcome to “our ancestral home” to tourists gaping from the gardens below. Mary Murphy, a fellow journalist, staged with me a little musicale called
The Chianti Tales
.

One night at dinner in the baronial great room, after copious refills of the castle's premium Chianti, one of the guests had the temerity to make this toast:

“Here's to us—we're rich!”

That fantasy would quickly fade with the dot-com bust of Y2K. But that inevitability did not inhibit Clay or me from living every moment we had together and sharing our gratitude for another reprieve by throwing the best Thanksgiving soirée ever. We decided to welcome the first day of the next thousand years in the style of a turn-of-the-century dinner party in the Hamptons. Fifty friends came, all dressed up in bustiers and boots, into the high-ceilinged room lit by dozens of candles mirrored in the window walls. It was magic.

Gail and Clay's little “castle”—the old farmhouse in East Hampton.
(Counterclockwise:)
Clay, Catherine O'Neill, Mohm, Maura, David Aaron, Richard Reeves, Chloe Aaron.

The birth of a new century could not hold a candle to the birth of a first grandchild, which took place seven months into the new millennium. Maura chose to deliver naturally in a homey room at Roosevelt Hospital's birthing center. Her serenity through the whole process was remarkable. Moments later, it seemed, Maura was holding her son, blue-eyed like his mother, to her breast and talking about being hungry. It was the most natural of passages. I found myself out on Amsterdam Avenue at one in the morning with Clay, scavenging for cold cuts. Delirious with my assignment, I brought back bagels and lox and chocolate chip cookies for everyone. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be a good grandmother. This was my year to give back, to Maura as a new mother, to my grandbaby as he reached out like a tendril seeking attachment.

The year's rental on the apartment Clay and I shared with Dr. Pat and her husband was up. I had found a charming loft near Lincoln Center. It was a miniature version of Clay's old bachelor pad, with a high ceiling and tall windows and a near replica of his great fireplace. The loft was badly in need of renovation. And as everybody knows, the contractor always takes twice as long as he contracts to take. You wait, and pay, and wait. Clay went back to Berkeley in the fall. I stayed in New York to do battle with the contractor. But the truth was, I welcomed the excuse so I could stay close to Brooklyn and see my new boyfriend.

Declan would greet me at the door in his mother's arms with a full pumpkin-head grin. “Hi, darling,” I'd coo. He'd duck his head shyly behind his mother. Then we'd be off on our giggly scales—I trilled, he trilled, I gurgled, he gurgled, delighted by the mirroring. I bathed him, singing “Rain in Spain” while dribbling water from his washcloth and watching him try to catch it. I couldn't get enough until Maura had to discipline her mother to mellow out and move on to a lullaby, time for bed.

Grandma Gail (called “Nonnie”) with Declan at eighteen months, 2001.

When Declan was six months old, I was entrusted with babysitting privilege while his parents went to a movie. I gave him a soft terry rabbit. He laid it over his eyes and dropped right off. Maura gave me clear instructions before leaving her apartment: “If he wakes and cries, lean down and croon to him, just for a moment, then kiss him and let him pacify himself again. Sure enough, when the baby stirred, I sang to him. He rubbed his hand over the silky square that was always nearby and dropped back into a deep sleep.

I curled up on the sofa to daydream. The phone rang.

“Mo?”

“No, she's out at the movies.”

“Who's this?” Rather alarmed.

“Gail.”

“Gail Sheehy—I know Gail Sheehy. Gail Sheehy is someone I know.”

“Albert?”

“You'll laugh, but I just called to see what Declan did today.”

“That's exactly why I'm here—to see for myself.”

We giggled together. The encounter of two foolish first-time grandparents, both of us were hungry to catch the day's droppings from this delicious creature whose every new sound and movement seemed utterly miraculous.

I described for him watching Maura take Declan to a body movement class.

“What's that?”

“Something like baby aerobics. He reaches for balloons and learns to roll over.”

“And gets to play with his mother for an hour. Isn't Maura a spectacular mother?”

“Isn't she?” I said. “Nurturing comes so naturally to her. She seems to know exactly what to do and how to do it.”

He mocked himself for being a stupid gooey grandparent.

“It's one of the few things that's great about getting old,” I said.

“How about only?” Albert was sixty-nine. “The only other good thing is getting a senior discount on dog biscuits.” We laughed again.

“Maura has turned out to be an extraordinary young woman,” Albert said with great depth of feeling.

“A most extraordinary young woman,” I quelled.

“Being a mother becomes her absolutely.”

“So does being a psychotherapist,” I said. “And she'll be able to balance it all because she's married to a supportive husband.”

“Right!” He said we should shake hands, phonetically, on how well Maura had turned out.

“Yes, let's shake.”

Suddenly, Albert said, “I'm so pleased we had this talk.”

“I cherish it.”

“
YOUR HUSBAND HAS ENTERED
the cycle of slow dying.”

An intensivist they called him. He was a pulmonologist with critical care training who saw patients when they were wheeled straight up to the intensive care unit. The intensivist had taken Clay into the bronchoscopy unit at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York three or four times and tried to dredge the sludge out of his lungs. It was 2006 and a fourth and final cancer was arrested. Recurring lung infections were the only problem. Seemed simple enough. But surgery had removed the part of the tongue that pushes secretions into the right pipe. And after chemotherapy, Clay did not have the strength to cough up the secretions that kept reinfecting him.

“How long does slow dying take?”

“He could live another year like this,” the intensivist said. “Maybe two.”

This sounded to me worse than a death sentence. Would this be like the polar bears who are slowly dying from global warming? As their icy habitat melts away earlier every spring and their swim from shore through rougher seas becomes longer and more treacherous, they lose so much weight and strength, they drown. Where does one go to do the work of slow dying? I asked the intensivist.

“The next time he gets a lung infection, don't send him back to the hospital.”

Give up? Quit? Surrender? I was the bird who flies into the glass window. I hadn't seen this coming. Clay was not actively dying, but he was beyond curing. This is what they call
serious chronic illness
. Our health-care system has no affordable solution for serious chronic illness. We were medical refugees.

Clay made the decision: “No more hospitals!”

I covered Clay with my coat and exchanged a decisive look with our Senegalese aide, aptly named Safoura Tall—six foot one and fearless. Safoura and I wheeled Clay into the elevator and past the protesting security guard and out the hospital's front door with the IV needles still stuck in his wrists. Just taking back that little bit of power felt like a triumph. We danced him into a taxi. Clay was smiling.

BY THE SUMMER OF
2007, Clay was recuperating from another pneumonia and had to be moved to a nursing home for rehabilitation. I was relieved when he was accepted at the Jewish Home Life Care facility on the edge of Harlem. It was a safe place for him to gain strength while I sorted out our future. I was having trouble making the mortgage payments on my house in the Hamptons. The IRS was breathing down my neck for back taxes. For too long I had been paying for private aides for Clay and copays for his many hospital admissions, while trying to maintain a semblance of our old lifestyle. With each of his medical emergencies, I had to cancel a speech or forgo a story assignment. My income was stagnant. Meanwhile, the housing market kept overheating, and my upkeep expenses kept climbing. I was not alone in using the perceived golden value of a resort property along with low interest rates to turn my home into a virtual ATM.