[sic]: A Memoir (17 page)

•

IN THE HOSPITAL
, I began to feel better so gradually that I couldn’t even tell I was feeling better until, one day, I realized I was bored; and this was an important realization, because in order to feel boredom you must be feeling better than I had been feeling before. Feeling well enough and bored enough to ask to see a music therapist, which was funny; well enough and bored enough to ask to see the priest in residence, the imam in residence, the rabbi in residence. Apparently they were in high demand, because I was only able to see the rabbi. The conversation was brief. He seemed a little distracted. I asked him about death: what if this is all there is? And he said,

You mean, if this is it, then this is it?

I said, Yes, exactly. What if this is it?

He said, nodding, Well, if this is it, then this is it.

And then he looked at me, smiled, shook my hand, and said he had another patient to see.

•

THE RELEASE WAS
sudden, and we were unprepared. It was a sunny morning, and suddenly the staff appeared and announced that I was free to leave. I called my friend Drew—he’s an old friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, a wonderful writer who has his own stories to tell, some of which are not entirely unlike mine—and he drove over and picked us up, my mother and me. We walked outside into sunlight and real air, outside air, and I felt as if I’d never been outside. Then into the car and, setting keel to breakers, went forth on godly York, with its more trucks and its less cabs as it pushed the city toward its limits and pointed beyond them; then on the pale ribbon of the FDR, boring us outward, through that peculiar, seemingly sourceless, greenish blue light of midtown, the light reflected many times over off the glass of skyscrapers, like it’s been spun in a centrifuge; past the 59th Street Bridge, the least elegant, most aggressively, heavily industrial of our bridges, not a joiner, but an exit, pointing elsewhere; along the river, under concrete pedestrian overpasses that connect hospitals to schools; past the sharply soft green jewel of the United Nations building, so lonely and lovely alone against the raging sea of the East River, like helpless Andromeda; the water was beautiful and black, and the traffic was deafening. Timing has been so important in this account: the day of my release happened to coincide with the last page of the little diary my mother was keeping.

The sentence is written on the top half of the last sheet of the ruled notebook. It occupies five of the total thirty lines of the page. These five lines are not consecutive. The first two are separated from the last three by an empty line.

The sentence does not end with a period or any other mark of punctuation.

It is encircled.

•

WHEN I WAS
a kid, my mom used to take me to this old diner on North Avenue, Ted’s, for a hamburger and a shake, as if we were in the 1950s. At a certain point I felt as if I were outgrowing it. (Immaturity!) One of the last times we had lunch there, I’d by then discovered music, discovered the immensity of it. We always sat at the counter. On the wall facing us hung a print of a painting. I don’t recall anything about the painting except that it was bad. (I want to remember it as one of those postwar American geometric abstracts by a forgotten mediocrity—a babyblue, cottoncandy fuzzball lanced by a brown vector against an orange field—but I’m probably making that up.) We were looking at it, and I said to my mom, “No wonder painting is more accessible to the public than music; with music you have to wait for time to get the form, but with painting it’s all immediately there.”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean look how off that thing is, most people would have some intuitive sense, even if they couldn’t explain it, that—” and here she described the awkwardness of the composition.

I don’t remember saying “I love traffic” as we left the hospital. Obviously I did. These were, then, among the last of a whole series of words I don’t remember saying. I don’t know how many words I said that I’ve forgotten, and I don’t know how many of those were recorded. The idea about the difference between perceiving form in music and painting was the type of thing I’d talk about more often with my father than with my mother. I think that by the time my mother and I were having lunch at Ted’s that afternoon, I’d realized they were separating. I was in college by then. We were sitting next to each other, she to my right, and she was framed by a window; her posture was slightly straighter than normal; North Avenue was outside. It occurs to me now that one reason I mentioned the possible difference between perceiving music and painting was that I’d realized they were separating.

Pretty soon after that I went to Europe for a few months. I remember my parents waving goodbye, at the airport. It was the last time I saw them together.

My dad told me once—“You know your mother can’t listen to serious music like Bach anymore. It’s too overwhelming. That’s why she listens to light music, when she listens at all.”

When I returned to college after that trip to Europe my parents would visit me separately, I’d visit them separately. One afternoon my dad dropped by. At the time, I had fallen in love with Mahler and was infatuated with a movement from his third symphony, a slow,
misterioso
setting of Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song.” I played it for my dad. He said, “My God, how sad.”

Not too long after that my mom came by. I never knew exactly where they were in their breakup, and I never asked. I put on a beautiful recording of the slow movement of Mahler’s sixth symphony. It was played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and my teacher was on the CD. After a minute she said, “I’m sorry, I have to ask you to turn that off.”

One morning not too long after that, my father awoke early, got in his car, and drove to the Arizona desert. He rented an apartment and wrote voraciously. He hadn’t written in many years. He had been creatively inactive during those years; he’d been busy raising a family, working in radio and television and advertising, reading when he could, lots of poetry, Anglo-Saxon, Native American, the Greeks. He would eventually reconcile with my mother, but he would never see her again.

The first time I saw my mother in tears was the morning after John Lennon had died in New York. She was driving me to grade school. I was too young to know who he was, but I had the sense that he was of some importance.

One of the final songs Lennon wrote before he died is called “Watching the Wheels.” It’s a poetic defense of artistic inaction. For about five years, Lennon wrote no music. He was busy raising his son, spending time with his wife, reading Plato. During this time, as he says in the song, “people” (which means “the self”) had been calling him lazy; people had been wondering if he was okay just “watching the shadows on the wall.” I’m fine, he replies, in the song, just sitting here watching the wheels go around.

My father ended up living in L.A., and he’d get sick and get better and get sick and get better. One time he called and I happened to be sitting at my computer, and something impelled me to start typing. I had never recorded his words before. He was in a good mood. “I’m just sitting on the edges of the ends of life,” he said, “feeling no pressure to do anything.”

It turned out to be our last conversation (a talk from which I shall draw later in this essay). Odd that I’d had the impulse to transcribe it. Odd that I recorded the last things he ever said to me. The song “Watching the Wheels” features a dulcimer, the Hungarian instrument in the basement restaurant where I never celebrated my entrance into the Liszt Academy in 1933. That dream is over. Before Mr. Lennon’s dulcimer song was released, a young man, holding a book, fired hollow-point bullets through his body, and he lost 80 percent of his blood, and died. It was announced on the news: one guy standing outside the Dakota told the newscaster, ominously, that “the eighties have begun.” The next morning my mother was driving me to grade school and it was the first time I’d seen her cry. Exactly 9,683 days later I left the hospital. It takes about eight minutes to get from Mr. Lennon’s apartment to the hospital I was watching, from my vantage point in the car, recede, watching the traffic, which I evidently loved. You pull out of the garage and drive east on West Seventy-Second Street, take the first right, onto Central Park West; cross the park (you’ll use the Sixty-Fifth Street Transverse, as they call it, but don’t worry about what it’s called, just take the second left), continue through the park until you get to East Sixty-Fifth Street, keep going, then turn left on York: your destination will be on your left. To get from the hospital to the apartment, simply reverse the steps. There was no public service for Mr. Lennon, nor was there for my father.

The original draft of “Watching the Wheels” was entitled “I’m Crazy” and contains lyrics that were dropped, modified, exchanged. For example, in the final version Mr. Lennon writes of how he’s happy just sitting there, how he loves to watch the wheels “roll,” a word that’s then half-rhymed, in an assonant slant, with “go.”

But in the original version, he loves, instead, “the traffic flow”: a perfect rhyme that was thus discarded before it was released, and therefore—like all excisions before release, for better or worse—is known and missed by only a precious few.

VII

A SERIES OF VIGNETTES,
WHICH TURN TO MELODRAMA

Diffused over her face was the dark pallor which I adore . . . Upon her mouth was the glorious, cruel smile which the divine Leonardo pursued in his paintings. This smile wasin sad combat with the sweetness of the long eyes.

—
Gabriele d’Annunzio
, “Gorgon”

It wasn’t until a comment made much later by my
oncologist—“You had a difficult hospitalization!”—that I realized I’d nearly died. It was after I’d had my first outing with Nothereal; I believe it was she who invited me, but we had been corresponding since I’d been convalescing at home, first by letter (beautifully old-fashioned, gracious, I thought), then by e-mail and phone. Finally, we went to a Romanian film at the Film Forum called
12:08 East of Bucharest
(unfortunate English translation), which had recently won pretty big at Cannes. Romania was, and is, at this time of writing, enjoying a flush of activity in film that might well be seen someday as a golden age, along the lines of Australian or Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s and ’80s. It’s a film about a host of a local talk show in a small town in the north of Romania. He’s trying to broadcast a roundtable discussion on the Romanian revolution, which occurred sixteen years to the day before. Gradually the film reveals ambiguity on the parts of the characters’ testimonials: did they commit themselves to the revolution before victory was assured, or did they wait until Ceau
s
¸
escu was forced to flee the capital by helicopter? The gravity of this investigation into truth, guilt, and self-delusion is counterpointed by the ineptitude of the small television studio’s technical crew: the director of the film, Corneliu Porumboiu, presents the last act of his story as the telecast itself. During one character’s impassioned defense of his actions (or inactions) on the night in question, the camera almost imperceptibly pans down, so his face seems to rise slowly to the top of the frame: the crown of his head is cropped, then his forehead is gone, but it’s like watching the sun set; one doesn’t see the actual movement, only its result. At this point, the viewer’s reminded that the small station lacks the funds to replace a faulty camera tripod. I enjoyed the movie, and it brought my trips to Eastern Europe back to me. But Nothereal, Serbian, seemed bored. Was I just a tourist? I wondered about that. Remember that everything the traveler sees, the foreigner sees, seems quintessentially
x
,
x
representing the adjectival form of the place within which stands the traveler. You’re sitting in Belgrade, for instance, in some random café. A few guys come in wearing suits; they’re murmuring to each other, deciding what to order, or where to sit. You watch their every move, their every gesture, every nuance. How quintessentially Romanian they are! To your right, there’s a fluorescent-lit refrigerated beverage display case stocked with Pellegrino, fruit juice, Coke, and some type of locally produced energy drink. Look at how the bottles and cans are arranged! Look at the way that woman drinks her frozen latte, hunched over, sipping through a straw: look at the way she’s peering around, birdlike. The way she’s peering around, birdlike, how uniquely, quintessentially Serbian!

But how many hundreds or thousands or millions of exact replicas of this exact gesture of this exact woman are being performed at exactly that moment, in Guadalajara? in Azerbaijan? in Prague? in New York?

But put the frame of Serbia around this girl, sitting there across from you, in the café, at four o’clock in the afternoon, sunnier now than before, the day’s turned surprisingly warm, and she’s unique.

On the other hand, is it entirely arbitrary to ascribe something that might be called communal trauma to a country whose government rounded up some thirty thousand people—men, women, children, infants—and began executing the men and not only the men, and began raping the women and not only the women. The crowning achievement in postwar mass murder occurred at the same time that, a mere thousand miles away, the classically trained musician Alan Wilder made the heartbreaking announcement of his departure from celebrated synth-pop band Depeche Mode. I remember when the survivors’ testimonials began to circulate. A boy was asked to rape his sister and, upon refusing, was murdered. A mother’s child beheaded while sitting on her lap. Members of the sequestered choosing suicide. I was traumatized by these stories, but I was worlds away, in Paris. What if I had been in Belgrade, in Bosnia? What if the trauma had been more direct? How would such events affect the very citizens of the nation that committed such acts? I’d fallen victim—directly—to the trauma of a life-threatening illness, a life-threatening treatment, the experience of almost dying: didn’t I go a little mad?

I distinctly remember waiting for her before the movie, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston, and seeing her across the river of traffic and feeling so unsteady—I was still unused to walking—that I wondered if I’d be able to cross the street to meet her. After all, nothing had actually
happened
between us when I was in the hospital. I wasn’t sure even now if there would be anything between us. I indistinctly remember her wearing a red dress, so that she resembled a cardinal, not a crow, on a black branch against a white sky, but that may be a false ascription. I distinctly remember waiting in line at the movie theater and talking about exercise, and her smile as she said that she liked yoga because it improved her orgasms. I indistinctly remember my reaction to this. I think I vaguely wondered if Nothereal had read and taken the advice of Madonna, who, in her 1992 book
Sex
, explains to the reader that “on every date you have to say one really disarming thing.”
¹⁵
I distinctly remember the feeling of sitting next to her, in the movie theater, the feeling of watching two movies at the same time, in one of which I was a participant: the feeling that she felt this too.

The movie was presented by the Romanian Cultural Center—the foreign branch of the Ministry of Culture—and there was a random lottery for a DVD of another film by the director: a random ticket receipt was chosen; and I knew we would win, and we did.

Then there was a single glass of wine somewhere nearby the cinema, either before or after the movie, and she looked at me, apropos of nothing and everything, and said,

—if you have to go back in the hospital I won’t be able to help you now.

Her voice was low, and she was not smiling. She looked down, and up again.

This was her lovely professionalism. Nothing had happened, nothing had been breached, when I was in the hospital, when she was a member of my staff.

At some point soon thereafter I went to her apartment, ostensibly to make the acquaintance of her cat. She had an austere, almost clinical flat a block from the hospital; there was something elegantly minimalist about it, but also something of the anonymity of the Eastern Bloc, the big grey shoeboxes just outside of Prague or Budapest. She had very few books, half a dozen, maybe. The place was spotless—hospital spotless. There was a couch and there was a single chair for her desk, and we looked at the couch and then the chair and then at each other. Do you want to take a walk? she said.

We walked along the river, which is, in that strange upper-east corner of the city, also to walk along a highway, and to walk under concrete pedestrian overpasses that connect various buildings of hospitals and medical schools. The water was beautiful and black, and the traffic was deafening, and other than that, there was only concrete, like what they thought, in the 1960s, things would look like now. At this point we weren’t saying too much.

We went back to her apartment. I moved the single chair to the middle of the bare room and sat down. She sat down in front of me, and I touched and then pulled her hair so that her head bent back. Then our bodies were pure as black water and as austere as concrete, as tight as the surface of black water.

So what were the signs, and when did they occur? In what order, what frequency? Was it she who revealed them, gradually, like a stripper revealing, and disassociating, parts of the body; or was it I, as my senses and my body and my mind gradually came back to life, who noticed them, one by one, part by part, reassembling the parts into a whole? We were in a café one morning, and she visibly tensed up, her almost almond eyes narrowing. A couple of good-looking TriBeCa guys had walked in; I had already vaguely recognized, without giving it any thought, that they were gay. She wanted to leave. So there were those kinds of things. One time we were walking down Canal Street, and we passed a trio of Hasidim, and she clenched my hand. We were having dinner outside at the Odeon one night and a friend of mine walked by. He lives in the neighborhood; he’s a television producer; he’s Jewish. I introduced him to Nothereal. I have no idea what transpired during the fraction of the second in which they exchanged glances, but he bid us goodnight and before he was half a block away I received a text message from him. It read

don’t walk run

At the same time, one night she came over to my apartment, crying, because she had met a new patient earlier that afternoon who was about to undergo a bone marrow transplant; she, thinking of me, could barely talk to him.

At the same time, she e-mailed me a research article about survival rates for patients in my situation. There were lots of variables, but as far as I could tell, the findings put my chances at 13 percent. This was, in a word, disappointing.

I printed the article out and showed it to my oncologist. “Hell is this?” he said. He scanned it, frowning. Then he was furious. “Who gave this to you?”

Of course I couldn’t say—your colleague, who is treating your patients: your colleague, with whom I’m sleeping. “I found it online.”

“Look at this,” he muttered. He was referring to the authors of the article, their credentials, the footnotes, their sources. “Bunch of amateurs. Listen to me. Don’t go online with this stuff. Promise me that. If you have questions, ask.”

And at the same time, the sex with her was more and more frequent, more and more frantic, more and more thrilling and impulsive, and then—compulsive? As were the adamant declarations of love. I chalked it up to the infatuation that I felt as well, my infatuation with her salt-bright beauty. But I also noticed that, increasingly, I was defending myself against vague accusations. Apologizing for not calling her right back. She’s vulnerable, I thought. But how vulnerable—vulnerable to the point of berating me for not calling her back within an hour? She said she was terrified when I wasn’t with her. That when I wasn’t there, it was as if I didn’t exist, as if an object in a room, temporarily obscured by someone standing in front of you, has disappeared. One morning I told her I was having a business meeting with an old friend, an author, a woman, and Nothereal said our relationship was over, that there was no way she deserved to be treated with such contempt. I apologized: I said I should have—what? I can’t remember what I said. Something about telling her things earlier, not springing things on her, I have no idea.

But the worst were the stares. Once, again at the movies, I felt the smarting sensation of burning on my cheek, and realized she’d been staring not at the screen but, fixatedly, at me. For how long? And then there was the time we were walking back to my apartment, and she was doing the same thing. (The French have a word for staring someone down,
devisager
, literally “de-facing.”) I looked at her, smiled, looked back ahead, looked back at her, puzzled. “This isn’t going to work,” she said.

“What?”

“I just don’t have to settle for someone who treats me this way. I deserve more.”

We’d reached my apartment. I was preoccupied by the results of the first big post-transplant CT scan, which were coming in a few days. If the scan was clean, that boded pretty well. Sara’s hadn’t been. She was a fellow patient I’d met in the hospital. Her story was pretty much the same as mine: she had the same thing I had, chemo didn’t work, so they did the same thing. But in her case the transplant didn’t work either. The first post-transplant scan was positive. They gave her six months, and she’d died in three. Nothereal was aware of this.

“You deserve more? Seek more, then,” I shrugged, and left her on the corner, alone; I didn’t look back, but just before I turned away, I’d caught the expression of incredulousness on her face.

She called the next day, had to see me. She came over. I’m in love with you, she said. Sometimes I go a little off.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Sometimes I go a little off. I need you to pull me back, like how you did last night. I need you.”

There was the sound of gentle rain in her voice, and our bodies were water again, that night, and the next night, at her apartment; there were defiant, tear-studded cries of love, dreams of children, voiced aloud; never felt anything like this ever never ever and she said she felt she was tipping over into something. I could feel her amber skin move over her skeleton; I wondered if it were our skeletons that were making love. Ever never ever.

I slept late the next morning, over at her place; she went to work. My phone rang: it was my brother, Matthew, who is three years my junior; he had moved to New York from Los Angeles after the death of our father in 2001. Like me, he was fooling around in the arts; he had studied music and had conducted concerts; he was an excellent conductor. Lately he’d been trying his hand at acting. He was calling to ask whether Nothereal and I would consider being extras in a student film he was involved with. The scene was to take place in a restaurant; there had to be diners dining in the restaurant for verisimilitude’s sake. It would be filmed in a couple of days, the night before I was to receive my scan results. I thought it might be fun, a distraction. I told him I’d ask Nothereal. I called her up and asked her if she was into the idea of sitting in a restaurant for a couple of hours, pretending to eat. She said sure.