The Red Book (39 page)

Clover feels the audience’s support, their kinetic energy. It’s so unlike the often bored or sometimes even hostile response she used to get to the PowerPoint presentations she had to give, day in and day out, in her life as a banker, especially toward the end, when she started to worry. “The centre cannot hold,” she’d typed onto one of the slides, giving proper credit to Yeats. One of the derivatives traders in the room had shouted—
shouted
!—“We get it, smartypants, you went to Hah-vahd. But that doesn’t mean you know shit about the health of the credit default swap market. And you spelled
center
wrong.”

“I was taking the seminar because I was fiddling around with the idea of becoming a shrink,” she says, “until I decided banking would be a much more stable, giving, noble career.” She infuses this last line with enough irony and self-mocking that people laugh. Bucky once again holds up his hand in the okay sign, urging her on. “Sharon was taking it because she’d just lost her mother to breast cancer, and she was trying to sort out her understandably complicated feelings about that.

“I remember we all had to read our final papers to the class, and most of ours were kind of boring and theoretical about the language of illness, the linguistics of it. As if we were all budding Noam Chomskys or pathetically trying to be. Sontag’s theory, if you’ll recall—and I hope I’m remembering this right—is all about how the sick person is often blamed, at least linguistically, as if they’d brought on their disease themselves. But Sharon found it odd that Sontag never mentioned, not once in her text, that she herself was a breast cancer survivor. So Sharon’s paper, in stark contrast to all of ours and Sontag’s, was a firsthand account of her mother’s decline, from the day of diagnosis to her last breath, and it was . . . heartbreaking. By the time she finished reading it, we were all blubbering. Even the beefy football player, whose name now escapes me but who, swear to God, never said a single word in class or changed his expression from a kind of neutral look of sheer boredom, even
he
was crying.

“Anyway, fast-forward to our little chance encounter at the Harvard Club in New York many years later, where Sharon was hosting her first fund-raiser for the Lila Fund. She called it the Lila Fund after her mother, Lila, because she couldn’t very well call it the Sharon Fund, now could she, if she didn’t want people to know she’d been recently diagnosed with breast cancer herself? For five years, no one other than her husband had any idea she was sick. She didn’t want it to interfere with people’s perception of the organization or its mandate or its viability as a long-term,
healthy
organization, which, by God, it is and remains, thanks to her husband, Whit, who took over all of the legal and CFO responsibilities, and her copresident, Jean, who deals with the day-to-day operations. I know. I’ve seen the books. They’re rock solid.

“But enough about the Lila Fund. That’s what I wrote about in here”—she holds up her discarded eulogy—“and I urge you all to go to their Web site,
www.thelilafund.com
, and send in a donation in Sharon’s memory if you can, or click on the link to buy a ticket to the annual fund-raiser at my house in East Hampton—it’s fun, I promise, we hire a DJ, the food’s good, and you can come in your jeans or even a bathing suit, we don’t care—but what I do care about right now, deeply, is telling you about Sharon Warren the person. Or rather, I guess, and more specifically about what Sharon represented to me, to her husband, to her children, to all of us who knew her, really, and that is, if I could sum it up in one word . . .
authenticity
. She was the most guileless, authentic person I’ve ever met, and we’re all old enough now to know how rare that is.

“Yes, she kept this big secret, for five years, about her illness, but that was part of her quest for authenticity as well, having seen what her mother went through. She wanted people to respond to her, not to her illness. She wanted to protect her children from pitying stares, especially since she was convinced she would beat this thing and move on, and no one would be any the wiser. She wanted to live as authentic a life as she possibly could while she still had it, given the parameters she’d been given, and for her a life that was authentic was a life that had no time or patience for self-pity.

“In fact, when I think about it? Sharon never did anything, at any point in her life, because it would look good on a résumé, or because it would make her fabulously rich, or because it would somehow show her in a better light, or because it would bring her fame or awards or give her an in with a better crowd. I remember this one time, a fairly well-known film director, who shall remain nameless, had kind of stumbled into our fund-raiser in the Hamptons as a guest of Billy Joel’s, and after talking with Sharon for only five minutes, this director decided he wanted to make a movie about her life. You know, a kind of Norma Rae who has breast cancer, who’s also on the front lines fighting the establishment. Anyway, this was a year and a half before she died, when she and everyone else knew she was dying, but she was still well enough to take a meeting with this guy, which she left feeling really excited, thinking that the film would bring great publicity and maybe even greater funds into the organization after she was gone. But somehow the director felt there wasn’t enough conflict in Sharon’s life—as if having a mother who died of breast cancer and then dying of breast cancer herself and leaving three kids behind, weren’t dramatic enough—so he asked the writer he hired to change certain biographical elements of the story.

“In the script she was shown, she had an expensive shoe fetish. And a weird tic where she could never remember any of her underlings’ names. And one child who was reacting to her mother’s cancer by becoming a kleptomaniac while the other became a cutter. And a husband who was off drowning his grief in an affair. None of these were of course implausible reactions to a woman’s illness, but they certainly weren’t Sharon and her family’s reaction to her illness. Far from it. That family faced cancer with more courage—and I know if Sharon were standing here right now she’d say, ‘Fuck courage, we did what we had to do’—but I don’t know what else to call the way she faced her illness other than courageous, so let’s just leave it at that.

“Anyway, she called me after she read the script, not crying, as I would have been, but laughing. Hysterically. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll just have to die anonymously then. Too bad. I was looking forward to wearing a dress to the premiere that would really emphasize my hacked-off tits.’

“I mean, even on that front—so to speak—Sharon refused to be inauthentic. After her mastectomy, she had these beautiful black-and-white photos taken of her and Whit. In one of my favorites, she’s completely naked, totally unashamed, with Whit lying next to her fully clothed, hugging her around the rib cage with his nose buried in her neck. She called it her John and Yoko photo, only, as she said, ‘I’m John and Whit’s Yoko, because I’m naked, flat-chested, and doomed to die early, and Whit can’t hold a tune to save his life.’ ”

The audience laughs again, some of them through tears. Clover keeps her eyes trained directly on Bucky, who, with subtle movements of his head, mouth, and hands, is as present and supportive as anyone could be from twenty feet away.

“I mean, how great is that, right? The woman
never
lost her sense of humor, even toward the end. With one great exception. She could not talk about her kids’ future—could not even contemplate it—without tearing up. Sharon’s children, I should probably note, were four, three, and five months when she was diagnosed. They were ten, nine, and six when she died.

“I really, truly, desperately hope none of you ever has to go to a funeral where three little kids are walking behind their mother’s coffin crying, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ because it is the saddest image I have ever seen. Ever. And . . .”

Clover starts to lose a bit of control, her eyes seeing the scene as if it were still unfolding right in front of her. “And . . .” She has to take her glasses off, for they are being covered in a salty residue. “And . . .” Shit, she thinks, I can’t finish. But she has an important closing thought that just occurred to her, and she wants to say it.

Suddenly, as if he’s heard her telepathically, Bucky is standing next to her, propping her up. “It’s okay,” he whispers, using the excuse of handing her a tissue to lean over and squeeze her hand. “Just breathe deeply. No one cares. You’re doing great, Pace. Just great. Take your time.” He cleans off her glasses with the corner of his shirt and places them on the lectern.

After a minute or so, Clover gathers her composure and says, “Sorry. I just . . . I just want to say one more thing about Sharon, and that is this.” She feels Bucky standing behind her, just off to the side—left, right, it doesn’t matter, he’s there—and there’s a warmth to his presence, an electrical charge between their bodies she can feel. It’s not sexual at the moment. Not at all. It’s . . . oh, shit, he was right. Okay, fine. It is love. “I don’t believe a beautiful, young mother’s early demise teaches us anything constructive. It’s one of those things that makes us shake our hands at the gods and say, ‘Really?
Why
?’ But I do think we can all learn something, not from Sharon’s death, but from her life. How many of us here can honestly say we’re living the most authentic life that we can lead? How many of us are being true to ourselves, true to our ideals, true to that eighteen-year-old kid who first walked into the Yard, filled with dreams? We’re all given one life. One. And we’re all marching toward the same miserable end. The question is this: How will you fill the rest of your days? How will you live a life that’s authentic? I’m not saying it has to be particularly ‘meaningful’ or that we should all run off to become Mother Teresas or anything like that, but I know, deep in my gut, that if I can live out the rest of my days being half as genuine as Sharon Warren was, every single second of every single day of her life, then her legacy is not lost. She is not lost.”

And at the exact moment Clover feels she will crumble to the ground, Bucky is there to catch her.

•  •  •

Jonathan’s feet run
as if trying to escape a predator nipping his heels, which he realizes is a ridiculous image, but he can’t help conjuring it. He knows he’s luckier than 99.99 percent of all the other recession-hit families to even have an exit strategy, but still. Last night, unable to sleep, he went online and reexamined all of the accounts and credit card statements, realizing, to his horror, that it is worse than he thought. If things don’t improve over the next year or so, they’ll have to sell both houses.

And so he runs.

Cowardly, he knows, this running. Hiding the truth from Mia. But she’s turned the house in Antibes into a veritable Shangri-la, a place apart where their family—torn asunder in every direction by adolescence, afterschool activities, homework, faraway film sets, and the minute-by-minute minutiae of caring for an infant—has an opportunity, for a few weeks every summer, to be a family. To spend time with friends. Without interruptions. Of any kind.

There in the Mediterranean hills, over which their stone house is cantilevered, meals replete with stinky-cheese endings are consumed slowly; the boys, on the brink of manhood, still find joy in hiding out in and building onto the tree house left for them by the previous owners; Frisbees are tossed; outings are planned to the ocean floor where phosphorescent fish are marveled over. There, too, he and Mia are able to finally talk, to exchange real thoughts and feelings and information, without the constant interruptions that so frequently befall them. Cell phones work sporadically if at all, and surfing the Web is severely limited by the constraints of dial-up.

He knows this kind of disconnection will come to an inevitable end soon enough. Being able to untether oneself from the data stream will become less and less of an option as the availability of enablers—cell towers, free Wi-Fi signals, some future data-facilitating invention as of yet uninvented—becomes more and more ubiquitous. But for now Antibes is the place they go to remember who they were, both as individuals and as a family unit, before their limbs bore 3G-ponic fruit; before human-to-human interaction uninterrupted by dings, rings, chirps, and slide whistle whoops ceased, overnight, to exist.

But while Mia will probably be more upset about the Antibes house than their house in LA, for Jonathan the ego blow of selling off their primary residence will strike deeply. They will have to sell at a price far below what they might have asked for it just a year earlier—that is, if there’s anyone left out there able to casually drop several million dollars on a property that, until very recently, was worth twice that. Yes, yes, of course, he and Mia can make up some story about how the offer was too good to refuse, how the buyer walked in off the street, how they wanted to move closer to the ocean/Brentwood/the Sony lot/whatever, but there’s something fundamentally crushing about the need-based selling off of a home where one raised one’s children which, Jonathan fears, he won’t survive.

He has a photo of the type he just shot for that young couple, of him and Mia, pregnant with Max, standing in front of the house on San Remo Lane the day they moved in. (He can’t remember who took it. One of the movers? A neighbor? So many of the trivial tidbits get lost.) The fact is, no matter how much success life has granted him, he will feel like an utter failure if they sell that house. It’s not just a primary residence. It’s his home.

Every night on the news it’s another family out on the street. He can’t watch it anymore. He turns it off as soon as he sees the inevitable
FOR SALE
sign topped with an all-caps FORECLOSURE. As if a sign could ever possibly signify the real suffering happening just offscreen: marriages torn apart; families left homeless; psyches damaged; lives wrecked. Not to mention all the secondary insults: a drop in health, a rise in shame, an increased risk of suicide.

He knows—he
knows
—one shouldn’t get attached to a physical structure, but people do! Rich, poor, somewhere in between, it doesn’t matter, they can’t help it. It’s in their blood, deep within their temporal lobe, the place where memory lives. They say the heart feels what it wants to feel, though at the present moment the only thing Jonathan’s heart feels is a now not-unfamiliar sharp stab that strikes him straight between his ribs. Shit, not again, he thinks. “Meditate,” his doctor suggested, when he went in last month complaining of these new chest pains on top of the old ones. “All studies point to a significant decrease in the gray-matter density in the amygdala, which we know moderates stress.”