The Truth About Death (16 page)

“Give me an example.”

“A man says to an undertaker, ‘Your wife has really nice tits. Mind if I cop a feel?’ ‘Go right ahead,’ the undertaker says. So the man fondles the wife’s breasts. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘They’re really nice.’ ‘Before you go,’ the undertaker says, ‘would you help me close the coffin lid?’ ”

“You’re right,” he said. “That’s not funny. That’s disgusting.” But he laughed.

“ ‘We made good time,’ ” I said. “ ‘We’re already in the valley of the shadow of death.’ Now
that’s
funny.”

“Sam Gross,” he said. “A woman talking to her husband as they drive past a road sign reading
FEAR NO EVIL
.’ ”

I started tossing out captions, and he caught every one.

ME
:  “ ‘Death takes a personal day.’ ”

MANKOFF
:  “Arnie Levin. Death lying in bed watching
TV
and drinking tea.”

ME
:  “ ‘The Founding Fathers were clear. You must win by two.’ ”

MANKOFF
:  “Two people playing Ping-Pong in front of the Supreme Court. That was a caption contest—last April. I don’t remember who did it.”

ME
:  “ ‘Oh darn, and just as I was starting to take charge of my life.’ ”

MANKOFF
:  “That’s one of mine. A man opens his apartment door and Death is standing there.”

“I’ll stop there,” I said.

“So,” he said. “What’s to laugh about?”

“ ‘Sudden glory’?” I said, shaking my head. “No. ‘The presence of inflexibility and rigidness in life’?” I shook my head again. “No.”

“That takes care of Hobbes and Bergson,” he said.

“I mention them only to show them the door. How about ‘Release of tension’?”

“Getting warm, warmer,” he said.

“ ‘Incongruity,’ ” I said. “That’s where
you
come down.”

He nodded. “Mashing two or three frames together.”

“But the problem with incongruity,” I said, “is that it’s a necessary cause but not a sufficient cause. It always seemed to me that Simon’s laughter came welling up out of something deeper. The cartoons were just triggers, vehicles, like the little
cars that bring up coal from the depths of a mine. He was an undertaker, but he loved to laugh. Until Hildi—that’s our daughter—was killed. But then at the end he started laughing again, as if he’d discovered something funny at the bottom of things.”

“Here’s what I think,” Mankoff said. “Grim Reaper cartoons are a coping mechanism, but they’re something more than that. Laughter is holier than prayer. I’m not a guy who talks a lot about holiness. Or prayer. But I think a lot about laughter. When you laugh, your ego disappears. Like dancing. Your whole body becomes part of the dance, part of the laughter. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, used to say that without laughter, there is no Tao. He used to ride a buffalo backward. I mean, he’d sit backward on the buffalo. A water buffalo, not a bison.”

“So the buffalo’s going one way and Lao Tzu’s looking the other way. He must have gotten a lot of laughs.”

“So life’s a comedy, not a tragedy.”

“Do you think that’s what Simon was doing at the end? Riding backward on a buffalo.”

“You could do worse.”

“Do you think that’s what
you’re
doing?”

“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “But I’m still waiting for my ego to disappear.” He looked at his watch. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to go to a meeting. I’ve got to take these cartoons to David Remnick. I’ll take in fifty roughs—rough drawings. He’ll pick seventeen or eighteen.” He moved the copy of
Marginalia
to one side and scooped up a pile of cartoons from his desk.

I was disappointed. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to show him
my
cartoons. But he said he’d be back in fifteen minutes. I conjured up a picture of Simon riding backward on a buffalo,
looking back at me as the big animal plods along, swishing its tail back and forth, its great thick horns curving backward, white socks on its feet.

When Mankoff came back I said, “Let me show you some of Simon’s cartoons before I go. They’re not all about death, but they all came to him while he was dying. He always wanted me to send them to you, so let’s pretend.” Of course, I wasn’t pretending. I was imagining how astonished everyone would be—Jack and Sally, my colleagues at Knox, Cyrus at the Morgan—when I told them I’d sold a batch of cartoons to the
New Yorker.

I laid out the seven cartoons I’d brought. They were on sheets of good quality eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, smaller than the large sheets that Mankoff had taken to show David Remnick. Even so, I was expecting Mankoff to jump at the chance to publish them, but that’s not what happened.

“This is my favorite,” I said—“ ‘The lost funeral home of the elephants’ ”—expecting Mankoff to chuckle at the mashed-up frames of reference.

“The reader,” he said, “has to be familiar with the trope of the lost graveyard of the elephants.”

“That’s a problem for
New Yorker
readers?”

He shook his head. “The real problem is that the caption doesn’t complete the drawing. The drawing says it all. The clearing in the jungle. The white hunters. The reader can see that it’s a funeral home. There’s even a sign:
JUMBO AND SONS, FUNERAL DIRECTORS
. The caption is redundant.”

I knew right away that my fantasy was just that. A fantasy. I forgot about death for a minute.

“And these trees,” he said. “They look like giant rocks.”

I knew better than to argue or to point out that this was the
way a lot of cartoonists shaded their trees, to say that these drawings were just roughs.

He looked over the rest of the cartoons.

“There’s no consistent style,” he said. “No signature. They’re all different. As if you’re imitating different cartoonists. This one is totally different from the funeral home in the jungle. You’d never know it was by the same cartoonist—and by the way, why are they ice fishing?”

“That’s Satan, you see. Hell has frozen over, and the other devil says, ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later.’ Hell freezing over.” I could feel the blood rising to my face.

He put it at the back of the stack, which he held in his hand. He was looking right at me with the stupid Google Glass. What did he see?

“Are you streaming this now?” I asked. “Right now?” I didn’t want him broadcasting my red face out to the World Wide Web.

He shook his head and put his hand on
Marginalia
. “This is an astonishing book,” he said, and we took another look at some of the images and talked about the exhibit at the Morgan and about my prospects as a cartoonist, which were not good. He explained the facts of life, cartoon life.

“You can’t just walk in off the street and expect to sell a cartoon to the
New Yorker.
It’d be like me going to the Morgan Library and asking them to let me curate an exhibit.”

“I didn’t realize that,” I said. “I’m sorry I took up your time.”

“You’re not really risk averse, are you?” He laughed again. “Don’t answer that. I’m glad you came,” he said. “You don’t need to apologize. But I want you to forget about drawing cartoons. Stick with your marginalia.” He paused. “I
am
going to hang onto this last one, though,” he said. “ ‘The Truth
About Death.’ Pretty funny. You did a nice job on God’s face. Uncanny. The dog too. I think you found your line here, your style. The others are too labored. This one does what a good cartoon should do: it simplifies everything.”

“My husband was dying—I mean really dying—while I was drawing this,” I said. “I labored over the other ones, but this one just happened.”

He wanted me to change the drawing a little. “Give God a cell phone instead of a landline. But don’t touch the dog. The dog is fine as is.”

“I can do that,” I said.

“You don’t need to do it now,” he said.

“Can you see things on your Google Glass? I mean the whole world?”

“As long as it’s on the Internet.”

“Could you see my home in Galesburg?”

“The funeral home?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like you to see it,” I said.

“Galesburg, right? What state?”

“Galesburg, Illinois.”

“Okay, Glass,” he said. “Funeral homes in Galesburg, Illinois.” He looked through the glass and then at me. “There are three, right? Oldfield, that’s you, and Lake Mortuary, and Peterson-Ward?”

“Do you see any photos?”

He tilted his head, ran his finger along the temple, and tapped, once, twice. “Oldfield and Daughter, Funeral Directors,” he said.

“It used to be
Oldfield and Son.
Simon’s grandfather started the business.”

He tapped again.

“That must be your husband and your daughter standing by that sign, and that’s your dog. In a green uniform.”

“That’s Olive. Next to Simon.”

“Do you want to look?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t need Google Glass to see them.”

“Your daughter was going to take over the business?”

I nodded. “She was, but then she went to Rome and fell in love, and then she was killed in a hit-and-run. Olive is dead too. Liver cancer.” I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes.

Mankoff didn’t say he was sorry for my loss. He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he said, “So now you’re trying to figure out the truth about death?”

“I am,” I said. “I was hoping we could put our heads together.”

“You don’t need any advice from me.”

“I do,” I said. “At least I did. I needed to come here. I needed to show you some of our cartoons.”

“Are you going to write something about this?” he asked.

“I am now,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Just remember all the things I’ve told you, and pump up my part, okay?”

We exchanged books. I signed
Marginalia
with “Warmest wishes” and drew a little gryllus wearing a Google Glass. Mankoff gave me a copy of
How About Never.
He signed it and drew a self-portrait under his name on the title page. I already had a copy in my briefcase. Now I had two. I asked him to sign the second one for Jack and Sally.

I gave him the tin of shortbread and he pried off the lid and took out a piece.

“I gave away a few pieces on my way here,” I explained. “That’s why the tin isn’t full. But you can make more.” I
handed him the recipe, which I’d typed out. “Give this to your wife. Put it in the tin.”

“This is delicious,” he said, taking his first bite. He put the recipe in the tin, and we said good-bye, and Colin, Mankoff’s assistant, led me through a maze of cubicles to the elevator. I gave him my card. “Give this to Mr. Mankoff,” I said.

I walked through Central Park on my way back to Jack and Sally’s. Four miles, but I was in no hurry. I sat on a bench by the reservoir and fed two packages of crackers to the pigeons.

By the time the boys—Jack Junior and Adam—came into my room to wake me up from my nap, the anniversary dinner had begun. I fluffed up my hair with a brush and slipped on the red dress I’d bought for the occasion. The guests had arrived and were eating slices of pâté on crusty bread, drinking champagne and a French rosé, and were inhaling the aroma of a bouillabaisse that had just been delivered from Bistrot Jacques in a big tin stockpot. We watched Jack assemble a
salade de gésiers de canard
on a beautiful white oval platter: mesclun, tomato wedges, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, boiled new potatoes, sliced cucumber, and the
gésiers—
sautéed duck gizzards.

“You can’t really do the
gésiers
at home,” Jack explained as he cut them into thin slices. “They’ve got to be cooked over low heat for a long time. In France you can just buy them already cooked in the grocery store. They come in little plastic pouches. The boys love them,” and to demonstrate he picked up a couple of slices with his fingers and placed them in his sons’ open mouths.

I’d never shown my cartoons to anyone except Simon, and now Bob Mankoff, and suddenly I was hungry for a wider audience. I didn’t want to make a faux pas by interrupting
the drama of the duck gizzards, but I thought of Mankoff’s advice—“Don’t pay any attention to what other people think about you, because it doesn’t matter”—and fetched my portfolio—a manila folder—from the guest bedroom. I laid six cartoons out in a row on the sideboard.

I soon had everyone’s attention. Who can turn away from a cartoon? No one. Everyone, the boys included, admired them and even laughed out loud at some of them. “The lost funeral home of the elephants” was the favorite. Everyone insisted that I should send all six of them to the
New Yorker
, and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned my trip there to anyone, not even to Jack and Sally, and I didn’t mention it now, didn’t mention “The Truth About Death,” which I’d kept to myself; didn’t mention the fact that Mankoff had wanted to “hang on” to it.

I put the cartoons away and had a glass of the rosé—Côtes de Provence—which was from a vineyard in Provence co-owned by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “It’s very hard to come by in the United States,” Sally told me. “No one can get more than six bottles.” She leaned toward me and whispered in my ear: “Jack says it’s not just another crappy celebrity wine. He says it’s really good.” And she started to laugh.

“It
is
really good,” I said. And it was, and the
salade de gésiers de canard
was really good too, though most of us were a little apprehensive about the gizzards. At least at first. And the bouillabaisse was heavenly, the
tarte aux abricots
divine. The coffee was robust, the pear cognac sweet and tart at the same time.

We toasted Jack and Sally and wished them many happy returns of the day, and Jack promised another dinner as soon as “Medieval Marginalia” opened at the Morgan.

*    *    *

I’ll be staying in New York for a few days while Jack and Sally fly up to Quebec for a little vacation and to check out some French-Canadian restaurants. I’ve got three long meetings scheduled with Cyrus at the Morgan. Even though it’s summer vacation, the boys will be at the Calhoun School from eight thirty to three thirty every day, working on a full-scale production of
Romeo and Juliet.
I should still have time to take in the Unicorn exhibit at the Cloisters, the Parmigianinos at the Frick, and the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney, but I’ll probably have to skip the Italian Futurist exhibit at the Guggenheim. After lunch I’ll stop by the school’s performing arts center on Eighty-First Street to watch the boys working on the set or rehearsing their lines or figuring out their blocking. Jack is Mercutio on stage and a carpenter when he’s working on the set; Adam is a torchbearer in the first act, Mercutio’s page later on, and a scene painter when he’s not on stage. We may grab some sandwiches at Zabar’s around the corner and take them home for supper, or we may wait till later, take a cab to Bistrot Jacques, and eat bouillabaisse or pasta with grilled artichokes, or we may pick up something at the little grocery store on Eighty-First Street near the condo that Jack and Sally wanted me to look at. Or we may order pizzas, or maybe we’ll just break out the peanut butter and jelly. We’ll figure out something.