The Violet Hour (6 page)

Peter radiates the paradoxical serenity of the perpetual seeker. He is small, bald, gentle, somehow evoking saffron-clad monks drifting through ancient carved temples in Cambodia. He had spent time doing hospice work. He first met Susan in the eighties when he began doing research for her. He is one of the many people who occupied an ambiguous middle ground between friend and employee, who moved from working for her to being an intimate, who were devoted to her with a kind of passion and absoluteness most people are unable to elicit or
uninterested in eliciting from those whom they pay for various kinds of help.

When Peter arrived in Seattle in July, Sontag was preparing for the treatment. One night they went out for Japanese food—without eating anything raw, which could cause a dangerous infection in someone whose immune system was so compromised—and then they saw
Spider-Man 2
. They sat nestled amidst the teenagers on dates. She particularly liked the flying sequence. Peter thought, if illness
does
have to have metaphors, a superhero soaring above a city would not be a bad one.

Somewhere in this same time period, Peter remembers, she had a moment of doubt: Should she go through with the transplant now that she was feeling a little better from the chemo? They were sitting across from each other in a restaurant, holding chopsticks, like they had sat in restaurants in New York. He remembers this doubt as a flicker, a passing thought she confessed to him then dismissed. She would never give up the hope of a cure, and he knew she would never give up hope of the cure, but it was there for a moment between them: the possibility that she could. That she could walk away from the transplant and take what little bit of life was left to her.

Several years before she was diagnosed with her first breast cancer, Sontag wrote in her notebooks: “All my life I have been thinking about death, + it is a subject I am now getting a little
tired of. Not, I think, because I am closer to my own death—but because death has finally become real (>Death of Susan).” Susan is Susan Taubes.

Susan Taubes was needy, doomed, depressive, elegant. The two Susans had met on the steps of Widener Library at Harvard when Sontag was in graduate school. Sontag may or may not have had an affair with the other Susan's husband. When Susan Taubes drowned herself while vacationing in the Hamptons, Sontag was called to identify the body, because her name was found on a note in Taubes's wallet. She drove out with her friend Stephen Koch, and together they went into the morgue. The officer pushed a button and a vinyl curtain lifted. The body was covered, from the neck down, in paper printed with “Suffolk County New York.” The officer said, “Is this your friend?” Susan looked. “It certainly is.” Afterward, her hand was shaking too much to sign the paperwork. When they walked out to the car, she said to Koch, “She finally did it, the stupid woman.”

Her frustration with Susan Taubes was that of someone who can't understand how anyone wouldn't cling to life in any form at any cost. As she told her doctor, Stephen Nimer, she didn't care about “quality of life”: She cared about life, and it was this absolute value that would be tested in Seattle.

For a few days in July, Sontag has to be isolated in a radiation room and radiated. Jerome Groopman explains that in this extreme and harrowing treatment, the stem cell transplant recipient is essentially “brought as close to death as is clinically
sustainable.” He continues, “It is a treatment of last resort. Even when all goes well, it represents an experience beyond our ordinary imaginings—the ordeal of chemotherapy taken to a near-lethal extreme.” The patient is put in isolation for a few days because of the intensity and toxicity of the radiation. Anne Jump sent her a copy of
Don Quixote
, which she takes into the room while she is radiated.

When she was still healthy, at sixty-nine, Sontag sold her archive to UCLA, but she was very adamantly not winding up. She commented at the time: “Selling the archive is not, ‘Now it's all over, and I'm packing up and getting ready to think about my estate.' I don't feel this is one of the gestures that one performs toward the end of one's life.” Note the flagrant irrationality of this comment: One doesn't sell one's papers at twenty-five; in fact, selling one's papers is precisely one of those gestures that one performs toward the end of one's life. But the idea of even being “toward” the end of her life was impossible for Sontag, on the verge of seventy, to accept or process or utter on the record in an interview.

One transplant patient whose skin was badly burned by the especially harsh radiation said, “I looked like a lobster and thought I had bugs crawling on me.” Sontag undergoes a slightly less extreme version of the radiation, but the effects of the treatment are unimaginable nonetheless. With a severely compromised immune system, the patient is afterward susceptible to all kinds of opportunistic fungus, sores, infections, even in the most successful version of the treatment, the body is broken down, destroyed in order to be rebuilt.

Annie would say later: “She was so brave. It was amazing. It was too much.” And those words would appear to crystallize the reaction of many of those around her:
It was too much
.

Sontag wrote in her journals in May of 1976:
“I'm mortified by being ill—this illness anyway. But I'm also enthralled by it. Sickness is a form of being ‘interesting.' Yet I'm also repelled by it. The vulgarity, the
indiscretion
of being ill! It makes me want to shut up. My body is talking louder, more plainly than I ever could.”

For a while Sontag doesn't want to watch movies in her hospital room in Seattle. She refuses the weighty foreign films that she normally likes, which Anne Jump had packed up and sent out from her apartment. There's much talk in the inner circle about how to get her to watch them, since it seems a good way to keep her entertained during the long hospital hours. Finally Sharon brings her some American musicals, and then suddenly she wants to watch movies: Cary Grant, Fred Astaire,
The African Queen, Kiss Me Kate, Singing in the Rain, It Happened One Night, Funny Face, The Philadelphia Story, Some Like It Hot, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca
, often two movies in a night.

In her notebooks, Sontag claims that Susan Taubes's suicide is important to her because it makes death “real.” Did it, though? Susan Taubes's suicide certainly remained with Sontag for a long time; it haunts the journals, hovering in the margins as a problem to be solved; she seems to be scribbling around it, fiddling
with it. In 1970, she writes in her notebooks: “An essay to write—on death. The two deaths in my life.

“1938: Daddy: far away, unassimilable.

“1969: Susan: same name as me; ma sosie [‘my double'], also unassimilable.”

Eventually she wrote a story based on Taubes's suicide, called “Debriefing,” which contains the following passage: “Some nights, I dream of dragging Julia back by her long hair, just as she's about to jump into the river. Or I dream she's already in the river: I am standing on my roof, facing New Jersey; I look down and see her floating by, and I leap from the roof, half falling, half swooping like a bird, and seize her by the hair and pull her out.” She replays the moment of her friend's death: pause, rewind, play. Here again is the recurring fantasy of cheating death, the last-minute reprieve, the swooping bird that carries you back to safety. This image of dragging her friend back by the hair is so vivid, so startling, and yet it is a dream. You can't drag someone who is dying back by the hair.

In August, Sontag goes in for the bone marrow transplant. For a while afterward it is hard to tell if it's working; even in the best-case scenario, transplant patients are very badly off after their procedure, before the body remakes itself. In Sontag's case, the medical information is hard to parse; the team announces
that the graft is going well, but then there are complications, setbacks, signs to read and interpret, signals from blood work and biopsies. She certainly doesn't seem, to those who are with her, to be doing too well.

When Peter arrives to take care of her again in the middle of October, he bursts into tears when he sees her, because she is so changed from when he was out in July, before the transplant. Her face and body are blown up from the steroids, her skin stenciled with sores and lesions.

Annie will take pictures of her looking much like this. Her hair is white, cropped like a man's. There are tubes running down her chest, a catheter tube snaking down the sheets. Her stomach is swollen like a pregnant woman's, and her hospital-issue pajamas slip up to reveal a leg mottled with sores, a leg that could belong to someone who is a thousand years old. But what is most shocking is that the familiar, iconic face, the face of the photographs, has vanished. The fierceness in her eyes, the drama of her features, is replaced by a new puffiness, a new indistinctness, as if she is blurred, as if she has transmogrified into an ordinary person, exactly the kind of ordinary person she swore to herself she would never become.

There is the same intimacy as in those other photographs Annie has taken of her in various beds, the ones in far-flung hotels—the Gritti Palace in Venice, Grand Hotel Quisisana in Capri—that are playful, that hint, more than hint, of nights spent together, but here there is no play, just the intimacy, this time doleful or cold, it's hard to tell. Annie does not analyze
why she takes these pictures, but she takes them. David will hate these pictures—he calls them “carnival images of celebrity death.” Anne Jump will never bring herself to look at them.

Susan had written, “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording angels of death.” And she wrote, “The appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” Still, Annie seems fairly sure that Susan wouldn't have minded the pictures. She writes in the introduction to
A Photographer's Life:
“Perhaps the pictures completed the work she and I had begun together when she was sick in 1998.” She does not put it this way, but the photographs may have been Annie's way of fighting illness as metaphor, her own visual person's equivalent of Susan's brilliant argument; she may have wanted to counteract the fantasies, the embellishments, the imaginative veil we usually throw over sickness, with the way it truly looked.

In one difficult patch, Sookhee comes to visit for a week. Susan finds it comforting to have her there, chattering like she used to in Susan's living room at London Terrace. Susan mentions the twins that Annie is having through a surrogate mother. She had been there for Annie's pregnancy and the birth of her first daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, three years earlier. Annie is, in her own way, busy thwarting mortality with all of this reproducing in her fifties. Annie had not told Susan about the twins right away, presumably to protect her a little from
the onward march of life, but when she finally did, Susan was pleased. “Do you know they are going to name one of them Susan?” she asks Sookhee. “I know,” Sookhee says. “We are going to have a Susan with us all the time.”

Often, when he is not traveling, David flies in. It is a vast understatement to say that his personal style is formal rather than expressive. He writes later in his memoir, “Perhaps some people transcend themselves when a loved one becomes ill, become demonstrative where before they were inhibited or withholding, and cheerful where before they were morose. But even if that's the case, I was not able to become one of them.” His way of helping, of entering the situation, is to talk to the doctors. He gives his mother confidence in the treatment. He renews her sense of intelligent, rational, informed people being on her side in the fight against the cancer. She does not expect him to be one of the caretakers, one of the people attending intimately to her physical needs, and he is not.