The Year of Magical Thinking (10 page)

I tell you that I shall not live two days,
Gawain said.

Later in the summer I received another book from Princeton. It was a first edition copy of
True Confessions,
in, as the booksellers say, “good condition, original dust jacket slightly frayed.” In fact it was John’s own copy: he had apparently sent it to a classmate who was organizing, for the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1954, an exhibition of books written by class members. “It occupied the position of honor,” the classmate wrote to me, “since John was unquestionably the most distinguished writer in our class.”

I studied the original dust jacket, slightly frayed, on the copy of
True Confessions.

I remembered the first time I saw this jacket, or a mock-up of this jacket. It had sat around our house for days, as proposed designs and type samples and jackets for new books always did, the idea being to gauge whether or not it would wear well, continue to please the eye.

I opened the book. I looked at the dedication. “For Dorothy Burns Dunne, Joan Didion, Quintana Roo Dunne,” the dedication read. “Generations.”

I had forgotten this dedication. I had
not sufficiently appreciated it,
a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.

I
reread
True Confessions.
I found it darker than I had remembered it. I reread
Harp.
I found a different, less sunny, version of the summer we watched
Tenko
and went to dinner at Morton’s.

Something else had happened toward the end of that summer.

In August there had been a memorial service for an acquaintance (this was not in itself the “something else” that happened), a French tennis player in his sixties who had been killed in an accident. The memorial service had been on someone’s court in Beverly Hills. “I met my wife at the service,” John had written in
Harp,
“coming directly from a doctor’s appointment in Santa Monica, and as I sat there under the hot August sun, death was very much on my mind. I thought Anton had actually died under the best possible circumstances for him, a moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark.”

The service ended and the parking attendant brought my car. As we drove away, my wife said, “What did the doctor say?”

There had not been an appropriate moment to mention my visit to the doctor in Santa Monica. “He scared the shit out of me, babe.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was a candidate for a catastrophic cardiac event.”

A few pages further in
Harp,
the writer, John, examines the veracity of this (his own) account. He notes a name changed, a certain dramatic restructuring, a minor time collapse. He asks himself: “Anything else?” This was the answer he gave: “When I told my wife he scared the shit out of me, I started to cry.”

Either I had not remembered this or I had determinedly chosen not to remember this.

I had
not sufficiently appreciated it.

W
as that what he experienced as he himself died? “A moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark”? In the sense that it happens one night and not another, the mechanism of a typical cardiac arrest could be construed as essentially accidental: a sudden spasm ruptures a deposit of plaque in a coronary artery, ischemia follows, and the heart, deprived of oxygen, enters ventricular fibrillation.

But how did he experience it?

The “moment of terror,” the “eternal dark”? Did he accurately intuit this when he was writing
Harp
? Did he, as we would say to each other to the point of whether something was accurately reported or perceived, “get it right”? What about the “eternal dark” part? Didn’t the survivors of near-death experiences always mention “the white light”? It occurs to me as I write that this “white light,” usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. “Everything went white,” those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint. “All the color drained out,” those bleeding internally report of the moment when blood loss goes critical.

T
he “something else” that happened toward the end of that summer, which must have been 1987, was the series of events that followed the appointment with the doctor in Santa Monica and the memorial service on the tennis court in Beverly Hills. A week or so later an angiogram was done. The angiogram showed a 90 percent occlusion of the left anterior descending artery, or LAD. It also showed a long 90 percent narrowing in the circumflex marginal artery, which was considered significant mainly because the circumflex marginal artery fed the same area of the heart as the occluded LAD. “We call it the widowmaker, pal,” John’s cardiologist in New York later said of the LAD. A week or two after the angiogram (it was by then September of that year, still summer in Los Angeles) an angioplasty was done. The results after two weeks, as demonstrated by an exercise echocardiogram, were said to be “spectacular.” Another exercise echo after six months confirmed this success. Thallium scans over the next few years and a subsequent angiogram in 1991 gave the same confirmation. I recall that John and I took different views of what had happened in 1987. As he saw it, he now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended. He often said, after the 1987 angioplasty, that he now knew how he was going to die. As I saw it, the timing had been providential, the intervention successful, the problem solved, the mechanism fixed. You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else does, I remember saying. I realize now that his was the more realistic view.

13.

I
used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day. “Don’t tell me your dream,” he would say when I woke in the morning, but in the end he would listen.

When he died I stopped having dreams.

In the early summer I began to dream again, for the first time since it happened. Since I can no longer pass them off to John I find myself thinking about them. I remember a passage from a novel I wrote in the mid-1990s,
The Last Thing He Wanted:

Of course we would not need those last six notes to know what Elena’s dreams were about.

Elena’s dreams were about dying.

Elena’s dreams were about getting old.

Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena’s dreams.

We all know that.

The point is that Elena didn’t.

The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so successfully compartmentalized her operation as to have lost access to her own cutouts.

I realize that Elena’s situation is my own.

In one dream I am hanging a braided belt in a closet when it breaks. About a third of the belt just drops off in my hands. I show the two pieces to John. I say (or he says, who knows in dreams) that this was his favorite belt. I determine (again, I think I determine, I should have determined, my half-waking mind tells me to do the right thing) to find him an identical braided belt.

In other words to fix what I broke,
bring him back.

The similarity of this broken braided belt to the one I found in the plastic bag I was given at New York Hospital does not escape my attention. Nor does the fact that I am still thinking
I broke it, I did it, I am responsible.

In another dream John and I are flying to Honolulu. Many other people are going, we have assembled at Santa Monica Airport. Paramount has arranged planes. Production assistants are distributing boarding passes. I board. There is confusion. Others are boarding but there is no sign of John. I worry that there is a problem with his boarding pass. I decide that I should leave the plane, wait for him in the car. While I am waiting in the car I realize that the planes are taking off, one by one. Finally there is no one but me on the tarmac. My first thought in the dream is anger: John has boarded a plane without me. My second thought transfers the anger: Paramount has not cared enough about us to put us on the same plane.

What “Paramount” was doing in this dream would require another discussion, not relevant.

As I think about the dream I remember
Tenko. Tenko,
as the series progresses, takes its imprisoned Englishwomen through their liberation from the Japanese camp and their reunions in Singapore with their husbands, which do not go uniformly well. There seemed for some a level at which the husband was held responsible for the ordeal of imprisonment. There seemed a sense, however irrational, of having been abandoned. Did I feel abandoned, left behind on the tarmac, did I feel anger at John for leaving me? Was it possible to feel anger and simultaneously to feel responsible?

I know the answer a psychiatrist would give to that question.

The answer would have to do with the well-known way in which anger creates guilt and vice versa.

I do not disbelieve this answer but it remains less suggestive to me than the unexamined image, the mystery of being left alone on the tarmac at Santa Monica Airport watching the planes take off one by one.

We all know that.

The point is that Elena didn’t.

I wake at what seems to be three-thirty in the morning and find a television set on, MSNBC. Either Joe Scarborough or Keith Olbermann is talking to a husband and wife, passengers on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, “Northwest 327” (I actually write this down, to tell to John), on which “a terrorist tryout” is said to have occurred. The incident seems to have involved fourteen men said to be “Arabs” who, at some point after takeoff from Detroit, began gathering outside the coach lavatory, entering one by one.

The couple now being interviewed on-screen reports having exchanged signals with the crew.

The plane landed in Los Angeles. The “Arabs,” all fourteen of whom had “expired visas” (this seemed to strike MSNBC as more unusual than it struck me), were detained, then released. Everyone, including the couple on-screen, had gone about their day. It was not, then, “a terrorist attack,” which seemed to be what made it “a terrorist tryout.”

I need in the dream to discuss this with John.

Or was it even a dream?

Who is the director of dreams, would he care?

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

W
hen the twilights got long in June I forced myself to eat dinner in the living room, where the light was. After John died I had begun eating by myself in the kitchen (the dining room was too big and the table in the living room was where he had died), but when the long twilights came I had a strong sense that he would want me to see the light. As the twilights began to shorten I retreated again to the kitchen. I began spending more evenings alone at home. I was working, I would say. By the time August came I was in fact working, or trying to work, but I also wanted not to be out, exposed. One night I found myself taking from the cupboard not one of the plates I normally used but a crackled and worn Spode plate, from a set mostly broken or chipped, in a pattern no longer made, “Wickerdale.” This had been a set of dishes, cream with a garland of small rose and blue flowers and ecru leaves, that John’s mother had given him for the apartment he rented on East Seventy-third Street before we were married. John’s mother was dead. John was dead. And I still had, of the “Wickerdale” Spode, four dinner plates, five salad plates, three butter plates, a single coffee cup, and nine saucers. I came to prefer these dishes to all others. By the end of the summer I was running the dishwasher a quarter full just to make sure that at least one of the four “Wickerdale” dinner plates would be clean when I needed it.

At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart. There had been the week or two or three here and there when one of us was doing a piece. There had been a month in 1975 when I taught at Berkeley during the week and flew home to Los Angeles on PSA every weekend. There had been a few weeks in 1988 when John was in Ireland doing research for
Harp
and I was in California covering the presidential primary. On all such occasions we had spoken on the telephone several times a day. We counted high telephone bills as part of our deal with each other, the same way we counted high bills for the hotels that enabled us to take Quintana out of school and fly somewhere and both work at the same time in the same suite. What I had instead of letters was a souvenir of one such hotel suite: a small black wafer-thin alarm clock he gave me one Christmas in Honolulu when we were doing a crash rewrite on a picture that never got made. It was one of those many Christmases on which we exchanged not “presents” but small practical things to make a tree. This alarm clock had stopped working during the year before he died, could not be repaired, and, after he died, could not be thrown out. It could not even be removed from the table by my bed. I also had a set of colored Buffalo pens, given to me the same Christmas, in the same spirit. I did many sketches of palm trees that Christmas, palm trees moving in the wind, palm trees dropping fronds, palm trees bent by the December
kona
storms. The colored Buffalo pens had long since gone dry, but, again, could not be thrown out.

I remember having had on that particular New Year’s Eve in Honolulu a sense of well-being so profound that I did not want to go to sleep. We had ordered mahimahi and Manoa lettuce vinaigrette for the three of us from room service. We had tried for a festive effect by arranging leis over the printers and computers we were using for the rewrite. We had found candles and lit them and played the tapes Quintana had wrapped up to put under the tree. John had been reading on the bed and had fallen asleep about eleven-thirty. Quintana had gone downstairs to see what was happening. I could see John sleeping. I knew Quintana was safe, she had been going downstairs to see what was happening in this hotel (sometimes alone, sometimes with Susan Traylor, who often came along with Quintana when we were working in Honolulu) since she was six or seven years old. I sat on a balcony overlooking the Waialae Country Club golf course and finished the bottle of wine we had drunk with dinner and watched the neighborhood fireworks all over Honolulu.

I remember one last present from John. It was my birthday, December 5, 2003. Snow had begun falling in New York around ten that morning and by evening seven inches had accumulated, with another six due. I remember snow avalanching off the slate roof at St. James’ Church across the street. A plan to meet Quintana and Gerry at a restaurant was canceled. Before dinner John sat by the fire in the living room and read to me out loud. The book from which he read was a novel of my own,
A Book of Common Prayer,
which he happened to have in the living room because he was rereading it to see how something worked technically. The sequence he read out loud was one in which Charlotte Douglas’s husband Leonard pays a visit to the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and lets her know that what is happening in the country her family runs will not end well. The sequence is complicated (this was in fact the sequence John had meant to reread to see how it worked technically), broken by other action and requiring the reader to pick up the undertext in what Leonard Douglas and Grace Strasser-Mendana say to each other. “Goddamn,” John said to me when he closed the book. “Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.”

I remember tears coming to my eyes.

I feel them now.

In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me.

He had twenty-five nights left to live.