Blue Nights (11 page)

She had never, not once, mentioned her other father.

I have no idea why but the picture in her mind seemed not to include a father.

“What a long strange journey this has been,” the letter from Florida read.

She burst into tears as she read it to me.

“On top of everything else,” she said through the tears, “my father has to be a Deadhead.”

Three years later the final message arrived, this one from her sister.

Her sister wanted her to know that their brother had died. The cause of death was unclear. His heart was mentioned.

Quintana had never met him.

I am not sure of the dates but I think he would have been born the year she was five.

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him
.

This call to say that he had died may have been the last time the sisters spoke.

When Quintana herself died, her sister sent flowers.

24

I
find myself leafing today for the first time through a journal she kept in the spring of 1984, a daily assignment for an English class during her senior year at the Westlake School for Girls. “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats,” this volume of the journal begins, on a page dated March 7, 1984, the one-hundred-and-seventeenth entry since she had begun keeping the journal in September of 1983. “In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life:
Pass into nothingness.
”

This March 7, 1984, entry continues, moves into a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger and their respective understandings of the abyss, but I am no longer following the argument: automatically, without thinking, appallingly, as if she were still at the Westlake School and had asked me to take a look at her paper, I am editing it.

For example:

Delete commas setting off title “Endymion.”

“Tell,” as in “a line that seems to tell my present fear of life,” is of course wrong
.

“Describe” would be better
.

“Suggest” would be better still
.

On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it
.

I try it:
She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre
.

I try it again:
She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”

Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984.

Was that deliberate?

Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man?

Hello, Quintana? I’m going to lock you here in the garage?

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?

Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?

Did it frighten me?

I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning.

What she said:
My present fear of life
.

What she said:
Pass into nothingness
.

What she was actually saying:
The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep
. When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying?

Does it frighten me?

25

L
et me again try to talk to you directly.

On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old.

Notice the odd construction there
—I became seventy-five years old
—do you hear the echo?

I
became
seventy-five? I
became
five?

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

Also notice—in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called
Blue Nights
for a reason, notes called
Blue Nights
because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days—how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to
address the subject as it were
. Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as “wrinkly,” or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one.

Quintana was born when I was thirty-one.

Only yesterday Quintana was born.

Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

Enveloped in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper.

Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in
.

What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called?

What would happen to me then?

Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405.

Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us.

We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway.

It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only yesterday when we still called the 10 the Santa Monica, it was only the day before yesterday when the Santa Monica did not yet exist.

Only yesterday I could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which the brake.

Only yesterday Quintana was alive.

I disengage my feet from the pedals, first one, then the other.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.

I am seventy-five years old:
this is not the reason I give.

26

A
doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggests that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.

Wrong
, I want to say.

In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.

In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the red suede sandals with four-inch heels that I had always preferred.

I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the gold hoop earrings on which I had always relied, the black cashmere leggings, the enameled beads.

My skin would develop flaws, fine lines, even brown spots (this, at seventy-five, was what passed for a realistic cosmetic assessment), but it would continue to look as it had always looked, basically healthy. My hair would lose its original color but color could continue to be replaced by leaving the gray around the face and twice a year letting Johanna at Bumble and Bumble highlight the rest. I would recognize that the models I encountered on these semiannual visits to the color room at Bumble and Bumble were significantly younger than I was, but since these models I encountered on my semiannual visits to the color room at Bumble and Bumble were at most sixteen or seventeen there could be no reason to interpret the difference as a personal failure. My memory would slip but whose memory does not slip. My eyesight would be more problematic than it might have been before I began seeing the world through sudden clouds of what looked like black lace and was actually blood, the residue of a series of retinal tears and detachments, but there would still be no question that I could see, read, write, navigate intersections without fear.

No question that it could not be fixed.

Whatever “it” was.

I believed absolutely in my own power to surmount the situation.

Whatever “the situation” was.

When my grandmother was seventy-five she experienced a cerebral hemorrhage, fell unconscious to the sidewalk not far from her house in Sacramento, was taken to Sutter Hospital, and died there that night. This was “the situation” for my grandmother. When my mother was seventy-five she was diagnosed with breast cancer, did two cycles of chemotherapy, could not tolerate the third or fourth, nonetheless lived until she was two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday (when she did die it was of congestive heart failure, not cancer) but was never again exactly as she had been. Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments. When she came to visit me in New York for example she pronounced St. James’ Episcopal Church, the steeple and slate roof of which constitute the entire view from my living room windows, “the single ugliest church I have ever seen.” When, on her own coast and at her own suggestion, I took her to see the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she fled to the car, pleading vertigo from the movement of the water.

I recognize now that she was feeling frail.

I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now.

Invisible on the street.

The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene.

Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door.

Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party.

“Estrogen actually made me feel better,” she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it.

Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better.

This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us.

And yet:

And still:

Despite all evidence:

Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have:

Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply:

Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity:

Despite all that:

Nonetheless:

That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me.

27

S
omething happened to me early in the summer.

Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon.

I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was “syncope,” fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on “pre-syncope symptoms” (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply.

I had been alone in the apartment.

There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach.

I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room.

I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time.

This was dangerously soothing.

I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me.

I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head.

I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up.

At which point I called a friend.

At which point he came over.

At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital.

It was I who said Lenox Hill.

Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill.

Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night:
it was I who said Lenox Hill
. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell,
and I said Lenox Hill
. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem.