Elegies for the Brokenhearted (23 page)

You declined to name your illness. In fact you hardly spoke of it, except to say that the previous winter you'd twice been in the hospital with pneumonia, and didn't expect to make it through the current season. You had taken up the role of invalid in the most stylish fashion. You wore a silk dressing gown and walked with the aid of a polished black walking stick. Your slippers were of black velvet. When you coughed, it was into a silk handkerchief.

You slept much of the day, but we stayed up late into the evenings. You stretched out on the couch and told all the stories of your life again. They were essentially the same as before, though less exaggerated. It seemed important to you, finally, to get things right. Often you paused in your recollections to think, to make sure you had the right names and dates. You had me write them all down in a notebook.
You've shown up at just the right time,
you said.
I've been wanting to leave a record of some kind, but I've never liked writing things down. Yes, you're just the solution I was looking for.

All of your stories stopped when you left graduate school, when you'd moved to Maine. If you mentioned the Bavarian, or the Oasis, it was only in passing, as a means of comparison to something from your childhood, and so the whole last twenty years of your life seemed little more than a trip you'd taken once, long ago, and could hardly remember.

You didn't mention your symphony. On the last night of my stay, I asked if you had finished it, and you stared off as though you hadn't heard me. You paused for so long that I began to wonder if I had actually posed the question to you aloud, or merely thought it. But finally you spoke.
Failure,
you said,
is an art form we are all engaged in whether we know it or not. And I suppose I've finally accepted it, I suppose I've made it my own.

You stood up and motioned for me to follow you. As you climbed the stairs one of your hairs, which had come loose from the impeccable order of the rest, stood on end and waved about, this way and that, though what current was stirring it I couldn't tell—you moved so slowly that it took us several minutes to ascend the steps.

Your room was just as sparse as my room had been. There was only a bed and dresser, a nightstand. Aside from your toiletries, which you kept on a mirrored tray, you seemed to have no personal effects whatsoever.

You opened the door of your closet, in which hung your suits and shirts—the very same your grandmother had purchased for you before you left Arkansas. Stacked on the floor of the closet were several crates, which held your composition notebooks.
My life's work,
you said.
An exercise in failure.
You picked up one of the notebooks, flipped through it, squinted, frowned, as if you couldn't imagine what had captivated you for all that time.
Take them,
you said,
they mean nothing to me. I don't quite have the strength to destroy them myself, but I'd be glad to know they were gone, I'd be glad to know they were in the hands of someone educated.

A week later I called the Bavarian to see how you were. When Mrs. Strauss answered the phone it was a voice even more manic that usual—“Hallo!” she said—and I sensed right away that you were gone. “We've lost our James,” she told me. “Just after your visit, my dear.” She said that you had taken too many pills, that your pain was so great you'd accidentally ingested an excess of sedatives. “It's the delicate souls,” she said, “that get eaten up.” I was touched by her naïvete, which I'd always suspected covered up a deep, terrible understanding of the nature of things.

 

I
n the evenings that followed I made a habit of sitting down with your notebooks. On the front page of each book you had written your name (which you signed in long, slashing letters, as though you were carving it with a sword) and the date, and so it was possible to get a sense of their progression over time. At first glance the books were overwhelming. On each page there were ten staffs stacked on top of one another, all of them sounding at once, and it was almost impossible for me to hold all of the notes in my mind. The kind of mind it would take to understand that music was very rare, and to have such a mind, I imagined, must have made it difficult to live in the flat, shallow territory of ordinary life.

There were a good many things about the notebooks, however, that were easy to understand. It was clear that you were fond of the oboe, for instance—of giving it high, trembling notes that outlasted the rest of the orchestra. In general the notebooks displayed a fairly obvious back-and-forth pattern, between the mess of spontaneous creation and the attempt at discipline that followed. There were times when the notes were slashed down, sloppy, and times when they were perfectly formed, each note evenly spaced. During your first years in Maine you produced at a furious rate, going through two or three notebooks a month, but as the years went by you produced less and less. In one year, 1988, you didn't get through a single book. In your final days you'd crossed out nearly everything you'd done. Page after page was marked with slashes so violent you'd in many cases broken through the page with your pencil.

Most valuable to me were the notes you'd made to yourself in the margins. Often you wrote the names of composers and passages from other works—you were fond of Satie, Debussy. You had a particular fascination with Beethoven's Seventh. But in other places you'd made notes about the feelings of the passages, the moods you hoped to evoke. What you hoped to create with your music, it seemed, was a sense of the solitary, the ruminative. You sought to create within the listener the sensations that come upon us in private, withdrawn moments.
Kicking a rock down the street,
you wrote.
Waking to rain in the night; flying in dreams; a neighbor seen through the window; voices in another room; children at play in the distance.

If your work made one thing clear to me, it was that your life was a battle. Essentially you had withdrawn into your work, into solitude, and yet what was your work but an effort to communicate, to be understood? Even the evocation of loneliness was something undertaken with the purpose of communicating it to someone, who would hear it and perhaps understand it. What impressed me most was how similar our lives were—yours, mine, and everyone we knew—and yet how little we'd noticed the connections. We had all known joy and then lost it, had blindly sought after it again; we had taken up burdens and carried them for a time, then stumbled beneath them; we had made strides and then lapsed; we had taken strange paths that sometimes delivered us to safety and sometimes led us astray; we had despaired, tried again, despaired, tried again. Through it all we had somehow felt ourselves alone, misunderstood. In the end you believed you had failed; you seemed to have died in despair.

All through that winter my mind was occupied with the question of whether life was worth living. To have ambitions, to make plans, to hope, to work, to dream, to enter into friendships and love affairs—I wondered if there was any point. I went back and forth. I still had the bottle of pills you'd given me, and sometimes I thought of taking one. I imagined myself—suddenly made loquacious, vibrant, giddy—going out to join the world, to seek my fortune, I imagined throwing my hat in the air like Mary Tyler Moore. But then again it seemed to me that all such efforts—at least the ones I'd witnessed—led to disaster. In my darker moments I held that bottle of pills in my hand and stared at it. I thought of taking them all at once.

One night I went through the notebook you'd been working on the summer I lived at the Bavarian, and I came across the passage you had played over and over again, the one I had woken to in the middle of the night, the notes rising and falling, rising and falling, which had sounded to me like a leaf tossed in the wind. And suddenly the question I'd been turning around in my mind—whether two people could ever reach each other, or whether we were all hopelessly alone—found a surprising answer. What convinced me that all was not lost, that there was still hope, that people in fact understood one another, if only in the smallest of ways, and mostly unnoticed—was something you'd written, just above those plaintive notes:
a leaf tumbling to the ground.

(1952–2003)

T
he fifties, and all the world wants is a bit of beauty, the forgetting that comes with it. You are born beautiful in a failing industrial city, and you learn soon enough that to be a thing of beauty in a place like this is to bear a burden, to carry on your shoulders all the desperate hopes of that ashy, crumbling corner of the world, its entire population of failures. “What a doll!” people say, wherever you go. “What a doll you are!” Every day of your life someone crosses a room to touch you, to pinch your cheek, to stroke your hair, as if to touch you would be to take a bit of your beauty for themselves. But what happens is something quite different. What happens is that these people leave, in tiny smudges, traces of their desire on you, their desperation, and it spreads like a tarnish. Soon you are coated in it, desperate in your own way. To be noticed, to be touched. You begin to feel on you, every moment, the gaze of a stranger—even in an empty room you feel it. You tilt your head, you toss your hair, you pout, you blink. Your every movement takes on a posed, anguished quality. Soon you are a doll, with a doll's hardness, you are stiff and heartless as a Tin Man.

You grow up, you do the things that girls do. Grammar school, Girl Scouts, dancing lessons, church. You do as you're told: you sit and you stand, you sing and you dance, you take your marks, perform your tasks. You do everything with the casual, indifferent ease that suggests it is all beneath you, that you are just marking time until you come of age, until you head west to make your name and fortune. “That child is impeccable,” people say. “That child should be in pictures.”

Even at your father's funeral you are self-possessed, the picture of dignified grief. (Your father dies when you're ten, of cancer, secreted away in your parents' bedroom. In the last stages he is too proud to let you see him, but you sneak into the room once and catch a glimpse of him, purple and bloated beyond recognition.) You stand straight-backed by the casket, receiving the line of mourners, offering your hand just like your mother does.
Thank you,
you say,
it means so much to us
. Meanwhile your sisters are compelled to sit down in another room, they are so crippled with sobbing. “Poise,” your mother calls it, lighting a cigarette on the drive home. “Thank you for your poise.”

At fourteen you start going around with boys—sneaking off with them in their cars after school lets out. What you want is their desire, the weight of it, on top of you. You are known as a cocktease; you take their dicks in your hand and squeeze. The boys cry out, they cry your name. “You're so beautiful,” they tell you, “you should be in the movies.”
I know,
you say, sitting up.
I'm going to Hollywood when I finish school
. You have plotted your escape from home, and your ensuing rise to fame, down to the smallest details, and there's nothing you love more than talking about it: the clothes you'll be wearing as you board the Greyhound bus, your first months of struggle working as a coat girl at a country club, the director who spots you as he checks his wife's mink. You talk about the kinds of films you'd like to be in, the actors you'd like to work with. Paul Newman, Marlon Brando. “Hey,” the boys say, “what about me? Are you gonna be nice to me? Look at Mr. Happy here, Mr. Happy's getting sad.” You turn away, pull your clothes together.
Mr. Happy,
you say,
is sad, all right.
You drive them mad.

When you are seventeen a local talent promoter named Vic DiPilato spots you in a dance recital and recruits you to join a performance troupe he operates—dancers, singers, magicians, even a comic. Every weekend they go around town performing for patients in nursing homes and hospitals. “It's not the big time,” Vic tells you, “but it's a start.” He is the clichéd small-time promoter (the false teeth and the off-color toupee, the powder blue suits and the alcoholic's swollen nose) and at first you turn him down. But then he gives you a line you can't resist. He has a friend in New York, he says, on Broadway, and it occurs to you that you might not have to strike out for Hollywood after all—you might have already been discovered.

On the weekends Vic drives you around the city, and you dance the Charleston for people who once danced it themselves, but no longer can. There is something absurd in your performances, you think—your health and beauty paraded around in front of cripples, as if to remind them of what they've lost—but people seem to enjoy you. They clap, they cheer, they beg for more. Other members of the troupe grow jealous, spiteful, one of them even quits. But this kind of resentment, Vic tells you, is a good sign—the first sign of a star.

One day Vic picks you up and tells you you'll be performing at the state mental hospital, a Gothic fortress whose tolling clock tower has always filled you with a sense of sublime dread.
I don't know about this,
you tell him, as you pull into the parking lot.
I have a bad feeling. I feel kind of sick.

“This is show business,” he says. “You gotta take every audience you get.”

An orderly leads you and the other performers through a series of long hallways. The orderly has a key ring with the circumference of a grapefruit, and he has to stop every fifty yards to unlock a heavy metal door. You lose your bearings. The hallways wind around and around, and you seem to be going in a circle, but it's hard to tell. Everyone in the troupe is dressed in some version of holiday cheer. You wear a red leotard with white fur trim, and the comic—a short kid named Mickey—wears the costume of an elf. There are little bells on the curved tips of his shoes. He looks ridiculous—you want to laugh, just looking at him—but on his face is an expression of such intense suffering that all the fun goes out of it. This place is a horror, a chamber of horrors, and you are wearing the same expression.

Finally you arrive in the women's ward. The patients sit in a horseshoe around you, sunk in their chairs. They wear pajamas and seem to have been wearing them for many years. Though they are of various ages—some not much older than you, some in their senior years—they all look the same. Their bodies are limp and slack, they are ghostly pale, their hair is disheveled, their teeth yellow and crooked. Common to each of them is a spooky thousand-yard stare. As Mickey goes through his act (So a pirate walks into a bar…), they seem to be looking straight through him.

When it is your turn, Vic starts up on the piano—“Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas”—and you do your best to dance with an enthusiasm that suggests there is nothing wrong with the hospital or the people in it. But the patients are unaffected—many of them seem not to notice you. It is the first time your beauty has failed, the first time an audience regards you with indifference. Just when you're thinking of giving up, of simply stopping and walking off, one of the older women (her hair is long and white, with streaks of yellow, and her eyes, you notice, are the same pale blue as yours) leaps from her chair with a swiftness you would have never guessed was possible. Suddenly she is on top of you, she has knocked you down on the floor. “Fucking bitch,” she yells. “You fucking bitch!” She has a fistful of your hair and pulls your head up, then smashes it against the tile. You stare at her the whole time, too shocked to resist. There is a great commotion, the guards pulling at her, but before they get her off you she opens her mouth—you see her teeth, jagged and rotten—and bites you in the neck. You feel her teeth break the skin, you feel a lump of flesh ripped away. When they pull the woman off of you, her mouth is bloodied.

You are taken to the hospital, then sent home with a concussion and with eight stitches in your neck. For two whole weeks you are sullen and listless, you won't get out of bed, you won't eat. You open your Christmas presents with stoic detachment. “Snap out of it,” your mother says, and shakes you by the shoulders. “What the hell is wrong with you?” She doesn't understand that something is broken, something is desperately wrong. Whenever you close your eyes you see the crazy woman's face, the rage she turned on you. You see the way the guards pressed her to the floor—one of the men pressing his boot against her neck. How wild she was, how she fought and screamed.

In January you return to school, but things aren't the same. Nothing interests you like it used to. You don't go out with your friends on the weekends. You quit the performance troupe and even give up your plan of moving to Hollywood. You enroll in Miss LaVonna's Secretarial Academy (“Since 1923, Turning Young Women into Right-Hand Ladies!”), which is the fate of nearly all the girls in your neighborhood. You can't explain what is happening, except to say that it is as though the crazy woman has infected you. The scars on your neck are still tender—you can still feel them throbbing with each heartbeat. Fucking bitch. You fucking bitch.

When the time comes, you don't even want to attend the senior prom. Your date is Mike Murphy, who has been in love with you since kindergarten. He is the handsomest boy in your class, captain of all he pursues: football, basketball, baseball. His father owns a plumbing business and after graduation Mike Murphy will become his partner. In your dying city, this is considered a good prospect (“A business owner,” people say. “An entrepreneur”) and you are supposed to be pleased to be his girlfriend. But he has always bored you—he talks of nothing but sports, he doesn't like to sit through movies. Prom night, when he shows up at the door (you can see him from your bedroom window, in his blue tuxedo, carrying a blue corsage) you are still in your bathrobe. Your mother calls you but you decline to come down. She barges into your room, hissing. “We bought this dress, and you're going.” She takes the rollers out of your hair and brushes it, she sweeps eye shadow across your lids, zips up your dress. “Beautiful!” she says.

Hours later, drunk, you're just another stupid girl with her legs spread in the back of a Buick, some sweaty jock on top of you, bourbon-breathed, pants around his ankles, ruffled tuxedo shirt still buttoned to the neck. You're not particularly enjoying yourself, in fact you're thinking of the crazy woman again, coming after you, on top of you. This is what you're thinking when Mike Murphy—tight end, point guard, short stop—cries, “Oh God, Oh God, I'm coming.” He is lost in it, outside himself, and you are outside of yourself in a different way, you hardly notice what's happening. You finger the scar on your neck—two jagged half-circles that look like birds in flight.

One of the oldest stories in the book. Later that summer, in the middle of Miss LaVonna's typing class (
f,
space,
f,
space,
f, f, f,
space) you keep nodding off, and it occurs to you that you're pregnant.
Shit,
you think.
Oh shit.

The only person you tell is your stepbrother Mike, not because you want him to know, but because you heard a rumor last year about his girlfriend and some back-alley abortion, and you think he might be able to help you. So you climb onto the rooftop of your parents' house, where the two of you sit smoking after your parents have gone to bed. “Aw, Jesus,” he says, shakes his head. “What the fuck, Maggie, you're supposed to be smarter than that. Jesus.” He blows smoke out of his nose. “God,” he says. “Goddamn.” He has always been a bit in love with you, and you with him, and it is as though you have run around behind his back. You work your way around to asking, but he won't help you. “I don't know nothing about that,” he says. “That wasn't even mine. No way.”

For a while you do nothing.
I just need time to think,
you say to yourself. The days go by, and go by. You graduate from Miss LaVonna's.
I'll think about it tomorrow,
you tell yourself, like Scarlett O'Hara, until so many tomorrows go by that you no longer have much of a choice.
Shit,
you think.
Oh shit
.

Mike Murphy is surprised when you tell him. “No way! Really? Holy shit!” He is pleased with himself, like a child who has just learned to walk—he staggers around the room with a stupid grin. A week later, when he asks you to marry him, you reason that it's nothing that can't be undone.
I'm just doing this for now,
you think,
just for the time being.

And so you sign on for it, a small church wedding with a reception at the Knights of Columbus hall, the two-day honeymoon at the Cape. You return home to your new one-bedroom apartment and spend a day opening gifts. Supposedly you've been set up with everything you could possibly need in life—plates and silverware, glasses and cups, table linens—but when you finish putting things away you think to yourself,
Is this all there is?
Your new apartment is only two streets over from your parents' house. From your back window it is possible to see Mike sitting on the rooftop, smoking, and you stare at him for long, wistful stretches.

You grow fat, fatter, so fat it seems you will never recover. You endure various agonies. The gas, the heartburn, the swollen feet. The doctor visits and examinations. The hideous dresses, like tablecloths. The touch of strangers, pressing their palms against your stomach. You are no longer yourself—you are a mother now. You have been brought into a fold you didn't want any part of, and you see now that all the world's mothers have been lying in wait for you to join them in their private hell, a place where you yourself are of no concern, a place where all anyone ever talks about is the baby. Older women come charging across the street to offer their advice, they never stop, every day they come after you, you can't so much as go out to get the mail without someone approaching you. “What you do is, you rub its gums with a little brandy. What you do is, you drive the baby around in the car when it won't sleep. Don't pick it up no matter what—let it scream its head off, get yourself a set of earplugs, if you pick it up it's just going to be spoiled.” Talking with these women you suffer moments of terror, panic, you break out in sweats.
What you do is,
you think,
you run away. You just run away.