Fear of Dying (9 page)

“As long as I was only building water systems I could be dismissed as a rich
grubber yung
—but when I make these things, I'm an artist! I love it! Art is defined as something useless.” Asher had gotten rich in a variety of businesses from finance to real estate to water.

Asher admired more than any contemporary work Smithson's
Spiral Jetty
, built into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We had to fly there in our plane and inspect it from all sides. We brought all the catalogs and noted the way it had changed colors over the years. Knowing of his interest in Smithson, the Dia Foundation tried to get Asher to fund the restoration of the jetty, but Asher wanted to build something as grand as
Spiral Jetty
and sign his own name to it. He was sick of being a patron. He wanted to be an artist. This led him to suggest hiring Smithson as his teacher.

“He's dead,” I said. “Died in a plane crash in the seventies.”

“Well, we'll find another earth artist.”

“Not so simple,” I said. “Earth art is no longer in.”

That was when he decided to take me on a tour of the stone circles of England and Ireland.

“People have always honored their gods with rocks and earth!” he said.

“But you're not honoring God, you're honoring yourself.”

He looked at me critically, almost disapprovingly—like the satrap about to have the concubine killed. Then he burst into peals of laughter.

“That's why I love you, Nes, 'cause I can't put anything over on you. You know me, baby.” He squeezed my hand, almost amputating a finger with the huge canary diamond I wore.

“Ow!” I yelped.

“That thing's lethal. Next time remind me to buy you a smaller one!”

I did know him. But did he know me? Did he know that I loved him with my whole heart? I wanted to make that clear.

The truth is we all want to be known. And we're simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect. That was the real reason Asher fell in love with me. My knowledge of him broke through his loneliness. Maybe his sainted late wife hadn't really known him—though he'd never admit that even to himself.

Money is like sex. Sometimes the more you have the less you have. As the Chinese sages knew, no amount of money can make people speak well of you behind your back. But Asher stockpiled money mainly to impress the other men who were stockpiling money. They were his peers, the ones he needed to impress. I'll never forget the day he learned that some contemporary of his was buying an out-of-service Concorde and planned to use it as his personal transport. It made him nearly insane.

“I know it's idiotically impractical, but it burns my ass. That bastard will get to Paris in three hours while we take six!”

“How much does it cost to run?”

“That's
not
the point!”

“And you can't fly it to California.”

“I could try to get the rules bent if it were mine.”

“We have a beautiful plane!” At that point it was a Gulfstream IV.

“But with a Concorde, we could have a flying palace!”

“For short people. And so what?”

“That asshole will have something no one else has.”

“The Sultan of Brunei has plenty of things no one else has—including a harem.”

“I didn't go to high school with the Sultan of Brunei!”

“Is that what it's about? High school?”

“You bet your bippy.”

“How childish. All of life is not about high school!”

“Maybe for me it is. Besides—everything about money is childish. So what? It still buys what I need most.”

“What's that?”

“Respect.”

“Or duplicity. Why would you want that?”

“Everybody gets duplicity from their fellow man. I'd rather have it in comfort. My dad never learned that.”

“Nobody could say you weren't comfortable. I make sure of
that
.”

“That's why I love ya, kid.” He kissed me on the nose.

*   *   *

In their own way, my parents were just as crazy about money—on a smaller scale. They had grown up during the Depression and for them the Depression was still a reality. They had transmitted that reality to their daughters. All three of us were marked by their money anxiety. All three of us felt poor despite the fact that we would probably inherit from them and had never known want or hunger or the blacking factory. In our hearts we were all Oliver Twist crying “More, please.”

 

 

 

Winter tightens its grip. The weather gets stranger and stranger—cold one day and fiercely hot the next. There are Kansas tornados in New York and humid New York nights in Kansas. There are torrential floods in New Jersey and Connecticut. Beaches are washing away on Long Island and Cape Cod. The dunes cannot keep pace. Not even the billionaires on the East End can rebuild their sand dunes fast enough to save their multimillion-dollar “cottages.”

Barrier beaches are temporary geological features—like waterfalls, like us. The whole planet seems to be washing away. Or turning to ash. We put it out of our heads as people do. “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” La Rochefoucald said. The death of a planet might be too much to absorb, but most deaths are more specific and less apocalyptic. They start with stunning simplicity.

The doorman calls up to the apartment: “Your husband has collapsed in the lobby.”

And I am in my leotard and bare feet, ready to work out with Balkan Man, my Serbian trainer.

“Gotta go!” I say to Isadora. I talk on the phone with her constantly.

“Why?” she asks.

“Asher collapsed in the lobby!”

“Oh my God! Call me back!” she orders me.

I run to the elevator as if in slow motion and slide downstairs to find my husband gray-faced and gasping on the marble floor of the lobby, muttering, “I'll be fine, got to get to the office…” Then he retches and falls back.

“The ambulance is coming,” says the doorman.

Out in the street, it's suddenly freezing December weather. (“Ice is nice / And would suffice,” Robert Frost wrote about the end of the world.) The ambulance screams up to the front of our building. Medics appear and strap Asher onto a gurney.

“I'm fine, I'll go to work,” he keeps saying before passing out. The wide double doors of the ambulance gape to receive him. The medics wire him up, lay him down, and give him an aspirin. He vomits it.

“Lenox Hill,” they say.

“No, New York Hospital,” I protest, knowing his doctor is there. What ensues is a fierce argument with the medics, which I win.

At New York Hospital the cardiac team goes into action, but not before they check out our health insurance. I am in limbo—the limbo that always overtakes me in emergencies—free of feeling, giving orders, unhesitant, unambivalent. I always become fiercely focused whenever the life of someone I love is balanced on a wire.

Again, my husband throws up the half-dissolved aspirin. Everything is suspended like that aspirin. Death is always here in life yet willed invisible because we cannot bear it any more than we can bear news that our sun will someday go out.

Then I am in the ER being told my husband has had a mild heart attack. Then I am in the cath lab being told they were wrong about that.

“It looks like a dissecting aneurysm,” says the surgeon.

“Can I get a second opinion?” I ask.

“Only if you want him dead,” the surgeon says. “Time is of the essence. We must go into surgery immediately.”

“But he had
breakfast
,” I say, thinking of the time Glinda was three and needed surgery for a severed finger and we had to wait for her to digest her dinner.

“No time,” the surgeon says, like the white rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
.

By then, Isadora is there, translating for me. “They cannot wait,” she says, “with an aneurysm.”

“What's an aneurysm?”

“The wall of the blood vessel balloons out and may burst,” says someone.

“It
has
burst,” another voice says.

Now my husband is alert and in charge, holding an iconic clipboard.

“Sign here,” a doctor says.

“Do you want a metal or a porcine valve?”

“I don't care,” Asher says. “I'm not kosher.”

I love him because even at a time like this, he can still make jokes.

He signs and they take him into the OR.

I realize my feet are still bare and I am wearing his huge green loden coat over my leotard and tights. I am shivering. My feet are bluish.

Isadora is holding my hand. “It will be all right,” she says. Neither of us believes it any more than we believed it when her husband came home from an avalanche in a box, his mouth twisted as if he were saying, “Shit!”

Since Isadora and I have been friends, she has gone through a series of trials that would have broken a weaker spirit. She has gone from being a wild girl to a wise woman. Since her beloved husband slammed into a tree during an avalanche, she has become the most spiritual woman I know.

*   *   *

Isadora is a writer who got famous way too young and then had to save herself from the brink of self-destruction. Like me, she went through terrible periods of being a love junkie and a substance abuser. But when she got clean, she was a model of sobriety like my daughter. I loved her sanity and grace. She inspired me. And despite her early fame and the criticism it brought, she went on writing. Going on is the ultimate test of character.

*   *   *

My daughter arrives with the clothes I must have asked her for. She has that manic humor that comes from terror:

“What does a woman wear while her husband has open heart surgery? Does she wear the J jeans and the Rykiel sweater? Or the Ralph Lauren cardigan and the Blue Cult jeans? And what about shoes? Clergerie or Blahnik? And her bag—Fendi or Hermès?”

My friend and I are laughing so as not to cry.

I grab my clothes, go to the ladies room, and get dressed there as if I have to be properly dressed for my husband's surgery.

We wait. Doctors come in and out and we attempt to nickname them. There is Dr. Buff, with his muscled arms, six-pack, and crew cut; Dr. Dash, who runs rather than walks; and Dr. Cud, who is always chewing gum. Dr. Buff gives us a V for Victory sign. Dr. Dash says, “So far, so good.” Other uniformed troops run in and out of the OR. It seems like an entire baseball team is working on my husband. It is a doubleheader.

*   *   *

In the last few years I have spent much of my life waiting at hospitals. First my husband's parents died nearly in tandem. Then my own parents began to fail. Once you have entered the hospital's mythic maw, your life is no longer your own—or perhaps it is too much your own. You are on hospital time, which slows to a crawl. You are at the bottom of the information totem pole. Everyone knows something but you—and if you protest you will know even less. In my family, we were always topping one another with misery. Well, now it seemed I had won.

My cell phone shrills. It's my sister Emilia—Em.

“Where are you?” she asks over the crackle.

I realize I have neglected to tell her where I am.

“Asher had an aneurysm of the aorta. I'm at New York Hospital waiting for him to come out of open heart surgery.”

“Oh my God,” says my sister. “I can barely hear you.”

“What did she say?” I hear my other sister ask.

“She's at the hospital.”

“Why?” is all I hear before the phone goes dead.

*   *   *

I am sitting beside Asher, who is sleeping in the ICU. His skin is as cold as refrigerated steak. Glinda is crying. Asher's eyelids flutter.

“Please stay,” I say, touching his chilled arm. I wish I knew a
brucha
, but I have absolutely no religious education. I don't want to be a widow like my sisters. But I don't want him to live with a tattered memory either. How shall I pray and to whom? I don't believe God has a personal connection with each of us. Yes, there is what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” but is it a personalized force? Who knows? It does not speak to each of us in the local language, still less in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Hindi. I believe in God or the gods, but I'm not sure God believes in
us
anymore. Witness the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib. Witness school shootings and our inability to stop them.…

God is disappointed in us. We failed each test. We are not kind enough or good enough to be saved. Kindness is the highest wisdom, says the Torah. By that standard, we are not wise, we who torture our fellows and live by the labor of little dark-skinned children. There, I said it. That's what I believe. Somewhere in the universe, there must be enlightened beings, but we are not them. Slash it, bash it, tear it down like the Tower of Babel. Flood it and drown the sinners. Surely another round of evolution may produce something better than the gun-toting torturers who populate our planet.

Dr. Buff walks in and signals for me to meet him in the hall.

“Your husband has lots of
mazel,
” he says. “My colleague, Dr. Ahrens, who just happened to be on yesterday, specializes in aortic repair. He did a gorgeous graft—a long one with tissue from the saphenous vein in the leg. It was an honor to watch him. Looks great. We didn't have to work on valves at all. He's a lucky man, your husband. Now all we have to hope for is no infection and good healing. No guarantees, but…”