I Regret Everything (9 page)

Oh, I've thought about it in the time you've taken to tell me you're going to Italy! His words were innocent enough, they've been said before by many people. But they stuck in my craw like fish bones.
I
have cancer, but
you
are going to Italy.
You
will be drinking Nebbiolo.
I
will be . . . well, you know what I'll be doing. More than anything I wanted to be going to Italy. Where I would be going: Not Italy.

“I spent my junior year in college there.” My voice sounded like it was coming from another room. Tapper prattled about Tuscany. It was impossible to listen. How could I be certain his diagnosis was correct? Before I allowed myself to drown in a sea of melancholy, I would get a second opinion. And I asked how soon I could meet the oncologist.

On York Avenue people swirled around me as if this were just another day, confident the sun would set and the moon would rise and they would return to their apartments and make dinner or order takeout, spend time with the family, make a phone call, send a text message, watch a movie, listen to music, play video games, read a magazine or a novel, make love or pleasure themselves, brush their teeth, wash their faces, go to bed, sleep untroubled or wrestle with vexations, then rise tired or rested, yearning or satisfied, and repeat, all as if nothing was wrong and convinced it was without end. Didn't they know the whole world was different now?

The hellish aura that enshrouded me was cleaved by the chirping of my phone. Reetika informed me that Dirk Trevelyan was eager to get an update on the Kandinsky situation and to sign his new will and that a Claude Vendler, nephew of the client that owned the Montauk house, had called about the disposition of his aunt's estate. Their lives were spectacularly irrelevant.

Going back to the office was not an option. Colleagues could gossip about my absence all they wanted. A man in my situation needs to believe he is immortal and if he finds himself in midtown Manhattan this belief might be strengthened by a long walk to Brooklyn. To know it was still physically possible, that I was not compromised, weakened,
dying
, that the six miles from Tapper's office to home were a simple stroll and would prove the planet had not spun off its axis
.

I joined the throngs of office workers on the daily march. My brain, heart, liver, and lungs, my sight, hearing, sense of taste, and smell were all present and accounted for and my skin seemed to absorb every external stimulus and turn it into energy. Never had I felt healthier as I marched south. In the East Village I stopped at the Strand Bookstore. Here was my first thought upon entering this temple of literary culture: If Jeremy Best/Jinx Bell were to ever have a book of poetry published he would not live long enough to see it on a shelf in the Strand. It was the saddest thought ever to occur to anyone. But the sight of the shelves had its usual brightening effect and drew me to their musty bosom where I posed like Kirk Douglas in
Spartacus
, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, in front of the B's. There, between the collected works of Anna Akhmatova and
The War Poetry of Homer Brant
, was the place reserved for my work, the place where it would abide for eternity. It wasn't there yet but it would be. If I could finish the poems I was working on and get them published as a collection.

Before leaving I bought several books about cancer, cancer memoirs with titles like
Sexy Cancer
and
Cancer, Baby!
, and a book in which the author claimed to have cured himself of a horrible disease through ingesting a mountain of vitamin C.

As I approached the Brooklyn Bridge surrounded by oblivious pedestrians an email arrived from Spaulding.
Spaulding!
For some reason this struck like the appearance of the first evening star low in the desert sky.

 

[email protected]

[email protected]

 

Dear Mr. Best,

Since you advised me to write emails if I felt stuck, I hope you don't mind if I send you this one.

Poetry is good to read when you're feeling lost or misunderstood or just effed up because the poets like you who are talented enough to publish what they write see the world in a way that is usually at least as twisted as the way I see it. This sent me to my copy of the Norton Anthology. With the list of poets in hand, I googled them one by one and printed out their portraits. My half-brother Marshall (he's 12) walked in and asked me what I was doing. When I told him, he wanted to know if he could help so I said sure, why don't you find some scissors and glue.

The two of us began cutting the poets' heads out one after another and then taping them in rows on the walls of my room. Marshall was working on a picture of Anne Sexton, moving the scissors like a pro.

—I like your shoes, he said. What kind are they?

—Ballet flats.

—Can I try them on?

Without a word, I took them off and handed them to Marshall, who removed the sneakers he was wearing and slipped into them. His smile was starlight.

—I wish I could wear these to school.

—Fly your freak flag, dude.

—I sneak into my mother's closet sometimes and try hers on. She has an awesome shoe collection.

Marshall kept the ballet flats on. The job took us four hours and by nine in the evening all of my walls were covered. There's an English wall and an American wall. There's a suicide section. There's a European wall. The printer in the house didn't have the capacity to render color so all of the faces are black and white and shades of gray.

Marshall was smoothing out some wrinkles on Emily Dickinson's face when Hurricane Katrina (his mother) materialized. The hallway was carpeted so we didn't hear her stealth approach. While she silently registered her shock at my interior decoration, Marshall slid the ballet slippers off.

—This is kind of surprising, Spaulding.

She ran her fingertips over W.H. Auden's nose, trying to determine how his photograph had been attached to the wall.

—You told me not to paint.

The advantage of having someone think you're unstable is that they don't want to provoke you. Katrina looked at me like I was a knot she could never unravel.

—It's totally cool, Marshall pronounced. I want to do my room like this.

—That isn't going to happen, Katrina informed him. Then she said it was bedtime and he needed to brush his teeth.

When my co-conspirator left he kicked up his back foot with a flourish his mother either did not notice or chose to ignore.

So that's life up here in Connecticut, not that you asked but I thought you might find it amusing. I've attached some pictures so you can see for yourself.

Any thoughts on when you might visit my class? I mentioned it to the teacher again and he's still into it.

Yours, Spaulding

P.S. I'm sending you a few poems. Can't wait to hear what you think!

 

Although it was somewhat discomfiting that Spaulding's missive had gone to my work email, I smiled for the first time in days. But to savor this welcome volley for even a moment was almost impossible. Spaulding, Spaulding, uncompleted poems, premature death. My thoughts were like a troupe of drunken acrobats, flipping and flailing. At home I tried to watch television, a ball game, a sitcom . . . I stared at the wall. I thought about my funeral and took a sleeping pill. From the sounds assaulting my apartment, it was clear my neighbor Bogdan had guests.

BOOM-THUNKA-THUNK, BOOM-THUNKA-THUNK.

The endless infernal bass loop vibrated in my bowels as I twisted the sheets in my king-sized bed. The bedroom was large and airy. There was a bureau with a clean surface and several bookshelves packed with sturdy hardbacks. The only decoration was a series of starkly framed black-and-white photographs of the World Trade Center under construction—steel skeletons rising toward the heavens, hard hats on beams floating thousands of feet above the earth—that I hung as a reminder of the ephemeral nature of things. This was a concept far easier to contemplate in the abstract.

Was I, in a few short months, going to be lying in a hospital bed surrounded by—by whom? No one. Or worse, strangers. Why had my personal life been such a disaster? When my mother died, we were barely speaking to each other, something that tormented me. My father had wanted some kind of relationship but his emotional needs were too complicated. There wasn't even an ex-wife I could lean on. Girlfriends had come and gone, some had wanted to get serious but I'd always acted as if there was plenty of time to make a choice. What an idiot I was.

The coolness of the air conditioning, instead of inducing relaxation, made me feel like I was already lying in the refrigerator of a funeral parlor.

And my colleagues? None of those friendships, if that's even what they were, felt like they would outlast our employment at the same firm. There was one friend from college that lived in the city, Margolis, a playwright, but we barely saw each other. What had my life become? Work, which was the immersion in the intimate details of other lives. Writing every day. And a casual social whirl with a series of people who could never penetrate the membrane that surrounded me.

I envisioned my organs closing like shutters in an empty house, unable to swallow, unable to see, hearing muted sounds in the distance until, finally, a faint murmur, someone's voice fading, fading, and then . . . and then? I stopped thinking about
that
as the inner seas pitched and heaved and my mind went reeling in the opposite direction, further and further back, to a summer rental in Montauk at the untamed eastern end of Long Island, and my first conscious memory. The day is beach bright and I am in a playpen in a room that opens onto a modest backyard. It is square-shaped with wooden slats and my small hands clutch the railing. I am calling out to my mother who is on the other side of the room folding laundry. She smiles at me. She wears capri pants and a fitted blouse, her hair in a bun. She is twenty-five years old. Her hands reach down and lift me up. In the air I am a conqueror! I am eternal! I will live!

BOOM-THUNKA-THUNK, BOOM-THUNKA-THUNK.

My feelings for my neighbor, murderous though they were, energized me. I got out of bed, collected myself, and, in a satisfying bit of psychological alchemy, logged in to my personal email account and channeled the rage I felt toward Bogdan into a measured response to Spaulding.

 

Dear Rhymester,

Your brother sounds like a terrific character for a short story. And I love your poet room idea although please don't tell your father I said that. If your parents make you take the pictures down maybe it could be an installation at the Whitney Biennial. Have you ever been?

You write well. Your prose is limber, you've got an eye for the mischievous detail, and you're funny, which never hurts. I don't even mind your non-use of quotation marks around dialogue. It worked for Joyce. Steal from the best, I say.

Keep writing emails. It's a great way to flush the plumbing before the clean water starts to run.

Thanks for the Kandinsky postcard. It's taped over my desk at home.

 

The etiquette for signing off in an email is always baffling and I spent a couple of moments trying to land on the one that would convey the combination of engagement and distance I was after. This meant
xo
was out. So, too, were
Best wishes
,
Always
,
Fondly
,
All best
,
Yours
,
Yours truly
,
Sincerely
,
Cheers
,
Ciao
,
Warm regards
, and, obviously,
Love.
But all I wanted to do was conclude an email. Could I not just say that I was done?

 

My decision:
 

Goodbye, JB

P.S. In the spirit of reciprocity, I've attached one of my poems.

 

It helped to write to Spaulding but my mind would not rest. Some draw on years of meditation practice to calm themselves in times of stress, others on prayer. I had a more personal technique to access the still center of the spinning world. During the year I spent in Italy, a film studies professor screened an obscure Italian movie from the 1960s called
Gianni and the Pope
about an old man from the provinces who travels to Rome in order to stand in St. Peter's Square and see the pontiff before he dies. But Gianni gets diverted to the demimonde of artists, dancers, musicians, whores, and hustlers and has an entirely different experience from the one he imagined.

I slid the DVD of the film into my laptop.

A prostitute named Lara escorts Gianni on a nocturnal journey through the sleeping city. He's infatuated with her and the sequence vibrates with a low-key sexual tension. Lara finds a stray kitten and sends the pliant Gianni to search for sustenance. When he returns with the bottle of milk he has miraculously located in the middle of the night, he sees her staring over the river, cradling the kitten. He approaches and places his hands next to her alabaster face but does not touch. He lowers his hands to her bare shoulders and rests them there. She kisses his cheek and together they turn to watch the river flow through the starry Roman night. Gianni falls asleep and Lara steals his wallet and runs away. When he wakes up he is bereft. Yet in those fleeting seconds when his heart is full of this wholly unexpected experience he is suffused with a profound sense of contentment and that's the moment that comes to mind when I remember the film. Not the disaster he awakens to but the moment of peace. Those fleeting seconds of utter quietude stilled my tempestuous thoughts (among them: Dr. Tapper was going to Italy but I wasn't?) and finally I slept.