JD (6 page)

A
fter Mickey's funeral we just went home. If we'd been Jews we'd have eaten smoked fish and covered the mirrors. If we'd been Episcopalians we'd have drunk martinis. But we were nothing. Maybe there are couples brought together by loss, but I think they would have had to be together in the first place. Without the shared enterprise of Mickey, Jonathan and I were stranded on separate islands, living in a household in which every connection except habit had atrophied.

No, I lived there, drawing vegetables, while Jonathan was out more and more. I even stopped making dinner, to our mutual relief. Why didn't we break up? Maybe because it would have cost too much: someone would have had to leave an apartment whose rent was controlled in 1951. Stuff would have had to be divvied up, packed. We were just too tired.

One morning a few months after Mickey died, I was cooking Jonathan's eggs—perhaps the last ritual we hadn't discarded. Jonathan said, “They've done something to the goddamn paper.” Almost whispering.

“What?”

He held it out to me. “Look.”

I looked. It was the paper. The daily Watergate stories, the mysterious statistics on the sports pages.

“You see?” he said.

“See what?”

“They've done something to it!” Shouting now. “There are no words there, just these lines and squiggles. Why are they doing this to me? There's something they don't want me to know.”

After some frenzied investigation, we established that
They
had also rendered everything from cereal boxes to Proust incomprehensible.

“You can read it? You can read it?” he kept screaming. I almost wished I couldn't, wished that
They
really had magically effaced every text in the apartment. And had gone on to wreck the Faherty's sign we could see from the window or the board in front of St. Anselm's announcing next week's sermon topic. But
They
hadn't. I could read all these things, and Jonathan couldn't.

He went on running around the apartment, shouting and growling, for another minute or two and then—at the threshold of his office—just stopped. Looked at all the books and the magazines and the papers. He fell to his knees, mouth still open but soundless now.

I walked him to the sofa and we sat, holding hands for the first time in so many months. He stared straight ahead.

After a while I got up and called his brother Bernie, the neurologist, in Boston. Bernie listened and then said. “That's it? That's all you've noticed?”

“I guess. So far.”

“No vision problems, motion? He's not in pain? He talks okay, he understands what you say?”

“Yes.”

“His face isn't distorted—drooping on one side, or …?”

“No”

“Can he write?”

“Write?”

“I'll hold on while you see if he can write.”

This seemed so absurd. I was sure, if I asked Jonathan to see if he could write, he'd just start screaming again. I said nonchalantly, “Jonathan, can you make a note that we're out of milk?”

He looked over at me, a bit dazed, then automatically picked up a pen and paper from the side table and wrote the note. He looked at it with wonder.

“He can write,” I said.

“And he can't read whatever he just wrote. Wow, I've read about this but I've never seen it. Alexia without agraphia. Probably a PCA stroke.”

“A stroke?”

“Yeah. In a blood vessel way at the back of his head. You need to get him to an ER pronto, but it could be this is all that's going to happen just now. You get him over to—what's close, St. Vincent's? Meanwhile I'll call—oh, maybe Sid Greenbaum, to get over there and take a look.”

We went to the ER. Dr. Greenbaum came and took a look; some hours later he was displaying to me Jonathan's electroencephalogram, an endless sheet of paper with parallel, spiky lines on it. “I was hoping to see something, right here,” Greenbaum said, pointing at one of the lines. Of course they were as indecipherable to me as the lines of the
Times
now were for Jonathan. “I know there's a lesion in the left occipital lobe, but it's too small to pick up. Which is a good thing—if it were big enough to detect there'd probably be a lot more wrong with him. Anyway, this syndrome he's got, what happens is that the right and left sides of his brain are kind of out of sync now. The right side is seeing all the letters, but it can't get the message over to the left side. And it's only the left side that knows all those funny shapes are words.”

“What can we do?”

“Nothing. We'll keep him here a couple days, see if anything else goes on. Then you can probably take him home.”

“What can we do?” I said it more sharply. “About his reading?”

“Nothing, probably. I'm sorry. But other than that he seems to be okay. Might put him on Coumadin.”

“That's a drug?”

“Uh-huh. Try to fend off the next stroke.”

The next, he said.

And maybe it would have, but the drug—which they also, I gather, use for poisoning rats—gave Jonathan blinding headaches. So he stopped taking it, and in a couple of months the next stroke duly arrived and he was dead. But of course he was essentially dead that first morning when he opened the
Times
and discovered that he had lost his whole world.

Still, in those last weeks our routine went more or less unchanged. While I made his eggs, he sat in the kitchen—not reading the sports pages, of course, just sucking on his Pall Mall and mumbling at me. Then, as he ate, I would read the
Times
aloud to him, doling out morsels I thought would interest him. Avoiding the ones that might enrage him, although the line between interest and enrage was pretty fuzzy.

Once or twice, early on, I would ask if he wanted me to read the sports pages. He would look at me with bewilderment and dismay. I realized I wasn't supposed to know about the sports pages. This was some sort of secret vice, even though he exhibited it every morning for years. Except, really, his expression—so far as I ever learned to read his expressions—was more like: why in the hell would I care about the sports pages? I may be illiterate but I'm not a cretin.

One day, after the first stroke and before the second, I came home from the grocery to find Jonathan in his office. The room torn apart as one imagines a room the secret police have searched, one filing cabinet overturned, books and papers scattered everywhere, Jonathan on his knees, weeping. He turned his empty hands palms upward, imploring. Of course he couldn't find what he was looking for, he couldn't read.

It occurs to me now: if he was looking for something he couldn't read, maybe he was looking for it so that he could destroy it.

I suppose I had better try to find out what it was.

T
he library at the School for Liberal Studies is a relic of that architectural movement of the sixties called Brutalism. Great slabs, deliberately left bearing the imprint of the wooden molds into which the concrete was poured, here and there a slit of a window, suitable for shooting an arrow through but admitting no light. People despise these buildings now, but I think they had a rather endearing honesty about them. Better than what they build today, still concrete slabs, but gussied up with a laser-cut veneer of granite. As if to say civilization is wafer-thin; under it the brute.

The library has no books in it. Well, that isn't so, but no more than adorn a living room in the home design magazines—just a scattering of coffee table books strewn here and there on the blond wood tables
that hold a phalanx of computer terminals. I cross the industrial carpeting to the main desk. Above it is a gray canvas about the size of my living room, with a faint red line running vertically an inch or so from the left edge.

Behind the desk is a boy with a shaved skull and five earrings in his left ear. Why not four, or six? I say, “Good morning,” and he looks at me expressionlessly: not hostile, just without any opinion at all, as if I were a television show he hasn't watched before. “I'm here to look at the papers of Jonathan Ascher.”

He looks away from me, into space, and says, “Papers?”

“Yes.” I say slowly, “His papers are stored here.”

He turns back to me and repeats, with patient incredulity, “Papers.”

I realize that he has no concept of what
papers
are. Am I looking for Jonathan Ascher's term papers? For Jonathan Ascher's bundle of last week's
Times
, ready to be recycled? “Professor Ascher's notebooks and letters and manuscripts were given to the library, and they're kept somewhere here.”

He gets up, with no show of enlightenment, and walks away, presumably to fetch an intergenerational interpreter. While I wait, I study the painting over the desk. It doesn't reward scrutiny, but I am uncomfortably aware that it is by someone who was famous thirty years ago. This school came and went without my ever learning the artists' names. I don't feel old when I fail to recognize the latest rock group; I feel old when I go to the Modern and realize that I can't identify a painter more recent than Jasper Johns without looking at the label.

A woman of about fifty, wearing a drab librarian suit but also tennis shoes, approaches me. She murmurs, in the way of librarians, so as not to disturb the scholars playing games at the computer terminals, “You were interested in the Ascher papers.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry, but access to those papers is restricted.”

“I'm Mrs. Ascher.”

“Mrs. Jonathan Ascher?”

“Yes. Do you need some identification?” I open my bag.

“No, I … They're not here.”

“What?”

“Mr. Ascher's papers aren't kept in this building.”

“Oh. Where …?”

“They're in storage. In Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth. In—what, a warehouse?”

“Not exactly. It's—we call it the Annex, it's humidity-controlled and …” She cringes a little, then draws herself up. “We have very limited space here, we need it for material that is in active use by researchers. And, since you won't give anyone access to the papers …”

“I understand,” I say. And I do, of course; it isn't their fault if I've been imagining, all these years, Jonathan's random jottings enshrined in some coffered room like a chapel.

“We can … you don't have to go to Elizabeth,” she says. Saving me the trouble of admitting the obvious: that a woman of my age, a white woman, is afraid to go to Elizabeth. I have reached the age at which, or I live in a country in which, there are entire cities I am afraid to visit in broad daylight. “If you know what you want to see, we can bring it here.”

“I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know what's there.”

“Oh. I believe there's a list.”

School for Liberal Studies
Houck Library
Manuscript Collection
Collected Papers of Jonathan Ascher (1912-1973)
(by item numbers)

I'm afraid Jonathan's life is pretty well summed up by the fact that half the collection consists of letters to the editor. But: journals. There are journals!

I had wondered sometimes. There were just a few spells—stretches of a month or two, scattered across the last years of our marriage—when I thought he might be writing about what was going on. He would head to his office after lunch and close the door. After a minute or two, the clacking of the typewriter. He didn't say what he was doing, I just surmised it: the stutter of his keystrokes was so continuous, he was clearly not enduring any throes of composition, just spewing forth his feelings about the day.

What were they for, these journals? He could as easily have sat in the office, lit his Pall Mall, and—if we'd had sharp words at lunch—simply mumbled all he had to say. Just as I, doing the dishes at the sink, ran through everything I should have said. But no: he would rush into the office and hurry to preserve for eternity
the last word
. That's what the journals must contain: the last word, with no comeback from me.

Did he mean to read them himself, later? Would he have liked—those last weeks, when he couldn't read—would he have liked me to sit and read aloud from the journals? Or did he really mean them for Philip Marks?

“I think I'd like to see the journals.” Feeling, even as I say this, that they are what I do not want to see.

“Items 1512 through 1516?”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry, but we've just missed today's last pickup from the Annex, and we don't do them weekends. Would Monday afternoon be soon enough, perhaps after two?”

“Yes. Or—no, can I call you when I'm ready to set up a time?”

“Of course.” As she writes the number for me I wonder if there are not books, full of dark spells, that you aren't meant to open.

I
am sitting in a cubicle at the SLS library, next to a sealed window that looks down on Ninth Street. On the table, four loose-leaf binders—the old kind, in light blue cloth, that kids used to carry to school. The labels on them—1964, 1966, 1970, 1972—are not in Jonathan's writing. Willis, the one who was supposed to write the biography, must have stuck them on while he was still at work. Maybe the labels were as far as he got. For some reason the people in the Annex didn't send over the fifth volume, 1973. I say there's no rush. After all, I waited thirty years.