My Mistake (25 page)

Having had surgery for lung cancer the previous spring, and looking at this magnificent animal brought down at random, I feel that the Great Temporariness has swung around from being a dark sidekick to a face-to-face superior who will no longer tolerate my disregard. Maybe he will wake up next spring with the huge black bears out there in the state forest, behind our land, and come hunting for me.

 

Sixty-nine

 

He does.

The pulmonologist with kids amazingly in their twenties finds three very small nodules in the remainder of my left lung on the annual follow-up CT scan a couple of years after my surgery. They were there even more tinily the previous year, but they could be ignored as inconsequential, but now, although they're still small, they're bigger. Or one of them is. Not good. She wants me to have one of them biopsied, by means of a needle through my back and the wall of my lung. I have it done. Malignant. Very not good. When the pulmonologist and I go over my options for treatment, and after I'm told that this appears to be an “indolent recurrence,” and that it's perfectly possible that I will remain asymptomatic for a couple of years, I say, somewhat idly, “What if I decide to do nothing? Just sort of sit back and see what happens?”

The pulmonologist gets upset. “You can't do that!” she says. “That isn't an option. You have to be treated.”

I say, “‘I have been half in love with easeful Death.' Do you know that Keats poem?” She looks bewildered. I am the subject, I think, casting back to Professor Wasserman, and the nodules are the object.

I call Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose “biography” of cancer,
The Emperor of All Maladies
, I acquired at Random House. He recommends an oncologist at his hospital, and I go to see him about treatment. He is a wonderful man, funny, European in origin, Old World in his sensibility. I think he has read poetry at some point in his life. When I ask, “What if I decide to do nothing?” he smiles and says, “I hope you won't, but it wouldn't necessarily be so crazy.”

He tells me to have a brain MRI, with contrast, to see if there is any spread to my brain, which is where lung cancer often spreads. (Puzzling.) Negative. He asks me to have a full-body PET scan, to see if there is evidence of metastasis anywhere else. Negative. The nodules in my lung barely show up.

For the brain scan, I have to change in a somewhat grimy bathroom, with paper towels on the floor, outside the actual MRI-machine room. The nurse is heavy and slovenly and comical.

 

MRI NURSE
: OK, Daniel, you can change into the gown in the bathroom. [“Dahn-
yell,
” she says.]

ME
: In the bathroom?

NURSE
: Yes, the bathroom—right there.

ME
: The bathroom . . . OK.

NURSE
 (when I emerge): Oh, Papi, you look good in that.

ME
: Thanks.

NURSE
: I see that ring.

ME
: Is it going to be a problem in the MRI machine?

NURSE
: No. No problem, Papi. You have a wife, but do you have a girlfriend?

ME
: Only if you want to be my girlfriend.

NURSE
(to another nurse): Daniel wants to run away with me. Did you hear?

ME
: I'll run away with both of you.

NURSE
: You're too much, Daniel. Make a fist . . . Good veins.

ME
: Thanks.

NURSE
(snaps on a single sterile glove, flicks the hypodermic she's holding in the other hand): This is the contrast.

ME
: Right. If you see something in my brain, don't tell me.

NURSE
: I know what men are thinking about all the time. (Laughs uproariously)

ME
: Not me—not under these particular circumstances, anyway.

NURSE
: OK,
vámonos!

ME
: 
Vamos a ver que pasa en mi cabeza. Espero que nada.

NURSE
: Oh, you speak Spanish.

ME
: 
Solamente un poco.
Mi padre viajo frecuentamente en la América del Sur.

NURSE
: 
Tienes que practicar, Papi.

ME
: 
Claro.

NURSE
: Now I know we will run away.

 

In the middle of the subsequent five-session course of chemotherapy for recurrent lung cancer, at Sloan-Kettering, I write a piece about the military language so often used in describing the treatment of the disease. The “war on cancer,” “a valiant fight against lymphoma,” “new weapons in the fight against cancer,” and so on. I send it to an editor of the Sunday
Times.
She likes it, buys it, and we agree that it can run anytime. All I ask is that it not run on the Sunday before Labor Day, thinking that readership for a newspaper must be smaller than usual on that Sunday. And also mildly congratulating myself for my sophistication about timing and publishing in general. So it runs the Sunday before that Labor Day Sunday—it runs on the day that Hurricane Irene hits and practically drowns the Northeast, obliterating anyone's interest in just about anything else.

 

I am in the country again, looking at our dog, Maxwell, in thirty-degree weather under tin-colored skies. The spring just will not come this year. He is
sleeping
in the driveway. Oh, to be a Tibetan, as he is—to say nothing of a terrier, and a cosseted one at that. He was digging a hole in the lawn for fifteen minutes, as industriously as a gravedigger, pausing to consider his work every minute or two, and sometimes going to the other side of the excavation site and attacking the earth from his own and more primal version of a different angle. It occurred to me that he was doing something like what I'm doing right now.

Maxwell is extremely curious. He will follow me around even after he has eaten, when he can't possibly harbor any hope or desire for more food. He wants to know what I'm up to, it seems. Everyone has had the experience of having a dog look at him with what seems like curiosity and the wish to be able to say something wise or important. Sometimes when I rub Maxwell's stomach—which he does not so much invite as suffer me to do, it looks like—he watches my face out of the corner of his eye, as if he were assessing my character. No wonder Mr. Maxwell kept his thinking dog in
So Long, See You Tomorrow.

And once again, as my own mortality is pulling into the parking area on the lawn across the road from the house and, as my father did so many years ago, may soon be walking up the driveway toward where I have just now been playing with the dog, I wonder about that other story Mr. Maxwell, my fourth and final father, told me as he lay dying, the story about his own father's slamming the door in the face of the man who came to visit. The more I think about it, the stronger it grows in my mind as a distillation of Maxwell's character, at least as I saw it: the enduring influence of his parents; his spare, sure sense of narrative; his concern about decorum and its chronic destruction by love and hate; his capacity for blunt honesty; and the openness and trust of his friendship and guidance, which lasted through his final days.

 

I'm teaching a humor-writing course in Columbia's graduate creative-writing program. Through my agent, Esther Newberg, who is also Steve Martin's agent, I ask Martin if he would visit the class and talk to the students. He and I had a couple of near-misses in book publishing some years earlier. He was working on one of his books—maybe the novel
Shop Girl
—and was looking for a new editor, and we had lunch. He said, at the end of a pleasant but somewhat awkward conversation, “So, should I just sign up with you?”

“Well, I think you should definitely talk to other people.” My mistake, bred of arrogance. Martin took my advice. He signed up with another publisher. But now, he kindly accepts my invitation.

I meet him at Broadway and 116th Street, at Columbia's famous gates. He's wearing a hat and sunglasses, and he dips his head down this way and that—the Celebrity Anti-Recognition Maneuver. I have told the students to call him “Mr. Martin.” I add, “Don't ask for an autograph, please.” The class goes well, but at the end, a couple of the students ask Martin to pose with them for cell-phone pictures.

Sometime later, inspired by Steve Martin's mastery of the banjo, I pick up my old steel-string guitar and try to play it and sing along. My fingertips have no calluses, and some of the knuckles on my chord-making left hand are arthritic—they look like pierogi. In the country, I try the nylon-string guitar that my uncle brought back from Mexico decades ago. It's a little easier on my hands but not easier enough to keep me going with guitar rehab. And I have no one to sing with. So instead I start prospecting around YouTube to hear the old singers and musicians I used to idolize: Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou, Doc Watson, the Greenbriar Boys, Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, J. E. Mainer.

 

After the biopsy, my YouTubing, especially as fueled by some excellent mediocre Chilean white wine, turns into making a list of songs I want played at my funeral: Liam Devally, an Irish tenor, singing the Gaelic anthem of misrule “An Poc ar Buile” (“The Mad Puck Goat”); Ricky Skaggs singing “Hallelujah, I'm Ready”; the Muppets' hilarious rendition of “Danny Boy”; and “Barroom Girls,” performed with such penetrating melancholy by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Listening to this last, which puts me in mind of failed romances of long ago and of what my life has had and hasn't had—what I've won and what I've lost, what happened to my family, how little choice we all have about the choices we make, just the tears of things, the tears of all things— I find myself lost in tears. I think, tipsily, They'll miss me when I'm gone, though I know perfectly well that they won't, not most of them, not really, and certainly not for very long. The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss is only to the dying, and even they won't feel it when the dying's done.

 

Seventy

 

When—despite the radical contingencies, the happenstances, that you know have determined so many aspects of your life, beginning with your very conception—you start trying to shore up its fragments into some kind of organization and meaning, your memory, despite its notorious unreliability, provides the most important information. It has already verified and falsified and winnowed the past in a way that begins to form, for you, patterns and through-lines. But though you have to distrust the memories that create these patterns, and though someone else might well see different patterns in them, in a way the ones you come up with can't be inaccurate. Because they are the patterns that
you
discern, and so they must be, in an important way, true of your life. Or at least say something important about it.

Still, if you have any conscientiousness and self-doubt, you will almost surely get up out of your chair and make an attempt to see if there's any research you can do to correct or reconfigure the narrative you've settled on. You can try to change or at least deepen your ideas about your life. This is the equivalent of the internal research—the rummaging around in dreams and recollections—that you do in psychoanalysis; if it is a good analysis, you come out not with a radically different view of yourself and others but with a more nuanced and less fantasy-distorted view.

The memory of Roger Angell cutting our lunch short and dashing back to the office to lend support to that odd boss reminds me of
The New Yorker
's first Fiction Issue, and the research Jay Fielden and I did for it in the New York Public Library, and Roger's angry response to the suggestion of devoting the centerfold to William Maxwell. I realize that somewhere in the dark corners of my mind I
knew
even at the time that the Maxwell suggestion would provoke Roger. My mistake.

But was it? It may have led to my departure from
The New
Yorker,
ultimately, but I may have been seeking that very result without realizing it. And I was certainly declaring some version of final independence from Roger, a sort of complex father who had nevertheless taught me a great deal: how to be the host at a dinner party; how to write humor, and why co-writing literary humor doesn't work for very long; how to be firm with writers (in my own way); how to sound a note of congeniality in feature writing and in reporting; how to take a long look at events in the present that seem momentous at the moment but will prove not to be; how to keep the writing life in some semblance of perspective to the rest of life. Roger Angell showed me a more pragmatic approach to writing and editing than Maxwell did.