One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (18 page)

And I believed him. For voluptuous brooding you need an array of words. So in a way it was still a blessing that he didn’t know what he was missing.

In
The Immensity of the Here and Now
, a book whose title I’ve always coveted, Paul wrote about a philosopher who had lost his philosophy after 9/11, and whose best friend provided him with a new one: that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. What was I to do with a wordsmith who had lost his language?

We modern humans are distinguished from our predecessors by lavish, sometimes outlandish, spells of self-awareness. Our scientific label says it all. We’re not just
Homo sapiens
—knowing man—but rather
Homo sapiens sapiens
—the man who knows and knows he knows. Today, all that knowing requires language, speech, and written words—three distinctly different tasks. Paul’s global stroke had nearly stolen from him the second
sapiens
of
Homo sapiens sapiens
. Paul was learning more words, but to
know
you know requires many more connections, much more than a heap of nouns. Knowing the names for things like
parachute
and
candelabra
and uncle won’t save you if your uncle attacks you with a candelabra for stealing his parachute. That requires a web of understanding: how heavy the sterling silver candelabra is, the grudge your mother’s brother always held against you, knowing what a parachute is used for, being able to compute the speed at which he’s running after you and whether you can outrun him, remembering that your mother warned you about him, and many more wordy twists and turns that reveal the intricate relationships between yourself and the world around you, and the people and objects who inhabit that world.

Unlike most other animals, we’re not locked inside a fast, reflexive, yet limited world of immediate sensory experiences. To live in the present is refreshing and fascinating—if you’re a human and it spares you a conflagration of self-sabotaging doubts. Probably not so for animals forever bound to each vanishing moment. We live in vanishing moments, too. We’re also curbed by our senses. But we can imagine the luminous spirits of worlds that are not physically knowable to our senses in the here and now, worlds imperceptible yet thinkable because people once spoke and/or wrote about them—the lands of history, fantasy, religion, the future, might-have-been, doesn’t-exist-yet-but-could-just-work, and so on. We imagine the possible through words. We use words to help us remember who and what we are. We refine how we love in words. We use words to solve problems—partly because a language that offers the word
problem
by necessity must include the word
solution
. Both words include the absorbing idea that a human is an animal who can act upon the world in such a way as to solve a problem. Using those words teaches us that we can master the world by understanding it. The more complex our words, the more layered our story, the more refined our understanding. Some grains of knowing are only possible when passed through the sieve of carefully arranged words. In
Life with Swan
, Paul wrote of us:

One of our favorite words was
salience
, for how something shoots out at you and “gets” you. We were always surrounded by saliences: the world bristled and sparkled, came out to meet us, and we went toward it. . . .

Sitting and staring at the yard, Paul could no longer say: “It’s a bright but foggy day. Not like yesterday. Maybe it will burn off or blow over.” Instead, his mouth stiffened, then relaxed, stiffened, then relaxed, until he finally managed to say: “T . . . t . . . trans . . . trans . . . trans . . . trans-
lu
-cent.” Then he settled back into the folds of the sofa and smiled in pleasure. He had grown thinner in the last month, and the cushion behind him fitted comfortably into the curve of his neck.

Oh!
I thought.
He knows the difference between
translucent
and
transparent—
between a well-lit but unclear state, and light passing through something with clarity. His brain still knows how to use words to express fine distinctions. And the smile? Because he knows he knows.

“My little
Homo sapiens sapiens
,” I said, much to his amusement, as I hugged him tight.

CHAPTER 14

T
HE HOUSE WAS FULL OF WHISPERS, BECAUSE PAUL’S BRAIN
had trouble coordinating lung and face muscles to blow resonant breath back into speaking. We made rubbery faces to practice sounding out letters, and we rehearsed
w
by puckering up for kisses. In the evenings, as we sat in the comforting depths of the old rose-covered couch, finding a word could take as much as half an hour for Paul, as I tried to guess his target. I learned to ask him sorting questions.

“Light house keeper,” Paul said, pronouncing each word in the same flat rasp, with no gesture, pitch, stress, or facial expression to act as a guide.

What on earth did he mean? If he meant a person who operates a lighthouse, he would have emphasized the word
light
. If he meant someone who cleans a little, he would have emphasized the word
house
. If he meant a light-haired domestic, he would have emphasized the word
light
and paused before saying
housekeeper
.

“Is it a person?”

“No . . .” He slapped the couch impatiently.

“Does it have to do with you?”

“Yes.” He leaned forward, and I had the sense that we were clos
ing in on it.

“Your pills?”

“No . ..”

“Food?”

“No . ..
inferior
. . .”

“Is it a feeling?”

Now his face twisted a little in a mobile expression that usually means “sort of,” and he stretched his fingers wide on both hands and waved them back and forth.

“An object?”

“No . ..
light house keeper
. . .”

Roundabout, we finally drew closer to what he meant, maddeningly closer, with Paul making do at last with a synonym rather than the exact word. How close he came, I couldn’t know, except by how triumphant he looked after uttering the word “replica.” All I could figure was that his brain felt like a replica of its old self. Or: once a lighthouse keeper, it now was reduced to doing light housekeeping. The exchange made him concentrate so hard that he worked up a sweat.

“Are you too hot?” I asked.

And to my delight he answered: “No, a tiny zephyr roamed through the yard for about a minute and a half and it felt good.”

I laughed, and he laughed too, but only after a pause, when he realized that he’d said something amusing. I squeezed his arm appreciatively.

All he meant was that a breeze had wafted through the screen door. Unable to say that, he made do with kindred words—any he could grab.
What a picturesque tumble of words, I thought. As a poet, I’d have to labor for an image like that.
Looking out at the yard, I imagined a tiny humanoid zephyr, a barely visible wind with eyes.

I felt tired as wet sand, but that didn’t matter. Few things are as delicious as sitting quietly under a canopy of stars and opening your senses to the world. The moon was lighting lamps across the eastern sky. As more stars blinked on, the black velvet sparkled with their diamond-backed catastrophes. When I heard a tapping, I traced the sound through the wall to the bedroom on the other side with its two large windows. Branches were rapping against the glass like poltergeists. In my mind’s eye: a crooked bony finger, a twig, a finger, a twig,
tapping, tapping, tapping.
A cat stole like wind through the bushes. Or maybe it was the wind conjuring up a cat. Hard to say, when the sun fades and the brain loses its brilliant lens on the world. We weren’t born to roam at night; our senses falter. Not like the yard’s covenant of garter snakes, sporting long red ribbons down their backs, nesting somewhere between the warm pool liner and the food-fragrant soil.

I wondered what Paul was thinking, and sensing, but didn’t bother asking him. He’d fought hard enough for words all day, and deserved to rest a spell. Fortunately he loved to sit and stare, too, and never grew bored. In
Life with Swan
, a novel loosely based on our life together, he once wrote:

A couple who can spend half an hour watching a female cardinal sit inside a bird-feeder . . . can do other things too, such as sitting by a table covered with amaryllises and dahlias, pretending it is already spring, or staring at the curvature and convolutions of a nail clipping.

This contemplative savoring was always ours, not something we aspired to or had ever read about, but a natural twitch to be reckoned with, its main implication a simple one: There will always be more to gaze and marvel at, even on the level of the commonplace, than we will ever be able to attend to. For us both, it was a matter of being plonked down amid an ongoing miracle whose component parts could not be counted.
Staring at stuff,
I always called it; the account of this activity needs no fancier phrase. So we could often be spotted staring overlong at sheep, birds, grasses, or a harvest mouse. . . .

Staring together was easy, communicating was brutally hard, and not just with me. After a few weeks, I acquired Durable Power of Attorney so that I could speak legally on his behalf and help him pay his bills. He’d completely forgotten how to write checks, so I wrote them for him, and he signed, left-handed, in a strange craggy scrawl. It brought back memories of my father teaching me how to write my first check when I was college-bound. All one day, Paul tried, in increasingly agitated ways, to say that he expected a check to come in, a reimbursement from his medical insurance company, but he didn’t have the words. I finally understood when it arrived days later. Addressing an envelope, paying a bill—all posed fatiguing challenges. And when he spoke—to me or to a bank teller—any random word could dash out of his mouth before he had time to find the right one.

Most confusing, perhaps, he didn’t use pronouns correctly, and they’re often the first word in a sentence. I would try to interpret what he was saying, only to discover in time that he was referring to a woman, not a man. Or that he was referring to himself as “he,” not “I.” Was this merely a language problem, or was it something graver, a loss of a coherent sense of self? What with feeling foreign to himself, and all the people dealing with him as a thing to be fixed, was his sense of self flickering from “me” to “him”?

When the speech therapist visited to do her initial evaluation, she recorded the following among her notes, underscoring Paul’s limits by repeating the single word
severe
, until it lost its impact and she had to fortify it with bold type:

The patient presents with
severe
verbal expression deficits . . . The patient presents with
severe
reading comprehension deficit. Given large print single words the patient was able to read words out loud, however he was not able to demonstrate comprehension of the words. The patient presents with
severe
written expression deficits.

Paul’s speech therapy followed a standard program which included sounding out letters and syllables, learning the names for common objects, communicating basic wants, reading short sentences, and comprehending talk. But as I quickly learned, it’s designed for acute problems, in the hopes of teaching stroke patients how to navigate the chief activities of everyday life. It’s not intended to help aphasics regain their lost treasure of words, express subtleties, or be nuanced listeners. I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul’s vocabulary, beginning with the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn’t mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. After all his years of education, Paul was now toiling over the equivalent of a first grader’s lesson book, which he found demoralizing. And yet, because of where his brain was damaged, he couldn’t connect even simple objects to their names. At night, in the familiar refuge of his study, he labored over the day’s homework.

As I peered in at him, unobserved, the light fell across his desk from the side. It looked like a scene in a Dutch master’s painting, of a man cramped over his workbench, struggling to master a few stubborn diagrams. So engrossed was he, he didn’t sense my presence, and he could no longer see things off to his right, anyway, so I craned my neck a little closer. Solemnly, as if they were sketches of family members he used to be able to recognize on sight, he considered the drawings of a chair, a lamp, a dog, unable to match them with the words in a column on the opposite side of the page. At last, with strain cutting shadowy creases on his forehead, he connected the chair with the word “dog.” Looked at it a moment. What was it, the four legs, that confused him? It reminded me of René Magritte’s painting
The Key of Dreams
, in which three out of four objects are incorrectly labeled, with a horse called a door, a clock called the wind, a pitcher the bird, and only a valise the valise. Magritte meant to confuse viewers, on purpose, by connecting unrelated words and images.

On the next page, some categories made sense to him, while others (“name five fruits”) proved such a bugbear that when I quietly stole away and returned in half an hour, he had only thought of four, three of which were wrong. Half an hour later, I returned to discover that he had revised the four, nearly mummifying them with Type White and strips of correction tape, and the revised versions were still wrong.

He reluctantly turned a page to even more categories, as if slaying one dragon only to engender a dozen offspring. Sighing, he rubbed his eyes with both hands, then picked up the felt pen, whose barrel had been widened with a rubber easy-grip saddle. In two determined swipes of black, he mismatched “Monday” with “month” and “August” with “day,” and turned the page.

The brain’s sorter was injured and off-duty, making thinking in categories a nightmare; and yet categories are essential for language, which otherwise would be a stream of nouns and verbs without any conceptual lakes uniting them. We’re not alone in this. Other animals—from chimpanzees and parrots to border collies, chinchillas, macaques, and quail—group important things, too, obsessively sorting the chaos into helpful mental bins. A brain stores those bins in different physical locations, where a small lesion can wreck havoc. Some patients have startlingly specific category deficits: they can’t say colors, or the names of animals, fruits, famous people, vegetables, flowers, or tools.

Drawing in a breath, Paul puffed his cheeks out like the North Wind on an old map, and then exhaled thoughtfully. Next to “opaque” he circled the category “color.” A color? It could certainly function as one, just as glare seemed to paint a new color in the Antarctic, and that’s something he might once have fancied. But he wasn’t playing with ideas now, he was groping for words in a mental blizzard.

Paul finally stopped from sheer fatigue, his mind blunt as a pencil after a long exam. The homework drained his whole brain of spare energy; he couldn’t speak as he tottered down the hallway and into the bedroom. Normally, sleep after study helps to seal facts in memory. But in his case, he barely had enough wattage left to run the city-state of his body. Instinctively, the way a whooping crane seeks home, he sought the tonic of sleep to revive him.

While he catnapped, I paged through his corrected workbook in disbelief. Told to circle the right word, he’d put an X over it instead, gotten three out of five wrong and hadn’t even guessed at four others. On another sheet, he had mismatched “radio” with something to be watched, “weatherman” with conducting traffic.

Yes, he had marked,
salt is green
.

He wasn’t sure if one could see
through
a mirror.

No, he had answered to “Can you see your shadow at night?” I smiled wryly. No was the correct answer. But something can be accurate without being true. There are moon shadows. And night itself is a shadow, nothing that falls, but the darkness that gathers as the rolling earth turns its face from the sun. These were subtleties he once might have sported with, maybe in a yarn, certainly in our mealtime chitchat. Now he struggled just to fathom the basics.

“Say an appropriate word to complete the phrase,” another exercise instructed, offering the first half of well-known sayings:

“Time waits for no —.”

“Look before you —.”

“The early bird catches the —.”

“Practice makes —.”

“Don’t put all your eggs in one —.”