One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (21 page)

But gradually, he began wearing less and less, as if sloughing off dead skin. Now only a short-sleeved cornflower-blue shirt would do (fortunately he had two). Loafers. No socks. White walking shorts gave way to long boxy swim shorts that almost passed for regular shorts. Since the stroke, the swim shorts yielded to plaid flannel boxer shorts in differently hued tartans. With or without button fly. Sometimes—if the buttonholes sagged open—he wore the shorts backwards. He insisted on dressing as comfortably as possible. Nor could I
gently
persuade him to dress otherwise, and I refused to wage war over something so trivial.
Pick your fight
was a marriage rule I’d long lived by. So, like a shrine to past attire, his closet held jackets, slacks, long-sleeved shirts, and dozens of ties and ascots he never wore. Including, in 2010, a favorite he picked out himself: a jazzy tie sporting, of all things, the H1N1 flu molecule.

At the restaurant, I steered him around chairs and tables, into a secluded booth where he might sprawl a little. The menu offered glossy photographs of perfect entrees, and he studied them intently, as if they were mail-order brides.

“Anything appeal to you?”

When he looked up nervously, I realized he didn’t know what to do. Would he make a scene? Run out? Frustrate and embarrass himself when the waitperson arrived? I wasn’t sure. Taking his hand reassuringly, I said: “Would you like me to order for you today?”

His forehead furrowed as he struggled to disentangle my sounds from all the others, including a television set high on the wall and a sizzling hibachi grill surrounded by celebrating students. I’d learned the value of repeating anything of importance.

“Would you like me to order for you today?”

Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to isolate my voice amid all the warring sounds. Leaning across the table, I mouthed the words slowly and loudly. With a grateful sigh, he laid down the menu.

I ordered dishes he had relished before the stroke: shumai, little clouds of shrimp-filled dough, and skewers of bite-size shrimp and vegetables. And we dined mainly in silence, with exaggerated wide-eyes and smiles for
It tastes good!
He was happy to restore a little normalcy to our life, and I was relieved to see him eating more solid food.

On the drive home, to my delight, he politely stammered, “Thanks . . . for the Japanese . . . bouquet,” trying to say “banquet.”

Although Paul did return to regular eating, he now insisted on exactly the same foods every day, without even minor changes for whim, holiday, health, or perverse fun. I provided what I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist. The dinner menu, a health addict’s nightmare, a British eccentric’s dream: white potatoes out of a can, mashed, topped with bottled gravy, and either canned chicken or ham. Breakfast: Egg Beaters, stove-fried toast in olive oil, and soy-based Smart Bacon. During the evening, he ate vast quantities of sugar-free vanilla ice cream right from the half-gallon container. This wasn’t the low-salt, diabetic diet he was supposed to follow, but I was just happy he was eating. With all the ice cream, he started putting on weight fast, so in the interests of portion control, he scientifically taste-tested his way through a dozen sugar-free ice cream sandwiches and bars, most of which he dismissed (as flavorless) with a sour face. At last he settled on “Klondike Slim Bears,” individually wrapped squares of “No Added Sugar” vanilla ice cream in a milk-chocolate-flavored coating. But the name “Slim Bear” wouldn’t stick in his head, and he kept substituting words for it.

“Skinny elephant,” he said, hungry for dessert.

I chuckled at the image. “A skinny elephant?”

“No,” he crooned, both annoyed with himself and amused by the picture he had created. Wiping the words away with one hand as if they’d been sky-written, he said: “Not skinny elephant.”

He drew a square in the air with both hands.

“A . . . a . . . a . . . skinny elephant! NO . . . skinny elephant . . .”

The next day, in complete seriousness, sure he’d get it right this time, he requested: “Minor Bear.” His request was matter-of-fact. In his mind he was saying the right words, not asking for a winter constellation.

“A minor bear isn’t what it’s called,” I explained with an amused smile. “But a minor bear
is
Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper.”

He pondered this and smiled. “
Ursa
,” he echoed, and nodded in understanding.

Yet another oddity about aphasia is that it’s possible to lose access to words in a native language, but still retain those in any foreign languages you may have learned. Paul had studied Latin and French more than half a century before, and he’d had a keen interest in astronomy. Ursa is Latin for bear, and the Little Dipper is known to astronomers as Ursa Minor, the Big Dipper as Ursa Major.

“Slim Bear . . .” I said with that special inflexion that means
Repeat after me
.

“Bear,” he repeated. “Bear.”

“Slim . . . Bear.”

“Slim . . . Bear.”

But his brain simply refused to store the brand name, only the paradox of something big being described as small. So he continued to refer to his nightly treat as everything from “Enormous Mouse” to “Midget Elephant.” As soon as he said it, he’d laugh, realizing it wasn’t what he meant, then ask for the right words, which I’d provide. But they had no sticking power. I might have tried “Klondike” instead, but after a while we gave up and enjoyed the nonsense words the slot machine of his brain kept tossing out.

Sometimes he’d just pantomime, drawing a square in the air with both hands. But he used the same pantomime for almost everything he couldn’t find the words for, regardless of shape—postage stamps, FedEx envelopes, misplaced manuscripts—so that didn’t help much, even though, in this case, it was accurate. In time, I began thinking of the square as a
templum
(the origins of our word
temple
). In ancient times, a soothsayer would hold aloft a square of four sticks (the
templum
) and foretell events based on what he saw fly across or into that space, be it sparrow, bat, star, sun, or dragon-headed cloud. It was more of a sacred corral than anything concrete, an aerial shrine or sanctuary, not an edifice. He didn’t have to use four sticks for divination. An augur could also outline a space with his staff, and wherever he drew that square it framed the future. Whatever Paul yearned for—a Skinny Bear or a chunk of cheese—seemed to exist in a similar kind of consecrated space in his mind, a perfect square of desire.

I felt relieved that Paul was eating, but drinking still posed diabolical problems. Over time, Paul progressed to honey-thick liquids, but still found them unnaturally viscous, like motor oil. Pitchers of thickened sugar-free lemonade were his main thirstquencher, along with the Thick-It steeled cocoa and milk. A couple of times a week, we’d mix a fresh batch, tossing the stale leftovers down the sink. Little did we guess how much trouble that would stir up.

One day the drain backed up and I summoned the plumber for what I assumed was a routine call. Sitting on the kitchen floor, he fed yard after yard of his coiled metal plumber’s “snake” down the open maw of the drain, and marveled at the seemingly endless amount of sticky black sludge he cajoled out, over and over, until the steadfast snake finally reached the street 100 feet away. As the buckets filled, it looked like a scene from an oil rig or a whaling ship, with stinking wads of tarry black. The plumber just kept shaking his head and muttering how strange this was.
Never seen it before
. . . It was only after he left that the laughter began as we realized that we’d created a huge gunky bog by subjecting the drain to gobs of discarded “Thick-It,” which had gelatinized everything it touched. After the plumber left, we hovered over the sink to watch the miracle of the waters once again flowing down the drain.

“I think he’s cooked it!” Paul crowed triumphantly, meaning, of course: “The plumber has fixed the drain.”

The ability to obsess well is an artist’s stock in trade, and apparently it doesn’t vanish with speech. Paul’s cravings might have changed, but not his craving for cravings. Gone were the fish pastes, salmon, and trifle that reminded him of his British childhood. Post-stroke, he developed an obsessive craving for chocolate, which, since he was diabetic, had to be sugar-free. Taste-testing once again, he settled on an obscure brand of sugar-free dark chocolate bars, which weren’t easy to find locally. When the supply ran low, I would frantically order them from New York City or Rochester, buying in bulk. Sometimes Liz or I had to travel overland to buy them in Syracuse or Corning, where to the mystification of shopkeepers we’d swoop in like bank robbers and demand all their supply,
including
any in the storeroom. We might leave with fifty. Paul ate one or two a night, considering them medically necessary, since they contained maltitol, with a printed warning on the chocolate bar label that it could cause loose stools if ingested in excess. Chocolate bars became the luxurious laxative backbone of his bowel regimen for a significant period of time. The swanky chocolate store in one mall came to recognize me as the habitué who bought the bars by the case. I hadn’t the heart to reveal they were being used as a laxative. Then Liz started appearing at the same store instead, with the same ostensible hunger, one only a mother lode of this particular chocolate seemed to satisfy.

Long before, Liz’s landlord Gustaf had recommended the easy-to-prepare dinner Tasty Bite, a prepackaged Indian curry meal he’d been packing as emergency rations while vagabonding in Mongolia and all over the world. She and her husband tasted it, and liked it well enough to start buying it in bulk for camping trips. One day Liz arrived with two Tasty Bite offerings, Madras Lentils and Bombay Potatoes, for us to try. They could be eaten cold, but tasted delicious warmed up, and I liked them, but Paul was completely hooked. It filled some craving powerful as chocolate or coffee. Maybe it conjured up his British childhood’s colonial past, or reminded him of the beef curry served nearly every day in his college at Oxford. Whatever the lure, from then on he ate nothing else for dinner. He would empty two pouches of Tasty Bite into a bowl, add plain yogurt to tone down the hot peppers, stir thoroughly, and microwave for three minutes (by pressing a red dot three times). This became his favorite dinner every night for five years, with the occasional exceptions of Chinese takeout or a bowl of cold peeled shrimp. Fortunately it’s a healthy vegetarian meal, because he’s eaten it now over 1,500 days in a row. Keeping a three-month supply on hand, our pantry is an homage to curried beans, and we’re well prepared for blizzards or hurricanes. In addition to its taste, Paul loved that it was manufactured in India, sealed in pouches designed for the Apollo space program, and tested to withstand extreme temperatures and heights—from below sea level to the moon. Tasty Bite had traveled up Mount Everest with the Indian Armed Forces and to Antarctica with Conrad Anker. Surely it would do for an aphasic-British-eccentric-ex-cricket-bowler-retired-professor-author?

CHAPTER 17

I
N THE CUBBYHOLES OF A LIBRARY CLOSET, I STORED YARN
, gift wrap, and all sorts of presents (from the nifty to the impossibly hedonistic) for friends and relations, gathered on my travels or whenever I happened upon something just right for someone. Then, when birthday or Christmas arrived, I had a perfect little gift. Whenever I entered the closet now, my eyes fell on language tokens squirreled away for Paul. What should I do with the book of palindromes, for instance?
Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. Rats live on no evil star. Do geese see God?
He would have loved those. Or the mug from the Folger Library with Shakespearean insults written all over it?
You egg, you fry of treachery.
Or the literary guides to European cities? Such presents would seem cruel.

Once we lived in a house made of words. Our personal vocabulary had ranged from the word
flaff
, which meant utter nonsense, to mrok, a plaintive cry often uttered by one of us hoping to locate the other. Just as some couples mainly relate through their children, we had related through our rowdy family of words. We wallowed in codes and idiomatic privacies.

On one signal occasion, carrying an untidy armload of mail and magazines from the mailbox, I announced my arrival—for no special reason; it just swam into my head—by singing out “Post trout!”

“Post trout!” Paul had echoed playfully from his study down the hall. He soon emerged grinning.

“Is this my post trout?” he’d asked of me, glad of a new pet name, and planted a fish-mouthed kiss on my forehead. From then on, trout functioned as postmen and carriers of all desirable commodities.

Depending on what you are carrying, you can be the Coffee Trout, the Bagel Trout, and so on, not that trout are known for their carrying capacity or even for their ability to reduce the portion of daily inconvenience. . . . [Nonetheless, trout serve as] the epitome-personification of the helpful other. . . . I don’t see how a civilized household that cherishes intimacy can function without these playful oddities, which firm the bond and widen the spectrum of sounds, though what a stranger would make of the little chiming Babel . . . I have no idea.

—Life with Swan

Every word that bended easily we warped in playful ways. Weekdays became: Mondalsday, Tueselday, Wendelsday, Thurselday, Fridalday, Egg Day (when I fried up eggs for him), and Sundalsday. Hand became
handle
, and breakfast
breaklefast
, mouthwash
mousewash
, lens
lensness
. Self
shelbst
, sleep
schluffy
, and the Johnny Carson show
Carsonienses
. A visit to the dermatologist became a “mole patrol.” “Are you a cyclamen?” meant “Are you feeling ill?” (etymology: “sicklamin” = diminutive of sick, which, sounding like the flower “cyclamen,” suggests a small flower-like sick person). One especially fond reference we abbreviated to A.C.H.M., often written Achmed, commemorating the tiniest mouse we had ever seen, in a botanical garden in St. Louis:
A Certain Harvest Mouse
. “Our intimate bestiary,” Paul wrote, “gave us a private world as secret as that of Cockney rhyming slang.”

Quite often, in carpet slippers, she walked on top of my feet as I paddled slowly backward and we let out a noise we had linked to the roseate spoonbill exquisitely depicted in watercolors in the laboratory waiting room at the local hospital:
Clack-clack-clack-clack
, we went, together being a bird that stepped in and out of tidal pools.

All couples evolve private catchphrases and codes, but I’m not sure why we had felt the need for so extensive a dialect, unless it had to do with how much of our work lives we’d spent juggling normal words and stacking them together in law-abiding ways. Or because even off-duty we loved playing with words at their most combinative, bobbin-like, and sly, jostling and recasting them at will, without having to worry about whether they bowed to literary fashion or even made sense. Or maybe because we secretly yearned to be among our prehistoric ancestors, who had the diagnostic necessity and raw fun of coining many of the words that today bind together languages as seemingly unrelated as Sanskrit, Hittite, English, and Lithuanian, words like “sun,” “winter,” “honey,” “wolf,” “snow,” “woman,” “awe.”

The forerunners of such words were probably spoken in sparse, robust, barbaric sounds. For sport, Paul had once translated “America the Beautiful” into Indo-European and sung it at Cornell in the “Temple of Zeus,” a coffee room used by the literary set, ringed with dusty plaster replicas of Greek statues (authentically missing heads, arms, and other body parts). Words had served us, and we had served them—at times we were masters, others vassals. We had lived in American society, but within the
culture
of words, which made their own demands and had their own special trappings.

EARLY ONE MORNING
, I rushed out to Target to pick up an ice cream-making machine for Paul. To get to the small appliances aisle I had to go through the office supplies aisle, for once with no requests from Paul for his standard supplies (black Flair pens, manila envelopes, glue sticks, Type White, high-luminosity printer paper), and I felt my stomach twisting.
He will never need these things again,
I thought, remembering how often we had “moused” around those aisles for office supplies. It was just one more of the incidental, barely noteworthy activities that add cell by cell to the body of a relationship over time. Familiar as rain, it was an obeisance to writing, a remembered absence, a discontinued small pleasure, a lost fragment of a home life. The pain I felt was wordless—beyond, beneath, unbeguiled by words. Not even gasping
No more
a hundred times could capture that visceral and wholly new kind of pain. There, in the Target aisle—surrounded by sparkly pink notebooks, animal stickers, glitter, a forest of multicolored pens, tapes of every hue, mothers bustling by with loaded carts and excited children, awash in upbeat music to shop by—I stood stiffly in shock, stricken that our favorite stripe of play was gone, all the impromptu word games we shared, including Paul’s improvised little songs.

In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share with Paul.

Sitting together at the kitchen table, we watched a vivid blue jay enter the courtyard, and hop from cherry-tree branch to the leaf-littered ground, looking for food. I began to chant:

Blue jay, blue jay in the tree,

will you come and play with me?

While you dance in the impatiens,

won’t you give me a second glance?

You are such a pretty fellow—

are you sad you are not yellow?

Paul laughed at the rhyme, but I wasn’t sure he understood the words.

“You’re such a cuddly little fruit fly,” I gushed, and he shot back a pleased smile, because he understood the word “cuddly” and he was still good at social responsiveness. But when I asked, “Do you know what a fruit fly is?” he shook his head no.

“I’m not
stupid
,” he added for the umpteenth time, his voice balancing between self-pity and scorn.

Patiently, reassuringly, for the umpteenth time, I replied: “No, you’re not stupid. You have a communication disorder. The words are still inside your head. You’re having trouble sorting out the ones you want.”

Then I described a fruit fly as a tiny fly that hovers around pieces of fruit. Did he know what fruit was? He did. He understood the word “hovers.”

“
Drosophila melanogaster,
” he announced, with the pride of a fisherman surprising even himself by hauling up a coelacanth.

“Holy smokes! Where did that come from?” Startled, I looked at him as if he’d just performed a magic trick.

My memory skipped to an afternoon in Jamaica, on one of our first vacations together, at a surfside hotel whose restaurant menu, littered with typos, had kept us laughing for days. “Chef’s bowel salad” sounded gruesome enough. But my personal favorite was: “Steak grilled to your own likeness.” We’d tried to picture a silhouette of Eleanor Roosevelt in beef.

A saucer of sweet fresh pineapple chunks had drawn several fruit flies, one of whom had walked slowly across my upturned palm.

“
Drosophila melanogaster,
” Paul had said with a flourish, retrieving a bit of Greek from his freshman year in college. I’d liked the swooping music of the phrase, but absolutely loved its translation.

“Hey, know the English?” I now asked.

He thought for a long while. I could hear the cicadas chirping in the forests of his mind.

“Used to,” he finally lamented.

“Black-bellied dew-sipper.”

The light of recognition flashed over his face and he tried to say the words, making it as far as “dew” before forgetting “black-bellied” and having to start over. Then he forgot “sipper.”

“Black-bellied dew-sipper. Let’s just picture the image of a black-bellied dew-sipper,” I murmured, hoping to curb his frustration. For a few moments we sat in silence and imagined the eggplant-blackness of the belly, the spiky hairs, the brick-red prisms of the eyes.

That morning, with increasing frustration, Paul had groped for “wallet,” “checkbook,” “swallowing.” When he was so at sea, I might try to chip through the blockade by asking him what category the word fell into, but that didn’t always work, because he might decide that swallowing was in the category of spelling since it involves the mouth. If Paul couldn’t point to the thing or body part he meant, I would ask him if he could picture it in his mind’s eye, because even without words one can still render some images and feelings. When that doesn’t happen, what is one left with? A psychic cramp, a precisely unutterable thought or feeling. In his mental pandemonium using one chancy word to define another chancy word was speaking in riptides. Words had lost their moorings, they drifted like boats in a storm, cleats torn loose, fenders awry, no longer holding fast to anything.

Quite often Paul would get a running start on a sentence, do the first half beautifully, and then stop short, stranded before the important final noun, suddenly having no idea whatsoever where the sentence was headed. This intruded into our simplest conversations. As his use of numbers improved a little, he knew that an 80-degree day was better for swimming than a 60-degree day. So he’d diligently check the thermometer on the back window before venturing outside. When struck by sunbeams, the dial always read 40 degrees too hot. Paul would see 120 degrees and grin, remembering his spell at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where the heat soared past 100, the air tasted combustible, the sidewalk burned through the soles of your shoes, and even the cacti grew parched. Coming from a cold rainy isle, Paul had a lifelong love affair with heat. We kept the faulty thermometer despite, or maybe because of, its unreliability, and nicknamed it our “optimistic thermometer” (in contrast to a more chilling one in a shady front courtyard).

Paul would call out the temperature as he grabbed a towel. On a lucky day in June, he cheerfully announced: “It’s 75 degrees! The faulty . . . hmmm. Cancel that. The phenom . . .”

I waited for his next try, arms hanging at my side, clock ticking.

“The faulty . . .” Stopping short again, his brain uncooperative, Paul blurted out an annoyed “It’s not
working
. . .”

I cocked my head, letting him know I was still listening. “One more go?”

“The faulty . . . the faulty . . . mmm.”

He began to look rattled, so I decided it was time to help. “
Thermometer
?”

“
Thermometer
. 100 degrees,” Paul announced with relief, his body visibly relaxing as he strode outside, gripped the railing, and edged at last toward the pool ladder.

It was yet another 60-degree day.

These aborted sentences were the new norm. This meant my steadfast listening and his fruitless, bitter plodding. Gone were all his tidings, bywords, and frisky chitchat. He raged at himself. How could he not be angry, bound by stutters, echolalia, and paraphrasing—to his mind a torrent of wounded language, defective language?
Bitter
, I silently called out in my best maître d’ voice,
party of one
.