One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (23 page)

CHAPTER 19

P
AUL WOULD DITIFULLY JOIN HIS SPEECH THERAPIST IN
the library for an hour each day, emerging exhausted and demoralized, having punished his brain in an effort to fill in blanks, list words within categories (how many flowers can you name? None . . . How many animals can you name? None . . . ), link words with pictures, and attempt to perform other language skills. She tried teaching him to ask himself: What category is a word in? What color or shape is the object? If he could exclude many competing things, his quest would be clearer. Despite their simplicity, he found the exercises demanding and at times impossible.

Later, I watched Paul puzzling over workbook pages, trying to rack words, like skittish pool table balls, into the rigid triangle of just one concept—he was
racking his brains
.

“Can bowls swim?” a question asked. I knew the answer they wanted was
No
. But bowls could float, even heavy bowls, if flat and large enough. The large, flat-bottomed bowl of an ocean liner, for instance. If Paul thought like that, too, he’d give the wrong answer. They meant small inanimate household bowls. Not the bowl of the deep ocean, say, holding currents, coral, plants, and creatures—itself floating on the earth’s liquid core of iron and nickel, whose swaying produces Earth’s magnetic field. Not the bowl of the earth floating—or, with so many life-forms, was it swimming?—in space.

“Can water freeze?” That one was easy. But some other questions required only the literal meaning of a word, not the way it’s used every day in slang. “Can bullets grow?” Certain kinds of exploding bullets expand,
grow
, on impact. “Can pearls fly?” If someone throws them. “Can beavers talk?” Those in the Ipana toothpaste commercials of the 1950s used to sing. “Is a siren loud?” Air-raid sirens—yes. The seductive bird-ladies of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths—not necessarily. “Can stones burn?” And how. The stones on a sun-baked beach, or the stones encircling a campfire. “Can bags frown?” They often do, especially when groceries are packed unevenly. “Are parakeets tame?” Store-bought—yes. But wild parakeets nest on several continents. Paul loved the squabbling, squawking monk parakeets that nest in Florida palm trees. “Are potatoes hollow?” No . . . but the minute I read the question I imagined a hollow potato. An intricate ivory one, carved by a Japanese craftsman, its skin a filigree where, on closer inspection, a cityscape loomed. “Are vitamins greasy?” Some absolutely are. The thick syrupy gold vitamins my mom fed me when I was little slid right down. “Are coupons expensive?” I presumed they meant coupons offering discounts at the supermarket. But municipalities had to
pay
the coupons on bonds, and they could be expensive. “Is satin sticky?” If you had rough fingertips, as Paul did, then your fingers snagged easily on satin and other slick fabrics.

Choosing the
correct
answer could be as tough as herding cats. But, like most people, I did know the
accepted
answer. Selecting it, I had to ignore all other answers that sprang to mind or were truer to my experience. Could Paul do that now with a hurt brain? Could he understand the domestic use of a word, while chasing away wild game? Or had his mind become simpler than all of that? Had he lost the mental elastic that used to connect everything to everything else with the tug of a few words? There it was again.
Tug
was another of those deliciously ambiguous words. I pictured the game we played when I sneaked up on Paul from behind and tugged almost imperceptibly at his sleeve; then I pictured a tiny boat tugging a goliath tanker into port.

Bewildered, Paul handed me the homework sheets, on which he had answered a few questions, and I silently read them, shaking my head in disbelief. Some questions seemed simple, yet were fiendishly ambiguous. Only context was missing, the opera of cues we often need to guess what sentences mean.

“Do you drink
a cup of water
or drink
a cup of river,
” I read out loud. My eyes clouded with memories of the Amazon River Basin, weeks of floating and walking through the vine-thick jungle, under canopies effervescent with life. After dinner one evening, carrying an underwater lantern, some boat mates and I had snorkeled in waters dark and clear as quartz. Except for the occasional stingray, there was nothing much to fear. Nothing large enough to see, that is. Out of curiosity, I’d drunk a slow, savory mouthful of river, which tasted tinny yet soft, as if it had been stirred by water hyacinths, mechanical watches, and dolphins. Bad mistake.

“Remember when I drank some of the Amazon and got that awful parasite?” I asked Paul.

“Gaaagh!” His jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he aped the blue tribal mask I’d brought home to him along with reddish-brown bats carved from mahogany, polished to a tranquil sheen, and bark-cloth paintings of butterflies in ginger, ochre, and black. The black had come from pressed fruits of the
huito
tree, which produce a liquid like invisible ink that’s painted on with clear brush-strokes, but later oxidizes to a rich, satiny black in the open air.

Then the huge sprawling Amazon vanished from my mind’s eye as I followed Paul’s finger, pointing to a workbook question that offered
Sit at a table
vs.
Sit under a table
. He pointed to
Cement is hard
vs.
Cement is soft
. Next he spread his fingers stiffly—all but the two droopy ones—in a sign of tortured woe. Then he mimed the weighing of produce. At last, sighing unevenly, he seemed to let all the air out of the room.

I understood.
Poured
cement is soft,
set
cement hard.

“How about these?” I pointed to
Bridges can be carried
vs. Radios can be carried, and
Sew your hair
vs.
Comb your hair.

“Yes!” he said, making a darning motion in the air.

Of course one could sew with hair. Before manufacturing, people sewed with animal hair.

“Kwai,” he added. Just the one word. For a few moments, I floated the word in my mind . . .
Kwai
. . .
Kwai
. . . only its bare sounds at first, until images marched in.
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
was a favorite WWII film of Paul’s, in which prisoners built, while simultaneously sabotaging, a wooden bridge for the Burma railway.

“Do you imagine these things—carrying a bridge or sewing with hair—when you read the sentence?”

“
YES
,” he whispered hard in exasperation, while rubbing his brow with his good hand.

Even if he understood all the words—and I wasn’t sure he did—he was still too imaginative for this sort of exercise, which required a different habit of mind. The minute he heard or read about it, he automatically pictured
taking cabbage for a walk, wearing poems
, or discovering
a wall full of money
. The brain imagines whatever it’s told about, and trying to suppress a thought results in preoccupation with it. Try not to picture a polar bear.

“Want to take a cabbage for a walk?” I teased with an exaggerated smile. “I think we’ve got a cabbage leash around here somewhere.”

“Why not,” he said in a blasé tone, like any normal spouse being asked to walk the family spaniel.

In all Paul went through five speech therapists, mainly teaching the same skills in the same way, none able to help him progress much. Number one was Catherine, a handsome middle-aged woman with tawny skin and an apologetic smile who had the habit of peeping up over her rimless glasses, as if she were repeatedly surfacing from a deep thought.

“Can you use these words to make a sentence?” she asked Paul, setting five cards on the table, one word printed on each: “Pat,” “John,” “down,” “eats,” “sits.”

Paul stared at the cards for a long silent spell, without touching them. Later he would tell me that they sometimes looked like worms cavorting on ice floes, or hieroglyphics on a tomb wall. He wasn’t sure which, not that it mattered much, because reading was no longer an effortless and unconscious knack. The brain doesn’t swallow a word whole. It breaks it into twigs, then reassembles the separate letters, syllables, and sounds to create meaning. Some of those mental steps had been damaged during the stroke. Anyway, he didn’t know what these scattered words were
for
. What was he supposed to do with them? Was it line them up? Soon they lost their novelty and he sat back in his chair and began drumming on the table with bored fingers.

“Now, now, don’t give up so fast!” she said. Leaning over the cards, she arranged two of them like this: JOHN EATS. “John eats,” she pronounced slowly and deliberately. “See? It’s easy. Now you do it.”

Then he allowed one hand to hover above the words, before slowly lowering it into action and plucking at the cards, sliding them into different arrangements, finally settling on PAT DOWN and JOHN SITS.

Toward the end of the session, their fifth time together, she surprised us by announcing: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to work with you anymore, Mr. West. . . .”

I looked questioningly at Paul. Had something gone amiss? He seemed puzzled as well.

“Because I’m getting married this weekend!” She beamed. “And we’re leaving right after the ceremony on our honeymoon . . . in Europe. We’ll be gone all summer.”

Number two, Roger, was a bearded young man, who always arrived with a hospitable handshake, though I found his palm damp and bony. I wondered if Paul did, too, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it in a way he’d understand.

“For this next activity,” I heard Roger say as I did chores nearby in the kitchen, “we will practice a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound.” He spaced his words rather far apart as he spoke, which removed some of the natural rise and fall of his voice.

“I want you to listen carefully and repeat after me. Let’s start with the consonant
M
. Ready?” Opening his mouth, he exaggerated the movement of his lips as he pronounced the sound “MA” clear as a musical note.

“M-M-MA,” Paul repeated stumblingly, more like a goat’s bleat.

A purposeful pause.

“MAY.” Said with lips rolled tightly together—grandpa without his dentures—then opened wide.

Staring hard, Paul studied how Roger’s lips moved to round out the sound.

“MM-MAY,” he said, elongating both parts, the
M
and the
A
.

Another pause.

“MY . . . MY.”

Roger continued through ME and MO and back to MA again, over and over, trying to help Paul’s brain connect letters with sounds that can be mouthed in speech.

We liked Roger, who tutored Paul for another few weeks, but a new semester was starting at Ithaca College and he needed to return.

Number three was Julie, a slender twenty-something woman with bulging blue eyes, and a voice that hadn’t “cracked” yet—the female equivalent of a boy’s voice during adolescence—from the distinctive crinkling soprano of a young woman into the slightly lower register of middle age.

I overheard her asking Paul “yes” and “no” questions, each of which he took his time answering, thinking it through and giving his brain a chance to mobilize a reply.

“Is your name Jack?”

“No,” Paul croaked.

“Is your name Paul?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Is the light on?”

“Yes.”

“Good, Mr. West. Now I’d like you to tell me what you see in the pictures I show you. Okay? Let’s begin.” The sound of several 5-by-7-inch cards being tapped on a teak

table.

“What’s this?”

Paul paused a long while, then said haltingly, as if groping for an unknown language: “Duck? No, smird. grap. looch, mem, mem, mem, snok . . .”

The strain in his voice tore through me, and at that moment I would have done anything to help him, including burning incense to Panacea, the goddess of healing.

“No, those are nonsense sounds,” Julie said, adding a little crackling laugh. “It’s a
broom
, a
broom
.”