One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (25 page)

“Well done!” I cheered.

You’re still in there!
I thought, my morale lifted by the flicker of his creative spirit. Despite everything, despite the monumental effort it was taking, the smithy who bends words was still keeping a forge somewhere in his brain.

He’s nearly eighty,
I thought,
and there’s no predicting the what-will-be. For any of us. Carpe diem
. Then I smiled bittersweetly, because
carpe diem
sounded like a travel allowance for goldfish, a pun that would have tickled Paul in bygone days. Now? Could he still make the mental hop from
carpe diem
sounding like
per diem
, and goldfish being a member of the carp family, to
carpe diem
not really meaning
seize the day
, but equaling what the carp’s employer will reimburse him for in a twenty-four-hour period when he’s traveling on business? That’s a lot of swerves. For a healthy brain, a pleasurable jaunt, but for Paul, whose mental pogo stick was missing some of its spring? Doubtful. And then he might feel bad about disappointing me, maybe slump into a discouraged low.
Let it all go
, I thought.
Seize the day.

CHAPTER 20

E
NRICH YOUR LAB RAT’S ENVIRONMENT IF YOU WANT
him to thrive.
To that end, Liz and I engaged Paul in “conversation therapy” nonstop. Almost daily, Liz regaled Paul with stories about her neighbor Gustaf, who could easily have been a zany character from one of Paul’s novels brought to life, and Paul always listened raptly to the madcap adventures.

“Gustaf’s back from Chernobyl!” she said. “He slept outside on the ground to save money. Sometimes under bridges! One morning he woke up scared to death by a big guy with a gun yelling at him in Russian. Remember, Gustaf’s seven feet tall, and wears bright yellow bell-bottoms, so he’s not exactly blending into the landscape.”

On other days I overheard: “Gustaf’s planning an illegal trip to a banned, deserted Japanese island. . . . He thinks he can kite-board to it. It’s only about a mile offshore. If the breeze is right . . .”

“Gustaf’s having the guy from Texas who puts decals on the Hooters buses apply a decal to his car with an eight-foot-long naked woman on one side.”

“Gustaf bought a new toy! Anti-gravity boots with
springs
, and apparently they’re super-dangerous. They’re supposed to make you be able to bounce about ten feet up in the air. He’s been putting a harness around his waist, his helmet on, and roping himself to the branch of a tree in the front yard. He’s been practicing jumping, springing up and down. . . . The neighbors seem a bit confused!”

“Gustaf has gone kite-surfing again on Lake Ontario. . . .”

Liz was a natural natterer, for whom any topic was fair game, from paranormal military programs to avant-garde art glass or endangered toads. As a result, I never knew what I’d hear drifting in through the screens, usually scraps of conversation too amusing to ignore. Quite often Liz regaled Paul with tales of her previous jobs, an American miscellany that, she swore, had perfectly prepared her for our household: slaloming through traffic and riding rails under the Capitol as a bike messenger in D.C., where she had also worked for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Lodging in a Mormon trailer park in Utah while mapping volcanics and faults for the U.S. Geological Survey. Jack-of-all-trades at the Q-U-P-Q-U-G-I-A-Q café (as I heard her spell it out to Paul), a coffeehouse and hostel in Anchorage, Alaska, named for an Inuit myth about a ten-legged polar bear. Coordinating residents at an Alaskan men’s homeless shelter. Shuffling contracts for a high-rise construction firm in Los Angeles. Making cheese for Maine’s iconic Nezinscott Farm, and careening their organic milk delivery van up and down the stony coast. Or her first job in Ithaca, harvesting organic herbs for the farmers’ market, which she confessed she found “a little dull as herbs don’t move very quickly.” And then, of course, before nursing school, with all its viscera and checklists, a couple of years on a thoroughbred farm, where she did everything from mucking out stalls to aiding veterinarian and farrier, and got used to handling half tons of snort and lather.

Or she aired tales from recent trips: Baja for New Year’s on a hippie bus from San Francisco. Canoe camping in Canada with her girlfriends. Wine-tasting in Oregon with the in-laws. Cézanne at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with her mother. The Pork Pavilion at the Missouri State Fair. The Roosevelt Memorial in D.C. (where a runaway horse was being chased, unsuccessfully, by Capitol policemen on bikes). Epic dragon-boat gaiety—from the Olympic paddling course in Montreal to our own Finger Lakes International Dragon Boat Festival, where a Buddhist monk blessed the boats and painted pupils on the eyes of the figureheads to give them sight.

Paul was by no means suffering from lack of verbal input; it was verbal output that he still found oh-so-difficult.

Whenever Paul didn’t know a word, Liz or I would ask him to let his brain hunt until it found another route around the roadblock. That took a while, and sometimes I could almost feel his mind panting through a labyrinth, hitting blind alleys, backtracking, and heading off in another direction.

“When is the nosebleed on? . . . No, no, not nosebleed . . . running and gunning . . . not gunning . . . ball . . . you know . . . city in England . . . kicking, kicking, yes, ball . . .”

“The Arsenal vs. Manchester United soccer match?” I guessed.

His face melted in relief. “Yesss,” he sighed.

Paul adopted a verbal shorthand for letting us know when he was tired and needed to stop wrangling with words.

“Later!” Uttered with a dismissive wave of his hand, shooing us away. His eyes said:
My brain is nodding from all the work. Let me rest.

“How does it feel to live in a sorority?” Liz teased, hoping he’d muster a response.

Paul couldn’t resist the bait. “I
luv
women,” he replied with an exaggerated leer, then rolled onto his side, dug his face into a welcoming crease of the couch, and plunged into a deep sleep, waking an hour later.

A born word-maven and reader, Liz often chatted around the kitchen, and I gabbled back as Paul woke up slowly over breakfast. He preferred to do one thing at a time, while Liz and I conversed easily while doing chores. Not just true of our household. Women ply the rapids of language more easily; and if we seemed to be talking double-time, we probably were doing that, too. Women can pronounce words faster than men, and utter more sentences in a given amount of time. Maybe because women use both hemispheres to comb through sounds, while men mainly use the left side. With a richer bounty of connections among neurons and a more thickly wired
corpus callosum
zooming traffic between the two hemispheres, the female brain may be better organized for language. Whatever the reason, females are less prey to stuttering, dyslexia, autism, and other language problems, including aphasia.

Most mornings Paul seemed to thrive on our prattle, vicariously enjoying my verbal high-jinks and keen to follow Liz’s newsy updates about life at home and the inspired antics of her husband Will, and of course the unending adventures of Gustaf.

“Too fast!” Paul chided us. “I’m . . . not awake! Tell me l-later.”

“Welcome to the planet of caffeinated women,” I teased. And then, out of the blue, in his old normal tone of voice, he stopped me cold by muttering:

“Every house is a madhouse at some time or another.”

My pulse jumped. A flutter in time. My old Paul was back with his cynical wit and one of his pet sayings, from a short story of Edith Wharton’s.

“What did you say?” I wondered if I’d heard him right or was merely hallucinating.

Taking a moment to carefully swallow his mouthful of omelet, he repeated: “Every mouse glad mouse bother.”

“Ah . . . yes, my little mouse,” I patted him gently on the shoulder. “We won’t bother you with our jabbering—not
yet
, anyway!”

So the perfectly rendered quotation was just a phantom of my mind born from wishing so hard. The way I sometimes startled, quite sure I saw my mother, strolling on a sunny street, years after her death. The brain searches for the fond familiars it has lost, their sounds and images and habits of mind that haunted it long enough to leave indelible traces, scant truths it could rely on in an uncertain world.

For me, one of the most disturbing aspects of Paul’s aphasia was his no longer being able to find ways to describe the combinative zest of life. That was beyond odd for Paul, of all people, whose written descriptions of anything had tended to be colorful, many-layered, and jazzy. By mixing language with a free hand, his images throbbed with an acute physicality, full of life’s sexy, chaotic, nostalgic, belligerent, crushing, confusing vitality. Objects could lose their identities in the identity of other objects. Sometimes the images didn’t so much combine things as trail them through a slush of other phenomena, suggesting the behavior deep in our brains, hearts, and cells, so that the language of his books often echoed their subject matter. Like his countryman Dylan Thomas, he could always be counted on to see the shroud maker in the surgeon sewing up after an operation. His images weren’t well behaved, nor always explicit. But they were bold, keen-eyed, wild, and voluptuous, sometimes tenderly so.

Cheese turning a pale green cheek like an albino monkey slipping into a vale of chlorophyll. Apples waiting to crack open like two clasped hands parting.

—Portable People

Or:

With sunset came an almost careless quiet as the saffron over the western range turned vermillion and the antennas, the dishes, on top began to resemble mutants semaphoring for help, silhouettes against an engulfing scarlet.

—A Stroke of Genius

Now he could sometimes describe pictures in short simple phrases, but rarely harness the vivid resemblance of analogies; adjectives were hard to come by in his frayed and burned association areas; all the beakers of categories lay in fragile ruins.

“The sky is beautiful today, isn’t it?” I observed. I knew he exulted in bright delft-blue skies. “What color is it?”

“Blue,” he said.

“What kind of blue today?”

He thought for a long, long while, then repeated all he could come up with: “Blue.”

By late afternoon, the day had dwindled into those hours when stroke and Alzheimer’s patients are sometimes described as
sundowning
, descending into a state of agitated confusion—usually from being over tired by the demands of the day. The rest of us mortals may just say we’re crashing from a day too full of hubbub and caffeine. For Paul,
sundowning
brought a real eclipse of language, a return to the long stumbling silences he dreaded.

This time, I couldn’t lead him into simple talk, and he didn’t want to watch television either. We sat in silence as the moon rose like a fleshy white old scar. All day, he’d been trying to communicate without much success (aphasia’s roadblocks can vary dramatically from day to day), and he seemed at last to have surrendered. He raised his fists to his forehead, palms facing inward, and tapped them gently. I gasped. I’d seen that gesture before performed by Koko the gorilla, who had been taught to communicate in sign language. It was the sign for “really stupid.” Had Paul seen the same films of Koko that I had? I wasn’t sure.

“Are you trying to say something?” I asked quietly.

He nodded yes, but gave up the effort of pursuing it.

Using a vocabulary adapted from American Sign Language, Koko could describe her world, express her wants, ask questions, and even share complex feelings. Evidently she experienced what we think of as quintessentially human—abstract thought—and relayed many of her states of mind to her trainers by signing such things as: “This makes me sad,” “I’m ashamed,” “It’s fake,” “I’m mad,” “That hurts,” “I’m sorry,” “I need your help,” “I want to visit,” “love,” “time,” and a host of other expressions. She was also creative. She enjoyed painting one canvas after another and sometimes described the subject matter, even if her bright red “bird” seemed to have an awful lot of wings. Unless, maybe, she was depicting it in flight? Most importantly, she knew that she was using signs to communicate, and she could mine a vocabulary of about a thousand words. Making monkey-baby sounds with Paul had felt intimate and right, but I grew immeasurably sad when I realized that, while sundowning, Paul was operating on a linguistic level below that of Koko the gorilla.