One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (32 page)

CHAPTER 28

“W
ILL HAS STARTED DESIGNING THE WEBSITE FOR THE
Buddhist monastery,” Liz announced in a breezy way as she entered the house on Monday morning. With a quick flick of each ankle, she sloughed off her street shoes by the front door and slipped into a pair of waiting flip-flops, whose raised soles were a translucent amber. Over the weekend she’d had her hair streaked sweet-potato red, and she was giving Paul a race in the tan department, hers from dragon-boat practice. “It’s a marketing thing. They plan on selling baseball caps to raise money for the new monastery, and because the Dalai Llama’s coming to town.” “I thought he wore an orange golf visor,” I interjected, but there was no slowing her caffeinated ebullience. Without missing a beat, she grabbed Paul’s electric razor from the counter, whacking it open for its regular cleaning.

“Hey! Remember when Will shaved his head that freezing winter night outside on the porch? I’d banned him from doing it indoors—he always makes such a mess, hair all over the place! He was standing in his sleeping bag, at midnight! And then the shaver broke, so there he was, halfway done with his haircut, dismantling and rebuilding the shaver so he could finish. He is
such
a disaster!”

Seated at the dining room table, a barely awake Paul began looking confused. This was exactly the sort of direction change that left him in the dust.

“Well, at least he can fix the things he breaks,” I rejoined, trying to sound reassuring.

“Break?!” Paul called out. That word he caught solidly through his morning fog.

“Remember when Will broke his arm practicing kite-surfing in the backyard with Gustaf? And of course he had bought all that equipment. Different kites for different wind speeds. Endless amounts of gear.” She rolled her eyes skyward. “Now in the basement with the ice axes, five bicycles, and six pairs of skis. Good grief!”

“
Nooo
,” Paul smeared the vowel around the air, managing to give it a
Ye gads, talkative women!
tone. “It’s an infestation!”

Liz and I laughed at the image of words thick as locusts.

“Need calm. For the . . . the . . . you know, the . . .” He waved a hand at himself impatiently, as if he were fanning the embers in his skull.

“Phone call?” I finally helped.

“Yes! Phone call. I’m not awake.”

“Okay, we’ll be quiet. Promise.” I lifted a hand to my mouth and turned it like a key in a lock; Liz did the same. We knew that telephoning was nerve-racking for him.

Paul avoided the telephone instinctively, the way moles avoid light. His anxiety was understandable, since he never knew if he’d be able to find the right words, and he couldn’t see the other person’s face to gain clues about what they were saying. Worst of all, as wrong words kept muscling in and sabotaging him, his listener would often retreat into a confused silence. Then the common to-and-fro of a telephone call would deteriorate into long spasms of quiet.

All he wanted was to return a call from his friend Brad, novelist and editor of the literary magazine
Conjunctions
. As we stood in my study, Paul finally gave up trying to dial and sat seething in frustration with the cordless phone in his hand.

“Why do I keep pressing the scurvy button when I know it’s scurvy?! I can’t stop pressing the scurvy one!” Paul snarled. Holding the receiver at arm’s length, he looked accusingly at its dumb gray face. “It’s as if someone else is guiding the machinery, and always scurvy! No . . .
scurvy
is the wrong word.
Wrong
is the wrong right word.”

“Shall I dial it for you?” I tried to keep my voice on an even keel.

“I won’t be able to talk anyway,” he moaned.

He was dismal, self-incriminating, feeling the warp of his mental universe. How could he not grow discouraged? My study was safe and comfortable, with the plush purple armchair for him to slouch shirtless in, and a flock of brilliant goldfinches chittering outside the open window, but there was no way for him to relax. And the more stressed he felt, the more difficult talking would be.

“Are you afraid you’ll have trouble finding the words you want?” I offered, hoping to help him make peace with his nerves.

“It’s like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves,” he lamented.

“It’s as if some words loom larger than others and actually repel them,” he then said at half speed, thrusting his arms out, as if pushing words away. “It’s as if a word, the wrong word, clings to my face like an
octopus
, and then leaves, thank god.”

Sympathizing, I murmured: “That sounds wretchedly frustrating.”

“Frustrating!” he echoed. “The minute I talk into the Plexiglas I’m a goner. . . . not
Plexiglas
. . . Plexiglas . . .” He paused so long he forgot what he was saying, and threw up his hands in disgust.

Doing my best to tease out his trouble, I pressed on: “What happens exactly? Does a roadblock get in the way? Can you talk around it, you know, make a little detour and find another way to say what you mean?”

Taking a deep breath to calm down, Paul stroked his ill-shaven chin with one hand, smiling absentmindedly when he discovered a tuft of hair missed by his razor.

“There’s a word clamoring to be heard . . . that . . . that . . . blots out all the others. Then all grammar, all verbal structures . . . blow out the window. . . . Sometimes I see a word, spelled right, at the front of my skull, in several colors. But never the word I want. For example, I said ‘Plexiglas’ when I was grabbling for something else.”

“Telephone.”

“
Tel-e-phone
,” he sighed with the relief of someone scratching an itch.

“Not to say
Plexiglas
is incredibly hard,” he said haltingly, as if groping for an unknown language. “When this anarchy occurs, there is for me no way of dragooning anything else into the mix. My brain feels like suet.”

“Nice image!”

Paul considered my praise a moment, agreed, and smiled with the pride of ownership. That small achievement, however slight, buoyed his confidence just long enough to risk the perils of phoning once more. This time I dialed, but after all our pre-game warm-up, Brad wasn’t home. I left a message that Paul had called.

Around dinnertime, Brad returned the call and began leaving an encouraging message for Paul on the answering machine. Hearing Brad’s voice, Paul pantomimed that he wanted to talk. I answered the phone just as Brad was saying “I love you, man,” and handed the receiver to Paul. Although I was tempted to leave the room to give him privacy, I knew he might need my help finding words, and several times he did. He stammered a lot, but nonetheless conveyed his feelings and for once he enjoyed the pleasure of touching voices with an old literary friend. I agonized as Paul searched in vain for words, but I was also proud of him for bravely tackling the labyrinth of aphasia.

“You know Rexroth had a stroke with speaking problems, too,” Brad ventured, referring to the poet sometimes called “the father of the Beats.”

Paul’s face seemed to wither from the question on his mind, but nonetheless he asked: “Did he recover fully?”

My heart sank.
Cure
wasn’t possible, only
improvement
, and only after unbelievably long, hard work, and even then Paul was bound to feel unsatisfied.

“What hap . . . happened . . . to Rexroth?”

“He hired an assistant and did lots and lots of therapy. But just a year later he published a new book of poems,” Brad replied in encouragement.

Long forgotten, I now recalled how another poet, William Meredith, had visited our home years before with his partner Richard Harteis. Ex-Navy pilot and past poet laureate, Meredith had published ten celebrated books of poetry before a stroke, in 1983, which badly crippled his ability to speak and move for over a year. Assisted by Harteis, he still traveled and “gave readings,” with Harteis reading while Meredith sat in the audience. Afterward, he’d socialize, and let Harteis interpret if need be. I remembered Meredith’s strange, clogged, halting speech. Yes, it made so much sense now. What a lovely guest Meredith had been, affable and smart, and, after years of speech and physical therapy, able to handle small talk and walking, albeit with great effort. In devastating hindsight, I recalled how Paul and I had felt grave sorrow for him.

Idly browsing my bookshelves while Paul finished his call, it occurred to me that Paul had joined a wretchedly distinguished club. With stroke and aphasia so common, myriad authors, composers, and other creative souls
must
have suffered similar fates for centuries. Ravel, Rexroth, and Meredith piqued my curiosity, and I resolved to do a little research, a project that might also interest Paul.

As if reading my mind, Paul asked after he and Brad hung up: “I wonder . . . about other writers . . . have aphasia? . . . Proust . . . Joyce . . . Dickens?” He quickly circled one open hand in the air, a motion that usually means
and so on
.

Despite the day’s highs, as night fell, a savage wistfulness haunted me, as Paul’s words, gestures, and concerns unfolded on a narrow plane, in few dimensions. All that was missing existed offstage, as shadows. Some things are much more present in their absence.

About that Marcel Proust was right. I remembered that like Paul, Proust also had a cork-lined room to shield him from the clamor of daily life, and kept a reverse sleep-wake cycle. Proust’s room was a bedroom chamber where he wrote, and sometimes dined on mashed potatoes delivered by carriage from his favorite restaurant at the Ritz. In Paul’s case, the cork-lined room was his study, also windowless. And for years before his stroke, Paul had had a serious mashed-potato addiction, too. He’d traveled with packets of dried mashed potatoes in his suitcase, and at home he liked to thicken soups or stews with them, a habit I found repulsive and vehemently banned from my own portions.

While Paul watched his nightly television, trying to distract myself, since I was still feeling a bit blue, I hunted through the library and online to find an answer for us about other writers afflicted with aphasia. Sure enough, Baudelaire had been stricken, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Johnson, and C. F. Ramuz. Proust was a strange case. A lifelong asthmatic and neurotic, he hadn’t endured aphasia himself, but morbidly feared it. His physician father had published scholarly papers on aphasia before succumbing to a stroke at the age of fifty-six, after days of altered consciousness. Later on, while Proust was still living with his mother, he experienced its devastation firsthand when she had a stroke that left her aphasic for two years before her death.

Small wonder Proust became alarmed, in his early thirties, by the onset of slurred speech, dizziness, memory lapses, and falls. That constellation of symptoms probably hadn’t come from stroke but from the collision of all the drugs he was taking in excess—for sleep, waking, asthma control, psychosomatic banes, and reappearing streaks of malaise. Paul knew about Proust’s suffering—lucid, addictive, and otherwise—but not his mother’s aphasia. Computer printouts in hand, I trundled out to the living room to share with Paul what I’d found.

When I read Paul this quote of Proust’s—“A foreigner has taken domicile in my brain”—he nodded with empathy.

“But did you know that Emerson also had a stroke with bad aphasia?” I asked.

“No! . . . How did he transcend?”

Paul’s question was serious, but we both smiled at the pun on “Transcendentalist” that had winkled its way around his brain and out through his mouth under its own power.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t find many details.”

By the summer of 1871 Emerson had begun losing his memory and braving progressive aphasia, probably part of a degenerative brain condition. The great essayist forgot his own name, and when someone greeted him with “How are you?” he’d often reply: “Quite well. I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.”

“Actually, there’s been shockingly little written about
any
authors who have had strokes or aphasia,” I told Paul. “Isn’t that odd? But quite a bit is known about Baudelaire. . . . he had a left-hemisphere stroke very similar to your own, only it didn’t turn out so well.”