[sic]: A Memoir (4 page)

She didn’t move closer but her voice did. She admitted that what she was about to ask was going to seem absurd, and she couldn’t quite believe she was going to actually ask it; she was afraid I would think her crazy, or drunk, but she wasn’t. She was wondering whether I’d like to have sex with her. She said that we seemed attracted to each other, and she had a maddening desire to have sex, right now; we could just go up to your apartment, she said, and she promised that she would leave right afterward, and that we didn’t even have to exchange names. “I promise you, it’ll be really nice,” she smiled.

“Sure, fine,” I said, “I’d be delighted.” I wasn’t fucked up enough to not wonder if she was schizophrenic, or a prostitute, but I was fucked up enough to figure maybe the best way to answer that question was to take her upstairs. Plus I felt like I had gotten to know her fairly well over the last ten minutes, she was a good conversationalist and seemed like a nice, honest person.

We walked into my apartment and I closed the door, and it clicked behind us with a funny sound. I was suddenly self-conscious; but of course when you bring somebody over for the first time, whether a lover or a potential lover or even (or especially) just a friend, you tend to look at your own habitat through the lens of the guest’s eyes. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in New York, where one’s apartment is one of the few distinguishing signals of status, where everyone is overeducated and overpaid and broke at the same time, and everyone wears basically the same clothes and has a book deal about to go through. People look at their apartments here the way people in Los Angeles look at their, and each others’, cars. Of course opinions can vary widely, apartments being more complex organisms than cars, which can be translated into their cash equivalents with a simple equation, rather than a pretty complex algorithm. I remember my friend Adriane, a childlike actress, remarking, “This is what I always imagined as a grown-up’s New York apartment.” But an ex-girlfriend, a manicured New Jersey Italian blonde, nouveau riche, as she freely would confess, peered around with narrowed eyes as if she’d just gotten off a small plane in the middle of Africa: “Well two things are for sure, you are single, and you’re not gay.”

We stood there, America and Korea, facing each other, like in
High Noon
. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered. At first I thought she was kidding—a little ironic jest to dispel the awkwardness everybody feels when they’re about to fuck someone they’ve known for ten minutes. But she was serious. “No, I’m serious,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

I was a little irritated. “Why don’t
you
take off
your
clothes?” Ever think of
that
? How do you like it now?

“Okay,” she conceded. “Why don’t we both take off our clothes. One article at a time.”

“Sure,” I said. I took off my shirt. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and pulled her shirt up over her head, and froze there for a moment, her arms stretched up to the stars, her head wrapped in cloth: Andromeda against the rock, waiting for her sea monster: a statue of Andromeda carved out of green marble. How the Greeks could sculpt fabric! Then with a flourish, applauding the virtuosity of her body, the shirt crumpled and, released into the air, unfolded with a sigh and she looked at me modestly, amused. She was in fact beautiful. She came over and knelt before me and gently tugged down my boxers and took me in her mouth. “This is nice!” She smiled. “Half is already enough.” But somehow it wasn’t ridiculous.

I picked her up and carried her over to the bed, but she was aghast that I could even conceive of having intercourse without a shower first. “I have, on occasion, had sex without taking a shower immediately before,” I told her.

“Europeans,” she muttered, incredulous. I knew intuitively that with this epithet she was casting all non-Asians, and perhaps anyone outside of the Korean Peninsula, in the same lot, just as a Cameroonian I knew in Paris told me the word for “white folk” in one of his languages applied equally to a Pakistani as to a Finn.

The water was scalding hot; I protested and she mocked me, saying I didn’t even know how to bathe. “What’s this?” She had found the hard round silicone disc of the catheter that had been surgically implanted, so shallow, in my chest. “Oh, that’s nothing. I’m taking medicine through that, at the hospital. It puts the medicine right into the jugular vein, so it’s very clever.”

“What is it—what do you have that’s wrong?”

“It’s no big deal,” I said.

“That’s good. What is it, though?”

I told her. She cried. Like anyone from the Midwest, I get alarmed when I have a life-threatening disease and I tell someone and they cry. “You don’t have to cry,” I said, but she stood there frozen, abandoning her choreography, just enduring the scalding water against her cheek. The water mingled with her tears: very New Asian cinema. That long black hair, plastered against her marble back, matted. I held her, felt her skeleton under her perfect skin and I felt like I was, yes, holding a bird.

“I’m sorry,” she said; she embraced me, pressed her perfect body against mine. I kissed her, for the first time—I’d been trying to kiss her the whole time, but for some reason she refused. I’d been wondering about this. I’d had a girlfriend in high school who loved to have sex without kissing. One night we had sex like this, outside, in a park (in Milwaukee), under a structure that was briefly the tallest free-standing tower in the world. (I’m not kidding! Milwaukee also boasts the world’s largest four-faced clock; the tower looms over a landscape of factories and marks the division between the city’s north and south sides.) But it turned out that the Korean girl’s reluctance wasn’t a fetish, she was missing an eyetooth: I’d caught her between dentist appointments, between the extraction and the replacement. She was self-conscious about it. I held her tight. What could be more endearingly apocalyptic? Two war-torn bodies silhouetted against fire.

With an elegant foot she kicked the faucet’s wand and the water was icy. I jumped, and she twirled us around twice, then shut off the water while grabbing the four towels she had artfully placed just outside the shower curtain and we were shrouded in the warmth of the fabric and of our bodies. “See how nice it is?” she said.

She was right—it really was nice. I gave in. Europeans
are
barbarians. She seemed to accept my apology. “Now we can have sex!” she exclaimed, with peninsular, wet-rice glee. She raced across the apartment, stopped short, turned on a dime (a small, gleaming silver Mercury, not our mundane, cupronickel FDR), flashed me a glance from under a lightly etched eyebrow, and then leapt and dove into the tangled sheets on the bed like a beautiful, bright-green fly. And then it was a series of tasks, of little adventures. First we tried to scale a sheer wall; then we were flying over a miniature city, on a carpet in the air; then we dove down alongside the city’s wall and all at once we were swimming together; then we were testing how long we could float on the surface, without moving; then we sank to the bottom and leapt in the underwater leaps so familiar from dreams, judging our buoyancy. Note to reader: when I was describing the proportion of the Golden Ratio I wasn’t really thinking of chemo number seven, or Debussy, or the Parthenon: I was thinking of a woman’s body and of her body, which was pure and ancient, and of which no part was not a beautiful surface, akin to a piece of music in which there is not a single moment that is not beautiful. That’s a consistency one doesn’t find too often. Or at least we don’t, maybe, in the West; our music, around the time of the Renaissance, uniquely divorced itself from religion and as a consequence had to replace sustained ecstasy with dynamic contrast, meaning that beauty had to be held up against something at least slightly different in order to cue the audience, as if to say, this is beauty. And this situation—somebody onstage suddenly, apostrophically, pointing to “beauty” with a Godlike, outstretched arm, while staring directly at the naked couple (save for fig leaves) in the front row, breaking the fourth wall—this is what we mean by “drama.” The anonymous seventh-century craftsmen of the sustained ecstasy of Gregorian chant wouldn’t have understood any of this stuff, the creases and folds and spasms. But even nowadays you come across traces of it sometimes, that older aesthetic. Mozart, sometimes, maybe. Her body was stretched out like a tightrope strung between two towers. Of course it’s entirely subjective. But then again when enough people find it in a piece by, say, Mozart, then pretty soon you’re dealing with a canonized artist who is different from the real human being and then cultural critics—well, you know the rest, obviously there’s no need to go on about it now.

Our fucking that night—there was obviously a ritualistic quality to it, but not in our usual sense of the word, which is a pejorative sense, artificiality, mannerisms, as when Anglo-Saxons loutishly deride the French as the “most ritualistic” of European cultures because of French table manners and the French fondness for Angkor Wat and Ancient Egypt. There’s a difference between that sense of “ritualistic” and the kind of wholesale devotion to, and fervent absorption in, a certain praxis that this woman exhibited while we fucked. I hope I did too. I certainly tried. I detest the phrase “good lover” or “great lover”—“she was a marvelous lover” or “he was magnificent in bed” or “he’s great in the sack”—honestly I’ve never even known what that means. If you love someone then you make love with them. And then being a “good lover” is like being a “good breather.” But having said that, there was the sense of engaging in an experiment together, a game on which our minds and bodies were focused in synchrony, which was very conscious and very purposeful—she would talk about things—and at the same time utterly unself-conscious.

The sky was light and I was exhausted, I fell asleep and she continued quietly to do things for a while and then I fell into a deep sleep for the first time in several weeks. Some time went by. I opened my eyes at one point and noticed that she had tidied up the apartment. Moved some things around, stacked papers into neat piles, that kind of thing. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Come back to bed, I said. “Really?” she asked. Of course, I said, and she moved over and I grabbed her legs and threw her over me, over a precipice, she fell like Fay Wray falling out of the pterodactyl’s winged fingers down the sheer cliff, plunging down and resurfacing with the glimpse of a bare breast. (That was 1933!) And then I asked her what her name was. “You really want to know?” Of course I did. She told me. I couldn’t quite understand it, but it sounded something like Ilene, so that’s how I put it in my cell phone, the cell phone that quit for good later that afternoon, ushering her, as far as I was concerned, into oblivion—there was, come to think of it, something ghostly about the whole encounter, the way she sort of materialized, like the way a girl did in a Japanese film I saw once, a black-and-white film: she floated out of mist. Or was it smoke? In black and white, mist and smoke are extraordinarily similar things; Orson Welles said the most beautiful thing in the world to film is smoke.

I’d already had a crush on my chemo nurse, a lovely, bohemian Brooklynite named (of course) Felicity, a freckled strawberry blonde with brilliant green eyes, and in typical form she had returned my affection by betraying me. Around chemo number four, I think, she’d married the father of her child, her long-term boyfriend who was incidentally (salt into the wound) the son of a prominent jazz musician. The encounter with Ilene, or whatever her name was, made the next session somewhat easier. Felicity was happy that I seemed cheerier; she wondered, I could tell, what was going on. “Still no nausea, no vomiting, no tingling in the hands and feet?” This was a rote question but there was a different inflection behind it. None of that, I told her: not even the loss of a single hair. She looked quizzical: eyes narrowed, angled, the hint of a smile.

I said, “I feel, really, pretty good—are you sure this stuff is working?”

“Oh, it’s working,” and now she smiled broadly, and she was wrong.

II

ACT II

At any point one may make the

division of the two hemispheres.

—
Leonardo
, Prophecies

“What’s disappointing,” the man in the mustache
and white coat and bow tie remarked, frowning at the CT scan results, “is the area of uptake.” He sat down next to me, looking away. “With resistant cases, we usually opt for a combined treatment of radiation, a high-dose chemotherapy regime called ICE, and a bone marrow transplant. It’s relatively endurable.”

The two of us were alone in the small room. Silence, like standing on a plateau, in the wind: I wanted to go inside, but I was already inside, in a small room. Why had I come to this meeting—the crucial post-chemo consultation—alone? I was tired, I suppose, of asking, asking, asking for help, for companionship. Friends offer to help, and they do, but what’s the cost? For they say it’s free but how can it be. What a terrible realization. In other words—how’s my credit in this joint, anyway? No matter the gambit, the house always wins.
È finita la cuccagna
, Mayor La Guardia might very well have said: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, the eminent free-market economist Milton Friedman verifiably, and considerably less eloquently, did say. And TANSTAAFL, the celebrated acronym for the phrase, is anagrammatic with several phrases: my personal three favorites are “fan, at last” (speaking of Japanese black-and-white films); “fatal tans” (speaking of radiation); and “flat Satan” (speaking of certain records which, when played backward, reveal hidden messages).

But anyway I’d assumed—not irrationally—that the chemo would have worked. Because it does, in around 90 percent of cases. So why drag another friend or lover or family member to yet another wearying waiting-room wait, followed by an unemphatic, anticlimactic confirmation of the expected? Why inflict this on somebody, anybody?

Or was I just greedy: did I want the feeling of pleasure at finally hearing some good news for myself, undiluted by another’s smile and relief?

But of course anyone will tell you not to go to meetings such as this one unaccompanied: if it’s good news, you’re stunned, and can’t listen; and if it’s bad news, you’re stunned, and can’t listen. I knew this. So maybe it was just another posture of defiance. Paul McCartney once said of John Lennon, “He’s really only ever wanted to be James Dean or Marlon Brando.”
¹

Although I wasn’t alone, precisely; I’d brought a friend, my journal. While I had been waiting, I’d written the following. The tone is conversational, even affable; even. The penmanship flowing. Full sentences. How supremely innocent, in retrospect. Unself-conscious. Here’s what we have just before the real cutoff:

Getting the first results of the chemo today: I sit once again under the fluorescent lights of the waiting room, flush with anxiety, discomfort—psychological discomfort. The present is uncomfortable, it has an edge to it that’s thrilling in its sharpness, like wind-chill. Tired, so tired of this feeling: mind bloated from this constant dread. Life, after all, is a process, develops gradually in all its counter-rhythms, but it feels like a series of sharp edges, of sudden cuts.

Outside the nurses make small talk, mundane conversation. Inside each room a patient sits, waiting for the door to open with a rush of air, a hiss.

Read Updike’s review of the new Jane Smiley. Updike’s writing is showing wear and tear, the holes are showing through.

Alan, the overweight guitarist from high school, so gifted. “All I do is practice guitar and masturbate. That’s my entire life.” Greg told me Alan had said that—he was frightened by Alan’s depression.

David Foster Wallace writing about S

That’s where the doctor came in, with the line “What’s disappointing is the area of uptake” and sitting down and looking away. I wonder what I’d been about to write? “Wallace writing about S”? Who’s “S”? Or what? Suicide? But I’d used a capital letter. So it’s a who. Couldn’t be suicide. Anyway, I didn’t know the extent of Wallace’s depression until after his death, and this was before that. But Wallace wrote about depression, of course. And everybody said that in retrospect his work is one long ribbon of a suicide note, but I thought it was the opposite—not the work of a depressed guy, but the work of a healthy guy who was writing about depression, compassionately. But anyway I’d used a capital letter. Sontag wrote about illness. Maybe it was “S” for Sontag? But I hadn’t read her book on illness, on purpose, and I still haven’t—I think I said that already, I can’t remember now. And did Wallace even ever write about Sontag? If he did, I’m not aware. And if he did, and I’d read it, how could I have been aware of that fact then and not now? But I’ve answered my own question, obviously he might have written about Sontag somewhere, and I could have read it, and been writing about it at the point of interruption. But the only reason I offered Sontag as a possibility was that I’d been writing about my friend’s depression, and the idea of illness must have been somewhere on my mind because I was sitting in a hospital room. Who’s to say I wasn’t changing the subject? I could have been thinking of Wallace writing about anyone whose name begins with “S”—Stefan Edberg, for example—or the title of a film or book or magazine, or the name of a country, or, obviously, any word meriting a majuscule. In any case, whatever I meant will remain forever lost at precisely that edit point, the real cutoff, the point at which that past self ceased to exist. In the past, people didn’t edit films with computers like they do now, like they’re doing right now, at this second; they made incisions directly on the film itself, which was laid out upon a kind of little operating table: sometimes fragments of actual film would fall on the floor, unnoticed, and then in the evening they’d be swept up by the cleaners into a dustbin, along with dirt and newspapers and dried leaves. Or sometimes footage would be collected, spooled on reels like ribbons (ribbons, after all, are what films are), locked in a room somewhere in a metal cabinet that would eventually rust, and the film stock would literally dissolve into dust. This is what happened to the film my relative Will Cody made in the fall of 1913. He turned to the new art form of “moving pictures” when he lost creative control of the live circus he’d created. He had been in debt; among other reasons, he had taken out a personal loan to cover wages for Native American performers his producers were unwilling to pay. His film,
The Indian Wars
, was a revisionist Western, envisioned as something between a narrative and a documentary. It portrayed reenactments of battles between the army and indigenous tribes as precisely as possible, at considerable cost, going back to the actual locations of the skirmishes and massacres, casting real-life veterans of the combat on both sides, rigorously following the original battle plans; Will wanted to record the past. (Oddly, this is similar to what Kubrick wanted to do for his Napoleon film; he never made it.) And then the final act dealt with Native American assimilation: pseudodocumentary footage of Indians raising hands in classrooms, or opening bank accounts, or standing in line at the art deco post office, or riveting things in a factory, or asking questions in hospital rooms. Some critics blamed this section, which they accused of didacticism, however well meaning, for the film’s dismal performance at the box office.
²
(“What’s disappointing is the area of uptake.”) The prints of the film were nitrate, as were nearly all silent films of the silent film period, and like the vast majority of silent films—I don’t think people are aware of this, the
vast
majority—
The Indian Wars
completely decomposed, along with its version of the past and along, indeed, with the past itself.

Meanwhile my oncologist was talking, in the present. I couldn’t hear him. The first thing my new self realized was how strongly the room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Reeked, in fact. Overwhelming. What was the source of the odor? I glanced at the counter. All white and spotless and rectilinear, all cotton balls and white latex gloves and needles and poisons. I remember I did have the distinct impression that while I would feel a form of happiness in the future, it would be a new type of happiness profoundly unlike (and, to be honest, less happy than) any I had known. What do I mean by “happiness”? I don’t mean exultant, radiant, manic joy—although there’s nothing wrong with that. And I knew I would have those moments again. If I made it out of all this alive, for example. That would be exciting, ecstatic even.

What I had the sense I would miss, forever—and I think I may even have been right—are those sudden, uncued moments of inexplicable, profound, unexcited contentment. I wonder if the poet Ezra Pound—who quickly coined the term “imagism,” and just as quickly, mercurial, on a dime, abandoned it—would call these moments “images,” like the glimpse he had, once, of commuters on the subway in Paris, which is where I lived once—it’s a city that has arcades, streets within streets, cities within cities, and buildings made of steel and glass. He saw a beautiful face within the crowd in the metro station at Place de la Concorde, which is where the guillotine stood. And then he saw another face, and another. He subsequently immortalized the whole experience in a famous poem, which you may well know, or, perhaps, remember from a class on poetry you might have taken once.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Like this one time I was in Düsseldorf with a couple of German friends having brunch, and it was an unseasonably warm late morning in late autumn, and we weren’t saying anything of any particular importance, and nobody was in love with each other or anything like that. Just the light and the falling leaves and the sense of being safe. Or this other time when I was having my car washed in a suburb of Chicago, I was standing on the sidewalk watching, and the white sunlight—odd how much time writers spend writing about light, you’d think more of them would write more about more important things—but anyway the white sunlight fairly dashed itself against the water and the glass, jaggedly, and the attendants, these black guys clad in electric-blue scrubs wielding sponges and towels, were laughing softly and hilariously about something; and I was listening to Debussy in my head, and it was incredibly loud, and I felt, overtaking me, an enormous rush of anticipation, of the sense of potential, the impression that something vague and very good was going to happen not so long from now. It was those kinds of moments, I caught myself thinking, that would be lost to the new self.

Or this one time I was in college, driving eastward across the entire country with this woman I was in love with, and as day tipped into dusk, at the diamondsharp peak of the afternoon, we came upon the Missouri River and saw, for the first time, after hours of yellow waving grain, pitchblack steel: we crossed the bridge over the ribbon of water that bisected the country, and the landscape was orangelit, and the bridge, casting a long shadow, was pointing somewhere.

Ah, but you’re saying—this could just be the old stupid romantic view of lost youth. And true, I’m part Irish, very sentimental; I remember this one time I was in the park and my then-girlfriend looked up from reading Yeats and exclaimed—all he does is talk about faded youth! My friend Sarah, also a writer (I mean, she
is
a writer—I’m not really a writer, I’m just writing this one thing and that’s it), grew up in London. Every Sunday morning her father would take her to this fancy pub in the neighborhood, and they’d have coffee and read the newspaper together, and the sunlight (light again!) streaming through the windows and—well she described it better than I ever could, but at the end of her description she said, “How could I have known, then, how wonderful that was?”

My oncologist was looking at me now. Hard to read his face. I suddenly recalled that at our first consultation, he told me that he had been born in Milwaukee. Frank Lloyd Wright and Orson Welles, whom an Italian friend of mine calls the two greatest artists of the twentieth century, were both born near Milwaukee. I was born in Milwaukee too. My parents were very fond of the arts, although they weren’t professional artists. My mom was gifted musically, and my father was gifted writerly-ly. We lived in a comfortable, Tudor-style house in a subdivision that originally, in the nineteenth century, was a grain farm for a brewery downtown founded by a German immigrant, Jacob Best. His son-in-law, Frederick Pabst, took it over and expanded the business into a very successful company: one of the company’s brands, Pabst Blue Ribbon, became very popular indeed: in the 1986 movie
Blue Velvet
, a character played by Dennis Hopper talks about it even. In a 1997 book David Foster Wallace talks about this even. Eventually the brewery didn’t need the farm anymore, so the farm was converted, for the burgeoning bourgeoisie, into our subdivision. The curvy streets were designed to form the shape of a Prussian military helmet. You can see this clearly from the airplane if you’re flying in a southwesterly direction to Mitchell Field and if you know where to look. I love traveling and in the hospital room I realized I probably wouldn’t be traveling anywhere for quite some time now. The house across the street was the original farmhouse, and our house was the second or third built, I think. They put a plaque on it, the national registry of historic buildings or whatever. The main thing in our dark orange living room was an immense old dictionary on a podium like a Torah on a bimah. It wasn’t an unusual thing for my dad to amble with some urgency into the living room to look up a word; this was normal, actually. I thought all businessmen did this; but then I thought all businessmen went to work in an office building that was converted from a Victorian arcade: a building of cast iron and glass (cast iron being easier to weld than steel) with a skylight, dizzying balconies, and a fountain at the bottom: a building that not too long ago housed a billiard parlor, Turkish baths, and a bar: a city within a city. But when I was a child I didn’t like the arts because I found them imprecise and meaningless. Music, above all. Couldn’t stand music. I could read it and play it but I couldn’t really stand it: I liked math and science, especially biology; I was a little obsessed with taxonomy. When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an ornithologist. I would try to memorize the Latin names of the birds, even though I hadn’t studied Latin. This came in handy later, in high school, when I did study Latin because I had discovered girls and suddenly I had understood why people liked the arts, and science and math flew out the skylight like birds; and at the same time my father had a nervous breakdown and rediscovered literature and quit his job to write, and my parents divorced. My father told me about Ezra Pound. How Pound’s grandfather had been the governor of Wisconsin. How at the age of fifteen Pound had said that by the age of thirty he would know more about poetry than any man alive, and by the age of t
hirty he did. When my father told me that, I was at that age where you’re going across a bridge, in a sense, and whatever you read and whatever you hear will mark you forever, like it or not, and so I happened to read Pound and Eliot and Auden, and that’s why I think about them all the time even though they’re not fashionable; I’ll probably refer to them again during this essay and I’m a little embarrassed about that; I’m afraid you’ll think I’m not fashionable. Writers hope readers will like them, just like people hope other people they haven’t met yet will like them. And sometimes, for this precise reason, people and artists will put up defenses, and this is why, partly, Auden called one of his great books
The Shield of Achilles
. A young
woman by the name of Rachel Wetzsteon wrote a great book about Auden. The idea of a shield, and hoping people you haven’t met would like you—these ideas have something to do with Rachel, I think. My father met Auden once, and he said that Auden was too shy and awkward to speak or even meet his gaze. I finished high school and went to college in Chicago and studied music. One time my father, who was living out West, in the desert, drove back and we shared an apartment for a while. The novelist Jonathan Franzen came over for dinner one night, and my father said, that’s just about the cagiest guy I’ve ever met. So it’s the same thing. Greek soldiers would face each other on plains, with heavy shields strapped to their left arms for protection. I finished college and moved to Paris and worked at a place that designed carpets, and I continued to write music. My oncologist was saying something, but I was trying to put all this together. After three or four years I moved to New York and worked at a hedge fund, briefly, and then started studying music at Columbia. Then my father died; my brother Matthew and I visited a Greek island in whose center waterfalls gave way to springs; and then I came back to New York, and planes flew into buildings, and there was much dust, and smoke, and leaves of paper, and leaves, and death; and then I felt a lump in my neck that was determined to be a malignant tumor; and it was easily treatable, and the treatment didn’t work; and now I’m in this room, floating, shrieking, trying to put all this together.