Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (18 page)

O'Brien is best known for his book about a self-destructing alcoholic,
Leaving Las Vegas
.
Better
is also about characters seeking oblivion and release in alcohol. A wealthy man named Double Felix runs his home as an open house for alcoholic males and for women willing to provide sex in exchange for a privileged lifestyle. William is the narrator, a previously ambitious young man who has been sucked into the narcotic atmosphere of the house, reveling in sex and alcohol round the clock. Most mornings begin with him slinging back vodka with his host Double Felix, and the drinking continues all day long. What O'Brien does so well in his novels about alcoholics is in how he exposes the apathy behind alcoholism, the giving up on life and the utter deterioration of will. His characters rely on inebriation to remain sedated through the stages of their self-destruction. William is never fully present for anything. All is hazed and clouded by drinking.

When William finally moved out of his stupor and acted to save one person and then protect another, I was startled. The book had changed tempo on me. O'Brien was offering his character a chance to restart his life. I read on with renewed interest as William took that chance and moved beyond apathy and into engagement. He comes out of his fugue state and into a state of hope and possibility: “Part of my enthusiasm, such as it is, for whatever turn my life is taking is the need to assert it all over the place in as many ways as possible.” Assertion is a step in the right direction, a positive movement forward. He takes that first step forward by caring for the people around him.

“Be kind,” Plato said, “for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Kindness is a positive and vigorous force to make a connection across a divide. William is alone in his inebriation, but when he reaches out to help the former prostitute who actually cares for him, he is no longer alone. When I was devastated by the death of my sister, the words and letters and hugs of friends reminded me that I was not isolated in my grief but surrounded by people who cared about me. When Meredith came home from London, she found her brothers, her father, and me with our arms wide open. All these situations are different in circumstances but alike in the kindness that bridges the divide between one person and another.

There is no way to balance the scale of inequities, and I can't find any persuasive explanation for why illness, death, and hardship are so inequitably distributed. But I do find that sympathy, compassion, and solicitude are an answer to the consequences of pain and sorrow. Jane Kenyon writes in her poem “Killing the Plants,” “They will go on giving / alms to the poor: sweet air, miraculous / flowers, the example of persistence.” Kindness
is
persistence; it demonstrates an unyielding will to answer the unanswerable questions of tragedy and loss. In the face of hardship, compassion answers back with stores of relief. Even the most generous of acts can never bring Anne-Marie back to me, but each gentle act of caring relieves the weight of the battle, lightens my load, and offers strength of support.

Now it was my turn to offer Meredith the strength and persistence of my support and caring. I gave her a day away from her troubles, a day off from thinking about her future. I gave both of us a beautiful sunny day spent drinking lemonade, watching tennis, and laughing and cheering along with the crowds. The Williams sisters played and won and wowed us with their presence. Kim Clijsters won, and Wozniacki won. I can't remember if Tommy Haas won, but who cared: he looked gorgeous. Meredith and I giggled together when he changed shirts, exposing his tanned chest.

Over the years, the incident of Meredith and me and Jack speeding home from Bear Mountain, and Meredith wanting to leave me on the side of the road, has become a family joke. But I think the core of the story is serious. It is the question of who was to be kept safe in the car and who could be let go. Who would be treated with kindness and who would be left alone on the highway. I wanted to reassure Meredith then, and now, that kindness is a strength, that acts of kindness are lines passed back and forth between people to form a web of safety. I want her to know that she will always have a place in the car, in the house, in the family. And good seats at the Open, if she is willing to get up early and run for them.

Chapter 20
Coming off Loulou's Motorcycle

Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again.

NICK HORNBY,

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

MY YEAR OF READING WAS COMING TO AN END.

“You must be so ready to just
relax
,” a friend said to me.

But I was relaxed. A year of pleasure had been afforded to me. A year of books. No matter how burdensome other aspects of my life became, the driving and the cooking and the laundry, reading my daily book was always a joy. I hadn't been sick one day during my entire year of reading. Bathed in pleasure, I was immune to illness. People who didn't know me well told me I'd be off books for sure once the new year was rung in. Ha! I was as hooked as ever on the pleasure of reading.

Book bliss, brought on by good writing. If I didn't like a book within the first ten pages or so, I put it away and chose another one from my shelf of waiting tomes. As Nick Hornby counseled me, way back in February, in his book
Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
, “One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good.” But all the books I read, the hard ones to work through and the easy ones to devour, were doing me good, lots of good. And bringing me pleasure, lots of pleasure.

I didn't need earth-moving writing to become hooked on a book. I just needed a good story, intriguing characters, interesting background. Sure, I loved the profoundly moving literature of Paul Auster and Muriel Barbery and Chris Cleave, but satisfaction came in simpler packages as well. Like the
Sunday Philosophy Club
, the first in the Isabel Dalhousie series written by Alexander McCall Smith. I fell in love with Isabel Dalhousie, the main character in McCall Smith's series, and my fascination with her was enough to keep me in my chair, reading up on her latest adventures in modern-day Edinburgh.

Isabel is extremely thoughtful and kind, yet capable of snarls of impatience or jealousy. She is interested in art and music but even more curious about the personalities of artists, musicians, and anyone else she meets. She feels obligated to help others and to connect to others, yet she is no pushover. Quite willing to state her own opinions strongly, she is also open-minded enough to change her views when presented with strong arguments. She is smart and funny, and, despite her very serious nature when it comes to questions of moral philosophy, she never takes herself too seriously. Isabel is not necessarily a very real or deeply probed character—nor are any of the characters in Smith's books—but she is a comforting one and an appealing one, a brainy do-gooder, an optimistic and compassionate heroine.

I'd also been captivated by Isabel's lifestyle. I'd happily take on her full-time housekeeper; her comfy town house filled with books and art; her lush garden complete with a fox and overgrown rhododendrons; her job editing a journal devoted to the philosophy of applied ethics (i.e., whether and how to be a good person); and her money. She has scads of it, plenty to live very comfortably and yet not so much that the money becomes a burden.

I read McCall Smith's sixth installment,
The Lost Art of Gratitude
, on the first day of October. Mixed in with a plot about financial fraud, plagiarism, and the changing relationship with the father of her child, Isabel pontificates on the nature of gratitude, as when she recognized that birthplace “determined what we were . . . a culture, a language, a set of genes determining complexion, height, susceptibility to disease,” and that we ought to feel grateful for what our chance of birthplace brought to us. I agreed with her ruminations that from those who had been given much in terms of health and wealth and security, much might be expected.

Such thoughts were not original coming from Isabel, nor were they when first attributed to Jesus in Luke's Gospel or later reformulated by JFK. But certain ideas bear repeating, and McCall Smith is the master of refashioning tried and true maxims through the mouths of his pleasing and attractive characters, thereby reinforcing the endurance and vitality of old saws. I finished the book feeling well satisfied, morally chastened, and ready for more vigorous fare.

My month proceeded as had previous ones: more sobering works balanced with lighter-hearted volumes, mysteries tempered by coming-of-age novels, reflections on middle age or end of life harmonizing with literature for younger readers, gothic and noir countering memoir and exposition. I read short stories and longer novels, personal narratives and science fiction. I found pleasure in all of it.

I basked in the final words of the prologue in Thrity Umrigar's
Bombay Time
and turned the page eagerly to fill myself up with more: “A day, a day. A silver urn of promise and hope. Another chance. At reinvention, at resurrection, at reincarnation. A day. The least and most of our lives.” My skin came up in goose bumps, my senses tensed and ready, in reading J. A. Baker's limpid impressions of nature in
The Peregrine
: “As her wings swept up and back, she glided faster. And then faster, with her whole body flattened and compressed. Bending over in a splendid arc, she plunged to earth. . . . I saw fields flash up behind her; then she was gone beyond elms and hedges and farm buildings. And I was left with nothing but the wind blowing, the sun hidden, my neck and wrists cold and stiff, my eyes raw, and the glory gone.”

My hope was raised to warming heights through the words of a main character in Sarah Hall's
How to Paint a Dead Man
, a heart-wrenching and life-affirming conclusion from a character who, for too long, had only contemplated death: “The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences—your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are.”

I had spent a year mixing up the bowl of my life's soup, making a meal, seeking a cure, and finding myself. And accompanying my meal was a steady supply of books. After all, one of the simplest pleasures I know is to sit and eat with a book beside me, devouring words as I devour food. For at least one meal a week, I allow my kids to bring a book to the table and read while we eat. A shared meal, a shared pleasure.

The first home that Jack and I officially shared was a two-room fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side. Just a few months after we moved in, I needed major knee surgery (the five-story walk-up was only partly to blame). After the surgery I was bedridden for almost three weeks, and hooked up to a knee machine that kept my left leg in constant motion. I couldn't leave the apartment, and because of the painkillers I was taking I had no appetite for food and was forbidden to drink. I couldn't fool around with Jack because that damn knee machine kept getting in the way. But I could read. For days and days at a time, all I did all day long was read. I discovered Jim Harrison, reading
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
; I read John Cheever and Leo Tolstoy and Barbara Kingsolver, and steeped in the stomach-dropping thrillers of Elizabeth George and the gentler mysteries of Antonia Fraser. I pawed my way through
The Quincunx
by Charles Palliser, a gift from Anne-Marie.

About one week into the recovery my leg swelled up to the size of a tree trunk (redwood), and the doctor told me to get myself down to the emergency room “now!”—i.e., immediately. Jack was out of town on business, and there was no way I could make it down five flights of stairs myself. I called Anne-Marie, who lived just four blocks away, and asked her to come get me, and to take me to the hospital.

“I'll be right there,” she promised.

“Oh, and Anne-Marie, one more thing?”

“Yes, yes, anything.”

“Could you just stop by the Corner Bookstore? They're holding David Leavitt's story collection
A
Place I've Never Been
for me.” I was lucky enough to live half a block from one of the best small bookstores in New York City, and its booksellers had supplied me during the past days with a steady stream of reading material.

“Nina, we have to get to the hospital! You could have a blood clot—this is serious.”

“Yes, but I need something to read while I'm in there.”

So Anne-Marie picked the book up for me and took me by cab down to NYU Hospital, and everything was fine. My leg shrank back down, the book was read, and I was happy.

When two more weeks passed and it was time for me to go back to work, I was not so happy. It wasn't that I didn't like my job. I worked then for the Natural Resources Defense Council, where I worked on sewage issues and where I was dubbed “the sludge queen”—what's not to love about a job like that? But I realized that now that I was going back to work, my days of uninterrupted hours of reading were coming to an end. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I'd have a long commute by bus (no way could I make it down the subway stairs on crutches) and could read on my way to and from work.

Now in my forties, I had resubmerged myself in a daily routine of hours spent reading. But I had added a new practice to the routine. I wrote about what I read, and I talked about books with anyone who wanted to talk with me. In sharing ideas and thoughts about what I was reading, I found a fundamental new satisfaction in books: talking about them.

Years earlier, in 1989, the
New Republic
published a commentary written by author and critic Irving Howe. Howe lamented the wide gap between literary critics and the reading public, whom he called “the common reader.” He wrote that literary critics just don't care what “the common reader” is up to.

I wrote a letter in response to Howe's piece in which I stated that as a common reader myself, I didn't care much about what the literary critics were up to. Neither they nor their critiques had anything to do with the books I loved to read. When and if I did talk about books, it was not to discuss trends in narrative style or the latest critiques of text. Instead, “it's gossipy chatter akin to ‘what's happening with the neighbors?' We love our books and we love the very real people who populate them.”

In my letter I referenced an old movie by Maurice Pialat,
Loulou
, starring a young Gérard Depardieu in the title role. Loulou is a handsome young motorcycle-riding thug for whom a beautiful woman leaves her older, well-educated lover. As she hops on the back of the bike to ride away with Loulou, the older man calls out, “But you can't even talk about books with him!” She replies with disdain, “I read books, I don't have to talk about them.”

To my surprise, the
New Republic
published my letter. To my even greater surprise, I met Irving Howe the following fall, at the offices of my physical therapist. I was there doing rehab for the knee, and he was an old man trying to keep his limbs and joints in working order. I introduced myself.

“Do I know you?” he asked, his eyes pinched over his glasses.

“I wrote the letter about being a common reader, in the
New Republic
.”

He made a noise deep in his throat. “I guess we won't talk about books, then. I just hope you always keep reading them.”

With that he turned away, back to his exercise bike. I never saw him again.

I was right about loving my books, but I had been wrong about not needing to talk about them. I was not like that young woman in
Loulou.
I do need to talk about books. Because talking about books allows me to talk about anything with anyone. With family, friends, and even with strangers who contacted me through my Web site (and became friends), when we discuss what we are reading, what we are really discussing is our own lives, our take on everything from sorrow to fidelity to responsibility, from money to religion, from worrying to inebriation, from sex to laundry, and back again. No topic is taboo, as long as we can tie it in to a book we've read, and all responses are allowed, couched in terms of characters and their situations.

On the last day of my year of reading I read Pete Dexter's
Spooner
.
Spooner
tells the story of two men, Calmer and Spooner, bound together by the love of a very difficult and bitter woman. Calmer is reserved, patient, and hardworking. His stepson Spooner is restless, reckless, and openhearted. Calmer leads Spooner to understand that every person is just one “part of the story,” and by understanding the part Spooner plays, he can understand everything important, including how to work, how to teach, and how to love. When Spooner finds himself in the unlikely role of novelist, it is Calmer's example he follows: “There were two things Spooner absolutely knew about writing, and the first one was that you can't get away with pretending to care. The other one, if you're interested, is that nobody wants to hear what you dreamed about last night.”

Very funny and engaging and moving. I read
Spooner
with pleasure. But I also found a mandate in that final book. I understood that I was “in the world . . . as part of the story” of everyone around me. My book-a-day project affected not only my life but those of everyone with whom I shared my reading. I spread the gratification of reading through discussing books, much as authors create bliss by writing them. What a gift, to share the joy and the comfort and the wisdom! Everything I shared, I found first through the simple act of sitting down in my purple chair and reading a book.