Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  Although raised by an outspoken mother in Cleveland, I had tried to learn some coastal manners and didn't ask if he was bound to his wife only by estate and community property issues. I looked at this white-haired man with the thinness combed carefully over his patchy spot, his pencil-thin white mustache quivering, and didn't say, “You haven't changed, either.”

  “Either?” he asked.

  So I thought I didn't say it, but actually, I did. I was be-mused.

  He measured me with care. “You've matured, Herb. You still almost have a spring in your step. Maybe your girlfriends from college might recognize you, if you had one.”

  “Thanks.” And I really didn't say, Sorry about your osteoporosis and the dowager hump and that hair that leaves the pink of your scalp shining so bright a person can read by it… And I actually did manage not to say those things.

  We cannot be indicted for fraud, nor convicted of a public offense, nor sentenced to anything but sleepless dreaming for lying to ourselves. The complications of love and marriage, child rearing and adventuring, companionship and lust, impulse and loyalty make for extenuating circumstances. The force that throbs through us can be tamed, subdued, closed off. It cannot be denied until the light finally goes out.

  I may not really care for Frank, Francis Xavier. But I respect his brave, maybe desperate clinging to a vision. How could I not be sympathetic with another aging man suddenly struck by romance, the memory of romance, the hope of one more love, the great one? How could I not?

  I managed somehow. And yet, within the tickle of ridicule—I'm not tangled in his overheated underwear—I know that we are companions on this road. We yearn toward eternity with “the love of my life”; we refuse to admit that this road to eternity eventually comes to a full stop. There was a gleam in the eyes of Francis Xavier, sudden tension in his face, the animal sensing springtime again, one more mating season, blood speeding and that unusual glow. I like gleam. I value glow. I admire them. I'd better have no more scorn for Francis Xavier than I have for myself.

  I, too, would prefer to defy mortality and the inevitable. I, too, see myself as I once was, despite the evidence of the mirror and, on occasion, the tendons behind my left knee.

  Sexual Perversity in Cleveland

  The winds of sixties sexual freedom, sung, danced, bongo'd, and guitar'd about, seem to have left eddies of fifties marital togetherness in idyllic corners of the universe, such as my hometown, Cleveland, the Paris of Northeastern Ohio. My childhood friend Harold, lucky enough to marry his high school sweetie and remain in Cleveland as a college teacher, came to visit San Francisco, courtesy of an academic convention.

  The subject under review at our dinner was intended to be nostalgia about a shared past, but instead it turned out to be his present exciting erotic adventure. He had met a woman! A fellow teacher at the convention! Incendiary eyes met, and it was clear they both wanted the same thing!

  Since they were staying at the Hilton, their affair required no travel other than a short, breathless elevator ride. “How was it?” I asked.

  “Oh, man.”

  This was powerful stuff, this was real, it was no one-night stand—they could spend three nights together at the Hilton Hotel in the glamorous cool gray city of love. “We could have!” he cried, shreds of California summer squash flying from his mouth.

  “Could have what?” The sweat of desire and summer squash with olive oil on the upper lip, plus the gleam of passion over his entire face, brightened our meal. His paper on “The Importance of Period Furniture in Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton” had generated probing questions from many, and meaningful eye contact with one.

  But something here confused me. “You said could have?”

  My old friend was boiling with joy. He couldn't wait to get home to Beatrice, his wife. “That colleague from Denver was so… we didn't do anything.”

  “What?”

  “Well, if we did, I'd have to tell Beatrice.”

  ? ? ? ? stated my entire upper body.

  “We tell each other everything,” he explained.

  I was bewildered. “So since you tell each other everything, you're going to tell Bea how you had this fantastic passion for the delicious woman from Denver, and she did too, and you could have, but you didn't? You'll map out the whole scene?”

  “Oh, boy. The seminar, the cash bar off the lounge area… we sat in a corner, and her knees, I could feel the heat —”

  Explanation relieved neither my confusion nor my sympathy for Beatrice, a woman I've always admired. She had written most of the dissertation Harold needed for his graduate degree. “How do you think she'll feel,” I asked, “after you map out the Hilton, the eye contact, the hot knees, what you both wanted, your knees touching in the dark, leading up to nothing?”

  “Oh, Herb, she'll be so proud of me.”

  “Togetherness,” a slogan of The Saturday Evening Post in the fifties, still reigns in secret gardens of America. It was an ideal of Norman Rockwell–illustrated family unity, aiming toward a loyal subscriber base, although eventually the magazine went out of business anyway. This was also the time in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and Buffalo when driving a foreign automobile could earn a drastic keying in patriotic parking lots. Although Alan Freed, a Cleveland radio disc jockey, had brought raunchy “race music” out of a segregated scene into what became the mainstream, pronounced like one word, “rocknroll,” much of my blessed hometown may cling to older verities.

  I am a stubborn and willful eldest son of an eldest son. I glared at Harold. “You could have, but you didn't, and now you'll tell Bea all about it and you expect her to be happy?”

  He was still flushed and excited. He loved San Francisco. “Yes! Very very proud! I phoned her and told her I have a surprise for her and she said it better be good because why didn't I use a phone card for a long distance call?”

  Having prepared his confession, anticipated his wife's reward, Harold calmed down. “You know, Herb, we have zucchini just as good in our city of Cleveland, but we cook it in butter, not this Italian olive oil they seem to like around here.”

  “Harold! This is California summer squash,” I said.

  The Eternal Rekindling

  A nationwide expedition in search of lost, past, and therefore eternal beloveds—rescuing his glamorous history, redeeming the debris of romantic stabs in the dark—was just the ticket for Victor, campus heartbreaker emeritus. His own lyrical temperament was an underappreciated national treasure. He felt deep sympathy for himself. He bade a fond un-regretful farewell to his family, roared away from home in the vintage Corvette bought for this purpose, headed cross-country to bask in the aura of every departed girlfriend he could find. Thanks to his research skills, he found many. His wife, one of his former students, understood that this was a thing he really, really, really needed to do; he was a champion explainer, she was a champion explainee. Perhaps she also could do with a rest.

  It could be recorded as the Super Geriatric Sex Tour Epic. He believed he was dying (isn't everybody?), and it was incumbent on Victor, champion romantic, to check in once more. Did Miss Poughkeepsie treasure the memory of him as he did of her, at least until he moved right along on the Interstate to Miss Cincinnati? Who was also unique in her own twangy Appalachian way?

  Some of those now grown-up women shrugged, assented, spent a nostalgic hour or two between the clean sheets of his hotel rooms. Fulfillment brought irritation, impatience in some cases, but the ensemble of the experience, the gestalt, was satisfactory because he also shared warmhearted dinners with amused former lovers who touched his hand and offered a hug before sending him on his way. (“Sorry, Victor, but thanks for asking.”) Best of all, of course, were the women he couldn't find because they had disappeared or managed to hide from him. They were the really perfect ones.

  A poetic swain again, Victor sat with me in San Francisco, recounting, eyes swarming with emotion. I wondered if it helped him to tell all while my wife sat with her hands folde
d in her lap, smiling indulgently. Occasionally his glance darted toward her, waiting for her to go to the kitchen or the bedside of one of our children, so that, man to man, he could specify certain physical details from this voyage of reexploration.

  Then he returned home. The dream of perfect love was quelled, surely to rise again, and perhaps it might have. The Corvette held up nicely, except for a bit of transmission trouble in Iowa City.

  During his last years, Victor discovered gardening. Fresh air and stoop labor removed him from himself while he worked in muddy boots, cotton gloves, aching back. There were tomatoes until the first frost. Mulch. Smells of leaves returning to the elements of earth, not irksome like old loves. The smells were strong, sharp, rich, penetrating his diminished olfactory talents. His diminished sense of smell, he confessed, was also irksome. Mulch, rotting leaves, tomato vines with the faint acidity of the fruit were reassuring because loss of the sense of smell was a sign of Alzheimer's, which he dreaded. He could still smell mulch, rotting leaves, fallen bird-scarred tomatoes. Nature, the agrarian life, was another way of tuning in the universe, a tradition like sex with students. “Otherwise,” he wrote, “all I'd have is the smell of my own shit, and that isn't good enough.” He told me not to worry if he repeated himself; it was only for emphasis.

  His daughter, Gwen, silent, withdrawn, tattooed, dressing in Goth black, departed the family, but at least she didn't commit suicide, not yet. Anorexia… well, maybe her pregnancy would cure that. Victor was hanging tough.

  He kept in touch with me as a treasured witness of his history and his cross-country quest. I could almost smell the frosted tomato vines when he telephoned late one night: “Sometimes I think it was all an imaginary solution to a problem that didn't exist, what do you think?

  “Don't get mellow on me, Victor.”

  But the real point of the call was to let me know that despite his late-life commitment to Claudia and the garden, both his acuity and his sense of humor, or irony, as he preferred to call it, were still present and accounted for. “I'm keeping dementia at bay, pal, and may you do the same.”

  “Thanks for the good wishes.”

  He asked if he reminded me of that knight who went in search of the Holy Grail. “What's his name, Herb?”

  “I'll look it up.”

  “Galahad, man. Parsifal in that opera by what's-his-face. Ha-ha, I remember, you don't.”

  “I'll start a garden tomorrow, Victor. Do you know what time it is in San Francisco?”

  “Oh, sorry, I woke you up? But this was important.”

  Claudia's soft bosom was a constant. After a morning of writing, an afternoon of gardening, an evening of quarreling with the remaining daughter, he helped Claudia make a nice fire in the fireplace before they tucked in. Starlight, leaves falling, ripening night, the telephone ringer turned off.

  “And how are you?” he asked. “Got anything going for yourself?”

  We sleep and sleep. We sleep through childhood, youth, our adult lives. We sleep after lovemaking. We sleep in depression, or if we can't, we seek to sleep. We sleep fitfully in old age. For most of us, the largest single part of the day is spent in sleep. We don't usually interrupt sleep to eat or clean the house or work on taxes; if we do, we wish we hadn't. We hope to restore the body and spirit in sleep. Dreams are essential. We sleep to dream.

  Dreams also nourish or infect the part of our lives that's not sleep. Victor and Francis Xavier needed their dreams, just as all of us need our dreams carried over as reward or punishment from sleep. Love is a most persistent dream. Sometimes it turns toward nightmare.

  Francis Xavier liked to quote one of Yeats's late poems: “When the mouth dies, what is there?” In a youthful male, a look across the room tends to make the man into a striding-across machine, uttering some variation on the mating bray: “So, do you come here often?” “Don't I know you from someplace?” The aging male can be a machine for turning the look across the room into redemption of an entire existence.

  Francis Xavier remembered the woman across the gallery from their senior prom. The heart is full of longing; the heart is full of regret; why did he marry someone else? Francis Xavier's congested heart now sought a period of delusion. My friend Ed Pols (real name) loved, trusted, treasured, lived in solidarity with Eileen, his wife. Harold (not his real name) leaned precariously in the world, leaned against his wife, needing maternal care. After much practice over the years, he didn't really yearn for anything else, but thought he should.

  Aging is perplexing to most of those who get there. We recall our youth, yesterday it was, and wonder, How did I get here? Wasn't I supposed to conquer inevitability? You mean the laws of nature apply to me, too?

  While evolving toward brotherly feeling for Francis Xavier, even toward Victor and his enraged quest for departed love in all four directions and perhaps the fifth dimension, too, Harold, the romantic swain from Cleveland, presents a challenge. I feel sympathy for his wife, although she must have chosen what she has—this husband, this spouse, this Harold. Generosity toward Harold glows fitfully. I breathe on the embers and they go out. Alas, help me, please, saintliness has fallen from my soul.

  The ungainly old romantics like Victor, Francis Xavier, even Harold, surely are owed my forgiveness because I'm also laughable. Love goes where it wants; we're helpless as it carries us along. We must want to be helpless, haunted by true or false events of love. This shouldn't be a surprise. Two people are involved, after all—two who remain mysteries to each other while they cleave together as if they are one. But if the mouth dies, what is there? Why turn to stone before returning to dust?

  Victor, Francis Xavier, and Harold aspired toward perfect love, just short of the perfect and eternal love found by the Norwegian captain and his wife in Jacmel, Haiti. Not immune to their condition, it's an arrogance to suggest forgiveness of my old friends’ delusions and excesses. I must forgive them, O Aphrodite, for I, too, am a sinner.

  Almost everyone remembers glimpsing his or her perfect completion, the dream lover, the soul mate, at a traffic light or sitting in a train speeding in the opposite direction or passing in a crowd when eyes meet for an instant. One sleepless night, jet-lagged in a Manhattan August, a stifling heat wave August, I fled from the Hotel Chelsea, wanting better turmoil than the one I was suffering in a strange bed. Calling for air-conditioning repair would not have helped. It was at that three A.M. which has been celebrated as the soul's darkest hour and the loneliest, with or without the buzz of ventilation. I found an all-night diner on West Twenty-third Street and thought: Scrambled eggs and coffee, that's the ticket, what the hell, let's pretend it's breakfast time.

  Among nightshift workers, speed freaks, pimps, hookers of many sexes and permutations—and ordinary distressed citizens like me—I felt more at home, nourished by company even before my eggs arrived. There was a pair of cops at the counter, shedding powdered sugar and flecks of glaze from their police-procedural donuts. Fried grease is essential to shape up the belly and belt from which equipment hangs. They dunked—maybe that's also the rule. Their rumps flowed over the stools. They were talking to each other in low voices. Although my hearing was still sharp—that's how long ago it was—I couldn't make out what they were saying, but gave myself a paranoia quiz: No, they weren't talking about me or my marriage. A whine of fluorescence overhead; the jukebox stood illuminated, waiting, but silent; blasts of cold air. I unfolded the early edition of The New York Times.

  Destiny then pulled one of its sly tricks on a night wanderer who had set out only in search of air-conditioning, protein, caffeine, and distraction from le cafard, the cockroach blues. A young woman was sitting in a stained mahogany-colored vinyl booth a few stained mahogany-colored vinyl booths ahead of my own. She was writing in a spiral notebook; her hair was tawny and thick; her mug of coffee stood unattended, probably cold. She didn't look up. I also carried a notebook in my pocket, pulled it out, pushed the newspaper aside. I poised my pen over a blank page. The page remained blank
. I had nothing to write. I thought of sketching her. Her lips were pressed together in concentration and her own ballpoint moved swiftly. I neither wrote nor sketched.

  Finally I wrote: Not yet four o'clock. Won't be dawn for an hour or so. There's a person…When I looked up, she was standing, dropping money on the table, and heading out into the glowing, steaming, middle-of-the night August Manhattan street.

  In our culture, especially with a couple of nourished NYPD cops nearby, it would have been inadvisable for me to leap up, follow her, and inquire if she happened to know the interesting French word cafard. Which is probably why, many years later, I'm still following her.

  Tawny hair, thick and careless at this hour, the smudged eyes of a night person, an insomniac or an inspired poet with erroneous skin, sallow, her pen speeding over the pages of a spiral notebook… Not much to go on, but I've gone over it for thirty-five years now. My wife and I had just parted in San Francisco, I was thinking about how to pick up the pieces at midlife, I never again saw the young woman with the tawny, thick, careless hair. Maybe she was a crazy, maybe she was merely a normal occasional insomniac, maybe she had also just parted from a husband or a lover, maybe she had no fear of late-night Manhattan streets, maybe she and I would have loved each other forever.

  Well, no, that was unlikely. But we never quarreled, did we? Right there, that's enough evidence for a perfect, unfailing, undying love.

  I offer this incident in my disfavor to prove that I'm as foolish about love in my way as Victor, Francis Xavier, and Harold in theirs. Since I've changed their names to conceal their shame; perhaps I should change mine, too. But what's the use? The dream of perfect love is a blessed affliction. It was for them; it is for me; and it can make us as foolish in age as we were in youth. It also offers proof that we're still alive and the blood stirring. It stirs still, especially during certain sleepless nights when there is no body by our side, or the body that is there is ninety-eight point six degrees cold.