by Herbert Gold
Then I was a bachelor again, célibataire, as the French put it in a word that seems overly finicky to an Americann ear. It doesn't mean celibate.
Divorced and grieving, a gray-flecked swinging single, I went out to sow my tame oats. At a party, the last time I saw “the love of my life“—that banal phrase is still alive—she smiled and winked approvingly across the room because she saw me with a pretty person. The man she planned to marry ambled up, grinning, abashed: “Herb, you raised a good wife.”
I shrugged in lieu of saying thank you. He shrugged, meaning nothing but friendliness, hoping I wouldn't think he was being sarcastic. We were both holding glasses. I left him to chat with the pretty person while I went to make a birthday lunch date with my former wife. We settled on one of the quiet neighborhood cafés, which serve organic foods for San Franciscans planning to live forever. Her birthday gift was nicely wrapped at my door, waiting to be delivered, not that it would be forgotten. But I never gave it to her because she and the man she was planning to marry both died in a helicopter crash a few days later. I spent a morning telephoning our children away at colleges, one by one—“It's Dad, please sit down”—and then called her mother and father, and then my other children, listening to the cries, the choking, the screams.
It's been said that a person always remembers the last time he saw a beloved. That doesn't cover the matter here. Each time I saw her seemed like the first time.
At the funeral service after Melissa was killed, our son Ethan had arranged a playing of the Bob Dylan song which asks for “one more cup of coffee before I go.” I can't hear that song without the terrible ache of loss, unrecoverable losses, here in the other valley below.
Every grief is unique. Life doesn't necessarily make us better; that's not life's business. Life gives what it gives, takes back what it takes back, and it's our business to sort things out for ourselves as best we can.
* * *
I tell my stories to my children, my daguerreotype memories of their grandparents, legends of the parents of grandparents, portraits all time-rubbed at the edges: Cleveland, once an industrial metropolis proud of its skilled labor and its ethnic enclaves, its daily newspapers in Hungarian and Polish; the Army during my war, trying to pass on memories of the friends now disappeared… I try to plant my own Jewish history in my half-Jewish children because no history should disappear. The ancestors I never knew are still a part of our lives.
In the telling of my stories, these lives take shapes that are no doubt distorted on behalf of significance, laughter, or a clarity untrue to history. (There may not really have been a textbook for Polish immigrants to Cleveland with the title Polish Up Your English. I probably had dinner with my parents in at least one restaurant without a gypsy violinist.)
Ari accuses me of saying he asked at age twelve what the world was like before herpes and AIDS. (“There were giants in those days, my son.”) My daughters are amazed that I transported myself through America by thumb and even hitchhiked in France with my first wife. Ethan listens patiently as I repeat the tale of my near court-martial for dropping my rifle and swinging on a fellow soldier during basic training. (He stepped on my heels, muttering, “Jew, Jew, Jew,” as we marched in morning formation across the red sands of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.)
The captain gave me a choice of a court-martial or a public boxing match in the Company day room. An improvised ring was set up with ropes tied to chairs. We strapped on 16-ounce gloves and flailed at each other until we could no longer move. I resmell after all these years the stink of my own sweat and that of my adversary. It was all part of the war against Nazism, now as real and as unreal as Brownie cameras and the appetite for frozen Milky Way candy bars.
So what was the world like before herpes and AIDS? And you hitchhiked in France with Edith, whom they met in her later life, when she was a five-star traveler, not a hair out of place, fanatic about her expensive pumps? We can't step in the same river twice, but we can recall snapshots of the long-departed flow and different footwear.
Along with the shared implications of their complicated family stand the unsharable moments remembered only by their father—firelight on the half-turned face of their mother, the sounds of Bob Dylan songs before these children were conceived, how a father's arm was warmed when their mother put her hand on it, how his chest felt when she laid her arm over it as lovers subsided into sleep. Such matters between lovers should not be lost.
And then, at the end of love, also fixed in memory, comes the vision of a woman strolling naked out of the bathroom and saying, “Okay, you want me, take me now so I can get a decent night's rest.” She took my arm like a happy lover and then she didn't.
Often the no longer married man's bed is empty when he wishes it weren't. Sometimes there's a sag in the spirit, a gloom in the afternoon, an emptiness in the day, a three A.M. awakening to futile thoughts of futility. The legs start from sleep as if to run from life and the eyes stare into the dark. Life has gone on so long, but why, to what end or good?
The problem might be low blood pressure, a glucose dip. But that's not the problem. Even loved children can't be expected to touch the body and soul with all that body and soul crave. Once a well-wisher, a close friend, suggested a solution to this late-life loneliness. “Give up about love, what we used to think was love. Find a companion, that's enough.”
The blood rushed to my head. I was infuriated. “That would be death. Living with someone because it's a warm body, someone to sit in front of the television with—no, thanks. No!”
We finished our meal in separate realms of silence. An exchange of services may be enough for some. There are those men and women who live with companions in marital irritation, which is worse than loneliness; or dwell with the warm body out of habit and a sense of duty; or endure in grief and conflict because they see no exit. I know a longtime couple who bicker over which one of them is more loved by their dog. (“She's getting fat! You spoil her! No wonder she jumps into your lap! You give her cookies when I'm not looking!” “They're called biscuits. You sneak them to her, too.”)
I'll take insomnia over boredom or desolation. If alone and needing to be driven to the emergency room, I'll call a cab or 911. Or if I cannot, I won't.
Stubbornly, I'm still ready to fall in love again tomorrow morning at dawn as I walk down Russian Hill to breakfast. The bathroom mirror informs me that I am no longer twenty-seven years old and the girl of my dreams is either still asleep or staring at the ceiling, wondering which unknown man's magic will suddenly wake her from her own dreams.
It seems that I extend my life backward in memory, forward in expectation. Yet I'm aware of the facts. Arise, dawn dreamer, come out to the café for coffee and the lover waiting there for you.
Dying, Does It Mean Anything? Does It Just Happen? Why Not Just Relax and Enjoy It?
My first childhood friend to die a natural death, not an unnatural war death, was a scientist with a brilliant career and a better one to come if he lived past the age of forty. He didn't. It's odd to describe Hodgkin's disease as natural, but so it is, like all diseases, part of our error-prone organic systems.
When I visited him late in this procedure of dying, propped up against pillows in bed, he remarked with a smile, “You know, another few years and they'll have a remedy, probably a cure.”
I didn't say “So hang on,” because I knew he couldn't anymore, not any longer. I told my young daughters what was happening, I wanted them to say good-bye. Judy, soon returning to her mother's custody, stared. He was so thin and wasted that he hardly dented the pillows. She said, “I'm going to write to you.”
He grinned. He understood what she meant: You're a polite person, so you have to answer my letters. I'll keep you alive by keeping you obliged, because you've known me all your life and you must keep writing to me… She knew the rules for courtesy.
Then, while my daughters were having milk and cookies with his wife, out of their hearing, he said good-bye to me, but then asked,
“What do you do when you know the end is near?”
I didn't know. What came out of my face was: “Hey, just relax and enjoy it.”
He laughed. I laughed. The end came a few days later.
I still don't know what to do if the end is near. Pretending it's not is an illogical option. Postponing it if possible is a temporary option. Now, more than forty years later, the best I can think of doing is still just to enjoy it.
I've learned to watch myself fall asleep. The smoky wisps of memory condense into images; stories from the past are played in revival; I'm not distracted by a daytime soundtrack of tinnitis. I float, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes anxiously, into new narratives, accumulating from elements of the old ones. And then I'm gone, the dream happening without me.
When the wisps form into nightmare, my leg jerks, I jump awake. Who! What! Where am I! Those are not questions; they are cries into the dark. When the story of my past or future is full of dread, I get up and walk in the nocturnal streets of whatever town I'm in, San Francisco, New York, Cleveland, Paris, Port-au-Prince. In Dakar, I was arrested as a spy, saboteur, or bank robber, probably all three, merely for standing outside a bank to admire its architecture, which combined international glass and cement with elaborate twists and knobs modeled on the patriotic Senegalese tree, the baobab. The police wanted to know why I performed this act of standing in the middle of the night. My explanation, that it was the Christmas season and my former wife and children were elsewhere and I was jet-lagged, struck them as illogical. I rethought the matter. I then emitted a eulogy of the delightful hospitality of the Senegalese people, concluding with the awe I felt before the stirring, glorious, nut-bearing baobab. I spoke French more rapidly than is my wont; I don't speak Wolof. Eloquence, plus a small pourboire, softened their hearts, and I returned to my hotel to sleep the sleep of the justly absolved.
In the world of night, trees stand like sentinels to guard our unrest, even trees made of glass and molded concrete.
Once I watched male and female coco de mer palm trees bending to each other in the tropical breezes near a beach at the Indian Ocean in the Seychelles. Legend tells that they mate like teenagers when others sleep, but there could be no lovemaking for the coco de mer during that night—I was spying on them. In Port-au-Prince, the city groans, awake and throbbing in the dark, charcoal cooking fires burning, ghostly peasant women, Mesdames Saras, barefoot, silently striding down to the markets with baskets balanced on their heads. The streets are stony, hilly, distressed, and ominous at that hour; I don't go far.
If the insomnia is that of jet lag or regret, I do my best to turn the corner into pleasure, studying the enjoyment of melancholy, spying on the other night people, listening under windows, relishing the wildness that grows in the interstices of every city. At night, weeds and junk vegetation are usually gray, but sometimes, if headlights approach, nature's stubborn persistence flashes as green as under sunshine. Then the vehicle passes.
In dreams, I still jump over roofs to escape pursuers. I can fly and they can't. I still meet the beautiful and complicated woman I married and thought I knew, or the brooding one bent over a notebook in the diner on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, whom I never spoke to or saw again. I see my dead brother, my dead parents, my dead wife, and am comforted by their presence even if only when I'm asleep. When I'm asleep, I'm still awake. The inevitable erotic dreams remind me that life goes on. I'm happy that nightmares still frighten, as they used to when I cried out and my mother came running to the room. And then I turned them into stories, which I told my thrilled brother in his twin bed against the opposite wall.
In nightmares, relentless devils chase me; they can run faster, but they can't leap over roofs as I can, so when I see a roof, I run toward it and gain space between me and dire fate. I'm pretty clever that way. In erotic dreams, gracious women beckon, sometimes the wife I loved, sometimes the woman in the all-night diner on West Twenty-third Street, sometimes no one I can remember but will surely find again in another dream.
Tinnitis is high and shrill, a whine, inappropriate, like the sound of fluorescent tubes in a rustbelt factory. No one else hears that buzz, that whine, it's all mine, its up to me to fix it. What can I do? Get anxious, call the audiologist, try white noise machines, try hearing non-aids, or get used to it?
I decided: okay, get used to it.
Now, I'm used to it. There should be fat flies buzzing around my head, attracted by the humid smell of old dreams. I understand just how they would feel—hungry, leaping, colliding in air, eager to suck juice and copulate. Dr. Shirley Li, the nice audiologist, does her best, but only for my hearing.
It's about as long now since the end of World War II, “my” war, as the span of time from the end of the Spanish-American War to the summer of 1956 when I happened upon an eerie gathering of ancients in Saratoga Springs, New York, at what might have been the last convention of its veterans. The leafy street was crowded with a shocking collection of the lame, the blind, the withered, the wheelchaired, the blinking and lost. I thought I had entered a madness, I thought this vision of the future was some sort of unholy punishment. An August wind barely stirred the branches overhead. A pennant hung loose: REMEMBER THE MAINE.
This vivid booty from the past stations me in the present time of my life. I still can taste the cold draft beer I drank in a sidestreet trucker's tavern, asking myself if I would ever be one of the veterans I had just seen, lolling in a wheelchair pushed by a woman in a white nylon uniform.
Old is not a process; it's a state of being. The process I'm in is aging, a different matter. I'm heading someplace not yet defined, growing not old but into further aging. When aging stops, then I'll be old. I'll do my best for it not to stop until my oldness is merely synonymous with death. When a French or Haitian friend greets me with the traditional “Mon vieux!” I grin, and he grins because this familiar “My old!” means “my friend-who-is-still-and-always-in-my-heart.” (The French aren't generally given to explicit open expressions of sentiment. “Mon vieux” is often administered with a mitigating irony, shoulders and mouth twitching.)
A longtime pal, a fellow striver whose work I admired, a man with whom I had shared many meals, whose wife I liked, whose divorce gave me sorrow, moved to Arizona for reasons that seemed good to him (sun, air, peace and quiet in which to breathe the air, bask in the sunlight, calm his striving spirit). We visited each other, exchanged letters, spoke on the phone.
One day I received a short note from him, stating curtly, “Please do not contact me again until one year from the above date.”
I immediately wrote to him: “Have I offended you in some way?” He wrote back with one word: “No.” I persisted: “Then what's going on?”
He replied with a few more words. “You may communicate with me again on the date previously indicated.”
And that was the last I heard from him. If there was anger, I never discovered its cause. He died before “the date previously indicated.” What grief, what deterioration, what stubborn shutting of doors?
Another friend treated his agonizing stomach cancer as a comic occasion. When he decided to put himself out of his pain, making sure he had enough pills and vodka, he said good-bye to his wife as usual when she went off to her job, then retreated to their backyard so that he would not make a mess in the house. He left a note by his body in the garden. “Warning: Anyone who resuscitates me, I will sue. If you're just a poor shlub, I'll take you to Small Claims Court.”
The novelist Mordecai Richler, dealing with kidney cancer, commented in his familiar comic style: “When my children visit, I don't see offspring, I see potential organ donors.”
The journalist Paul Jacobs, in the grip of lung cancer, which he believed he contracted from breathing the particles during his investigation of uranium tailings in Nevada, visited dying soldiers who had worked on atomic testing for the Army. Before he died, he finished a documentary film on the subject. He was delighted when a terminal patient croaked at him
from his bed: “Mr. Jacobs, what are you doing here? You look worse than I do.”
Paul thought that made great footage. He was happy in his perishing to be able to argue his points. I still keep his photograph in my study and think: Way to go, Paul.
In the late life memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, he writes that old age is a shipwreck. De Gaulle felt defeated and abandoned. But his old age was more like a leaky sailboat thrashing in the storm before it finally went down.
Loss needs to be acknowledged. Growing old is something I have suspicions about. It's a by-product of other losses. Death is something I can only dimly imagine, fear, expect. I admire its absoluteness. I don't know anyone out there, perhaps one with a white beard and kind eyes, who can provide me with further explanations. I have to make my own way with piecemeal notions about the mysterious destination.
Last words are supposed to be especially important as a clue to the meaning of it all. Henry James said something like “Now, at last, the distinguished thing”—sticking to the end with his Jamesian style of elegant moroseness. Beethoven is supposed to have said “More light! More light!” That's better, not so pretentious, and full of Beethovenesque imperative. William Saroyan commented that he knew all men are mortal, but didn't think it applied to him. “Now what?” he asked. That was proper and fine. But I most admire the last words of Alfred Jarry, author of King Ubu, who noticed his admirers gathered around him, hoping for a final revelation, although he could barely utter a sound. When someone bent an ear to his lips to catch his dying revelation, Jarry whispered: “Any-body got a toothpick?”
If I had Jarry's photo, I'd place it next to Paul Jacobs's. Death is the end, not like sleep. Sleep is crowded with dreams, activity. The analogy of sleep with death offers comfort I don't want. The comfort I have now is that the past will live because of what I've done, the children I have, their children, and the time I put my wife's initials in wet sidewalk cement. Just because I'm no longer walking, you won't dig up my heartfelt sidewalk inscription, will you?
