Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  But tonight was not about dying; it was, in fact, a resurrection. Within the warm, glowing green walls of the restaurant, among rows of round white tables arrayed along tomato-colored carpet, all of old New York seemed to have sprung to life to celebrate Joe’s outing. He could almost hear the applause of prewar patrons, rising and saluting George Balanchine as he strolled across the room with a ballerina on each arm. The orange spice of tea, the tang of white chocolate, the wheaty steam rising from breads and blintzes made Joe’s mouth water. Never mind that heavy renovations were occurring on either side of the restaurant, walls torn down, windows busted, towers raised (in New York, buildings, too, often became corpses overnight). This evening, this place, and all the people in it would live forever.

  * * *

  THE TROUBLE had started the morning of December 12, 1981, a Saturday. The previous evening, Joe had eaten dinner with his old friends Norman and Gloria Barasch. They lived in California now—Barasch had moved there to write for television—but they were visiting New York, and Barasch wanted to discuss Good as Gold with Joe. “I thought it was hysterically funny,” he says. “I thought it could work as a movie. So I told Joe I’d like to try to get an option—chop off the first and last part of the novel, and turn that juicy middle into a crazy farce. Joe said, ‘You can have the option for a dollar.’ I said, ‘Good!’ In truth, I thought it was a little high.” (Joe had been disappointed that Mike Nichols, who initially expressed interest in making a movie from the novel, had decided to pass on it.)

  Later, Joe remembered how impressed the Barasches were that Friday night by his apparent health and good spirits. He had spent the summer and much of the fall in Aspen, Colorado, and Santa Fe, New Mexico (having returned to New York only ten days earlier). He had been working happily on a new novel about King David’s estrangement from God. He was suntanned and lean, his hair a silver nimbus. A light snow fell after dinner. Joe felt chilled as he walked his friends back to their hotel, but this was not surprising. He was wearing only a trench coat with a light wool lining.

  Then, on Saturday, Joe ate breakfast alone at the Red Flame on West Forty-fourth Street, an old-style diner with plastic menus in the windows and long Formica-topped tables. He thought about the breakfasts Shirley used to fix him in the Apthorp. He missed her cooking. Then he relished not being chastised by his wife for never helping her with chores. Suddenly, he found he couldn’t swallow a forkful of hash brown potatoes he had brought to his mouth. He rolled the potatoes around on his tongue and finally spat them out. The rest of the meal—eggs, toast with butter, coffee—went down fine. He met Speed Vogel a few blocks away. Speed had agreed to go with him to look at the furniture of a man who was giving up his apartment and leaving Manhattan. Joe was now subletting a place at 888 Eighth Avenue; he needed more tables and chairs (recently, he had wasted a morning, buying a lamp at Rosetta’s Lighting and Supplies over on West Forty-fifth Street—his first domestic shopping spree solo—bringing the lamp home, setting it up near his writing desk, fiddling with it, sitting down to stare at the pages he’d written, deciding the lighting didn’t suit him, fiddling some more, sitting down again, shuffling pages, getting back up, finally concluding that the lamp was just wrong, boxing it up, and taking it back to the store).

  The day was quite chilly. Joe wore a heavy sweater over a velour shirt. He didn’t like the furniture. He and Speed walked back to his apartment. Joe tugged the building’s outer door; it didn’t budge. Speed whisked it open. Inside the apartment, Joe could not pull his sweater off without Speed’s help. Static electricity? Perspiration?

  Speed baked a couple of sweet potatoes because Joe was hungry and Speed wanted to demonstrate how to use the toaster oven he had purchased for Joe: he knew his friend was helpless on his own, and he worried about the future (already, Joe had hired a once-a-week cleaning woman). Joe loved sweet potatoes. They reminded him of his mother. After a few bites, he could not swallow anything more.

  He went with Speed to jog around the indoor track at the Y. Warming up, stretching, he lay on his back, bent his legs, and tried to touch his chin to his knees. He could not come close. “It struck me then that something was wrong,” he recalled. He could ignore the signals no longer. “It was as though I had suffered a loss of communication between my wish and my capability to achieve it.”

  He ran a sluggish mile and a half on the track. Back at his locker, he struggled to remove his sweaty T-shirt.

  That night, he and Speed ate dinner with a mutual friend, Cheryl McCall, a writer for People magazine, at a small West Side restaurant called Simon’s. Joe enjoyed the fish he had ordered, but his martini tasted metallic. And then he began to have difficulty swallowing the vegetables. Speed’s brows furrowed. “[Joe was] the most prodigious eater in the world,” he said. “The very last thing to expect from him [was] trouble swallowing.” With his fork, Joe waved away his friend’s worry and kept his anxieties to himself. That night, alone in his apartment, he struggled once again while taking off his clothes, and he could barely hold the early edition of the Sunday Times.

  The phone woke him the following morning. A young woman he had hired to type his novel in progress told him she had completed the most recent section and could deliver it whenever he wanted. Her name was Tedda Fenichel. She was brisk, attentive, efficient. She could tell she had awakened Joe from a very deep sleep. At first, he was disoriented, thinking it was late Saturday night. When she told him it was Sunday, he wondered if it was evening. When finally he came to himself, he told Tedda he would check his schedule and get back to her. As usual, he had slept in his underpants. Clumsily, he pulled on a loose pair of trousers and a sweatshirt. In the kitchen, he sliced a grapefruit. Another queer taste—that same metallic edge. His arms felt leaden.

  He had agreed to meet the Barasches for brunch. When Norman phoned, Joe said he wasn’t feeling so hot. They should go ahead without him—he recommended the scrambled eggs with imported ham at the Russian Tea Room. Speed called to see how he was doing. He admitted he was worried enough to phone one of the Baders, Richard or Mortimer, twin brothers who shared a medical practice and served his family as personal physicians.

  Joe reached Morty by phone. He apologized for calling on a Sunday morning. When he described his symptoms—realizing, as he was talking, that he could not cross his right leg over his left—Bader muttered, “Guillain-Barré syndrome.”

  “Okay. Now what does it mean?” Joe asked.

  “Can you get over here? To my apartment?”

  Joe wasn’t sure. “Sure.”

  * * *

  FROM MID-DECEMBER 1981 to January 4, 1982, Joe stayed in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital. At various times and in varying degrees, his limbs were paralyzed, his muscles useless; he was unable to defecate and pee on his own, unable to swallow (“dysphagia,” nurses wrote in his daily reports). He was fed liquids through a nasogastric tube, medications through an intravenous tube attached to the back of his hand, and was cleared of phlegm and saliva through a third tube. Doctors debated cutting a hole in his throat and hooking him up to a respirator. They told Joe that Guillain-Barré syndrome caused an elevation in protein in spinal fluid. His body was manufacturing cells to destroy tissues. The malady is rare and mysterious, its origins unknown. Not a virus, its roots appear to be autoimmunological. “It’s like a short circuit in the nerves,” Speed Vogel took to telling folks. Frederick Karl informed Joe that the disease had been linked in the past to swine flu immunizations (such was the case in 1976). Respiratory failure and cardiovascular trouble were frequent results of the condition. It was sometimes fatal. Sometimes, people recovered.

  As Mario Puzo muttered, “When they name a disease after two guys, it’s got to be terrible.”

  As Joe lay in the ICU, wired to monitors, pale under the lights (despite his recent tan), his children and friends—among them, Joe Stein, Julius Green, and George Mandel—marveled at how calm he was. He asked someone to contact Tedda Fenichel and tell her to deliver
the manuscript of his King David novel to the hospital. He asked for a dozen number-two pencils. “I was not [really] aware I faced any [lasting perils] until the most serious had been left behind,” Joe admitted. Heartened by his fortitude, his friends joked that he was the immobile Soldier in White from Catch-22. “Did you hear what Joe said today?” they’d kid one another. “No, what’d he say?” “Nheh dehgrehda waddleta deh nahe nheh!”

  Privately, they feared he might be dying.

  One night, a nurse drew a curtain around his bed, shutting off his view. Joe heard a woman weeping nearby. Apologetically, the nurse whispered that the man in the bed next to him was about to expire. “That happens in here,” she said.

  * * *

  THE BEGINNING of the 1980s should have been a glorious time for Joe and his family. Good as Gold earned him a record advance and had become a national bestseller. His brother, retired from the mail room at MCA–Universal Pictures, and his sister, retired from Macy’s, lived comfortably in West Palm Beach, Florida (though Lee’s wife, Perle, had died of cancer). Joe’s children had graduated from college and appeared to be prospering. Erica was embarked upon a career in advertising, working with some of the best ad people in the city. She wrote copy for Doyle Dane Bernbach, and would soon handle multimillion dollar accounts from Seagram, Chanel, and Volkswagen. Ted, asked by Barbara Gelb if he had ambitions to be a writer, said, “No. But that’s a lie.” He worked in the clothing business, loading and unloading trucks, unpacking boxes, and shelving garments according to size and color; his literary talent showed in an uncanny ability to imitate the older Jewish fellows and young black men on the job. He would soon write a drama that merited a workshop production in L.A., “pleasantly shock[ing]” Joe, he recalled—his father had no idea he was writing seriously. “[He] was proud [but he] was merciless in his corrections of it,” Ted says. “I remember a line in the play. It was sort of a malaprop: one character says that another character ‘has the patience of Lot.’ (I know that Job is the epitome of patience.) My father wrote in the margin something like, ‘You mean Job. Lot was not known for his patience.’ I think he was such a perfectionist that he missed the joke.”

  Joe was writing, and rather swiftly for him. He had come up with a good first line: “I’ve got the best story in the Bible,” spoken by King David. Joe liked the comic possibilities, the opportunity to lampoon history and religion. He was physically fit, working out, keeping his weight down.

  But in spite of good tidings, he was restless. On a large, impersonal scale, the election of Ronald Reagan disturbed him: The neoconservatives had gotten a foothold in the White House. He told interviewers the survival of America no longer mattered to him much. Capitalism was in its death throes. “I see hopelessness,” he said to a reporter from Rolling Stone. The country’s problems had grown so large, they were unsolvable. “An experienced businessman can’t run his business, but the government can’t either,” Joe said. “So socialism won’t work. I mean, we have a history of corrupt government.… [Incompetence is] our tradition.… It warmed my heart [recently], in the way that watching a Laurel and Hardy comedy might warm my heart, to read about the losses that General Motors and Ford posted. We just assume these companies are infallible and in expert hands, and everything’s going to go beautifully. But not only was there incompetence, there was passive acceptance.”

  As for his career, Joe was beleaguered by the fact that, despite his successes, nothing matched Catch-22 in the minds of most readers and critics. He groused that Good as Gold would not have been reviewed if it hadn’t been for his first novel. Late in life, he responded to the comment “You’ve never written anything as good as Catch-22” by saying, “Who has?” But in the early 1980s, in his late fifties, he still fought to top himself. The critic Clancy Segal said of him, “Sheer, stark terror, however disguised as farce or satire, stalks the pages of Heller’s writing.… [T]he temptation is to find the ‘something happened’ that helped cause Heller’s deep, sad anger of life’s hurtful illogic.”

  Especially in his personal life, Joe was whirling. Publicly, he spoke positively about the virtues of a long and comfortable marriage, but more and more frequently he had neglected Shirley. She found it increasingly galling to swallow the obvious but unspoken fact that he had led a double life throughout their marriage, seeing other women, privileging his own pursuits. “The Mogul,” she called him in angry moments. “At one point, she got a feminist shrink who kept telling her to leave Joe—it’s enough,” said Barbara Gelb. For his part, Joe felt Shirley had not matured along with him and could no longer recognize his needs. In rough draft notes, written in the early 1980s, for what would eventually become a book about his illness, Joe wrote, “I began to feel the married life to which I had been accustomed for more than thirty years was falling apart irretrievably.” Elsewhere, he said that one night when he and Shirley were returning from a party she turned to him quite suddenly and admitted she was jealous of his fame and success. “The problem,” Joe said, “was that in all the years of my struggle to make it as a writer, she had never developed a career or life of her own.”

  So when, in the midst of all this, a rare illness with no known cause struck him unexpectedly, he said, “Stress? Maybe.”

  * * *

  THE STRESS had built incrementally. While writing Good as Gold, Joe had seen a therapist, Dr. Robert Michaels of Payne Whitney. The writing, particularly the autobiographical sections of the novel, stirred Joe up, and he started to think of himself as a “fatherless Coney Island child.” What had happened to him? He was in search of his real self, he said—poor abandoned Joey.

  During this period, Lee made regular trips to New York from Florida, accompanying Perle as she received cancer treatments. Over coffee in diners, Joe nudged Lee to reminisce about their father. Lee was reluctant to talk, choked by the ambivalence the older man provoked in him. He admitted their father had beaten him on occasion. Then he’d express understanding and forgiveness—Isaac was only doing what he thought he must to raise a good kid. Joe stared at his brother in pity and wonderment.

  In his memoir, he wrote, “The first time I met my father face-to-face to talk to him, so to speak, was in the office of a psychoanalyst sometime in 1979, when I was already fifty-six years old. My father had been dead for more than fifty of those years.”

  He had been having the old dream again: Once more, he was a child, trembling in bed. A faceless figure approached his bedroom door. After a few meetings with Dr. Michaels, Joe realized with a shock one day as he lay on the therapist’s couch that the dream had not recurred since their sessions began. “You don’t need that dream anymore,” Michaels commented. “You have me here now.”

  So, with the doctor, Joe explored the patterns in his novels: threats to children, fathers betraying sons, deaths allowing the protagonists to live. Could the emotional confusion Joe had experienced in childhood be rooted in the feeling that his father had died as a child; that is, he was in his infancy as an American, unformed, unintegrated, whereas Joe had become the successful adult American male? Their roles had reversed.

  Michaels warned Joe not to overintellectualize. The danger with a literary patient was, he read all the psychoanalytic literature. Joe knew Freud as well as the doctor. He batted around repression, narcissism, Oedipal complex, applying the terms to himself—“All that serious stuff was easy,” Joe said. He would write in Now and Then, “My theory … about psychoanaly[sis] is that corrective therapy demands unwavering concentration by a patient of intelligence with a clear and untroubled head who is not in need of it.” Those who really need help won’t be aided by the talk, however insightful it is.

  Still, the sessions brought pragmatic results. Joe learned he “never really wanted to live in a house in Tuscany or the French Riviera or have Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe in love with [him], and [he] didn’t really covet … the bolder public life lived by Norman Mailer, although there was much there to envy. People with choices generally do what they want
to do and have no real choice but to be what they already are.”

  At one point, he admitted to the doctor one of his reasons for seeking therapy was the “wish to have a psychiatric medical authority … to quote in comeback during domestic arguments—even to misquote, by attributing to [the shrink] statements that had not been made.” Michaels laughed at this, but Joe did feel “enormously [helped] in the matter of day-to-day embroilments at home.”

  The therapist examined Joe’s and Shirley’s actions dispassionately and rationally. “[H]e bound me to this,” Joe said: “I was not to make fundamental changes in my life once we began—not in my marriage, my work, or other areas—without discussion with him.” Michaels was prescient, making this warning: Within months, Joe, desperately angry and depressed for nonspecific reasons, would break his promise to the doctor and severely strain, if not shatter, every important relationship in his life.

  Joe’s marital miseries drove him from the Apthorp. In December 1980, he was living in his studio when he heard that John Lennon, whom he had often associated with Yossarian, had been shot to death just blocks away. Reporters described Lennon’s murderer as a deranged fan. It was impossible not to contemplate the violence inherent in fantasy, fan identification, or disappointment with objects of adulation as one of the consequences of celebrity in America. Moreover, Joe believed Lennon, Yossarian, Lenny Bruce figures were similar to Socrates: questioners, provocateurs, flashing mirrors at the warped cultures that had spawned them. Inevitably, society found methods to eliminate them. Joe felt anxious and chilled as he walked the edges of Central Park.