You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  Not at all, I said. Not at all.

  I stopped drinking the next morning. The glooms retreated, defeated by your trust in me, which was, in that moment, certainly greater than my trust in me. Three weeks later, I received galleys for Prizefighter, and you and I celebrated by driving to Maine for lunch (clam rolls became your favorite food well into your teens). I waded into revisions with gusto, and within a year I married again—Inez Palenco, a sweet, bright woman four years older than I (a social worker at an agency in Holyoke, a competent oboist, and a master gardener), whom you may remember only through photos, for within seventeen months of our marriage, she was done in by that cunning variety of breast cancer that can sneak in and take over between regular check-ups.

  Somehow you grew up, went to school, graduated, and set off to seek your fortune, and what I have since thought of as The Great Glooms never returned with any marked force, though I feared their return, as now, every day when I woke and every night before I slept—and you turned into as fine a son as any man might be lucky enough to have.

  Let me note something else that contributed to the fading away of my missing year, and I note it not to deprive you of credit for having helped me—us!—come to a better place, but to put what happened, and how it happened, into a somewhat larger context. I had, perhaps two years before the night on which you fell, come under the spell of Primo Levi, who, as man and writer, had become my hero. As you know, he wrote about his experiences in Auschwitz and journey home from Auschwitz, but also about myriad other matters: his career as a chemist, his family, other people’s vocations, his friendships, his beloved city of Turin.

  It has occurred to me of late—when I have, happily, been able to give freer rein to my ruminative disposition—that the slight lessening of depressive pain I began to experience may have come from reading, not about Levi’s life as victim, survivor, and witness, but about his views on suicide, along with what in him is so life-affirming (to use an apt if banal phrase): his fierce ability to see the differences in other people—their particularities and idiosyncracies—in a time when they were put to death because they were judged, as Jews, to be no different, one from the other.

  Though, of course, they were also exterminated because they were just that: other. We always fear, and despise, whatever we perceive as different from who we are, and in this, he has explained, we are not that different from animals, who are much more intolerant of members of their own species than they are of those of other species. Thus, anti-Semitism, he has suggested, is simply a horrific example of a more general phenomenon.

  But suicide—what about suicide? There were, I was surprised to learn, few suicides in the camps—and generally, Levi points out, fewer suicides in wartime than in times of peace. His reasoning as to why this was so appears in a self-interview I came across a few evenings before the night on which you fell, and long before—inexplicable, profoundly disturbing mystery!—he fell down a stairwell in a self-willed act I trust neither of us will emulate—one that ended his life in the place he loved: the house in which he’d been born and, before and after Auschwitz, had lived.

  Yet some years before this, Levi wrote that he considered suicide a distinctively human act (we had never seen evidence that animals committed suicide), and that because, in the camps, human beings, both victims and oppressors, tended more toward the level of animals—of animality—it was the business of the day—essentials—that ruled: what you were going to eat and if you were going to eat, how cold it would be, what you would wear against the cold, how heavy was the work and of what kind, et cetera. In short: you thought, if ‘thought’ is the right word, of how you were going to make it through the day and into the evening and through the night. There was, simply, no time to think about killing yourself.

  So I became busy. I began exercising regularly. I began preparing, in earnest, for the book I would write about Henry James as Irishman; I began making notes for new stories and novels; I began planting a garden, and learning carpentry; I began seeking out women who would make suitable helpmates for me, and loving (step-)mothers for you. I began cooking meals regularly, breakfast and dinner, and planning vacations, and asking my department chair if I could teach new courses that would require I put myself to school in the work of authors (Howells, Dos Passos, Proust, Beckett) with whom I had, until then, only cursory acquaintance. I took tennis lessons, joined a co-ed softball team, took a course in auto repair, and searched out (in vain for the most part) lost cousins, aunts, and uncles. I painted rooms, repaired furniture, built bookcases, created file systems, learned to do my own taxes, and to play the piano.

  Not all at once, of course, and after a while—when the demon of depression seemed to have increasing difficulty finding its way back into my daily life, I began to let some of the new activities fall away. But this happened over the course of several years, and I mark what has, until this moment, been its definitive departure (though daily wariness remains), from the third month of my third marriage—to Pamela Fullerton, whom you will recall as perhaps the most animated and lively of my five wives, though herself—the aphrodisiacal cue and clue to my infatuation and our romance?—a lifelong victim of chronic depression, which, in the glory days of falling in love, departed, only to return when a bit of the bloom, as was inevitable, began to wear off the rose of our bliss.

  Pamela never became suicidal—her condition was more like a ground bass, or low-grade hum—a Baroque ostinato I came to think I could actually hear, and some twenty-one months after our wedding, she left us, saying it was simply not fair—not fair!—can you imagine?—that it was not fair for anyone to have to live with someone so plagued with sadness, and with such catastrophic changes of mood. (Why, she would write in a note a month or two later, should we have to live our lives on the nauseating sine-curve of her feelings?)

  I tried to talk her out of leaving (I truly loved her, as, in fact, I loved all my wives, along with a good number of my girlfriends; my capacity for falling in love, and staying in love, being one of my more consistent capabilities), and with medications (not then as effective as they are said to be now), and some psychotherapy, she did return to her happier and more stable self for a while. Her will to be a miserable, unloved, unworthy, abandoned child, however, proved ultimately stronger than medications, therapy, or us. In the cartons of correspondence I have left behind, you will, if interested, find some four to five dozen letters from Pamela. She never married again, never had children, and always inquired about you, Charlie. I believe she missed you more than she missed me, the fact that you were and were not her (only) son creating complex, and somewhat anguished attachments, not to you—no guilt, Charlie, please, please!—but to parts of her earlier life that held a power over her against which all efforts, ours included—tolerant and loving though we both were—proved helpless.

  But to the end of ending this meditation, let me return to what I saw in your eyes, and believe I sensed of your sensibility—and thus, your happy prospects—on the night of your fall. I had, then as now, the highest hopes for you, Charlie, and I trust you won’t confuse these hopes for expectations. Of the latter, I have none. Let me explain: When I was preparing my book on Henry James, I came across a letter Mrs. Cadwalader Jones wrote to a friend after having come upon some of James’s early stories. The stories were pleasing, and well enough made, she wrote. What had impressed, though, was that the stories were informed, despite their undistinguished quality as stories, by a remarkable and remarkably unexpected singularity of mind—a quality of mind so rare it had taken her by surprise, and moved her utterly. It is so difficult, she wrote (in a sentence with which I’ve always hoped—no: intended!—to end this letter)—it is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.

  Comfort

  The previous afternoon, when they were less than a two hour drive from Le Tignet, a small village in the south of France, they had turned off Nationale 95—the old Route Napoléan—and meandered through towns and villages that seemed litt
le changed since they had passed this way in 1968.

  Now, drinking coffee on a terrace that overlooked the Lac de Castillon, Saul found himself remembering how, during the time they lived in Le Tignet, they had adopted the custom once a week of searching out a new town or village, usually one they had read about in Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. They would start out after breakfast, arrive at their destination within an hour or two, wander the village’s streets, enjoy a leisurely lunch, and after lunch adjourn to a local hotel where they would, before returning home, make love.

  The names of the villages stayed with him—Gordes, Séguret, Ménerbes, Ansouis, Coaraze, Peillon—and there were others, not included in Les Plus Beaux Villages, they had happened upon and, by doing so, made their own: Sisteron, Draguignan, Digne, Rousillon, Gap, Mons, Eze, Bonnieux, Ys, Apt—each name having the power, still, to evoke specific days, conversations, meals, and rooms. In Digne, he recalled, in the Hotel de Ville, the wallpaper had been composed of faded red and green chevrons like those on Chevrolets; in Peillon, they had, within less than a minute of entering their room, and with most of their clothes on, made love, and they had done so standing up, Janice’s back against the door, her legs clasped around his thighs; in Ménerbes, they had talked for the first time about getting married; in Apt, on a noisy, broken-springed bed, he had—another first—entered her from behind; and on a broiling August day in Entrevaux, in a room with a large chestnut armoire, one whose doors were faced with narrow gilded mirrors covered with colored streaks that, in memory, appeared to be dried blood stains, they had, after love-making, and on sweat-drenched sheets, fallen into the blackest, most sublime post-coital sleep he had ever experienced.

  Was the hotel still here?

  While Janice talked about their daughter Ellen, who had, several weeks before their departure, taken up with a guy Janice said was like the others: an untrustworthy, manipulative drifter, Saul thought about Camus. It was because of Camus—of his reading of Camus’s The Plague—that Saul had, forty years before, while they were living in Le Tignet, decided to become a doctor. This had happened—this small epiphany that changed the course of his life—in May of 1968 when the entire French nation was shut down by striking students and workers, a time when he and Janice had believed that a revolution was taking place in France that had the potential to transform the world. They had arrived in France the previous summer, ten days after graduating from Oberlin College, and seven weeks after having voted themselves a year in which to travel in Europe before returning to the States, and before making decisions about jobs, careers, and family.

  So that Janice would think he shared her concern about Ellen, Saul asked questions—Was the guy doing drugs? Was he abusive? Did he have a day job? Was he clean?—though his mind was not on Ellen, but on his imagined affinities with Camus, a man who had once declared that he believed in three things only—in courage, in intelligence, and in women. On his last day on earth, while riding in the car in which, at the age of forty-eight, he would be killed, Camus, in a kind of a premonitory revelation that Saul envied, had told his friends, Janine and Michel Gallimard (Michel was Camus’s publisher), that he felt he had made all his women happy, even those he had loved simultaneously.

  Janice was asking when, after they spent some time in Le Tignet, they might begin traveling again—Saul had promised they would go to Italy: Venice, Florence, Siena—and Saul said he couldn’t think about that yet. Why so intent on planning? Why not just let things happen? Couldn’t they simply be where they were without thinking of where they might be?

  Janice sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to organize your life, much less run it,” she said. “In truth, you seem so distracted that I was just making conversation. I thought that talking about Ellen might have upset you.”

  “Let’s enjoy the view, okay?” Saul said. “As for Ellen, she’s been down this road before. She’ll tire of the guy in a month or so, and go on to another.”

  “And if she continues in her patterns? Can you imagine her going on like this through her thirties and forties?”

  “I’m not into imagining what might be,” he said. “Ellen’s Ellen. I don’t imagine her being anyone else.”

  He looked away, toward the lake, its surface gray, calm, metallic. He pictured Camus leaving Villeblevin and driving south along Nationale 5 until he came to the spot some twenty-four kilometers north of Sens (was the Nationale 5 still there?; Saul had not been able to find it on the new map he’d bought), where the car Camus was traveling in with his friends and their eighteenyear-old daughter Anne, along with the Gallimards’s dog, had slammed into a tall plane tree, bounced off, then crashed into another tree some forty feet beyond the first.

  Although neither his face nor body showed signs of visible injury, Camus, his skull fractured and neck broken, had been killed instantly. Michel Gallimard died five days later while being operated on for a brain hemorrhage. Neither Janine, who was found near her husband, leash in hand, calling for the dog, nor Anne, who was found sitting in a field some sixty-five feet from the crash, were seriously hurt. Camus’s black leather briefcase, which contained his passport, photographs, and some books—including Nietsche’s Le Gai Savoir and a school edition of Othello, along with a manuscript of what would be his posthumously published novel, Le Premier Homme—survived intact.

  Camus had written, previous to this day, that he considered death in an automobile to be une morte imbécile—the single most absurd way of dying. The manner of Camus’s death, thus, made sense to Saul. But to visit the spot where Camus had died—or even to stop in Villeblevin or Lourmarin, as Janice, in deference to Saul’s obsession with Camus, had suggested—was not something he cared to put on their itinerary.

  They came upon the village of Entrevaux the way they had first come upon it forty years before, from the east, and once again—suddenly, physically—it took Saul’s breath away. Janice, hearing his rasped intake of air, pulled to the side of the road, turned off the engine.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He stepped from the car, rested his hand on his chest, felt loud, irregular thumpings, and heard, also, the sound of rushing water. He wondered, for an instant, if the sound were coming from within—if his blood pressure were rising immoderately. In the silence, though—unearthly somehow, as if they had been transported to a place covered with a huge transparent dome, one that let in light, but that kept out all sound—it occurred to him, with relief, that the sound of rushing water probably was the sound of water: of the Var River, which, overflowing from spring rain and mountain run-off, would be surging nearby.

  The village seemed, as ever, an apparition: from a cluster of perhaps a hundred closely set stone-walled houses that seemed to grow from the ground itself, their red tile roofs bright in the late morning sun, a walled road zigzagged up the side of a pyramid-shaped mountain. At the top, some fifteen hundred feet above ground level, was a medieval fortress from whose ramparts one had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the surrounding countryside.

  “I’m excited is all,” Saul offered. “It’s just very exciting to be here again.”

  “We should eat,” she said.

  “And then—?”

  They walked toward the part of town where they expected to find the hotel they had once stayed in and where, were it open, they would have lunch. The village seemed preternaturally quiet, shutters on most homes closed while people ate their mid-day meals and prepared for their siestas. They remembered this: that stores in these villages—butcher shops, bakeries, groceries—closed down for two to three hours mid-day, and all afternoon on Wednesdays.

  They found their way to the far side of the village, walked along a path that bordered the Var River, and came to an abandoned fortress. Beside its drawbridge, a few feet from the river’s bank, three small green-backed turtles sat on a single flat rock. Under the bridge, where the river narrowed, the water, coursing downstream, foamed with increased turbulence, and he thought of boiling water, and of th
e fact that if you placed a frog in a pot of boiling water, it would jump out, but if you put it in the same pot, and then lit a fire underneath the pot and let the water come to a boil slowly, the frog would remain where it was, and would die.

  He had often mentioned this fact to his medical students even before, he would joke during lectures, Al Gore had ‘expropriated’ it for his film on global warming, and he had used the fact in order to draw his students’ attention to the ways in which human beings, like frogs, seemed to have been programmed by evolution to be able to respond to acute crises but not to chronic conditions, not to thinking and acting in terms of long-range effects and consequences.

  This short-sightedness was deadly when it came to medical care, where the government, medical groups, insurance companies, and his own hospital rarely thought long-term, where the premium was always on efficiencies dictated by profit margins and cost-effective ratios, and where, therefore, doctors were paid more for procedures—to shove things down people’s mouths or up their assholes—than they were for essentials, like taking good histories.

  It was the same, he’d come to think, with matters beyond health care: the belief that we were going to have a quick, neat, and complete victory in Iraq—to shock and awe the enemy without having to think about or deal with the aftermath of our invasion; the delusion that we could keep polluting and using up the world’s resources—water, air, oil, coal, minerals, wetlands, forests—without regard to consequences and future generations.

  And so, when the Bush administration had pushed for a delay in giving grants to the UN Global AIDS Fund—of an amount that was, as a percentage of Gross National Product, the lowest amount any developed nation was contributing—he had gone to his office, told the nursing staff to hold all calls, and, feeling like the Moses Herzog of the AIDS pandemic, written a letter to the president in which he identified himself as an AIDS doctor, and accused the president of being a murderer. For if, he had written, you watch a neighbor drowning and you have a life preserver and do not throw the life preserver to that neighbor, you have killed that person, which was what, when it came to AIDS, we were doing. Unlike Moses Herzog, however, who rarely sent his missives off, Saul had left his office and put the letter in the nearest mailbox.