Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  “Quite a chokehold.”

  “That’s one way to describe it. I think of it as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ That’s what assisted suicide is all about.”

  The designation hadn’t been used until now. It sat between us, a gate through which the rest of our dialogue about Jordan would have to pass.

  “So can you talk about it now?” she asked.

  “In the car,” I said.

  I TOLD her, as we continued southward, about Jordan’s plan.

  How he’d researched the method, the necessary amount of Seconal. How I’d found the right plastic bag for him, medium-sized, with drawstrings; how, with me watching, he’d practiced its use until he felt comfortable undertaking the entire process on his own. How, at the appointed time, he’d fastened the bag’s drawstrings around his wrists—a procedure requiring some dexterity, though he’d managed without my help. How I’d placed a glass of champagne, some water, the pills, and a bowl of chocolate pudding on the little side table next to his chair, and watched as he’d swallowed the pills slowly, one at a time, taking alternating sips of water and champagne and consuming small mouthfuls of pudding. At one point he’d asked me to spoon-feed him; the bowl was too heavy for him to continue holding it at chest height. After he’d ingested everything, I’d watched as he slipped the bag over his head and crossed his wrists (around which the drawstrings were now tied) over his chest.

  “Why the bag?” Danny interrupted. “Why not just the pills?”

  “Because barbiturates aren’t entirely reliable,” I answered. “The combination of the pills and the lack of air—”

  “I get it,” Danny said.

  I described how I left him, knowing it was over, and went to my room, waiting for Eve to return. I didn’t tell Danny how I’d gone back to his study in a little while and checked his pulse, first one wrist, then the other, to be sure. The one other thing I’d intended to do—take the plastic bag off my father’s head so it would look as though he’d simply sat in his chair, eaten some pudding, and died—I couldn’t get myself to do. All I could do was cut off the drawstrings.

  After Danny called out, as Eve and I approached my father’s study, I’d glanced at Eve’s face. I hadn’t realized until then that she, too, had been waiting, knowing what he’d planned—but he hadn’t told her the date. She looked shocked, but less, it seemed, for her daughter’s sake than for her own. Closing her eyes, she lay a hand on Jordan’s shoulder for a moment. Then, collecting herself, she picked up Danny and held her, murmuring softly into her hair. It felt to me, watching them, as if they were both as far from the room as my father was, in all but body.

  JORDAN HAD made his request on a Friday evening. Eve and Danny weren’t there.

  The house was quiet. Eve had called me midweek to say they wouldn’t be joining us that weekend; she had too much work to do. The weekday nurse had left as soon as I arrived. I’d cooked and cleaned up after Jordan’s and my supper, and was in my usual chair by his bedroom window. He was sitting in bed, a sheaf of papers on his lap.

  Cam, he said, we need to talk.

  Taking off his glasses, he polished their lenses painstakingly on one of his pajama sleeves. His face was gaunt and slack, his shoulders hunched.

  What is it? I asked, expecting him to say something about his pain medications. His eyes were watery but focused, the sole source of animation in a face from which the energy had been steadily draining for weeks.

  I’ve been reading about dying, he said. I called the Hemlock Society, and they sent me some information. I’ve thought about it and made my decision, which I’d like to share with you.

  Decision? I said, confused, as the word began wriggling its way into my consciousness. When its meaning slid home, it kicked off a little rush of adrenaline.

  Look, I said, you shouldn’t be thinking about—

  Hang on, Jordan said. You need to hear me out first, hm?

  A muted slurring started up in my ears, the sound of distant waves: my nervous system’s surf.

  All right, I said.

  My hunch is, it won’t be over tomorrow, or next week, or the week after, he said. I’ll weaken but I won’t go quickly, although the pain will worsen. I can’t keep my thoughts straight on the pain medications, and I can’t handle the pain without them. And I am, after all, eighty years old . . .

  I said nothing. The surf was still there inside my eardrums, a rhythmic sandpapery sound.

  So I’d like to exit now, he said. While I can do it myself. Or mostly by myself.

  Our conversation was no longer a conversation but a foreign object making straight for me at high velocity. What does that mean? I asked.

  It means I can do almost everything I need to do without someone else’s direct physical assistance. Which is how it needs to be. But there are a few things I’ll need help with. Not the drugs—I’ve got almost all the pills already. I’ll need to take some food with them, though. A little alcohol would probably be a good idea, too, to speed things along. And just in case, I should have a plastic bag as well. I’d like you to get me the right kind of bag and help me practice with it, so even when I’m in a drugged state I’ll be able to use it correctly.

  Is that essential?

  He paused, the slightest of smiles playing across his mouth. Think of it as a mask, he added. You can pretend I’m one of those commedia characters—you know, what’s his name—that old merchant who’s always trying to attract women . . .

  Pantalone, I said.

  Yes, he said, that’s right. I saw a show in London once, a little takeoff on standard commedia routines. Lots of acrobatics. With several scenes involving Pantalone. Columbine was his daughter. She’s the one who’s invisible to mortals . . .

  He paused, then added: As you’ll need to be, my dear. If you agree to help me out. We’ll both be better off ending what doesn’t need to be prolonged. I’m trusting you can see the sense of that. Can you be my Columbine?

  I SAID yes. Like a person under a spell, I said I would help him. Good, said my father.

  We began to speak about the details. When, I said, and he said soon. Can you be specific, I asked, and he said how about two weeks from now, on Sunday, and I said Eve and Danny will be here, and he said I know, I’d like to say good-bye even though they won’t know that’s what it is. Plus it’ll be easier for you if you’re not alone afterward.

  All right, I said.

  And, he said, what about the drink—what’s best, I wonder? Didn’t Chekhov have a glass of champagne right before he died?

  Yes, I read that someplace, I said.

  Good, that’s what I’ll do. But there’s the question of food, he added. I’ll need to eat something, to help keep the pills down. How about chocolate pudding—I wouldn’t mind that as a last meal. Make me some chocolate pudding, would you, Cam?

  I TOOK a temporary leave from my job managing a Village antiques shop and moved into the spare room in Jordan’s house. To Stuart and Eve, I explained that my father was weakening and I needed to be with him full-time to help him acclimate to new medications. Stuart said he’d keep an eye on my apartment.

  I hadn’t yet met Sam; that happened shortly after Jordan’s death. I knew at some point I’d talk with Stuart about what was to happen, and my role in it. But I couldn’t talk about it beforehand. And I’d never have discussed it with my cousin, even if Jordan hadn’t made that impossible.

  EVE MADE perhaps a half-dozen weekend trips to Frenchtown that summer, always with Danny in tow. Sometimes they stayed for just a few hours on Saturday. Other times they arrived early on Friday evening and stayed until after dinner on Sunday—Eve on the pullout sofa in the living room, Danny in a sleeping bag in my room.

  During their visits, Eve took Jordan’s garden in hand and Danny amused herself with sketching (already her favorite pastime). I tried to keep my father as comfortable as possible. Because walking was painful for him, he was seldom anywhere but in his bed. I tacked Danny’s drawings (each of which she proudly displ
ayed to him as soon as it was completed) on the walls of his bedroom; Eve saw to it that there were always flowers on his bedside table. Some mornings I’d enter his room and notice she’d changed a vase sometime during the night, replacing one colorful batch of blossoms with another.

  Jordan slept a lot, but whenever he was awake and had some energy, I shut his bedroom door and questioned him about his life. The experience of listening to his voice for extended periods of time was as confounding as it was gratifying; we’d never before talked with such regularity or at such length.

  One night as I lay in bed, unable to sleep and replaying in my mind the things Jordan had told me that day, I thought about a book I’d read a few years earlier, which had offered viewpoints on acting from various theater directors, living and dead. Among them was Vsevolod Meyerhold, who’d made an intriguing observation on the art of pantomime. Mime excites us, he’d said, by the framework that confines its heart.

  Yes, I thought, and a similar principle governed intimate relationships as well. My father had spent a lifetime submitting to confinement, and now he was letting me into the cage with him. Was I not somehow transgressing? He’d been so alone for so long. Since my mother, who else had he let in? No one, really—just myself, to a pathetically limited degree.

  And Eve, I supposed. Yes—Eve, too, in some sense I’d never been able to name.

  When she put fresh flowers on his bedside table in the middle of the night, did she wake him to talk with him? Or had talk become unnecessary? Maybe she simply sat next to him in the dark, listening to his breathing, resting a hand on his shoulder. Perhaps she understood there was nothing further to be said, only to be felt, and soon she’d have to do that—feel—on her own. As I would, too.

  YOU’RE READY? Jordan asked me, the Friday before the final Sunday.

  Everything’s set, I answered.

  And Eve and Danny are coming tomorrow?

  That’s right.

  We’ll need to figure out how to get them out of the house on Sunday.

  I know, I replied. But that won’t be hard. We’ll send them out to do some shopping or get some lunch.

  All right. I’m not worried, he added, so don’t you be either.

  That evening he reiterated that I should never speak to anyone, including Eve, about his plan and my role in it. This was crucial, he said, to avoid any danger of liability. Once the bag was off his head, there’d be no reason for anybody to suspect he’d died anything but a natural death. His illness was such that no doctor or nurse would be surprised if he were to expire peacefully in his chair.

  I asked about the supplier of the barbiturates. That person, he said, had also been counseled about the need for silence, and was unaware of my role. As far as anyone else was concerned, my father was acting on his own.

  REMEMBER, CAM, this plan wasn’t yours, he said on Sunday morning, after I’d informed him that Eve and Danny had left to run some errands.

  You’re not putting pills in my hand or down my throat, he said. And you’re not placing a bag over my head. I’m going to do these things by myself. You’ve made me some chocolate pudding. That’s all you’ve done.

  The cork of the champagne bottle made a satisfying retort when I popped it. I poured a little champagne into both glasses, careful not to spill any. In the silence I could hear the bubbles’ spritely hiss as they ascended to the surface. My father and I had never done this before, I realized—never drunk champagne together. As Jordan clinked his glass against mine, I closed my eyes for an instant, picturing him in a Paris café with my mother, the two of them toasting each other. Salut, Camilla! Salut, chéri.

  Cheers, he offered. May you live a long, healthy life.

  Cheers, I said.

  We drank, each of us taking a few sips. Jordan held his glass in both hands.

  So, Cam, he said. We ready?

  My nerves flickered like a string of lights about to fail. Jordan inhaled softly. In a little while he’d be ending this, the body’s most banal and astonishing of performances: inhalation, exhalation, air and blood coursing on their hidden circular track. I would be sitting here with him as he switched off the ignition.

  He took another sip of champagne. You and I are face-to-face now, he said. We get to do a proper farewell.

  We’ve said good-bye a lot, over the years, I said. But you always came back.

  He gave a small laugh. In its tone it reminded me of one of his quiet chuckles with Danny.

  When you were young, I shouldn’t have taken off so much, he said. Now it’s different—now I should. It’s the right thing to do.

  The right thing for you, I said. But what if it’s not the right thing for me?

  I won’t ask you to convince me of that, he said. I just want to ask one question. Can you be sure what I’m doing isn’t the right thing for you?

  No, I said. Maybe it is. And I don’t want you to suffer.

  Well then, he said. Why not give me the benefit of the doubt?

  In the silence that followed, I imagined various things I might say. I could tell him he’d failed me, turning my mother’s death into a pathetic excuse for his own absences; I could say I’d chosen to spurn him, and this became my own failure. I could wonder aloud whether the exhaustion I’d felt all along, loving him, was any greater than that he’d felt, loving me. I could ask how one child might take her mother’s life and then, at his request, her father’s, and go on with her own.

  All right, I said, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

  He took my hand, pulled me toward him, reached out with his other hand, touched my cheek—the skin of his palm as dry and soft as a feather—and released me.

  That seat cushion there? Reach under it, feel around toward the left-hand side, all the way at the rear, and you’ll find a little envelope of pills.

  DANNY AND I were in Westchester, on the Taconic Parkway. Traffic was mercifully light; another hour and we’d be in the Village.

  “The night before he died, Jordan gave me a bottle of perfume,” Danny said. She’d remained silent after my account of my father’s death; I had no sense of what she was thinking or feeling. “You remember that little leather box?”

  I nodded. “Do you still have it?”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t opened the bottle yet. I didn’t find the box until recently.”

  “It was lost?”

  “Not exactly lost. Mom kept it for me when I was young, of course. Then she claimed to have mislaid it somewhere. I didn’t worry about it; I figured she’d hand it over at some point . . . When I was cleaning out her apartment, I came across it at the back of her bedroom closet. It was inside a hatbox, with some souvenirs from her college days. Mostly photos of plants and trees and whatnot—no people . . . There was one picture taken from the top of McGraw Tower, at Cornell. I recognized the view.”

  “When will you open the mystery perfume?” I asked. “Be prepared, it might’ve soured after all these years. Even really good perfumes don’t last forever.”

  “I know.”

  We fell silent again, my thoughts returning to Frenchtown. That final Saturday evening, Eve and Danny had arrived after supper. Visibly tired, Eve had headed straight for the living room’s sofa bed while Danny went into Jordan’s bedroom to say good night. That was when he’d given her the gift.

  The next morning, Eve rose early to work in the garden. While she was outside, Danny showed me the present she’d received from Jordan. It was beautifully packaged—that was the first thing I noticed about the gift. A small bottle of perfume was housed in a square box made of interlaced strips of buttery dark brown leather, and lined in red silk. Marveling at its elegance and craftsmanship, I figured Jordan had found the box in France or Italy. Nestled at its center was a pouch of azure-blue velvet cinched with a black cord. The bottle, Danny explained, was inside the pouch.

  When I asked to see it, she demurred. No, she said shyly, I can’t show you, or anyone. It’s a secret.

  Jordan, she explained, had ins
tructed her not to open the bottle until she was a grown woman. Hearing this, I chuckled.

  So you don’t even know what the bottle looks like? I asked.

  Nope, she replied solemnly, and I don’t know what it smells like, either. But he also gave me this, and it smells really good.

  She pulled a plain vial from the pocket of her shorts. On its label, lettered in Jordan’s distinctive print, was the word “Lune.” I pretended not to recognize the name; I wasn’t going to spoil her treat by telling her I already knew what it was. I cooed as she removed the vial’s stopper and waved the scent beneath my nostrils.

  You only need a little bit—it’s pretty strong, I told her.

  I know, she answered. Jordan told me you just put a drop on your fingertip and pat it on your neck and wrists. Like this.

  Her small forefinger grazed the sides of my throat, then the inside of one of my wrists.

  You did that just right, I said. And when you wear this perfume, you’ll smell better than any other kid in your class. Even better than your teacher.

  She smiled at that. Then Eve was calling her, telling her they were going on an errand and then to lunch. Perhaps Jordan had urged Eve to take her daughter out. In any case, I hadn’t needed to manufacture a reason for them to depart.

  SOMEWHERE ON the West Side Highway (had we crossed the little bridge over the river between the Bronx and Manhattan?—I can’t summon any visuals, only the moment itself), Danny spoke again.

  “I’d like to take a break,” she said.

  “From what?” I asked.

  “From this . . . from talking.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I certainly don’t need to talk about this stuff on a regular basis. But it’s good we’ve—”

  “No, Cam. I mean, I need a break from talking with you. I’d like not to call or see you for a while. I can’t. It’s just too hard to be playing an endless guessing game with you. It’s like I’ve been banging on the door and nobody’s answering.”