Man in the Empty Boat

by Mark Salzman

  “Life is bullshit.”

  Then he turned his face away so I couldn’t see him.

  At that moment, I asked myself: If there was a button I could press, and I knew that pressing it would make every human being on the planet disappear instantly, painlessly, forever, without a trace, so that the whole bonfire of fear and hope and confusion and pain would be over with, once and for all—would I press it? My own children, I reminded myself, would dissolve along with everyone else. Everything dear to me, and everything dear to everyone else would disappear. So would beauty, courage, love, tenderness, curiosity, ambition, art, science, technology, history, knowledge, consciousness—all of it would be erased. Would I press that button?

  God yes, I thought. I would press it in a heartbeat. And I felt truly sorry that no such button existed.

  As soon as we got back home, Dad went upstairs to his apartment. Daniel pulled into the driveway not long after us. I went across the street to fetch the girls. Daniel sat them down again at the dinner table and told them that it was over: Mommy was no longer suffering. Once again, they seemed too shocked to really grasp it all at once. Within minutes, friends of Rachel’s and Daniel’s started appearing at the house. It was amazing how quickly it happened. Within an hour, we must have had two dozen people there. I felt a strong urge to keep busy, so I started making food for everyone. I made enough dinner to feed forty or fifty people, and that’s pretty much how many we had there by late afternoon. Isabela and Livia started a soccer game with the neighbors’ kids in the backyard, and when Daniel saw this, he joined them. A few of his soccer buddies followed suit, and before long there was a crazy game going on. Most of the men playing had either wine glasses or beer bottles in their hands, the girls were squealing with delight, and it was as beautiful as it was heartbreaking.

  I went over to check on Dad. He was lying on his couch listening to classical music on the radio. “Are you OK?” I asked.

  He said, “I tried to stick my head in the oven, but my head wouldn’t fit.” I truly don’t know if he meant it.

  There was something I wanted to tell him, about how he’d handled the talk with Daniel that morning. I tried, but I couldn’t get my mouth to work. It was very strange, like in dreams where you want to speak or run or look over your shoulder but your body will not obey your mind. I threw up my hands, found a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote: I have never been so proud of you. I passed it over to him and he read it and said, “Daniel’s the one who had the hard job. I don’t know how he did it.”

  I returned to the house to keep an eye on the food. Dad eventually joined us for dinner, and then he and Erich and I sat out on the porch in front of Rachel’s house, where it was quiet. It was a beautiful summer night. None of us could think of anything to say. Then I remembered where the phrase “the peace of green fields” came from: the Marcus Aurelius book on Rachel’s bookshelf.1

  The next morning, Daniel came into the kitchen while I was making breakfast. He opened the medicine cabinet to get some aspirin and saw all the bottles of children’s pain relievers and children’s cold medicines and children’s allergy medicines, and he went pale. He said to me, “What will I do if the girls get sick? Rachel always handled that stuff.”

  When Isabela came downstairs, Daniel followed the grief counselor’s advice and asked her if she still wanted her birthday party to take place that day. Isabela’s answer was a very firm yes, she definitely wanted the party. So we mobilized.

  After breakfast I mowed the lawn. Lisa and Annie and at least half a dozen of Rachel’s girlfriends came over to help set up. They held a meeting at the table in the backyard and soon they had it all figured out: who would bring napkins, who would bring cups and paper plates, who would put out balloons, who would go pick up the ice cream cake. Daniel had promised Isabela that he would let all the guests make their own pizza in the big pizza oven, and he wasn’t going to go back on his word, so he started chopping wood and getting the dough ready. At one o’clock, the guests started coming, and here came the tricky part: Rachel’s illness had come on so suddenly that most of the children who had been invited—and their parents—didn’t even know she’d been sick, much less that she had died. None of us had been thinking clearly enough to try to contact the families beforehand to alert them to what was going on, and now it was too late for that, so Annie and I took turns standing at the end of the driveway, waiting for each child and parent to arrive, and then informing them that we had very sad, very shocking news. One by one, the mothers’ faces went pale as they placed their hands on their daughters’ shoulders and pulled them in close. The little girls stood very still in their party dresses, eyes wide with fear. We explained that Isabela was eager to have something to look forward to on this terrible day, and we hoped everyone would be able to stay for the party, but would understand if they couldn’t. Every one of them stayed.

  As I did this, once again I felt as if my mind had been planted inside a virtual body. My physical sensations felt real, but nothing else did.

  Having that party turned out to be the best thing we could possibly have done. The animal presenters showed up with their civets and armadillos and snakes, and they even had a frog-jumping contest inside the house. The kids had a great time. Daniel helped them make their little pizzas, and then he made a bunch of big ones for the parents. He was obviously relieved to have something to do, something that brought pleasure to others.

  I stayed on one more week to help prepare for the memorial service on Friday night. Daniel asked if I would lead the service and deliver the eulogy. I couldn’t stop fussing over it until the moment the time came to speak. I was even crossing things out and scribbling in the margins at the funeral home. The toilet stall in the men’s room became my office.

  Hundreds of people came to the service; it was standing room only in the funeral home. Isabela and Livia begged not to have to attend the event. Daniel felt conflicted about this, so he and I paid another visit to the grief center and asked about it. The counselor there thought that it might do more harm than good to force the kids to go against their will, so Daniel let them stay home while Annie and her daughter kept them company. At the last minute, my father decided not to come either. He said he just couldn’t face all those people and have to talk to them about Rachel. He was seventy-nine, and he’d lost his wife six years earlier and now this. I didn’t try to change his mind.

  Jessica and I talked about her bringing Ava and Esme out for the service, but we decided that it might be better for everyone if, instead, we offered to fly Daniel, Isabela, and Livia to California whenever they felt like getting away. That way, the cousins could see each other under better circumstances. I ran this idea by Daniel, and he liked it very much.

  After the service, at least a hundred of us spilled across the street to a restaurant. We turned out to be a noisy bunch. Jessica’s father, John, who had flown out from San Francisco for the service, had to stay to the bitter end of the party because I was his ride back to his hotel, but he was a good sport about it, and several people went out of their way to tell me how lucky I was to have such a great father-in-law. Although he complains of having to search for words all the time, if you didn’t know he’d had a stroke eight years ago, you wouldn’t guess it. He charmed everyone to such an extent that even friends of Rachel’s and Erich’s that I’d never met were plying him with drinks. After Erich and I paid the bill, we said good night to each other, and John and I went back to the funeral home parking lot. We got into Rachel’s car—and the goddamned thing wouldn’t start. I managed to flag someone down who had jumper cables, and we set them up, but the engine wouldn’t respond. It was truly dead. I had to call Erich at midnight and get him to come for us.

  The day after the service, I drove John to Westchester airport, then I drove Liviu and his family to La Guardia. The traffic heading back to New England was awful—it took me five hours to get back—but I didn’t mind. I was glad to be by myself. Daniel and the girls and I had dinner at
home, and at around nine o’clock that night, Erich came to pick me up. It was time to say good bye. I offered to put the girls to bed and read them one more story, but Isabela, looking and sounding a lot older than nine, said, “It’s pretty late, Uncle Mark. You can read to us next time we see each other.” I kissed them good night and came downstairs and hugged Daniel, and that’s when I fell apart. I felt I was abandoning them, and I couldn’t think of anything to say or do to make it better. Erich told me later that the girls, hearing me get so upset, crawled out of bed and were lying on their stomachs, watching us from the top of the stairs. He overheard Livia whisper to Isabela, “Everybody misses Mommy.”

  I went next door to Dad’s apartment, and he thanked me for coming out and helping watch the girls. I told him how badly I felt about leaving, and he said, “You’ve got your own family; you have to go.” He made a shooing gesture so that I could leave. Neither of us wanted to draw it out.

  __________________

  1 “Let it be clear to you that the peace of green fields can always be yours, in this, that, or any other spot; and that nothing is any different here from what it would be either up in the hills, or down by the sea, or wherever else you will.”

  Nineteen

  JESSICA AND THE GIRLS PICKED me up at the airport, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them the whole drive home. It was June 6, a month and a day after I’d left. Ava’s birthday party had taken place the same day as Isabela’s, only instead of a reptile and amphibian show, Ava’s party featured an actor made up to look like the wizard Dumbledore from the Harry Potter movies. I got to hear all about it, and I savored every detail. There had been no subtext of tragedy, no agonizing poignancy to their wizard-themed party, nor had grief marred Esme’s “Animals and Rainbows”–themed party the week before. We got to the house, I stepped out of the car, and can you guess who rushed forward to greet me?

  A barking dog.

  Bowie had settled in to her new home while I was away. She stood ready to defend her territory against intruders, and as far as she was concerned, I was an intruder. Her reaction upon seeing me was to explode into desperate, ear-splitting alarm barks and to scurry back and forth in what can only be described as a fight-and-flight response. She could, as promised by her trainers, obey twelve commands in Dutch and German, but somehow, the one command she’d apparently never mastered in any language was Shut the hell up.

  I would describe myself as a mild-mannered guy, and I doubt that anyone would argue with that description. I’ve got my issues, but up until that day, anger had never been one of them. But the sight and sound of that fifty-pound, four-legged burglar alarm telling me to get off of her property really pissed me off. All of my pent-up grief, frustration, helplessness, stress—it all turned into anger, anger like I had never felt before, and I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that it wasn’t healthy. I went into my room and lay down until I stopped shaking, but every time the doorbell rang or a car came down the driveway or someone walked past on the street or our mailman came, that dog blew up. And every time that dog blew up, I wanted to kill it.

  The most impressive display of barking came a few days after I’d come home, when my daughter Ava’s guitar teacher came over for the weekly lesson. Kevin is as soft-spoken and easygoing a guy as you’ll find anywhere. He’s also African American. I learned that day that when our dog sees a black guy, she goes ballistic. Tell me what’s wrong with this picture: Dark-skinned music teacher comes to the door, trained dog from North Carolina goes berserk, white owner tries—unsuccessfully—to control the dog by giving it commands . . . in German.

  Nein! Sitz! Fuss!

  The barking wasn’t the only problem. The dog had separation issues. One night we tried leaving her alone in the house, and when we got back we found that she had forced her way into the girls’ bedrooms, urinated on the carpeting in both rooms, and defecated there for good measure. She was having a lot of potty accidents in the house, especially at night. Since I’m the morning person, guess who stepped in it every time.

  Out of fairness to the dog, I should point out that she was still new to our home, she had surely been abused before being abandoned, and she was only a year old and therefore still a puppy. She behaved perfectly around women and especially around children. When I walked her, she never barked at strangers or at other dogs or even at squirrels. If I told her to sit, she sat. If I told her to wait, she waited. And everyone who saw this dog told me she was adorable. “She’s a movie-star dog!” was something I heard a lot. I assume it was meant as a compliment, but I’m married to someone who has worked with movie stars, so it doesn’t sound like a compliment to me. Dog people say she looks like a gigantic West Highland white terrier. I think she looks like a dust mop.

  Every morning during those dog days of summer, I got up before dawn, sat out in the backyard for a few minutes, and thought to myself, Today is going to be a good day. But then the chaos familiar to any parent with young kids would begin. The girls would start bickering, we would run out of milk, I’d open a cupboard and find it crawling with ants, a toilet would back up because someone had used too much paper, and no matter how hard I tried, it seemed I could never get the girls anywhere on time. They dragged their little feet and did everything at the last minute and could never find their shoes or their blankies or their hair bands or the brush that doesn’t hurt when you use it. By ten every morning, I felt as if I couldn’t take another minute of it, but there was no escape, and there were still ten hours to go until bedtime. And our bedtime ritual, which usually took about forty minutes, seemed to go on forever. It didn’t help that by that time of night, I had already had several glasses of bourbon just to keep from losing my mind. And after putting the girls to bed, I still had to walk the dog and collect her stool in little plastic bags.

  Then Erich called me with the results of Rachel’s autopsy. It turned out that she didn’t have an exotic virus from Central America after all. She’d entered the hospital with influenza—the flu—but on her second or third day there she got infected with staph, a highly antibiotic-resistant bacteria that has become endemic in hospitals. She may very well have lost her life because somebody forgot to wash their hands that day. If John Irving had done that to one of his characters in The World According to Garp, especially the mother of two little girls, I’d have thrown the book away a second time.

  Twenty

  TOWARD THE END OF JULY, Jessica surprised me with tickets for a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The composer Philip Glass was scheduled to conduct a performance of his musical score for the movie Koyaanisqatsi, and during the performance, the film was to be projected onto a giant screen behind the orchestra. We hired a sitter for this one—Philip Glass is a minimalist, and so far, our children seem to prefer maximalists in every category of human endeavor. We brought a bottle of wine and some food and watched the sky darken and the stars come out before the performance began. As soon as the music started, I was hypnotized.

  Koyaanisqatsi (a Navajo phrase meaning “things out of balance,” and pronounced something like KOI-yah-ni-SCOT-sie) is a wordless, plotless film. It’s a series of glimpses of our magnificent but troubled world—hundreds of them, seen through the lens of a master cinematographer: canyons, cave paintings, deserts, forests, cities, machines, insects, traffic patterns, smokestacks, escalators, mushroom clouds—presented without explanation. The music gives the film its emotional shape. As the music reaches its climax, a rocket appears on screen. It takes off, all controlled fury. It powers its way skyward; it is a perfect, flaming spear. But then it is overwhelmed by its own power. Its fury catches up with it and consumes it; it explodes. Whoever was filming the rocket launch chose to follow a single, jagged chunk of wreckage as it fell burning to Earth, and the music that accompanies this scene is a modernist requiem.

  That night, as I watched that piece of flaming metal tumble through the sky, in slow motion and in total free fall, I started to cry. At Rachel’s memorial service I had been unable to shed a tear, bu
t at the Hollywood Bowl it finally happened. The movie ended, but I couldn’t stop crying. I covered my face with my hands while the rest of the audience left the theater, and I kept my hands there as Jessica and I walked to the parking lot. I handed the keys over to her and cried all the way home as she drove. I cried as I undressed and cried until I fell asleep. The next morning, when I woke up, I felt better. But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened or even think about it.

  After seeing my reaction to that film, Jessica said to me: “I have an idea. It’s been years since you’ve had time to yourself. Why don’t you drive up to Idaho? You’ve always said you liked taking long drives by yourself. I’ll take care of the girls. You can stay up there for a week, then I’ll fly up with the kids to meet you there, and we’ll all drive home together.”

  We have a dear friend up in Idaho with a guest house that we stay in when we visit him. I called Greg and asked if the guest house was available. He said he would be out of town, but yes, by all means, use the house.

  But here’s the thing: I felt sure that I couldn’t relax on this trip knowing that Jessica would be working full time, watching both kids, and taking care of the dog without my help for ten more days. She’d just spent a month doing that while my sister was dying, and although Jessica never complains about anything, I knew that it hadn’t been easy, and I didn’t want her to have to do it again. So—believe it or not—I offered to take the dog with me.

  It was my idea, not Jessica’s or anybody else’s, proving once and for all that I’m a moron. I thought that maybe, if I wasn’t having to be a stay-at-home parent and grieving brother and panicked writer all at the same time, I might bond with the dog the way curmudgeons always do in heartwarming movies and bestselling books. I wanted that to happen. I didn’t enjoy feeling the way I felt; I didn’t want my kids to think that their daddy didn’t love their new best friend. I was determined to turn things around. If I bring her to Idaho, I told myself, she’ll lie at my feet and keep me company while I read and eat and nap and jot things down in my notebook. We’ll take walks together every day. By the time we return to Los Angeles, we’ll be inseparable.