This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Also by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  FICTION

  Two-Part Inventions

  The Writing on the Wall

  Referred Pain

  In the Family Way

  The Fatigue Artist

  Leaving Brooklyn

  Disturbances in the Field

  The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories

  Acquainted with the Night

  Balancing Acts

  Rough Strife

  NONFICTION

  Not Now, Voyager

  The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (editor)

  Ruined by Reading

  Face to Face

  We Are Talking About Homes

  A Lynne Sharon Schwartz Reader

  POEMS

  In Solitary

  See You in the Dark

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  The Four Questions

  TRANSLATIONS

  Smoke over Birkenau, by Liana Millù

  A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg

  Aldabra, by Silvana Gandolfi

  this is

  where

  we

  came in

  ■

  Copyright © Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schwartz, Lynne Sharon.

  This is where we came in : intimate glimpses / Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

  pages cm

  1. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon.2. Authors, American—20th century—

  Biography. I. Title.

  PS3569.C567Z46 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  [B]

  2013029182

  ISBN 978-1-61902-359-8

  Cover design by Natalya Bolnova

  Counterpoint Press

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  Contents

  You Gotta Have Heart

  This Is Where We Came In

  “I Wish I Could Say the Same”

  Stone Reader

  Intimacy. Anger

  Yes, New York, There Are Baby Pigeons

  Wheelchair Yoga

  Thriving on Hardship

  Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw

  Letters from Robben Island

  The Piano

  Street Food

  Absence Makes the Heart

  Meditations in Time of War

  Carlos Saura’s Cria!

  Ultimate Peek-a-boo

  Listening to Anthony Powell

  Reality Tour

  Alone with the Cat

  Acknowledgments

  You Gotta Have Heart

  CIGARETTES

  A pack of Vantage containing two cigarettes was in my coat pocket when I arrived at the hospital. It was a bitter morning in late December. The angiogram was scheduled for eleven o’clock, at least I had been told to be there at eleven o’clock, but it didn’t take place until three in the afternoon. I made a scene over this at hourly intervals, first arguing with the receptionist in the waiting room, then insisting on being admitted past the swinging double doors behind which others before me had disappeared, to confront whoever was in charge back there. Just because they were the authorities, the medical bureaucracy, I wasn’t going to be a meek cipher in their hands. I would begin this journey in the right spirit.

  But no matter how vehemently I railed against the injustice and lack of consideration, the angiogram didn’t take place until three o’clock.

  The surgeon had advised that I stay at the hospital after the angiogram, since the heart surgery would begin around six the next morning: why go home merely to get up in the middle of the night and return? This seemed sensible and I agreed. My plan was that once the angiogram was over—I understood you had to lie still for an hour or so afterwards—assuming I survived, I would go out with my husband for a cup of coffee and to smoke what would be my last cigarettes for quite a while. Maybe forever. Again, assuming I survived. Whenever doctors or nurses lean over my body preparing to insert something in a place not designed to be penetrated, I feel endangered. During the angiogram, they would be making a hole in my groin and threading a tube straight up to my heart; it sounded like an unwieldy as well as unnatural procedure, but many before me had survived it and most likely I would too.

  While it was in progress, though, I had my doubts. I wasn’t completely unconscious; I had enough awareness to hear the older doctor telling the younger one—a very young doctor, his bare face sticking out of the plastic shower cap was cherubic—what to do, how to guide the tube inside me, and so on. I said, “Why so much instruction? Are you actually teaching him how to do this on me?” The older doctor laughed, ha-ha. “No, of course he knows how to do it.”

  I didn’t want to distract them from the lesson, and so I desisted. Also, I really wasn’t up for a dialogue; I was too entranced by the drug. I’m not sure what they gave me—if I were, I’d try to get a prescription—but it was something that leaves you half awake and aware, and yet everything happening to your body, as well as the people working on it, seems at a great remove. So close and yet so far. Something unnatural is happening to you, but it’s painless, and anyway, “you” are not the same singular entity as before: there’s the body that belongs to you (who else?) and then there’s your dimmed consciousness, looking on from afar. A great drug, but it wears off quickly.

  Instead of carrying out my plan of the cup of coffee and cigarettes afterwards, I found myself being led into an elevator by an orderly, deposited on a floor, and assigned a room, a rather nice private room: a luxury floor. The room had the usual hospital paraphernalia and TV protruding from the wall like a hunter’s stuffed moose head, but it also had the mildly pleasant, expectant, scentless air of a hotel room, and that was how I intended to treat it. I began getting out of the grotesque hospital gown—white with little blue circles, not dots but donut-like circles, little O’s. Later I found that this garment, whose only accommodations to the shape of the human body were enormous sleeves and a string to be tied at the neck, also came in sky blue with no circles.

  I can’t help wondering if there is some reason—economy, perhaps, or mere thoughtlessness?—why these hospital gowns have to be quite so humiliatingly ugly. I know they have to be open so that the body within is fully accessible to the professionals who will handle it, but must it be ugly besides? Adding insult to injury, so to speak? Would it cost so much more to use the services of a designer, maybe not someone first-rate like Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren—that would be an extravagance—but some young person just starting out who’d be grateful for the work? It would be only a onetime thing.

  I was reaching for my street clothes when a nurse came in to the room. “What are you doing?” she asked, gazing at me and my husband, who sat in one of the pink plastic chairs.

  “Getting dressed,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to leave the gown on,” she said.

  “My surgery isn’t until tomorrow morning and it’s not even six yet. We’re going out to get a cup of coffee.” Despite my pose of bravado, I knew enough not to mention the cigarettes.

  She was no Sue Barton but a stern-looking nurse of the old school: stocky, short hair in a mannish cut, sharp voice, no nonsense. “You’re not going anywhere. This is your room. You’ll stay here until they call for you.”


  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “The surgery isn’t until tomorrow, as I said. The angiogram is over. There’s nothing you need me for. I’m going out. I promise I’ll return for dinner,” I said with a little chuckle, to lighten the situation. I didn’t want to make this a fight over my civil rights, or rather I did—but without being pompous, as such fights are liable to be. I tied my sneakers as I spoke.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, a bit more gently, as if indeed the rules hadn’t been explained to me properly. “You are a patient.”

  My mother used to tell me that I had no patience. She also used to say, during my minor childhood illnesses, that I was a terrible patient, I suppose meaning fretful, demanding and impatient. Maybe because I’ve been labeled impatient, I’ve always disliked the homophonic connection between the noun patient, the sick person, and the adjective patient, the character trait. They come from the same Latin root, meaning suffering or enduring, and it’s easy to see why that root branched out in the two directions and parts of speech. But that doesn’t mean that a patient necessarily is or ought to be patient, that is to say, according to the dictionary definition, “enduring pain, trouble, affliction hardship, etc., with fortitude, calmness, or quiet submission.” Certainly it makes practical sense to endure one’s ailment with fortitude and calmness (not that practical sense ever played a large part in determining my attitudes). But must a patient also endure with “quiet submission” the thousand and one well-documented indignities of hospital life? I would think a patient’s patience is already being sufficiently tried by illness; she shouldn’t be expected to muster still more reserves of patience for those indignities. Rather it’s the doctors and nurses who should be patient with the already patient patient.

  All the same, after my husband went home and I began anticipating the events of the next morning, the fighting spirit deserted me. I was a patient. I put on the hospital gown, ate the hospital dinner, and settled into bed with a fat Henning Mankell mystery. All that was missing was a cigarette, one of the two in my coat pocket, but I didn’t dare. It was a good thing I didn’t, because the nurse entered and seemed pleased to find I had surrendered like a chastised child. She gave me a stack of papers to sign granting the hospital permission to do with me as it would, and I signed without really reading them, just a quick glance. I was in no mood to contemplate whatever I was agreeing to. Then she gave me a thick folder full of information about hearts and heart surgery, complete with diagrams and charts. “This literature may be helpful to you,” she said. “It will familiarize you with your surgery, and with what goes on in the heart in general, how it functions and how to take good care of it.”

  I accepted the folder politely but had no intention of spending what might be my final hours reading its contents. In my heart I was thinking, So this “literature” will tell me what goes on in the heart? As if I didn’t know! I’d spent years of my life reading about the heart. There was little I didn’t know. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The Heart of the Matter. The Heart of Matter. In the Heart of the Country. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. A Simple Heart. Near to the Wild Heart. The Mortgaged Heart. Heart of Darkness. Change of Heart. Crimes of the Heart. Habits of the Heart. The heart has its reasons, Pascal said.

  THE SURGEON

  Weeks before the surgery, I meet the surgeon for the first time. He is a young man, quite good-looking in the common way of well-bred American white males, so common I barely notice them: dark hair, squarish face, neatly shaped features. Charlie Sheen, say, or the younger Tom Cruise. Courteous manners. He explains the “procedure.” I ask him what kind of valve, animal or artificial, he will use to replace my faulty one. I thought I’d have some say in the choice once I was apprised of the advantages and disadvantages of each, but now that we sit here contemplating the surgery, I realize he’s not the kind of doctor who will welcome my input; he is most definitely the decider, as George Bush used to say, and that’s okay with me because I don’t really have an opinion. He says animal.

  “What kind of animal? A pig?”

  “No. A horse.”

  There is a pause, as I consider horses as opposed to pigs. “This may sound like a silly question,” I say, “but isn’t a horse valve a little large for me?”

  He laughs. I made him laugh, quite unintentionally. There was a saying we had back in Brooklyn, that some girls think they’re hot shit because they can make a man laugh in bed, the joke being that this is pretty easy to do, within the range of almost anyone. “We don’t use the entire valve,” he says. “We make a valve from material in the horse’s heart.”

  Oh. What about those horses? Is it like organ transplants—someone young and healthy is in an auto accident and their intact, barely used organs are rushed to a patient who needs them? No, I doubt it. Horses don’t get into auto accidents. Are they horses who’ve outlived their usefulness and are put out to pasture, like Black Beauty, whom I wept over in adolescence, to spend the remainder of their lives at ease, as in a nursing home? (Though people in nursing homes tend to decline and die faster than those cared for at home.) And then the horses die of natural causes but have agreed beforehand to allow their organs to be used for humanitarian purposes? I mean of course that their owners agreed. Perhaps their owners got paid for the heart parts; yes, surely they got paid.

  Now that I think of it, sitting here facing the young, generically handsome and self-assured doctor, I actually prefer a horse to a pig, if I have to have some other species inside me. I don’t feel fastidious or repelled by the prospect of carrying around a part from another species; after all, we’re all in this together, all creatures great and small. Nor am I a snob about animals. But I think most people would allow that horses are more attractive than pigs. As I’m staring at the doctor—a button on his right shirt cuff is loose and dangling, it could fall off any minute—it occurs to me that perhaps Orthodox Jews with a faulty aortic valve would not permit a pig’s valve to be lodged inside them. If their doctor opted for a pig, they might protest and insist on a horse—no cloven foot. If no horses were available, those people would have to have an artificial valve. Also I read somewhere that Orthodox Jews, whose wives and daughters wear wigs covering their natural hair, stopped permitting wigs made of Indian hair. Indian hair is the best hair for wigs, and perhaps the best hair all around, period. There is a thriving business in selling Indian women’s hair. But the Orthodox Jews thought that some of the original women’s Hindu-ness might have infiltrated into the hair and thus would violate the heads of their new wearers. Well, I’m not an Orthodox Jew, so I needn’t concern myself with hair just now, or with the doctor’s loose button. Just pigs and horses.

  Like a pubescent girl, I love horses. I even rode horses, though not well, in my teen years. My family spent the summers in a bungalow colony in the Catskills, whose aggressive dullness I loathed, but its saving grace was the nearby hotel where you could rent horses and ride around on the dirt roads. My favorite horse was called Brownie, very gentle, and I learned to trot, to post properly, and even to canter, before I got old enough to stay home alone in the summers. In Brooklyn a few times, I rented horses at a stable near Bergen Beach and rode along the ocean. I felt I was in a movie: the surf, the sand, the sky, the horse and me on it. I rode just two or three more times as an adult, and then the equestrienne part of my life was over.

  But I do know horses, at least a bit, and I would like to know the provenance of the piece of horse heart about to be lodged in my own: was he or she a farm horse, a police horse, maybe a prize racehorse? I enjoy the races. I’ve been to the track lots of times, both Belmont and Saratoga, with my husband and friends. Could I possibly be harboring a piece of a horse I’ve seen in a race, a horse I might have bet on, and won with?

  “Okay,” I say. “A horse.” I’m trying to think of suitable and intelligent questions to ask. “How do you get to the valve? I mean mine, not the horse’s.”

  “We reach in,” he says, not exactly tersely, but in a tone th
at means he doesn’t care to elaborate.

  We reach in. I’ve remembered those words ever since as a kind of magic formula, an Open Sesame, as it were. So ominous, so graphic and yet so vague, enigmatic. They reach into me. Me! This man would touch my heart as no man ever had before.

  The only other question I have for the surgeon was, Will I die by your knife? and it certainly isn’t suitable to ask that. What do I expect? Of course he’ll say I’ll be fine. He’ll probably say, with a confident chuckle, that he’s done this hundreds of times, thousands. Later on I thought of many specific and important questions, but at the time, as I confront him before the surgery, my mind is blank. It seems I should know him better than one brief appointment’s worth, since he would be opening my chest and handling my heart. And yet he’s a virtual stranger. It’s like going to bed with someone when all you know about him is his name, if that.

  “How long is the recovery period?” I ask as I get up to leave.

  “Two weeks,” he says.

  MILD, SEVERE, CRITICAL

  It wasn’t as if I was undertaking this surgery under duress, as it may appear from my recalcitrance. No, strictly speaking, I chose it. I’d known about the faulty valve for several years, but at first the cardiologist, a gentle, rotund, clear-eyed youngish man, said the situation was “mild.” Unless and until it progressed through “moderate” to “severe,” to “critical,” at which point it would require surgery, I should forget about it and carry on with my normal life. In that instance, I was more than willing to obey the doctor without question. At this rate, “critical” would not arrive for many years, I thought, maybe so many years that I would already be dead and therefore no surgery would be necessary. I carried on. Until one day after a stress test, the cardiologist directed his steady gaze at me and said the state of the valve had passed “severe” and was near “critical.” He strongly recommended surgery. Soon.

  “Are you serious?” I said, still panting from the stress test, sitting on the examining table, my legs dangling down. The idea of undergoing surgery had no reality for me, even though I’d seen several members of my family go through it. From my husband’s bypass operation six years ago, I knew intimately what open-heart surgery entailed.