Room for Doubt

by Wendy Lesser

  But not exactly like one. What Lenny offered to me, I now begin to see, was a sensation of the familial without the burdens of family. Families carry with them a deeply engraved history of everything that has ever happened within the family setting. This history is how you are known by the other members of your family, and while that knowledge can be reassuring in a way, it can also be imprisoning. No items of misbehavior are ever forgotten or erased—they just hang about in the grotesquely overstuffed family closet, waiting to fall out if anyone should open the door. In my own family, at least, no move toward or away from another family member can be made without this burdensome past intruding itself. But with Lenny, the past was only the length of time we had known each other, and nothing else was automatically entailed. I could stop speaking to him without guilt; I could re-engage without acrimony. It was a fantasy version of family, in which estrangement was always temporary and complete reconciliation was always possible.

  II.

  “In Arezzo, where you go to see frescoes by Piero

  della Francesca, there hangs a large, startling, magnificent

  crucifixion painted on wood by somebody

  unknown. The effect is disturbing. You expect

  to see a great name, and you're confronted by

  this crucifixion, impertinently and outrageously

  beautiful, by nobody.”

  —“Table Talk”

  It was during the trip to Italy, the one to visit Katharine and Lenny, that I first became smitten with Annunciations. We did not see all that many of them (that is, the dozen or two we did see were a small fraction of the paintings, frescoes, and altarpieces on this subject located within a hundred-mile radius of Lenny and Katharine's house), but we saw enough to make me feel there was something about the form itself that appealed to me. Was it the relationship between the two primary figures, the way they were almost always facing each other but somehow facing us as well, so that even a profile seemed communicative? Was it the fact that one was male and the other female, though neither was a sexual creature in any way? Was it the wings?

  In the Annunciation I remember best—Fra Angelico's fresco at San Marco, which you come to just as you reach the top of a flight of stairs—the wings are extraordinary. They are so large and detailed that they seem almost like a third figure standing beside Mary and Gabriel. In fact, they take up more space, and matter more to the composition of this picture, than the real third figure (it must be Joseph: a quiet, bearded man standing almost offstage, his hands folded in prayer) whom Fra Angelico has chosen to include in what is normally portrayed as a two-character drama. So the fresco is rather crowded on its left side, with a tall Angel Gabriel, his huge, beautiful wings, and a smaller, slightly obscured Joseph all facing Mary across the gap that takes up most of the painted surface. This gap is an architectural space resembling the actual monastery wall on which the fresco is painted— an arched, high-ceilinged, colonnaded room—but it is also a pool of light spreading across the wall and down the floor and filling in the area between the angel and the woman. It is as if the usual white dove or ray of light that represents the Holy Spirit in these scenes has been diffused and magnified to create an intense zone of pure whiteness, of nothingness that is also everythingness. To my eye, the beauty of this picture has been enhanced rather than damaged by the series of small cracks that now run through the space between Mary and Gabriel— as if to stress that this is indeed a destructible wall behind them, and not just a timeless emanation of light, though it is that too.

  It is strange that I can feel so intensely about Annunciations without having any feeling for God at all. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that if I have any feeling about God, it is utterly negative. I don't believe he exists but I dislike him anyway. Nothing in my life justifies this attitude: unlike Job, I don't have a particularly valid gripe against God. But I have managed, in my typical fashion, to convert a rational sense of disbelief into a more personal emotion. Raised as an agnostic, I have instead turned out to be a full-blown atheist, with an intense reaction against almost any form of religious observance. My rational agnostic side is what makes a philosopher like David Hume so attractive to me, but my faith-based atheism makes me much more like Lenny, who was eminently capable of holding two logically conflicting positions at once. Like Lenny, I am personally offended at God's demonstrably bad administrative performance; and like Lenny, I have chosen to replace God with art.

  Lenny always felt strongly about the visual arts. I believe he even wanted to be a painter himself, in his youth. Part of the reason he was so attached to Italy was its abundance of wonderful art: it moved him to be surrounded by so much manmade beauty. I remember that when he first visited Venice at the age of sixty-three, he could barely enjoy the initial pleasure because he was already thinking about how much he would be longing to come back after he left. He loved art partly because it seemed to last forever and partly because it didn't.

  I don't know the names of all the artists Lenny cared deeply about—he was always surprising me with new ones, and it wasn't until after he died that I learned, for instance, that Arshile Gorky was a favorite. But among the ones I knew about, I thought I could detect something in common. What seemed to attract Lenny, whether in the self-portraits of Max Beckmann or the sculptures of Michelangelo, was art that acknowledged its own tortured origins. He liked—but that is probably not the right word—he needed to see the artist's agony written across the face of the finished work; that is what drew Lenny in and made him feel connected. In this respect, all art was expressionism to him, even Renaissance angels and medieval saints. He understood art, as he understood everything else, through his own intensity of response.

  About two years before Lenny died (though obviously at that point I did not think of time in that way), my husband and I acquired a painting. We had bought small works on paper and decorative ceramics before, alone and together, but we had never yet bought something as large as a museum-sized painting. This one, called Shangri-la, was an eight-foot-long portrayal of a Victorian dollhouse (the walls of the dollhouse were coterminous with the edges of the painting, so all you could see were the rooms themselves) inhabited by elegantly dressed skeletons. In one room, a young girl skeleton in a red dress played the piano while her skullheaded grandfather and grandmother sat by listening. In the bedroom directly above that, a peignoir-clad mother skeleton sat preening at her dressing table while her husband rested comfortably in his rocking chair, his hollow-eyed skull grinning above his smoking jacket. In what was clearly the nursery, baby skeletons frolicked with dolls and toys while a nanny skeleton in formal maid's garb watched tenderly over them. The bathroom was occupied by what I took to be a skeletal aunt, a large, jolly, tweed-skirted character gesturing broadly at herself in the mirror. The biggest room of all, clearly a dining room, held two cigar-smoking men-skulls desultorily conversing over their port; at the opposite end of the room, past the whole length of the recently deserted, white-cloth-covered table, sat a bony-armed young spinster in a ravishing pink gown and a goldenhaired little girl skeleton (not unlike the central figure in Velázquez's Las Meninas) propped up in an upholstered armchair. In its shape and arrangement and decor, down to the very color of its strange blue wall, this long room uncannily resembled the dining room of our own Victorian house.

  It was clear, from the moment we saw this painting, that my husband and I would probably have to buy it. (We saw it in a show of contemporary Andalusian art, which featured four painters we had never heard of; the painting we loved was by a man named Curro González.) It was equally clear that there were many obstacles in our path. There was, first of all, the cost— about nine times more than we had ever paid for any piece of art before. Then there was the question of where to hang it: in our dining room, obviously, but could our guests tolerate eating under the gaze of these supervising skeletons? And what about us? There was no question in our minds that it was a good painting. The question was whether we could live with it.


  And I, on the top of all these other anxieties, found myself becoming uncharacteristically superstitious. I thought it might be bad luck, of some as-yet-unimaginable kind, to introduce these specters into our house; I feared we were asking for trouble. It seems silly now, but such worries weighed on me.

  After a few days of fruitless dithering and then delicate negotiating (because some dear friends who had seen the painting when we did also wanted to buy it— that's how evidently good it was), we wrote out the check and became the rightful owners. The huge canvas, when it was finally delivered to us, went straight up onto the dining room wall, the first wall you see as you enter our house. We were excited but also nervous, because although the deliverymen had been vocal in their admiration, our son (who had not been present on the buying trip) had his doubts. Was it still possible that we might come to regret our purchase? We couldn't be sure.

  In the days following its arrival, I would come home from the office at odd intervals to visit the painting. It took over the whole front room and gave it a new kind of life (strange to think of skeletons giving life, but these were very lively skeletons). It seemed to me to be an extra window out of our dining room, allowing us to look into a fascinating, dreamy, imagined past—rather than, say, a scary, impending, personal future. My superstitious anxieties disappeared. And yet I still wondered what all our friends would think of it. Until, that is, Lenny arrived on one of his periodic visits from Italy and, after meeting me for our usual lunch at a neighborhood café, came back to the house to see the painting.

  He stood in the doorway and took the whole thing in.

  He didn't flinch or shy away; there was nothing here that terrified him. Then he stepped closer to the painting and examined every panel, every room. He noted the cunningly carved table legs (of which there seemed to be an inordinate number), and the jolly woman in the bathroom, and the little blonde girl, and the profusion of entrancing household objects, including the barely discernible paintings on their walls. And then he sighed a deep sigh of approval. “Yeah,” he said with a smile, “it's a good painting.”

  Since he died, I have searched our Curro González for the agony I find in most art Lenny loved. And, other than the obvious matter of the subject, I cannot see anything bleak or melancholy or tortured in it. Now that I know a bit more about what real death is like, this painting does not seem to me to be about death at all, but about some strange kind of life-in-death, or life-after-death, or life-defying-death. I do not find the painting consoling, but that is not what it means to be. I find it companionable. Maybe that is what Lenny saw in it, too.

  I2.

  “Of course there is all of King Lear to consider as a

  moment of soul. To try to say why that play is

  good you really wouldn't want the analytical

  genius of any critic who ever lived, but something

  more like the boundless enthusiasm of a moron.”

  —“ On Culture and Anarchy”

  Perhaps one of the reasons it is taking me so long to adjust to Lenny's death is that I couldn't feel sad while he was dying. I don't mean I couldn't feel anxious, or upset, or exhausted, or any of those other hospital-illness emotions; I felt all those. But partly because the whole thing went so quickly, and partly because I was so worried about Katharine, and partly because I kept hoping, long after it was medically rational to do so, that he wasn't going to die, I couldn't summon up a full sense of his impending death until it was actually over.

  Sometimes you rehearse experiences beforehand, without even knowing that's what you're doing, and maybe this is what happened to me with Lenny's death. If I had trouble summoning up the appropriate emotions while he was dying, it might have been because I had misspent those emotions on the rehearsal. I had no idea, at the time, that I was preparing for anything, but in retrospect that's what I seem to have been doing.

  A few weeks before Lenny found out he was sick, I sat through Frederick Wiseman's six-hour documentary about the dying. I had been avoiding Near Death for many years: it had first aired on television when my son was only a few months old, and since I knew I wouldn't have the energy or the time to get through it at that point, I didn't even try. Over the intervening years I had many other opportunities to see it. I even became acquainted with the filmmaker himself, who offered to send me tapes of any of the movies I had missed, but though I asked for others, I didn't ask for that one. Then, at last, it appeared on the schedule of the film archive near my house, conveniently separated into two three-hour segments, one on Saturday afternoon and the other on Sunday. I knew, then, that the experience could no longer be evaded.

  Like all Wiseman documentaries, Near Death brings its subjects intimately before the viewer. There is no narrator, except the implicit one displayed in the editing decisions, and there is no story-line, except the one that naturally arises when human lives are intelligently captured on film. In this case, the normal Wisemanesque sense of being thrust into other people's lives is exacerbated by the setting itself—that is, the intensive care ward of a major hospital, in which terminally ill patients are being treated by doctors and visited by relatives. Over the course of the six hours, you develop strong feelings about the individual patients and their medical fates; some of the relatives come to seem heroic, and some of the doctors less so. The experience of watching the film is both riveting and devastating, and I wept unashamedly through most of it. But it was not quite the cathartic crying that is evoked by, say, a good production of King Lear. It was unmitigatedly painful—so much so that I wondered, at the end of the first three-hour segment, whether I would be able to bear coming back for the rest. By the end of the second half, I was so wrecked with sorrow that I could hardly function in the polite social setting I had committed myself to for that Sunday evening; in fact, I excused myself early and went home to bed. I felt (or rather, I thought I felt, because I did not yet have any real experience to compare it to) as if four or five people I knew had just died in the hospital.

  When Katharine and I were young, we used to amuse ourselves with Hamlet's line about the actor: “What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” We converted it to all our trivial uses—applying it to neurotic fellow-students who reacted excessively to small mishaps, or to overly demanding boyfriends who queried our every move, or to employers who expected us to spend all our waking hours on their consulting project. It was a joke then, though a good and useful one. But as I have grown older, I have come to see it as the central question in my way of thinking about art and life. What makes me care so much about the characters in plays and films and novels? Does it matter to me, should it matter to me, that they are fictional rather than real? Do real people become in some way fictional if their deaths are converted into an artwork by William Shakespeare? How about an artwork by Frederick Wiseman? (Or by Lenny? Or by me?) What, if anything, is lost when this happens?

  I still like to think about such questions, but I have become impatient with the kind of aesthetic philosophy that tries to answer them. In every case, the particular instance now seems to me too complicated to be covered by a generalization, and this has caused me to become distrustful of theories that once struck me as plausible. I used to believe, for example, in Walter Benjamin's assertion that “what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Now I am less sure.

  What I do know is that I was able to cry for the dying patients in Near Death in a way that I was not able to cry for Lenny. Perhaps, as I say, I had used up my tears on the movie, in unconscious anticipation of the event that would require them of me. Perhaps tears themselves had come under suspicion, since they could so easily be drawn out of me by the filmed fates of strangers. Perhaps the demands of Lenny's dying put pressures on me that made tears irrelevant, or unnecessary, or even forbidden. I can't say. All I know is that I couldn't cry for him until after he was dead.

  Only three and a half weeks passed between th
e day Lenny checked into Alta Bates Hospital and the night he died. Before this, there had been almost no warning: a few persistent stomach pains, the decision to go for some tests in Italy, and then, like a hammer blow, the Italian diagnosis. (It turned out to be wrong in the details—they had him with stomach cancer, not lymphoma—but right in its dire prediction.) Against all odds, Katharine got him out of the smalltown Italian hospital and onto a flight to America. The Italian doctors hadn't wanted to release him. “Do you want to take him back to America because you think the medicine is better there?” one of the doctors asked her challengingly

  “I want to take him back to America because his children are there, and our friends are there, and that is where we feel at home,” she said in her perfect Italian, and then she looked the doctor in the eye and said, “If it were you, what would you do?”

  “I would want to go home,” he agreed.

  Katharine has always been a very strong person, and a very rational person. She dealt with Lenny's irrationality (and, at times, with mine) by remaining calm and sane. So it was painful and shocking to see how she disintegrated at the prospect of Lenny's death. She did not collapse or yield to circumstances or give up—she organized his care, talked to all his doctors and nurses, got a huge circle of friends involved and kept an even larger circle at bay—but she in some way loosed her hold, temporarily, on her own coherent personality. The Katharine I encountered during those three and a half weeks was one I had never seen before, and I was frightened for her in a way I never could have imagined. People had to force her to eat a meal or catch a few hours of sleep; she had given up remembering, and perhaps wishing, to stay alive herself. She almost never left the hospital, even at night—especially at night, because that was when she feared Lenny would wake up alone and miss her. Every sudden turn in his condition, and there were at least three or four of them, drove her almost mad with grief. I do not say this lightly or metaphorically: what I saw in her during those few weeks was a terrifying abyss of irrationality, which seemed to be her only refuge from the otherwise unendurable pain. She became superstitious—not like Lenny, with his careful calculus of equivalences and exchanges, but like an old Italian woman afraid of the Evil Eye. On one horrible day, for instance, when Lenny was in surgery for seven hours, she seemed to think (but I know she did not really believe this) that if she kept the door to the cancer-ward waiting room closed, no bad news could come through it. I had to persuade her that Lenny's other family members were stifling in the airless room, and that she could achieve the same effect if she kept her back to the door, talking to me for hours on end about the friends she and Lenny had made in Italy, the life they had created there.