by Sigrid Nunez
During his trial, the killer, aware of all the attention his case has drawn, imagines that a book about him will be written—a best-selling book that will then be made into a major motion picture. It occurs to him that whoever plays him in the movie will have to be not just a good actor but also a great dancer. That, of course, would be John Travolta. And that is how we leave him: sentenced to life in prison, and fantasizing himself on-screen, in the person of John Travolta.
The book goes on for about another fifty pages, but I’m not sure I’ll read them now that the fate of the killer has been decided. I suppose probably there is some kind of twist ahead, but I’m not so fond of twists in mystery novels.
* * *
—
There was a bookstore in the shopping mall. When we dropped in to browse, my friend noticed before I did: Look who’s coming to town.
To be precise, it was the next town, at one of the state university’s campuses. “How Bad Can It Get.” A conference on global crises.
A week from that day, according to the poster.
The wonder of certain coincidences.
Any interest in going? she asked.
I reminded her that I’d already heard that talk. Not to mention having read the article it was based on.
Right, she said. I forgot.
I hope you won’t mind my saying I always thought he was a jerk, she added.
One of those aggressive, arrogant, entitled male journalists, she called him, reeling off the names of several other conformers to the type.
Nevertheless, he was the one I had turned to. He was the one to whom I’d told everything. He was the one I’d be calling when this whole ordeal was over. But I don’t say any of this.
* * *
—
My friend, who is probably the best-read person I know, has been having trouble reading. Ever since my diagnosis, she said. The only time in her life when she wasn’t in the middle of several books at once and all eager to move on to new ones.
She had tried turning to books she’d already read, she told me, the ones that had meant the most to her.
But the old magic just isn’t there, she said. My favorite writers, my favorite books—they don’t affect me like they did before. I don’t have the patience. It’s really not so different from reading bad stuff, you know. The way I keep wanting to say, Why are you telling me all this?
I tell her about another writer, who wrote on a literary journal’s blog about a visit to a former professor whose passion for modern literature had inspired and helped shape the writer when he was a student. Now wheelchair-bound and with much time on his hands, the professor reported that he’d been rereading modern masters—Faulkner, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and so on. To the writer’s question How did they hold up? the old man replied that they did not. Like completely empty performances, he judged them. Not worth it at all.
But it’s not just reading, my friend said. It’s hard for me to know what I should pay attention to anymore. It’s been very strange with music, for example. I used to like listening to different kinds of music, she said, but now it’s become something of an irritant. Who’d have thought?
Most pop songs sounded drearily the same to her, she said. And the inanity of the lyrics (Why no exceptions to this rule, ever? she asked), which had never really bothered her before, now depressed her.
And lately a lot of classical music also seemed to depress her, she said. It was too much. Too serious, too moving. Too, too unbearably sad, she said.
I was startled to hear this. Recently, classical music had begun unsettling me in much the same way. Music I once loved and considered a blessing and a balm I could no longer listen to, a change I didn’t at all understand but that I found heartbreaking.
The owners of the house had a passion for old films. Among their large collection of DVDs was Make Way for Tomorrow, a film neither of us had seen before. I was eager to see it when I remembered that it had been an inspiration for Ozu’s great film Tokyo Story.
The Depression. Having lost their house and all their savings, an elderly couple are forced to turn for help to their children. They don’t want to be a burden; in fact the man makes every effort to remain the breadwinner he’d been all his hardworking life, but finding a job at his age turns out to be impossible. To the children, having to deal with parents in needy old age is a burden indeed, and they do little to hide their resentment. Ma and Pa, happily married for more than fifty years, can’t bear the thought of separation, but to the children this is the only fair and workable solution. At first supposedly just temporary, the separation is set to become permanent when Pa is forced to move to the home of a daughter living many miles from where Ma has been placed with a son and his wife. The children have arranged a farewell dinner for their parents, but, devastated by their children’s betrayal, and relishing the last day they’re given to be together before the man must leave for California, the two decide to skip the dinner and make it a night out on their own. They dine together at the very hotel where they spent their honeymoon. Comes the hour when the old man must catch his train. At the station, though they gamely behave as if it’s not the last time they’ll ever see each other (Pa will find a job out west, he’ll send for Ma, they’ll be together again soon, never to be parted), it is only too clear (to them, to us) how their story will end.
The saddest picture ever made, Orson Welles called it.
We watched it sitting side by side on the sofa, choking and clutching at each other like two people hopelessly trying to save each other from drowning.
Which is not to say that we regretted having watched it; no matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.
The owners of the house were into Buster Keaton. We watched Buster Keaton running downhill, dodging an avalanche of rocks, trying to put his passed-out drunk wife to bed, running from an army of cops, getting tangled up in the ropes of a boxing ring, trying to put his passed-out drunk wife to bed, being bullied by various much larger men, loving and being loved by a big brown cow, trying to put his passed-out drunk wife to bed. We watched Buster Keaton fall down, fall down, and fall down again, we watched the bed collapse under his passed-out drunk wife, and we laughed and laughed, choking and clutching at each other like two people hopelessly trying to save each other from drowning.
* * *
—
My friend had been doing yoga for many years—she’d even once had a part-time job as a yoga instructor. There were two yoga studios in town offering two different kinds of yoga classes, but she had no interest in either of them. Like many other people, she’d been doing yoga mainly to help her stay physically fit. Nothing to do with enlightenment. Whatever people might claim, she said, she herself had never witnessed any spiritual growth, any improvement in the moral character of any person she’d known who did yoga—and the number of people she’d known who did yoga was vast—she had never seen anyone who could be said to have become a better person by doing yoga, she said, unless being a better person meant feeling better about yourself; if anything, she said, she had seen people become increasingly self-centered, something she’d seen also in some people who were in psychotherapy. In any case, she didn’t have to care about being fit anymore. Since her diagnosis the only exercise she enjoyed was walking. Depending on how well she felt, we took walks around town or through the nature preserve, though there were days when she had to go very slowly and days when she had to stop and sit and rest along the way. Usually we went out together, though sometimes when I got up in the morning she was already out, on her own. She was often up very early, before the light; I had the impression sometimes she’d been up all night, though she insisted that she was in fact sleeping quite well. No fear of losing consciousness, no fear of the dark, so common among people facing death. It was because she wasn’t afraid, she thought; it was because she was ready to go. She had discovered that, unlike the pleasure of mus
ic, the pleasure of birdsong had not diminished. It was one of the things that drew her out to the nature preserve in the early hours. There’ll be birdsong in heaven, she said, if heaven exists.
I wasn’t interested in yoga either, but I sought out the nearest gym, a sports club located in the same shopping mall as the bookstore, where I was told I could pay to work out without buying a membership as long as I did so with one of their personal trainers. If I came around the same hour each time, I could work with the same trainer. I would have much preferred to be on my own. I don’t like having someone standing by watching and counting so that I can’t quietly think my own thoughts while exercising, and the personal trainers I see working at my regular gym often look so bored.
The trainer, though all tattooed tight muscle, had the face of a choirboy and a choirboy’s pure treble.
We got off to a bad start when he addressed me as “young lady.” Even after he learned my name, he sometimes called me young lady. But there was an earnestness about him that I liked, and he never looked bored. And, after registering the terseness and evasiveness with which I responded to the questions he asked me about myself, he stopped trying to draw me out and we got through our thirty-minute sessions without chatter.
Have you ever done burpees?
I had.
Think you can do ten in thirty seconds?
I could.
Well, that was impressive. You’re pretty strong, young lady.
I was also pretty winded. As I was catching my breath I remembered what my friend had said, about her fear that being in such good physical shape would only make her death throes more agonizing. It sank in then, like a spear. No hope, death near, the mind wanting only release, and the body, with a mind of its own, desperately struggling to stay alive, the weakening heart with every beat panting no, no, no.
How terrible. How cruel. How absurd.
Is something wrong? asked the trainer.
I shook my head, but then immediately blurted that a friend of mine was dying.
I’m sorry, he said. Is there anything I can do? Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion. A high school teacher once made us read Henry James’s famous letter to his grief-stricken friend Grace Norton, held up since its publication as a sublime example of sympathy and understanding. Even he begins by saying, “I hardly know what to say.”
Let’s sit down, my trainer said. And we did, we sat down together on one of the thick padded exercise mats on the floor.
I wish I could give you a hug, he said. But we’re not allowed to touch clients anymore. The manager is afraid of a lawsuit or whatever. It’s a problem, because it can be hard to make corrections and explain things like proper alignment with just words. And touch is so important.
My face was in my towel now. My shoulders were jerking.
So you’ll just have to imagine it, he said. Imagine my arms around you right now in a big warm hug. His voice cracked. I’m sorry, he said. Ever since I was a kid, I can’t not cry when I see someone else crying.
That’s because you’re still a kid, I said without speaking.
After we had each collected ourselves he said, It’s so good that you’re working out. Exercise is the best medicine for stress. And please know that I’m always here for you.
But after that day I would not go back. In fact, it would be a very long time before I could bring myself to work out again.
When we were saying goodbye he said, I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. Promise me you won’t forget about self-care.
I closed my eyes so that he would not see me roll them.
I was in the parking lot when I heard him shrill my name.
I’m sorry, he said as he jogged up to me. I just couldn’t let you go like that. Then, after a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, he gave me a big warm hug.
On the way back to the house I imagined myself sharing this story with my friend, before I caught myself and realized that I could not do that.
I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.
III
Off to the gym, I told my friend. Back soon.
In truth, I was meeting my ex. We had arranged to have brunch at one of the town’s waterside restaurants the morning after his event at the conference.
When I asked him how it had gone, he shrugged.
“They weren’t happy about my not taking questions. Someone said it would be seen as cowardly. There was a time when that would’ve mattered to me.”
“No more?”
“Nevermore.”
“You don’t care what people think about you anymore.”
“Of course I do. But, like most people, I’ve spent way too much time caring about what other people think of me. My image. My reputation. I’m not sure they ever really mattered, or at least not as much as I thought they did. Not that I can’t name far stupider things I’ve wasted half my life thinking about. I’m obsessed these days with the kinds of things people are paying attention to in spite of the elephant herd in the room. I get a kick out of the New York Times home page, scrolling down from the ghastly headlines to their better living feature or whatever it’s called: How to have better posture. How to clean your bathroom. How to pack a school lunch.”
“Smarter living.” There have been times in my life when focusing on things like cleaning the bathroom helped keep me sane. There have been times when everything seemed to hinge on whether or not I could get the smallest chore done. Times when nothing meant more than that moment in the day when I took my break from work, found a quiet place, and ate the sandwich and piece of fruit I’d packed that morning. A moment of peace. Anxiety and depression held at bay. I could do it, then. I could live another day.
“I admit that my own interest in things has been shrinking for years,” my ex said. “I haven’t read a novel in, oh, I can’t even say how long. In fact, the only books I read now are for work. I watch a little television when I’m too exhausted to do anything else. But I never go to the movies anymore. No museums, no concerts. No vacations, needless to say. No travel except for work.”
For decades it was art and culture he’d gone around the world lecturing about. How could he have lost interest completely?
“If every poet in the world sat down today and wrote a poem about climate change, it wouldn’t save one tree. Anyway, art—great art seems to me a thing of the past.”
“That’s ridiculous. There are more professional artists working now than ever before.”
“To be sure. But a certain kind of artistic genius doesn’t seem to occur anymore. We’re in the age of great tech, where genius abounds, but the last creative artist on a level with, say, Mozart or Shakespeare was George Balanchine, who was born in 1904. In any case, I certainly don’t believe in the salvific power of art as I once did. I mean, who could? Considering what we’ve come to.”
“What about sex?”
“What?”
“Going back to what you said about your lack of interest in things that used to matter to you.”
“Oh. That, too,” he said. “A relief, frankly. A lot of men spend most of their lives going around feeling like dogs. When I look back, if I’m honest I’d say that on the whole my sex life was more degrading than satisfying to me. If there’d been a drug to kill my libido I would’ve taken it, at least during my wilder years. It would have made me a better person. Anyway, I’ve become something of a monomaniac, it’s true. These da
ys I only write and lecture about one thing. Even if it does make me feel like Cassandra. Even if people do hate me so much that they make death threats. Thank God I’m single now and living alone. But it’s not just strangers, you know. A lot of friends have dropped me. My own son is barely speaking to me because I didn’t hide how appalled I was that his wife is expecting their third child. Doesn’t want me anywhere near her. Says I’m enough to scare her into a miscarriage.”
“So you already have two grandchildren. I didn’t know that.”
“Two boys, five and three.”
How do others deal with it. For years you share a life, the same house, the same bed, the same (or so you dare to believe) future plans. You spend so much time together, rarely make a move without consulting the other, reach a point where it’s hard to say where one of you ends and the other begins—
“Do you have any photos?”
—and then, incredibly within the same lifetime (and how short, after all, is that) comes a day when you know nothing of even the most important details of the other one’s life.
“Of course. But I know you don’t really want to see them, you’re just being polite.”
That time on the subway: wondering why on earth that man was smiling at me, until he leaned forward and said his name. A dozen years earlier, fresh out of school, we’d set up house together. Somehow I had failed to recognize this great love of my life (now married, it turned out, and a new father) sitting across from me on the uptown express.
“But that must be very painful for you, given how pessimistic you are about their future.”
