What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

  How could I not now also recall the old graffiti “God is dead—Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead—God.” Later, anti-atheists could not resist replacing “Nietzsche” with “Hitchens.”

  Recent obits. I. M. Pei. Agnès Varda. Ricky Jay. Bibi Andersson. Doris Day.

  Though not in that order (I liked the rhyme).

  I’ve heard of people who confess to regularly reading obituaries in the hope of seeing the name of someone they know. Reading obituaries is also said to be a source of comfort to many lonely people. Presumably it’s not the deaths that these people like reading about but the neatly summarized lives that the deceased supposedly lived. But are these same people also avid readers of biographies? Probably not. Write your own obituary: an exercise often recommended by life coaches and human-development counselors, and one that has never had the tiniest shred of appeal for me.

  It is from death that the storyteller derives his authority, wrote Walter Benjamin, in his authoritative way. And: the “meaning of life” is the center about which the novel moves.

  Bart Starr. Carol Channing. W. S. Merwin. Michel Legrand.

  Who, coincidentally, wrote the score for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

  Most of these people were long-lived, almost all having survived well past the average human life span of seventy-nine years. My friend, not young at all, was nevertheless young enough to have been their daughter.

  John Paul Stevens. Toni Morrison. Paul Taylor. Hal Prince.

  Chaser, “the world’s smartest dog.” Sarah, “the world’s smartest chimp.”

  Grumpy Cat!

  The last of his kind. On New Year’s Day, 2019, in a university breeding facility in Hawaii, a fourteen-year-old tree snail named George died. And with that his entire species went extinct.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t mean to say that we just stopped speaking, abruptly. It was not like that. Even before the disaster that forced us to vacate the house, we’d stopped having the kind of conversation that sometimes left my friend coughing or out of breath. It wasn’t that we had nothing more to say to each other but rather that our need for speech kept diminishing. A look, a gesture or touch—sometimes not even that much—and all was understood.

  The farther along she was on her journey, the less she wanted to be distracted.

  She no longer wanted to be read to, though she was able again to do some reading herself. While we were gone a package had arrived: the galleys of a book, the author someone she knew, a former student, asking for a blurb.

  One last good deed, my friend said. Why not.

  It would be the last book she read. (I’d like to say, for effect, that the blurb was the last thing she wrote but, although that’s perfectly possible, I don’t know for sure if it’s correct.)

  Let me not forget our last good laugh together.

  We had loaded the car with our things and were driving away from the house. We had gone a few miles in silence when she blurted in a small, woeful voice: You work, you plan.

  Could I have heard her right? Those words were a piece of dialogue from one of the movies we’d watched together, an old screwball comedy in which a playboy courts an heiress, plotting to enrich himself by first marrying and subsequently doing away with her. Damn, damn, damn, the cad cries in exasperation when all goes amiss. You work, you plan, nothing ever turns out the way it’s supposed to! This scene had had us in stitches, and now, in spite of the fact that she was obviously upset, her words struck me as so outrageous under the circumstances that all I could do was laugh. Startled at first, she joined in.

  After we’d calmed down and driven another few miles, I said that I hoped this time she hadn’t left the pills behind. Which set us off again. Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia. I was shaking so hard that the car veered a little off the road.

  No, she didn’t want any visitors. She had said her goodbyes, she said.

  No, she did not want to reach out one last time to her daughter.

  I am reconciled to our not being reconciled, she said.

  Once, sitting in the park across the street, I scanned the front of her building. Which windows were hers? I counted the floors—and there she was! Standing at a sixth-floor window—her bedroom window—looking out. From there she would have had a good view of the park. But did she see me? From what I could tell she wasn’t looking down at the street but into the distance. I thought of waving, but it was too late: she was gone. (Even so, as often happens, imagination would become memory: I would recall the sight of my friend waving to me from that bedroom window again and again.) It was this glimpse of her, though, that made me think of another woman, someone I had known briefly many years ago.

  I was in between college and grad school then, a time in my life when I made ends meet by stringing together various part-time jobs, and this woman had hired me to do some research for a book she was writing. She too lived in an apartment with a view of a park: a much grander apartment, a much larger park. Central Park. She was about twenty years older than me, and the book she was writing was a biography of a woman from an old rich American family who’d found fame as a model and actress in the 1960s but whose psychological disorders had led to self-destructive misery and untimely death.

  Aside from the book, which was apparently giving her enormous trouble, the woman was pursuing other projects. She had me call several literary agents to ask for copies of manuscripts by writers whom they represented. (I don’t remember exactly what this was about, most likely she was looking for something to develop as a film.) The agents all seemed to know who she was but did not seem to take her seriously, and a few let me know that they were busy people who didn’t appreciate being bothered in this way. When I reported that one of them had said something highly insulting—something like “You girls should find yourselves another game to play”—instead of being highly insulted she was amused.

  Once, she gave me a list of names and phone numbers of people she wanted me to call to invite to a party. Just about every name on the list was recognizable to me; several would have been recognizable to anyone.

  I didn’t like the job, because it never felt quite real to me; it did often seem like just a game. I didn’t have much faith that this woman would ever finish the book she was writing. Also, the pay was low.

  One morning she called me at home and asked me to go that same day to a certain archival library and ask for a certain book. She wanted me to go through this book, an antique bound typescript that was not permitted to be taken out, and cull from it specific details about the lives of the people of whom the woman she was writing about was a descendant. She said that I should call ahead and ask to have the book waiting for me when I arrived. But I didn’t call ahead—I doubted that this was really necessary—and was surprised when I had to wait more than an hour for it to be brought to me.

  When she saw my bill for that day’s work, she questioned the amount. When I explained about the wait, she reminded me that she had told me to call ahead; if I had done so there wouldn’t have been a wait, she said. We had words then. In the end she agreed to pay me for the extra hour and would have been happy to move on. But I didn’t want to work for her after that, and I never did again.

  All this was more than forty years ago. In all that time I rarely thought about her, though I was aware that she did in fact finish her book and that it had been published. From time to time, I’d hear something about one of her glamorous parties. But as one who does not regularly read obituaries, I missed hers when it first appeared, and it wasn’t until just recently that I learned that, a few years ago, she had jumped from the penthouse apartment where she had moved sometime after I last saw her.

  None of the photographs that were published with the obituaries I have seen showed her as she was at the time of death: old—about twice the age as when we first met—and depressed. Most matched the image in my head: curly dark hair, toothy smil
e in a thin bony face. She had a frothy ever-excited-sounding voice and a tendency to gush: Everyone was adorable. Everything was divine. The silver (or they might have been gold) ballet flats she wore around the house. Her jagged penmanship, like a drunk’s or a child’s. An exaggerated fear of getting sick. (Do you have a cold? I won’t go near my own children when they have a cold.) Shuddering as she told me about a close friend who’d found what turned out to be a malignant tumor in her neck. And it was just this tiny lump, she wailed. Gingerly palpating her own long thin neck.

  The gracious host. At our first meeting, when she was interviewing me for the job, a maid entered the room carrying a tray: white wine, crackers, and pâté, the pâté served in a small clay flowerpot. The gauche guest: after a too tightly held cracker snapped between my fingers I was too self-conscious to touch anything else.

  From the obituaries and in memoriam pieces I learned several things about her that I hadn’t known before and was reminded of other things that I had known once but had completely forgotten. It was often recalled that, while she was still in school, she had had an affair with old William Faulkner.

  A moment of remembrance, then, as I sat in the park, looking up at my friend’s windows. Those windows that had just been scrubbed as clean as Orwell’s ideal prose.

  At my side: my grocery bags, the eggs and bread and salmon and kale and ice cream that she will never eat. That I will eat and eat until I am so full that I can eat no more. Yet will eat more.

  Along comes a man with a broom and a long-handled dustpan. I know him. He is a neighborhood volunteer who keeps the park free of litter, bless him.

  And bless the woman who comes each day to feed the squirrels and the birds.

  Bless the squirrels and the birds.

  But now that couple, across from me. They have just sat down, a young couple, and they are arguing. I can’t hear them well over the fountain’s burble and splash, but I believe they are speaking French. They have sat down on the edge of the fountain. They are young and they are beautiful—even in anger, they are beautiful, the way young people are. I do not know what they are saying but I can tell—you can always tell—that they are fighting.

  Oh, please don’t fight, young people. Let this be a place of peace.

  I too had a fight with someone, this very morning, I could tell them. I could interrupt the couple right now, like a crazy lady, the sort of crazy lady you meet in the park. Break into the middle of their fight, start telling them all about my own fight, the fight I had this morning on the phone with my ex. Because I told him I was afraid I couldn’t do it, I did not think that I could lie. We were going over it all, once again. If you are present at the time of death, he said, it’s a given that you’ll be questioned. I know, I know, I said, because of course I did know—how many times had we been over this? But I could imagine how, in that very moment, it might be hard for me to lie. Or, at least, to lie convincingly.

  Was all I said.

  He blew up then. This is so like you, he said. Also for the umpteenth time. He said, You are impossible.

  This is so like you. Everything that bothered him, everything that went wrong between us, was always so like me.

  It was so like me not to have made him happy. So like me to have driven him away. To have forced him to seek comfort in somebody else’s arms—that was so fucking like me.

  He actually said.

  Yelled, in fact.

  Imagine the young couple exchanging bewildered looks. Why is she telling us all this?

  Or why not imagine them kind. Forgetting their fight, putting aside their own troubles to listen. Quel est ton tourment?

  A folie à deux was how my ex described what was happening between my friend and me.

  He washed his hands of us.

  Crazy lady. Talk about your biggest fear. Crazy old lady with her bags on a park bench. Blessing things, cursing things. That kind of woman’s story. A fate my own mother barely escaped. I should get up and go now. The ice cream is melting. The fish will spoil. But my head is light. I’m afraid if I stand up I’ll be dizzy. Panic strikes. What is happening here?

  The man with his broom and dustpan, the feeder of squirrels and birds have both moved on. The French couple (oh good: they must have made up, he has his arm around her, her head is on his chest) are moving on.

  What is happening? My heart throbs with fear. Soon it will end, this fairy tale. This saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I’ll be alone.

  Blessed are they that mourn.

  What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about, said Benjamin.

  I have tried. I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different. As my friend’s life, like any other life, could have been different.

  I have tried.

  Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice—

  What does it matter if I failed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Joy Harris and to Sarah McGrath.

  I am also deeply grateful to the Ucross Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence Program, and the MacDowell Colony for their generous support.

  CREDITS

  Quote: Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

  Quote: Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard, trans. and ed. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget (Portland, Ore., and Brooklyn, N.Y.: Tin House Books, 2008).

  Quote: Inger Christensen, The Condition of Secrecy, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2018).

  About the Author

  Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award–winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.