Books for Living

  I would continue to read books by Baldwin, including The Fire Next Time, and the essay it contained about racism in America and American history written by the then thirty-nine-year-old African American author as a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew. Reading this book, I felt horrified, saddened, complacent, and complicit. I still do. And rereading Giovanni’s Room as an adult helped me see that book in a much-richer light—as an exploration of masculinity in its many forms and as a meditation on lies, shame, and grief.

  Miss Locke introduced me to James Baldwin. And James Baldwin made me see myself and the world differently. He still does.

  —

  After graduating, when I would visit my school over anniversary weekends, I would stop by and say hello to Miss Locke. Legend was that she remembered every student; it’s impossible to prove, but I’ve never met a student who says she didn’t.

  Over the years her hair changed from brown to gray, but it was always immaculately waved. She wore the same kinds of sweater sets she always wore, favoring pastels. She spoke softly with the slightly nasal, broad-voweled accent of New Hampshire. And she always had a supply on hand of those pan-baked brownies. Kids continued to come to the library for these, which gave her the chance to put books in the path of those who might not otherwise seek them out.

  During those visits we talked about the school, about faculty who had come and gone, and always about books we were reading. But our conversations weren’t long, as the weekends were busy, and there were always other alums waiting for their chance to see Miss Locke.

  I hope I thanked her. But I can’t imagine I ever thanked her enough.

  Miss Locke died in 2012 at age eighty-one, of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  I learned from her obituary that she had started at my school as an assistant librarian in 1963. She retired in 1995, fifteen years after my graduation. She left behind adoring nieces and a nephew and grandnieces and grandnephews. I knew about many of them, because she talked about them with immense pride. She also left behind thousands of students for whom she had provided, always, the perfect word, hug, and book, whether handed to us directly, recommended, or left on a cart.

  David Copperfield

  Remembering

  DICKENS FAMOUSLY SAID of David Copperfield, “Of all my books, I like this the best.” It’s easy to see why: the protagonist’s childhood closely mirrors Dickens’s—with its grim factory labor and privations. And he wrote it after the long illness and death of his beloved sister, which provided inspiration for the pivotal scene in the novel: the long illness and death of Copperfield’s beloved Dora. (Almost nothing reduces me to a puddle of tears more quickly than reading that scene.)

  The first time I read David Copperfield, it was summer and I was a young teen, staying with my grandmother in Westport, Connecticut. I adored Gran, but she wasn’t an easy person, and she spent most of the day on a La-Z-Boy recliner, drinking white wine and watching golf. So I sat outside and read. From the first lines of David Copperfield, I was captivated: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” For several weeks, I was alone with Gran. While I was reading this miracle of a book, David and Emily (aka Little Em’ly) and Dora were my friends.

  And then there was Steerforth, the charismatic older schoolboy who takes young David under his wing. Dickens describes him as a “handsome boy”—and David Copperfield is totally smitten with him. I was, too. After Steerforth’s first introduction in the book, the chapter ends with David staring at Steerforth as he sleeps. Steerforth brings about a turn in David’s life and fortunes. And even though he later proves himself to be a bit of a rotter (especially with regard to how he treats Emily), there would be no David Copperfield without him—he saves David. So when I look back on the book, I rarely think of Steerforth’s caddishness and treachery. What I recall instead is the way he adopted David and the bond between them when David needed him most. I have forgiven him, just as David Copperfield did.

  After I turned the last page that long-ago summer, I sobbed even harder than I had when Dora died—mostly because I was going to miss these characters so much.

  When I was writing the book about my mother and her death, several of my friends asked me if I was hoping that the book would give me “closure.” What I realized was that I didn’t want closure—I wanted to continue our conversations. Just because someone is gone doesn’t mean that person exits your life. I remember vividly the day during that hot summer when I finished David Copperfield. But my engagement with David and Little Emily and Steerforth and Dora didn’t end then—it had just begun. I talk to them and live with them. Just as I still talk to my mother.

  I don’t miss the characters in David Copperfield as much as I thought I would—because I never had to say goodbye. The characters never left me nor I them. David Copperfield stays with me to this day: David Copperfield himself, and also as he is refracted in the other Davids I have known.

  There has been something very mysterious about the role that Davids have played in my life. Now, granted, David was a popular name around fifty years ago, the second most popular. We had four Davids in my grade-school class. I was the only Will. Still, I am not willing to cede all of this to demographics or happenstance.

  My first best friend is named David. We met at kindergarten, were inseparable through school, slept over alternate Saturday nights at each other’s houses for years, went to summer camp together, and have stayed in constant contact ever since. He and his wife made me the godfather of one of his children, and they named another after me. We live on different coasts, but there is nothing important in my life that I wouldn’t need to tell them the day it happened.

  I wrote a book about email with a friend named David.

  My husband is named David.

  And then there is David Baer. I met him sometime in September 1980 when we were college freshmen. We were in adjoining suites. I liked my suite mates but didn’t connect deeply with any of them. We were a mismatched set, or that’s how it seemed to me. David was in the same situation. And so we found each other.

  Now, thanks to our endless photo taking and posting and updating, we may in years to come be able to find a record of the actual moment when we first met the people who would be most important to us, the people who would change our lives. Generations previous to mine were better diarists, so people of centuries past were able to do this, inasmuch as they captured first impressions in print. But I just have my creaky memory. So I can’t say I remember the day I met David Baer.

  I do remember, though, that when the president of the university addressed the freshman class on one of our first days, he mentioned that one of us was just sixteen, and when I first met David, I was sure he was the sixteen-year-old. He was several inches shorter than I was—so he couldn’t have been more than five foot five. He was thin and wiry, with olive skin, unruly black hair, and a square jaw that he cocked to one side when he was thinking. I don’t know if I asked him outright, but I soon discovered that he was my age. I never did find out who the sixteen-year-old was.

  We became friendly, and then friends, and then great friends, and then roommates (sharing a suite with an incredibly good-natured drummer from Rumson, New Jersey, whom we referred to as Bamm-Bamm, both for the drumming and because in his exuberance he reminded us of Pebbles’s sidekick in The Flintstones). David seemed profoundly East Coast—dark, Jewish, somewhat cynical, intense. But he was from Los Angeles; from a place above Santa Monica called Rustic Canyon that was, indeed, exactly that.

  I would meet David’s parents before too long—his mother, a school principal, and his father, a physicist who worked at the RAND Corporation. And eventually I met his twin brother. They looked only vaguely alike to me—though others couldn’t tell them apart. Of the many differences between them, one seemed particularly important at that stage of our lives: David was gay and his brother straight.

  David and I loved almost all the
same things, but often for different reasons. So we always had more to talk about than the hours allowed. We both felt that Cyndi Lauper would outlast and outshine Madonna, but for David that was because of Lauper’s haunting voice, and for me it was her superior lyrics. We loved a local pizza place called Naples, but David ordered the cinnamon toast, and I always had a slice. We loved the Francis Ford Coppola film of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, but for David that was because of Patrick Swayze, and I was all about Matt Dillon.

  When it came to books, it was the same. We were both crazy about works by Christopher Isherwood. But David’s favorite was the novel A Single Man, and I was most obsessed with Isherwood’s memoir, Christopher and His Kind. David Baer also loved David Copperfield, and for the same initial reason—the friendship of Steerforth and our young protagonist. But he was among those who found Dora’s death overwrought, whereas it continued to slay me. As I said, he had a cynical side—and that’s a hard scene for anyone to stomach who looks at the world with a critical eye. He didn’t love Dora the way I did—he found her unbearably silly and a bit cloying in her love for her husband. We were both, however, in full agreement about Emily; we loved her fervently and unreservedly.

  After we graduated, I moved to Hong Kong. (On a whim, I had applied for a fellowship to study and teach there but had failed to get it; so on a bigger whim, I decided to go there under my own steam to try to be a journalist, having saved up enough money for a one-way ticket after months of work as a temporary secretary.) David Baer moved to New York to be near his boyfriend, to work for an architect, to save money for architecture school, and to savor the city he had come to love. This was before the Internet, so we wrote each other postcards and letters. But so much was happening for David in New York that even long letters couldn’t contain it all. He had begun to make area “rugs” out of remnants of linoleum from the 1950s, and they caught on enough to be written up in the papers. He was hanging out with writers and painters on New York’s Lower East Side, just as the art scene there was exploding with graffiti artists. He promised me he would come visit—when he saved up some money, when life slowed down a bit, when his applications were done. We had traveled together famously for a few weeks after our sophomore year and also when I had to come home to renew my six-month Hong Kong work visa. We would travel together again, we promised each other—this time throughout Asia, on the cheap.

  And then one day, in 1986, in Hong Kong, I woke up feeling extraordinarily well. It was a Saturday. I went about my errands. Came back to my apartment. Tried to do some writing. I remember the most curious thing: one second I was feeling absolutely fine, better than fine, great, in fact. And then the next second I was burning up. I thought I was going to vomit or pass out. I reached for a thermometer—my fever was 104. Then I broke out into a sweat, the proverbial cold sweat that people mention. I was shaking; sweat poured down my face; my clothes were drenched. And then I was fine, albeit weak and a bit wobbly. So I lay down for a nap only to be awoken some hours later by my brother, calling from New York to tell me that David Baer had been riding his bicycle to work when he hit a pothole in the street and lost control of the bicycle and slid under a bus right outside Lincoln Center and had been instantly killed. A mutual friend had tried to reach me and had found my brother instead. I would soon learn that David’s father was on a plane to New York to see him, after a business trip, and would only find out about his son’s death hours after my brother and I had spoken.

  I’m not a believer in psychic phenomena. But as near as I can figure out, my fever had spiked for no reason at the exact moment David died.

  I flew back home to New York from Hong Kong for the service. On the plane I wanted a whiskey. Northwest Airlines was charging four dollars, and I only had a twenty, and the flight attendant wouldn’t make change. When I saw him collect dozens of singles from the two dollars they were charging for headsets, I asked him again to make change. He wouldn’t. That was the headset money. He couldn’t use it to make change for drinks. In that moment, on the edge of rage, I was overwhelmed by the full misery of David’s death. Suddenly, I missed David Baer so much that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stand it. I was sadder and angrier than I had ever been and knew that if I started to express it I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  I counted from one to ten again and again and again and again until I finally fell asleep.

  At the funeral, I was in a daze, as was everyone. I was also jet-lagged. I realized then that grief and jet lag have much in common—the world isn’t spinning right, you can’t sleep, or you are exhausted and then wide-awake, you feel dizzy and feverish and ill. Hot one minute; cold the next. More than anything, you feel strange and unmoored and displaced. It’s a leap of faith to believe you will ever feel any different, ever feel the same. With jet lag you soon recover fully; with grief you don’t. Jet lag quickly ends; grief can get worse before it gets better, if it does.

  When David Copperfield loses his wife, Dora, he thinks:

  This is not the time at which I am to enter on the state of my mind beneath its load of sorrow. I came to think that the Future was walled up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at an end, that I never could find any refuge but in the grave. I came to think so, I say, but not in the first shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that.

  When I lost David Baer, I couldn’t actually believe at first that he was gone. I kept expecting him to turn up, the way characters do in Dickens, chapters later. But as time went by, I finally accustomed myself to a world without him. It’s not the same world. It never will be.

  I also went through a period of intense guilt. He had been thinking about coming to visit me in Hong Kong. Why didn’t I insist he come? If he had been in Hong Kong, he wouldn’t have been in New York riding a bicycle that day, and he would still be alive. I knew this was irrational, but it was much easier to blame myself than no one.

  What kind of impression can someone make in five years? Sadly and happily I know the answer to that question. Deep. Cavernous. I can’t say I think about David Baer every day. But I do think about him many days. And those days are usually happy. It’s when several days have gone by and I realize that I haven’t thought of him that I feel his loss most acutely.

  I love to talk about David—with our friends, with his boyfriend—and I love to tell others about him. Usually this makes me happy, but sometimes all I can think about is how much I miss him.

  Someone once told me that when he is intensely missing someone who has died, he makes up a little story in his mind. For example, he’ll decide that a dead friend is actually just working at a salmon cannery in Alaska, and that it’s very remote, and there’s no phone or Internet. When I miss David too much, I like to think of him at a cannery or on a boat or a tropical island. He’ll be home soon, and I’ll see him then.

  After the memorial service, David’s parents wanted me to have something of his. They gave me several of his drawings and also a copy of his thesis, on John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century British artist and critic. It was an attempt to explain how Ruskin’s views of nature changed the way we view nature. It brought together literature and art and architecture.

  On my bookshelf I keep a volume of John Ruskin and a copy of David Copperfield, and I visit them whenever I’ve gone too long without remembering my beautiful, vibrant friend, who like Dora died way too young.

  Last year I met a hospice worker. He was telling me that he loved his work with dying people and their families and constantly looked to literature for wisdom for himself and to share. He showed me a notebook full of quotes, words he had come across and kept close at hand. As I was flipping through, I noticed one from John Ruskin: “When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera from end to end, and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow’s chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that makes it sweet.”

  When I think of David Baer, I get to choose whether remembering him makes me sad or happy, whe
ther I remember his death or his life. I try to choose happy. I try to choose life.

  Wonder

  Choosing Kindness

  Wonder, a novel by R. J. Palacio about a boy who is just about to start fifth grade, makes me want to be a better person. I want to tell you about it—but first I’m going to obsess a little about my weight.

  Every January I used to buy a slew of diet books, and I would read them right away, convinced that this would be the year I would finally lose some pounds.

  I would do pretty well for a while on a diet of skinless, boneless chicken breasts and water. But then the doughnuts and beer would come back, and the weight along with them. I would beat myself up a bit, but then move on, vowing to do better next year. Not tomorrow or next month: next year. Having blown my New Year’s resolutions, I could now wait another eleven months before getting serious.

  Of course, some of these diet books were worse than others. The grapefruit diet books were never going to work, no matter how religiously I followed them. Man cannot live on grapefruit (and protein, also allowed) alone. But some were good—in fact, excellent—with sensible advice, clear logic, and realistic strategies. If I followed the advice in those books, I could change, and change for good. So why did I find it so hard to follow sound advice?

  Other books I’ve read, books like Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, explain why I’m failing to change my habits and how I might succeed. Duhigg presents studies that show you need to recognize cues and institute a system of rewards to change a bad habit (gorging on chocolates after dinner, spending too much money on magazines I barely read, wasting time on the Internet) or to institute a good one (going to the gym to do cardio). I had never allowed myself sufficient time nor given myself rewards along the way.