CHAPTER 17
IN THE CUBBYHOLES OF A LIBRARY CLOSET, I STORED YARN, gift wrap, and all sorts of presents (from the nifty to the impossibly hedonistic) for friends and relations, gathered on my travels or whenever I happened upon something just right for someone. Then, when birthday or Christmas arrived, I had a perfect little gift. Whenever I entered the closet now, my eyes fell on language tokens squirreled away for Paul. What should I do with the book of palindromes, for instance? Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. Rats live on no evil star. Do geese see God? He would have loved those. Or the mug from the Folger Library with Shakespearean insults written all over it? You egg, you fry of treachery. Or the literary guides to European cities? Such presents would seem cruel.
Once we lived in a house made of words. Our personal vocabulary had ranged from the word flaff, which meant utter nonsense, to mrok, a plaintive cry often uttered by one of us hoping to locate the other. Just as some couples mainly relate through their children, we had related through our rowdy family of words. We wallowed in codes and idiomatic privacies.
On one signal occasion, carrying an untidy armload of mail and magazines from the mailbox, I announced my arrival—for no special reason; it just swam into my head—by singing out “Post trout!”
“Post trout!” Paul had echoed playfully from his study down the hall. He soon emerged grinning.
“Is this my post trout?” he’d asked of me, glad of a new pet name, and planted a fish-mouthed kiss on my forehead. From then on, trout functioned as postmen and carriers of all desirable commodities.
Depending on what you are carrying, you can be the Coffee Trout, the Bagel Trout, and so on, not that trout are known for their carrying capacity or even for their ability to reduce the portion of daily inconvenience. . . . [Nonetheless, trout serve as] the epitome-personification of the helpful other. . . . I don’t see how a civilized household that cherishes intimacy can function without these playful oddities, which firm the bond and widen the spectrum of sounds, though what a stranger would make of the little chiming Babel . . . I have no idea.
—Life with Swan
Every word that bended easily we warped in playful ways. Weekdays became: Mondalsday, Tueselday, Wendelsday, Thurselday, Fridalday, Egg Day (when I fried up eggs for him), and Sundalsday. Hand became handle, and breakfast breaklefast, mouthwash mousewash, lens lensness. Self shelbst, sleep schluffy, and the Johnny Carson show Carsonienses. A visit to the dermatologist became a “mole patrol.” “Are you a cyclamen?” meant “Are you feeling ill?” (etymology: “sicklamin” = diminutive of sick, which, sounding like the flower “cyclamen,” suggests a small flower-like sick person). One especially fond reference we abbreviated to A.C.H.M., often written Achmed, commemorating the tiniest mouse we had ever seen, in a botanical garden in St. Louis: A Certain Harvest Mouse. “Our intimate bestiary,” Paul wrote, “gave us a private world as secret as that of Cockney rhyming slang.”
Quite often, in carpet slippers, she walked on top of my feet as I paddled slowly backward and we let out a noise we had linked to the roseate spoonbill exquisitely depicted in watercolors in the laboratory waiting room at the local hospital: Clack-clack-clack-clack, we went, together being a bird that stepped in and out of tidal pools.
All couples evolve private catchphrases and codes, but I’m not sure why we had felt the need for so extensive a dialect, unless it had to do with how much of our work lives we’d spent juggling normal words and stacking them together in law-abiding ways. Or because even off-duty we loved playing with words at their most combinative, bobbin-like, and sly, jostling and recasting them at will, without having to worry about whether they bowed to literary fashion or even made sense. Or maybe because we secretly yearned to be among our prehistoric ancestors, who had the diagnostic necessity and raw fun of coining many of the words that today bind together languages as seemingly unrelated as Sanskrit, Hittite, English, and Lithuanian, words like “sun,” “winter,” “honey,” “wolf,” “snow,” “woman,” “awe.”
The forerunners of such words were probably spoken in sparse, robust, barbaric sounds. For sport, Paul had once translated “America the Beautiful” into Indo-European and sung it at Cornell in the “Temple of Zeus,” a coffee room used by the literary set, ringed with dusty plaster replicas of Greek statues (authentically missing heads, arms, and other body parts). Words had served us, and we had served them—at times we were masters, others vassals. We had lived in American society, but within the culture of words, which made their own demands and had their own special trappings.
EARLY ONE MORNING, I rushed out to Target to pick up an ice cream-making machine for Paul. To get to the small appliances aisle I had to go through the office supplies aisle, for once with no requests from Paul for his standard supplies (black Flair pens, manila envelopes, glue sticks, Type White, high-luminosity printer paper), and I felt my stomach twisting. He will never need these things again, I thought, remembering how often we had “moused” around those aisles for office supplies. It was just one more of the incidental, barely noteworthy activities that add cell by cell to the body of a relationship over time. Familiar as rain, it was an obeisance to writing, a remembered absence, a discontinued small pleasure, a lost fragment of a home life. The pain I felt was wordless—beyond, beneath, unbeguiled by words. Not even gasping No more a hundred times could capture that visceral and wholly new kind of pain. There, in the Target aisle—surrounded by sparkly pink notebooks, animal stickers, glitter, a forest of multicolored pens, tapes of every hue, mothers bustling by with loaded carts and excited children, awash in upbeat music to shop by—I stood stiffly in shock, stricken that our favorite stripe of play was gone, all the impromptu word games we shared, including Paul’s improvised little songs.
In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share with Paul.
Sitting together at the kitchen table, we watched a vivid blue jay enter the courtyard, and hop from cherry-tree branch to the leaf-littered ground, looking for food. I began to chant:
Blue jay, blue jay in the tree,
will you come and play with me?
While you dance in the impatiens,
won’t you give me a second glance?
You are such a pretty fellow—
are you sad you are not yellow?
Paul laughed at the rhyme, but I wasn’t sure he understood the words.
“You’re such a cuddly little fruit fly,” I gushed, and he shot back a pleased smile, because he understood the word “cuddly” and he was still good at social responsiveness. But when I asked, “Do you know what a fruit fly is?” he shook his head no.
“I’m not stupid,” he added for the umpteenth time, his voice balancing between self-pity and scorn.
Patiently, reassuringly, for the umpteenth time, I replied: “No, you’re not stupid. You have a communication disorder. The words are still inside your head. You’re having trouble sorting out the ones you want.”
Then I described a fruit fly as a tiny fly that hovers around pieces of fruit. Did he know what fruit was? He did. He understood the word “hovers.”
“Drosophila melanogaster,” he announced, with the pride of a fisherman surprising even himself by hauling up a coelacanth.
“Holy smokes! Where did that come from?” Startled, I looked at him as if he’d just performed a magic trick.
My memory skipped to an afternoon in Jamaica, on one of our first vacations together, at a surfside hotel whose restaurant menu, littered with typos, had kept us laug
hing for days. “Chef’s bowel salad” sounded gruesome enough. But my personal favorite was: “Steak grilled to your own likeness.” We’d tried to picture a silhouette of Eleanor Roosevelt in beef.
A saucer of sweet fresh pineapple chunks had drawn several fruit flies, one of whom had walked slowly across my upturned palm.
“Drosophila melanogaster,” Paul had said with a flourish, retrieving a bit of Greek from his freshman year in college. I’d liked the swooping music of the phrase, but absolutely loved its translation.
“Hey, know the English?” I now asked.
He thought for a long while. I could hear the cicadas chirping in the forests of his mind.
“Used to,” he finally lamented.
“Black-bellied dew-sipper.”
The light of recognition flashed over his face and he tried to say the words, making it as far as “dew” before forgetting “black-bellied” and having to start over. Then he forgot “sipper.”
“Black-bellied dew-sipper. Let’s just picture the image of a black-bellied dew-sipper,” I murmured, hoping to curb his frustration. For a few moments we sat in silence and imagined the eggplant-blackness of the belly, the spiky hairs, the brick-red prisms of the eyes.
That morning, with increasing frustration, Paul had groped for “wallet,” “checkbook,” “swallowing.” When he was so at sea, I might try to chip through the blockade by asking him what category the word fell into, but that didn’t always work, because he might decide that swallowing was in the category of spelling since it involves the mouth. If Paul couldn’t point to the thing or body part he meant, I would ask him if he could picture it in his mind’s eye, because even without words one can still render some images and feelings. When that doesn’t happen, what is one left with? A psychic cramp, a precisely unutterable thought or feeling. In his mental pandemonium using one chancy word to define another chancy word was speaking in riptides. Words had lost their moorings, they drifted like boats in a storm, cleats torn loose, fenders awry, no longer holding fast to anything.
Quite often Paul would get a running start on a sentence, do the first half beautifully, and then stop short, stranded before the important final noun, suddenly having no idea whatsoever where the sentence was headed. This intruded into our simplest conversations. As his use of numbers improved a little, he knew that an 80-degree day was better for swimming than a 60-degree day. So he’d diligently check the thermometer on the back window before venturing outside. When struck by sunbeams, the dial always read 40 degrees too hot. Paul would see 120 degrees and grin, remembering his spell at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where the heat soared past 100, the air tasted combustible, the sidewalk burned through the soles of your shoes, and even the cacti grew parched. Coming from a cold rainy isle, Paul had a lifelong love affair with heat. We kept the faulty thermometer despite, or maybe because of, its unreliability, and nicknamed it our “optimistic thermometer” (in contrast to a more chilling one in a shady front courtyard).
Paul would call out the temperature as he grabbed a towel. On a lucky day in June, he cheerfully announced: “It’s 75 degrees! The faulty . . . hmmm. Cancel that. The phenom . . .”
I waited for his next try, arms hanging at my side, clock ticking.
“The faulty . . .” Stopping short again, his brain uncooperative, Paul blurted out an annoyed “It’s not working . . .”
I cocked my head, letting him know I was still listening. “One more go?”
“The faulty . . . the faulty . . . mmm.”
He began to look rattled, so I decided it was time to help. “Thermometer?”
“Thermometer. 100 degrees,” Paul announced with relief, his body visibly relaxing as he strode outside, gripped the railing, and edged at last toward the pool ladder.
It was yet another 60-degree day.
These aborted sentences were the new norm. This meant my steadfast listening and his fruitless, bitter plodding. Gone were all his tidings, bywords, and frisky chitchat. He raged at himself. How could he not be angry, bound by stutters, echolalia, and paraphrasing—to his mind a torrent of wounded language, defective language? Bitter, I silently called out in my best maître d’ voice, party of one.
Paul’s tortured search for words reminded me of work by Samuel Beckett, the wild and woolly Irish playwright, novelist, member of the French Resistance during WWII, and literary assistant to James Joyce. In his best-known play, Waiting for Godot, Beckett describes God’s inscrutability as “divine aphasia,” and God utters such aphasic-sounding gibberish as “Quaquaquaqua.” I had a new appreciation for Beckett’s character Watt, who speaks with aphasic peculiarity, jumbling word order, letters, and sense until they’re cockeyed and no one can understand him. “In his skull,” Beckett writes of Watt, eerily reminding me of Paul, “the voices whispering their canon were like a patter of mice, a flurry of little grey paws in the dust.”
A custodian of silence, Beckett had often created characters afflicted with language disorders, who became tongue-tied or voiceless. With humor, gusto, and impenitent absurdity, he spent a lifetime narrating the unnameable, lives of personal apocalypse, and almost every mummery of human language, literally from first bark to final silence. Paul had relished Beckett, devoured his funny aphasic-sounding fiction especially, and shared it with students. In an odd twist of fate, Paul now spoke as if he were one of Beckett’s characters, as if he existed within Beckett’s novels.
My penchant for Beckett rekindled, I stumbled upon his final creation: an aphasic poem. Of all people to wind up beyond the pother and rescue of language! After a fall in his kitchen in July of 1988 (most likely caused by a stroke), to his befuddled horror, Beckett awoke with aphasia, from which he never fully recovered. His last work, “What Is the Word,” tortures itself with relentless aphasic striving. For fifty lines it compulsively echoes variations on this faltering lament: “a faint afar away over there what . . . what is the word—”
In the poem’s avalanche of repeats, elisions, stumbling, and stuttering, I heard Paul’s voice as he beat the mental bushes, hunting for lost words. Paul didn’t know about Beckett’s post-stroke aphasia or the circumstances of his last poem, and I decided not to tell him. Beckett died a year and a half after his stroke, having spent his end days aphasic, in a small, sparsely furnished room, watching soccer and tennis on television, accompanied only by his boyhood copy of The Divine Comedy in Italian. It was too dismal a scene to plant in Paul’s skull. He still believed in the wishbone of recovery, and I wanted him to keep reaching for it. Me, too. If only we both reached with gusto, at least one of us was sure to win, and it didn’t matter who.
CHAPTER 18
A WELCOME LETTER OF ENCOURAGEMENT ARRIVED FROM A friend, with the gift of the Indonesian phrase Holopis kuntul baris (hoh-LOPE-iss COON-tool BAH-riss), uttered to summon extra muscular strength while carrying a heavy object, or summon more energy when toiling under a mental or emotional burden. I took to whispering it to myself. In America, we have war cries, work songs, marching chants. But we could use a phrase of our own whose only purpose is to concentrate fading energy, a bolus of sound uttered just to grip one’s resolve.
The big crisis might be over for Paul, but many smaller crises followed, accompanied by lingering fears. Would he fall? Would depression strike him again? Would he give up on speech therapy? Would he learn to dial 911? Would he ever agree to use a cane? Would he be safe cooking? Would a poorly swallowed pill catch halfway down his throat? That happened more often than we liked, and the burning pill would cling like a suction cup and take ages to dislodge, leaving him with a badly inflamed throat. Another epic nosebleed? Scrape his leg, pick up a splinter, or scratch a bug bite (any of which easily became infected)? Contract pneumonia (sometimes spawned by a simple cold)? High blood sugar? High blood pressure (usually heralded by a headache, but headaches could also be run-of-the-mill)? Aspirate food down his windpi
pe that, for once, he couldn’t free? Suppose he fell and broke a bone? I never knew from day to day what medical frights might unfold.
And then there were all the lesser crises: trying to fathom bills and taxes, dialing a phone number, working the Xerox machine, composing a letter, going out (bank, restaurant, clinic), or Paul daring to speak on demand with strangers. Navigating some days felt like a sheer drop on a country road. Others like driving over a street full of hidden potholes. Which one would crack the chassis?
Coping with those trials wouldn’t have been possible without our cushion of snuggling closeness each morning, when we were simply sweethearts. Paul’s sleep gradually returned to its old timetable of late nights and late rising. But a new era deserved new rituals, so after rising at dawn, I usually crept back into bed and woke Paul at 11 a.m., and we cuddled for half an hour or so. Soon afterward we would hear the telltale whumph, ping, clatter, gush, and clunk—which meant Liz had opened the door, microwaved water for coffee, unloaded the dishwasher, set pills, started preparing Paul’s breakfast and going about her other morning chores.
Thank heavens the brain has a mind of its own, because on weekends, holidays, and during Liz’s myriad travels, I became submarine commander and crew combined. Breakfast routine. Then maybe shaving or showering. Helping him dress. Lunchtime medications. Swimming and supervising the careful transition into and out of the pool. Preparing dinner, taking dinner pills. Endless channel-changing with the insidiously complex TV remote control, whose array of buttons and arrows continued to look like runes from extraterrestrial Bingo. Or reading his mail to him, doing bills. After a few days, I felt tired at a visceral, mineral level, and slept in thick geological strata, not hours.