Drowsily heading into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I knew I’d find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away, which he’d attached to the refrigerator door by a magnetic bat, alligator, whale, lion, wolf, flower, or airplane, depending on his mood. A new note appeared almost every day for decades. Instead of signing his notes, he would draw himself with curly hair, svelte shape, pointed feet, full-stop eyes, and delirious smile. It was his version of a cartouche or a royal seal, meant to keep me company until he awoke at noon. Sometimes I accused him of being a maggoty-headed misanthrope, who haunted the wee hours to avoid having a social life. But I supposed his circadian rhythms were simply off-kilter because he had been a night owl since childhood.
Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate “flextime,” in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.
Our studies offered a good example of our essential natures. Paul’s was a pack rat’s haven: balsa airplanes; eight pairs of cheap, dusty sunglasses (all aviator style); a windup miniature skull; a plastic six-shooter; his father’s WWI medals, framed; a do-it-yourself Egyptian mummy-making kit; a Cockney rhyming dictionary; a collage he’d made that blended paint with flattened wads of green chewing gum, used matchsticks, and labels from a box of La Tropical cigars; boxes of crayons and colored pencils; a never-used soap lion; a blue and white Amazonian mask; classical CDs stacked unevenly, like geological strata, on every free ledge; a gray filing cabinet full of old clothes he hated to part with; crumpled manila folders fat with letters; tall heaps of books, papers, research materials—all the curious accumulata of a bustling novelist’s life. One needed a guide dog and map to navigate the room. Possibly it reminded him of the craggy English moors.
In the cork-lined alcove where he typed, there were no windows to usher in the outside world, no daylight. “I don’t need nature,” he once told me. “I can create it.” He never touched a computer. On an old blue-and-gray Smith Corona—a classic, leaden typewriter with long strike arms, noisy carriage, and well-worn, begrimed keys—he furnished one lavish fictive world after another and inhabited them with a cavalcade of engagingly kooky people, producing dozens of books during our years together. When he was dubbed a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, I pronounced him “Chevy,” which became one of his nicknames.
My study, on the other hand, was all windows festooned with bright floral drapery. Stained-glass magnolias framed a bay window, beyond which a large old real magnolia swelled. A tall curiosity cabinet of shelves held pottery “storyteller” dolls from Indian pueblos, the “Oldest Bird House on Earth” built from local fossils, framed photographs of family and friends, a miniature Frank Lloyd Wright window, carved jade monkeys and flowers I inherited from my mother, and a mannequin hand, whose pose I often changed. A computer with a large sleek monitor presided over the desk, and a laptop waited in the bay window. Tattered, faded, ripped-out newspaper and magazine clippings filled a series of wooden filing cabinets and overflowing three-ring binders I affectionately called my “portable universe,” a repository of things I found curious. The walls had been painted the yellow of spring light in the forest, and oriental area rugs softened an oatmeal-colored wooden floor. Photos of monk seals, bats, and other endangered animals I’d worked with graced the walls. I worshipped nature, roamed the world of nonfiction, biked most days, and shmoozed a lot with friends. Paul could easily accommodate violence and evil into his imagination, work, and sensibility. I couldn’t; I didn’t even like movies to end unhappily.
Paul had a different kind of memory from mine, an almost perfect recall—his dark past (wars, poverty, early marriage, years of turmoil) was a country he could homestead. I preferred Zen’s idea of living mindfully in the moment. I was more concerned with social issues than he, and felt drawn to volunteer work in the community. His sense of community wasn’t local; it spanned seas and eras.
In our writing lives, Paul was a born phrasemaker, and I loved phrases, too; but we didn’t construct them in the same way. His were more flamboyant and allusive, such as describing Oxford dons as “noetic pharaohs” and old bread as “sprouting its beard.” To a large extent he searched for arresting images as fishhooks to pull up all sorts of thrashing memories. I used imagery more for defining experience. Indeed, that’s one key way in which our creative processes differed.
He was without exception the most deliciously quirky person I’d ever met, a classic British eccentric of myth and legend, right out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. He wouldn’t touch or be near fresh fruit, beets, cucumbers, or tomatoes. He didn’t leave the house much; instead he was abundantly happy to talk with friends in letters or on the phone. He hated wind, rain, snow—truly, any weather if not sunny and mild. He didn’t like wearing clothes, and cheerily strolled around the house and yard like one of Dubuffet’s naked pink men. Because society requires clothes he did make concessions: in the summer he wore swim shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt when we went out, and in the winter he wore a velour jogging suit in unvarying shades of black, gray, or blue. But never, ever socks. At least once he flew home to England lugging a ream of typing paper, which he sat on, “to soften it up.”
One day, when we were out driving, he asked me rather urgently to close the sunroof.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t like space above me,” he said. I smiled. This was a new one.
“You know, dear,” I replied as evenly as possible, “if you’re very lucky, you’re going to have space above you for a long time on this planet.” Then I closed the sunroof anyway.
I found his eccentricities novel and amusing, in part because they weren’t an affectation but grew naturally, like crystals, in the cave of his personality. They sprang unconsciously from a childhood in an English coal-mining town; early absorption of its customs and values; and a deeply eccentric family, in which it was typical to pay a call on relatives only to find aunts, uncles, and cousins all napping naked in the living room with open books covering their privates. The unique society of his brain cells was more than a little different from my own mental colony, but we granted one another most-favored nation status.
When asked about the secret to our decades-long duet, I sometimes teased that we stayed together for the sake of the children—each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos—a cult of two with fallible gods. All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
So our household had been saturated in wordplay. We relaxed with “Cheater’s Scrabble,” in which we combined several sets, didn’t feel confined by the edges of the board; accepted puns, phrases, and foreign terms; and played not to win but to tie. It seemed more cordial that way. “RareJaponesquedstool” morphed into “RareJaponesquedstoolpigeon.” Every day we did the Word Jumble in the newspaper. Puns littered our idle chatter. Paul never spoke my given name. Instead, he made up pet names for me, which evolved. “Pi” became “pilot” became “pilotpoet.” T
he full menagerie of our animal love included kissel panther and lion, camel and bewilderbeast, roseate spoonbill and bush-kitten, bunny and swan, among many other passionate critters.
A lifelong aficionado of classical music, Paul had the habit of extemporizing operettas about me throughout the day, singing in his rich baritone such ad hoc ditties as: “She has a lovely little smile, / dark brown eyes like chocolate drops, / into which I plunnnge, and Cliffs of Dover whiteness to her teeth, / above and beneeeeath.” I’d be washing the dishes, Paul would be on his way to the garage, and he’d idly start singing—barely loud enough for me to hear—“She washes the dishes, / rub-a-dub-dub, / soaps up the pots, / la, la-la, la, la . . .” launching into an improvisatory song about the glories of sudsy domesticity. One spring day, when we were going out and I decided I didn’t need a sweater after all, he trilled:
Please leave your sweaters at home,
if you are driven to roam.
You can wear a bikini
and eat some linguini,
but please leave your sweaters at home!
Well, that was all the invitation I needed, and as we drove down the little asphalt road to the farm store, we piled on more lunatic verses involving kimonos, tuxedos, and flamingos.
Writing mainly in different genres, we thought it best to have separate agents and publishers, and our books rarely appeared at the same time. In our household, whenever possible, we didn’t allow the other to read reviews that were hatchet jobs or poisonously ad hominem. We had both received both and knew it was easy enough to inadvertently push someone’s button and be bombed to smithereens.
On those blessedly rare occasions, we offered comfort and hope from someone who had walked a mile in his shoes and fully understood the other’s hurt. Reading each other’s manuscripts first and last, we served an important role as ally, editor, critic, and advisor. I tended to be kind to a fault; Paul had a mercurial temper and didn’t suffer fools.
Once, in a writing seminar, when a student kept defending an abysmally written story with a self-flattery that finally strained the class’s goodwill, Paul lost his cool and declared sharply: “Listen, I’d rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!”
For thirty years, he had taught graduate fiction writing, and also contemporary European and Latin American literature at Penn State. He was infamous for making his students’ brains hurt from the strain of learning how to juggle complex ideas. One day I passed a student of his in the hallway holding his head under the gush of a drinking fountain, trying to cool his mind after grappling with some of Samuel Beckett’s hilariously thorny fiction in Paul’s class.
In addition to being a collegiate and county cricket player in his youth, and an RAF officer who lectured on giving good lectures, he garnered several degrees, including a coveted First from Oxford, one of only four given in literature that year. I don’t know how Oxford may have changed since those post–World War II days, but at the time there were only two ways to earn a First—the rough equivalent of an A+ and a guarantee of a sterling job—by breathtaking feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle. A working-class boy on a scholarship to Oxford, he managed to do both. The dazzle came easy because Paul had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons.
CHAPTER 3
THE TESTS REVEALED THAT PAUL HAD A MASSIVE STROKE, one tailored to his own private hell. In the cruelest of ironies for a man whose life revolved around words, with one of the largest working English vocabularies on earth, he had suffered immense damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Though not visible in the CAT scan’s chiaroscuro world, other vital language areas had also wilted, leaving a labyrinth of fragile liaisons hushed. Global aphasia, it’s called. Paul’s aphasia was indeed global, round as his head, a grief encompassing our whole world. I’d never heard the expression before, and didn’t want to think about the full cartography of loss. Yet I had no choice because someone had to make decisions about his care—informed, clear-headed decisions.
Where was the tutelary angel who should descend at such times and restore the everydayness of things? I felt acutely unqualified. I hadn’t volunteered for this job, and never would have, given how much was at stake. I didn’t want to be responsible for my loved one’s life. Sitting in his hospital room while he was enduring more tests floors below, I could picture him in my mind’s eye, glowing red with warmth as he was wheeled through the chilly haunts of the hospital, could track his travels as if I were a pit viper sensing his heat through tunnels underground. I felt very much alone, scalded by my own ineptitude, and thought: Forget angels. Where are all the grown-ups when one really needs one?
I knew his plight wasn’t unique. Browsing the pamphlets I’d picked up in the waiting room, I discovered that stroke is the number one cause of long-term adult disability in the United States. Paul was now among the 5 to 6 million American stroke survivors, and of those he’d joined the ranks of over 1 million Americans living with aphasia—a void of language, a frustrating perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory loss, a mute torturer of words, a jumbler of lives. Aphasia doesn’t just cripple one’s use of words, but the use of any symbols, including the obvious ones: numbers, arrows, semaphore, sign language, Morse code. But also the lightning bolt that spells electrical danger, the three triangles that warn of radiation, the intersecting arcs that announce a biohazard, the cross that locates a hospital on a map, even the paper-doll man and woman on restroom doors.
In 1861, French neurosurgeon Paul Broca inspected the brain of a dead patient, known as Tan, who’d suffered from an unusual complaint. Although he understood language, he could neither speak nor write. All he could say was the one syllable—Tan. Broca discovered a large lesion in the lower left front of Tan’s brain, and when he autopsied the brains of other patients in similar straits and found matching wounds, he declared the peanut-sized area the home of language. That was the first patch of the brain pegged to a specific function, and it still bears Broca’s name. Ten years later, German neurologist Carl Wernicke realized that patients with a lesion in the left rear of the brain often spoke incoherently, and he flagged this second area as key to comprehending language.
For the longest time, people believed that the neural pathways of language curved along a Silk Road, journeying from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s, and when Paul had his stroke, that’s what all the textbooks taught and I accepted. But recent strides in brain imaging now suggest that word signals spread widely, detour through mazy souks in the temporal lobe, and strike Wernicke’s and Broca’s almost in parallel. It seems those two classic word-mills don’t so much specialize as conspire to fabricate language, and other artisans contribute to the neural weave.
When we hear a noise, the brain analyzes the incoming stimuli, asking itself: Is that weird yammering human? Is it a syllable, a real word, just nonsense sounds? If it resembles speech, the brain conjures up the memory of how certain words sound, associates them with meaning, and furnishes instructions on how to use the muscles of the tongue, throat, lips, and mouth to dispatch a reply.
In so-called convergence zones, cargo from the senses combines with emotions, resemblances, a tangle of memories, and other mental spices. As neural traders hobnob (wiring and firing together), they grow stronger ties in the process, establishing a quick route for future trade. The brain relies on such guilds of neurons firing in synchrony, but they don’t have to be neighbors. They don’t even have to share the same hemisphere. Still, they forge vast assemblies of cells. One such convergence zone in the parietal lobe, gravely damaged during Paul’s stroke, is associated with drawing meaning and emotion from language, with providing music’s rhythmic enchantment, numbers’ clout, writing’s constellations, telling left from right, directing thoughts outward to the bright spangled world, and defle
cting thoughts inward to judge a feeling or hatch a plan. Adding to the carnage, adjacent cells that spur movement can be injured, too. It’s the equivalent of knocking out a state’s electrical grids. After that comes a cascade of silently detonating disabilities.
My mind raced. In an instant, Paul had moved to a land of foreigners, whose language he didn’t speak and who couldn’t understand him. He’d become the unspoken, the unspeakable. In our most talkative of worlds, where lovers coo and confide, friends and family chatter, employers dictate, stores pitch, and all the ready forms of entertainment for the sedentary or sick (TV, books, doctor’s office magazines, newspaper, movies) babble language. Suddenly he could not comment, share thoughts, voice feelings, describe hurts or desires, ask for help.
Over the next day, Paul slept a lot, thank heavens, and, in a stupor, I dragged home to shower and nap, and also cancel upcoming book tour events. I needed to let the venues know so that, with any luck, people might see the last-minute “canceled because of family illness” postings. But I still felt guilty imagining them arriving at events only to find a cryptic sign awaiting them. I emailed editors who expected work to be turned in, and canceled all assignments. My project lay in a narrow bed across the lake.
ON DAY TWO, I swooped up the highway edging Lake Cayuga, a cavernous lake too murky for scuba diving, with a rumored underground passage connecting it to Lake Seneca, and a legend of long-necked monsters. Small white sails battled chop on the steel-blue water. I’d admired the lake thousands of times, and glimpsed it while driving thousands more. It always looked different, depending on its mood, and mine. As I drove, it stabbed at the corner of one eye, shining dimly, not glacial at all, but like some impure metal, with slaggy brown inlets, and at times a glaring surface tense as aluminum. Every landmark I passed held spring-loaded memories.
The hospital is located on a hill overlooking the lake, and just past the Finger Lakes Massage School, Paleontological Research Institute, and Museum of the Earth, which houses over 2 million species of fossils. Paul used to chuckle about the road being an avenue not of pines but of spines, traveling from spiny trilobites to spinal taps, and enjoyed the jazzy rhythm of the fossil syllables: “Cenozoic benthic foraminifera.” Whenever we drove past it, he’d pronounce “mollusk” very slowly and roundly, just for the mouth-feel.