You have obviously thought this out, says Myrna, the poet whom I have loved since childhood for the burlap, asthma-rasp of her voice, making decisions of a lifetime with the speed of deli orders. She can dismiss lovers, choose upholstery, sign on dotted lines, and fly to Olbia faster than anyone I know. She is finality with a hard obsidian edge. We are dealing, she continues, with a mind, as Williams put it, like a bed all made up. You have our love and our support, Liz.
I look around and try to smile gratefully as Myrna seems to speak for everyone, even without conferring. A miracle, that woman. There appears to be no dissent.
I say, Well now, and sip my Scotch and think of my bed in the next room strangled in the twists of sheets and blankets, edges dragging on the floor. I am not afraid of death, I decide to add. I am afraid of what going on like this will do to me and to my daughter and to my husband.
Elliott, arranged next to me on the sofa, looks at his fingers, which tip to tip form a sort of steeple between his knees.
I am getting into the swing of it. I tell them the cancer is poisoning at least three lives and that I refuse to be its accomplice. This is not a deranged act, I explain. Most of them have known for quite a while my belief that intelligent suicide is almost always preferable to the stupid lingering of a graceless death.
There is silence, grand as Versailles. It seems respectful.
Shennan, Algonquin princess with black braids and sad eyes, stands and says in the oratory deadpan of sixth-grade book reports: I think I can speak for Liz when I say that suicide can be, often is, the most definitive statement one can make about one’s life, to say that it’s yours and that you are not going to let it wither away like something decaying in a refrigerator drawer. As it is Liz’s life to do with as she pleases, so it is her death. As long as Liz and I have known one another, I think we have both realized that she would probably be a suicide. It is no inchoate fancy. It is Liz’s long-held vision, a way of meeting one’s death squarely, maturely. It is an assertion of life, of self.
(Ah, Shennan dear, yes, but didn’t I always say that seventy-one would be better than forty-two, in love as I am with prime numbers, those curious virginal devils, and they could always say, ah, yes, she died in her prime—even at seventy-one—good god I’m really getting awful, Joanie, what did I tell you, babe?)
Shennan finishes by saying it is the culmination of a life philosophy, the triumph of the artist over the mortal, physical world.
It will possibly be the most creative act Liz has ever accomplished, adds my husband. I mean, it could be viewed that way.
He swallows with some difficulty, his wonderful Adam’s apple gliding up and down his throat, a tiny flesh elevator. I think of the warm beers, unfinished books, the buttonless sweaters, and the miscarriages upstairs. I wonder if he could be right.
I think it is beautiful she is doing this for me, Elliott adds as a further announcement. He squeezes my shoulder. I look for tears in his eyes and think I spot the shiny edge of one, like a contact lens.
Well now, I say.
Now we all get up and cry and eat brie and wheat thins. Joanie steps toward me with her husband, William. Until now no one has mentioned God.
I fear for you, Liz. She is crying. I hold her. Why didn’t you tell me this before? she murmurs. Oh, Liz, I fear hell for you. What are you doing?
William doesn’t bullshit: It’s crap, Liz. There’s no such thing as an aesthetic suicide. You’re not going to be able to stand back afterward and say by jove what a damn good job I did of it. You’ll make the Post, Liz, not the Whitney. This all smacks of some perverse crypto-Catholic martyrdom of yours. It’s deluded. It’s a power play.
(I can clear my throat louder than anyone I know.)
I appreciate your candor, William.
You know, he continues, a roomful of people, it sounds beautiful, but it’s fishy. Something’s not right underneath.
Joanie the star of catechism class: We love you, Liz. God loves you, please—
I understand, I interrupt, if you cannot help me do it.
Help you do it? they chorus, horrified. They leave early, forgetting their umbrellas. The room is reeling.
Frank Scherman Franck pulls at his cowlick, sips Cherry Heering. His cowlick bounces back up again, something vaguely lewd. You are a marvel, Liz, he coos. It’s a brave and awesome thing you are doing. I never thought you’d actually go through with it, but here you are …
(Cherry Heering, Hairy Cherring.) Do you believe in God, Frank Scherman Franck? I ask.
Well, long story, he begins. We have a kind of mutual agreement: I won’t believe in him and he won’t believe in me. That way no one gets hurt.
Sometimes I still believe in God, Frank Scherman Franck, I say, but then that belief flies away from me like a child on a swing, back and forth, back and forth, and I do not really say this. (Cow lick, lick cow.) I notice William has returned for his umbrella. He stops Elliott in the foyer, says something urgent, something red. I can hear Elliott’s reply: If I saw or felt any ambivalence I would, William, but there’s no ambivalence. She’s sure. She’s strong. She knows what she’s doing. I have to believe in her.
Excuse me, I say to Frank as I run off to hide temporarily in the bathroom. I lock the door behind me and bury my face in Elliott’s bathrobe hanging on the inside hook like a sheepish animal. Hug. Clutch. Press. Cry. I could get lost in it, this vast white country of terrycloth, the terrain of it against my face, Elliott’s familiar soapy smells inextricable, filling, spinning my head. I turn around and sink back against the door, against the robe. I do not look in the mirror. This place is a mausoleum of pills and ceramic and fluorescent lights blinking on and off so quickly you think they’re on all the time, those clever devils. But we know better don’t we. This is where the dead belong, with the dying belonging to the dead belonging to no one. This is not supposed to go like this. I am getting drunk. I think we were supposed to sit around rather politely, perhaps even woodenly, and discuss this thing, cool as iced tea, a parlor of painters and poets like the Paris salons, like television, and we would all agree (my reasoning flawless) that my life ultimately meant my death as well and that it was a right both civil and humane to take whatever actions my free will so determined yadada yadada, and they would pronounce me a genius and not steal the best lines and they would weep just the right amount that anyone should weep for Bastille Day and no one would fucking mention God or hell and when I stepped out of the bathroom I would not see Shennan eyeing Elliott’s ass as the two of them stand alone in the kitchen, one slicing cheese, the other arranging crackers, nor would I have to suffer the aphasic stupidity of the articulate (therefore unforgivable) who when offered the topaz necklace of a dying woman do not know what to say (and Myrna, this is not Myrna, Myrna is a poet who flies to Olbia, dismisses lovers, sculpts in words, her poems like the finest diamonds in the finest Fabergés of the finest Czar, not faltering, defeated by topaz). I do not like to watch Myrna grope; she doesn’t do it well.
I am something putrid. I wonder if I smell, decaying from the inside out like fruit, yet able to walk among them like the dead among the living, like Christ, for a while, only for a while, until things begin to show, until things become uncomfortable. I return to the living room, grin weakly, stand among my friends. I am something incorrect: a hair in the cottage cheese. Something uncouth: a fart in the elevator.
Go like this; my husband pushes my head between my knees.
Ugh, what a night, I say, huh.
Ssshhhh. Be quiet. This increases the oxygen to the cortex. You know you’re not supposed to drink like that.
I inhale four times with the drama of the first amphibian. How am I doing so far?
The sun is up, depressing me like the mindless smile of a cheerleader. My face is the big bluish-white of white elephants.
The phone rings.
It is Olga, her quiet Slavic cheekbones pale and calming even through the wires, her voice a learned English breathiness affected in the s
tyle of too much late night Joan Fontaine. She is sorry, she says, for not having spoken much to me last night. She felt a little bewildered both by my announcement and by the reaction of the others. It was, she says, as if they had already known before and had nothing but clinically prepared affirmations for me, convinced as always of Liz’s sound-mindedness.
Well, the dissent left early, I say, and forgot its umbrella.
I, too, am dissenting, she says slowly, like Jane Eyre. Don’t the others know what you still have to offer, in terms of your writing, in terms of your daughter?
Olga, I despise people propping my pillows.
Olga is getting cheeky: Perhaps the time has come for you to learn to need people, Liz. And to be patient. You haven’t earned your death yet. You want the orgasm without the foreplay.
Look, Olga, at this point I’d take what I could get. Don’t get too sexual on me, okay, sweetie? (I can feel myself starting to get mean, my tone invidious.)
Please, Liz. I’m trying to tell you what your sister might have told you. I mean, I couldn’t let last night just sit there like that, Shennan standing there like an Indian priestess celebrating death in this fraudulent guise of a philosophy, and Myrna—well, Myrna will be Myrna.
(And sometimes not, I think. God, I’m not in the mood for this. Olga, dear, go back to the moors.)
I care so much for you, Liz, she continues. (Oh, Rochester, take her the fuck away.) It’s just that … it’s like you and your death, you’re facing each other like loners from a singles bar who have scarcely spoken. You haven’t really kissed or touched and yet are about to plunge into bed together.
(Sex again. Jane Eyre, indeed.)
Honestly, Olga. All this erotica on a Sunday. Has Richard returned for free piano lessons or something? (I am cruel; a schoolmaster with a switch and a stool.) I really must see what Blaine is shouting about; she’s downstairs and has been calling to me for a while now. It may be one of her turtles or something.
Liz, look. I don’t want to go like this. Let’s have lunch soon.
(We make plans to make plans.)
I think about what William should do.
Elliott and I have weekly philharmonic seats. I am in bed this Friday, not feeling up to it.
Go ahead, I say. Take Blaine. Take Shennan.
Liz, he drawls, a mild reprimand. He sits at the bed’s edge, zooted, smelling of Danish soap, and I think of Ivan Ilych’s wife, off to the theater while her husband’s kidneys floated in his eyes like cataracts, his legs propped up on the footboard by the manservant—ah, where are the manservants?
Elliott, look at how I’m feeling today. I can’t go like this. Please, go ahead without me.
You feel pretty bad, huh, he says, looking at his watch at the same time. He gives me the old honey I’ll bring you home a treat, like I’m a fucking retard or something whose nights can be relieved of their hellish sameness with gifts of Colorforms and Sky Bars.
Enjoy, enjoy, you asshole, I do not chirp.
It is already July. The fireflies will soon be out. My death flashes across my afternoon like a nun in white, hurrying, evanescing, apparitional as the rise of heat off boulevards, the parched white of sails across cement, around the corner, fleeing the sun. I have not yet seen the face, it is hooded, perhaps wrapped, but I know the flow, the cloth of her, moving always in diagonals, in waves toward me, then footlessly away again.
We told Blaine tonight. We had decided to do it together. We were in the living room.
You’re going to die, she said, aren’t you? before I had a chance to say, Now you’re young and probably don’t understand. She has developed a habit of tucking her hair nervously behind her ears when she does not want to cry. She is prophetic. Tuck, tuck.
Yes. And we told her why. And I got a chance, after all, to say you’re young and probably don’t understand, and she got a chance to look at me with that scrambled gaze of contempt and hurt that only fourth-graders know, and then to close her eyes like an angel and fall into my arms, sobbing, and I sobbed too into that hair tucked behind those ears and I cursed God for this day and Blaine of course wanted to know who would take her to clarinet class.
Tuck, tuck. She lay her head in my lap like a leaky egg. We stayed like that for an hour. I whispered little things to her, smoothing back her hair, about how much I loved her, how patient she would have to be, how strong. At nine-thirty she went silently to her room and lay in bed, swollen-eyed, facing the wall like a spurned and dying lover.
I realize now what it is that William should do. When the badass wildebeest comes out of the closet and messes up his room, William should blow a trumpet and make the wildebeest cease and desist. He should put his foot down and say, Enough of this darned nonsense, silly wildebeest: Let’s get this room picked up! I am practically certain that wildebeests listen to trumpets.
I would tell this to Elliott, but the wildebeest was in the third book. And I finished that long ago.
No, I must think of something else.
Oh God, it’s not supposed to go like this. There I was like Jesus, sure as a blazing rooster, on Palm Sunday riding tall, dauntless as Barbra Streisand, now suddenly on Thursday shoved up against the softer edges of my skin and even Jesus, look, he’s crying and whimpering and heaving so, Christ, he pees in his pants, please god, I mean God, don’t let me go like this but let me stay right in this garden next to the plastic flamingoes and let me croon the blues till I am crazy with them.
Elliott has a way of walking in just before dinner and kissing me as if for a publicity shot.
Who do we have out there waiting in the wings, Elliott, fucking Happy Rockefeller? Channel 6 News? Hey, baby, I’m not dead yet; I’m writing, I’m hungry: let’s make love, baby, let’s do it on the terrace, high and cool, sugar, hey how about the terrace Elliott babydoll, waddaya say?
And if he does not stride angrily from the room, he stays, fumbles insincerely, makes me weep. He has no taste for necrophilia, and I sigh and crave the white of his shoulders under my chin, his breath on my neck, the plum smoothness of him in my hands. And I want it still for me here now as I lie in the blue-black of this aloneness thirsting for love more than I ever thought I could.
Even at midnight the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes.
Tomorrow’s Bastille Day, Elliott, and I want what I’ve written for the fourth William book changed. So far William thinks he forgot his umbrella and wanders all over the city looking for it, misfortune following him like an odious dog, until after he is splashed by a truck and nearly hit by a cab, he goes home only to realize he never forgot his umbrella at all. I want that changed. I want him to have all kinds of wonderful, picaresque adventures so that it doesn’t even matter if he has lost his umbrella or not. Can you change that for me? Can you think of some wonderful adventures for me? Maybe he meets up with cowboys and a few Indians and has a cookout with music and barbecue beans.
Or meets a pretty little Indian girl and gets married, suggests Elliott, an asshole sometimes, I swear. He doesn’t even realize, I guess.
My turn: Yeah, and scalps her and wins hero-of-the-day badge. I guess I’ll just have to entrust it all to you, Elliott.
Don’t worry, he says, gingerly stroking my hair, which I picture now like the last pieces of thread around a spool.
I really would like to finish it myself, but tomorrow is Bastille Day.
Yes, says Elliott.
Joanie, hon, Joanie with the webbed toes, I know it’s late, no, no, don’t feel you have to come over, no please don’t, Elliott’s here, it’s fine. I just wanted to say I love you and don’t feel sad for me please … you know I feel pretty good and these pills, well, they’re here in a little saucer staring at me, listen, I’m going to let you go back to bed now and well you know how I’ve always felt about you Joan and if there is an afterlife
… yeah well maybe I’m not going to heaven, okay … what … do you think I’m silly? I mean if it wouldn’t scare you, maybe I’ll try to get in touch, if you wouldn’t mind, yes, and please keep an eye out for Blaine for me, Joan, would you, god she’s so young and I only just told her about menstruation this past spring and she seemed so interested but then only said, So does that mean all twins look alike? so I know there will be other things she will want to know, you know, and she loves you, Joan, she really does. And be good to Olga for me, I have been so unkind, and remind your husband I’ve immortalized him, ha! yeah … can you believe it, dear rigid soul, and Joanie, take care of yourself and say prayers for me and for Blaine and for Elliott who did cry this morning for the first helpless time, how I do love him, Joan, despite everything
everything I can see from the round eye of this empty saucer, faintly making out a patch of droughted trees and a string of wildebeests, one by one, like the sheep of a child’s insomnia, throwing in the towel, circling, lying down in the sun silently to decompose, in spite of themselves, god, there’s no music, no trumpet here, it is fast, and there’s no sound at all, just this white heat of July going on and on, going on like this
HOW TO TALK TO YOUR MOTHER (NOTES)
1982. Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, “What?” “Huh?” “Shush now,” as it creaks, aches, groans, until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished.
Dream, and in your dreams babies with the personalities of dachshunds, fat as Macy balloons, float by the treetops.
The first permanent polyurethane heart is surgically implanted.