when you walk up Third Avenue toward the IRT, do it quickly. You will have a full bag. People will seem to know what you have done, where you are going. They will have his eyes, the same pair, passed along on the street from face to face, like secrets, like glasses at the opera.
this is how you are.
Rushing downstairs into the steamy burn of the subway. Unable to look a panhandler in the pan.
you will never see him again. Or perhaps you will be sitting in Central Park one April eating your lunch and he will trundle by on roller skates. You will greet him with a wave and a mouth full of sandwich. He will nod, but he will not stop.
there will be an endless series of tests.
a week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference. The logy whine of a cowboy harmonica, plaintive, weary, it will fade into the hills slow as slow Hank Williams. One of those endings.
* * *
Go Like This
If an elephant missteps and dies in an open place, the herd will not leave him there…
lewis thomas, The Lives of a Cell
i have written before. Three children's books: William, William Takes a Trip, More William. Perhaps you've heard of them. In the first, William gets a duck, builds it a house with a doorbell. In the second, William goes to Wildwood and has a good time. In the third, William finds a wildebeest in his closet. It messes up his room. Life is tough all around.
I was planning a fourth book, but I didn't know finally what William should do. So instead, I am writing of rational suicide—no oxymoron there. I eschew all contradictions, inconsistencies, all stripes with plaids. I write as a purist, a lover of skim milk, a woman who knows which pieces of furniture look right together in the living room. A month ago I was told I have cancer. It was not the clean, confined sort I might have hoped for, suspended neatly in my breast with its slippery little convolutions turned tortuously inward on itself, hardened, wizened to a small extractable walnut. Or even two. It had spread through my body like a clumsy uninvited guest who is obese and eats too much, still finding, filling rooms. I tried therapy for three weeks, wearing scarves, hiding hairbrushes. I turned up the stereo when rushing into the bathroom to be sick. Blaine heard my retching above the Mozart only twice. Mommyouallright? Her voice had a way of drifting through the door, a small, misplaced melody that had lost its way, ending up in a room full of plumbing and decayed flesh, cavorting innocently with the false lilac aerosol and the mean stench of bile and undigested foods. Okay, honey, I'm okay. Hell, I'm okay.
dr. torbein said that many women go like this for months and improve. Live many years after. Go Christmas shopping, have birthday cakes, all those simple pleasures, now you certainly would like that wouldn't you, Elizabeth?
I am not a skinny child with charge cards, I said. You can't honestly expect me to like this. And please: don't call me Elizabeth.
He was taken aback, vaguely annoyed. Ad lib unpleasantries, my, my. He did not have lines for this. He took off his glasses, no, perhaps you'd call them spectacles, and stared at me over his clipboard, the glare one gives a fractious child who is not going to get ice cream. This is not going to be easy, he informed me. (No maple walnut.) But women have survived much greater damage than you have suffered, much worse odds, worse pain than this.
Well, waddaya know, I cheered heartily. Bully for them.
Now Elizabeth, he scolded. He started to raise a finger, then changed his mind. Go like this, he said instead, demonstrating that I should lift my arm as high as possible over my head so he could examine tissue, feel for further lumps or something. He began to whistle "Clementine."
Ouch! I shrieked. He stopped whistling.
Dreadful sorry, he murmured, trying to probe more gently.
I try not to look at my chest. It is ravaged, paved over, mowed down by the train tracks and parking lots of the Surgical Way. I know there are absences, as if the hollows were the surreptitious marks of a child's spoon in tomorrow night's dessert. The place where I thought my soul was located when I was five is no longer there.
I haven't worn falsies since junior high, I smiled and told the doctor, my future spreading before me, a van Ruisdael cemetery. Thank god I don't have to take gym like y'know wadda mean, doc?
joanie, joanie, my friend with the webbed toes, why do I make Dr. Torbein so uncomfortable, don't you think he'd be used to this by now, he must get it all the time, even if he doesn't get it all all the time. (Joanie smiles and looks at her feet a lot.) I mean, he's got his glasses so far down here, see, that he has to tuck two of his chins back into the recesses of his throat in order to read The Clipboard, which seems to grow out of his gut like some visceral suburbia, and unless we are speaking of the ferrous content of blood, he is utterly ill at ease with irony and gets twitches, like this, see? (Horrid, feeble humor.)
Joanie groans and rolls her eyeballs like Howdy Doody. Jesusmaryandjoseph, Liz, she sighs. (Only Catholics can say that.) You're really getting silly.
Even wit deteriorates, I say, my eye running fast out of twinkles.
i have decided on Bastille Day. It is a choice of symbol and expedience. Elliott will have time enough before he begins teaching again in the fall. Blaine will not go to camp this year and can spend some time with Elliott's folks upstate. As it will be unbearably hot, I'm sure, I will tell everyone to wear light clothes. No black, no ties, no hats, no coats. The dead are cruel to inflict that misery in July. Open-toed shoes and parasols de rigueur, I will tell everyone. (Ditto: pastels, seersucker, flasks and vials of Scotch, cocaine.) They should require little prompting. They're enlightened. They've seen others go like this before. They read the papers, see the movies, watch the television broadcasts. They know how it's done. They know what for. It's existential. It's Hemingway. It's familiar. They know what to do.
when i told elliott of my suicide we were in the kitchen bitching at each other about the grease in the oven. Funny, I had planned on telling him a little differently than No one has fucking cleaned this shithole in weeks Elliott I have something to tell you. It wasn't exactly Edna Millay.
i have lain. In bed. So many nights. Thinking of how it would be when I told him. And plotting, ruminating, remembering the ways our bodies used to love each other, touch, waltz. Now my body stands in the corner of the gym by the foul lines and extra crepe paper and doesn't get asked to dance at all. Blighted, beaten, defeated friend. I rock it, hold it like a sick child; alone, my body and I, we weep for the missing parts. I never question Elliott's reluctance to have sex with me. It is not the same body to him, with his simple, boyish perceptions of the physical. It's okay, I say, but I look at the curve of his bones, the freckled skin of his back, something wildly magical still, something precious. I always think he's the first one to drop off to sleep at night, but I have often awoken in the morning to find the hand lotion bottle on the floor by his side of the bed, so I know it's not always so. It's like some rude poem of my stupidity, of this space grown between us. (Oh, Elliott, I am so sorry.) I return the lotion to the bathroom sometimes only to discover it by the bed again the next morning. I never hear him. (Elliott, is there nothing I can do? Is there nothing?)
he looked a little white, standing there by the oven. He took my hand, kissed it, held it between his, patted it. Let's think about it for a day or two or whatever. Then we'll discuss it further.
Then we'll discuss it further, I repeated.
Yes, he said.
Yes, I said.
but we didn't. Not really. Oh, it drifted piecemeal into subsequent dialogues like a body tossed out to sea and washed days later back into shore, a shoe there, a finger here, a breastbone in weed tide-bumping against the sand. But we never truly discussed it, never truly. Instead, allusions, suggestions, clues, silent but palpable, crawled out of the night ocean, as in a science fiction movie: black and slow they moved in and arranged themselves around the apartment like precocious, breathing houseplants, like scavengers.
i hea
rd elliott last night. He thought I was asleep, but I could see his motions under the covers and the tense drop of his jaw. I thought of Ivan Ilych who, dying, left his overweight wife in the master bedroom (with the knickknacks?) to sleep alone in a small room next to the study. Darkness. The late spring sky has strangely emptied. The moon rummages down in the alleyway like somebody's forgotten aunt.
i have invited our closest friends over tonight, seated them around the living room, and told them that I wanted to die, that I had calculated how much Seconal was required. They are a cool intellectual lot. They do not gasp and murmur among themselves. I say I have chosen suicide as the most rational and humane alternative to my cancer, an act not so much of self-sacrifice as of beauty, of sparing. I wanted their support.
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 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. (I have named my books well.)
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. 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 somethin
g 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 style 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.