Coming into the End Zone (6 page)

Now I look, hard. I see the pull of gravity on the soft tissues of my breasts and buttocks. I see the heavy rings that encircle my neck like Ubangi jewelry. I notice bones that seem to have thinned and shrunk. Muscles appear to be watered down. The walls of my abdomen, like Jericho, have softened and now press outward. There is nothing lovely about the sight of me. I have been taught that firm and unlined is beautiful. Shall I try to learn to love what I am left with? I wonder. It would be easier to resolve never again to look into a full-length mirror.

I open mail I have brought with me. A letter asking me to ‘read' at a conference on creative writing. My first response to the invitation: pleasure, ego gratification. Someone remembers and wants me still. The second: a quick reminder. I dislike reading my work aloud, hearing all the errors that are, too late, cemented into print, noticing the rhetorical slips, the grating infelicities. The sound of my own voice gives a terrible legitimacy to faulty prose. I say no. But thank you for thinking to invite me.

Another letter asks if I am willing to be nominated to the Senate of Phi Beta Kappa. Out of the blue. I have had no connection with the society since I was elected to it fifty years ago. At that time I had to explain to my father, one of this country's nastiest anti-intellectuals, what PBK was. He laughed, and directed my mother to attend the induction ceremonies, adding that he was far too busy to come out of his haberdashery store on the Bowery to go to ‘Phi Beta Krappa.' A long, hearty laugh followed that witticism, in which, as I recall, my mother and I did not join.

I say yes, for the usual reason. I always figure I will not be alive when the time comes to do anything about this, or, as likely, I will not be elected. I never say yes to invitations to speak or read or teach if the proposed time is a month or two ahead, believing that there might be a chance I will be living when the time comes. But a year from now is very safe.

I ponder the vast unlikelihood of PBK's selection of me, after all this time, out of its 300,000 members. Did my name come up on some computer screen, as the result of random choice? My acceptance of the nomination is as unlikely as the coincidence (it seems to me) of its coming upon me. To all this happenstance, I say an unbelieving yes.

Sallie Bingham, whom I have known since we met at the National Book Critics Circle's yearly meetings (or perhaps it was the National Book Award ceremonies in the early seventies), sends me a copy of
The American Voice
, a magazine she publishes in Kentucky. There is a small essay of mine in this issue.

When we first knew each other in New York, I had no idea who Sallie was—a daughter of Kentucky's most famous family, as it turned out—until her family sold its interest in the
Louisville Courier-Journal
and the story of the family's internecine war was revealed. I never guessed she was wealthy:
my
Sallie Bingham? She was shy, unassuming, quite willing to lunch at my suggestion at a grubby sandwich shop. I assumed she was probably in New York on a small budget from the paper for which she worked as book editor.

Now she uses her money to assist women writers and to publish the magazine
The American Voice
, in which this short, sad piece of mine appears. I read it with dismay, wondering how I could have brought myself to display in print my grief at the deaths of Bill Whitehead, Lazarus, the fish, and the sight of the moribund Florida lions.

This is what I wrote on growing old:

Everyone does who survives. The inevitability of it is offensive to me, but what is to be done? To choose not to is oblivion, and do I want that, yet? No. I prefer half a loaf, a piece of the stale pie, diminishment, a slant of light, to total eclipse. The flowers of my life wilt, they lose their fragrance and their colors, but I cling to them, preferring them to nullity. I hear less, see crookedly, lose weight and height, grow spotted and stolid, placid and inept. A writer named Guy Davenport reminds me that for Edgar Allan Poe time was the unstoppable tread of death. This sound I hear more clearly than once I did, when the steps were muffled by activity and love, or drowned out by my hot pursuit of notice and satisfactions. I used to fly; now I linger or stumble. Once, it was always dawn; now it is twilight.

I collect metaphors for death. Driving down US
I
toward the flat and unexceptional Florida town of New Smyrna Beach, I pull over onto the shoulder of the road. I get out, and walk toward an elongated boxcar with grillwork at the sides. There, in three narrow cages, are six tired, sick-looking lions, with yellow, aged manes and flabby, ineffectual paws. Their eyes are full of tears. Scabs line their mouths. They lie in sawdust and excrement, haunch forced against haunch, and their flesh hangs upon their bones like drapery.

They are stationed there to call attention to a display of secondhand Chevrolets. Their trainer (keeper?), who wears knickers and a jungle shirt, flips his whip in the direction of the parked lines of dingy automobiles. We do not stir, so fascinated are we by the boxed-up captives who look as though they may be dying. He tries to enliven them by poking at their legs with a pointed stick. They do not stir. He flashes his whip across their faces. They stare back at him, understanding perfectly but too weary, too sick, too wise to obey.

Two children standing near me scream with delight at the sight of the six princes of the jungle now reduced to proletarian paupers. Children love animals, I think, even stuffed ones. These prisoners, locked into their coffers, especially delight them. The children are free; these poor guttersnipes are down on their luck, recumbent, enslaved. What a pleasurable turnabout, I imagine they are thinking.

The children move away, toward the cars, holding their parents' hands. I stand still, enclosed like the abject lions in the unreasonable quarters of my old body, confined to the bars and sawdust of a future that can end only in the black light of oblivion. What remains of their lives is a dirty joke, told with a snicker by an obscene keeper in cowboy boots, holding a taunting whip. What remains of mine is not much more elevated: There are too few years left to make another life. My age is my cage; only death can free me.

Or:

My friend, the editor of two of my books, dies. His death is not a solitary phenomenon; many others are dying of the same irrevocable disease. The tragedy of his death, and the death of others, is that they are all young. Their talents have been blasted away by a God seemingly blind to their value and deaf to their prayers and the prayers of their friends. Feeling older than ever, I board a train at seven in the morning, a shining silver bullet aimed at a straight shot up the East Coast from Washington to New York, depended upon by this aging body to get me to the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street in time to bid my friend goodbye, to tell him how much I will miss him, how I despise the irrational fate that determined it.

Would I have said these things? I will never know. Arrived at the door to his apartment, I find he is not there. His friend, Tony Blum, tells me he died three hours ago. Bill, a man at the height of his physical and intellectual powers. A young man (to me) who understood the value of full friendship with this old writer. I rage against my own survival in the darkness of his disappearance, I hate being an age he will never see, I detest his leaving before I can bid him farewell.

Oddly, I cannot cry. I am too angry with the God I trusted to save him, to lift his affliction. All the way back to Washington tears press against my eyes, but they never come. Two weeks go by. I do the ordinary household things to ready our home for the winter. I sweep leaves and bag them into fat plastic sacks, I store the lawn chairs and drain the hose. I wonder what to do about the pair of black goldfish who live, against all lack of care and expectations, in the small pond in the garden.

I note the temperature. They must be brought into the house before the frost expected this evening. I scoop them up into a wide enamel basin (all I have on hand), fill it with water, and leave them on the deck while I go uptown to buy (at a place called Think Tank) a bowl for their winter housing.

When I go to transfer them to their new abode, one is not there. I cannot believe it. Where can he be? The mystery of this absence overwhelms me. And then, looking down, I see his bloody body on the deck. He has committed suicide, I decide, leaping out of the basin onto the destructive wooden floor. Stuck into the wound on his head is a dead wasp. I put the survivor, whom I now name Lazarus, into the new tank, take the body of the suicide into the garden, and bury it, placing a cross made of matchsticks over the grave.

And then I cry. For half an hour without being able to stop. For the dead, nameless fish, for Lazarus now left alone and lonely, I believe, for my carelessness which allowed the nameless one to die, dashing against the slanted side of a merciless washbasin to his solitary death.

I am amazed at my free-flowing tears (I do not cry easily, perhaps five or six times in my adult life, which now stretches to half a century), at the depth of my grief, at my obliviousness to the true cause of my sorrow. Now I know: I am crying for my dead friend, not alone for the newly dead fish. At last I am able to flood his memory with my hot, resentful, furious, contrite tears. I realize I am trying to wash away my guilt at having, at this late age, survived his youth, my remorse at my health in the light (darkness?) of his undeserved disease. I place crossed matchsticks over the memory of my love for him, my vision of his bright face and endearing young smile. I surrender to the inevitability of all death and the injustice of his early one. I mourn my late arrival at his door, my unspoken words of farewell and love.

I mourn the fish. The moribund Florida lions. The odium of growing old, the perversity of not growing old: the whole inexplicable condition of life and the illogic of its termination.

I read over this record of what I felt. At the time I thought putting it down on paper would assuage my suffering. Now I know nothing will do that. I used to believe confession (in the dark upright box with the sound of the priest breathing on the other side of curtain) would take away my sins and guilt. No. Nothing will, except time, age, forgetfulness. Even then …

We drink champagne with Peggy, and Ted and Bob, our Washington friends who now live most of the year in East Blue Hill, Maine. Someone says something about seventy being young these days. I smile and say nothing, thinking of three-year-old Emily Galvin's birthday party in Iowa City. Her mother, poet Jorie Graham, read to her after the feasting. When Jorie went to answer the telephone, I asked Emily if she wanted me to finish reading the book to her. ‘Oh no,' she said, withdrawing in horror: ‘You're too old!'

Sybil and I have a quiet dinner together at a restaurant in Blue Hill overlooking a small stream and waterfall. We talk about everything but this day. I am grateful for her tact. I don't know how much more celebration I can bear. We have wine, but no toasts. I think how wise she is not to propose one.

All day I have been doing what we do each end-of-year period in the bookstore: I ‘take stock,' a curious phrase. For books it means counting what we have on the shelves. For me, today, it meant looking at what I had and have and was and am and did and do, what I no longer wish to be and do and keep and acquire. I try to find some sound philosophical basis for what I have been, and fail. All I can conjure up is bits and pieces, nothing solid, nothing whole. My lifelong, hard-held views: where are they now in this reexamination? What do I believe? What have I done? The time I have been granted: what has it all come to?

I look across the table at my friend, who is happily paying the bill for our good dinner, as a final gift for the terrible Twelfth, and wonder, under the confusions of the day and my amazement at having survived this long without being aware that all this time had passed: Who am I? At the end of this hard, dismaying, and only occasionally heartening day, Sybil and I talk of someone we have heard about who, it was reported to us, died, ‘leaving nothing.' The phrase stopped me. Its ambiguity is interesting. Does it mean money, property, goods, books, ‘belongings,' as they say? In a different sense, perhaps it is more accurate to say we die leaving
everything:
what is left of the beauty of the natural world, the familiar faces of those we have loved, the music we have come to know so well that it plays in our ears without the use of technology, the paintings engraved on our eyes, the interior vision of dancers who perform brilliantly in our heads while we sit inert in our chairs at home. All this we ‘leave.' It is never nothing. It is everything.

As I fall asleep, I remember that I have not spoken to Richard Lucas in many days. I feel the need to be close to him now, to be part of his suffering and his courage, to
see
his dying. Am I being honest, or is this feeling accentuated by the impossibility of gratifying it? We are three thousand miles apart.

This desire is something new for me. When I was a child I would not look at the dead, would not accompany my mother into a hospital to see a sick friend (in those days children could visit their friends without hindrance). ‘I'm afraid,' I remember saying. ‘Of what?' she would ask. I could not tell her, I did not know.

During most of my life I walked away from the sight of an accident, sickness, suffering, as if, by my not witnessing them, they would cease to exist. Forced, by chance, to look upon an old man who had been shot through the head in front of his cigar store at the corner near my apartment house in New York, I am unable to forget the sight, in my dreams, and awake: a piece of the shell of his skull was left on the sidewalk after the ambulance had taken him away. As a young girl, all of death, dying, suffering, and pain coalesced into that glimpse of a section of a dead old man's head.

I could not bear to look upon anyone who was less than perfect for a long time.

My grandmother took great pleasure in the spectacle of death. She used to attend funerals regularly, most often for persons she did not know. The Frank Campbell Funeral Home was three blocks from where she lived. As I recall, she had no particular sympathy for the living, except for her close relatives, whom she loved devotedly. But she was proud of her own survival to a great age—ninety-three. The longer she lived the more she seemed to enjoy funeral ceremonies for strangers.