Watch Me: A Memoir (37 page)

It seemed that the paramedics came in seconds. Like ministering angels, they laid Bob on the bed, gave him oxygen, and took his vitals. He was in full heart attack. Steven arrived and left with Bob in the ambulance. I locked up the house and the dogs and followed them to UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. Bob’s heart stopped twice in the ambulance and they had to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation using a defibrillator.

When I got to the hospital, Bob was in intensive care. The doctors had given him a blood thinner, and where the IVs penetrated the skin, watery blood was seeping through bandages and towels. I stayed with him, talking to him, telling him I was there and that everything would be all right, but it wasn’t. Bob was now having a stroke. He had already undergone kidney failure.

At three o’clock in the morning, I traveled with him to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. It was dangerous but crucial to move him, because they had a better capability to treat him there. They would not allow me to be with him for several hours, as they were doing tests and biopsies. Jaclyn came and we tried to sleep in the waiting room. How awful those rooms are! Windowless, dark spaces with bad lighting and two small couches, like an afterthought. Following those first hours, the nurses were kind and allowed me to stay with Bob unless a procedure was taking place for which they might prefer I not be present. I felt that the care at the hospital was excellent.

I called David Geffen, whose name decorates the UCLA School of Medicine, and the kind and concerned head of the hospital, Dr. Gerald Levey. I called the mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa,
a friend of Bob’s, and I called Cardinal Mahony, for whom Bob had made the cathedral doors at Our Lady of the Angels. I wanted all thoughts and prayers to be with Bob. Both the mayor and the cardinal were kind enough to come see him.

The elevator doors opened one day and I beheld dozens of Tibetan monks in saffron robes outside intensive care. I learned that their spiritual master had suffered a heart attack. In the days following, whenever I walked down the glass corridor to see Bob, I would pass the priest’s room, where two acolytes were stationed, one with prayer beads and the other spinning a prayer wheel. It made me feel that Bob was a little bit more protected.

At the end of the ICU corridor on the fifth day of his crisis, I saw a doctor sitting in a glass booth, studying a computer screen. He had a bemused look on his face. He introduced himself as Dr. Saleh, a kidney specialist.

“I think,” he said, “that we have an overall diagnosis for your husband.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

“Your husband has a disease. It’s called Wegener’s granulomatosis.”

“Is there a cure?” I asked.

“We have a treatment we generally reserve for cancer patients, but in this case, we bomb his kidneys with Cytoxan and hope that they start to function again. Until then, he will have to do dialysis—first every day and then every other day until we get results.”

Bob was in intensive care for a month before they moved him across the street to the acute physical rehab unit. I was with him every day. As a result of the stroke, he had to learn to
use his left side again to walk and to read. They were teaching him to climb stairs, and he was making valiant efforts.

On Bob’s birthday, August 19, the doctors allowed him to go outside in a wheelchair to visit with Mecha and my little dog, Pootie. After that I would bring the dogs to the hospital grounds regularly to have picnics on the lawn outside the Jules Stein Eye Institute next door, which reminded me of Dad, because it was where I first read him the screenplay of
The Dead.

Bob was very weak, but they still had him on masses of steroids, so, deceptively, his appetite was enormous. I had always associated having an appetite with health, but in Bob’s case, his sudden immense urges for lamb gyros or doughnut creams were the result of his illness. One was under the illusion that he was getting well, but it was an insane appetite—hunger fueled by the drugs. At least it took his mind off things. I would sit with him and we would choose three-course dinners from take-away menus and an array of ice creams from the best gelaterias in Westwood. Bob was having fantasies about Mediterranean food, something remembered and treasured from his time in London, living as a young artist in Notting Hill, and a dish his mother used to make for him, a Mexican stew called
mancha mantales
—literally, “tablecloth stainer.”

On Saturday afternoons at the hospital, when the patients were being evaluated and the staff turned over for a few hours, Danny would drive me to Manhattan Beach to pick up Stella from her mother’s rented condominium and take her down to the seashore. Sometimes Katie would be there, and a couple of times she came with us to an ice cream parlor and we all ordered big cones. She seemed sleepy or distracted, drinking a
lot of coffee and smoking a chain of cigarettes. She was sharing the house with a girlfriend from London and an assortment of dogs adopted from the pound. She said she loved life at the beach, that she had been to visit a burlesque nightclub, and that she was doing a lot of dancing. There were several pale young women in her employ, both tattooed and pierced. Katie introduced one of them as Stella’s babysitter. Danny and I would take Stella down to the beach and watch her beautiful lithe body splashing in the waves. For those few hours, it was possible to breathe again.

At last, after seven weeks in the hospital, Bob was allowed to come home. The Cytoxan had not worked, but we were still hoping that his kidneys might return to functioning. He was spending every other day in dialysis, seven hours a day. I had redone the ground floor for him so he would not have trouble with the stairs, and installed a big flat-screen television and ordered a king-sized bed.

After daybreak, before having breakfast, I’d leave Bob with his private nurse and walk with Pootie and Mecha one block down to the beach, past the bars and hostels on the boardwalk, then south toward Washington Boulevard, over the lumpy hillocks of grass and sand under the palm trees, their trunks the color and texture of an elephant’s legs, stopping to look out to sea at the surfers dotted on the waves. Each day I said hello to the neighborhood’s homeless and displaced: the Joker, Eugene, Frederick, Old Papa John, who read paperback crime stories and Westerns sitting in his wheelchair under a tarp in the pouring rain, his back to the seawall, where his epitaph now reads
FLOW ON HOME
in half-concealed graffiti. And Wino Bobby, who wore a yellow top hat and had his “wine goggles” on; for a few dollars, he’d recite a poem for you. Bob
used to give him a few hundred dollars once in a while so he could go to his favorite place in Manila in the Philippines. Bobby was black, but he had a girlfriend there who had persuaded him that he’d fathered her white son. Now Bobby, too, has passed on.

Most of these men were veterans of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq—victims of post-traumatic stress, living out the years. Although they never asked for money, I slipped them a few dollars once in a while. I was reminded that Bob Richardson, the man I’d left at the baggage carousel and from whom I had learned so much about life, had until recently been living among them out there on the sand.

*  *  *

For the first time in two months, on October 16, I left Bob at home and went out to a friend’s birthday party in Hollywood, an all-girl outing to a lingerie shop called Kiki de Montparnasse; they were serving caviar and champagne. No sooner did I arrive and sit down at dinner when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I answered; it was Jaclyn. “It’s Katie,” she said. “She committed suicide.”

I left the party and rushed to Danny’s house in the hills, only a few minutes away. Some friends of Danny’s had already arrived. Stella was asleep, oblivious that her mother had jumped to her death off the roof of their Manhattan Beach summer rental earlier that day.

I got home late. Bob was asleep. I lay awake for the rest of the night, staring into the dark in disbelief. In the morning, when I told him what had happened, Bob just covered his eyes with his sleeve. Danny and Stella came to stay with me through the weekend.

Katie’s funeral was at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It
was one of those pale days that turn into brilliant sunshine. Zoë and Katie’s family had flown in from England. We were all in shock. The ceremony was at the chapel on the grounds, the same chapel where we had congregated for Dad’s funeral. After Katie’s coffin was lowered, Stella dropped into the grave some pink roses she had picked in the garden of her house.

CHAPTER 35

W
hen Bob got sick, the world turned mean in ways that were totally unexpected. His sweet private nurse Mary was not on duty one night, and although her substitute said she was watching him, Bob fell to the floor at six in the morning so hard that it shook the whole house. It woke me up and I ran downstairs. He had gone down on his face; his eye was swollen shut, and a black bruise was already traveling to the other eye.

“I don’t want to go to the emergency room,” he said.

I called his doctor. He was at home; it was Sunday. “How bad is it?” the doctor asked.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” I answered, and handed the phone to Bob, who by now was looking at himself in a hand mirror.

“I’ve got a bruise the size of a tennis ball,” Bob said ruefully, then paused. “Well, okay, like a golf ball.”

When I got back on the phone, I asked the doctor what I should do. The response was typically unhelpful. “Keep him propped up,” he said. “If he passes out, call an ambulance.”

I went upstairs and stepped into the shower. My heart was beating very fast. I was unspeakably angry and upset. As I dressed, I decided to take Bob to the hospital. I was not going to wait and see if he fell unconscious. When we passed the
kitchen on the way out of the house, I heard Stella screaming. I looked through the porthole window in the kitchen door to see her on the floor, her hands between her legs, rocking back and forth. When I opened the sliding door and asked her what was the matter, she held up her little hand to show it was bleeding; she’d shut it in the doorjamb. Danny’s face appeared. He had come running down from the guest room when he heard her cries.

“Stella’s okay,” I said. “I’m taking Bob to the emergency room.” Bob, meanwhile, had leaned down to the sobbing child and, putting his bruised and blackened face close to hers, made a mocking sound, as if to say, “You think you’ve got it bad, little girl.” Danny and I exchanged a look of disbelief, and then Bob, his nurse, and I drove to UCLA Santa Monica. Eight hours later, they told him he had a fractured eye socket. They didn’t tell him he had cracked three ribs and had several compressed discs in his back—that information came later. Or maybe that injury had happened previously. I never knew fully what to believe.

Bob refused to stay in the hospital that night or any other. He resumed his rehabilitation and formulated a plan to deal with his dialysis: He estimated that by getting up at 3
A.M.
and going to Santa Monica for treatment in the middle of the night, he could actually survive two days in a row without it. He claimed that this would keep him sane, and that he would be home in time for breakfast, and for me to read the morning newspapers to him. He told me he would lose his mind if he had to spend seven hours on the machine every other day. So this became our routine for a couple of months. Dialysis, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, occasional visits in the courtyard with friends and family over tea and biscuits.

Hercules was in from London. I had heard that he was ill as well, that he was in all probability having a relapse of the lung cancer that had challenged him years before. We had lunch at the Lobster in Santa Monica and sat at his customary table overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He kept the conversation light and agile, as always. We talked about our mutual friends, from Bernardo and Claire Bertolucci—he was having a back operation, she was buying them a new flat in London—to our dear friend and his partner in film, Jeremy Thomas. And we talked about Bob. That afternoon Herky came over to see him. They conversed quietly for a considerable length of time; soon after, Herky left for London.

*  *  *

Bob had great elegance—he wore the white Sulka pajamas I had given him as a ritual every birthday and at Christmas, with his initials on the pocket,
RPG
, Robert Pena Graham—and such extraordinary dignity under pressure. The doctors told us that his disease was rare, basically unheard of in black- or brown-skinned people, and that it was a vascular disease. This explained why for years Bob had pain and numbness in his feet and headaches whenever he rode in airplanes. He had gone to many specialists for these problems. Even though his hair was now falling out from the treatments, he had so much that one could not see it was thinning. Bob was a beautiful man at all times.

There was a day when his doctors wanted to perform a kidney biopsy, and Steven called to say he didn’t like the sound of that. The gurney was already in Bob’s room, about to take him to surgery. There is such anguish in having to make these decisions. Ultimately, I felt that Steven should have power of consent, and I gave it to him out of respect for
the father-son bond. But throughout Bob’s mystifying illness, it became apparent that none of the doctors had an answer for the unified diagnosis of Wegener’s granulomatosis. It was as if we had entered a medical dead zone. Nothing seemed to work.

One night when Bob was downstairs in the living room and I was upstairs, awake at four in the morning in the bed we used to share, Mecha came upstairs for the first time since Bob became ill to lie beside me. It was then I realized that she was transferring her allegiance to me. Mecha had always been obsessed with Bob—she had always stayed by him and had never chosen to leave his side until that moment.

Late at night on December 12, the television was on downstairs, as it usually was, and we had just finished watching a movie. Bob’s back hurt so bad that he couldn’t lie down, so I was lying on the rented hospital bed and he was at the foot of it in a big white armchair. “I think it’s time we went to sleep,” I said.