24 August 2004

A long drought in this record. I did indeed return to FSG's bedside, leaving Friday the 20th after work at the Renaissance Center. His respiration had worsened considerably over the intervening week; fluid gathering around the lungs had made breathing frighteningly difficult. Steady application of prednizone, platelets, and blood supplements eased his discomfort somewhat, and he improved slowly if meaningfully during the course of the weekend. His sister A, his elder sister, a lifelong friend, and I took turns at or near his bedside. I had brought a few of his favorite books--an earlier effort to read psalms to him not having met with much success: Hilaire Belloc, Ogden Nash, a bit of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung sequence. At his request, I read Belloc's "Matilda"--but he was asleep before I had finished the second stanza.
How can one not marvel at the reliable, tedious anxiety of the sickbed and the hospital? the litany of obscure, slowly-changing indicators, constantly repeated and clung to like spars in the sea; the repetition of details, carefully scrutinized for meaning. What the dear sufferer eats; what goes in and comes out; how the eyes look and the skin feels. All of keenest interest to the central players; all dull as dust to the outer world. During a part of FSGl's stay, there was a very substantial family with a patriarch in Room 4 of the Cardiac Care Unit; at any time of the day or night, at least Mother was sure to be there, and more likely many more--I saw, over the several days, perhaps thirty different faces. Much of the time they filled the waiting room, tirelessly mulling the minutiae of the patient's condition. Rather uncannily, there was always one chair empty somewhere in the little room, where I might wait until FSG was ready to receive my visit, where I might awkwardly sit as they discussed Papa around me, or how entirely Cousin T's daughter resembled her. The final crisis arrived Saturday afternoon, when something like ten of them gathered in Papa's room, gustily weeping as he failed altogether--Mama, oddly, not at his elbow, but centrally placed in the doorway, as suited, I suppose, her role as principal player. The following day, FSG remarked to me that nurses had told him how much of the floor had turned over--several moved away because they had improved; others--"gone." "Yes," I said, "I'm sorry you had to hear that." "Ah," he said; "I thought I heard a lot of weeping yesterday."
A quite cross with me Sunday evening: I had encouraged her to come directly from a visit to their other brother in the south of the state to my hosts' apartment, from which point I would drive her to Brookline, for dinner and advice from TP about the marketing of FSG's house. I had been with FSG in the later afternoon & said good night without much further promise; A had promised to return "in the evening," and on our way back from Brookline I received a rather disoriented call from FSG, wondering where A was. A opined to me--as we waited for FSG to be ready to see us--that anything, anything that upset the patient in any way was bad, and that we had made a bad plan. If we couldn't do it right, she said, we might as well not do it at all. I said, "You cannot possibly be telling me that I have been screwing up all weekend." "No," she said, "but in the past, you have had a tendency to feel put upon--" "I don't feel put upon," I said. "What I feel is that we can't make all the guesses right all the time. I was with him all afternoon; he slept most of the time. When I left I made no promises--there was no reason to think he wouldn't sleep all evening--that he would even notice that you were 'late'."
All, of course, smoothed over by our visit to FSG--and my recognition that A is utterly exhausted. She has taken upon herself the tasks of first contact and principal comfort to her brother; she is spearheading the sale of his (and formerly my) splendid, crushing, white palace of a house; she is still trying to plan her own wedding.
In the midst of this unhappy, worrisome episode, my mind continued to revert to my last--perhaps my very last--conversation with TWB, whom I called about a month ago. It was a difficult and unpleasant conversation, not all of which I remember (a kindness bestowed by my subconscious,perhaps). The essence of it is that he has made no response to my repeated proferrings of the olive branch because--he wants no contact. He has concluded that I “did not treat [him] well at all, not at all.” In other words, I am the villain. I said,“That makes it sound as though you hate me.” “Well,”he said, “I don’t hate you, but I don’t like you much either. So I guess it’s somewhere between the two.” What generosity of spirit! I said: “My feelings about you haven’t changed” He feels that the whole thing was just a mistake, an illusion; that we are very different; that it doesn’t matter whether or not we are in contact since we live on different continents. I pointed out that we might cross paths at a dance event or weekend or week; he felt it didn’t matter since “it wouldn’t last long.” I said we might *want*to be in contact—artistic or intellectual things we might want to share; questions to ask. He said, in his snottiest tone, that that would be something I would want to do, not he. And that that pointed to the wholedifference between us. [Because, I suppose, he’s so“evolved”?]. I backed away from all these matters and asked after a mutual friend, and after his great-aunt. I thanked him for taking my call. He said, “Good-bye. Take care.” And I thought: that’s as much as I’ll ever get from him.
But as I hung up the phone, I thought, “What a jerk.” And then I thought, “*I* didn’t treat *him*well? What? *What*? WHAT? What is he talkingabout? I put his name on my bank account; lent him my car for months; edited his book; helped sell his album. Did whatever he wanted. What does he imagine my crime to be? Oh, I asked for help—for him—from his friends, because he was so evidently unhappy—that’s the crime? [The crime was that I got too close—and threatened him too much; but TWB can’t see or acknowledge that.] What about his mistreatmentof me—his persistent belittlement & disparagement—of my interests, character, talents, on and on and on?I’d have a much better case for ‘emotional abuse’ than he.”
The only merit of all of this is that I have finally stopped blaming myself. There was still a (fading)voice in the back of my head that said, “He was the perfect man, and you screwed it up.” Now I’m more inclined to think that I brought out the best in him—he was a more genial, smiling person with me; perhaps truly happy, if so briefly. I would have preferred to help him find that again-but he would scarcely let me help him then; I certainly can’t help him now.
I am a sentimental fool; I want us all, in the rondelay of changing relationships, to love each other, somehow, forever--but there is no such balm for this. In some ways, it’s worse. I think less of him than before--that unaltered feeling I voiced in conversation with him evaporated even as I voiced it to him; there is no real peace between us. It is a great shame that it seems impossible to detect the poison in a person until the toxin flows in your own veins--but the chimera, the delusive dream, that one can heal by love, like the lover of Rappaccini's daughter, is almost stronger than love itself. But as I remarked to a friend, "You apparently don’t get much credit for loving, except in Heaven."
At my hosts'--DM and her charming, sturdy-minded fiance--I found a charming and hitherto unfamiliar masterwork of fantasy--Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, a name worthy of comic poems and campfire songs. Its eponymous hero has the slightly flexible morals, and the bitter humor, of the figures of the comedies and noirs of the nineteen-thirties and forties (no wonder, since the book first appeared in 1949); its writing is swift and brash, but not without local beauties. He compares himself to the ship that has just sunk under him--"I, too, would have filled with water that stopped my fires." Elsewhere, a woman is described in one place as "settling in like sourdough," and in another place, as she searches the forest for her lost love, as "sifting big timber for her man."
25 August update:
Returning from a lesson in the sailor's hornpipe, for application to Ruddigore, I stopped in on my marvelous friends, CY and GC. "The sign nearest your house said, 'DON'T PASS.' So I didn't." We feasted on corn and turkey kielbasa, and in the course of a long and rather sidewinding conversation begin to wonder what has happened to the American midriff--why are the young so doughy in the midsection? and what has become of the revolutionary edge of sexual-preference politics, ours and the nation's? have we tired out, given up; has the fervor skipped this generation, to be relit in the next? There is no solution, but they press a gift of fresh tomatoes and onions on me, to my delight.
As I return to the car, I see that FSG has called my cellphone, which I had improvidently and inconsiderately left in the car. He has moved to the next level of care down, and has a new telephone number, but when I call him he is having a backrub "from which I maybe shouldn't be distracted," his voice still weak and faint and somehow like a child's. Am I to be comforted by his apparent improvement, or distressed by the exhaustion I still hear in him?