CHAPTER 15

WHILE PAUL SLEPT, I MET MY FRIEND JEANNE FOR LUNCH at Moosewood, a vegetarian restaurant downtown serving my idea of comfort food ever since I was a student. There we sat at a shiny oak table beside a mantelshelf of moose memorabilia, presided over by a blackboard offering the day’s specials. A novelist with short blond-flecked brown hair and hazel eyes, Jeanne had grown up nearby, in the small town of Geneva, New York, where she went to parochial school before moving to Ithaca and marrying a painter, Steve, who taught art at Cornell and moonlighted as an aerobatic biplane pilot and aerial artist (trailing smoke as he drew four-dimensional objects in the sky). She knew more about the texture of everyday life in past eras than just about anyone; excelled in kitchen and garden; and hand-stitched exquisite quilts. But, best of all, Jeanne could go from silly to serious and back again in a wink.

As I filled her in on Paul’s condition, her eyes held me in a worried hug. “He’s able to say a few more words, though they tend to be odd or arcane.” “Like what?”

“Well, let’s see . . . One of my favorites is eldritch,” I said with a fleeting smile.

Jeanne looked amused. “That sounds like a cross between an elf and a witch!”

“It does. But it means strange, eerie, weird, as in: ‘A flying saucer arose silently from an eldritch swamp.’”

“When did he learn that? Or where, for that matter.”

“Heaven only knows.”

My memory flitted to the day before, when Paul had stood at the living room window watching evening’s grays smoke through the treetops. For long moments, he’d looked pained as he’d groped for the right words. Finally, turning to me with a satisfied look, he’d uttered the one word: “eldritch.” Though it rang a distant bell, I had to turn to a dictionary, after which I’d found Paul again, still standing at the window, watching the sprinkler’s rhythmic salaams to the garden. Taking his arm, reverently, I’d repeated: “eldritch.”

“But he still doesn’t understand much of what anyone says to him,” I continued. “Reading, writing—all that’s going so slowly. He’s not accomplishing much with the speech therapist. And he’s still having trouble swallowing. . . . But I don’t want to sadden you with my grief,” I said abruptly, cutting my account short.

“Are you kidding? You’re my oldest friend in town. I’d be hurt if you didn’t tell me what’s happening. It’s awful. I can’t imagine how I’d cope if, god forbid, something like that happened to Steve.” I watched her face blanch in fear, then soften once more, bearing sympathy.

“How are you doing?” I heard her ask.

A titanic question, and unanswerable, or so it seemed. I hadn’t the faintest idea how I was. Token pleasantries wouldn’t do (“I’m-fine-how-are-you?”), and there were no fresh bulletins from my overwhelmed psyche. I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down, one grain per cell, just enough in sum that I walked with head lowered, shoulders rolled into a slump, feet shuffling at a gait I associated with my parents when they were elderly, not a woman of still-reconnoiterable years. I ghosted between islands of anxiety (I’m doing so little of my own work) and a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.

“I don’t know how I am,” I said, idly stirring a mélange of French lentils, cabbage, and diced tomatoes. “I’m probably in shock, or traumatized. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a slow-motion car wreck, where the spinning never stops, and I keep trying to remember what to do—take my foot off the brake, yes, turn into the spin, yes—but nothing is working, and the car keeps spinning out of control.”

“Oh, honey, that sounds terrifying!”

“It’s that churning in my chest and stomach without the visuals. And then other times I’m in a sort of zombie haze, yet somehow speaking, moving, functioning, even making decisions about Paul’s care—but all that’s happening while I’m sleeping inside this real-life nightmare that keeps unfolding at new angles and growing deeper. Sometimes I feel so feeble, like a rag doll that’s been shaken day after day. . . . See? I told you, I really don’t know how I am. Except that I’m a mess.”

Jeanne’s eyes clouded. “You know, I bet a big source of stress comes from feeling like you’re responsible for his recovery.”

“I do feel like I’m responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can’t. That’s so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?”

I couldn’t remember the last time my vigilant selves could leave their posts and swan around.

“What do his doctors say?”

“They don’t really know. It’s still early days. So little is known about the brain. Even less about broken brains.”

Leaning forward, she stared straight into me. “What can I do to help?”

I thought about the question for a while, as I submerged my spoon and let it fill with the fragrant stew. Finally, I met her eyes, which still held their concern.

“I haven’t a clue.”

AT HOME, I flickered between denial and anguish. In one of the denial moments, which occurred often and briefly (but at other times could upend a whole afternoon), I saw signs of the old Paul, the familiar spouse, returning home to his historic self after a sojourn away in the wars.

There he was at his desk, cackling to himself as he looked at a photograph of the Versailles Conference of 1919. A sick old man and a young boy peered side by side from his eyes. I didn’t have to ask what he was up to—I knew the mist his brain gave off when it was dreaming up a new story. He must have sensed me at his side.

Revolving toward me, unexpectedly, he said: “Gorgeous . . . name some flowers. . . .”

“Roses, lilacs, daffodils, tulips, peonies—?”

“Peonies,” he cut in. “The yellow ones.”

My mind chased around—which peonies? Oh, our peonies, the ones out front. “They really are gorgeous! I love their big fluffy yellow cuffs.”

“Cuffs,” he repeated slowly, savoring the word, perhaps picturing men in long-sleeved shirts with ruffled cuffs and onyx stickpins at a Manhattan soiree in the early 1900s. The perfect setting for a novel by Henry James.

“I planted that bush five years ago, and do you know I moved it to three different locations before I found the right combination of soil, light, and neighbors for it. High-strung plant, but beautiful—like one of those toy show dogs.”

“You’re plucky! And I’m . . .” He smiled, amused by what he was going to say next: “lucky. You’re plucky and I’m lucky.” He chuckled at the rhyme.

Normally, it would then be my turn to nudge the game of word dominoes forward, as in: “You’re plucky, and I’m lucky, ducky.” To which he’d reply: “You’re plucky, and I’m lucky, ducky, not mucky.” And so on. Whoever ran out of add-ons first lost. This time, I didn’t press him to continue; I wasn’t sure he could.

Still, in that moment fragrant with hope, I believed life hadn’t really collapsed all around me, that I wouldn’t just be grateful for the few crumbs of our relationship that remained, but could return to How It Was, that just-so land lost in fog.

Lying in my bay window a little later, I faced the loss more squarely. Then it crushed me with its heavy machinery, and nothing, not even a glorious vineyard of wisteria or a wren’s long cantata, could save me from feeling flattened beyond repair.

Faith is a liquor that comes in various strengths and is often flavored by chance. When I looked out over the grass where the midday sun had created a cartography of light and shadow, I had faith that each of the clover blossoms contained nectar. But my faith in Paul’s improving, healing back into language, changed from moment to moment, day to day, and when it vanished nothing filled its hollow. I found playing through my mind the last line of a favorite Robert Frost sonnet, “The Oven Bird”:

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

What to make of a diminished thing, that was the question. The injury was permanent, I told myself, and Paul needed to understand that. With any luck, his skills might continue to improve some, though if they did, it would probably take years. But the lesions in his brain wouldn’t disappear, he would never return to his life before the stroke. That wasn’t a realistic goal, for me or for Paul. He needed a new perspective on who he was: not a hopelessly faded photograph of his old self, but a work in progress. And I knew I needed to come to terms with this, too.

I hadn’t realized how much hope was still woven into my consciousness, how much denial of the obvious, overestimation of small triumphs, and a hard refusal to admit that Paul, his gift, our life together as it had been, was gone. I saw that clearly now. What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. I mean to the us that once lived in our house, once furnished so much of my life, the symbiotic self spouses evolve together and cherish. There was no going back to how things were. A hard truth to accept, even if no one and nothing is ever what it was.

Everywhere I looked, nature flowed indivisibly as one stream of atoms. Paul had merely borrowed 4 × 1027 carbon atoms from the universe, which he must one day return, maybe as lichen or tree, either one the journeywork of stars. “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass, “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Nothing, not anyone, is an unchanging event, no blade of grass or self exactly what it was a moment ago.

I tried my best not to compare his new state to how he was before the stroke, but rather to how bad off he was at the time of the stroke. Before the stroke no longer existed. But it was hard to hide my anguish. And he often looked at me with eyes clearly saying: Who are you kidding, you fond fool.