CHAPTER 26

“MA BÊTE, MA BELLE BÊTE,” MY BEAST, MY BEAUTIFUL Beast I sweet-talked to Paul one day, quoting from a movie we both knew well.

In Jean Cocteau’s exquisite 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, a rose-adoring, art-collecting, sensitive beast is the avatar for a prince, whom an evil fairy has turned into a hideous monster (until he can find true love, despite his ugliness). It was based on a popular eighteenth-century European fairy tale about a search for a lost husband. We both adored the magical film, which we’d seen eleven times, often enough for Paul to decipher the Latin on the back of the Beast’s chair, which reads: “All men are beasts when they don’t have love.”

“Ma Bête, ma belle Bête,” I whispered.

Automatically Paul responded, also quoting from the film: “Je suis un monstre. Je n’aime pas les compliments.” I am a monster. I don’t like compliments.

Just as I’d sometimes called him “ma Bête” in bygone days, he’d sometimes called me “ma Belle,” but that had been one of the simplest of all his fanciful names for me. For him, playing in the sandbox of language had meant building ornate castles. As well as his dictation was going, and his speech improving, he still had difficulty combining words to forge images. And he deeply lamented the loss of decades of daily pet names and endearments. He’d loved creating and bestowing names of all sorts—wildly whimsical, just feasible, or apropos: , Moon, Paprika Cheeks, Bush-kitten. We’d both relished the Native American spirit of naming, in which a Hopi female might be called “Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill,” “Child of Importance,” “Spider Woman at Middle-age,” “Butterfly Sitting on a Flower,” “Overflowing Spring,” “Beautiful Clouds Arising”; and a male “Where the Wind Blows Down the Gap,” “Short Rainbow,” “Throne for the Clouds,” “Joined Together by Water,” “He Who Whistles.”

There was a time, long ago, when all names described personal attributes, origin, or the hopes of parents, when names could be allegories that determined someone’s fate. A time when naming was magic, knowledge, possession, and a shaman could inflict injury by mishandling someone’s name. A time when you only shared your true name with someone you completely trusted. What spells Paul and I had cast with our secret names for one another.

Passing by the back door, when Liz and Paul were wading at the shallow end of the pool, I heard her ask him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?”

His face fell as if touched by a taser. “Used to have . . . hundreds,” he said with infinite sadness. “Now I can’t think of one.”

It was true. Once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo. Now it was as if a mass extinction had taken place, all the totemic animals we shared had vanished. The veldt of our love was less noisy, the fauna of the watering holes sparse. He understood how much I missed the romantic, frisky hobgoblins like Elf-heart he used to invent for me, the strange cuddly creatures of forest and sky he tricked out with diminutives and recruited for our private fun. In our mythology there were golden baby owls, ring-tailed lemurs, axolotls, shoulder rabbits, honeybunnies, bunnyskins (a.k.a. peaux de lapin), hopping spiders, roseate spoonbills, and many more.

He wished he could revisit that private bridge to the supernatural world, which we had crossed and recrossed with ritual devotion. But he couldn’t find it in the mob of words elbowing one another for attention.

So I began teaching him some of his old favorites—swan, pilot-poet, baby angel—and he recognized them. Other times he sighed “my precious,” “my little sweetheart,” or “my cute.” Was he really once master of the piropo, that adorable Argentine courtship game? A street poetry of amorous, flirtatious compliments, piropos are public yet private, usually whispered to a woman as she passes close beside an anonymous admirer.

“If beauty were a sin, you’d never be forgiven,” a man might sigh to a woman in Buenos Aires. Or: “You move like the Bolshoi Ballet.” Or: “So many curves, and me without brakes.” Or, simply: “Goddess!”

“My legume,” Paul murmured romantically, trying to say “My Lady,” and I giggled before I could stop myself.

“Legume!”

Then we both slid into laughter at the thought of his romantic inclination for a lima bean or lentil. But slowly, heartfully, the endearments were beginning to emerge again. Aphasics are often good at echoing, and if I told him that I loved being his little bush-kitten, thus prompted, he’d repeat in imitation “my little bush-kitten,” and I’d coo appreciatively to reinforce his efforts. I knew Paul needed the tangible bond of naming during his famine of words; and he knew I needed the nourishment during my long days of caregiving.

“Why don’t you make up some brand-new names?” I suggested to Paul one morning.

His first offering—after ruminating for a few minutes—was: “Celandine Hunter.” Not a deliberately chosen twosome. The words just tumbled out like dice.

“Celandine? . . . Oh yes, buttercups. How sweet!” We had celandine sprouting wild in the garden, and I often strolled to gather them in springtime.

“Where on earth did that come from?” I asked.

He didn’t know, but was pleased and surprised by it. This was a new pier where aphasia’s merry-go-round of words could be welcomed in a colorful and creative way. Instead of trying to block wrong words from popping out, he made space for them. Before the stroke he would have had to purposefully “free-associate” to do the same thing. Now he opened the floodgates in order to create. In search of a piropo, he could unleash the hounds of aphasia for a second or two. One piropo was all he could manage at a time, he told me, it was too taxing. But I think the truth lay deeper, that it was too frightening to invite the aphasia any more than that. Turning it off and on like a valve empowered him. What he didn’t want was the leaky trickle of chaotic words.

The next day, on waking, I cajoled Paul for another and he chewed his mental cud and provided: “Swallow Haven.” He didn’t always have a sassy sobriquet for me each day—“Sorry, later,” he’d say to excuse not being in good tune—but on many mornings he was able to freshly mint a new pet name. When they started following a pattern too much, such as the “— of —,” I’d protest and beg him to conjure up a novel variation. My intent, along with added play time, was fun practice at creative imagery, a seemingly lost gift. Since aphasics’ brains often snag on one word or sentence or way of doing something, this wasn’t always easy for him. (I wondered if, with the usual pathways broken, some signals looped round and round in a cul-de-sac.) But from then on names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as “Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory,” “My Snowy Tanganyika,” “Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs,” “My Little Spice Owl,” “The Epistle of Paul to the Rumanian Songthrushers,” “Blithe Sickness of Araby,” “Baby Angel with the Human Antecede Within,” “Little Flavanoid Wonder,” “Rheostat of Sentimental Dreaming,” “My Remains of the Day, My Residue of Night,” “Lovely Ampersand of the Morning,” and “O Parakeet of the Lissome Star.”

What a surprise! I cherished these riotous, spell-cast endearments and wondered what fantastic gallantry he might utter anew each morning. Even if some seemed to go awry, like “Blithe Sickness of Araby!”

“I love Blithe and Araby,” I said, “but . . . could you maybe find a word other than sickness?” When nothing sprang to mind, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Best can do.” They only emerged as amalgams.

“My little corn-crake,” he whispered tenderly, and I made contented creatural noises into his neck as he caressed my cheek and ear, then wrapped both arms tightly around me, locking me into our circle of love. In those moments, which were really hours, I came to rest, warmed by his irregular heartbeat, free of worry’s albatross, feeling safe at last.

Whether whacky or tender, the names spiraled in ways that always made me laugh and feel loved, courtship restored. The old pet names and piropos from before the stroke—“Swan heart,” or “Park” (short for “You are a park for my eyes”)—had evolved over time, acquiring layers of meaning. But I also treasured the new, more hallucinatory ones, forged on demand, as aphasic telegrams from his phoenix-feathered brain.

And Paul loved playing the swain again, even if it meant difficult and tiring word-craft, and he had fun concocting verbal novelties, offered to me as miniature gifts. It also guaranteed that, whatever else might unfold, each day would begin with closeness and a dose of laughter.