CHAPTER 29

TWO YEARS AFTER HIS STROKE, PAUL WAS ABLE TO write longhand, slowly, which he did with gusto every single day. Our mission was to keep the momentum of his recovery going, and for Paul that meant continuing to write, regardless of obstacles. In part because writing daily influenced his self-confidence and mood. But also because it was his lifelong form of deep play. Not ha-ha play, but an altered state humans seem to crave, one of clarity, wild enthusiasm, and saturation in the moment. This requires one’s full attention, because when acting and thinking become the same event, there’s no room left for other thoughts. Life’s usual choices and relationships recede. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life, deep play brings a temporary, limited perfection. So even if what he wrote read like a dog’s breakfast, I cheered him on relentlessly, sometimes having to draw deep to find the energy, while at other times feeling invigorated because it was something tangible I could do to help him.

Some of his sentences were so aphasic as to be incomprehensible, and then Liz or I, as tactfully as possible, would go over the work with him, highlighting nonsensical phrases or misused words, and helping him tease what he meant out of the mental cobwebs. We all regarded his writing as vital speech therapy. Passing by his study, the door cracked open a little, I’d see him sitting at his desk, in a cork-walled corner of the room, curving over a page as he always used to, redolent with thought. But more than his mind seemed to be straining these days—his back yawed, his shoulders flexed and wilted. I sometimes stood and watched the tension of a whole body thinking. With great effort, he’d painstakingly revise every page, sometimes only to have new infelicities emerge. Though Liz and I were free with our opinions and criticism, out of necessity we simply overlooked many mistakes in the name of progress. Paul always knew how he’d like something to read; it was his creation, his deep play, not just speech therapy, and above all it should please him. Writing both fiction and essays, he scrawled 300 pages during the first two years, and the dogged daily work of writing and revising exhausted but satisfied him, while improving his skills.

It also allowed Paul and me to bridge our old and new life, as once again we found ourselves having discussions over word choice, consulting each other for adjectives, and comparing the sound of one phrase to another. Again our voices breached the space between our offices, which felt as welcome as a bluff of trees on the prairie. Like the call and response of two strange, literary birds, Paul would yell across the hallway to me:

“Hey, poet, what’s the name of that red star . . . Orion . . . belt?”

And I’d yell back: “Betelgeuse.”

Then I’d call: “Honey, how do you spell zyzzva [a palm weevil]?”

And he’d answer: “Three z’s!” His spelling was surprisingly reliable when it came to arcane words.

And we were all beyond thrilled when he began to place some essays and fiction he’d written since the stroke in Harper’s, The American Scholar, Conjunctions, The Yale Review, and a few other literary magazines.

Every so often, if Liz and I were chatting too much in the kitchen, Paul came to scold us, holding his small navy blue talisman of a pillow, on which white embroidery implored: Quiet Please! Novel in progress. Silently, he’d lift it to his chest and hold it out to us like one of the “ring girls” at a boxing match announcing the number of the round.

Over these years, Liz had become an ace literary assistant and good friend. I’d grown used to her hair color changing, from fire-engine red to carrot-orange to calico. More and more of her flip-flops took up residence in her office, a converted guest room with three walls of windows looking into the garden, floral tiles along the skirting boards, a floral sofa and matching drapes, floral rug, large blond table for a desk, and chairs whose wooden backs were silhouettes of Montgolfia hot-air balloons. In the fall, I planted spring and summer bulbs outside her windows—daffodils, fritillarias, giant alliums, bluebells, dwarf irises, daylilies, and canna lilies—without telling her exactly what or where so that they would be a surprise.

In time, the household wombat fetish evolved from my addressing Paul as “wombat,” to his calling me “wombat,” to Liz referring to us as “the wombats,” to Liz merging into the general wombattery. When she was in Oregon, she signed her emails as “Wombatat-large,” in San Francisco she became “West Coast Wombat,” in Washington, D.C., “Capitol Wombat.” I might sign my emails “Wombat-in-Residence” or “Two-legged North American Long-haired Wombat.” And Paul swiftly became the likes of “P-Wombat, House Wombat, or Swimming Wombat.” The screensavers on her laptop and mine showed adorable baby wombats. A growing collection of wombataphilia entered the house: key chains, stuffed animals, mugs, baseball caps. Before her annual canoeing adventure with college friends, she created a notebook whose cover read: Field Guide to the Wombats of . . . Inside, methodical notes and instructions explained everything from Paul’s medicines to how to restart my hybrid Prius. At Christmas one year, Liz received a mug appropriately emblazoned with Wombat Wrangler.

So it was only fitting that I produced a quirky new work contract, a “Wombat Incentive Package,” which included, among other things, a raise, as many weeks off as she wanted pretty much whenever she wanted them, a monthly pedicure, and last but not least, her body weight in chocolate.

Ultimately, the “body weight in chocolate,” much as envisioning a public weighing-in ceremony delighted us all, was not as alluring to her as a book allowance, so together we drew up an elaborate sybaritic chocolate-to-books conversion chart. The far from button-down contract suited her, and she signed on for another tour of duty in the wombat warren of the household and the always-a-surprise-around-the-next-corner jungles of aphasia.

Self-described as “borderline OCD in a useful way,” Liz was a born fact-checker and proofreader, an awesome organizer of people and closets. I was grateful that she set out and triple-checked Paul’s pills, and was fanatically methodical about everything from keeping Paul’s prescriptions up-to-date to bandaging a cut or scrape on his foot. Liz folded towels symmetrically, like perfect strips of colorful pastry, and only occasionally confessed to refolding the ones I’d folded into thirds, which didn’t match those she’d folded into quarters. She performed elaborate interventions on neglected filing cabinets and the hinterlands of our dusty, junkyard-style garage, where old manuscripts lurked.

“I’m just fully integrated,” she would say when praised, suggesting that, after a while, she knew instinctively what we preferred. But a parallel truth is that we had adapted to her ways, too.

When it came to sway in the household, I sometimes teased that she missed her calling as a dominatrix. Like most people, I have habitual ways of running the house, but I’m not wedded to them. About sharing space, I have a strong sense of “live and let live.” So I gave her free reign. To my amusement, it astounded her that I didn’t mind at all if she reorganized the kitchen drawers, turned the mudroom into an overflowing pantry, rearranged the in-their-place-for-a-decade armchairs in the living room (creating a fine basking spot at the picture windows), or devised a color-coded monthly calendar on the refrigerator with red dots for days Liz was away, yellow for days Diane had trips, blue for Paul’s appointments. She established a hierarchy of Post-it notes on the kitchen counter—ranked by size, color, shape, and level of importance—now and then so abundant that they looked like prayer flags strung across a Nepalese col, and other times overlapping like genteel folds of skin.

We were a shockingly good fit. Paul and I would generate an endless stream of projects, and Liz would get to compulsively organize them, cheerfully stating she had always been “a fan of enthalpy,” by which she meant the fine art of bringing order to chaos. Hundreds of small changes appeared in our daily life, and although I wasn’t as systematic, I appreciated the growing sense of method in the house at precisely the time my world felt disheveled beyond repair. Myself, I’ve always organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks and stack them vertically. Or I have a longtime writerly habit, more of an instinct really, of obsessively tidying my office before I begin a new book, as if I were an expectant mom preparing for birth. I think it soothed the bubbling inner commotion a little to find my surroundings less chaotic, providing a bit of sensory relief.

One thing we all had in common was a great respect for, even a reveling in, eccentricity. With pride, Liz told us stories of her dad, a small-town Presbyterian minister in Missouri and consummate tinkerer who fervently believed in reusing and recycling. How he’d salvaged materials from a local junkyard and cannibalized discarded lawnmowers to build fully functional, multihued, Frankensteinian mowers. How he’d unconventionally, yet oh-so-practically, painted her childhood home two-tone: dark brown halfway up all the walls, then white above the height where kids could leave dirty fingerprints. How he and his second wife, a former Ukrainian nuclear biochemist who now runs a successful luxury knitting business, were building their lakeside retirement home complete with a small “worm factory,” to provide bait for their almost daily fishing.

So while Paul and I had such playful habits as soccer-kicking boxes of Kleenex and rolls of toilet paper down the hallway rather than carrying them to the other end of the house, and quacking the theme song to Masterpiece Theatre, Liz was hard to faze. Married to her burly, six-foot-tall, double-earringed husband (a graphic designer working at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology), she enjoyed the turmoil of highly creative minds. She would sometimes mock-vent, while pretending to tear her hair out at the roots: “Artists! What’s wrong with me?! I surround myself with you people at work—as if I don’t get enough chaos at home!”

At times Liz reminded me a lot of my undergraduate college roommate Kathe, a woman with a Scottish complexion, cropped blond hair, and quick wit. Kathe was yards smarter than I was, upbeat, insightful, and fun. To earn money, she’d been a part-time go-go dancer at the My-Oh-My Lounge down the street from our apartment. We romped verbally all the time, and got up to endless mischief. What Liz and Kathe had in common was a certain stripe of brain. Not artistically creative, but brilliant, high-spirited, and curious, they had similar restless minds that craved stimulation. And so when Liz said of herself, “I don’t do reflection,” or regaled us with stories of the many jobs she’d had, I understood. For both Paul and me, although our passions changed as we invented new books, our career was writing. Our method was focused and dreamy spells mixed with practical minutiae. In contrast, Liz needed the variety of changing occupations, keeping her family and longtime friends constant, while replenishing her pool of coworkers and her landscape. A different sort of mental nomad, one who wanders without versus one who wanders within. My mother was similar. I had a hunch Liz wouldn’t work with us forever, no matter how much she might enjoy the work or grow to love us. Her brain needed novelty to feel most alive, something it didn’t generate but sought, then explored and transformed with gusto.

To her delight, in our household, unpredictability was de rigueur, so she never knew what to expect when she arrived each morning. One of us might be immersed in Mongolia and the other in the primeval forests of Poland, each needing her research skills at the last minute. She didn’t hesitate, but I think was amused, when I suggested we hang a few lovely photographs of bats up by the rafters where they belong. She regularly found on her to-do list such items as: “organize universe” (the filing system in my study), “blow up cheetah” (the inflatable one in the living room), “don’t frighten lady garter!” (striped snake that likes to sun on the patio), “Desdemona—safe to plant with Othello?” (two ligularias I’d planted), “down to two endangered species; order a dozen” (referring to a brand of dark chocolate). Or “Slim Bear shortage” (indicating we were down to the last of Paul’s frozen treats).

Or there might be a medical emergency requiring her care, which over the years Paul and I provided in spades: broken toe (I confess, mine, from an unfortunate incident with a massage table), concussion, pinched cervical nerves, asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritic knees, congestive heart failure, and more. Or an unexpected publishing crisis or proofreading deadline. Then we’d all three gaze at each other, nod our heads, and together bleat in mock seriousness: “Never a dull moment!” Emailing old friends from college, she’d once laughingly described her job as: “stay-at-home mom for two writers.”

“You know what’s weird,” Liz said in a tone of bemusement, “Some people work in cubicles! . . . Of course, working with your contrarian spouse Paul isn’t all that different from working with thoroughbreds”—referring to the racehorse farm where she’d labored for a few years before nursing school—“except, unfortunately, no whips and leathers!” Her eyebrows leapt like twin dragon boats at a starting line.

I’d never known anyone with such expressive eyebrows. They didn’t just raise or cock. Instead they vaulted, they pranced, they sharpened into hard strawberry mesas, or curved somberly into neolithic burial mounds—especially when Paul dug his heels in.

Liz and Paul could be equally stubborn and opinionated, and it always amused me to see them hunched over the table, politely arguing about all sorts of things, from the “correct” way to take his pills without choking, or the benefits of replacing his molting loafers, to the fine points of grammar. Liz’s eyebrows would hover in a tolerant position as she listened, then close ranks to be peered under as she stated her judgment: “Well, Paul, with all due respect, I think you’re wrong this time.” Liz’s husband frequently sent his sympathies to Paul, because he knew Liz was a “tenacious arguer.”

One day when I descended into Liz’s office with a look of horror and dismay, my arms piled with seemingly infinite versions of a manuscript that needed line-by-line sorting—because I’d made the behemothic mistake of working on it in different cities, on different computers, over several years—she gazed upon me with messianic mercy and declared:

“Every poet needs at least one overly linear friend.”

About Paul’s health issues she was especially vocal. Paul protested, as a point of honor, but he also appreciated her vigilant concern, sometimes in endearing circumlocutions. Once, when Liz apologized for nagging him about checking his feet for diabetic sores, he blinked hard, then responded cordially, without a hint of sarcasm:

“Always feel free to lecture me—I’m a friend to knowledge.”