SOMETIMES HIS URINE WAS CLOUDY. Sometimes gritty with what he called “gravel.” Sometimes his piss flowed bloody and frightening. No matter how disturbing, Montaigne recorded his condition in his travel journal as coolly as he did the daily weather. He was always in various degrees of pain, and he noted that, too, but dispassionately, like a scientist in a white lab coat.
Even before he suffered from kidney stones and the burning pain that came with them, Montaigne had long thought about death, and not only his own. He had thought about how to meet it and if doing so gracefully would change the encounter. His closest friend, the man he had loved more than anyone in the world, was to love more than anyone in the world, had died with calm dignity. In his last minutes, in his last words, his dear friend did not begrudge life or beg for more time or express regrets over what was left undone or make apologies to those he might have or had offended or injured. Montaigne thought that when death approached, he would neither wave him away nor welcome him, but say to death’s shadow on the wall, “Finally, no more pain.”
I put my book aside when she walked in.
“I’m leaving you,” she said. She had a red handbag on her arm.
“For how long?”
“For always.”
“And what about Pascal, will you take him?”
“He’s always favored you.” I was very glad. I could see Pascal sitting in the dining room doorway, pretending not to listen.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Don’t you care to know why I’m leaving?” she asked, petulantly, I thought.
“I suppose you’ll tell me.”
“I will, but maybe another time.” She stared at me as if wondering who I was. Then she started to speak but was interrupted by a car-horn blast. I looked out the window and saw a taxi with a man behind the wheel.
“May I help you with your bags?” I asked.
“I’ll send for them later, if you don’t mind.”
“Who will you send?”
“The person who comes.” She stared at me another moment and then left.
I heard a motor start up, then the swerve of the car leaving the curb. Pascal took his time walking over to me and then, with a faint cry, he jumped into my lap, curling himself on my open book. I stroked his head until he made that little motor purr that all cats make when they pretend to love you.
One day, Montaigne went all the way from his home in Bordeaux to Italy for its famous physicians and for a change in diet, for that country’s warm climate and healing sky. He went to soak himself in the mineral baths, which sometimes gave him relief—also noted in his journal. He recorded but never whined about the biting stones in his kidneys or the bedbugs in the mattress in a Florence hostel or complained about that city’s summer heat, so great that he slept on a table pressed against an open window.
He traveled alone. Once, in Rome, Montaigne hired a translator, a fellow Frenchman, who, without notice or reason, left him without a good-bye. So, armed with maps and charts and curiosity, he went about the city with himself for company and guide. In that ancient city he witnessed horrific public executions of criminals, men drawn and quartered while still alive. He visited the libraries of cardinals and nobles, returning to his hostel to note in the same disinterested voice the books and the tortures he had seen and the hard stone that had that day passed through his urethra.
I knew there was no hope in lifting Pascal up and dropping him on the carpet so that he would leave me in peace to read. I knew he would just bound up again and sit on my book again and that he would do the same 101 times before I gave up and left the room or left the house or left the city. So I took the string with a little ball attached to it that I kept tucked under the pillow and let it drop on the floor. He leapt off my lap and began pawing the rubber ball. I pulled it away and he followed with a one-two punch. Montaigne had once asked himself, Is it I who plays with the cat or is it he who plays with me?
The house seemed full now that she had gone, the rooms packed with me. I wandered about, savoring the quiet, the solitude, the way my books, sleeping on their shelves, seemed to glow as I passed by—old friends who no longer need share me with another. I thought I would spend the rest of the day without a plan and do as I wished. Maybe I would sit all day and read. Maybe I would go out with my gun and empty the streets of all the noise. I would then at last have a silent, empty house surrounded by a tranquil, soundless zone. That was just a thought. I have no gun.
After his beloved friend died, Montaigne went into seclusion, keeping himself in a turreted stone tower at the edge of his estate. It was cold in winter and hot in summer and not well lit, the windows being small. He had had a very full life up to the point of his withdrawal, if fullness means social activity and a role in governing. He was a courtier in the royal court and the mayor of Bordeaux and was always out day and night doing things. But now in that tower, Montaigne was determined to write, which he did, essays, which some believe were addressed to his dead friend. His mind traveled everywhere, his prose keeping apace with all the distances and places his mind traveled. He wrote about cannibals. He wrote about friendship. What is friendship? he asked, and answered, When it is true, it is greater than any bond of blood. Brothers have in common the same port from whence they were issued but may be separated forever by jealousy and rivalry in matters of inheritance and property. Brothers may hate each other, kill each other, as the Old Testament so vividly illustrates. But friends choose each other and their intercourse deepens in trust, esteem, and affection; their intellectual exchange strikes flames.
He stayed in his tower for ten years, his world winnowed down to a stone room of books and a wooden table. Crows sat on his window ledge and studied him, imperturbable in their presence. His wife visited and, in his place, saw a triangle. Sometimes he would look at his friend’s portrait on the table, a miniature in a plain silver frame, and say, “We’ve worked enough for now, let’s have lunch. What do you think?” Sometimes he just stayed in place until the evening, when he dined on cold mutton and lentils and read in the wintry candlelight. Once, as he climbed the stairs to his bedchamber, he noticed his bent shadow trailing him on the wall. Just some years ago his shadow had bounded ahead of him, waiting for him to catch up. Now he grew tired easily; writing a page took hours and he was always in pain. He pissed rich blood. He howled. But he sat and wrote until he finished his book. Then he went on his extensive travels.
I went into the kitchen and made a dish of pears and Stilton and broke out the water biscuits; I opened the best wine I had ever bought, one so expensive that I had hidden it from her, waiting for the right occasion to spring it. I sat at the kitchen table. Pascal leaped up to join me. I opened a can of boneless sardines, drained the oil, slid the fish onto a large white plate, and set it beside me so that Pascal and I could lunch together. He was suspicious, sniffed, then retreated, and then returned to the same olfactory investigation until he finally decided to leave the novelty to rest. The bouquet rose from the wine bottle like a genie and filled the room with sparkling sunshine and the aromatic, medieval soil of Bordeaux. It pleased me to think that Montaigne might have drunk wine from the same vineyard, from the same offspring of grapes.
I went up to her bedroom and opened the closets. So many clothes, dresses, shoes, scarves, belts, hats. The drawers were stuffed with garter belts and black bikini panties that I had never been privy to seeing her wear. Soon the closet would be empty and I would leave it that way. Or leave it that way until I decided what to do with the house, too small for two, too large for one and a cat. She had left the bed unmade, the blankets and sheets twisted and tangled, as if they had been wrestling until they had given up, exhausted. I sniffed her pillow, which was heavy with perfume and dreams. Pascal came in and danced on the bed, where he had never been allowed. I left him there stretched out on her pillow and went down to my study.
It welcomed me as never before. My desk with its teetering piles of books and loose sheets of notes and a printer and computer and a Chinese lamp, little pots full of outdated stamps and rubber bands, an instant-coffee jar crammed with red pencils, green paper clips heaped in a chipped blue teacup, a stapler, an old rotary phone, framed prints of Goya’s Puppet and Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus, Cézanne’s Bathers, and van Gogh’s Wheat Field in Rain greeted and accepted me without any conditions. I could sit at my desk all day and night and never again be presented with the obligation to clear or clean an inch of the disorder. Now, if I wished, I could even sweep away every single thing on the desk and leave it bare and hungry. Or I could chop up and burn the desk in the fireplace. I would wait for a cold night. There was plenty of time now to make decisions.
I went back to the living room and turned on the TV and madly switched channels, finding I liked everything that flashed across the screen, especially the Military Channel, where I watched a history of tank battles and decided I would rather have been in the navy if it had come to that. Montaigne, surprisingly, detested the sea, from where much contemplation springs. All the same, perhaps the swell of a wave and a splash of the brine might have made him a more dreamy man of the sky than the solid man of the earth, where he was so perfectly at home. Later, watching another channel, I bought four Roman coins purporting to be authentic reproductions of the emperor Hadrian’s young lover, Antinous, whose death he grieved until his last imperial breath. On another channel, I ordered a device that sucked wax from the ears. It was guaranteed that my hearing would improve within days. But then, after it was too late to change my mind, I realized I did not need or want to improve my hearing. Except for the music I love, I thought, I don’t care to hear well at all. Most of what is said is better left unsaid and left unheard. It is the voices from the silent world of the self that matter, like the ones that Montaigne heard and wrote down in his tower room. I thought I might demolish the house now and build that tower in its place and live in the comfort of its invisible voices, and sit there and transcribe the voices as they came.
I grew bored with TV and realized that I missed reading my book of Montaigne’s travels, that I missed him. Montaigne was someone I was sure that I could travel with, because he was someone whom I could leave or accompany whenever I chose. And there would be no recriminations, no arguments, no pulling this way and that about where to eat and how much to cool down or heat up the hotel room—or any room anywhere. I went back to my chair and opened Montaigne’s book, sure that Pascal would soon arrive and jump up. But a half hour passed and he still had not come. I missed him and the game we played. So, after several more minutes, I went to find him. He was nowhere to be found. But the window to my wife’s bedroom was open and I surmised he had left through it and to a world of his own making.
I was about to settle back to my reading when there was a strong knock at the door. I opened it to a man in a blue suit.
“Is she here?”
“Not presently,” I said.
“Will she return presently?”
“Who knows?” I said.
“Well, I looked for her everywhere and thought she might have returned here,” he said, peering in the doorway.
“Not here,” I said, slowly closing the door.
“Do you mind if I come in a minute? Just to rest my feet.”
“Have you been searching for her on foot?”
“Not at all,” he said, nodding over to the cab standing before the house. “But I’m exhausted from looking for her.”
“Come in,” I said, not too graciously.
He went immediately to my favorite chair but before he could plunk himself down, I said, “That one’s broken.”
He sat down on the couch and gave me a sheepish grin. “Thanks, buddy.”
I pretended to be reading my book but I was sizing him up, slyly, I thought. I did not find him remarkable in any way.
“Is she a reliable woman?” he asked.
“Absolutely. And punctual, too.”
He looked about the room and folded his hands the way boys are told to do in a classroom. “Does she read all these books?”
“Some, but not all at once.”
“That’s very funny,” he said with a little sarcastic smile. Then, changing to a more agreeable one, he asked, “Got something to drink? Worked up a thirst running around town looking for her.”
“I just opened a bottle of wine you may like.”
“Is it from California?”
“No.”
“From France?”
“No, from New Zealand.”
“I’ll pass, then. How about a glass of water, no ice.” I didn’t answer. He stared at me a long time, but I waited him out. I noticed he wore burgundy moccasins with tassels and was without socks. That he had an orange suntan that glowed.
“She has me drop her off at the mall and says to come back and get her in an hour or two. But she never shows up.”
“Was your meter running?”
“My Jag’s in the shop. The cab’s from my fleet.”
“By the way, have you seen a cat out there in the street?”
“A salt-and-pepper one with a drooping ear?”
“Yes.”
“No, I haven’t.” Then, in a shot, he added, “Is she your wife?”
“We’re married,” I said.
“She told me you were roommates.”
“We do share rooms, though not all of them.”
He stood up, pulled down his jacket, which seemed on the tight side, and came up close to me. “You’re better off without her, pal. With all due respect, she’s a flake, but the kind that suits me.”
He went to the door and I followed, my book in hand, like a pistol. “Would you still like that water?” I asked in a most agreeable way.
“Don’t tell her you saw me,” he said.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.
He gave me a long look, half friendly, half bewildered, half menacing. “You’re not so bad for a dope.”
He sped off in his cab—Apex. Twenty-four Hours a Day. We Go Everywhere. The street was empty. The sidewalk was empty. The houses and their lawns across the road were empty. The sky was empty. The clouds, too. I shut the door and returned to my favorite chair and went back to my book.
Montaigne wrote brief notes to his wife, describing his adventures with bedbugs and the summer heat, never referring to his urinary condition or to his pains, which worsened with each day. He noted that the Italians painted their bedpans with scenes from classical mythology, favoring those of Leda and her admiring swan. They were comforting, those bedpans, so unlike the severe white porcelain ones in France, which never thought to combine art with excrement.
I was near the end of the book and that left me in a vacuum for the remainder of the day. I thought that now that I was at large, I would need to plan for the evening and the night ahead. I would leave tomorrow to itself for now. But then the door swung wide open and she appeared, fancy shopping bags in hand.
“Well, aren’t you going to help me?” I relieved her of two of the larger bags and settled them on the sofa. “There’s another one on the porch,” she said, as if I had been malingering. I retrieved it and another one at the doorstep, a large, round pink box.
She sat on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. She looked about, as if in an unfamiliar place. “What have you done?”
“To what?” I asked.
“To the room! It looks different. Did you change anything?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at me suspiciously, then said, “Something’s different.”
“It knows you’ve left. Rooms always know when someone has left.”
She pretended to yawn. “Sure.”
“And they shift themselves to the new situation,” I added. “Like when a person dies in a bedroom and the walls go gray and cold. Or when a child is born and the room goes rosy and roomier.”
“Has anyone been here since I left? I can smell that someone has.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“Was he wearing a blue suit?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Let me show you something,” she said, removing her dress. She fussed about the shopping bags and pulled out a red skirt and red jacket with large buttons. “Whataya think?” she asked, fastening her last fat button.
“You look like a ripe tomato.”
“It matches my handbag,” she said, waving it before me. “I realized after I left this morning that my bag needs something to go with it.”
“Everything matches and matches your hair, too.”
“You’ve always had a good eye,” she said.
“For you,” I said in a kind of flirty way that I wasn’t sure I meant.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going upstairs to pack some things.”
“Let me know if you see Pascal up there, please.”
“That’s another thing. I cringed every time you explained to a guest that Pascal was named after some French philosopher,” she said, turning from me.
“If you had ever seen Pascal stare up at the night sky and give a little shiver, you’d understand,” I said.
She was already halfway up the stairs and I wasn’t sure she had heard me. But then she shouted down, “Did he say when he’ll come back?”
I pretended not to have heard her. She came down the stairs again and said, “Well?”
“He didn’t say. But his Jag is in the shop.”
“I don’t care about the books. You can keep them all,” she said. “They prefer you anyway, like the cat.”
“I named him Pascal, after his namesake, who asked for the patience to sit. I named him Pascal because he sits quietly in the window box and I can see in his eyes that he is training himself against his nature to learn to sit.”
She gathered up the red dress suit and the handbag and, without a word, went back up the stairs. I returned to my book but my heart was not in it. Montaigne was on his way back to Bordeaux to his wife and his old life of solitude and voices. To his old known comforts. For all its vaunted claims, travel is a deterioration, taking minutes off one’s life with every passing mile. So, for all his bravery, his condition worsened with each jolt of the carriage, with each bug bite and bad meal. By the time he finally arrived home, the blood in his urine had grown darker, the pain stronger, the loneliness greater.
I returned to the kitchen and to the remains of my lunch, still scattered on the table like the flotsam of a minor wreck. I sipped a glass of wine. It tasted of damp nails forgotten in a dank cellar. I sat there as the dusk filtered through the kitchen window, softening the edges of the table and the chairs and the hulk of the fridge. My hand looked like a mitten. Montaigne should never have left his tower, I thought, and gave voice to it in the shadows: “You should have stayed home,” I said, advice given too late to an old friend.
Then I went to the door, thinking that Pascal might be there sitting on the step, waiting for me to let him in after his adventures in the wide world. Or maybe he would be just sitting and waiting for the night and the chill of its distant stars.