My father is eating a lunch salad with a business associate at Chasen’s on Doheny Drive. He stands to go to the bathroom, puts his napkin on his seat, and the world dissolves out from under him. He is lying on the tile floor of the restaurant, watching people moving in slow motion above him, speaking down to him, their voices slowed to incomprehensible syllables.
I get the phone call from Marge. “Your father had a massive stroke.” I will find out later that on the meds cocktail his doctor prescribed, green salad and blood thinners don’t mix. In the hospital I find him in intensive care, his body shrunken to the size of an eleven-year-old boy’s under his sheet. This can’t be him, but it is. He is paralyzed on his left side. His speech is slurred beyond comprehension. His brain has changed, the area that controls short-term memory and inhibitions damaged. He will regain partial use of his left arm, his speech will become less slurred, he will laugh at his memory loss, but his crackling intelligence is dulled, the father we knew gone forever.
* * *
My father has ordered each of us to take a corner of his bedsheet.
His caregiver, Lynette; my father’s skinny-necked assistant, Paul, who hopes to produce movies one day, which is the only reason he is here now, in this cat-urine-soaked condominium, because he is still hoping, despite all evidence that my father is dying; my brother Greg; and me.
My father’s world has shrunk to the four walls of the condominium bedroom, where Marge deposited him after the stroke before she filed for divorce and disappeared. He orders Lynette around as if she were an entire movie crew. She never sleeps more than ten minutes day or night, but she talks to him about converting from Judaism to Catholicism so he is assured a place in heaven, which he does a few days before he dies.
“Lower me to the floor.” Despite everything, his voice still commands. There is no question of disobeying. We man our posts.
In my father’s mind, the air is too thin in the four-foot-altitude of his bed. Desperate to fill his lungs, suffocating with emphysema, he has probably been planning this move for days, telling no one. Biding his time, perhaps waiting for the right combination of visitors.
“Lower me to the floor!”
We look at one another. Are we really doing this?
“Lower me!” he says, desperate now.
We heave.
Maybe he has even been waiting for me, the oldest, the only girl, specifically, because he knows I won’t refuse him.
“Lift!”
I pull the sheet taut. All of us, acting in unspoken unison, exert equal amounts of pull. Even so, he rolls onto his left, the paralyzed, side.
Greg and I step back; Lynette and Paul step forward. We lift him away from the bed. And slowly, with controlled strength, lower him to the in-need-of-a-shampoo beige carpet.
My father has come a long way from our apartment in the Dakota building to these three stained, mildewed, claustrophobic rooms.
He lies at our feet, trying, and failing, to breathe like every fish I ever watched die in the hold of his Boston Whaler.
“Lift me!” he roars again between gasps.
We bend our knees, grip, stand, pull the sheet with the rise of our bodies, raise his bulk, fat from the medications he’s taking, somehow from the floor, up, up, slowly now, steady, onto the bed.
Lynette re-tucks the sheet around the mattress as my father lies, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling. Though his mouth is open and we can see him panting, his chest barely rises. No breath brings in enough air.
This time he doesn’t ask us to move him. There is no place left to go.
* * *
“Where is Christine?” he asks from his bed. This is the last time I will see him alive.
“I’m right here, Dad,” I say.
He looks past me to the door, still waiting.
* * *
Six days after my father dies, the crematorium calls. There had been a rush of deaths that week, but they are finally getting to him.
“Drink lots of water,” the man in the shiny, ill-fitting suit tells me. “There’s nothing like crying to dehydrate a person.” He has a huge head and an unidentifiable accent. He stoops, his shoulders stiff, awkward, as if the orange-wallpapered rooms in this crematorium don’t fit him any better than his jacket and trousers. He hands me a bottled water, holds out a box of Kleenex. I pull two tissues as he opens the door.
In life, my father filled a room. In death, at first I don’t see him lying in the corner of this refrigerated crematorium display room.
When the doctor told my father he was going to die, five days before he actually did, my father ordered him to get out of the f-ing hospital room. He glared at us, daring us to live longer than him. Daring us to even try feeling smug that we were young and strong and upright, standing beside his prone, flattened form.
* * *
One of my brothers has turned on the air-conditioning in my father’s Los Angeles condominium. I cross the carpet, step over the stains. In the living room, a miniature city of cardboard boxes forms an unintentional grid of blocks and streets and avenues across the dingy carpet. My brothers, Godzilla-size, move among them. I pull out folders with stacks of papers inside. Some of these papers are typed, but here is one with my father’s scrawling handwriting, the first twenty pages, all he wrote, of his autobiography.
As a boy, I knew the Long Island Railroad as if it were a companion.
The words are heavy with emotion and self-importance, the tale of his boyhood town, Long Beach, New York, and his place within it. But the story trails off as if the railroad itself has taken an unexpected fork and my father can’t follow it. I recognize the hesitancy and uncertainty of my own attempts at writing. I see my father, in these sentences, caught up in the magnitude of a story he wants to tell, trying to follow the threads of his ideas as they veer into new directions, multiply, and double back on him. He hesitates, confused, mistakes the confusion for restlessness, puts the yellow notepad in a drawer, telling himself he will come back to it. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he’d turn down the football game, pull these pages out of the drawer to read them to me. He liked the ring of his words. What he didn’t like, clearly, was the sense he must have had that this story, so strong within him, the story of his own life, seemed to dissolve the harder he looked at it.
I pull out another, very worn notebook. A Day in My Life, in childish cursive, faded pencil, his thirteen-year-old self grinning in two-by-two, black-and-white and toothy, from the cover. My Town, My Family, a neat cursive paragraph page for each. I imagine the teacher’s approval. I stop at the last page and really see it: The Best Day of My Life.
“Look,” I say. I read out loud as he describes Long Beach’s small movie theater, where he sat alone in the dark on sunny afternoons to see every movie that came through. Clara Bow kissed me today. Douglas Fairbanks was here. I got their autographs. But my brothers are looking through other piles; they don’t notice, yet, how much rests on this, the day two movie stars came to my father’s small town; one kissed him on the cheek and he fell in love.
My brothers have moved to my father’s bedroom. I follow. His armoire smells of mothballs. They find a box in the closet that holds what is left of his valuables, gold cuff links, a gold money clip. An old Rolex watch.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sees himself lying dead in his room, while a few neighbors haggle over the curtains that drape the four posters of his deathbed. I look over my shoulder. He never liked us going through his things.
In the armoire, his cashmere sweaters are stacked, neatly folded. The bottom drawer is filled with socks. This is the last time I will see these rooms, the books on his bookshelf, our macaw’s wrought-iron birdcage sitting on the moisture-warped deck outside his bedroom door, his neatly folded socks and Hanes undershirts. The smell of him—faint sweat, shaving cream, hand lotion—that still lingers here will be aired out in the next few days, replaced by someone else’s smell.
I take two pairs of cashmere socks from the drawer, one brown, one navy. The socks will keep me warm and remind me of his feet; he never liked them to be cold. From the armoire, an oversize dark gray—my favorite color—cashmere sweater. From the bookshelf: Tuesdays with Morrie. As I’m leaving I double back. His reading glasses are still lying in the tray by his bed. They saw what he saw. I take them, too.
* * *
In our kitchen Tim shows me the letter Jesse, his new captain, whom Tim calls the freak because he is so good, has written to his fellow players on the Holy Mary College rugby team Tim has been coaching for four years. It begins, I have been captain of every team I’ve ever been on. We need to work together not apart. The season has just begun, one week, and already this rookie, whose Jewish father raised him after his mother left when he was two, has evaluated his teammates and is calling on them to step up, expecting excellence. I peek at Tim’s face. He looks out the window as I read. He scratches the side of his mouth, waiting for me to see what he sees about this young man I have yet to meet.
“He reminds me of you,” I tell him.
What I don’t say is how much Tim reminds me of my father these days. He is often gruff, he keeps his methods to himself, and his players treat him as a godfather of sorts, an enigma.
They come to me with their observations of him. Tim is slowly transforming the rugby team he inherited at Holy Mary College into a national powerhouse.
“He likes to keep us off-balance. He never says what he’s thinking.”
“He’s not human. Who else gets to work every day at five o’clock, works for eight hours, volunteer coaches in the afternoon, and still exercises four hours a day?”
“He never eats. He has no needs.”
These players feel what I feel. I imagine a shared camaraderie.
* * *
Holy Mary’s women’s basketball game is a blur of ponytails, screeching rubber soles, layups, and three-point shots. In what Tim calls a gesture of goodwill from one Holy Mary’s sport’s team to another, Tim brings his team and me to watch. It’s still early in the season, and I have yet to meet Jesse.
Tim calls, “Hey!” on our way out of the gym. Three men stand in an eddy by the door out of the current of the streaming crowd of exiting students. The tallest of the three has a pale beard, pale skin, pale eyes. He lifts his Gilly Callaghan–like chin when he sees Tim and gives a little laugh, as if it’s a private joke that we’re all here. He’s still grinning when we reach them and I decide, based on his cocky tip of the chin, the confident glow in his eye, that this is he.
* * *
That spring Tim invites me to join the team on their rugby tour to Ireland. Luke, also on Easter break, is with us; Em is home with a babysitter so she doesn’t miss school.
In the Dublin clubhouse after the game, Jesse is watching me. Around us, twenty-two-year-old man-boys scoop up the last forkfuls of rice-and-chicken dinner from their paper plates. Those not eating sidle up to the bar to pour foamy glassfuls of Irish beer. I wait for him to join them. Instead, in the shadows, amid empty wooden tables and upside-down chairs, the sweaty smell of chlorine and the black slick of just-mopped linoleum, I see him, tall and broad, jutting chin, horse-size thighs, place his foot behind him on the wall and lean. Like he has all the time in the world to do just what he is doing.
I am failing at eating strictly enough to maintain the euphoria of a fast. Being watched and noticed, I am suddenly lifted above all sadness. As much as Tim feels like home, it’s nice to be this high again. It feels like something I can’t do without.
* * *
I have never been this lost before. I don’t even know the name of our hotel. We arrived in Cork, and I never looked. Now, around the skyline of brick towers and spiderweb bridges the sky darkens, glowing an unfamiliar steely blue, cadmium orange. Why is the river behaving like this? Taking me into a part of the city where I know I haven’t been, though I’m tracing it backward, back the way I came. I have never lost my bearings in a city. But here the streets curve and swirl, sometimes running alongside each other, then suddenly crossing and crisscrossing like an optical illusion. I look behind me at the intersection I have just crossed. I passed a yellow planter box by an iron bench, but there is no planter box or bench now. Instead an unfamiliar bicycle sits propped against a green lamppost. It’s as if Cork has a current and I am drifting farther and farther into unfamiliar waters regardless of how hard I paddle. For a moment I feel the urge to give up. Let go. Drift for real. Who would I be? Stripped of whatever it is I think of as me.
I see a guard in a blue cap with a gold brim standing in front of a shop. It feels like the second or third time I’ve passed him, though nothing about the white brick of this shop with the red shutters looks familiar.
“Can you help me?”
He is tall. He peers down.
“I followed the river down from my hotel.” I remember a detail. “It used to be an orphanage. I can’t find my way back.”
He is broad shouldered with a long face, his mustache as thick as a cigar. He smiles and his face cracks open. The dazed feeling I have, as if I have already let go, as if I am already less myself than I was when I left the hotel, cracks a little with it.
“There are two rivers,” he says in a thick brogue. I can barely understand him. “They run parallel through town, then branch off in different directions.”
Did he say two rivers? He points and I see, on the other side of a small park, another lip of a blond-gray stone wall, the running water dark silver in the dusk. Yes, two, a stone’s throw from each other. I had picked the wrong one when I came from the shop without knowing not to.
“Follow that and you’ll come to a hill soon enough.” He tips his hat.
I follow the river and, faster than I could have imagined, I leave the winding maze of shops behind. Soon the dark green hill and the hotel, redbrick and upright, come into sight. As I follow the long slope of the street toward them, I feel myself congealing. Like a genie returning to a bottle, I am returning to Luke, Tim, and the team in the hotel, and in one week, Em, my house and dog, my routine in California. It feels awkward, like birth, backward. As if I am fitting a slightly altered version of me back into its original frame.
But at least I am found. For now.
* * *
I answer the phone; it’s my mother, trying to croak out words.
“Illinois died tonight.”
She tells me Illinois had closed their annual gig at the Midsummer Night Swing concert at Lincoln Center for a sold-out crowd just a few days ago. Last month he had been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Julliard School in New York City.
“He was so proud,” my mother had told me at the time. “He said receiving the honorary doctorate was the happiest moment of his life.”
Now she sobs, “He wanted a chicken sandwich from White Castle. He asked for one. I made him some seitan instead.” I hear her ragged intake of breath. “I should have gotten him the chicken sandwich. Maybe he would have been okay if he had had the chicken sandwich.”
* * *
I am along with the team on tour in Argentina. Unlike Ireland, Tim didn’t want me on this trip. No women. But Fay, the girlfriend of the assistant coach, Al, wanted to go, and Al needed her to have someone to pal around with.
Buenos Aires is muggy and hot. I am perpetually covered in sweat. I shower to find my clothes heavy and wet again in minutes. My hair sticks to the back of my neck; my underarms are soaked. The front door of our hotel opens onto a narrow thruway, more alley than street. Buses overhang the stained, uneven edges of sidewalk; taxis honk angrily. The heat rises in oily waves off the pockmarked, blackened concrete; the sour-sweet ammonia of urine; the muddy, vinegary liver of drying excrement; the alcohol of bus and taxi exhaust. Amid the honking and revving of motors, men and women hurry by, many with limps, limbs twisted and bent, half hidden under skirts. This is a place where arms and shoulders and stomachs and thighs are perpetually beaded, where cleavage is damp and glistening. Here, people bear their bodies, whole and misshapen. Despite the thread of familiarity in buses and taxis and dirty city streets, I remember we are not home.
The team is walking from the hotel to the waterfront for dinner. Like pebbles in a stream, Jesse, who has been on the team for three years now, stays just ahead of me, sometimes just behind. Now we approach a girl and a boy, sitting on a redbrick planter box, kissing urgently. The boy is dark-skinned, with a shiny mop of hair, the girl darker, her hair lighter, longer, sleeker. In his lap she turns to press against his skinny teenaged chest, and their tongues twist in and out of each other’s mouths like snakes. They are not coming up for air. We approach, but it is clear that, for them, nothing exists except each other’s hands and buttocks pressed on thighs, faces, mouths, and eyes. The sun is setting. The river is silver. The warm air smells of blossoms, the sour stink of open garbage cans, car exhaust, and mown grass as we pass these lovers pressed together in this sensual, hot, sultry night.
* * *
It’s Sunday, and we’re home from Argentina. The next morning, I turn over in bed and feel a piece of paper folded on my pillow. Tim has already left for work. Half asleep, I reach for it, open it. In the semidarkness, I recognize my own handwriting, the blue pen, black now, from a copy machine.
We kissed.
I go cold, sit up. Really look. A page from the journal I had with me in Buenos Aires. Written the second to last night, after I had gone out to celebrate the birthday of one of the players and drank only a few sips of some mysterious homemade Argentine whiskey that made the warm night and the lights of the bar swirl for hours. Tim had stayed home. At four in the morning, standing outside the pub while waiting for a taxi, still swirling from the whiskey, Jesse and I had kissed.
“Do you want to do this?” Jesse had asked.
“Do you?” I said.
The next morning I find another page of my journal taped to the toilet seat.
“You’re just going to torture me like this?” I call Tim at work.
“How is this torture? Put yourself in my position. Then you’ll know what torture is.”
Tim feigns affection in front of Em and Luke but turns his back to me as soon as we’re alone. Rugby is over; Em and Luke have summer camps. I drive them around, grocery shop, clean the house, fold the laundry, feeling like a trauma victim. Eating feels like trying to swallow cement. I can see in the mirror how thin my face has become. All my jeans and T-shirts hang. The only thing I can get down are Starbucks mochas. I start early, tipping my tongue into white foam and sugary chocolate, breathing in the sweet steam, sipping. Heat is a carrier. This isn’t a drink; it’s a sugar transfusion. The high lasts all morning. I know there is some balance I am seeking. If I found it, I wouldn’t want this exhilaration in a cup. But I don’t want to not want it. I want my pores to open; I want to feel my cells breathing. I want to live on air; I want to float back up to where I was.
I begin eating dark chocolate to replace the mochas, which are making me fat. But one square a day leads to two bars. I switch to coffee to replace the chocolate; soon one cup of coffee in the morning leads to drinking coffee all day. I try diets: no carb, no fat, all fat, no oil, no gluten, no nightshades, low-glycemic, proper food combining, only alkaline foods, all raw, no sugar. I’ve gone through every artificial sweetener I can get my hands on: stevia, aspartame, sucralose, saccharin. I swing in the opposite direction and live on sugar, then eliminate sugar and add caffeine back in, then subtract caffeine and go back to eating sugar. I want the feeling of aspiring and striving and wanting and needing.
A friend invites me—“I don’t know what this is, but it looks interesting”—to a screening of The Secret at a small New Age-y book store in Walnut Creek. As we sit in the room amid the gathering of fold-out chairs, I feel wary. On the screen, people talk about how they pull things—houses, money, success—just by thinking about them. So hokey. So I’m surprised when I start to sob. What I’m hearing mostly, behind what these people on the screen are saying, is the comfort I remember coming from the swirling smoke-like light the night of Emily’s first seizure. Everything’s all right. I’m also hearing this: the high I’ve been looking for has been attainable all along. Like my mother said, it doesn’t depend on anyone else, it exists inside of me. I just need to know where to look. On our way out, I buy The Secret from a stack of copies that have been set out on a table by the door, and the book beside it, The Law of Attraction. A few days later, I try to explain the law of attraction to my mother.
“That’s nice, if it’s something you like.” She sniffs, disdain in her voice. It’s not thousands of years old or validated by a guru who has been initiated into a divine lineage. It’s coming from a middle-aged woman from Utah who says she is receiving blocks of thought from the nonphysical. But it’s visualization thoroughly described, using desire as a road map. When we were on the Program, it didn’t take long to learn that just wanting something was the indication it wasn’t good for me. Every religion I can think of counsels against desire. The idea that I can have what I want feels completely new. If I can have anything, what do I want?