[sic] Read online

  The next morning I entered the hospital. Some time after that—I don’t know when, I heard about it from a common friend, later—Caroline entered rehab. How well she’d hidden whatever she was dealing with from me. Had she been waiting for me to start the hospital stay? Had she thought that I’d had enough, as it were, on my plate, without dealing with her problems? My problems were enough for the two of us? I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past her; she’s smart and caring like that, and she’s that self-possessed. I’d have loved to have helped her as she helped me. But I’ve never asked her about it; the fact that she never spoke about it was a signal, at least in my interpretation, that inquiring would have been a sort of breach of protocol. But this just shows how differently different people deal with circumstances: where they draw the chalk line around the self. And anyway I only saw her once again, much later, not too long ago in fact, and we never got into it: my impression was that she’s doing fine, that wonderful smile and those slightly watery eyes.

  * * *

  * Swinburne got this, as he got so much else, wrong: what the spurned (and more than a little defensive) Aphrodite says at the opening of Euripides’ Hippolytus is actually which roughly translates as “I am a Goddess mighty and of high renown, among mortals and heaven alike.” She goes on to introduce herself as the “Goddess of Cyprus,” from whose foamy shores she famously arose: “celestial Aphrodite.” In other words, she’s pissed.

  IV

  The Catalogue Aria

  Events which would make a life-lasting impression on others, pass like shadows before me, while thoughts appear like substances. Emotions are my events.

  —Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

  By “entering the hospital,” I mean checking in for the weeks-long inpatient stay required for the last round of full-body radiation, the rounds of high-dose chemo, the bone marrow transplant, and the recovery, where your immune system is basically that of a patient with late-stage AIDS. I’d already been going to the hospital daily for a few weeks for outpatient radiation sessions. But now I was “entering”; it was check-in time. And by this time, somehow, even though I’d just seen Caroline the previous night, I’d already met Sophie. And there we were, sitting in the waiting room. Checking into the hospital for a multiday stay is just like checking into a hotel, except the hospital asks you to show up at eight in the morning or some such ungodly hour (especially considering) and then you literally wait until four in the afternoon before you’re admitted. The waiting room in which Sophie and I were sitting was empty except for a woman behind the desk and a single other person, an African-American woman who was speaking quietly on her cell phone. Behind the woman at the desk was a sign that read, “No cell phones allowed in the waiting area.” I noticed the sign, looked at the woman, looked at Sophie, maniacally typing something into her laptop, and hoped that Sophie wouldn’t notice the sign, but of course, over the due course of time, she did.

  She looked up suddenly. “Excuse me.” Nobody looked at her. Louder: “Excuse me.” This time, the woman at the desk looked at her, puzzled. Now Sophie fairly screamed. “Excuse me!”

  The woman speaking quietly on her cell phone—obviously speaking to a family member, maybe a patient; or maybe she herself was the patient—peered at Sophie from across the otherwise empty, otherwise silent room.

  Sophie answered her gaze. “No cell phones. No cell phones here. You’re not allowed to have cell phones.”

  The woman’s speechless face said—What? Sorry?

  Sophie pointed at the sign. “No cell phones allowed here. Did you see the sign? Can you read the sign? No cell phones. See? Right there. See? No, see? Right there. No cell phones. It’s not allowed. Could you please go outside with your cell phone? Please?”

  I whispered to Sophie that it wasn’t really that big of a deal. I may as well have been whispering to her in Italian, from a street corner somewhere in Prague, in the year 1787. The woman shrugged, stepped out of the room, and continued her conversation. Sophie went back to assaulting her poor laptop, writing God knows what, and I inserted my iPod earbuds, put on Don Giovanni, and tried to pretend that—just temporarily, just for that moment—at least one of us didn’t exist.

  In the “catalogue aria” in Don Giovanni, Don Juan’s valet breaks the news to Donna Elvira—a hysterical woman hopelessly in love with the scoundrel, her ex-lover—that she’s not the only girl in Europe to have slept with his boss. Living vicariously, Leporello has kept track of the others, who number,

  In Italy, six hundred and forty;

  In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;

  A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;

  But in Spain, already one thousand and three.

  Among these are country girls,

  Servant girls, city girls,

  Countesses, baronesses,

  Marchionesses, princesses,

  Women of every class,

  Every form, every age.

  (That’s my translation, from the Italian. I didn’t know what the Italian word “marchesine” was, and when I looked it up I didn’t know its translation, “marchioness,” either: it’s the female version of a marquis, like the Marquis de Sade.) That’s 2,065 women—more than 10 percent of Wilt Chamberlain’s celebrated repertoire. And there must be more! Leporello’s just talking about the girls in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Turkey. Now even if we interpret the country names in the broadest sense—“Germany” to mean the Holy Roman Empire and “Turkey” to mean the Ottoman Empire, which in 1787 was about to breach Belgrade—in order to get from Germany to Turkey, Don Juan must have traversed the part of Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, including Prague, that was still autonomous. It’s an interesting omission, given that Don Giovanni was commissioned by Prague, and it was premiered there. And let’s face it: both Czech women and men must realize how totally cute Czech women are: their eyes, their cheekbones, the stuff they talk about. Killer. But no matter the number, Mozart’s opera begins after Don Juan’s last conquest, a fact that often goes unnoticed, just as I tend to forget that I never actually had sex with Sophie.

  Again, why would Leporello torment Donna Elvira with this litany? To commiserate with her, in mutual envy—he, jealous of his master; she, envious of his master’s conquests? The secret of James Bond’s appeal is that women want him and men want to be him.

  Suddenly I felt a sharp poke in my side. I paused my iPod, looked at Sophie. She was typing away. (The French verb for “to strike” is frapper, and I’ve always thought it would be a great slang word for typing, as in “Sophie didn’t just type: she frapped.”) She didn’t look at me. Then—quick as a cricket—she glanced over and winked.

  Winked.

  Just as quickly, she returned to frapping.

  I clicked back to my playlist because I couldn’t get back into Mozart after the wink, so I put on the Rolling Stones. At first it seems like Mozart and the Rolling Stones have relatively little to do with each other, until we recall that Mozart, again, conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787. Four years later, he died. Six years after that, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, moved to New York, where he became the first chair of Italian at Columbia University, where I studied and taught. Forty-one years after that, in 1838, Da Ponte died, and his funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street, exactly where, exactly 133 years later, Francis Ford Coppola shot the baptism scene of The Godfather; exactly where, twenty-two years after that, my then-future girlfriend’s grandfather’s funeral service was held; exactly where, fourteen years after that, and without my knowledge, my mother, known to me only as an atheist, was secretly praying to St. Catherine because it seemed as if I might die. Her notes, from the diary she kept while I was in the hospital, are reproduced in facsimile on the following four pages.

  But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, six weeks or so. Back to my iPod and Sophie’s frapping. What’s the connection between Mozart and the Stones? Just 139 years after Da Ponte’s fu
neral service was held at Old St. Patrick’s, the Stones, in Paris (where I lived before I moved to New York), recorded their homage to New York City: the triumphant and wholly unexpected (and therefore triumphant) comeback album, the punk-appropriating Some Girls, the eponymous single of which stands as Mick Jagger’s own catalogue aria, a satirical portrait of a misogynist, surely not the author’s own voice. He begins the song complaining that women, while professing their love, are actually attracted to his financial health. Then, in the second verse, he catalogues them. French women want jewelry. Italian girls want Lamborghinis or Lancias, Fiats or Ferraris. American girls? “Everything in the world you can possibly imagine!” It’s funny. The humor here is not only due to its semantic content. There’s the vocal inflection on the last line, exaggeratedly distraught. There’s also the fact that the rhyme scheme isn’t simply broken after five pattern-establishing stanzas; it’s demolished, like the house Laurel and Hardy try to build in their 1928 short The Finishing Touch. So formally, this stanza is a highlight, and one can’t help but be disappointed that it doesn’t end the central verse. But thematically, it can’t, because it’s transitional. As Leporello’s Don Juan—and who knows how accurate his account actually is—moves breezily from Italy to Germany to France to Turkey to Spain, Mick Jagger must move from France to Italy to America to England, where he gets stuck, and now the narrative tone is inflected. It’s not that British women are acquisitive; it’s that they’re so straitlaced he can’t bear to be on the phone with them, and indeed, at times, goes to the length of simply leaving the receiver off the hook so he can’t be reached. The verse-length instrumental interlude that at this point ensues gives the listener time to reflect on this scenario, and it also expresses his silence. Maybe the singer is just remembering a particular British girlfriend with whom he was temporarily irritated. Or maybe the image of a man sitting at home, phone off the hook, paints a more alarming picture: it’s an image of the recluse, the paranoiac, the suicide.

  The fourth verse resumes the catalogue, this time by ethnicity, not nationality. White chicks can drive him crazy; black women are sexually insatiable, and he just doesn’t “have that much jam.” To me, that last word always sounds like “jazz,” not “jam.”* Maybe that’s just because I continue to think of the ety mology of “jazz” as “jism,” which strikes me as properly salacious, although this etymology has apparently been disproved. In any event, the singer’s character has now been revealed as not only possibly depressed but possibly impotent, hiding his state behind a curtain of clichéd racist tropes. And, presently, as xenophobic and gynophobic at the same time (a provocative association!), noting that one must be wary of Asian women, whose balmy docility might cover something menacing “inside those silky sleeves.” It’s a gynophobia, to be fair, rendered a bit tongue-in-cheek via the reference (knowing or unknowing? does it matter?) to Updike’s celebrated vagina metaphor. (Nicholson Baker noted that “once the sensation of the interior of a vagina has been compared to a ballet slipper, the sexual revolution is complete.”)6 Which of the Rabbit volumes did that come from? The second, I think? That would have been 1971. And when did Rodney Dangerfield utter his immortal line, “If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex life at all”? I paused my iPod and looked up at the woman behind the desk, but my name still hadn’t been called. I looked at Sophie next to me. We don’t really have to spend an inordinate amount of time on Sophie—seen here in profile, and again it’s not her real name but, again, it’s not Not Her Real Name—for the more time we spend on Sophie, the longer it will take us to bring ourselves to address Not Her Real Name herself. In fact I even hesitate to bring Sophie into this discussion because I happen to harbor a great deal of affection and admiration for her, and I am terrified by the possibility that the inadvertent disclosure of certain details regarding Sophie—the two life-size, framed photographic portraits of Sophie that hung over her bed, for instance; or the fact, entirely subjective but irresistible, that her personal wardrobe and her apartment somehow reminded me of the fake white Christmas tree Ray Liotta brings home for the family after the 1978 Lufthansa heist portrayed in Goodfellas—might provoke mild amusement in the reader, partly, no doubt, because these details are hilarious, which would be wholly at odds with the literary tone I am attempting to employ. But I will speak briefly of Sophie, because the potential benefits of expressing an appreciation outweigh the risks, and because her story of addiction and recovery not only is a model of courage but places a mirror up to both my illness and my brief encounter with Not Her Real Name. As I said, I met Sophie before I had bid Caroline goodbye, not that I ever bid Caroline good-bye. Perhaps I knew that trysts such as that which I shared with Caroline are typically ephemeral. Relationships do tend to appear stamped with expiry dates: the whole is apparent in the part. So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to meet his single friend for lunch I said yes. It was my first and only blind date. For that matter it was I think the only date I’ve ever had, because I’ve always fallen in love or lust with friends or acquaintances. My reflections, therefore, on the dating scene in New York are based on a highly limited data pool, and my experiences have been uniformly positive. Sophie and I had lunch at a nice restaurant somewhere in TriBeCa, and our conversation seemed somehow adult, tinted with shades of wisdom, sobriety, wry knowingness, shared understandings—all elements, of course, that prohibit love. She was, as our common friend had told me, very attractive, very intelligent, an arts enthusiast; we shared basic political values. She had a freelance design career that was going well. She had a great eye for fashion, architecture; after lunch, we walked across the street to the Mizrahi boutique whose undulating ceiling was designed by a friend of mine who works for Frank Gehry. It was fun, talking about clothes, fabric, stuff I don’t understand. It was one of those pleasant afternoons one never seems to have but always seems to be recalling.

  The next time we saw one another was not a second date. Like acts in American life, there are no second dates. There’s only a first date, either successful or unsuccessful; in the former case, the second meeting is referred to euphemistically as a second date. But one always knows, right from the start. From the part one can read the whole. The second time we saw one another was dinner, and I told her that I was sick and was about to have a bone marrow transplant and she told me of her lifelong struggle and triumph over addiction. Somehow, a pact was made, a partnership was formed: and like the merger, unlike the acquisition, liquid assets were swapped to share the risk. We fast-forwarded into mid-relationship; both parties were compliant, agreeable.

  I remember not knowing how to read words, but I don’t remember not knowing how to read music. Sophie doesn’t remember not drinking. She drank constantly: the only moments she would ever stop—ever—were the moments devoted to vomiting. As soon as regurgitation was complete, she would drink. The only time alcohol wasn’t going into her mouth was when vomit was coming out. She blacked out constantly, of course: waking up on trains, subways, in friends’ houses, hotels, on front lawns, at her parents’ place, on sidewalks. I don’t like thinking of her lovely cheek against cold concrete: opening her eyes to discover the x and y axes have been switched. There were other substance abuse problems too. She had been in a couple of abusive relationships, which she never really went into. I don’t know if these concerned family members or lovers or what. Curiously, in spite of all this, she had been able to lead a fairly functional social life. She avoided injury; she didn’t have to work because her family was wealthy enough to support her financially, though not healthy enough to support her in any other way. She had friends, relationships. Ironically, she said, if she hadn’t been drinking for the first thirty years of her life, she would have, she believes, died.

  However, one day this self-medication that had been preserving her sanity turned around and almost killed her—she never explained precisely how, and I had the impression that it was simply a moment of self-apprehension, rather than some physical near-death incident, alth
ough I could well be mistaken. She went immediately to an AA meeting and never touched the stuff again. I know next to nothing about AA, and I had never encountered someone with a comparable degree of addiction. The figure of the addict is such a familiar one from mass media, films, celebrities in rehab. Sophie breathed life into those clichés, traits that were familiar and strange at the same time, like finally visiting Rome. It was literally one day at a time for her, an hour at a time, sometimes a minute or a second at a time. Her face, strikingly attractive, was tightly drawn. I’ve never seen anyone eat so much candy—entire bags at a sitting, the bags of candy you find at a drugstore that no one ever seems to buy. She quite literally was unable to sit still. Seeing a movie, for instance, was impossible. She would shrink down in her seat, then straighten up, then leap onto my lap, then stretch out, then hop out of her seat to buy more candy. (Granted, the film I took her to was the African director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, not the fastest moving of screwball comedies. Sissako is a beautiful filmmaker, but a minimalist.) When we first started hanging out I wondered how she slept. Later I learned it was through considerable medication. We shared a completely contrived intimacy—to the point that she would often, before a kiss, wink— I know you know I know you know—which does to romance what breaking the fourth wall does to the cinematic illusion of verisimilitude. The calls to the sponsor at appointed moments, the journal keeping, the form filling, all followed with the diligence of a prayer schedule. She never commented on the religious aspects of AA, a matter of some controversy. AA has its critics. And while it certainly worked for her, there was the overzealousness of the proselytizer. As I began my multiday hospital stays, with a week or so at home in between them, I was also beginning to suffer from symptoms of anxiety derived from the trauma of not simply the diagnosis but the fact that the chemo hadn’t worked; I found myself inexplicably grasped by new phobias, a clenching sense of panic on the subway, for example, or when going over a bridge. I would have the sensation that time was about to stop, or that space was on the brink of bankruptcy, or that things actually ceased to exist when they were obscured. Or that suddenly it was not three in the afternoon but four in the morning, and I was the only one in the room to realize this. Such episodes would arise out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear. Meanwhile I was also enduring episodes of blind rage, directed at no one and nothing in particular except of course a malignant universe or myself at having sinned to deserve such a penalty. It was not because Sophie and I were both pretty much thoroughly occupied with our own private manias, not because we were basically total strangers to one another, that I was unable to share my experiences with her; it was because, in the throes of them, I couldn’t recognize them. She recognized but misidentified them; they were familiar to her, and they scared her. One evening, we went to dinner at the apartment of a couple of dear friends of mine. We drank freely (not Sophie, of course), there was wonderful conversation, wonderful food. In the taxi on the way home over the Brooklyn Bridge I was infused suddenly with uncontrollable fury; I slammed my fist repeatedly against the seat of the cab until my hand was bruised and my fingers were bleeding. Sophie, next to me, was terrified; she had seen this type of violence before, as the result of drink or drugs, directed toward others, toward herself. She shrieked in terror, and as soon as we got off the bridge into Manhattan, the cab driver pulled over and threw us out onto the street. She screamed that my behavior confirmed what she had long suspected: I was a serious alcoholic, a drug user. This was a perfectly understandable reaction; she was relating my conduct to the world she knew; it couldn’t have occurred to her that I had drunk that night in an intuitive, clumsy attempt to counter anxiety resulting from the fear of imminent death, and it didn’t occur to me, either: it took a psycho-oncologist to explain it.