Essays After Eighty (13 page)

 

Jane had leukemia for fifteen months. I don't remember what I ate in fifteen months of hospital cafeterias. Most of the time Jane ingested only TPN through a catheter in her heart. After Jane's funeral my porch filled with whole wheat bread like Jane's, casseroles, and a ham that I sliced for three weeks. In late spring my supper every night was fresh asparagus from the patch Jane had dug and planted and nourished across the road. Sometimes I'd buy myself two pork chops and eat one at supper with a frozen vegetable, two days in a row. I tried a restaurant alone, but I couldn't stand it. Only when I started dating would I eat
osso buco
again at Piero's La Meridiana. (Poetry finally attracted females, as it was supposed to do when I was fourteen.) As I escorted my date to New London's Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked “No!” and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters. At home I made them stew with red wine. I made meatloaf. Some of them cooked in my kitchen or in theirs. A friend from California flew in bringing her own garlic press, and we bought a bushel of cloves at Cricenti's. When she took charge of the kitchen, even chocolate ice cream tasted of garlic. After my years of brief romances, I settled down with Linda. Until I stopped driving, one of us made dinner. Then we went to restaurants because I needed to get out of the house. We drove to the bookstore, the supermarket, and Piero's. He isn't reticent about cooking with garlic.

As I enter my mid-eighties my appetite dwindles. I bring home doggie bags from a restaurant. My daughter cooks me chili to freeze, and annually gives me a head of Stilton. My son keeps me supplied all year with five-year-old Vermont cheddar. Linda freezes thick soups, makes shepherd's pie and garlic potatoes. Carole gave me a quart of roadkill bear stew. Most nights I push my four-wheeled pusher to the microwave to heat up widower food. It's always Stouffer's—the red packages with Swedish Meatballs, or Stuffed Peppers, or Cheddar Potato; the white ones with Meatloaf and Potato, or Steak Portobello with Broccoli, or Ranchero Braised Beef with Sweet Potato—flakes of garlic with everything.

MY COUSIN AUDREY
is ninety-six. She taught reading for sixty years, professionally and as a volunteer, at the Danbury Elementary School, which staged a celebration in her honor last fall. Audrey's mind is undiminished, but like me she walks pushing a roller with four wheels. I remarked that the school was generous to seat us together, so that she would not seem the eldest in the room. (I am eleven years younger.) I told her a recent dream in which I found myself walking in a dark house, among shadowy male strangers. I felt mildly anxious and wanted to go outside. I kept looking for a door but couldn't find one. It was a house without a door.

Audrey said, “Sometimes it's hard.”

When Jane and I moved here, I worked all day on freelance writing, taking breaks between genres. For ten years, before we installed an oil furnace, I hauled wood from the shed to our centenarian cast-iron Glenwood stoves, then huffed back to my rolltop desk. With central heating I lost my trips to the woodshed. I interrupted my work by walking our dog Gus, or by driving to browse in the Morgan Hill Bookstore, or by visiting Cricenti's to buy a jar of pimentos I didn't need. When I was eighty, after my two accidents and selling what remained of my car, it was annoying for a month not to be able to take an impulsive spin in the Honda. Gus was dead and neither the cats nor I took walks. Gradually the car desires dwindled, and I congratulated myself on accepting unavoidable limitation. Then I dreamed the dream.

 

My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. Yesterday I fell asleep in an armchair. I never fall asleep in a chair. Indolence overcomes me every day. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next: putting on a sweater or eating a piece of pie or calling my daughter. Sometimes I break through my daydream to stand up. At Christmas or birthday I no longer want objects, even books. I want things I can eat, cheddar or Stilton, my daughter's chili, and replacements for worn-out khakis, T-shirts, socks, and underwear. Every day in winter I wear a long-sleeved T-shirt, in summer the short-sleeved kind.

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. Jane and I married in 1972, when she was twenty-four and I forty-three. For six months we delayed marriage because she would be a widow so long. After a surgeon removed half my liver, Jane wrote her elegies—“Otherwise,” “Prognosis,” “Pharaoh”—and the next year was crowded with generous anticipatory funerals. (A writers' group put on a Donald Hall tribute; the University of Michigan gave me an honorary degree.) I felt fine after chemo in January 1994 when Jane was diagnosed with leukemia, and in April 1995 she died. I will mourn her forever.

Ten years ago I found Linda, and she helps me get out of my house. Earlier she helped me travel, as long as a week at a time. She saw to my requirements at poetry readings from New York to Los Angeles, from the District of Columbia to Chicago, from Monterey to Pennsylvania to Kansas City. We flew to international literary festivals in Sweden, in Vancouver, in Mexico, and twice in Ireland. The places where I read my poems paid for travel, and airline credits helped us undertake more fanciful journeys. In summer we flew to temperate Argentina and Chile. May and June were right for London. July was warm enough in Russia's St. Petersburg. In spring we went to Italy, and in many seasons flew to Paris. For the first French visits we stayed at a hotel that served paradisal croissants. One morning I ate fourteen. Between one flight to Paris and another, my balance began to fail. I waddled with feet wide apart and found stairs increasingly fearsome. The entrance to our hotel was five deep steps without railings. Holly, my travel agent, found us a hotel with no stairs, only three blocks away from our old one. We clambered into taxis for museums, returning to old marvels and discovering new ones. For lunch we walked a block or two, usually to Les Deux Magots, where I ate a
sandwich Camembert
, the cheese an incomparable ripeness on a baguette warm, dense, tender, and delicious. Once the waiter took our order and shortly returned. He said it would take a few minutes; the bakery had just delivered fresh bread. How many times a day did warm baguettes arrive at Les Deux Magots? For dinner we went to fancy places—to La Tour d'Argent, to Lapérouse—but later found less notorious, more dingy and intimate restaurants. My favorite was old and plain, Joséphine “Chez Dumonet” on rue du Cherche-Midi, where they served a
boeuf bourguignon
I loved as much as the city itself.

In September of 2011 Linda and I last flew to Paris. I was eighty-three, and at home I avoided a broken hip by pushing my roller. For Paris I took only a cane, assuming that as I walked more, my legs would get stronger. Hah. After five days I moved two or three inches each step. Taxis could carry us to
boeuf bourguignon
, but I got Linda to look at paintings alone while I lay in bed reading books.

A year later Linda took a job teaching French, and over school vacation returned to France to practice the language. She went by herself.

 

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't
walked
through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. For years a pusher has scooted me through security in fifty-four seconds, and for years I have boarded the plane before anybody else. One pusher in Minneapolis insisted that Linda sit in a wheelchair too, because Linda's walking would slow him down. He sprinted us to the luggage carousel as if he were Usain Bolt. In 2010 a university gave me an award. I flew there with Linda, and at two A.M. of the prize day I woke with stomach flu. Imodium shut me down by noon, and I struggled through my honors at four p.m. The next day I was still shaky and frail when we flew back by way of Baltimore-Washington. A pusher wheelchaired me to the Southwest Airlines gate for Manchester, New Hampshire. As usual I was first to board, Linda behind me. As we started toward the empty seats, my trousers fell down around my ankles. “Technical difficulties,” Linda announced.

Poetry readings become increasingly difficult for my hosts, because I'm hard to handle—and I'm no longer doing many. My lecture agent makes sure about no stairs. If anyone says there are only a few steps, there are probably ten. (They never noticed.) Mostly I live the same day, every day, which doesn't bore me except at beginning and end. In the morning I turn on the coffee, glue in my teeth, take four pills, swallow Metamucil and wipe it off my beard, fasten a brace over my buckling knee, pull painfully tight stockings over edema—then read the newspaper and drink black coffee. Daytime is writing, napping, daydreaming, and dictating letters. Days are not boring because I read and write different things, and because writing sustains me. Bedtime is as much ennui as getting up. Fill coffee machine for morning, detach false teeth and soak them, take evening pills, remove brace, peel off painfully tight stockings.

Weeks are not boring, or months. Since I started long ago to make a living by freelance writing, it's been hard to tell day from day, week from week. Sundays the mail doesn't come. Occasionally the mail doesn't come on other days, which is puzzling until I realize it's the Fourth of July.

 

Old age is averse to innovation. Ten years ago I touched a computer once. It was black, it was hard, it did something weird when I touched its mouse, which was not really a mouse. I inhabit the only computerless house the length of Route 4, and I don't have an iThing. I do have a television set, for MSNBC and baseball. In newspapers and magazines I read about what's happening. Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles its speed, then doubles it again. Art takes naps.

I should add that the electronically equipped Kendel lives just down the street. Like me she is handicapped, though thirty years younger. She has MS, and we compare notes on getting around. As well as typing my manuscripts and letters, she is my bookkeeper who tells me what I paid for what, and when. With my accountant she prepares my taxes. She shows me where to sign my name. If I want to know something, she finds it on Google.

 

When I'm annoyed by change, I think of my mother Lucy. When she could no longer live alone in her Connecticut house, Jane and I wanted her here, but she needed a medical facility. She had frequent attacks of congestive heart, which required an immediate doctor. We found her a bed in a New Hampshire place attached to a hospital, the Clough Center. Beside her was a phone jack that lacked a phone. When we bought her a telephone we found only an instrument that worked by pushbuttons, numerical as a cash register. She was disgusted. A phone has a dial!

At ninety my mother's mind remained clear. This farmhouse was twenty minutes away from her bed. She could have shuffled out of her squalid room wearing a caftan, squeezed herself into the front seat of the Honda, and sat in her childhood living room or visited the bed where she was born. She might even have smoked a cigarette. She never made the journey. In old age everything is too much trouble. The Clough Center had no door.

 

The ground floor of this farmhouse contains a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. I have not visited the root cellar—with its empty cider barrels, its molasses kegs, and its abandoned ping-pong table—for nearly a decade. I put in a new furnace without looking at it. There is a big floor upstairs with books and papers and pictures, and the workroom where Jane wrote her poems. I last climbed up—on two-hundred-year-old risers five inches deep—several years back with a man who evaluated my pictures. I use the living room for reading and writing, the parlor for watching baseball and dictating letters. My children and grandchildren visit, which enlivens a day.

It is Carole who keeps the house. She washes my clothes, she drives me to the doctor. She arranges my furniture for comfort and safety. She examines my tick bite infection. When my bottom missed the toilet and I fell, she found and installed aluminum rails, giving me handholds. She bought an electrical chair to help me stand up. (For
some
reason, such things are easy to find secondhand.) She nailed two handles to help me step on the porch. We smoke cigarettes together and I write about our habit in
Playboy
. I depend on four women in their fifties. My trainer Pam forestalls the wheelchair. Linda, Kendel, and Carole do everything else. When I talk with them, I carelessly assume I'm their age, while they witness decrepitude without letting me know. I look in a mirror at my extravagant beard and I have no idea that the back of my head is bald.

When I was thirty, I lived in the future because the present was intolerable. When I was fifty and sixty, the day of love and work repeated itself year after year. Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing. Exhaustion limits energy. Yesterday my first nap was at nine-thirty A.M., but when I awoke I wrote again. Some days in the evening I climb down with Linda from my porch by a stout railing and pull myself from newel post to car door to front seat. I back into the seat ass-first in order not to put my weight on a buckling knee. Linda stores my four-wheeled pusher in the trunk, so that when we arrive I can roll from the car to La Meridiana. Back home we read a novel to each other. We watch a movie from Netflix. In the morning she stirs quantities of sweet onion and five-year-old Vermont cheddar into a four-egg omelet, which is outstanding.

She leaves to teach French 4. I pick up my pen.

 

One feature of old age is gabbing about almost-forgotten times. I think of my great-uncle Luther, born in 1856, telling me on the farmhouse porch how he remembered the boys coming home from Virginia. I listened to a man with a white mustache who shuffled as he walked and remembered the Civil War. I was almost ten. Then New England was torn by the hurricane of 1938. Shore cottages were swept inland, power went out, houses blew down—this house survived—and in the countryside whole forests were uprooted. Roosevelt's CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, cut up great fallen trees and preserved the timber by corduroying lakes and ponds with logs. For many years everyone in the East reminisced about the hurricane. At some point, ten-year-old children who bicycled among freshly fallen trees will not be alive to remember the storm.