Essays After Eighty (7 page)

Into the living room I walked. Philippa screamed. Jane and her mother ran from the kitchen horrified, ready to dial 911. Hubbub rattled the plaster on the walls. My mother stared with her mouth open, then grinned. Only Andrew smiled calmly, enjoying my trick on the family world. Through turkey and stuffing, I was aware of eyes that kept looking up to confirm the new face. After three pies on a warm Christmas afternoon, Andrew sat me down on the porch and trimmed away the remaining fuzz. In the days following, responses from the local world were mostly bewilderment, followed by laughter. The farrier who had repaired the range, however, refused to believe it was me. I was pulling out my license, in the store down the street, before Bob Thornley convinced him. My uncle Dick, on the other hand, didn't notice the alteration. He thought I looked different but wasn't sure why.

My face remained naked as long as Jane was alive. We were photographed together, and Bill Moyers did a show called
A Life Together
. Occasionally today the film is shown in my presence, and I need to proclaim that I am not an imposter.

 

Jane died at forty-seven after fifteen months of leukemia. I mourned her deeply, I wrote nothing but elegy, I wailed her loss, but—as I excused myself in a poem—“Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” Among spousal survivors, many cannot bear the thought of another lover. Some cannot do without. In
Ulysses
, Leopold Bloom thinks of a graveyard as a place to pick up a grieving widow. Thus I found myself in the pleasant company of a young woman who worked for a magazine—a slim, pretty blonde who was funny, sharp, and promiscuous. (We never spoke of
love
.) I will call her Pearl. After dinner, we sat in my living room drinking Madeira and talking. I pulled out a cigarette and asked her if she would mind . . . “I was going crazy,” she said, and pulled out her own. She told me about her father's suicide. I spoke of Jane's death. When she left the room to pee, I waited by the bathroom door for her to emerge. I led her unprotesting to the bedroom, and a few moments later, gaily engaged, she said, “I want to put my legs around your head.” (It was perfect iambic pentameter.) When we woke in the morning we became friends. We drank coffee and smoked. When I spoke again of Jane, Pearl said that perhaps I felt a bit happier this morning.

After seven weeks Pearl ended things. Before I received my dismissal, we lay in the backyard sunning, and she suggested I grow a beard. She had seen book jackets. “You'll look Mephistophelian,” she said. That's all I needed. It suited me again to change the way I looked because the world had utterly changed. I mourned Jane all day every day, and acknowledged her death by the third beard and the girlfriends. Some entanglements ended because I was needy, others because of adultery or my gradual physical disability. A California friend and I commuted to visit each other for more than a year. She diminished my beard by trimming it into a goatee, getting me to smooth my cheeks from sideburns to mustache and chin. After dozens of assignations amassing airline mileage, we decided we had had enough. I grew the big beard back.

A dozen years ago I found Linda and love again. We live an hour apart but spend two or three nights a week together. She is an Old Lady of the Mountain in her bone structure, with pretty dimples. She is tender and as sloppy as I am. She abjures earrings, makeup, and dresses; she wears blue jeans and yard-sale shirts. Combs and brushes are for sissies. We watch movies, we read Edith Wharton to each other, and we travel. In 2002 we impulsively flew to London, and later we took many trips for poetry readings without ever combing our hair.

When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone onto my chest, my beard roared like a lion and lengthened four inches. The hair on my head grew longer and more jumbled, and with Linda's encouragement I never restrained its fury. As Linda wheelchaired me through airports, and my eighties prolonged, more than ever I enjoyed being grubby and noticeable. Declining more swiftly toward the grave, I make certain that everyone knows—my children know, Linda knows, my undertaker knows—that no posthumous razor may scrape my blue face.

WHEN I LOOK
at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the
NO SMOKING
sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. None of my grandparents smoked. I don't know when my grandfather nailed up the sign, but I know why. Sometimes a tramp would dodge inside the barn after dark to sleep on a bed of hay, and once my grandfather found cigarette ash when he climbed to the tie-up in the morning. It doesn't take much to burn down a barn. Whenever I focus on the sign, white letters against red, I pull a cigarette from the pack beside me, flick my Bic, and take a drag.

When my parents and I visited the farm, way back, my father was required to do his smoking outside. My mother, who learned to smoke when she went to college, pretended to her parents that she never touched the stuff. (My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven, and her sense of smell diminished. My elderly mother sneaked upstairs and puffed on a cigarette.) My father was a gentle and supportive man, but he was tense, shaky—and could not do without his Chesterfields. He walked up and down the driveway, dodging horse manure, to work on his four-pack-a-day habit. He started smoking when he was fourteen and wasn't diagnosed with lung cancer until 1955, when he was fifty-one. Every time I write, say, or think “lung cancer,” I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.

 

In 1955 I lived with my wife and baby son about two hours away from my parents. In May I drove down for my father's exploratory operation, and pushed his gurney into the elevator. My mother and I drove home to wait for the telephone call. If the phone did not ring for half a day, it could mean that the cancerous lung had been removed. The telephone rang too soon. When we arrived at the surgeon's office, Dr. Appel told us that he could not extract the tumor without killing my father. He said the short-term prospects were fine, but the long-term . . . (My father's radiation would give him two good months. He played golf, and didn't die until December.) As my mother realized what Dr. Appel was telling us, her fingers twitched at her purse. For her convenience, the thoracic surgeon pushed his ashtray to the edge of the desk.

 

Everyone smoked in 1955. When adults had a party, they set out cigarettes in leather boxes on every table, every mantelpiece, every flat surface, beside silver Ronson lighters among myriad ashtrays. There were round crystal ashtrays, and square ones with deep receptacles over ceramic bottoms; there were ashtrays that sprouted from the floor on black steel stems; there were ashtrays with cork humps in the middle, for knocking cinders out of a pipe. In Durham, North Carolina, there is the Duke Homestead and Tobacco Museum. I imagine multiple busy artifacts overcrowding its showcases. There are museums elsewhere, but it would be tedious to visit them all. In Shanghai there's the China Tobacco Museum with Cigarette Exhibition, and there's another in Indonesia.

In her attic, my friend Carole Colburn found a large, impressive volume. The American Tobacco Company published
“Sold American!” The First Fifty Years
to celebrate its birthday, 1904–1954. In 144 pages, nine inches by twelve and bound in bright red, the industry illustrates its development from the sixteenth century, when explorers and colonists first enjoyed the leaf, proffered by generous Indians. There are many companies that were founded to cure tobacco, and there were three means of induction. You could sniff it or chew it or burn it. Fire required devices like pipes, or tobacco wrapped in tobacco, or tobacco rolled inside an alien substance. Paper won out, and in 1904 ten companies combined into the American Tobacco Company.

A foreword by the company's president, Paul M. Hahn, gives us history. Sir Walter Raleigh helped to spread the addiction to tobacco. George Washington sought it for his troops. We hear of King James I as “the first great tobacco-hater”—a surgeon general of the sixteenth century. Despite the book's many anecdotes, Mr. Hahn never mentions that firing squads pulled their triggers when victims threw away their last cigarettes. He doesn't tell us that Christopher Marlowe, murdered in 1593, died declaring, “All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools!”

We hear of cigar store Indians. We hear of Sweet Caporal, LS/MFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco), Herbert Tareyton . . . We see woodcuts of farmers growing tobacco, commissioned by the American Tobacco Company and executed by Thomas Hart Benton. We hear how Franklin Delano Roosevelt switched from cigars to cigarettes, which he sported in a fashionable long holder. It was during the Great War that cigarettes conquered both sides of the trenches. From the Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War, tobacco enhanced and facilitated slaughter.

Nowhere can I find the American Tobacco Company's centennial sequel:
“Harmful to Your Health!” The First Hundred Years
. I tried Amazon.

 

For fifty years, all American living rooms turned dense with smoke, as did bars, restaurants, hardware stores, hotel lobbies, cabins, business offices, factory floors, sedans, hospital rooms, pizzerias, sweatshops, town meetings, laboratories, palaces, department stores, supermarkets, barbershops, McDonald's, beauty parlors, art galleries, bookstores, pharmacies, men's rooms, corner groceries, women's rooms, barns except for my grandfather's, movie houses, dairies, airports, offices of thoracic surgeons, depots, tearooms, Automats, cafeterias, town halls, Macy's, gymnasiums, igloos, waiting rooms, museums, newsrooms, classrooms, steel mills, libraries, lecture halls, emergency rooms, auditoriums, parks, Mongolian yurts, and beaches—not to mention funeral parlors.

Tidying up living rooms after parties, host and hostess filled garbage cans with a thousand cigarette butts. Ashes and ground-out cigarettes outweighed burned toast, eggshells, paper towels, tin cans, hypodermic needles, and kitty litter. In 1954 twenty-three cents bought a pack of cigarettes. (Now it takes maybe six to nine dollars, even more depending on state taxes.) Hotels didn't need to designate smoking rooms, because people smoked in all the rooms. The back page of every magazine—
Time
, the
Atlantic Monthly
,
Newsweek, Life
—carried a full-color ad for cigarettes. Retiring boomers remember the Marlboro Man, who suggested that cigarettes enlarged one's penis. Virginia Slims deepened one's cleavage. A prominent advertising theme was medical. A solemn man looked us straight in the eye and pointed his finger at us, the way Uncle Sam recruited us during the Great War. The man wore a white coat with a head mirror and—in case you didn't recognize his profession—a stethoscope draped around his neck. “Old Gold,” he told us firmly, “is good for you!”

Then the surgeon general put terrifying labels on each pack, and by the millennium everyone decent knew that smoking was unforgivable, like mass murder or Rush Limbaugh. My dear friend Alice Mattison twice bopped me on the face to dislodge a Kent. At first there were smoking areas in bars and restaurants, but shortly all smoking was forbidden in all public places. Guilty, grubby men and women gathered on sidewalks in front of buildings. Despite blizzards or record heat, people in johnnies stood outside hospitals, a cigarette in one hand and an IV pole in the other. Everyone huddled in shame, bending heads to conceal identity, and took deep drags of emphysema, congestive heart, high blood pressure, heart disease, COPD whatever that is, and cancers of the mouth, esophagus, and lung.

For a moment I interrupt myself. Ah, that's better.

 

My friend Carole smokes cigarettes, the only friend who does. When she visits we sit opposite each other, smoking and talking about death. We speak of how, when we're driving or watching a game on TV or reading, we pick up a cigarette, light it, and inhale—in order to have
something to do
. Is it a masturbation substitution? There's one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, “Why me?”

Sentient, sensible human beings flee into the bushes when we exhale. When Linda stays with me, I step outside on the porch to smoke. (From cars passing at night I feel the horror and rage of motorists who witness the red tip of my culpability.) It puts off for a moment the agony of deprived addiction. Depraved. Something I haven't mentioned about the benefit of cigarettes. When I am twisted by a hacking cough—which interrupts me as I read obituaries, or Ira Byock on palliative care—guess what I do to stop the coughing?

Linda praises, with reluctance, another result of my smoking. She accompanies me on poetry readings, and says that my ravaged throat keeps my voice low and resonant. At the end of a reading, people line up for signatures; sometimes, interrupting the customers, I pretend to use the men's room. When I was offered the Poet Laureateship I decided I must turn it down because I couldn't smoke in the Laureate's office; I changed my mind when I learned I could avoid the office. When I visited it, just once in my tenure, a librarian unscrewed a long window that opened onto a secure balcony. At an AWP convention—a writers' group—eight thousand people registered at a Chicago hotel. When I walked through the lobby to lumber outside and smoke, I was assailed by four hundred emerging poets, and fled as soon as I could. If you smoked in your hotel room, the fine was seven hundred dollars. I cracked the window and smoked in the hotel room. The chambermaid did not snitch.

 

Kendel Currier is my assistant, who types my drafts and my letters, who bookkeeps, who solves my technical problems, who explains legal and financial documents, and who drives me places. Once she found a cigarette butt in the leather case that I leave for her on my porch. A misplaced cigarette had torched my revisions. “I couldn't find it. I figured it went out.” Once when the snow melted, she harvested a bushel basket of soggy butts from the garden by the porch, which I had hurled all winter into snowdrifts. Another time, she drove me in my car all the way to New York, and I courteously opened the window to smoke. Somewhere around Springfield, Massachusetts, she told me I could not smoke in my own car. She parked and I walked up and down a gutter, inhaling relief. Kendel is kind, but Kendel is a hard case.