Essays After Eighty (8 page)

I came late to cigarettes. When I was young, I smoked cigars in Exeter's butt rooms. (All prep schools provided smoking retreats in each dormitory.) Later I smoked cigars in lecture halls when I taught, and on all social occasions. One friend told me that whenever I smoked coronas at her cocktail parties she sent her drapes to the cleaners. Of course I didn't inhale—I didn't know how—but when I blew out a lungful of cigar smoke, I choked on the murk around me. Everybody did. I even smoked cigars during psychotherapy. Dr. Frolich was a psychoanalyst, the only one in Ann Arbor who did therapy. (There were seven analysts in the city, seven more than in Vienna.) Therapy instead of analysis kept the two of us face-to-face—I didn't lie on a couch—and we met only three times a week, for only four years. While I sat with a smoldering Judges Cave, Dr. Frolich smoked Camels, sometimes lighting a new one from the butt of the old. He had smoked from early adulthood through four years of medical school, while a medic in World War II, during an internship, two years of psychiatric residency, analytic training for five years at an institute, and decades of practice. He was seventy and told me that he finished three cartons a week. During a session late in our progress I noticed that he was not smoking, and remembered that he had not smoked for days. I asked him why, and he told me that his elder son had asked him to stop. Dr. Frolich answered that it would not help him after all these years. When his son replied that he was thinking of secondary smoke and himself, Dr. Frolich stopped smoking. He told me it was easy. He lived to be ninety-two.

Like all smokers I quit from time to time. Once in my sixties I stopped for good, as it seemed. Someone told me about a hypnotist in Concord who cured smokers. I've always been easy to hypnotize; if you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender. The moment I met the doctor, I knew he was a fraud. With a starched white coat, he was as handsome and suave as the model who recommended Old Golds for your health. (I expected him to offer me shares in his Bernie Madoff investment firm, annual dividends guaranteed at ninety percent.) But what the hell? I decided to go ahead and try. In a small room he spoke to me soothingly, his tone impersonating a hypnotist's. When I felt sleepy he turned on a tape of his own voice and left the room. When the recording finished, I knew I would never smoke again. I left his office feeling ecstatic. Illicitly, I threw a pack in the gutter. For seven weeks I continued to feel blissful without nicotine. Then one night at suppertime, before I would fly to Arkansas in the morning, the phone rang. My dearest friend from school and college, best man at my first wedding, had dropped dead at the age of fifty. Driving to Logan Airport on my way to the reading, I stopped at the first open shop and bought cigarettes. A week later I returned to the hypnotist and told him I had failed. He put me under again, but nothing happened. He told me, “If this doesn't work, we'll try psychoanalysis.”

 

I was forty before I smoked a cigarette, about the time the surgeon general issued his fuddy-duddy warning. I was a college teacher, separated from my wife, and had entered a fringe of the counterculture that took over the sixties. My students' greatest sport was to turn a professor on. Never did I need to buy a joint, and unlike Bill Clinton I accepted instruction in inhaling, learning to enjoy the pain. Alas, I had another, deeper reason for seeking humiliation and harm. I endured a volcanic love affair with a beautiful young woman who was not psychotic but whose utterance sounded like surrealism. She had other attractions, of which she was aware, but she felt devastated by one unforgivable flaw: she could not stop smoking Kents. In our assignations the foggy air trembled with erotic joy. She adored our sex but abhorred her own fog. Then, viciously, she dumped me. I went crazy, I daydreamed suicide, I took up Kents for revenge. I have not seen her for decades, and at eighty-some I am still proclaiming, “
Look what you did!
”

If my tender father had not smoked so much, by now he would have turned one hundred and fifteen. From the late sixties into the millennium, American living rooms have become smokeless, as well as 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 mine, 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, beaches, and definitely funeral parlors.

MY TRAINER, PAMELA SANBORN
, works me out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She's tiny and strong, four foot ten and a hundred pounds of muscle. If she had to, I'm sure she could carry my two hundred pounds slung over her shoulders. For half an hour each session she has me do cardio on the treadmill, squat with five-pound weights, lift tenners over my head and out from my sides, stretch muscles, stand up no hands with a beach ball between my knees, and do push-ups (as it were) standing against a wall. Exercise hurts, as well it might, since by choice and for my pleasure I didn't do it for eighty years. (Once in my fifties I walked four miles.) Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy.

When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.

 

Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed. Sculptors and painters and musicians live longer than writers, who exercise only their fingers with pen or on a keyboard. Sculptors chisel or weld or mold clay. Painters work standing up. They drink quarts of cognac every night but return to physical activity the next morning. A tuba player holds a weighty object and breathes deeply. Even a harmonica requires more fitness than writing.

People have tried to encourage my mobility. Jane for years cherished cats. This house is full of Jane's cat presents from friends—cat night-lights and cat doorstops and cat china dolls. In time she found herself mooning after dogs at the house of a writer friend. When she adopted Gus, Jane (who called me Perkins) invented an excuse: “It will get Perkins off his ass.” Thus for several years I walked fifteen minutes a day. The husband of a friend, who went dog walking with me, swears that I parked the car on a dirt road, let Gus out to walk alone, and whistled him back. Then Jane died of leukemia, the dog's hindquarters failed, and my hindquarters failed. I sit on my ass all day, writing in longhand, which Kendel types up. Sometimes in a car I would pass Pancake Road, two miles away, and see a man walking his collie, the dog stepping out on his forepaws, two wheels harnessed to his backside. These days I no longer drive past Pancake Road or anywhere. I push wheels ahead of me instead of pulling them behind me like the dog. With my forepaws holding the handles of a four-wheeled roller, my buckling hindquarters slowly shove my carcass forward. I drool as I walk, and now and then I sniff a tree.

 

I have been told that as a baby I crawled up on a kitchen table and devoured a quarter pound of butter. I spewed it out quickly, and mouth-memory has endured in my distaste for yellow milkfat. Because it was so athletic to climb the table, perhaps my misadventure also led to my athletic malfitness. Or maybe it came from my mother Lucy. On the farm as a girl, she didn't chop trees or hayfields or haul ice from the pond. With her mother Kate she helped wash overalls, squeeze clothes through a mangle, and hang them out to dry. She carried cans of corn and peas up from the root cellar to the kitchen. Otherwise she was not a muscular sort. Her mother mopped the hardwood kitchen floor every night while Lucy studied Latin for the mill town high school. Later, they sat under an oil lamp while they knitted, tatted, and darned socks. Everything my mother did was useful and her hands were nimble, but nothing my mother did stretched a tendon, nothing firmed a muscle.

Upstairs in the back chamber, where everything goes when it dies—a green rocking chair with a broken rocker, long-dead long underwear, oil lamps retired after electricity—I found a pair of wooden skis with runners two inches thick, heavy as a hayload, on which I was told my mother slid down a slope. Her lift had to be a horse that trudged uphill as she hung on to a rope. When I moved into the farmhouse in middle age, I decided to try cross-country skis. I bought a pair, and in a flat field next to the barn I stood up and fell down, stood up and fell down, stood up and fell down. I retired the skis to the back chamber. With snowshoes I didn't fall down so much, but it was harder getting up. I did not try ice skates.

 

My father remembered skating on January ponds, playing shortstop, even running sprints at school. In Hamden he and I played catch on Greenway Street and I threw the baseball over his head. He trotted up the pavement to retrieve it.
Trotted
. We played ping-pong in the cellar, and it wasn't until he started shaking that I beat him two out of three games. Every Saturday morning he golfed with his foursome. He acquired his golfing passion when he caddied for spare change as a boy. As a grownup he became a member of the New Haven Country Club and hired his own caddies. When my parents were first married, my father tried to teach my mother golf. She found it hard to hit that little white ball with that long wooden stick. Once when my father walked a few yards in front of her, my mother's golf ball flew up the fairway past him. He turned around, ecstatic, to congratulate her on her drive. She didn't tell him right away that she had thrown it.

I did not love golf. Sometimes on a family ride we would stop at a driving range. My mother would sit on a bench as my father bought two pails of exhausted golf balls and we stood at a rubber tee and swung away. Mostly I missed, or tapped the ball three inches, but occasionally I caught it flush and it rose majestically into the air and landed a graceful thirty-seven yards downrange. There was a target two hundred yards beyond it.

I wasn't any good playing anything. Back in Spring Glen Grammar School, a physical education instructor came on Tuesdays and brought two basketballs and set us into circles—one for people who had passed a basketball before, another for those who hadn't. I had touched a basketball on a Saturday at the YMCA, so I stood in the Circle of Experience. After one or two rounds our instructor switched me to the Circle of Innocence. By the time I moved on to Hamden High School the war had started. Everyone expected to be drafted shortly after graduation, so physical education amped up its requirements. We boxed. My opponent was a quiet, willowy guy and our fists mangled only the sweaty air of the gym. In spring we were required to run a quarter mile, which I mostly walked. Still, I lost my breath.

Doubtless that's why, when I switched to Exeter after tenth grade, I went out for cross-country. As I did laps for endurance, I heard my eighty-year-old coach—the war had resurrected elderly faculty—mutter, “Truck horse.” My feelings were hurt. I worked on improving my style, but when I ran cross-country, agony rotated from ribs of one side to ribs of the other. I faked turning my ankle.

 

Summers on the farm I hayed with my grandfather. I milked cows badly, I was scared to pull eggs from underneath hens, but I liked haying. I liked sitting up front with my grandfather behind the slow old horse as we approached the hayfield. Even more I loved the slower plod back to the barn. My grandfather told story after story with affection and humor. Sometimes he recited wonderful, terrible poems he had memorized for school. Loading the rack with hay took more muscle than sitting and listening to stories, but I tolerated the strain. My grandfather, as he approached and passed seventy, stuck his pitchfork into a pile of hay and raised it over his head onto the hayrack, where I hauled it into place and treaded it down, so that interlocked forkfuls would not slide off while we plodded back home. The air inside the barn was intolerably hot and chaffy. My grandfather by himself pitched the load up to the lofts, where it would remain until winter brought the cattle inside. Meantime I rested in the cool of the living room.

When I was sixteen, I found a girlfriend in Connecticut and stopped haying. To pay for rum and Cokes at a teenage tavern, I found a summer job where I could sit down.

 

It was the wrist skill of Ping-Pong that budged me toward athletic triumph. At prep school I learned squash, where I could snap the ball with my table tennis wrists. Although the playing space was large, the rackets reached long and I delayed between points to breathe. When I got to college I tried out for the freshman team. One by one the hackers were cut, often with generous words from the young coach. Then came my one athletic triumph: I was the last man cut from the freshman squash squad at Harvard.

In Ann Arbor, when I taught, I never lost cellar ping-pong games. My prowess went to my head, and when the Ann Arbor Table Tennis Association printed a notice in the paper, I called and asked to join. “Are you a beginner or a moderate?” said a voice. I hemmed and hawed out of modesty and was told I was a beginner. We played on adjacent basketball courts where we could retreat twenty feet behind the table to retrieve a slam. I was a beginner.

 

Baseball has always been my favorite sport to follow. I could never play it. I tried and tried. I arrived at the University of Michigan as a twenty-six-year-old assistant professor without a graduate degree. The
Michigan Daily
told me that the English department softball team was to play against Physics at two p.m. on a Saturday. Interested students and teachers might participate. I found myself on an intramural field among a host of grad students. I was chosen—however skeptical the scholars-in-training—to play left field and bat ninth. In the second inning, before I had a chance to strike out, a fly ball approached me in the field. I kept a steady eye as I moved under it and poised my glove. The ball hit me straight on the skull. My teammates gathered around me until I staggered up and was replaced by a burly medievalist. When I collapsed on the bench, a woman approached me, saying that she was a nurse. If later I felt nauseated or had double vision, she advised me to hasten to an emergency room.