Just One Catch (57 page)

One could argue—as did biblical scholar Robert Alter—that Yiddish-based humor
always
had a tiny scope. In fact, this was its point: to whittle the metaphysical down to the daily (“If you want to forget all your troubles, put on a shoe that's too tight,” said one Yiddish proverb).

In any case,
Good as Gold,
Joe's first openly Jewish novel, certainly trafficked in parent jokes, banal realities, and did so with gusto. Almost immediately, he decided his next effort would encompass
all
families—the generations of Jewish history. It would examine not only fathers but
the
Father. Joe Heller's next book would pose a direct challenge to God.

PART FIVE
Die Trying

 

16.
Hard to Swallow

WHEN IT WAS OVER
and Joe could finally leave his hospital bed, emerge again into the world in a wheelchair, and visit a local restaurant, it was Jerry McQueen who, one night in April 1982, drove Joe to the Russian Tea Room, pulled the car onto the sidewalk, stopped within a few feet of the door, hugged Joe in his bearish arms, and carried him inside to be settled in his wheelchair at a cloth-covered table next to plush red leather seats. “I [had] never seen [Joe] so ebullient, so purely joyful,” said Barbara Gelb, another dinner guest that evening, along with her husband, Arthur, a
New York Times
managing editor, and Joe's nurse-companion, Valerie Humphries. “That night, [Joe] was as close to euphoria as [he] had ever come.”

A heavy rain was falling. “I was dry as a bone … when I was finally inside [the restaurant] in my wheelchair,” Joe recalled. “[The] others were drenched and disheveled.” During dinner, he felt “genuine happiness,” though it remained difficult for him to swallow food; chewing awkwardly, his cheeks partially numb, he covered his mouth with his hand.

He had met Jerry McQueen through the Gelbs. Barbara had written a book called
On the Track of Murder,
all about McQueen, a homicide detective. A man “on good terms with himself and the world,” he was nevertheless anxious about his health—a trait he shared with Joe (sometimes, said Gelb, McQueen would “develop mysterious muscle twitches … that vanished as inexplicably as they arose”). He was pugnacious, wary, and witty. He was not tall and could be, Gelb said, “self-conscious about his height. Perhaps in compensation, he often walked with a semi-swagger, suggesting latent menace—James Cagney playing a bad guy. His hands were blunt-fingered, not formed for eloquence.”

He was patient, a good listener, quick to pick up body language from others, perhaps a consequence of being the son of deaf parents who had never learned to speak. As a young cop, McQueen took adult-education courses at John Jay College, developing an interest in the
Iliad
and Socrates. He earned a B+ on a paper denouncing Socrates for so blithely accepting his martyrdom.

But it was McQueen's knowledge of the city that attracted Joe—as though no harm could come to anyone close to a man who could smell danger. As a rookie policeman, McQueen had paced every filthy inch of his precincts, gotten to know the shopkeepers and street toughs, learned local lingoes, got to know the stink of each block's garbage. Like an animal marking territory, he had “peed on tenement rooftops,” he said, in alleys all over Manhattan. In command of birth and death, he had delivered babies and examined corpses for the last stories they told. He could glance at a place—say, the Hudson View Hotel, located near Riverside Drive in the West Seventies—and tell in an instant that among its eccentric residents, any one of them was capable of murder. By the time he'd met Joe in the mid-1970s, he was tired of perpetual discouragement. Almost half the city's homicides went unsolved each year. Whenever a corpse appeared on a street, McQueen wanted to stick a “suicide note in his pocket, confessing to all our murders,” he said.

But tonight was not about dying; it was, in fact, a resurrection. Within the warm, glowing green walls of the restaurant, among rows of round white tables arrayed along tomato-colored carpet, all of old New York seemed to have sprung to life to celebrate Joe's outing. He could almost hear the applause of prewar patrons, rising and saluting George Balanchine as he strolled across the room with a ballerina on each arm. The orange spice of tea, the tang of white chocolate, the wheaty steam rising from breads and blintzes made Joe's mouth water. Never mind that heavy renovations were occurring on either side of the restaurant, walls torn down, windows busted, towers raised (in New York, buildings, too, often became corpses overnight). This evening, this place, and all the people in it would live forever.

*   *   *

THE TROUBLE
had started the morning of December 12, 1981, a Saturday. The previous evening, Joe had eaten dinner with his old friends Norman and Gloria Barasch. They lived in California now—Barasch had moved there to write for television—but they were visiting New York, and Barasch wanted to discuss
Good as Gold
with Joe. “I thought it was hysterically funny,” he says. “I thought it could work as a movie. So I told Joe I'd like to try to get an option—chop off the first and last part of the novel, and turn that juicy middle into a crazy farce. Joe said, ‘You can have the option for a dollar.' I said, ‘Good!' In truth, I thought it was a little high.” (Joe had been disappointed that Mike Nichols, who initially expressed interest in making a movie from the novel, had decided to pass on it.)

Later, Joe remembered how impressed the Barasches were that Friday night by his apparent health and good spirits. He had spent the summer and much of the fall in Aspen, Colorado, and Santa Fe, New Mexico (having returned to New York only ten days earlier). He had been working happily on a new novel about King David's estrangement from God. He was suntanned and lean, his hair a silver nimbus. A light snow fell after dinner. Joe felt chilled as he walked his friends back to their hotel, but this was not surprising. He was wearing only a trench coat with a light wool lining.

Then, on Saturday, Joe ate breakfast alone at the Red Flame on West Forty-fourth Street, an old-style diner with plastic menus in the windows and long Formica-topped tables. He thought about the breakfasts Shirley used to fix him in the Apthorp. He missed her cooking. Then he relished not being chastised by his wife for never helping her with chores. Suddenly, he found he couldn't swallow a forkful of hash brown potatoes he had brought to his mouth. He rolled the potatoes around on his tongue and finally spat them out. The rest of the meal—eggs, toast with butter, coffee—went down fine. He met Speed Vogel a few blocks away. Speed had agreed to go with him to look at the furniture of a man who was giving up his apartment and leaving Manhattan. Joe was now subletting a place at 888 Eighth Avenue; he needed more tables and chairs (recently, he had wasted a morning, buying a lamp at Rosetta's Lighting and Supplies over on West Forty-fifth Street—his first domestic shopping spree solo—bringing the lamp home, setting it up near his writing desk, fiddling with it, sitting down to stare at the pages he'd written, deciding the lighting didn't suit him, fiddling some more, sitting down again, shuffling pages, getting back up, finally concluding that the lamp was just
wrong
, boxing it up, and taking it back to the store).

The day was quite chilly. Joe wore a heavy sweater over a velour shirt. He didn't like the furniture. He and Speed walked back to his apartment. Joe tugged the building's outer door; it didn't budge. Speed whisked it open. Inside the apartment, Joe could not pull his sweater off without Speed's help. Static electricity? Perspiration?

Speed baked a couple of sweet potatoes because Joe was hungry and Speed wanted to demonstrate how to use the toaster oven he had purchased for Joe: he knew his friend was helpless on his own, and he worried about the future (already, Joe had hired a once-a-week cleaning woman). Joe loved sweet potatoes. They reminded him of his mother. After a few bites, he could not swallow anything more.

He went with Speed to jog around the indoor track at the Y. Warming up, stretching, he lay on his back, bent his legs, and tried to touch his chin to his knees. He could not come close. “It struck me then that something was wrong,” he recalled. He could ignore the signals no longer. “It was as though I had suffered a loss of communication between my wish and my capability to achieve it.”

He ran a sluggish mile and a half on the track. Back at his locker, he struggled to remove his sweaty T-shirt.

That night, he and Speed ate dinner with a mutual friend, Cheryl McCall, a writer for
People
magazine, at a small West Side restaurant called Simon's. Joe enjoyed the fish he had ordered, but his martini tasted metallic. And then he began to have difficulty swallowing the vegetables. Speed's brows furrowed. “[Joe was] the most prodigious eater in the world,” he said. “The very last thing to expect from him [was] trouble swallowing.” With his fork, Joe waved away his friend's worry and kept his anxieties to himself. That night, alone in his apartment, he struggled once again while taking off his clothes, and he could barely hold the early edition of the Sunday
Times.

The phone woke him the following morning. A young woman he had hired to type his novel in progress told him she had completed the most recent section and could deliver it whenever he wanted. Her name was Tedda Fenichel. She was brisk, attentive, efficient. She could tell she had awakened Joe from a very deep sleep. At first, he was disoriented, thinking it was late Saturday night. When she told him it was Sunday, he wondered if it was evening. When finally he came to himself, he told Tedda he would check his schedule and get back to her. As usual, he had slept in his underpants. Clumsily, he pulled on a loose pair of trousers and a sweatshirt. In the kitchen, he sliced a grapefruit. Another queer taste—that same metallic edge. His arms felt leaden.

He had agreed to meet the Barasches for brunch. When Norman phoned, Joe said he wasn't feeling so hot. They should go ahead without him—he recommended the scrambled eggs with imported ham at the Russian Tea Room. Speed called to see how he was doing. He admitted he was worried enough to phone one of the Baders, Richard or Mortimer, twin brothers who shared a medical practice and served his family as personal physicians.

Joe reached Morty by phone. He apologized for calling on a Sunday morning. When he described his symptoms—realizing, as he was talking, that he could not cross his right leg over his left—Bader muttered, “Guillain-Barré syndrome.”

“Okay. Now what does it mean?” Joe asked.

“Can you get over here? To my apartment?”

Joe wasn't sure. “Sure.”

*   *   *

FROM MID-DECEMBER
1981 to January 4, 1982, Joe stayed in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital. At various times and in varying degrees, his limbs were paralyzed, his muscles useless; he was unable to defecate and pee on his own, unable to swallow (“dysphagia,” nurses wrote in his daily reports). He was fed liquids through a nasogastric tube, medications through an intravenous tube attached to the back of his hand, and was cleared of phlegm and saliva through a third tube. Doctors debated cutting a hole in his throat and hooking him up to a respirator. They told Joe that Guillain-Barré syndrome caused an elevation in protein in spinal fluid. His body was manufacturing cells to destroy tissues. The malady is rare and mysterious, its origins unknown. Not a virus, its roots appear to be autoimmunological. “It's like a short circuit in the nerves,” Speed Vogel took to telling folks. Frederick Karl informed Joe that the disease had been linked in the past to swine flu immunizations (such was the case in 1976). Respiratory failure and cardiovascular trouble were frequent results of the condition. It was sometimes fatal. Sometimes, people recovered.

As Mario Puzo muttered, “When they name a disease after two guys, it's got to be terrible.”

As Joe lay in the ICU, wired to monitors, pale under the lights (despite his recent tan), his children and friends—among them, Joe Stein, Julius Green, and George Mandel—marveled at how calm he was. He asked someone to contact Tedda Fenichel and tell her to deliver the manuscript of his King David novel to the hospital. He asked for a dozen number-two pencils. “I was not [really] aware I faced any [lasting perils] until the most serious had been left behind,” Joe admitted. Heartened by his fortitude, his friends joked that he was the immobile Soldier in White from
Catch-22.
“Did you hear what Joe said today?” they'd kid one another. “No, what'd he say?” “Nheh dehgrehda waddleta deh nahe nheh!”

Privately, they feared he might be dying.

One night, a nurse drew a curtain around his bed, shutting off his view. Joe heard a woman weeping nearby. Apologetically, the nurse whispered that the man in the bed next to him was about to expire. “That happens in here,” she said.

*   *   *

THE BEGINNING
of the 1980s should have been a glorious time for Joe and his family.
Good as Gold
earned him a record advance and had become a national bestseller. His brother, retired from the mail room at MCA–Universal Pictures, and his sister, retired from Macy's, lived comfortably in West Palm Beach, Florida (though Lee's wife, Perle, had died of cancer). Joe's children had graduated from college and appeared to be prospering. Erica was embarked upon a career in advertising, working with some of the best ad people in the city. She wrote copy for Doyle Dane Bernbach, and would soon handle multimillion dollar accounts from Seagram, Chanel, and Volkswagen. Ted, asked by Barbara Gelb if he had ambitions to be a writer, said, “No. But that's a lie.” He worked in the clothing business, loading and unloading trucks, unpacking boxes, and shelving garments according to size and color; his literary talent showed in an uncanny ability to imitate the older Jewish fellows and young black men on the job. He would soon write a drama that merited a workshop production in L.A., “pleasantly shock[ing]” Joe, he recalled—his father had no idea he was writing seriously. “[He] was proud [but he] was merciless in his corrections of it,” Ted says. “I remember a line in the play. It was sort of a malaprop: one character says that another character ‘has the patience of Lot.' (I
know
that Job is the epitome of patience.) My father wrote in the margin something like, ‘You mean Job. Lot was not known for his patience.' I think he was such a perfectionist that he missed the joke.”