Max would text me to distract me from nervousness before I gave a public reading (I am a reluctant public speaker) or to enliven my commute to New Haven. These dialogues would go something like this:
SARAH:
I’m on the Amtrak quiet car, it’s like my fairy godmother.
MAX:
Is it godmotherish because it transforms into a magically civilized place? Maybe death is an Amtrak quiet car, then we’d both be right in a way.
SARAH:
Yes. But would we know anyone on the car? And who is the conductor?
MAX:
No, I think you don’t know anyone, but there are familiar dinner rolls.
SARAH:
That sounds sad. Are there books?
MAX:
And the conductor is a reticent beautiful Steve Jobs.
SARAH:
That made me laugh.
MAX:
Good.
I think when you die, you are a book so you can’t read any other books. Give me some brutal feedback on my new poem; it’s new so I’m afraid it isn’t any good.
SARAH:
Because I’m so brutal.
MAX:
You’re not brutal.
SARAH:
You haven’t seen me play ping-pong.
MAX:
Good Lord your dark side.
At my forty-first birthday party at Risotteria Melotti in the East Village, there was a large group of friends and family. Max came and we played the Noel Coward adverb game. It’s a game in which one person has to leave the room and the others decide on an adverb they will act out and have that person guess. Max had us all in stitches. Max gave me a tea mug with two fish on it. There was a lot of jollity that year. Max’s illness seemed at an arm’s length.
We sometimes had lunches on the Upper East Side. I would joke that the only good reasons to come to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn were biopsies, getting highlights, or lunch with Max. I sometimes wrote at the New York Society Library, not far from Max’s apartment. I would bury my nose in those old stacks until I disappeared enough to write a play. And sometimes I would emerge into the light and have lunch with Max.
SEPTEMBER 12
Dear Max,
A little poem for you that I wrote:
LUNCH WITH MAX ON THE UPPER EAST SIDE
1.
The skinny women on the upper east side
have eaten too many salads and
have come to resemble their own salads.
Dry and brittle, they push kale around on their plates.
They need some cooked food, and quick.
You, a young man, also skinny,
push the food around on your plate—
but it’s warm and has the
flavor of the poison medicine doctors give you.
2.
The wildness of youth
and the wildness of death—
too much to bear, so close together.
A big why called to God over ageless time . . .
Some loop closed by old age,
the droop of an old man’s head
conferring a measure of acceptance,
head already looking at the ground, thinking:
when will a hole open up
and I’ll fall into it?
3.
We talk of Madame Bovary and whether her
emotions are banal and whether the doctor’s are really not banal
and whether emotions can ever even be banal
or if they only seem banal in art.
Health does not belong to literature.
I wish it did.
Max is a poet.
Max is a poem.
We all become poems
in the end.
SEPTEMBER 12
Dear Sarah,
I’m gonna cry. I feel like I have a toehold in the world through this poem.
That fall, big news: Max reconnected with a woman he’d known as a teenager, Victoria. She had a luminous smile, was working on a PhD in neuropsychology, and painted beautifully. They fell in love.