she promised them all, the ghosts, too. And Death, standing over me and stirring up the muck that refused to be the bottom in the onslaught of the revolting pneumonia.
I lived through Ellen’s will from time to time during those days. I had her agility and subtlety vicariously. I had that merciful depth of her female self at my disposal. It was like that as long as she was awake, anyway, and as long as her strength held out. At the same time I felt a bit cheated, while she was awake, of the mortal solitude that I expected to meet with at what I took to be the end.
Our regular lives, our once-usual life together, had been reproduced in a truncated form in a hospital room: flowers, fruit, a newspaper, quibbling with each other, a certain seclusion, a habit of judging—the usual things, even at death’s door, in death’s presence.
But it was a hospital room, and I was dying, and I didn’t have many private emotions. The husband in this marital scene was drugged to the teeth with prednisone, a steroid that walls off physical pain and depression by creating a strange pre-craziness of its own. I felt a rather awful clarity of humor, a nauseated comic sense; I was in an odd state. And the wife in the scene was overly gentle, sickroom gentle, terrified and obstinately hopeful—not her usual self. She was afraid of gloom in this well-intentioned parody-caricature of our former life. The moments of grief I had were immediately contagious—well, the room was very small.
We would hold hands and I would say, “Oh shit” or “This is shitty,” and we would cry a bit. It seemed like a sufficient amount of poetry. I would say, “Well, who cares?” or “I don’t like this mushy stuff. Let’s stop.”
Equally invasive were the tender moments, Ellen bathing me and turning me, ninety-seven-pound Ellen, or changing the bed. Or helping me into the bathroom. I had to be propped on her and on the wheeled pole of the IV. I was determined to spare her my excrement. My head lolled. My legs gave way.
I had no strength, but it is true that willpower can do a great deal. It can’t halt or cure AIDS, but it can mock death and weakness: it can mock these things sometimes. Our bedtime talk or our toilet talk had to avoid sentiment; I had no strength for sentiment. I showed off for Ellen. I talked about business and money, about the information I’d negotiated from the doctor.
But she was the one with hope. She was the one with the sense of drama. She was the one who, with some, ah, degree of untruth, exclaimed on being told that she was HIV-negative, “Oh, I don’t want to be clear. I want to have it, too.”
An emotional remark. A bit of a marital lie, of marital manipulation. But true enough in that if I decided to kill myself she was still determined, so she said, to kill herself, too.
She wanted to die of what I was going to die of.
“That’s bullshit, honey. It isn’t what I want. Just can it, OK?”
I am peculiarly suited to catastrophe because of my notions and beliefs; I am accustomed to reconstituting myself in the middle of catastrophe. And my ideas, my language, support me in the face of disastrous horror over and over. I am like a cockroach, perhaps—with vanity, now with AIDS, with a cowardice much greater than that of Kafka’s Samsa.
Ellen is not like that. She has an identity, of the real, familied sort. (She has written two novels, both of which illustrate this.) A good many people, including me, care about her. Her children are never alone in the world, and that sometimes irks them. She was once rich and is at times so grateful to have her own feelings without reference to money that she can seem happy in the manner of an escaped convict. She is gullible toward bad news in a rebelliously saintly way that tends to irritate me. Her rebelliousness extends throughout her existence—it is toward God and death, toward society, toward men. How she reconciles that with the propriety she manifests day in and day out is beyond me. So little has been written (or at least published) by women who feel as she does that she has had to be, as a woman, her own prophet. Her code is unworded. You can categorize her emotion quite easily but you cannot define it. You cannot ever demand it. Or even trick her into it. She will let some people trick her, but she has a bored, brittle quality then. I tell her we are cowards and artists and are in flight and are and have to be awful people to get our work done. She ignores me when I talk this way. She does and does not believe what I say or what I believe. “I cannot live like that,” is what she says. I mean, I can see, often, the degree of enlistment in her being with me.
I have a number of kinds of humility, but I am arrogant. I am semi-famous, and I see what I see. I examine everything that is put in front of me, like a jeweler. I am a Jew from the Midwest, not at all like a New York Jew. I am so arrogant that I believe a formulation only if it has the smell or lift of inspiration. I have never, since childhood, really expected to be comforted.
I inherit from my blood father and my blood mother and her father considerable physical strength. One time, as I said earlier, when I was seven, I nearly died, because of an allergic reaction to an anesthetic, the ether derivatives then in use. (My real mother returned in a hallucination, and I found it unbearable.) I went into convulsions and, according to the machines and measurements, I died: my heart stopped, my breathing stopped. Some young doctors and nurses and one old nurse saved me. I can remember their bustling labor, even the nervous smell coming off them. I had been more or less legitimately dead, but I managed to get up and walk partway across the hospital room that evening. My adoptive father called me Rasputin for a while: “Nothing can kill you.”
Sick or well, all my life I’ve had enough strength for whatever I set out to do. But this time, no. That degree of strength was over. Now I knew how my parents felt when their strength failed. It is extremely irritating. Certain melodramatic speeches do come to mind: “Kill me and get it over with.” They both said that. I said it once or twice myself, but with more irony. I would save my strength and then leap—biliously, worm-in-the-muddishly—into speech: “This goddamn hospital bed is so uncomfortable you might as well kill me and get it over with.”
I was always aware mentally of the rather awful certainty of death, of the physical, sensory fact, but only in words. I mean the mind looked on, weakly, and saw the situation as a folkish joke, like a newspaper headline: THREAT OF DEATH FOR HAROLD, or HAROLD IS GOING TO GET IT THIS TIME, or H. R. BRODKEY FINDS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SUCK MUD. With a subheadline: THIS IS ROTTEN, SAYS EX-AMATEUR ATHLETE. And then the subheads: “The Statistics Look Bad,” and “Killer-Diller Pneumonia Strikes ‘New Yorker’ Writer.”
My adoptive parents were ill for most of my childhood, and I was aware of the implacable dissimilarity between the people and events in the active world and the people and events in the grip of medical reality, the medicines scouring and wrecking, or surgical intervention doing that, or radiation. My adoptive father, Joe Brodkey, had raged and grieved. My blood father, Max, had suffocated—he had something that was described to me as senile asthma: the asthma starved his heart, and his heart gave out. And he had raged and cursed, as did my adoptive mother, Doris, who had cancer and told all those around her that they were getting on her nerves. I was prepared for the irritability or even madness of being a patient, but except for the suffocation, none of those things was happening to me. I felt very little of anything, I mean as comment. It was a relief to have the illness unmasked, to have Death be openly present. It was a relief to get away from the tease and rank of imputed greatness and from the denial and attacks and from my own sense of things, of worldly reality and of literary reality—all of it. In the last few years, mental and physical revulsion toward the literary empire-builders and the masters of fakery had grown to the point where hiding and containing it had been a bit like having tumors that cleared up whenever I was upstate in the wilds or in Europe. The inadequacies of the work these people did and in the awful work they fostered, the alternate revulsion and pity they aroused, I had had enough of. It was truly a perceptible relief to be out of their reach and into another sort of experience, even if it was terminal.
It was a relief to have the future not be my speculative responsibility anymore and to escape from games of superiority and inferiority.
Yet I couldn’t sleep; I was able on the prednisone only to doze in a kind of shallow unconsciousness, and perhaps in fear, I dozed better by day than at night. I believe in sleep. In the past, when I was ill, or even