Truth

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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If you’re old enough, you may remember that game.  We used to play it at birthday parties in someone’s house when we were five and six and seven, after the candles and cake. Somebody’s mother would double as pianist. Armless chairs were set out in two rows, back to back – one fewer chair than the number of guests. Then we marched around the chairs to the music, alert for the sudden stop. Quick! Scramble for a chair! Alas – one guest was always luckless and found herself out of the game. A chair was removed, the music resumed. It was very exciting.

I never won, although I came close a couple of times – one of three pushy little girls trying to commandeer either of the two remaining chairs.  There were consolation prizes of course, as well as the real prize – all of them on the level of what could be found in a Crackerjack box and therefore not anything anyone had really wanted but nice to have won all the same. And afterwards, there were other games and maybe a few magic tricks performed by a father.

I’m reminded of this now that I’m eighty-eight and own an apartment in what is known as an “independent living community for people over fifty-five.” The truth is that very few people buy in here until they reach their mid-seventies, however energizing “over fifty-five” may sound.  Since the community is about twenty-two years old, those who initially came when they were in their seventies are twenty-two years older. Of course they may have moved on to a nursing home or the hereafter. But if not, are they still living “independently?” Well, around here “independent living” seems to have become an elastic term, meaning that you require no services from the community other than those provided to residents who can still take care of themselves. So if you’re sufficiently well fixed to afford an aide twenty-four-seven and have an extra room so she (it’s usually a she) can live with you and help you do all the things you can no longer do for yourself, you may never need to go to a nursing home.

What has this got to do with musical chairs? The disappearance factor. Not the disappearance of a chair; we’ve got plenty of chairs – in both dining rooms, in the café, the pub, the living room, the library, the large community room. It’s the people you’ve gotten to know since coming here who keep disappearing from the chairs they normally occupy. If something non-fatal happens so that they’re sent to the ER or hospital (both quite nearby), then spend several weeks to a month in a rehabilitation facility, and then come back to the community but retire into their apartment or villa with the aforesaid help of a full-time aide, arranging to have all dinners delivered – they’ve essentially dropped out of community life.  We no longer see them at activities, or outings, or movies, or meals. As in musical chairs, they’re out of the game.

That’s hard enough for the disappeared.  It’s also hard for the rest of us. Setting aside questions of developing affection or friendship, what you see happening in a place like this, even if you’re still relatively “okay,” is probably a harbinger of your future. God forbid you fall.  You realize from the experiences of those around you that even if you recover, it will take two or three times as long to regain most (although probably not all) of your prior mobility and strength as it might have done twenty years earlier.

Other residents start disappearing in another way. Put bluntly, as memory loss increases, it begins to make you a non-person to everyone else.  You completely forget to come take your place at scheduled dinners with your friends. You can’t be relied on to participate in activities, or assume responsibility for a program.  You tell the same stories again and again and again and again. Eventually you’re no longer invited to occupy a chair at anyone’s table.

In the past three months, one acquaintance – hitherto very active, although functioning (well) with one kidney — fell in her own villa and broke her shoulder.  Her right arm (the one she uses) is in a sling for a month.  Another sustained a similar fall in her apartment and hit her shoulder on the edge of a bureau, shattering it.  After two months she was back from rehab in her apartment, still recovering, when she fell again, trying to pick something up from the floor.  This time it was just bruises all over; she was lucky. A very active woman got out of her car the wrong way and put her hip out; four weeks later it’s still so painful she needs to lean on a walker to get around the building. Another friend was entering the back seat of a car when the driver, thinking she was already in, accelerated; the friend fell out and the car’s rear wheel ran over her heel. (She also broke her arm.)

My closest friend here, a year older than I am, came with me to a performance of the Messiah by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra two years ago. This year I went with others; my friend is now in hospice. In the intervening two years, she began repeatedly to fall while walking, always because her right foot kept tripping over the left; it was a symptom of what was eventually diagnosed as Parkinson’s Plus, the “Plus” being MSA (an acronym for a hideous disease descriptively called Multiple System Atrophy). She can no longer move, and no longer makes much sense; she has a doctorate, but asks me to observe all the rabbits running up and down the corridors of the assisted living facility where she will soon die.

I may be wrong, but I believe I am now the oldest American person with a personal blog.  With astonishing regularity, Judy Kugel writes an Eighty-Something blog twice a week from Cambridge, Massachusetts; although her husband has Parkinson’s, she does try to look on the bright side of every day and has a devoted following.  She’s only in her early eighties though.  Ronni Bennett, in her mid-70’s, writes As Time Goes By from the West Coast; she has both pancreatic cancer and COPD and is an inspiration in how she’s been dealing with these appalling tribulations. I read both these blogs assiduously, considering their authors to be shining examples of how I should comport myself but don’t. As you can see, I disappear from the blogosphere for a year at a time and return with downer reports of all the not-good things that likely lie ahead.

On the other hand, so far I am still hanging in here. Which I shall have to continue to do, because I’m not one of those who can afford an aide. (Nor do I have a place to put her, or the temperament to put up with her.)  Should I be unlucky and the need arise, my offspring will have to deal with it. Also, I still have most of my memory, so can remember when not only musical chairs but a number of other things were fun. Much fun. Happy memories do brighten gloomy days. So I tend to remain an optimist. What about I couldn’t really explain to you, but there it is.  Perhaps an ostrich optimist.

And — oh boy! – do we have holiday festivities galore around here, for those not yet closeted in their apartments and villas.  Christmas Eve dinner coming up real soon, followed by Christmas Day buffet, New Year’s Eve Buffet — with music and a removable dance floor in the living room till 10 — and then New Year’s Day dinner too.  You may notice that when old people celebrate, it’s likely to be with lots of food!  Ours is excellent.  The Executive Chef recently got married; our menus glow with his happiness.

In conclusion, dear readers (if I still have any), enjoy your relative youth, your relative health and all the good things that exist in your now.  You’ll never get your now back, so revel in it while it’s here.  Believe it or not (in view of the realities I’ve just laid out in this piece), I’m looking forward to 2020 as much as you are.

FAKING IT

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Even as a young girl eagerly devouring the “ladies” magazines my mother brought home from the corner newsstand, I thought the advice I found there about keeping a husband’s interest after marriage quite unfair. Especially the part about hurrying to the bathroom to apply makeup before he woke up and caught you with a nakedly unadorned face.  Although privately agreeing with the magazine beauty columnists that one looked much better enhanced by the sorcery of cosmetics than not, I did wonder how come the man didn’t have to do anything special to keep the marriage going.  Of course this was a long time ago, when in most marriages — as I realized long before I had finished high school — the man earned all or almost all the money and the woman’s job, if you could call it that, was to make sure he wanted to go on supporting her.

Whether a heavily made-up face was what a man fantasized about in the privacy of his side of the double bed is another question entirely, and not within the purview of this piece, wherever you thought its headline was leading.  But even if the magazine editors didn’t quite get the male psyche, they were right on the button with the then-economic interests of their readers. Keep yourself attractive, by whatever standards then obtained. Whether “attractiveness” also included faking pleasure between the sheets even where there really was none was probably determined privately by the woman on a case-by-case basis. In any event, back in those long-ago days when I was still living under my parents’ roof, I thought both parties simply exploded simultaneously with some kind of as yet unimaginable joy upon vaginal entry,  which meant that kind of fakery was not an issue.

When at last old enough actually to share a double bed with another, I never was able to force myself to reach for the cosmetic case before he opened his eyes.  However, time had marched on and that was no longer key.  What you were supposed to be was thin, or thinnish (even if “thin” didn’t come naturally); you also had to wear a panty girdle or girdle even if you were thin so nothing at all could possibly jiggle, so your behind was one unbifurcated cheek (preferably perky), and also so any bumps at the top of your thighs, however slender, wouldn’t show in a sheath dress or skirt. That was just to get to first base with a man — long before the necessity of having to keep his mind on you after marriage.

Ideally, you also had to be able to manage your hair, do without glasses in social situations, be a lady in the living room and a whore in the bedroom.  Of course plenty of women did get to first base without some or all of these qualities (myself certainly included), but most of us nevertheless hated one or more parts of our bodies because they didn’t look the way they were “supposed” to look and therefore struggled with as many fakeries as we could afford. (Hot rollers, padded bras, stilettos that improved the ankles but were killers to walk in, dieting in public but raiding the fridge once the girdle was off for the night; I’m sure every female reader of a certain age has her own list.)  I remember asking both a journal when I kept one, and a psychotherapist when I could pay one, “Why can’t I be loved just for me?”

Indeed, who doesn’t want to be loved just for being who they really are?  And yet long after marriage — or multiple marriages — most of us continue to play games with the truth. If we’re lucky, not so much on the domestic front as we and our men grow older and more realistic about what is important, and lovable. But almost always in the outside world, in order to survive. Although I haven’t worked for pay for over ten years,  I still keep a moralizing magnet on my refrigerator acquired during all those decades of having to market myself to successive employers, latterly at an age which on paper might have looked like the kiss of death: “Good clothes open all doors.”  They do, and they did.  Of course, once the door opens and you walk in, the clothes aren’t enough.  You’ve got to be up to scratch on all the multiple facets of the work you’re applying to do.  But you never get to that if the door never opens.

Bottom line: some form of fakery is probably necessary in a market economy for almost every kind of success.   For instance, as a new late-life lawyer in a large firm I soon learned my professional survival would likely depend on keeping to myself all real opinions about the value of what we were doing on behalf of our huge corporate clients.  Do I therefore owe my legal career, and consequent ability to achieve a modest retirement  before death, to the fact that I had little yellow stickies on my computer and inside my front desk drawer reminding me all day long to KYMS?  (My personal acronym for “Keep Your Mouth Shut.”) Not entirely. Good work was also involved.  But KYMS was an excellent start.

Which brings me to yet another example:  selling residential real estate, where the fakery is known in the trade as “staging.”  I learned all about staging in 2005 while selling the first property I had ever owned only in my own name: a two-bedroom, one-bath walk-up apartment on the second floor of a a semi-historic building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The building may have been old, but it did have charm and a good address, and the floor-through apartment had “good bones.”  Moreover, I was basically neat, and didn’t own a lot of crap because I had left most of it in the marital home when I moved out six years before buying the Cambridge apartment.

Then I met Bill.  I had bought the apartment  without foreseeing a second occupant, especially one who collected “stuff.”  Bill brought his smaller possessions with him.  (The larger ones, I learned later, were in storage.) Where to put them?  There was one sizable locker unit two floors down in the basement of the building, but it was already fairly full of beloved old grade school math notebooks and incomplete sets of Clue and Monopoly belonging to my two adult but as yet unmarried sons.  Besides, Bill didn’t really want to be rummaging around in a dark basement locker every time he wanted something.  So any available surfaces of my previously uncluttered home began to look like this:

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Cambridge 2005: End table in den (aka second bedroom). Formerly holding only lamp.

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Cambridge 2005: Other table in den. (Formerly holding only lamp. Big pictures mine; small pictures his.)

Since I wasn’t blogging in those days, I have no photographs of his side of the bed with its cluttered bureau top and piles of books on the floor, or of the single bathroom after it had acquired his toiletries and nutritional supplements as well as mine. However I’m sure you can imagine. (Having the two photos above was dumb luck.) “Great apartment,” said the friendly realtor. “But you’ll have to clear all this stuff away.”

“Where shall I hide it?” I asked plaintively.

“Wherever.” She waved her hand blithely.  “I’m sure you’ll find a place.”

[To be concluded in next post.]

 

 

 

 

WRITING SHORT: 22/50

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

I met my second husband on the right-hand side of East Hampton Main Beach, facing the ocean, early in July 1963. This was before summer rentals soared to $20,000 a month and up. A girlfriend and I found a one-bedroom cottage  that cost $1200 for the whole season.

The left-hand side was attached to the Maidstone Club, allegedly only for white Christians. You could buy a drink at the Maidstone bar, and even walk across the Maidstone part of the beach, but no one I knew had ever put down a towel or blanket  on it. Who would you talk to? All the marriageable Jews were on the other side.

I was there in my pink modified bikini, on the right-hand side, because I was nearly 32 and my Hungarian therapist kept saying, “I don’t mean to insult you, honeybunch, but you’re not getting any younger.” He meant I’d been divorced long enough and if I wanted a baby, I’d best get off my ass and start working on it. The first husband had been a white Christian who would have fitted right in on the left-hand side. I thought I’d do things differently this time.

Future second husband was there, on the right-hand side, to get out of the city. (He said.) He stayed at a bed and breakfast. The sun went down, the right-hand side was emptying, but I sat on, conveniently alone. (My house-mate was in New York with a cold.) Future second husband, on a towel not too far away and still a stranger, needed a match.

Yes I did have a match. He moved his towel closer. We smoked and chatted together. Then came a drink at the nearby Maidstone bar. He asked what brought me to East Hampton.

I said I was looking for a father for my unborn children.

He said that sounded like a good idea and how would it be if we saw each other till I found him.

Is the point of this story that it always pays to tell the truth? Or that the part of themselves men think with isn’t always the head?

East Hampton Main Beach: July 1963

July 1963. (Not wearing modified pink bikini)

FACT OR FICTION?

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Readers often wonder how much of a novel, novella or short story comes from the writer’s own life and how much is made up. Some literary critics (and some biographers) have built an entire career on teasing from literary texts published as fiction what may have really happened and what likely didn’t. Other critics — and probably all writers — maintain the fact-or-fiction question doesn’t matter because after the writing leaves the writer, it must stand on its own.

As a would-be writer, and certainly as a nearly life-long reader, I don’t think the question is worth pursuing.  What did or did not happen in “real life” is irrelevant to the merit,  or lack of it, of the completed literary work. Anyone whose reading of what a writer publishes is driven by prurient interest in the details of the writer’s life is not far removed from the reader of fanzines and other sources of celebrity gossip.  Which is not to say that a taste for gossip isn’t a  widespread human failing, shared by me, but should not be confused with the experience of reading literature.

What’s more, even where the published work bears no apparent surface resemblance to what is known of a writer’s life, you can rest assured that every writer who ever lived has in one way or another cannibalized his (or her) own experience of living for material.  Nothing is safe from the writer, not even the writer!  Sometimes, it’s emotional experience — translated, for example, into science-fiction, or fantasy, or “post-modernism” of some kind, or innovative structure.  Sometimes, apparently more realistically, it’s a character or characters modeled either on the writer, or someone the writer knows or has heard of.  But — and this is the important part — something always happens to that lived experience in the process of putting it on the printed or digital fictional page, and what that something is makes all the difference.

(Parenthetically, I would go further yet and assert that even when writers compose allegedly factual memoir or autobiography, or when non-writers explain to themselves in private the important events in their lives, the accounts can never be fully factual accounts of “real life.”  They are how we see things, how we justify to ourselves what happened. They are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves so that we can keep on living. But did they really happen that way?  Who’s to say?)

Now back to writers. When in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” teen-age Alexander Portnoy comes home from school and twice that day has the liver he finds in the refrigerator:  once,  raw, behind a closed door in the bathroom and again, cooked, on his plate for dinner — does it matter to the gestalt of the book whether Philip Roth ever himself jerked off with raw liver when he was a teen-age boy in Newark, New Jersey?

Roth, of course, is our century’s champion creator of what appear to be fictional alter egos.  “Portnoy” was his fourth book, relatively early in his career.  “Deception,” his eighteenth book, is a series of pre- and post-coital conversations over several years between two adulterous lovers (with a few other conversations interspersed). The man is “Philip,” a writer of novels who spends half the year in London (as did Roth for many years while living with Claire Bloom). The woman in “Deception” is English, and  nameless. The conversations, and the coitus, take place in “Philip’s” London writing studio, on a mat where at other times he does back exercises.

At some point between the earlier conversations and the last one in the book, “Philip” has written and published a novel in which the lover, and then wife, of a man named Zuckerman is an Englishwoman. Non-Roth readers should know that Nathan Zuckerman, who has many of Roth’s characteristics, had already appeared in several Roth novels prior to “The CounterLife,” a novel with many of the characteristics of the novel that “Philip” has just published in “Deception.” “The CounterLife” was Roth’s second book before “Deception.”  If it isn’t already too confusing, I might point out that Peter Tarnopol, another Roth fictional alter ego, wrote two stories about Zuckerman in Roth’s “My Life As A Man” before Zuckerman got to be the central figure in novels apparently written by Roth. (With Tarnopol’s help?)

The Englishwoman in “Deception” is upset that “Philip,” she thinks, has written about her in his recently published novel. I will leave you with their conversation, which is obviously much better than anything I could add at this time to the topic under discussion.  (It’s on the second to last page of “Deception.”)  I love the last line.

“….I object greatly to this taking people’s lives and putting them into fiction.  And then being a famous author who resents critics for saying he doesn’t make things up.”

“Because you had a baby doesn’t mean I didn’t make up a baby; because you’re you doesn’t mean I didn’t make you up.”

“I also exist.”

“Also. You also exist and also I made you up.  ‘Also’ is a good word to remember. You also don’t exist as only you.”

“I certainly don’t anymore.”

“You never did. As I made you up, you never existed.”

“Then who was that in your studio with my legs over your shoulders?”

Res ipsa loquitur.  (The thing speaks for itself.)  Which has nothing — and of course everything — to do with the matter.