Blue Nights Part 8

25.

Let me again try to talk to you directly.

On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old.

Notice the odd construction there-I became seventy-five years old-do you hear the echo?

I became seventy-five? I became five?

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

Also notice-in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called Blue Nights for a reason, notes called Blue Nights because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days-how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were. Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as "wrinkly," or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one.

Quintana was born when I was thirty-one.

Only yesterday Quintana was born.

Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.

Enveloped in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper.

Daddy's gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in.

What if you hadn't been home when Dr. Watson called?

What would happen to me then?

Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405.

Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us.

We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway.

It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only yesterday when we still called the 10 the Santa Monica, it was only the day before yesterday when the Santa Monica did not yet exist.

Only yesterday I could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which the brake.

Only yesterday Quintana was alive.

I disengage my feet from the pedals, first one, then the other.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.

I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

26.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggests that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.

Wrong, I want to say.

In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.

In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the red suede sandals with four-inch heels that I had always preferred.

I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the gold hoop earrings on which I had always relied, the black cashmere leggings, the enameled beads.

My skin would develop flaws, fine lines, even brown spots (this, at seventy-five, was what pa.s.sed for a realistic cosmetic a.s.sessment), but it would continue to look as it had always looked, basically healthy. My hair would lose its original color but color could continue to be replaced by leaving the gray around the face and twice a year letting Johanna at b.u.mble and b.u.mble highlight the rest. I would recognize that the models I encountered on these semiannual visits to the color room at b.u.mble and b.u.mble were significantly younger than I was, but since these models I encountered on my semiannual visits to the color room at b.u.mble and b.u.mble were at most sixteen or seventeen there could be no reason to interpret the difference as a personal failure. My memory would slip but whose memory does not slip. My eyesight would be more problematic than it might have been before I began seeing the world through sudden clouds of what looked like black lace and was actually blood, the residue of a series of retinal tears and detachments, but there would still be no question that I could see, read, write, navigate intersections without fear.

No question that it could not be fixed.

Whatever "it" was.

I believed absolutely in my own power to surmount the situation.

Whatever "the situation" was.

When my grandmother was seventy-five she experienced a cerebral hemorrhage, fell unconscious to the sidewalk not far from her house in Sacramento, was taken to Sutter Hospital, and died there that night. This was "the situation" for my grandmother. When my mother was seventy-five she was diagnosed with breast cancer, did two cycles of chemotherapy, could not tolerate the third or fourth, nonetheless lived until she was two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday (when she did die it was of congestive heart failure, not cancer) but was never again exactly as she had been. Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments. When she came to visit me in New York for example she p.r.o.nounced St. James' Episcopal Church, the steeple and slate roof of which const.i.tute the entire view from my living room windows, "the single ugliest church I have ever seen." When, on her own coast and at her own suggestion, I took her to see the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she fled to the car, pleading vertigo from the movement of the water.

I recognize now that she was feeling frail.

I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now.

Invisible on the street.

The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene.

Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door.

Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party.

"Estrogen actually made me feel better," she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it.

Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better.

This turns out to have been "the situation" for most of us.

And yet: And still: Despite all evidence: Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have: Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply: Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity: Despite all that: Nonetheless: That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different "it," did not until recently occur to me.

27.

Something happened to me early in the summer.

Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon.

I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was "syncope," fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on "pre-syncope symptoms" (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply.

I had been alone in the apartment.

There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach.

I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room.

I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time.

This was dangerously soothing.

I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me.

I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head.

I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up.

At which point I called a friend.

At which point he came over.

At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital.

It was I who said Lenox Hill.

Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill.

Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously a.s.sumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem.

"Your cardiac problem isn't showing up on the monitors," one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying.

Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my "cardiac problem" was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes.

I countered.

I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem.

She countered.

"Of course you have a cardiac problem," she said. And then, closing the issue: "Because otherwise you wouldn't be in the cardiac unit."

I had no answer for that.

I tried to pretend I was home.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.

Only shifts.

Only waiting.

Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.

Will someone please take the catheter out.

That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening.

"How do you normally get around your apartment," someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: "Walker?"

Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom "cardiac problem," seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me "someone in the house": it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy.

With effort, I managed to convey this point.

I got released from Lenox Hill.

My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg.

After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned.

An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell.

Many tests were scheduled and done.

A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes.

There had not been.

A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs.