Late-Life Love Read online

  “Every mark of an old crock,” he says. “Bibs, urinals, wheelchair, safety belt, smelly clothes.”

  Coming and going on errands, Julie calls her father “Grumparella,” but it could be my nickname today too. I’m grumpy because earlier this morning, I was awakened by “an accident,” the term I used to use when one of my kids had trouble with toilet training. Every once in a while accidents happen with the ostomy, no matter how careful I am about my diet and about changing the contraption that sticks on my stomach. Excrement oozes through the adhesive that attaches the pouch to my belly.

  At the crack of dawn, I felt the messy seepage below, jumped out of bed, fled upstairs to the bathroom, cleaned myself up, showered, and put on a new apparatus. My mistake was looking in the mirror over the sink in which I cleaned the soiled underpants. Every mark of an old crock: a tall scarecrow with a balding head, no eyebrows or eyelashes, a bump on my chest where a port was embedded, abdominal surgical scars, no pubic hair, a plastic bag hanging from my belly, what little flesh there is hanging downward too. I don’t look like the person I used to be; I am not the person I used to be.

  While I put on a clean pair of pajamas, I thought of the narcissistic wounds of aging and of horrific scenes of its acceleration when the destruction of time speeds up. Dickens’s aged flirt Cleopatra whose hair drops off, her lips shrink, the skin becomes “cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, . . . huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.” Don had read the thickest novels by Dickens aloud to me throughout a succession of toasty winters: a blazing fire in the fireplace making the leeks and radishes flicker in the big painting on the wall as I glanced up from the quilting that enveloped me.

  I’m so weary that I feel perpetually pulled down by gravity, encumbered—as if moving through muck—by the weight of the cast, the wheelchair, the walker, our bodies. For doctor visits, I have to prop open the broken screen door to haul them into the car. Except for these fraught trips, every day is the same—simply getting cleaned, dressed, fed, undressed, bedded takes up all our time and strength.

  “If I hadn’t married you,” Don had said in the Trace, “I would be rotting in a ditch.”

  To prove that married people could also rot in a ditch, on our arrival home I ordered a DVD of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days from Netflix and then settled down with the play—since Don snoozes intermittently from all the drugs. The common notion of love conquering all and providing a safe haven from the miseries of the world—the powerful conviction that there’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us—seems ridiculous to me, an old lover. If late-life love cannot make us invulnerable to everyday misfortunes, what conceivable purpose does it serve?

  I had worried that watching the play might deepen our depression, but we both found Beckett’s geriatric farce intriguing in its portrayal of a later-life love affair like no other. The play’s unflinching honesty about the deterioration of the body is unexpectedly funny about inextinguishable language that just keeps on going on within the bizarre landscape of aging.

  The arid wilderness of aging in Beckett’s play invokes heat and gravity, the sweltering and swelling weightiness of flesh: a female character immobilized in a scorched mound of earth, a male character so incapacitated that he crawls on all fours. Winnie, in her fifties, remains buried up to her waist in act 1; in act 2 she is imbedded up to her neck, unable to turn or bow or raise her head. To her right, sixty-something Willie lies out of her sightline. She is stuck, immobilized, while he finds it difficult to speak or maybe he is losing his hearing.

  Winnie cannot win and Willie cannot will himself to do much of anything during indistinguishable days that blur into a daze. At the opening of both acts, an insistent bell wakes them and Winnie begins her happy day or daze of incessant chattering, though in the first act she starts by praying while in the second she does not—perhaps because in the first act she has the use of the objects in her large black bag. Why are the contents of Winnie’s bag so important to her? Rummaging in her purse and incessant grooming occupy most of her attention in the first act.

  A toothbrush, toothpaste, a mirror, spectacles, a handkerchief, a bottle of medicine, lipstick, a brimless hat with crumpled feathers, a magnifying glass, a windup music box, a gun, and a nail file: Winnie takes one after the other out to use or inspect it. Some of these objects are running out (the toothpaste, medicine, and lipstick); others may not be available again (the parasol spontaneously combusts, the revolver is not replaced in the bag). She considers them treasures or comforts that help her get through the hours.

  Winnie’s props give her a sense of getting something done, of keeping calm while carrying on. “There is so little one can do. [Pause.] One does it all. [Pause.] All one can.” The objects in her bag keep her busy as she tells herself not to complain, for there is much to be thankful for, and there is hardly any pain. Trimming her nails or checking her teeth: “these things tide one over,” she says. And so they do, when nothing else can be done.

  Willie’s props include his yellowing newspaper, a handkerchief, pornographic cards, Vaseline, and his boater. When Winnie instructs her partner how to crawl backward—“Not head first, stupid, how are you going to turn? [Pause.] Oh I know it is not easy, dear, crawling backwards, but it is rewarding in the end”—I am reminded of myself directing Don on how to move his unmovable body around.

  Pauses make up a large proportion of their conversation, since Willie speaks for the most part in monosyllables. That too seems resonant: Don is losing his voice or he mumbles (or I am going deaf). Pestering Willie to communicate, Winnie cannot contain her joy when he does: “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day!” Yet the next stage direction reads “[Pause. Joy off.]” Is she acting, expecting pretense to make it so, or might she be bonkers?

  Like Philip Larkin, Beckett could be accused of gerontophobia: fear and loathing of old people or of aging. Willie picks his nose and eats the pickings too; Winnie intones botched and irrelevant snippets of Shakespeare and Milton. It would certainly be possible to view the couple as fearful, garrulous, foolish, solipsistic, or senile. Useless and isolated, they are nevertheless also amusing and insightful. Nostalgic, Winnie exclaims over fond memories of a past lover in a toolshed, but then admits, “We had no toolshed and he most certainly had no toolshed.” She repeatedly praises the blessings she receives, yet worries that there is “so little to say, so little to do, and the fear so great, certain days, of finding oneself . . . left, with hours still to run, before the bell for sleep, and nothing more to say, nothing more to do, that the days go by, certain days go by, quite by, the bell goes, and little or nothing said, little or nothing done.”

  A perfect encapsulation of existence at the Trace: how can I enliven Don’s homecoming? I invite his colleagues to visit for a late afternoon cup of tea. Some of them were part of a lunch group—I called them the Wheezers and Geezers—he can no longer attend. Positioned in the living room with all his props out of sight, Don looks depleted, not the vital man he once was but a phantom of himself, encased in the cobalt-blue carapace and the weird camper outfit. I leave these men to discuss university affairs since their presence means I can quickly run to the grocery store, where I stock up on foods Don likes—Moose Tracks ice cream, cinnamon bread, jam—as well as my own staples: Nicorette gum and red wine. That’s what I subsist on these days.

  Winnie and Willie never eat or drink; neither do they pee or poop. This sort of inane observation seems inescapable on a day begun not with a bell but with an accident. Maybe Winnie should count herself lucky not to have to deal with my below-the-belt issues. Judith will bring over soup for dinner; next week Jayne will drive me to Indy for my monthly meeting with my oncologist; Jon and Jan have put up screens; Mary has stopped by with a fruit tart. Although grief-struck at the departure of her partner, Sandra sent treats mailed from Zabar’s.

  But I brood over four weeks of Fran’s silence. While driving or cooking,
I denounce her to the empty air, telling her how selfish she is. After the first operation, when she had asked if I was avoiding our phone chats, I had sent her an email explaining that I did not want to reproach her and we should just “let matters rest” for a while. Yet when Don had to have a second operation, I was worried about him and about the baby in New York and also about Fran herself—her eerie withdrawal. I emailed again, informing her of the second fall and the needed second surgery and hoping that she was not encountering difficulties of her own. In response, she trotted out a phrase of formulaic sympathy and then stated that she was fine, enjoying her gardening. Hello? She’s enjoying her gardening? As for helping out, apparently she prefers not to.

  Since then, whenever I dread running into her at a grocery store or drugstore, I rehearse my words—which should simply be “Nice to see you,” since what I want to say sounds like the screech of an infant wailing for or raging against its mother. On the toilet with excrement dripping down my thigh this morning, I seethed thinking of Fran, though I had avoided discussing the ostomy with her because this was one problem that really could not be remedied.

  On the day of an accident, the best strategy for me is fasting. Even if it means showering instead of bathing, even if I cannot conceive of going swimming ever again, the ostomy equipment, I realize, is the essential prop without which I could not function. With it—hidden under clothing so most people have no clue—I can look and act like a regular person, especially when I wear my wig and draw on eyebrows. This morning, didn’t I clean myself up and help Don to dress? My situation seems far superior to Winnie’s, I think, and then I hoot, for I am doing exactly what Winnie does: I’m encouraging myself to look on the bright side, to see the glass half full, to remark on another happy day. Surely this is not what Beckett means us to understand, that we are programmed to accept whatever nightmares come and to keep on going?

  The question of what Beckett means us to understand is posed in Happy Days by the characters called Mr. and Mrs. Shower or Cooker. This couple never appears on stage, but toward the end of act 1 Winnie recounts their appearance. One day they had arrived hand in hand and Mr. Shower or Cooker gaped at Winnie: “What’s the idea? He says—stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground—coarse fellow—What does it mean? He says—What’s it meant to mean?” The last human beings to stray into Winnie and Willie’s desert departed without effecting any change at all. Except they prod us to ask about Winnie stuck in a mound and Willie crawling around it: what are they meant to mean?

  Winnie considers Mr. Shower or Cooker’s question nonsense, drivel, tosh. And she is right, since there is no rhyme or reason for her condition, Willie’s, Don’s, or my own. Shit happens, my kids and stepkids would say. Don fell twice, I had an operation for ovarian cancer that nicked a bowel and led to infections that in turn led to an ileostomy: a bit of small intestine pulled out of the body and stitched onto the stomach. Whatever caused Winnie’s immobility and Willie’s incapacitation, it happened to happen and there’s no good in it.

  But Winnie and Willie’s meaning on stage has something to do with their endurance as a couple. Because Happy Days concludes with the schmaltzy waltz duet “I love you so” from Strauss’s The Merry Widow, I have an excuse to read it as a story of later-life love. Throughout Winnie’s numerous requests for the sound or sight of Willie in the first act, she reiterates that his presence makes her ongoing existence tolerable. She entreats him to hold up a finger or repeat a phrase. She promises not to ask him for taxing responses, because “to know that in theory you can hear me even though in fact you don’t is all I need, just to feel you there within earshot.”

  All the tried-and-true clichés about theater of the absurd tell us that the play emphasizes human isolation, the entropy that will doom each and every one of us to be engulfed in the tomb of mother earth’s womb: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we all fall down. And certainly Winnie, wondering where her arms and breasts have gone, looks even more immobilized in act 2. Though she repeatedly mentions great mercies, she has sunk deeper into the ditch. With only her head above ground, she has no hands to retrieve the contents of her bag.

  Fretting about Willie’s visible absence and audible silence, Winnie in the second act finds her head “always full of cries” that remind me of my worst fears of cancer and maybe also Don’s fears of his disability: terrors of hosting an alien, of being violated or exposed, of losing body parts and control over so-called private parts. In a reprise of the Shower or Cooker story, Winnie remembers his asking, “Has she anything on underneath?” And in a tale Winnie fabricates, a little girl gets out of bed to undress her dolly when a mouse runs up her thigh and she “screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed.”

  As in act 1, where the words “Eggs” and “Formication” conflate reproduction not with fornication but with the sense of insects or animals crawling on or under or into the body, infestation worries a character rotting in a ditch. Winnie is rescued from these frights by the extraordinary vision of Willie on all fours and “dressed to kill—top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, etc., white gloves in hand. Very long bushy white Battle of Britain moustache.” As he starts to crawl up the mound toward her, she cheers him on and jokes about wanting to give him a hand: “You were always in dire need of a hand, Willie.” After he slithers back but then rises again on his hands and knees to face her, Winnie gets what she has wanted all along: “Someone . . . looking at me still” with “Eyes upon my eyes.” She has dreamed of Willie coming round to live on her side of the mound.

  Will he use his props—top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, white gloves—to follow the advice of Shower or Cooker: to dig Winnie out with his hands? Or, as Winnie surmises, is he dressed to kill in order to reach for the revolver and kill himself or her? Or does he want to reach out to touch her face or get a kiss? Her fright at how he looks at her—she exclaims twice, “Don’t look at me like that!”—indicates a new unknowingness of what might eventuate from this sustained reciprocal looking. She is startled at his unpredictable intentions.

  His speaking her nickname launches her into the Strauss love song of the music box tune from act 1: “Every touch of fingers / Tells me what I know, / Says for you, / It’s true, it’s true / You love me so!” The curtain comes down on Happy Days with the couple alone in the wilderness, looking at each other with a wild surmise that we in the audience share, for they have changed. Even though Winnie has repeatedly said, “No better, nor worse, no change,” Willie has changed his clothes and Winnie has changed her tune.

  At the end of the show, he’s about to put on a show that she cannot foretell. Somehow their remaining changed onstage—especially her tremulous, heightened uncertainty—trumps their stumped physical remains. However long we live together, however intimately, we are capable of being surprised by our partners and at how little we know them and what they might be capable of, or so I thought as I looked down at the ring on my finger. Isn’t this the source of ongoing attraction, being reminded how strangely inscrutable our partner remains?

  I’m waiting not for the curtain to go down or the bell for sleep but for five o’clock so I can begin drinking. Don teared up when we heard about the death of our friend Paul Zietlow, and then an email arrived from George: his wife has been diagnosed with lung cancer that has metastasized to her brain. On the Web, I read about the deaths of Shari Benstock and Jane Marcus, two feminist critics gone with so many of my generation. They bring back the terrible loss of Patsy Yaeger last year. Would Sandra weather the shock of her breakup? What month is this, what year? It is the season of sorrow, the year of grieving.

  I gaze out at the steep driveway down to the garage, its edges covered by ivy and myrtle. Did Don and I really once take sleds and slide down it on moon-lit snowy nights, risking a smash in the ravine below? They were yellow and red plastic trays, flimsy things, sending us hurtling downward, fast and then faster, until we toppled over, laughing at having escaped colliding into encrusted tree trunks, their ic
ed branches glittering in the lone, tall yard light. The thick, downy snowflakes clung to our hats, scarves, even our eyelashes as we embraced in a heap, warmed by our crunching up and careening down.

  During one of this succession of difficult days, I ask Don, “Do you think we should have the bathroom renovated?”

  “No,” he says. “We won’t be here that long.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  On another of these difficult days, I tell Don, “You need a new iPad. Yours is cracked and running out of juice.”

  “So am I,” he says.

  It’s the vaudevillian pitter-patter of familiarity, as comforting as the chirping of birds. Once during the stroke fright, when I was informing Don about the taxing demands made by the families of the women in my cancer support group, he said, “You have the advantage of being married to an older man: joint decrepitude.” After his first operation, Don recalled a time when he had been working a harvest in Oregon and heard a fellow laborer say about another, “He has as much of a chance as a one-legged ass-kicker.” Every time I announce that I’m going to take a shower, Don says, “I believe there’s one left.”

  Chitchat, babbling, nattering—that is what resilient Winnie excels at: phatic speech, sounds that may signify nothing, but neither are they full of sound and fury. The recycled routines of long married people: “Each couple is its own vaudeville act,” the novelist Zadie Smith knows. The tick of “Say goodnight, Gracie” is followed by the tock of “Goodnight Gracie.” (That’s how I remember it, even though Gracie actually only said “Goodnight.”)

  Chirp, Winnie says, I’m here and are you there? Her prattling rattles on, it keeps her and Willie going on. Maybe this is why Winnie never fears the tug of gravity, of being sucked down into the earth, but rather surprisingly she worries about being “sucked up” into “the blue, like gossamer,” should the earth yield and let her go. She asks, “Don’t you have to cling on sometimes, Willie?” Indeed I do, Winnie, yes I do.