The Year of Magical Thinking

14

There came a time in the summer when I began feeling fragile, unstable. A sandal would catch on a sidewalk and I would need to run a few steps to avoid the fall. What if I didn’t? What if I fell? What would break, who would see the blood streaming down my leg, who would get the taxi, who would be with me in the emergency room? Who would be with me once I came home?

I stopped wearing sandals. I bought two pairs of Puma sneakers and wore them exclusively.

I started leaving lights on through the night. If the house was dark I could not get up to make a note or look for a book or check to make sure I had turned off the stove. If the house was dark I would lie there immobilized, entertaining visions of household peril, the books that could slide from the shelf and knock me down, the rug that could slip in the hallway, the washing machine hose that could have flooded the kitchen unseen in the dark, the better to electrocute whoever turned on a light to check the stove. That this was something more than prudent caution first came to my attention one afternoon when an acquaintance, a young writer, came by to ask if he could write a profile about me. I heard myself say, too urgent, that I could not possibly be written about. I was in no shape to be written about. I heard myself overstressing this, fighting to regain balance, avert the fall.

I thought about this later.

I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

Some days later I was stacking some copies of Daedalus that were lying around the house. Stacking magazines seemed at that point the limit of what I could do by way of organizing my life. Careful not to push this limit too far, I opened one of the copies of Daedalus. There was a story by Roxana Robinson, called “Blind Man.” In this story, a man is driving in the rain at night to deliver a lecture. The reader picks up danger signals: the man cannot immediately recall the subject of his lecture, he takes his small rented car into the fast lane oblivious to an approaching SUV; there are references to someone, “Juliet,” to whom something troubling has happened. Gradually we learn that Juliet was the man’s daughter, who, on her first night alone after a college suspension and rehab and a restorative few weeks in the country with her mother and father and sister, had done enough cocaine to burst an artery in her brain and die.

One of the several levels on which the story disturbed me (the most obvious being the burst artery in the child’s brain) was this: the father has been rendered fragile, unstable. The father is me.

In fact I know Roxana Robinson slightly. I think of calling her. She knows something I am just beginning to learn. But it would be unusual, intrusive, to call her: I have met her only once, at a cocktail party on a roof. Instead I think about people I know who have lost a husband or wife or child. I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly — on the street, say, or entering a room — during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw.

How fragile, I understand now.

How unstable.

I open another issue of Daedalus, this one devoted to the concept of “happiness.” One piece on happiness, the joint work of Robert Biswas-Diener of the University of Oregon and Ed Diener and Maya Tamir of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, noted that although “research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.” Unemployment was one such event. “We also find,” the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”

Was I “the average widow”? What in fact would have been my “former level of life satisfaction”?

I see a doctor, a routine follow-up. He asks how I am. This should not be, in a doctor’s office, an unforeseeable question. Yet I find myself in sudden tears. This doctor is a friend. John and I went to his wedding. He married the daughter of friends who lived across the street from us in Brentwood Park. The ceremony took place under their jacaranda tree. In the first days after John died this doctor had come by the house. When Quintana was at Beth Israel North he had gone up with me on a Sunday afternoon and talked to the doctors on the unit. When Quintana was at Columbia-Presbyterian, his own hospital although she was not his patient, he had stopped in to see her every evening. When Quintana was at UCLA and he happened to be in California he had taken an afternoon to come by the neuroscience unit and talk to the doctors there. He had talked to them and then he had talked to the neuro people at Columbia and then he had explained it all to me. He had been kind, helpful, encouraging, a true friend. In return I was crying in his office because he asked how I was.

“I just can’t see the upside in this,” I heard myself say by way of explanation.

Later he said that if John had been sitting in the office he would have found this funny, as he himself had found it. “Of course I knew what you meant to say, and John would have known too, you meant to say you couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

I agreed, but this was not in fact the case.

I had meant pretty much exactly what I said: I couldn’t see the upside in this.

As I thought about the difference between the two sentences I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. They were the songs, and the logic, of the generation or two that preceded my own. The score for my generation was Les Paul and Mary Ford, “How High the Moon,” a different logic altogether. It also occurs to me, not an original thought but novel to me, that the logic of those earlier songs was based on self-pity. The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could otherwise take her down.

I kept saying to myself that I had been lucky all my life. The point, as I saw it, was that this gave me no right to think of myself as unlucky now.

This was what passed for staying on top of the self-pity question.

I even believed it.

Only at a later point did I begin to wonder: what exactly did “luck” have to do with it? I could not on examination locate any actual instances of “luck” in my history. (“That was lucky,” I once said to a doctor after a test revealed a soluble problem that would have been, untreated, less soluble. “I wouldn’t call it lucky,” she said, “I’d call it the game plan.”) Nor did I believe that “bad luck” had killed John and struck Quintana. Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequable distribution of bad news. In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide. In the eleventh grade she had been woken at Susan’s at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered. “Most people I know at Westlake don’t even know anyone who died,” she said, “and just since I’ve been there I’ve had a murder and a suicide in my family.”

“It all evens out in the end,” John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn’t he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.

Several years later, after Susan’s mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end. I said I remembered.

“He was right,” Susan said. “It did.”

I recall being shocked. It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us. Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood. I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” John said.

“I knew what he meant,” Susan said.

Had I understood nothing?

Consider this matter of “luck.”

Not only did I not believe that “bad luck” had killed John and struck Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent whatever happened. Only after the dream about being left on the tarmac at the Santa Monica Airport did it occur to me that there was a level on which I was not actually holding myself responsible. I was holding John and Quintana responsible, a significant difference but not one that took me anywhere I needed to be. For once in your life just let it go.