Blue Nights

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.