“He knows Latin?”
She honked a greeting at someone on foot I didn’t know. “Are you listening to me? Look, prepare yourself. The house is a zoo.”
I don’t know why, but I had been expecting to find the house draped in a somber pall, the days drifting melancholically between the unplaceable moment an afternoon becomes sad and the cobalt fullness at dusk’s last breath. What I walked into, however, more closely resembled a Great War hospital established in some British country manor. There were maids and nurses and respect payers and well-wishers. It took me a long time to get everyone straight. For a while I had to approach each conversation with the ecumenical delicacy of a store clerk. I failed — wildly, you might say — to calibrate my answers to the questions I got about who I was and what I did and where I lived, questions to which I had no good answers anyway. After half an hour, and asking after the family of a man who turned out just to be making a delivery, I found my way to the bayside veranda where my grandfather was set up looking out to sea.
I bent to kiss him.
“You made it,” he said in a voice that somehow, at once, conveyed both boyish gratitude and a faint sense of betrayal.
“I wouldn’t have missed it.”
My grandfather ignored the innuendo in this, the sort I am helpless to make, wincing all the while. Perhaps he didn’t catch it. He raised a quivering finger to point out a passing schooner making its way up the bay on a reach. An osprey scrutinized the stretch of coast a few hundred yards out, and at the foot of the porch flowers in the parterre had the full lavish beauty of their high summer bloom.
“Not too shabby,” I said. And because I had been here every year since my birth, it was simply not possible to say how deep an impression this one bit of extravagant and stern beauty had made on my psyche, my longings, my fury, my hope.
It took my grandfather a while to collect the words on his tongue, but he managed finally, shrugging with a feigned cool. “If you like that sort of thing,” he said.
Misty and I had the third floor to ourselves, a suite of seaward garrets out whose windows we smoked, monitoring the comings and goings below. There was a rotation of nurses, daily shifts and weekly substitutions; as we were on an island, they stayed with us and slept in the house. The stream of visitors my grandfather received was unending, social acquaintances from half a century of summers here, people committed to making an appearance but with little idea, finally, what you said to a ninety-seven-year-old widower in manifest pain, for whom speech had become an unpleasant game of recollective hide-and-seek. Cynthia had set up her easel on the back lawn, painting for hours with the imperious, imperturbable air of a cultist. Ruth, as far as I could tell, spent her days with a cordless phone wedged in the crook of her neck on calls to New York, holding up an index finger and walking away from anyone who talked to her. I loved my aunts, and beyond that I liked them, but I did not at heart understand what had come between them and their father, the irritations that had grown with age and then mapped themselves onto dynamics of grievance, of insufficient or misapplied love, rooted somewhere deep in the past. Perhaps nobody can respond to you exactly the way you want. Family is no doubt a pier glass for one’s own self-contempt. But for all my regret that this should happen now, for all my frustration and incomprehension, those feelings, I knew, had to be set next to my own meager participation in these lives, the implicit idea that it was enough for me to show up now and again for a few days and assume the unencumbered neutrality that may, in fact, have been no different from my habitual absence.
“Do you like what we’ve done with the place?” Cynthia asked.
I had wandered over to her easel barefoot with a mug of coffee.
“I like that you’ve found a way to live together under one roof,” I said politically.
“I wish your mother were here.”
“She wishes that too, I’m sure.”
We looked at the bestrewn islands of the bay, the mainland hills beyond, which at twilight took on the glaucous sheen that gave them their name. Although it was morning Cynthia was painting a night scene, bright buoys and ship lights overexposed on a dark sea.
“Do you know why I paint facing east?” she said.
“Because it’s the direction with the view?”
She looked at me until every last bit of levity had drained from my remark. “Because that is the direction the Vedas designate for the gods.”
“Ah.”
“Where the sun comes from. Dawn Land. That’s what indigenous tribes called this region.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yes,” she said. “Ancient people all over the world knew that everything begins in the east. I find myself wanting to focus on beginnings.”
I had dealt with death before, of course, but I had been younger then — more certain, that is, that the important experience being undergone was my own. I couldn’t and wouldn’t have wanted to summon this illusion now, and still I had only my own subjectivity to refer to. If I tried to imagine my grandfather’s first-person experience of his own enfeeblement, helplessness, and mortality, I could do this only through an awareness of myself making the effort, choosing to make the effort, and so with a trace of self-congratulation spoiling the act. Nor was I even certain that this kind of transpersonal projection made up a worthy or compassionate goal. It verged on pity, and pity looked an awful lot like just the displaced fear of the same happening to you. My grandfather and I were separated by the impregnability of two skulls. I had taken to kissing him, more than I had ever kissed any relation of mine, his balding head, his sallow, sunken cheeks, but even I knew this was no more than symbolic pretense to the notion that we were of the same flesh and that nothing would undo this. He was my last living grandparent; I watched daily as he shrank into himself, able only to wonder, from my remove, at the indignity and terror of having your body desert you, of finding yourself trapped in the play and apperception of a still-lively mind while the words that gave thought form floated beyond your reach. I read to him mornings and evenings about Galileo and Janet Yellen, the plump little gibbous moon where our spheres of interest overlapped. He tired quickly following the movement and subordination of the written word. He tired when we spoke too. And through it all he groaned as waves of a great, unnameable pain came over him, saying merely “I’m fine, I’m fine” when we asked, bouncing a hand to shush us, like we’d grown histrionic.
The worst was at night. My bedroom was right above his, and he seemed no longer to sleep but to drift in states of an unpleasant semiconsciousness, moaning with a periodicity just irregular enough to keep me on edge. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I wandered into Misty’s room to drink her vodka out of a red-wine glass and share a smoke above the moonlit sea.
“Denise’s husband is dying,” Misty said. She made a fishlike face, letting the smoke float out of her mouth. “I don’t know if you knew.”
“I didn’t,” I said. Denise was the chummiest of the nurses and had a way of speaking, a delicate soprano whisper, that after having spent a good portion of the afternoon just fucking rapt as she described the uses and pitfalls of a medication called Coumadin I had begun to worry she was giving me ASMR.
“He has cancer,” Misty said. “Lung that spread to the brain.”
“Christ, and she’s looking after Granddad.”
“And we’re smoking.”
“Same guilt,” I said, hating myself for smoking and smoking mostly out of self-hatred. “Thumbing our nose at the metanarrative, you know. The stupid tax we pay on how loathsomely important our privilege asks us to take ourselves.”