I was lucky—supremely lucky. For some years, I was the host of a very successful children’s show on television. It was not the best time in my life because those years were all rush, deadlines, sprint from here to there, hurry-up-and-get-it-done. But the momentum and energy that came from it were exquisite. Solid gold adrenaline. The best you can hope for is to live in a present so full and all-encompassing that you lose any sense of future or past. For those years I lived in that kind of packed Now, and it was enough.
My roommate was the producer of the show and we thought we had the kind of relationship that could survive Hollywood, success, too much money, not enough time, everyone and his brother coming out of the closet… all those things. But it didn’t. I fell in dubious love for a couple of weeks with a film critic in New York and had a short frivolous affair with him. I confessed everything over the phone to my friend and partner in Los Angeles, hoping he would understand.
He didn’t. When I returned home, he had already moved out. What was worse, afterward he treated me with the same good will and kindness in our working life as he had privately. What is more distressing than being treated well when you know you don’t deserve it? I was dismayed, but I was also a STAR, which flattered me into believing for a time that I was allowed to behave badly and get away with it. Hey, all of television land still loved me. They didn’t know what I had done.
Not many people know how to be famous, to twist the phrase, and that included me. I behaved atrociously toward someone I genuinely loved, then tried to brush it away like lint off my cashmere sleeve. Instead of atoning, I decided on a spree. Went out and had a ball and almost forgot down deep what a shit I was. Drinks on the house! Strike up the band!
Then one day while taping the show, I didn’t see a thick cable on the floor and tripped over it. I fell on my arm and got a nasty bruise. Which didn’t go away. It was the color of an angry thundercloud, and it stayed around for weeks. Until then, I’d been one of those lucky ones who are rarely, if ever, sick. I went to hospitals to visit others, never to stay. My medicine cabinet contained a bottle of aspirins and an unopened package of cold pills.
The doctor spoke slowly, as if someone were carving his every word into stone tablets as he pompously enunciated each one.
“We’re concerned about these test results, Mr. Leonard.”
“But it’s only a bruise that’s stuck around, doctor.”
“Unfortunately, it is more than that.”
I tried to shut my eyes but fear wouldn’t let me. How quickly we understand the worst. So many simpler things in life we fail to grasp—algebra problems, trip directions, why love failed. But we hear “it is more than that,” and our understanding increases a hundred thousand times. More. Take that quick desperate breath that is the only possible first reaction, then say, “What do you mean?”
He explains even more slowly. It is your first lesson in the language of death.
In the hospital the only two interesting people I met were Radioactive Girl and Liver Man. The others were a mixed bag and blur of panic, greed, and resignation. We knew why we were there, but our misery did not love one another’s company. It only reminded us of our running clocks and isolation. We wanted to be out of there, away, even without a clean bill of health. Just out. Didn’t want to walk down those shiny corridors, look out the clean windows into gardens that were too silent and well kept, gardens that reminded you of cemeteries. In a hospital what you miss most is the roll and tumble of real life. A pastrami sandwich served by a surly waiter. Horns honking, people passing in animated conversation… And there are really only two facial expressions in a hospital—great fear or calm. Once in a while you see sadness, but people try to hide that; it’s either unprofessional or unfair to show it. Hugh called them faces squeezed out of a tube.
Liver Man Hugh Satterlee was all the things I missed outside. Animated and funny, he had, astoundingly, managed to retain his sense of balance throughout a nightmare ordeal that made me cringe just to hear about it.
Years before, they had found a tumor on his liver. It didn’t respond to treatment and worsened until he was close to death. Then, miraculously, a donor was found and Satterlee was given a transplant. He recovered. His wife died. A year and a half later, another tumor was discovered growing on the new liver—in exactly the same place as the old one. Inoperable. Time to die. When I knew Hugh, he was about to be moved to a hospice in Palos Verdes so that he could “at least die with a view.”
“Bet you never heard a story like mine. Spooky, isn’t it? Maybe I should start a tumor business. Bring me your organs and I’ll grow tumors on them for you. Like those surrogate mothers, you know?”
The only thing that distracted me from the omnipresent fear and boredom of hospital life was to ask people for their stories. Some were eager to talk, but others regarded me distrustfully, as if I were trying to take from them the last thing they would ever own—their personal history. Before I was discharged from the hospital the first time, I sat for an afternoon with Hugh and told him some of the stories I’d heard. He was very ill. His eyes were exhausted and bloodshot, although now and then he smiled or chuckled when he heard something he liked. When I was finished, he sighed and wondered out loud if Death was the final pencil sharpener.
When I asked what he meant, he said most of the people I’d talked about had probably never once really used their lives, although it was the only thing we ever truly own. Think of it like a pencil, getting duller and duller until finally there’s no lead left to write with. Then Death comes along, and if you’re lucky, you’re given a while before it happens to think things over, put them in their place, whatever. Just like sharpening the pencil so that it can be used again the right way.
Unable to stop a wave of bitterness flooding over and through my voice, I asked, “What good is sharpening it if you’re never going to use it again?”
“Because it’s back the way it should have been all along, Wyatt. I don’t know about you, but I always found sharpening pencils a very pleasant thing to do. And afterward, placing them on the desk ready to go. It didn’t matter if I was going to use them then or in a month. Having them there, seeing them clean and sharp… that was the real pleasure for me. These stories you’ve heard? Doesn’t it sound as if the people are finally savoring their lives for the first time? It does to me.
“But you know something else I’ve thought about? I was poor most of my life. Have you ever been poor? I mean really rock-bottom poor, not a dime in your pocket? It’s a terrible, terrible place to be. Horrible thing to experience. And you know what? You learn the experience in one second. Know you’re poor for ten minutes, and you’ve learned the lesson for the rest of your life. You don’t need to go through years of it, like school. One day, an hour, and you know all about it. Same thing’s true with dying. Know for sure you’re dying for even ten minutes, and you’ve learned the lesson forever.”
“That contradicts what you just said, Hugh.”
“Yes, it does.” He closed his eyes.
A week after Sophie showed me the letter from her brother, he disappeared. Jesse Chapman worked for an agency in Vienna that helped refugees from the East Bloc find places to live in the west. Consequently he was often traveling, but this had nothing to do with that. His wife called after he had been missing four days. His employer had no idea where he was. It was not like Jesse to disappear for even twelve hours without letting someone know where he was. He’d gone to work with a briefcase and an overcoat. No luggage, and he did not take his credit cards. At breakfast he’d been calm and talked only about what they were going to do that weekend.