Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  Born on Christmas Day in the year 1900, my grandfather died a month short of his seventy-fifth birthday, three or more months into Indira Gandhi’s declared Emergency. That my father’s father would never know his son had two children is a sorrow that doesn’t loom, so much as, sporadically, I get the sense, my father is hit with the hypothetical: Imagine he could have met you. There’s an understanding that my grandfather would have liked me. Loved me, sure. But liking is altogether different. It’s gentle. Almost chewy. Liking someone is taffy.

  The moment one hears that sentiment expressed—that someone who has passed would have enjoyed you—one begins to carry it. I heard it young, and I became, in little ways, curious about what in me he might have found interesting. He would have, I’m convinced, asked me about my friends. Pronounced their names fondly. One of my top five favorite sounds: when my family enunciates my friends’ names with an odd emphasis on certain syllables. Rachel became Raaaaay-chel. Collier is suddenly French, like the word for necklace. My friends India and Echo have been tagged together and confused, and I rarely insist on correcting the mix-up because how are parents expected to keep up? They shouldn’t have to. Elana is pronounced “Uh-La-nuh,” which seems correct enough, though there’s a trace of casual melody in my parents’ accents, especially my mother’s. So even “Elana” sounds like the name of a song by a seventies folk band my mother might have listened to on tape.

  Over the years my mother has mentioned in passing how she thinks my father should have, like his father, been a doctor. He is, it’s true, the first person in my family anyone calls when there are questions about a cough, a lump, an ongoing pain. He knows what to do, how to heal. Who to call. The next logical step. He accompanies his aging friends to physiotherapy and, at night, to the emergency. He sits and waits. He fills prescriptions. Buys them new pants when, in sickness, they’ve lost weight. And new ones when they’ve gained it back, to mark the occasion. He cares for those not lucky enough to have grown children. He gives rides. Buys and delivers bags of basmati rice.

  When there was a tear in my father’s valve, I wondered if he missed his father; if he spoke to him in his head and went forth with a small amount of heritable wisdom. If in those days leading up to his surgery he was, once again, a son.

  The day of his surgery, I sat in my college’s dining hall clutching my phone, waiting for the call from my stepmother where she’d say, choked-up but relieved, that everything went well. I was with two friends who were talking about another friend, and I remember thinking how noisy friends can be. How they are, at times, battery-powered clamor and emotionally expensive, and briefly I wondered, Why have friends? Why sit through their noise when what I needed was an impossible silence. There’s no such thing as the silence one needs. It doesn’t exist because need is loud. So I sat and listened to my friends and clutched my phone, and then, without noticing it, a tear slid down my cheek. My nerves had burst but my face was numb. My friend reached her hand across the table and touched my arm, and what’s more, she didn’t ask why I was crying. She barely made eye contact. We were each other’s tolerable silence. Energy between two people can feel the opposite of energy. The most muted, beloved bailout.

  In the late John Gregory Dunne’s book Monster, in which the critic and novelist recounts his experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood, cowriting scripts with Joan Didion, his wife, many sections are devoted to Dunne’s weakening heart, and the cost—both financial and physical—that powered and metered his work. In the interest of covering the price of doctors’ visits, tests, and hospital bills following his first collapse, in 1988, while speed walking in Central Park, Dunne needed to remain a member of the WGA in order to benefit from the union’s health insurance plan. Consequently, Didion and Dunne wrote movies: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), an adaptation of Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1972), A Star Is Born (1976), an adaptation of Dunne’s Black Dahlia murder case–inspired True Confessions (1981), and Up Close and Personal (1996), of which the eight-year, twenty-seven-draft saga is detailed in Monster. “We’ve written twenty-three books between us,” he told The Paris Review in 1996. “And movies financed nineteen out of the twenty-three.”

  In 1991, Dunne underwent aortic valve replacement surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian and recovered in the hospital’s McKeen Pavilion. Throughout Monster, Dunne avoids indulging in every writer’s more obvious belligerence; our fixation and phobia with End. How to ward it off in our work and still conclude with presence, hope. A hatch. Even when Dunne describes first fainting that crisp February morning in Central Park, the episode seems cursory. “I was stretched out in the middle of the road rising behind the Metropolitan Museum,” he writes, describing regaining consciousness seconds after his collapse. “A stream of joggers detouring past without looking or stopping, as if I were a piece of roadkill.” The image would be gruesome if it weren’t for the Met. For the joggers. For the whole uptown mise-en-scène. Or perhaps it’s gruesome because of it. Life could end—conk!—at any moment, and uptown joggers might treat you like New York roadkill, and hours from now, the Met will be mobbed with tourists wearing sensible walking shoes. And you’ve been swatted down, and tomorrow the joggers will return, running faster, having improved on their times. And the tourists—still in town, wearing their sensible shoes—will be riding the ferry to Ellis Island or eating pastrami at Katz’s.

  Though, in a rare moment of self-reflection, Dunne describes the replacement valve’s clicking sound and how it signified “reassuring proof [he] was still alive.” This newer, louder heartbeat was a reminder of his impermanence and how in illness, what’s been assumed can no longer be assumed. We develop a habit of converting the everyday into souvenir. Of holding off what’s meaningless. That, or we veer off script. Illness compels us to ad-lib. As Katharine Hepburn once suggested—again Hepburn because she’s never far from my mind—“Wouldn’t it be great if people could get to live suddenly as often as they die suddenly?” To live without delay. To come to just as tersely as death comes for. I’d like to think Hepburn—who I’m now picturing in a photo I’ve seen of her riding a skateboard wearing a white pantsuit—I’d like to imagine she meant, despite all of its concerns, that life should be lived unusually.

  The clicking from Dunne’s plastic valve, which replaced his calcified one, also resonated with his daughter, Quintana. The click, click, click entertained her. She began calling her father the Tin Man. When I first read Monster, Quintana’s nickname for Dunne reminded me of that scene near the end of the movie where the Wizard tells the Tin Man, “As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one,” he warns. “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.” Regardless, the Tin Man still desires one. He’s tired of sounding like an empty kettle. Of never registering emotion, he sings at the movie’s start. The Tin Man wants all of it. For his soul to light up. To feel the hot swell of jealousy, devotion, he continues. To really feel the part.

  Those four words, as plain as they are, toll. An unassuming way of saying he’s ready to be human. Or possibly, some impersonation of it. The role of humanhood as he’s imagined it.

  But to consider his song as such, tilts the sentiment. To really feel the part, the Tin Man needs his prop: a heart. It’s fundamental to the costume. Perhaps I’m overthinking it and the Tin Man has it all figured out. The lub-dub sound is what’s keeping record after all. Evidence of a narrative build. Maintenance despite life’s lows; its howling moods and those days when you find yourself in bed before dinner with the windows open, disaffected by the sounds trickling in. How mobile those sounds are: a neighbor riffling through a cutlery drawer; sandaled feet on dusty pavement; a fire engine’s ungainly siren.

  Even when life presents one disincentive after the next—“I’m fine,” she’ll say. “It’ll be okay,” she insists unconvincingly. Even when hopes aren’t met or the comedown from an emotional night cedes to birds chirping before five a.m.—which, honestly, is too e
arly for birds to chirp—even then, despite the guilt you feel from greeting morning having not yet slept, the heart stays lub-dubbing. Even when love is unreturned; when I’ve been hurt but refuse to get furious—would I even know how?

  Even when someone forces you to articulate what you find intolerably hard to articulate, the heart is at work. On board, howbeit. In this way, the heart seems inhuman. Or actually, superhuman. It doesn’t acquiesce. It’s motored. It’s motiveless.

  In her 2004 book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine considers Mr. Tools, who, in July 2001, was the world’s first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart. “His was a private and perhaps lonely singularity,” notes Rankine. “No one else could say, I know how you feel.” Mr. Tools didn’t have a heartbeat but a whirr. “It was not the same whirr of a siren, but rather the fast repetitive whirr of a machine whose insistent motion might eventually seem like silence,” she writes. “The weight on his heart was his heart.” Mr. Tools survived 151 days with his artificial heart, dying at the age of fifty-nine in Louisville, Kentucky, from complications unrelated to the heart device.

  Neither Dunne’s clicking valve nor Mr. Tools’s heart-whirring seems like particularly strong sounds. More like test sounds. In Dunne’s case: metallic. Or as Rankine wrote of Mr. Tools: “If you are not Mr. Tools, detectable only with a stethoscope.” They are sounds in place of. Proof not of life but of proof. Another symbol for “heart,” like the plush Build-A-Bear heart, like our fingers butting up against one another and held in front of the left side of our chest. Just yesterday my phone autocorrected “heart” to “hearse.” Sometimes when I send emails from my phone while riding the subway underground, the blue sending bar that slowly crosses the bottom of my screen looks like a heart monitor flatlining. Doesn’t the red “low battery” symbol on our iPhones glow like E.T.’s heart?

  Ten years ago I was in Mumbai with a friend I’ve since fallen out with. We were visiting another friend whom, as time has passed, I’ve also lost touch with. The three of us were there for New Year’s, and my friend and I—the one I fell out with—were traveling back to Kolkata by train once the trip was over, and then back to New York shortly after. At first, the idea of Mumbai was exciting. Visiting friends in foreign cities usually is. Isn’t this crazy?! we’ll say upon reuniting. Completely wild, we’ll nod. The extreme familiar—a close friendship—reoriented by the extreme unfamiliar is usually a formula for fun. All the qualities of a new experience in the company of someone who lessens the overstimulation sometimes brought on by new experiences. This is why we laud people who make good travel companions. We value that mix of curiosity, of limiting impatience for the trip’s duration, of being responsive, even-tempered, but also willing to skip the museums and spend whatever money you have left on day drinks and aimless walking.

  But in Mumbai, I remember drinking too much vodka and feeling restless. Like I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Like I was meant to be having fun—so much of it—that as a reaction, my anticipation had soured. I was in possession of all this freedom, traveling with a friend, visiting another friend, and yet, I felt hollow. Looking out an apartment window, standing on a balcony, returning to my book, barely reading, thinking of perhaps sightseeing, not knowing where to start. Waking up early and badly wishing for the chatter only a family can provide. That nothing-talk that grows lively for no reason. Ten years ago was too young to know friends who chatted in the morning. It still might be.

  But one morning I was given a task. My mother called and asked, since I was the only immediate family from Canada in Mumbai at the time, if I’d visit my cousin’s husband’s mother who was recovering in the hospital. She had undergone heart surgery. I was thrilled. Something to do. A destination. I could leave my friends, the vodka, the lazing around, and arrive somewhere. I got dressed, decided to wear a pair of dangly earrings, and grabbed a shawl my mother had loaned me for the trip.

  Downstairs, my friend waved over an auto-rickshaw and in Hindi instructed the driver where to go. I understood none of what he said, but smiled, climbed in, and stared at the map I’d drawn that now looked like nothing at all. A few lines, a turn I’d emphasized by going over it a few times with my pen, some more lines, a big loop. The scribble had made more sense moments ago, but now that I was in the auto-rickshaw, among life as it zipped past me—two wedding processions; daylight waning; immeasurable traffic—I hoped the driver knew where he was going.

  An hour went by. We’d stopped twice for directions. I showed anyone willing to help, my map—the lines, the turn, the more lines, the big loop. I said “Heart Hospital” over and over. Heart Hospital! Of course that wasn’t the name of the hospital. It was called the Asian Heart Institute. But somewhere along the ride, the rickshaw driver started saying heart hospital and so I started saying heart hospital. Whenever someone giving directions would nod, I would nod. He nods. I nod. And so on. But shared nodding in a country where you don’t speak the language is, I learned, the same as saying, Yes, yes, yes. But what were we agreeing on? Was I simply trying to keep the mood light and not look too confused? “HEART HOSPITAL,” I enunciated. The more I pronounced the words, the more the words lost all of their meaning. Say anything too much, and soon language becomes pummeled nothing. Totally estranging, inadequate, and without substitute. Your tongue may as well be numb.

  By the time it got dark, we had driven on all kinds of roads. The driver’s handlebar steering revved loudly as if accepting a new challenge each time we curved around and inched between cars. Oddly enough, I never grew anxious. A deep calm nestled inside of me like my nerves were newly insulated. Like when a dog chooses my lap to curl up on. Like when a sweater is too long in the arms. Like when nobody is speaking and nobody feels pressed to.

  Anything could be just outside this doorless, trembling auto-rickshaw. The unreal, even, like raging water, bare desert for miles—and it wouldn’t matter. I was disoriented yet deaf to concern because I only experience the candied tang of what’s imminent—the possibility of drawing near—when I am truly lost. When hope is a weak vital sign. A low ticking. A glowbug.

  Maybe I would never arrive at the heart hospital. Maybe it didn’t exist. Maybe I was lost in Mumbai. The trip had felt like nothing up until now. As far as I was concerned, failing to find something was greater than having nothing to look for. So I let go. I leaned back against my vinyl seat. I closed my eyes. I felt the road’s bumps—a replenishing, gentle shock each time. I felt the abrupt, crass smoothness of highway. I felt the night’s breeze, my own breathing, and sounds approaching, and horns passing. I heard unspecified purring like a score of whispered secrets, sped up and looping, and just a bit sinister. More so than daytime noises, nighttime noises wreathe.

  With my eyes closed, I felt like I was flying. Arbitrary images popped into my mind as if what screens inside my eyelids is half haunted and clipped of story. Those tousled and nearly unaccounted-for impressions. Those observations that go nowhere yet enrich my memory—incongruous, random, and without incident, like found footage. Like the sheared memory of Christmases; the topography of someone I love’s palm; roof tar sticking to my shoe; a skinny cat’s rib cage; the rubbery satisfaction of yanking a single blade of grass from its root; the sound of someone setting a table for lunch in the garden and those intervals of silence where she looks up at the sky to weigh the threat of dark clouds and how fast they’re moving, and in looking up, she wickedly obscures who has more power—the incoming storm or the woman bargaining with it by placing cloth napkins as winds pick up.

  Even more indiscriminate thoughts collage. Like my irrational fears: dryer lint, the void that hollows a spiral staircase, or the several ways I feel illegitimate whenever I allow myself some latitude. Or feeling somehow fidgety when there’s unexpected legroom on a plane; the ugly manner in which my face warps when big tears are about to overwhelm me, and how repressing them means deforming my cheeks and chin and forehead as though a leech is swimming frantic beneath my skin
. Or the power that composes me when I walk down the aisle of a moving train. Or the coppery taste of blood; the slippery touch of cherry seeds; signing my name on condensation; the novelty of a round window; how little I know about birds. How the string section of an orchestra appears hypnotized, far more than the brass and woodwind; how at the grocery store, spotting the bottom hem of a woman’s nightgown under her raincoat feels classified. Or how awkward it is to be in the company of a friend who’s expressed to me that I’ve been inconsiderate and self-absorbed, and how attempting to mend my pattern is graceless, pinching, and worse, feels false. How being hard on myself is, oddly, a lazy system for letting myself off the hook. How sometimes I imagine hubcaps spinning off the wheels of cars and slicing me in two. How a coral shirt I rarely wear compels my friends to argue whether the shirt is more salmon than coral, and even if the difference is slight, sometimes it’s nice to hear voices I admire boom emphatically over dumb, trifling things.

  The memory of peering into my cousin Samantha’s bedroom surfaces. I was small, no older than ten, and I spotted a biography of Marilyn Monroe tossed beside a pair of black Dr. Martens boots, and Samantha caught me looking and slammed the door, and instantly Marilyn Monroe and Dr. Martens were the most forbidden. Or my mother’s crooked teeth. Fanged and disobedient. Crowding her mouth like concertgoers front row, pushed up against the stage. They are my favorite set of teeth because when my mother smiles her teeth resist any notion that happiness is an upshot of perfection. Her smile is chaotic. Teeming, toppling, and lovely.

  * * *

  “Madam … madam.”

  I’d closed my eyes just long enough to have dozed off.