Of course, that doesn’t factor in the role of other chemicals in the brain’s bag of tricks. Without a doubt, the antidepressant Zoloft was working, and the Ritalin helped Paul focus. But one of his heart medicines probably fostered creativity, too. In a University of Florida study neurologist Kenneth Heilman conducted with college students, some were given a stimulant (ephedrine) and some a calm-inducing beta-blocker that’s often prescribed for stage fright (Inderal). Surprisingly, the students on the beta-blocker performed better on tests requiring mental flexibility. For years, Paul had been forbidden coffee, tea, chocolate, and other stimulants by his cardiologist, but prescribed Inderal to lower his blood pressure and slow the speed of his quivering heart muscle. Made sleepier by the Inderal, he nonetheless stayed wickedly productive.
As much as I might relish a mug of oily, dark French roast coffee, revving up the brain doesn’t necessarily spur creative thinking. Vigilant calm works better. After all, the secret to good improvisation isn’t choosing the first thing that comes into your mind, but the best thing. That usually means generating different possibilities, rotating mental images, juggling, arranging, rearranging, testing how each lurks in the mind, before settling on a solution.
So, with one thing and another—the years of foreign language, his strong bridge between the hemispheres, his luck with medications, the previous TIA, etc.—Paul remained fiercely creative, even if he couldn’t process language well. Since he was motivated, it made sense to encourage his brain to recruit healthy laborers from the suburbs, and travel even farther afield to employ other gandy-dancers, however strange, who were still fit enough to hammer out a word or two.
CHAPTER 26
“MA BÊTE, MA BELLE BÊTE,” MY BEAST, MY BEAUTIFUL Beast I sweet-talked to Paul one day, quoting from a movie we both knew well.
In Jean Cocteau’s exquisite 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, a rose-adoring, art-collecting, sensitive beast is the avatar for a prince, whom an evil fairy has turned into a hideous monster (until he can find true love, despite his ugliness). It was based on a popular eighteenth-century European fairy tale about a search for a lost husband. We both adored the magical film, which we’d seen eleven times, often enough for Paul to decipher the Latin on the back of the Beast’s chair, which reads: “All men are beasts when they don’t have love.”
“Ma Bête, ma belle Bête,” I whispered.
Automatically Paul responded, also quoting from the film: “Je suis un monstre. Je n’aime pas les compliments.” I am a monster. I don’t like compliments.
Just as I’d sometimes called him “ma Bête” in bygone days, he’d sometimes called me “ma Belle,” but that had been one of the simplest of all his fanciful names for me. For him, playing in the sandbox of language had meant building ornate castles. As well as his dictation was going, and his speech improving, he still had difficulty combining words to forge images. And he deeply lamented the loss of decades of daily pet names and endearments. He’d loved creating and bestowing names of all sorts—wildly whimsical, just feasible, or apropos: , Moon, Paprika Cheeks, Bush-kitten. We’d both relished the Native American spirit of naming, in which a Hopi female might be called “Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill,” “Child of Importance,” “Spider Woman at Middle-age,” “Butterfly Sitting on a Flower,” “Overflowing Spring,” “Beautiful Clouds Arising”; and a male “Where the Wind Blows Down the Gap,” “Short Rainbow,” “Throne for the Clouds,” “Joined Together by Water,” “He Who Whistles.”
There was a time, long ago, when all names described personal attributes, origin, or the hopes of parents, when names could be allegories that determined someone’s fate. A time when naming was magic, knowledge, possession, and a shaman could inflict injury by mishandling someone’s name. A time when you only shared your true name with someone you completely trusted. What spells Paul and I had cast with our secret names for one another.
Passing by the back door, when Liz and Paul were wading at the shallow end of the pool, I heard her ask him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?”
His face fell as if touched by a taser. “Used to have . . . hundreds,” he said with infinite sadness. “Now I can’t think of one.”
It was true. Once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo. Now it was as if a mass extinction had taken place, all the totemic animals we shared had vanished. The veldt of our love was less noisy, the fauna of the watering holes sparse. He understood how much I missed the romantic, frisky hobgoblins like Elf-heart he used to invent for me, the strange cuddly creatures of forest and sky he tricked out with diminutives and recruited for our private fun. In our mythology there were golden baby owls, ring-tailed lemurs, axolotls, shoulder rabbits, honeybunnies, bunnyskins (a.k.a. peaux de lapin), hopping spiders, roseate spoonbills, and many more.
He wished he could revisit that private bridge to the supernatural world, which we had crossed and recrossed with ritual devotion. But he couldn’t find it in the mob of words elbowing one another for attention.
So I began teaching him some of his old favorites—swan, pilot-poet, baby angel—and he recognized them. Other times he sighed “my precious,” “my little sweetheart,” or “my cute.” Was he really once master of the piropo, that adorable Argentine courtship game? A street poetry of amorous, flirtatious compliments, piropos are public yet private, usually whispered to a woman as she passes close beside an anonymous admirer.
“If beauty were a sin, you’d never be forgiven,” a man might sigh to a woman in Buenos Aires. Or: “You move like the Bolshoi Ballet.” Or: “So many curves, and me without brakes.” Or, simply: “Goddess!”
“My legume,” Paul murmured romantically, trying to say “My Lady,” and I giggled before I could stop myself.
“Legume!”
Then we both slid into laughter at the thought of his romantic inclination for a lima bean or lentil. But slowly, heartfully, the endearments were beginning to emerge again. Aphasics are often good at echoing, and if I told him that I loved being his little bush-kitten, thus prompted, he’d repeat in imitation “my little bush-kitten,” and I’d coo appreciatively to reinforce his efforts. I knew Paul needed the tangible bond of naming during his famine of words; and he knew I needed the nourishment during my long days of caregiving.
“Why don’t you make up some brand-new names?” I suggested to Paul one morning.
His first offering—after ruminating for a few minutes—was: “Celandine Hunter.” Not a deliberately chosen twosome. The words just tumbled out like dice.
“Celandine? . . . Oh yes, buttercups. How sweet!” We had celandine sprouting wild in the garden, and I often strolled to gather them in springtime.
“Where on earth did that come from?” I asked.
He didn’t know, but was pleased and surprised by it. This was a new pier where aphasia’s merry-go-round of words could be welcomed in a colorful and creative way. Instead of trying to block wrong words from popping out, he made space for them. Before the stroke he would have had to purposefully “free-associate” to do the same thing. Now he opened the floodgates in order to create. In search of a piropo, he could unleash the hounds of aphasia for a second or two. One piropo was all he could manage at a time, he told me, it was too taxing. But I think the truth lay deeper, that it was too frightening to invite the aphasia any more than that. Turning it off and on like a valve empowered him. What he didn’t want was the leaky trickle of chaotic words.
The next day, on waking, I cajoled Paul for another and he chewed his mental cud and provided: “Swallow Haven.” He didn’t always have a sassy sobriquet for me each day—“Sorry, later,” he’d say to excuse not being in good tune—but on many mornings he was able to freshly mint a new pet name. When they started following a pattern too much, such as the “— of —,” I’d protest and beg him to conjure up a novel variation. My intent, along w
ith added play time, was fun practice at creative imagery, a seemingly lost gift. Since aphasics’ brains often snag on one word or sentence or way of doing something, this wasn’t always easy for him. (I wondered if, with the usual pathways broken, some signals looped round and round in a cul-de-sac.) But from then on names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as “Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory,” “My Snowy Tanganyika,” “Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs,” “My Little Spice Owl,” “The Epistle of Paul to the Rumanian Songthrushers,” “Blithe Sickness of Araby,” “Baby Angel with the Human Antecede Within,” “Little Flavanoid Wonder,” “Rheostat of Sentimental Dreaming,” “My Remains of the Day, My Residue of Night,” “Lovely Ampersand of the Morning,” and “O Parakeet of the Lissome Star.”
What a surprise! I cherished these riotous, spell-cast endearments and wondered what fantastic gallantry he might utter anew each morning. Even if some seemed to go awry, like “Blithe Sickness of Araby!”
“I love Blithe and Araby,” I said, “but . . . could you maybe find a word other than sickness?” When nothing sprang to mind, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Best can do.” They only emerged as amalgams.
“My little corn-crake,” he whispered tenderly, and I made contented creatural noises into his neck as he caressed my cheek and ear, then wrapped both arms tightly around me, locking me into our circle of love. In those moments, which were really hours, I came to rest, warmed by his irregular heartbeat, free of worry’s albatross, feeling safe at last.
Whether whacky or tender, the names spiraled in ways that always made me laugh and feel loved, courtship restored. The old pet names and piropos from before the stroke—“Swan heart,” or “Park” (short for “You are a park for my eyes”)—had evolved over time, acquiring layers of meaning. But I also treasured the new, more hallucinatory ones, forged on demand, as aphasic telegrams from his phoenix-feathered brain.
And Paul loved playing the swain again, even if it meant difficult and tiring word-craft, and he had fun concocting verbal novelties, offered to me as miniature gifts. It also guaranteed that, whatever else might unfold, each day would begin with closeness and a dose of laughter.
CHAPTER 27
“HI, WOMBAT,” I GREETED PAUL AS HE STUMBLED OUT OF the bedroom’s cave of dreams, looking like he’d been waylaid by gremlins. His hair stood to attention, his flannel boxer shorts were on backwards, he wobbled as he walked. And yet he wore the expression that humans do upon waking, that of a swollen-eyed infant, which, by design, we find cute.
“You have me all to yourself today,” I announced—as I always did on Saturdays, Sundays, and the many weeks when Liz was away.
He put his right hand over his heart, curled pinkie and all, as if a national anthem had begun playing, and added the day’s new pet name: “My Little Bucket of Hair.”
I laughed so hard I had to stop pouring a cup of milk. “Ooh, I love that one!”
“My Little Bucket of Hair,” Paul said again in a singsong, this time grinning to the right and left, acknowledging the applause of imaginary bystanders.
Then, with a “What’s new, wombat?” sung off-key to the 1965 tune “What’s New, Pussycat?” he sat down to breakfast.
Well, this morning I had fun news to share with my fellow wombatophile.
“I’ve discovered that the Pre-Raphaelite painters were obsessed with wombats! Did you know there’s a British tradition of wombat-snogging?”
“Wombat-snogging? Tell more.” He was hooked.
Paul had once been an expert on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: the mid-nineteenth-century band of young British artists who had jolted the drab art world of their day with jewel-toned paintings full of moody women who somehow managed to be simultaneously erotic and ethereal. When the Pre-Raphaelite ringleader, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was commissioned to paint the walls and ceiling of the Oxford Union, he gathered his motley crew of friends, and they gaily painted elaborate murals filled with heroic and supernatural scenes of Arthurian legends, complete with forests, castles, velvet-clad damsels, and dashing knights.
“You know about Rossetti painting knights on the ceiling of the Oxford Union, right?”
“And on the roundabouts,” Paul added.
Roundabouts? Oh, walls. “Yes, on the walls, too. Everywhere except the windows, which were whitewashed for protection. But the whitewash made such a tempting clean surface that they sketched dozens of frolicking and cavorting wombats on the windows!”
Paul’s gray-blue eyes opened so wide I could see their rims of agate.
“Apparently Rossetti had persuaded his clique that wombats were just dishy, the most beautiful of all God’s creatures, and he threw picnics full of frolick and badinage near the “Wombat’s Lair” at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo. One of his sketches even showed a wombat dashing past Egyptian pyramids! Fantastic!”
“Can I see them?”
“No, I’m afraid somebody washed the windows. But there are sketches at the British Museum. Shall we fly to London and hold hands in front of Rossetti’s wombat drawings?” I asked impishly. If only his health were better and he could travel, what a lark that would be.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “Good idea . . . maybe . . .” He twirled round the index finger on his right hand, struggling to find the word for something. “. . . box?”
“Mailbox?”
“No, not mailbox, the other thing . . .” He continued the high-spirited word-hunt. “. . . Light dancing mailbox.”
Light dancing mailbox. . . . light dancing . . . and a mailbox . . . “Computer?”
“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Swivel?” Whirling his forefinger in the air, as if stirring up mischief.
Months before, I had shown him an Italian museum website where viewers could virtual-tour, strolling through the museum, from gilt to rococo. Did he actually remember that?
“Do you mean the museum tour . . . ?”
“Yes!” he said with relief, adding, “Of course.”
In school, Paul had studied the great revolutions of the past—Agricultural, Industrial, Transportation—and how they’d edited and revised being human, from our gene pool to our ability to survive in climates and landscapes deadly to our ancestors. But that hadn’t prepared him for being swept up in the next great one. It was both his privilege and bad fortune to be alive in the throes of the Information Age, too slick, fast, and silicon for his old-fashioned brain. This was a revolution he didn’t fathom, didn’t like, didn’t use much, and yet nonetheless profited from—which made it all the more daunting before his stroke. After his stroke, it confused him utterly, and Liz or I served as go-between. I soon found the British Museum site, and although we couldn’t “stroll through” the halls, together we browsed.
Discovering Rossetti’s wombat was fun, but it also reconnected us through an activity not related to illness, the arc of learning something new together, a lively way to bridge minds. More and more now, we began to delve into subjects we could share, which satisfied both my curiosity and Paul’s. The history of aphasia produced a cabinet of wonders not for the squeamish. In the second century AD, the Greek physician Galen would have diagnosed Paul’s aphasia as a blockage of black bile gumming up a cranial sac believed to store his animal spirits. To our horror, in the sixteenth century, doctors would have applied leeches to his tongue. Paul relished the recipe in Théophile Bonet’s seventeenth-century Guide to the Practical Physician, which advised a “most secret and certain remedy for apoplexy [stroke]”:
Take a lion’s dung, powdered, two parts, pour spirit of wine till it be covered three fingers’ breath, let them stand in a vial stopped three days. Strain it and keep it for use. Then take a crow, not quite pinfeathered, and a young turtle, burn them apart in an oven, powder them, pour on the above-said spirit of wine, let them stand in infusion for three days. Then take berri
es of a linden tree, an ounce and a half. Let them be steeped in the aforesaid spirit, then add as much of the best wine and six ounces of sugar candy, boil them in a pot till the sugar be melted. Put it up. Let the patient take a spoonful of it in wine, often in a day, for a whole month.
To Paul’s delight, an apparently plausible medical reason for his aphasia in the late eighteenth century would have been keeping a mistress. Presumably because the worry, or the unusual sexual excitement, raised some men’s blood pressure? Doctors didn’t specify why, only that mistresses could lead to stroke. We chuckled together when we discovered that in the nineteenth century, phrenologists concluded that verbal memory was located behind the eye sockets, because brilliant wordsmiths displayed big bags under their bulging, frog-like eyes.
Thank goodness for medicine’s steady advances. At least Paul didn’t have to endure tongue leeches or linden berries stewed in lion’s dung and baby crow. I’d already told him about the clinical trials with vampire-bat saliva, and those in which the brain is stimulated by coiled magnets. Maybe treatments hadn’t changed that much after all.
“No bat saliva?” Paul casually asked Liz as she offered him a mug of milk.
“Bat saliva?” She cocked an eyebrow. Her pixie-cut hair was a new shade of red—dark chestnut with a touch of persimmon—and her shoulders were newly tanned from a canoe trip.
Deadpan, he said: “Because I’m off Tasty Bite.”
“R-i-ght,” she drawled skeptically. “You better not be—Tasty Bite was having a sale, and you have seventy-eight boxes stacked up in the pantry!”
Her eyes lingered a moment on the unopened asparagus can next to Paul on the kitchen table. It was wearing a wristwatch. A self-winding one, which seemed all the more implausible. I smiled. Though it looked like a doubly amputated aluminum arm, I knew it was just Paul’s solution for a tight Twist-O-Flex watchband.