“Kiss me,” she had said in the dark. It was already almost thirty years ago. “No. Really kiss me.” Like in the movies. The way Frank kissed Ava Gardner.
Maybe I’m Amazed
My brother’s head blew up. This had nothing to do with dropping the big flat rock on his skull. That was a game. That was a long time before. That was when we were boys, when we would stand by the creek and see who could pick up the biggest rock and raise it over his head and toss it in the creek. My brother was two years older than I was, and athletic, and he almost always won. Every game, practically, ended with the winner dropping a large flat stone on the top of his head, while my sister watched laughing with her little girlfriends, and a great deal of blood ensued, and howling and usually stitches. During the dinner hour. Imagine.
Once, blood streaming from my brother’s head, we walked into the middle of an outdoor cocktail party, on the green back terrace, little trays of cucumber sandwiches sweating on the wrought iron Salterini filigree cocktail table, the men in shorts, some of them, all of them in those shirts that men with big forearms wear. One of the guests, a doctor on his third or fourth Highball, was called upon to examine him. “Hell,” he said, “the damned hole’s no bigger than a quarter.” Everybody laughed. This same doctor was given to singing only the first line of a remarkably irritating song, “She’s got trains, bells, and whistles in her ears.” After which, with a pumping gesture of his noncock-tail hand, he would scream in a falsetto, “Whooo! Whooo!” Everybody thought this was very funny. People laughed until they wept, even after the twentieth or fiftieth time.
The blood matted my brother’s hair to his scalp. We were so used to it; it was, almost, the whole point of the game, and he wasn’t even crying. We just went upstairs to my grandmother Miss Nell, who had been a nurse, and she applied penicillin ointment and a bandage. She always said not to use penicillin ointment too often, because you’d get immune to it, but she always used it anyway.
My grandmother Miss Nell was sweet and benign and incredibly forthright. We lived in her house. She was both strong and kind and she was a widow for thirty-five years and served herself breakfast in bed every morning, going down to the kitchen and making strong coffee and cereal with cream so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, and sausages or grits. Then she would carry the whole thing up to her bedroom on a breakfast tray, and eat in her lonely bed all by herself, and I loved her with all my heart and I still think of her every day. She had a way of addressing you as “baby” which was not at all like a Hollywood mogul but that was wholly sweet and endearing, like a mother with an infant, or rather a small child, and I can hear it in my head to this day and I couldn’t imitate it in a million years. I’ve tried.
I still live in her house. I always hope she would like the way it looks now, but I fear she’d find it tricked out and pretentious, although most people seem to like it fine. Miss Nell. My mother’s mother. Not the other one.
My brother’s head blowing up had nothing to do with any of that. My grandmother was already dead by then. He was thirty-five; about the age, actually, that most people’s heads blow up, if they’re going to. Senator Joseph Biden’s head blew up the same year. So did Quincy Jones’s. They went right on being senators and winning Grammys.
My brother was at a Saturday night cocktail party in Atlanta, where he was spending his days being a brilliant reporter for the Wall Street Journal, although he knew nothing about economics, as far as I could tell, not one soul in the family did, when all of a sudden he got a splitting headache. His wife and a nurse who was present concluded that he was having a migraine. He’d never had one before, but both of them had, and he did have all the symptoms of a migraine—the speckles in his vision, the searing pain on one side of his head—and one of them was a nurse, after all, a nurse and a migraine sufferer, and it all seemed logical.
He went home to dark rooms and cold compresses and vomiting and all of the rest of it. He stayed in bed all day Sunday, watching sports and dozing and putting up with this incredible pain and nothing changed, still the same relentless blinding agony.
On Monday morning he woke up, the pain just the same, and his wife said to go make some coffee, to move around a little bit to see how he felt. He got up and walked across the room. He bent over and picked up his shoe.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It’s your shoe,” his wife said.
“I know that,” he said. “I know that. But what do you do with it?”
In half an hour he was at DeKalb General, having a CAT scan. He had a berry aneurysm, a congenital weakness of one of the blood vessels in his brain, and it had started oozing blood on Saturday night. If it burst, he would have a cerebral hemorrhage and die. If it didn’t, they could operate, and put a little clamp on it, and he could go on with his life. Like Joseph Biden did. Like Quincy Jones.
When your blood vessels start oozing blood into the brain, the brain swells, and when you operate on the brain, your brain swells some more, so he had to lie flat on his back, not moving, for ten days, while various drugs were pumped into him to make the swelling go down before they could operate. Too much swelling, and no oxygen gets into the brain, causing brain damage.
I flew down there right away, and it was just a horrible situation. His wife, who hated me, was eight months pregnant, and her family, who were grim, sour-faced, hard-line Southern Methodists, except for her sister-in-law Judy Judy, who may have been a Methodist but in no way could be called hard-line, were sitting around the waiting room as though the funeral were about to take place any minute, and it was pretty hardcore. His wife was a wreck, so much so that she sort of forgot for a minute that she hated me with every fiber of her being. Just for a minute.
She was one of those small-town Southern girls who are raised to believe that they are just the prettiest, smartest, best little things on the face of the earth, and sometimes they are. She was from a town called Social Circle, Georgia. She might as well have owned Social Circle, Georgia, in its entirety.
So, what with the black dresses and the aroma of bar soap and the pregnancy and the general air of entitlement, it was pretty ghastly. My brother lying on a hospital bed with his head in restraints covered in lamb’s wool like a taxicab driver’s car seat seemed almost too abstract to take in. It was too horrible. He was my older brother and he was my beloved. Not to mention it runs in families, and siblings are far more likely to have the same thing happen to them. I did not want the same thing to happen to me, particularly not in Atlanta, at DeKalb General Hospital.
My sister-in-law, even though she has turned out to be a much finer person as the years have passed, loyal and good-humored and capable of acts of great kindness, hated me so much that she’d actually told me how much she hated me. She was a holy terror in those days. She had come to New York, before she and my brother were married, and she had stayed with me in my disgusting apartment on Thirty-fifth Street. One night, I had taken her out to a restaurant in Chinatown and, looking at me over green tea, she had actually said it: “I hate you. I’ve always hated you, and I’ll hate you until the day you die. I hate your guts, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” And I actually paid for dinner. A doormat, my mother had once said to me.
We then went back to my grotty apartment, where she proceeded, in the night, to come down with the flu, so she lay in my bed for four days while I slept on the sectional aqua sofa left over from the previous tenants, who were waiters at the Westchester Country Club and who had left everything behind and did not own one thing that was not in bad taste, and I took care of her. Fed her chicken soup and listened to her vomit. Jeez. That kind of loathing.
It was all because of another trip to New York, when she had gone to bed early and my brother and I had sat up real late drinking Jack Daniels and discussing our internal affairs, and I had finally told him it was time he did something with his life. He had been a classic slacker. Actually he had had a kind of Episcopalian nervous breakdown and been thrown out o
f Williams, where once, when I was visiting, I discovered that he hadn’t opened a letter in six months. So he’d been booted and drafted into the army, where he served for three years in this dreary little town in Germany. It had one distinguishing feature: It had an organ once played by Mozart. I went there to visit him because my parents hadn’t heard from him for months and I was living in Torremolinos, Spain, and they figured it was an easy hop to go over and check up on him, which I did, walking for hours the dismal streets of this dismal town, waiting for my brother to get off duty so I could meet him in a tacky discotheque and watch him get drunk and stoned. I learned the only German word I know, kellerfensterhalter, which means a little thing that holds a cellar window open, and I kept thinking: These people were all Nazis.
So years later, in my apartment in New York, we were discussing, over the many glasses of Jack Daniels, his general lack of direction, and I had happened to mention that it was time he did something with his life. I told him I’d already been working for three years and he was two years older than I was and I was tired of being the younger brother and the older brother at the same time and I told him I thought he’d make a terrific journalist.
“I’d never do that,” he said. “It would sully my soul.” He actually said that. Sully my soul. He’s the only person I’ve ever heard use the word sully in conversation.
It turned out his future wife was listening to all this, and she had somehow conceived the notion that I was being unbearably cruel to my brother, and I actually think he had won her heart by telling her all the heartbreaking stories of the various cruelties he had suffered at our hands, his own family—the neglect, the slights, the missing the Little League games because they all came at cocktail hour when nobody was allowed to do anything—my darling, unique brother whom I adored, as I have said, but who really did need to do something with his life. And who actually did go to journalism school, where he wrote his graduate thesis on a punk rock music club, and go on to be a brilliant young journalist in Atlanta, which is where he was when his head blew up.
But she had heard the conversation and her mind was made up. She hated me. It didn’t seem likely to change, tragedy or not.
He lay there so helpless and quiet and afraid and every part of his body was soft. His upper arms were unbearably white. His wife was getting massive amounts of attention and he seemed so alone, so unattended, although he wasn’t; it’s just that when you’re so close to death, there’s no amount of attention that’s going to assuage the calamity, at least no amount or kind a normal person could give.
I slept in the guest room in their townhouse apartment thing, whatever those things are, and I drove his car back and forth to the hospital all the time. It was a nifty little convertible, an Alfa Romeo or something, and I loved that car. His wife slept on a cot in the hospital, surrounded by Methodists, and she wept a lot, which is understandable. The hard part was trying to give any real comfort to somebody who so clearly despised me.
The ten days passed in a languid agony. I shopped for food. I did the laundry. I took my brother’s wife into the chapel and read poetry to her. She only wanted to hear poems about death. She said that, if he died, she would wait to have the baby and then kill herself. She was very young, not even thirty.
My parents flew down to Atlanta for the operation, these people who never went anywhere, except to Nags Head for three weeks every summer. My sister and her husband came down, leaving my five-year-old niece at home with their friends Teddy and his wife. My sister and her husband stayed with Judy Judy and her husband, but still it was pretty tight quarters in the townhouse with my mother and father since nobody wanted to sleep in my brother’s bed, and so I ended up on the sofa again.
I made dinner for everybody, a cold tenderloin of beef. It was Memorial Day weekend. I asked my sister-in-law’s best friend whether the piece of meat was big enough.
“How much did you pay for it?” she asked.
“Thirty-five dollars.”
“That’s enough.”
My parents were out of their element, and very afraid, and they seemed frail. They were very brave, I thought. Brave, and they were besotted with my brother, even after he wrecked his brand-new car in Germany and took it to the repair shop to have the axle replaced and never went back to pick it up so my father had to buy a car he never saw because he had cosigned for it or something. It was just the abstract of an automobile somewhere in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
They adored him enough to leave home. Even when my sister was broke and alone with a two-year-old baby and she got tularemia from Bubba, her rabbit, that summer everybody got Legionnaires’ Disease, they wouldn’t go up to Martha’s Vineyard to see her.
They brought along their own bourbon, in their Samsonite suitcases, as though, in all of Atlanta, you couldn’t buy an inexpensive but drinkable bottle of bourbon. They did that all the time. They took bourbon to the beach. They brought their own bourbon to London, when they came to visit me there, although that made a lot more sense. My mother in her nightgown reminded me of my brother, all underbelly. Pale and slack, without muscle, soft and vulnerable.
The night before the operation, when the swelling in my brother’s brain had finally gone down enough, Judy Judy had the whole mismatched family to dinner. The Methodists didn’t drink, of course; my parents did. Here’s what Judy Judy had: a casserole that was made with skinless chicken breasts on the bottom, then a layer of canned asparagus, then a sauce of cream of mushroom soup, the whole thing covered with a layer of corn flakes. I had been to Lutece. I had been to Grenouille. I was sure it would be revolting. I was wrong. It was absolutely delicious. I was ravenous. I couldn’t get enough of it.
Judy Judy, who was later to go crazy in her own particular way, imagining a ravaging breast and/or cervical cancer she didn’t actually have, even going around the country giving brave lectures about living with a deadly cancer, driving her perfectly ordinary, nice husband to fall to pieces and hate her and, finally, to leave her, was then a blond, amusing woman with enormous breasts who adored butterflies. She was covered in butterfly jewelry, some costume and some real; all the magnets on her refrigerator were butterflies; the paper napkins had butterflies on them. The plates had butterflies on them. The sofas and chairs were covered with needlepoint butterfly pillows. In the bathroom, the toilet paper was covered with little butterflies. I’m not kidding. Aunt Minnie Lee Lee, who before I met her I had assumed was Chinese but who in reality had married silent Mr. Lee twice, said she thought Judy Judy and the butterfly thing were strange, although she was just being conversational. For a Methodist, she was not afraid to express her opinions.
Aunt Minnie Lee Lee had the habit of saying, whenever anything had pleased her particularly, or even when she just felt like being cordial, “Well, now, my, that was a refrasher.” She thought Judy Judy’s chicken casserole was a real refrasher.
But nobody in the South ever thinks that anything done by a family member is really strange, or rather, their strange deeds are merely more endearing. Judy Judy called everybody dawlin’ as though she really meant it, and she probably did, and she just said the butterfly was her personal symbol. It gave her hope.
As dinner parties on the night before your brother’s brain operation go, it was a huge success. My parents had their bourbon. The teetotalers had their soft drinks and iced tea. Judy Judy had her butterflies. Everybody got along. The chicken casserole gave cornflakes a whole new and magical aspect. We knew that tragedy had struck. We couldn’t escape the image of my sedated brother lying over there at DeKalb General in head restraints. You don’t forget that kind of thing just because the chicken casserole was yummy and nobody screamed at anybody else about religious issues and burning in hell for drinking bourbon whiskey. We knew that by the next night it could all be better or it could get a lot worse and there was the camaraderie of the terrified to hold us together. I was so afraid.
The operation was on Memorial Day. It was decided, since the hospital was less than
a mile away, and because waiting in the waiting room with the Methodists was so grim, that my family would wait it out at my brother’s place, where they could smoke and have access to the bourbon. I drove to the hospital early in the morning, the warm early summer breeze blowing through the Alfa. I had the top down, feeling smart. In the parking lot, I saw his surgeon’s stainless steel gull-wing DeLorean. Brain surgeons think they’re God. So did DeLorean. I once saw him try to cut in line at the movies in New York, only to be shouted down by the angry crowd. It seems sort of quaint now, waiting in line for a movie. Kind of sweet.
My function was to run back and forth all day, carrying news from the hospital to my family. At the hospital, the surgeon came out and told me and my brother’s wife that the operation should take about three hours. It took eight and a half. It was a disaster. I guess he wasn’t God after all.
The brain doesn’t feel any pain. Getting through the skull hurts, although my brother was out, but once in the brain, the brain tissue itself doesn’t feel pain.
As soon as they bored the hole and got into his brain, the aneurysm burst open, and he began hemorrhaging massive amounts of blood. The aneurysm was right at the base of his skull, where the artery divided, carrying blood to the left and right side of his brain.
It was interminable. The Methodists were mute or locked in silent prayer. My sister-in-law was distraught, so we sat in the chapel, reading more poems about dead people. We knew nothing about what was going on, only that it was going on for a very long time.