Daring (55 page)

The minute I tossed a bag into the trunk of a cab and said, “LaGuardia, please,” the fog of depression lifted. Plunging into the breakneck schedule of debates, spot interviews with fiercely divided mothers and daughters, hoofing it from school gyms to buses to planes to scant sleep in Best Westerns across Texas and Ohio, my feet stopped burning.

Hillary in the bubble of her campaign plane was surprisingly radiant, considering that just a month earlier, in February 2008, she had lost her commanding lead over Barack Obama. My friends in the traveling press corps were boarding the 737 with the sullen obedience of inmates after an outing in the yard. “Are you here for the death watch?” one of them said. But Hillary welcomed me and several other journalists to cross the line from the quarantined press section into her private cabin.

“Hi, Gail, I'm so glad to see you back out here!”

Recalling Howard Wolfson's parting words to me almost a decade earlier, I was pleasantly surprised by her friendliness. She needed me now.

What continued to impress me deeply was Hillary's persistence. She had never given up, not once in her life. She tried valiantly to revive her poorly managed campaign. I watched her virtually bleed when stalwart supporters like the Kennedy family and the African American congressman John Lewis pulled away. But she hung on until her old friend Congressman Charlie Rangel had to call her up in June and tell her bluntly, “It's over.” After seventeen months of running for president, it took Hillary four days of internalizing the loss of her dream before she could let go.

When Hillary conceded on June 7, 2008, in the finest speech of her career, she sounded to me like a woman of full humanity. Yes, ruthless, nakedly aggressive, hawkish, and often tone-deaf—qualities common among politicians who dare to compete at this level. But she was also extraordinary: killer smart, empathetic, unsparing of her energy and commitment, and so resilient, she could eat scandal for breakfast. Hillary would not allow her heartbroken supporters to dwell on the what-ifs. “Life is too short, time is too precious . . . We have to work together for what still can be.”

Like millions of women, I took that message to heart. I would work for what still could be—for our country with its first black president, for Clay's best last days, for a life of meaning after Clay. If I dared to begin walking the back half of the labyrinth, maybe I could come back.

DR. MORRISON HAD TOLD ME
that the chief worry he heard from people with serious illness was not about themselves: it was about the well-being of the loved ones they will leave behind. I assured Clay that he was leaving me a world of people who had been a part of our life together. “You've left a part of you in each of them. I'll feel it when I'm with them. That's what I'll hold on to.”

“But what about your writing?” he insisted.

I fell silent. When I tried to sit down and compose a coherent narrative out of the four months of reporting on the dazzling presidential campaign, I froze. My mind was splintered between the twenty-four-hour cable-news squawk cycle and our own twenty-four-hour life-or-death vigil. I had one week to capture the whys and wherefores in a ten-thousand-word story for
Vanity Fair
. I also had to plan a funeral. My powers of concentration deserted me. The fear persisted:
Could I still write?

My sister told me that she and Maura hardly recognized me anymore. I had lost myself. And they couldn't bear to lose both Clay and me.

Dr. Morrison called another family meeting at Clay's bedside. He told Clay that he was ordering me to go somewhere in the country for a week, to do nothing but write and rest. He wanted Clay's endorsement.

Clay gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He would wait for me to finish the story.

In my week's getaway to a farm in Upstate New York, blanketed by the simplicity of the buzzing and greening and mooing of early June, I began to find myself again. An early bike ride, freshly laid eggs deposited on my porch, a day of writing, a late-afternoon walk to the song of frogs, and a night for a second burst of writing, was the best medicine anyone could have prescribed.

Clay couldn't wait to hear me read my first draft when I returned. We reverted to mentor and disciple. He commented. I listened. I felt a surge of his old intellectual force. More important, he felt it, too. One night, after I came home from closing the story at the magazine, I found Clay sitting up with a broad smile.

“I'm feeling happy,” he said.

I looked at this man propped up in a hospital bed with a special valve that permitted him to speak, and I could barely ask the question: “Why are you feeling happy?”

“Because they liked your story.”

WE HAD NOW BEEN THROUGH
nine months of palliative care with no emergency we could not handle at home. It was time to decide whether to treat the next episode of pneumonia or to suspend feeding and let nature take its course. Shortly thereafter, Clay sent us all a message without speaking. He pulled out his feeding tube. When Safoura tried to reconnect it, he pushed it aside. She sensed it was deliberate. But when I later asked Clay if he meant to disconnect it, he insisted it was just an accident.

“Don't keep asking him!” Dr. Morrison chided me. “Look, a husband can't admit to his wife, ‘I don't want to fight anymore,' because that would be abandoning you. Leave that role to me. Your role is to keep him living as long as he's alive.”

I had to ask Clay, “Sweetheart, you've been in and out of pneumonia for two years now, what keeps you going?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Are you doing it for me?” A long pause.

“Yes.”

The secret was out at last. I had to let him know that I was ready.

IT IS EASY TO SLICE MUSHROOMS
with a sharp knife but this knife is like so much of my life now. Blunt. Worn down, eroded, made weary by constant overuse.

This is probably the smallest kitchen of the many kitchens of my life. It is unusually hot for June. The fan on top of the refrigerator has to be small so it will clear the ceiling. It groans as it swivels and barely parts the air. I am slicing astragalus mushrooms because the Chinese speak highly of their potency in boosting the immune system. I still can't give up.

Could he have left already?

Once the hospital bed invaded our apartment, everything changed. We no longer sleep beside each other. We occupy different realms. He sleeps now in our former sitting room, not facing the window, facing inward. So unlike him. He was always looking out, looking ahead.

I hear the TV droning in there. Somebody is haranguing. Who? I know the voice. It must be Bill O'Reilly. The substitute aide must be a Fox fan. Is Clay too weak to change the channel? Or does he not care?

I am slicing earth-moist organic ingredients for his breakfast, or is it lunch, whatever. Shiny purple aubergine, baby-skinned zucchini, garden-grown garlic. I like to imagine the clove rubbing all the insides of his anatomy down to the smallest intestine, to give him flavor.

I remember the first time he took me to his apartment not far from the East River. When we came off the elevator, his door was held wide open by a pair of brass lions, his avatar, with a view out a pair of cathedral-size windows to the ramp of one of Manhattan's grand bridges. I felt as if the world itself was opening to me.

Now I am alone. With the blunt knife. In the dim kitchen. A blunt knife is more dangerous than a sharp knife. When a blunt knife cuts you, it leaves a ragged wound.

He has been slow-dying for two years now.

Don't leave yet. Stay another day.

It will take another twenty minutes to simmer the whole mixture down with pasta and protein. Then whirl it in a blender, mash it through a strainer, thin it to a stingy soup, and pour it into a feeding tube with the diameter of a drinking straw. Praying that it will not clog.

I feel a wave of nausea. The sudden memory, so sharp it's painful, of our long lazy Sunday mornings sifting through the papers together, correcting the mistakes of the world. After breakfast we would walk through Central Park all the way up to the Shakespeare Garden at 110th, stealing kisses behind rocks, swooning under the first bursts of magnolia, returning home in time to make supper for friends. That was in the larger apartment, when we had a larger life.

Slowly, I step across the threshold into his world. He is a pale giant under a white sheet, his still face dissolved in the white vastness of a hospital bed. This is the mentor who sculpted my career, the lover who haunted me for decades, the husband who shared my life for twenty-four years, a man who never had time to sleep. I bend over him and find the place where the surgeon's knife cut out the invader.

The surgeon's knife must have been sharp. The crater it left in Clay's neck was so big, at first it looked like his head was on crooked. I kiss that place in his neck. I whisper, “Sweet as honey.”

Don't leave yet. Stay another summer. Another lifetime.

IN LATE JUNE,
Clay's body began to shut down. As he approached his final deadline, his life force returned once more with gusto. He asked Dr. Morrison, “How long?”

“Not long,” he said. “Days to a week.”

Clay accepted the news with equanimity.

“Do you want to do one great thing, darling?” I said. “Something wonderful?”

He nodded vigorously.

“Jazz?”

The light flared again in his eyes.

“Tonight?”

He shook his head up and down.

I ran to the computer. Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola had a show that night. I ran back to Clay. “The show starts in two hours—think we can make it?”

I couldn't believe my eyes. He pressed up from the hospital bed and slid himself into the wheelchair and rolled it to his wardrobe. He picked out a linen jacket and a blue shirt and a suede cap. He even let me touch up his face with tinted sunscreen, “to give you color.” I wheeled him in front of the full-length mirror.

“How's that for handsome?”

He looked pleasantly surprised to see a picture of near normalcy.

A taxi driver took one look at Clay's wheelchair and tried to avoid us until Safoura snapped out a few choice words and he backed up, reduced to quivering obedience.

Dizzy's was the quintessence of New York. A window wall offered a larger-than-life vista across Central Park. A full moon. We watched it slide across the star-studded sky. Clay's attention locked on the jazz pianist, a man of his vintage.

“There's a lot of pessimism and feelings of futility out there,” the pianist said. “It's the job of music to dispel those feelings.” Then he played an original composition called “Life Is What You Make It.” Clay's philosophy. I asked the waiter for swizzle sticks.

When the drums kick-started an up-tempo piece, Clay picked up the swizzle sticks and began drumming on the table. He was a drummer as a boy. For the next hour and a half Clay sat tall and straight in his wheelchair, drumming, and drinking in the music as his sustenance. He was young again. A drummer boy again.

We were back in our apartment shortly before midnight. Clay was not the least bit tired. He wanted to talk. He gripped my hands and said, with absolute clarity, “That was a
magical
evening.”

TWO DAYS LATER,
on the morning of July 1, 2008, I laid my hand over Clay's. I felt a slight movement. His eyes did not open. His lips inscribed two words on the air.

“Thank you.”

“Are you saying good-bye to me?”

His lips closed in a yes.

A few stop-start breaths and he slipped the last fetters of this fragile life and floated to that imagined realm beyond time. I rolled into the bed beside him and pressed my body to his. I felt a last imprint of our mated souls, and it felt good. Safoura wrapped the blood pressure cuff and pumped it up. The numbers slid to 0.

Not more than twenty minutes later, the phone roused me from a sobbing reverie. Safoura handed me the receiver. It was a reporter from the
New York Times
obituary desk wanting to confirm the time and cause of death. I snapped into journalist mode.

“He died at eight twenty-two, of natural causes.”

“We never use that. It's not
Times
style.”

“But it is the style in which some people go out.”

“Didn't Mr. Felker have cancer?”

“Yes, four times. We beat it four times. He hasn't had cancer for the last two and a half years. And he wouldn't want anyone to think he died suffering.”

The reporter persisted. “Well, then, what
did
he die from?”

A cascade of emotions silenced me for a moment. Then I came to rest on an inner smile. “He stopped breathing.”

AT NOON, MAURA AND TRISH
drew me outside to escape the phone. We sat quietly over tea. It hit me when we returned and saw three men in black rocking on the curbside like great crows. Waiting to take my love away. We went in ahead of them to say good-bye for the last time. I bent to kiss his forehead. Cool. He looked like an alabaster carving of a Sophoclean wise man from ancient times, his nose aquiline and skin whitened and brow serene. An unfamiliar scent wafted through the apartment, strong, but light as wisteria. His spirit, ascending.

Out on the street again, as the black crows passed us, we nodded in mutual consent for their turn to take possession of the vacated body. Sobs began grinding through my body, rattling my ribs; heaves of emotion doubled me over. Maura held me up. The three of us threaded arms over shoulders and wept together on the street until we were spent and could sit on a bench in Central Park and reimagine the joyful times with this man.

That evening my girlfriends were summoned by Maura to smother me in food and hugs and to share stories. My dear friend Sherrye Henry took one look at my face as the last guests left and crooned in her Memphis drawl, “Pack a nightie, sweetie, you're coming home to spend the night at my place.”