The Violet Hour (40 page)

Somehow we keep going back to the idea of being awake or alert for one's death, of marking the moment. “I am not sure it's true. It might be one of those things that sounds good,” he says. “It's like Heidegger. The language is evasive yet strangely summoning.”

Were there moments when he thought he would die? Once, in a flying exercise when he was a cadet, he lost his bearings in his plane. It was evening and the signal became weak. He was flying low and nearly out of fuel, with maps folded out in front of him. He remembered that there was a pamphlet, “What to Do If Lost,” and he read it with a flashlight. He tried reciting
Invictus:
“I am the master of my fate…” He didn't want to pray, but finally he did say a few prayers. With the fuel running dangerously low, he saw what he thought was a park. He turned on his landing lights, which turned out to be a mistake, because he couldn't see, and he plowed into a tree. The plane lost a wing, and he could no longer control it. It careened up, its nose vertical, and the landing light flooded a house for a moment, then the plane crashed into the house. The family ran
out—no one was hurt. He turned off the ignition. As he breathed, he felt like his teeth were loose. He stepped out of the plane onto what had been the porch of the house. That night, he lay on a feather bed in the home of the mayor of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was too jittery to sleep, replaying the scene over and over in his head. “Afterward I had nightmares,” he tells me. “I couldn't erase it.”

When the terror of death blows through you, what do you do? What do you reach for? Aside from, of course, a drink or another person. When Salter's daughter died, he recited the only psalm he could mostly remember. He said prayers the night his plane scraped into trees and crashed into a house. In his last days, Updike kept
The Book of Common Prayer
next to his bed and prayed with Martha and the reverend who visited him. Even Sontag, a passionate atheist, called Peter Perrone to pray with her one morning. Not that this prayer comforted her or that she believed it for a second—even his description of her request is suffused with a high-level skepticism and irony—but, still, even she seems to have said a prayer.

To me, religion has never been consoling. I can't get anything out of even the cadences of it. It feels like a foreign language. I sometimes find the reassurance I imagine other people getting from religion in passages of novels, in poems. The words transform, tame. The perspective shifts. The world alters a
little, for a few moments, to make death bearable or almost bearable. Sometimes if I read bits of poems I feel stronger, shored up. Like Dylan Thomas: “That the closer I move / To death, one man through his sundered hulks, / The louder the sun blooms / And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;” or Updike: “God save us from ever ending, though billions have. / The world is blanketed by foregone deaths, / small beads of ego, bright with appetite.”

The year I was sick and in and out of the hospital, there was one poem in particular that comforted me: Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium.” Even though I was twelve, I strongly identified with his line “That is no country for old men.” The young are in one another's arms, the poem said, but you. You are outside all of that.

I wrote what was probably an unnaturally impassioned English paper on the poem. I really saw myself as that aged man. This is when I was coughing up blood and telling doctors I was fine. Yeats seemed to be speaking directly to me:

“Fastened to a dying animal.” That part I got. And then comes the implausible and weirdly uplifting part: There is a place called Byzantium, an eternal world of art, a place where words exist forever, out of time. The poem ends with a vision of being reborn as a golden bird, forged in an eternal fire, who lives in Byzantium and sings to lords and ladies of what is past and passing and to come. Why would that golden bird comfort me? I have no idea. The words did.

It was also during the year I was sick that I began to compulsively keep notebooks. I wrote everything down—every inane fight with a friend; my fears about my upcoming operation; later, nights in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, drinking lime wine coolers with my friends, and problems with boyfriends—in cheap sketchbooks, composition pads, leather books, on both sides of the page. I couldn't bear the idea of losing anything, forgetting it, not having every single thing that happened to me in a tangible form I could hold. Later, these notebooks would become a liability, as I carted dozens around from apartment to apartment; nearly every man I ever loved read them, and some form of chaos or upheaval ensued. When I was married, I kept them at a trustworthy friend's house for safekeeping. Later, I put them in a strangely elegant leather suitcase with a lock, a very low-level bargain-basement Byzantium, but there it is.

Salter puts it this way in
Burning the Days:
“Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.”

Salter talks about going to see his very close friend Irwin Shaw in Switzerland, as Shaw was dying. By the time Salter arrived, Shaw was already dead. I remember what he wrote about this moment in
Burning the Days:
“I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it.” This is how I feel now about the deaths in this book. “I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it.”

At times in our conversation, Salter seems to be saying to me: “Why would I be thinking about dying on this glorious August day? And, furthermore, if I, in my late eighties, am not thinking about dying, why are you, in your forties, with children still needing you to pour cereal, thinking about dying?” He is not in fact saying this; he is, among other things, too gentlemanly to say this, and more open to rueful lines of thought, but his stoicism, his toughness, raises the question anyway. Maybe I don't need to think about it. Maybe you take your knowledge and move on.

Why does it matter to me now? I am talking to the frightened girl in the blue satin nightgown in the hospital, a tray with orange Jell-O and one of those little half cans of ginger ale in front of her.

I am trying to tell her that these death stories are okay. They are not really okay, because in each case someone dies, and
there may, in fact, be no less-okay thing than that. But it's okay for this reason: If you have to let go, you can. You can find or manufacture a way to.