Page 40 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Unfair (continued from preceding page)
And yet not believing in something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And for me that became especially clear when, continuing my research, I came upon the cir- cumstances of Barthelme’s death. Having smoked his whole life, he had developed throat cancer, and despite a “successful” surgery, his own habits got the better
of him. He went to a rehab center to deal with a life of alcoholism, but the withdrawal from alcohol appeared to have weakened his stamina, and, within a year, his body was full of tumors, including ones in his head and heart. It had first taken his speech—and then it took his thoughts and feelings.
Berthelme was fifty-eight when he died—two years older than Schlegel. I remember reading this and feeling not irony or anxiety but fear. I got up and, I couldn’t explain why, but I called Keren. She answered the phone and her voice sounded sweet, a little sur- prised to get my call, but still pleasant.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “How are you?”
I wanted to cry.
“We keep meaning to come visit you,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m better.”
I wanted to say something encouraging but the only thing my mind produced was a question.
“How did you get better?” I asked.
I heard her laugh.
“You know,” she said, honest and calm, “I used to look at my body and see a mushy bag of flesh. I didn’t care about it very much and related to it as something that needed minimal attention. I was more focused on my spirit and what it needed. But when I got sick, espe- cially when I was throwing up, I realized: this mushy bag of flesh is the only thing keeping me connected to life here on earth. The minute I disconnect from my body—I’m done. So I started liking this mushy bag of flesh. And something changed inside. I got better.”
I wanted to cry again. Not because I was sad. Just be- cause everything felt so damn fragile.
“Can we come visit you?” I asked. “Sure,” she said.
“When?”
“Whenever you’d like.”
~
When my wife came home that evening I said we had to pick up Keren and take her out—like we said we would that one night a bunch of weeks ago—but she said she was exhausted after a very long day at the clinic and could in no way get herself back in the car to drive an hour there and an hour back. She had an- other full day of patients tomorrow, she said, and she needed to rest so she could be focused for them.
We didn’t go that evening. But we called Keren and made plans to take her out to Yaffo for breakfast that next Friday. When we picked her up in the morning and I just couldn’t believe she was the same person I’d seen a few months before. She had a big smile on her face and a stylish beret on her head with light fuzz where there’d been only skin. We all hugged, she made us a coffee at her parents’ place, and then we drove out to Yaffo.
We had breakfast among the busy flea-marketeers, wandered in and out of different shops, and took a long walk on the beach. As we did, I thought of the end of Barthelme’s story, where the therapist tells a story eliciting a strong reaction in the main charac- ter. On the one hand, he realizes that some people
can express their own emotions sincerely, and on the other, it threatens the safety of his beloved irony. With bitterness he says, “that makes up for everything.”
I’d always read that sentence as suggesting it was hard for the character to inhabit emotions—some- thing I think many people share. But, right at that moment—as I walked in and out of these old antique shops alongside my wife and Keren—I realized it was something else. It’s the only point in the story where the character feels that he’s not alone: where he feels most clearly that, besides irony, the only thing that can contend with the unfairness of life is the fact that we experience it with others.
Stromberg's fiction has appeared in Call Me Brackets, Atticus Review, The East Bay Review, and the UK's Ambit; his nonfiction in The Los Angeles Book Review, Speculative Nonfiction, Entropy, among others; and his translations in The New Yorker, Asymptote, Lampham's Quar- terly, and Conjunctions. He is the author of four cartoon collections, two critical studies, and is the editor of a children's collection, In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times (Delacorte),
and editor to the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust. He recently published "A Search for Belonging" in ROOM, excerpted from Good- bye, America: A Personal Reckoning, a work-in-progress.
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