11. ALOHA OY!

"Tiny bubbles

in da wine,

Make me happy, 

    Make me feel fine ..."

When, on the 16^th of April 2009, ten days after Em’s death, Solitaire’s cousin, Gillian, and her husband, Alex, invited her to spend a week with them at their home on Hawaii, she gratefully accepted, but not without trepidation.  So harrowing were the memories of her last trip to the Islands that her initial impulse was to decline with regret.

By the time he died, Em had been in treatment for five years at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, for multiple myeloma , a rare and incurable blood cancer.

During the first two years, he had undergone three sequential drug regimens in an attempt to halt the advance of his cancer.   

The first was a devastating year-long course of Dexamethasone, a malevolent steroid that devours muscles, damages hearing, darkens teeth, destroys inhibitions, and turns one into a species of euphoric werewolf.  After six months, Em had been transformed from a basically cool and complaisant diplomat, into a snarling cripple with legs like stilts and a voice as jagged as a hand saw, a vibrato so vicious that having once been the horrified target of it, one could never erase the memory.  In the family support group meetings that Solitaire sometimes attended, the mere vocalization of the dreaded “DEX” word sent seismic tremors of terror round the room.  When Solitaire pointed out to Dr Adair, his oncologist, that Em could no longer stand up unaided, let alone walk, and suggested that he take him off the drug, which in any case was harming rather than helping him, the doctor seemed, finally, to bring Em into focus, not as a specimen or statistic, but as a human being.  He asked him to walk across the room.

“Hm,” he said, watching with faintly furrowed brow as Em’s six-foot-three inch frame tottered precariously across the floor, “you may be right.” 

Dr. Adair is a kind of “doctor-doll,” a diminutive, dapper man who, through the judicious use of such props as three-piece suits, crisply-starched collars, lace-up ankle boots and a stethoscope coiled neatly round his neck, achieves a look of 19^th century Harley Street propriety and prosperity.

 His manner is formal; he addresses Solitaire as “Mrs…” (that is if he addresses her at all) and Em is always “Mr. Ambassador.”  Though apparently devoted to his mother, he is anything but cozy. Still, Solitaire respects him.  His “hands-on” examinations are exceedingly thorough:  he washes his hands fastidiously for the minimal two (or is it three?) minutes, dries them, then examines the patient’s eyes, ears, mouth, abdomen, lungs, liver and lights, reflexes, etcetera, with fingers that are extraordinarily sensitive and adroit, not to mention free of all known and unknown bacteria.  When he is finished, he once again washes and dries his hands rigorously.

After meeting with his cancer board, Dr. Adair takes his patient off dexamethasone and prescribes a course of thalidomide.  As everyone knows, this is the drug that, when used for morning sickness by pregnant mothers, caused heart-wrenching deformities in babies, but has now been found to be highly effective in curing certain diseases.  The medication is dispatched by a  pharmaceutical company once a month by post, which for some reason hugely reduces the price, but before they will send it the company insists that the patient sign an oath stating he will not become pregnant.  This amuses Em no end.

Despite neuropathy (numbness and tingling) of the hands and feet and a fatigue that verges on the catatonic, the drug works so successfully at reducing Em’s cancer cells that at the end of several months he is deemed a likely candidate for an autolagous stem-cell transplant, meaning that he will be his own stem-cell donor. 

The procedure takes roughly two months.  During this time Em is hospitalized and given booster shots to increase the potency and number of his healthy stem cells, after which the cells are harvested, separated centrifugally, and saved, his entire system blitzed with a lethal chemo-cocktail that nearly kills him (and does, in fact, kill some patients) and when he is delirious and nearly dead, re-injected with his own invigorated cancer-free stem-cells.  This is a brief and very simplistic account of a procedure that is, in fact, indescribably complex. The machine itself is no less than astonishing:  attached to the body at bedside, it removes the blood through one port, whirls it around visibly in the centrifuge, then replaces it through another port.

There follows a long, dicey period of recovery, during which time they rent, at staggering expense, (it is the high season in Arizona),  a condo in a newly-built, gated community near the hospital in Paradise Valley.  Occasionally, Solitaire spots a car (black with black filmed windows) gliding through the gates and into a garage, but she never sees an actual person and concludes that the cars are driven by zombies.

At last, in March, they are allowed to go home.  They arrive at their house in Tubac in the late afternoon; Solitaire puts Em to bed and takes the dogs for a walk.  She looks at the surrounding mountains, the Santa Ritas and Tumacacoris, at the dusty olive trees and palo verdes, listens to the call of the quail and the  white-wing doves, and cries for joy.  

Em's numbers plummet and he is now pronounced “in partial remission”.  He seems fine:  strong and robust, though still somewhat puffy from the drugs. Friends say he looks like Kojak; his granddaughter Belinda says his bald head is “cool.”  In June, they go east, to Washington and Boston for consultations and Em remains strong.

Two months later, however, his numbers start to creep back up; this is disheartening to say the least because an autologous stem-cell transplant is a one-off procedure.  A cancer patient only has a limited number of useable stem cells and rarely are there enough for an encore.  When they're gone, they're gone forever.  Adair says he will have to put Em back on drugs.  Nevertheless, when they ask him if they can take a little pre-drug holiday, he readily assents.

“Certainly!” he says.  “Why not?”  Why not, indeed?

They make a weeklong trial run – a four-hour drive to San Carlos, a fishing village on the Sea of Cortez.   Em, who has never displayed disease-related symptoms but only drug-related ones, now has numerous reactions to drug deprivation.  His blood pressure rises alarmingly and a corresponding rise in fluid retention causes his appendages to swell.  His feet are pudgy and pink, his bloated hands look like bunches of bananas.  His anxiety is palpable.  He keeps asking Solitaire to take his blood pressure, which hovers like a hot air balloon around 180/90.  What to do?  “I think I should lie down,” Em says. 

“Definitely not!  You should walk – the best thing is to keep the blood pumping.  Also, no salt.  No chips.  And NO margaritas.”

In fact, neither of them has a clue what they should do.  They just keep taking his blood pressure, his pulse, his temperature.   The next morning they decide to go back to the Mayo Clinic.  They head north from Sonora, Solitaire driving, as she always does now, while Em tries to elevate his long legs and feet on the dashboard.  Dr. Adair examines Em’s swollen extremities, then gives him a prescription for Lasix, a diuretic, and says to go ahead and travel.  Why not?

The trial run to Sonora, however, has narrowed their options.  No car trips to exotic beaches with dodgy medical care.  No long airplane flights, no crowded airports with stressful security checks and pat-downs.  Also, no journeys fraught with potential delays and missed connections due to inclement weather.   In sum, no stress.   Ha-ha. 

   

Solitaire has a premonition, not unwarranted, that this may well be their last trip.  She calls a travel agent, who immediately suggests a cruise.  Solitaire recoils.  She and Em love ships, but it is crossings they like.  Together and separately, they have made passages on every sort of sea-going vessel:

Derelict river boat

Sailing ship

Rusted freighter

Troop ship
                                 

Naval destroyer

Departing troop ship 

Inter-island steamship

.

Queen Mary

But not cruise ships.  Nevertheless, when the travel agent
 comes up with a terrific last-minute deal on a Princess cruise going from Los Angeles to Honolulu and back, she decides to take it.  It seems to solve all the problems.  No airports, no bacteria-bearing airplanes, no packing and unpacking; an easy drive to the west coast.  No stress.  Ha-ha.

In Tucson, they rent a car and drive to Palm Springs, listening en route to a recording of Point to Point Navigation, a late-life memoir by Gore Vidal.

 His weary recounting of the sad descent towards death, a downhill road marked by the usual grim milestones and harrowing switchbacks of old age – the ailments and terminations of friends and lovers, the closing of his glorious cliff-top palazzo in Ravello, the move back to the U.S. –  make for several hours of depressing listening.

Ou sont les neiges and all that ...


How well she remembers meeting Vidal one wintry evening at a
literary gathering in New York.  She is twenty-four and new to

the city; he is in his mid-thirties and impossibly sophisticated.  She thinks                
him the handsomest, wittiest, most charming, glamorous man in the world,
which he is.

"You do know that he's queer?" her escort asks in happy anticipation
of her reaction.

"No!" she gasps.  "Queer?"


"As a coot."

 

Well, so what?  He's still dazzling.  And, secretly, she doesn't believe it anyway.

During dinner at Ichiban, one of those Japanese knife-throwing restaurants in Palm Springs, Em makes scratchy little throat-clearing noises that often signal post-nasal drip and the onset of a cold, but when Solitaire questions him he replies briskly that he “feels fine, just fine.”  As they head out of town early the next morning, the royal palms cast long skinny shadows on the brush-cut lawns and the light shimmers in the sun-baked air.  Em has stopped clearing his throat and everything does indeed seem “fine, just fine.”  Solitaire is singing,

    “Oh we’re goin’ to a huki-lau,

     a huki, huki, huki, huki, huki-lau

      Everybody loves a huki-lau…

                                          Da-de-dum-da-de-dum-de-da-dum-de-dum…

                                          We cast our nets out into the sea

                                          And all the ama-ama come a-swimmin’ to me,

                                          Oh we’re goin’ to a … "

       

It is not until they reach L.A. shortly after noon that things begin to deteriorate.  Princess has put them up overnight at the Airport Marriott, a caravansary situated amid the terrifying maze of stacks, ramps, abutments, cloverleafs, overpasses, underpasses and flying buttresses that constitute the zany engineering marvel of Interstate 405, aka the San Diego freeway.

 Em is the default navigator despite the fact that, as noted earlier, he suffers from acute DDD – Direction Deficit Disorder. (Em, who was in the Air Force during the Korean War, once told Solitaire that he had very nearly joined the Army’s Officer Candidate School when he was in college and ever since then she has had a recurrent nightmare of Em leading a company of men over a hill somewhere in the wintry wastes of the Yalu River, shouting “Follow me, men!” at which point mayhem ensues and the company winds up in Pyongyang.)

Alas, his driving skills are even worse.  He is the sort of driver who has not been behind the wheel two minutes when his eyes take on a contemplative glaze and he begins to ponder the strategic long-range political ramifications of US China policy in the Thirties on the old school Washington Cold Warriors whose thinking shaped our policies in the post-war era and propelled us ineluctably into the Vietnam War.  As he drifts meditatively over into the fast lane, maddened drivers careen past, shouting obscenities and giving him the finger.

So Solitaire is driving and Em is (sort of) navigating.  By the time they have missed the same exit ramp for the fifth time and gone north when they should have gone south, Em, who is never angrier than when he has erred, has a serious case of road rage which he is venting at Solitaire.  She in turn feels so furiously victimized that when at last they arrive, purely by accident, at the hotel she vaults out of the car, elbows the startled bellman in the sternum, makes an end run through a crowded lobby heaving with repulsive, scantily-clad bodies belonging, she suspects, to fellow passengers aboard the Island Princess, and ducks into the ladies’ loo where she hides for the next hour, doing 4-7-8 yoga breathing and “down-dog,”occasionally splashing her face with cold water.

Down-dog

When she finally gets to their room, Em, who would normally have recovered his good humor and be reading and drinking a beer, is lying on the bed, on his back.  She watches him for a moment.  He is breathing noisily, restlessly napping.  She sits down beside him and kisses him lightly on the forehead.  His brow is hot and he rolls away from her without opening his eyes.

“Sorry,” she says.

When Em and Solitaire first met in the early 70’s, the movie “Love Story” was in its heyday and the catch phrase of the time was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

“Rubbish,” said Solitaire.  “Love means wanting to say you’re sorry – and saying it damned quickly.”

 She knows he must be sick to be so irascible.  And what could be more horrible to contemplate than two weeks of incarceration in a small cabin at sea with a sick, irascible husband?  The very thought of it gives her a wracking headache.

“Let’s call it off,” she says.

“Not a chance.”

“Why not?   We’ve got trip insurance.”

“We cancelled France last summer and Venice over Christmas.  We’re not cancelling Hawaii.  So just forget it.  Besides,” he adds, “I don’t think I’m going to get it.”  The dreaded “It.”  To most people, “It” is just a cold, maybe the flu; to those with cancer, “It” is something of a far greater magnitude, possibly fatal.

She orders up a pot of tea and some sandwiches and they lie on the bed and watch “Little Miss Sunshine.”  The movie amuses them and makes them both feel better. Then they catch part of a documentary about a writer’s colony, probably Yaddo, she can’t remember now.

When it is over she makes the horrible mistake of calling her mother.  Lavinia informs her that she is out of urinary incontinence pads, baby-wipes and “pull-ups,” as though she expects Solitaire to chopper off the Marriott roof, zip over to Safeway and airdrop the goods onto the DZ of her mother’s carport in Green Valley Villages, Arizona.

  She is also, Lavinia says, “dangerously” low on Dewar’s scotch whisky (purchased weekly by the gallon), as well as Fritos and Kongs .  (Kongs are rubber dog toys filled with peanut butter.) This is Lavinia’s basic shopping list, which is another way of saying that the sum and substance of a life, after 96 years on earth, can be reduced to baby-wipes and whiskey.  And Kongs.    

“Are the Kongs for Lavinia or “Lucky?”  Em asks.

Solitaire stands at the hermetically sealed window looking down at the parking lot; the setting sun strikes the steel patchwork of cars squatting below her in their hideously glaring metallic colors.  She feels wretched, trapped.  She suspects that these huge high-rise hotels seal the windows in the conviction that their guests, mostly suicidally depressed self-defenestrators, will fling themselves from the 24^th floor, hurtling head-first onto a representative sampling of the Japanese car industry, splattering the paint jobs of all those marshmallow-white and gunmetal-blue Subaru behemoths with blood and guts and costing Marriott a bundle.  As a matter of fact, Em once sued the Marriott Corporation for gross negligence – and won!  But that, as they say, is another story.  

She wishes she were at Yaddo where casement windows compliantly opened and after breakfast each morning writers picked up their prepared lunch boxes and strolled off to their cottages where they spent the day pecking away at two-hundred pound Underwood typewriters or lay dreaming the hours away on their chaise longues until, along about mid-afternoon, they brewed themselves a pot of lapsang souchong, the only time they ever went near a stove, because the writers at Yaddo never had to cook and they never had to talk to their mothers, either, for the simple reason that there were no telephones and, come to think of it, no mothers.

All night Solitaire lies in bed listening to Em’s dry but ominously percussive cough backed up by the doleful hum of the air-conditioner.  In the morning she doesn’t have to ask him how he feels; she knows.  But she does anyway.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Rum,” he replies, looking miserable.  “I’m afraid I’ve got it.”  It…

“So,” she asks brightly, “shall we go home?”

“Absolutely not!”

Solitaire sighs.  Rarely has she felt such a sense of foreboding.  To alleviate her dread, she rolls out of bed and venturing a "sun-salutation," trips and tumbles.  A bad omen?  "Oh the hell with it," she says and goes for a "down-dog" instead.

Down-dog

                                                                   END -- PART I

 

10. LIGHT MY FIRE

"If," thought Solitaire, "I can just get through today, then the worst will be over and I shall be all right."

It is daybreak on Sunday morning, the twelfth of April.  Wispy grey curtains of rain swing north out of Mexico and blow across the Sonoran desert.  An unseasonably cold wind, more like February than April, is gusting, whipping up dust devils and clusters of acacia pollen.  Everyone in the Old Pueblo is sneezing, wheezing, dabbing at their eyes, and blowing their noses.  

"Aviva is up and brewing a pot of coffee, but not without the faint whiff of condescension common to the coffee cognoscenti of Seattle.  The two women put on windbreakers and take the dogs out.  To the left of the front door a large hole has been dug and Em's tree stands in it uncertainly, teetering slightly, its  fronds quivering nervously in the wind.  The dogs climb down into the pit, christen the tree, and clamber out.

Zach and his two girls, Lily and Marsha, drive up in their SUV, the interior of which looks, with its mashed juice cartons, gummy bears, Kit Kat wrappers, stray socks, hairbands and last week's classroom "art" smeared with turquoise bubblegum ice cream, pink sprinkles and ketchup, like the inside of a dumpster.

Em’s eldest son, Zach, a good looking fellow who will be fifty on his next birthday, has lately taken to wearing khaki cargo shorts and billowy Hawaiian shirts as though he were about to spin a south seas tale for his shipmates on the fo’c’sle, though his silvery mesh running shoes with the orange day-glo laces are somewhat at odds with his Outcast-of-the-Islands image.  The “Aloha” shirts, which he apparently buys by the gross on e-bay have been embellished with patch pockets, (obligingly custom-sewn by his poker pal, Jenny, a former flower child who learned her trade in a sweat shop in the Haight), in which he carries a half-dozen ballpoint pens the better to network potential poker clients.

“You’re not planning to dress like this for the service, are you?” Solitaire asks edgily.

Zach raises his eyebrows.   “Is there a problem?” 

Like many men in the southwest, Zach’s body is trim except for his gut which he carries before him as though it were a balloon spinnaker about to bear him aloft in a high following wind.  At the moment he is standing flat-footed in a quasi-passive-aggressive stance, a huge yellow hibiscus stretched taut across his belly and several coco-shell buttons tugging combatively at the fabric like puppies with a pull-toy.

Solitaire starts to respond in kind, then reconsiders.  “No problem.”  Zach grins.  Round #1 to him.  She gestures toward the girls.  “What about those ragamuffins?”

“You’ll have to discuss it with them.  I don’t get involved in their fashion choices.”  The girls are five and seven.

Well, did you bring some clothes for them to change into?”

“I told you – I have no idea.”  He walks over to the van, extracts what appear to be some items of wearing apparel, and heads toward the house.

 Aviva and the girls, meanwhile, have taken the dogs for a walk and return just as Nestor the landscaper arrives.

Zach, who emerges from the house after Nestor has cut the sacking from the root ball and wrestled the tree more securely into the soil, is now turned out in chinos, a long-sleeved light blue Oxford shirt of Em’s, and loafers.  High fashion for Tucson.  Like his father, he doesn’t know one end of a spade from the other  (unless it’s a playing card, of course) but that doesn’t prevent him from telling Marsha how to wield a shovel.

A cold drizzle begins to fall.  The air is scented with wet dust and wildflowers.

 Each person takes a quick turn at the shovel, tips in a spade full of dirt, then rushes inside, leaving the rest of the job to Nestor.

The girls sit in the kitchen, shivering over a cup of cocoa, then change into their spangled spandex party dresses and sequined sneakers.  Solitaire thinks back, way back, to her own demurely smocked organdy frocks and patent leather maryjanes.

Everyone is busy.  Around noon, Em's younger son, Benjamin, arrives with his longtime Korean girlfriend, Kiki.  The daughter of a prestigious mathematician in Seoul, Kiki fulfills the family potential by playing tournament poker at various casinos "on the rez" and peddling diamond jewelry to other players on the side.  Everyone’s got a culinary specialty and Kiki’s is a colossal lemon meringue graham cracker crust pie from the Village Inn. 

 Friends, about a dozen, come with assorted food and flowers. Solitaire makes a vague attempt to find platters and vases.  Standing in the middle of the dining room, aimlessly opening and closing cabinet doors, she greets her guests in a quizzical manner that suggests they have come on the wrong day, or, alternatively, that she has never seen them before.  

Aviva, who is setting up a buffet table, puts an arm around Solitaire’s shoulder and leads her out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the sun shines; the big pepper tree sparkles with raindrops.

There is a slight hubbub as a shockingly beautiful young woman slips obtrusively between the guests and, dashing for cover under a market umbrella, huddles in its protective shade.

“OMG!” she gasps.  “What’s with this sun?”  This is Belinda, Benjamin’s 23-year-old daughter.   Like her peers, she texts, twitters, tweets and Twilights.  Although not unintelligent, she does not speak in complete compound sentences.  (So what?  Neither did George Bush.)  On the other hand, she is, as they say, so jaw-droppingly gorgeous that if she spoke not a word in any language no one would notice.  In fact, they might prefer it.  In Belinda’s mouth, words seem superfluous, a distracting irritant like spitballs.

Solitaire remembers Belinda as a sweet, sun-tanned little jock who loved to swim all day and throw frisbees for the dogs at her parents’ ranch.  What happened to that little girl?  The sun, great ball of life-sustaining fire, became her enemy.  An apostle for cosmetology, Belinda believes that if her alabaster calves and marmoreal décolletage were to be grazed by a ray of wrinkle-inducing sun she would implode in flames, collapsing in on herself like a White Dwarf;

her velvety brown eyes would grow dim, the luscious scarlet lips blister, her lustrous mane of black hair turn to dandruff and dust.  But here’s the sad rub about Belinda:  this wondrous gift, this miraculous marriage of nature and artifice, is a gift that seems to cause more pain than pleasure; it’s called “Lost Youth” and no one quite knows what to do with it.

Only Solitaire’s mother, Lavinia, once a great beauty herself, seems immune to the numbing aura of unease that Belinda’s beauty engenders.  Now 98, permanently imprisoned in her wheelchair, she lives, as though pre-embalmed, in a realm of eternal hauteur located in a film star stratosphere somewhere between the late Ethel Barrymore and Dame Maggie Smith.

Em, who occasionally grew weary of being press-ganged into his role as reluctant courtier to his very own Queen Mum-in-law, swore that he had actually seen Lavinia languidly raise her forearm, slowly revolve her hand, and give him the Windsor Wave.  Of course, she has also been seen to flip him the Bird, which shows a certain nonagenarian versatility on her part.

Needless to say, Lavinia regards Em’s male progeny as “common” and they in turn  regard her as “bitchy.”  (And that’s putting it nicely.)  So much for familial solace and harmony.

Aviva and Solitaire have prepared a kind of altar-of-remembrance in the library, a selected retrospective of Em memorabilia that includes family snapshots , clippings, photos with heads-of-state and presidents past, published poetry, articles, books, and now, his obituary.   Guests mosey through, gazing and schmoozing, and after making the requisite number of respectful noises they troop into the sitting room, perching on sofas and chairs around the black maw of the fireplace, and Solitaire can’t escape the obvious comparison between this ancient symbol of “hearth and home” and the image of that other fireplace (a recent model of crematorium is actually called a “Hot Hearth”) in Wally’s charnel house across town.

Aviva leads the service (hardly kosher, but who cares?  Not so very long ago she wouldn’t even have been allowed to attend the service, let alone lead it.)  It is sweet, eclectic, somewhat awkward.  A pinch of this, a dash of that.  A little Eliot, a bit of Bach.  A sonnet, a Psalm, a cantata, an elegy, Kaddish, a candle.  The End. 

Much of it is stiffly read, as though they were standing up at a highschool recitation.  Em , who loved the theatre and had done some Shakespeare with Paul Mazursky at Brooklyn College, (his first role, in “Othello,” was as Lodovico, a Venetian nobleman, who, at the very end of the play, utters the immortal line, “Oh bloody period!” thereby cracking up legions of undergraduates) was given to the rueful observation that our parents’ generation was the last American generation to read aloud or to routinely memorize and recite poetry.  What schoolgirl had not read from Willa Cather or recited Amy Lowell’s “Renaissance;” what youth had not known  “Gunga Din” or “The Highwayman?” or some stanzas of “Hiawatha?”  

“By the shores of Gitche Gumee,” runs idly through Solitaire’s mind, “by the shining Big-Sea-Water… dwelt a miner and his daughter, sandals were for –“  Oh for pete’s sake, that’s not it, she’s really losing it…    

And who is she to be critical, anyway?  While others gamely stand up and give it a go, she sits like a stone, not daring to open her mouth to so much as whisper lest her face shatter like a dropped teapot.  Instead, she sits on the sofa, stunned, calcified, bat-ears straining to hear – is it from the netherworld or from just across town? – Em’s well-remembered voice.  If only he were here!  How splendidly he would recite these selections!  With what depth of understanding, with what resonance and elegance of expression!   

            Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar

            Binot deshe yarbitseini,

            Al mei minuhot

            Ynahhateini …

               The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

              He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he

             Leadeth me beside the still waters…

But Em is not there.  He is not there, where he ought to be, because he is in a queue of two or three corpses waiting in plastic-lined particle-board boxes (called “chippies” in the trade) to be “charged” (inserted) on a motorized trolley into a “retort” (a propane-fired industrial furnace lined with heat-resistant refractory bricks) where, at temperatures ranging from 1600-1800° F and in a time span of  less than two hours, her husband’s limbs, flesh, organs – heart, genitals, brain – will be, no, not burned but dissolved, oxidized … vaporized into the atmosphere.

 But wait – not so fast!  Two-thirds of the way through the process, whatever remains of the incinerated corpse is turned, “repositioned,” as Wally puts it, which makes Em sound either like a cruise ship, or an evenly-roasted side of beef.  Solitaire is assiduous in her questioning and Wally forthcoming in his answers, sketching rudimentary graphs and graphics, diagrams of out-take valves, burner placement, and percentages of gaseous compounds.  He points out, thoughtfully, that having two gas burners in the main chamber and an entry burner prevent your body from smoking like a wet log and, moreover, that such terrific heat is guaranteed to re-ignite you if your fire goes out.  But when he gets to the part about the repositioning, he pauses uncomfortably.

“So,” Solitaire insists, “what is it that’s left at that point?”

“Well… the skeleton, mostly.  But sometimes there’s a bit of … other stuff."

"Stuff?"

"You know, this and that.”

This and that.  “Oh God!” Solitaire groans, thinking of this fiery prison, this hermetic chamber of horrors.  “Couldn’t it be done outside?  Don’t you have some sort of crematory garden?”

“Certainly not.”

“We could take him down to the ranch,” Solitaire says.  “We’ve got an old sunken –“ she is about to say “barbeque “ but thinks better of it and substitutes “fire pit” instead.  “The new owners wouldn’t mind and no one else would know.”

“Are you kidding?  It’s totally illegal.  I’d lose my license.”

“I can’t bear it!  It’s all so hideously claustrophobic.”

 “Oh no,” Wally protests.  “There’s a nice little peephole in the retort.  You can even watch the burning if you’d like.  And now we have dual exterior and interior shut-off heat switches, so you can turn the heat off from --"

"You mean ... in case he changes his mind?"

"... plus you can open the door from inside the cremator… 

“In case he’s not dead?”

“Of course he’ll be dead.  He is dead.  And frankly, if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think claustrophobia’s going to be an issue with your husband at that point.”

 

By the time they reach the Kaddish, Solitaire is on the verge of somnolence, a state induced partly by the sing-song sound of the ancient Aramaic chant:

           

            Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash shmay ra’bbo, bolmo dee’vro           

            chir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say, b’chayayhon…

               

            May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified,

            Throughout the world, which he has created according to his will...

Her mind strays back to the death of Em’s father, Ezra.  A gentle man who loved music, (“Never underestimate Mozart!” he exhorted Em), he had a powerful torso, strong features and a great leonine head of iron grey hair.  An emigre from Minsk and a sewing machine operator in the Garment District for most of his working life, Ezra walked to his job each morning with his sewing machine slung over his shoulder. 

Em’s mother, who was bi-polar, and his father had long been divorced and it was Ezra’s second wife, Edith, who arranged the service at a temple in the Bronx.  Em and Solitaire, who were in Washington between assignments, drove up in a rental car on a sweltering mid-summer day and the moment they entered the temple Solitaire felt as though she had been transported to another country and that, moreover, her husband had become a complete stranger.   Normally so cool and controlled, he gave vent to a wild dithyrhambic display of grief, wringing his hands and sobbing, chest heaving and tears coursing down his cheeks.   So accustomed was she to the funereal Wasp stiff upper lip that she was astounded, even embarrassed.  She looked around apprehensively at the other mourners and was surprised to see that not a few of them were weeping copiously as well.  They drove to the grave site in a cortege from the funeral home and Em and Solitaire found themselves riding in the same limo with Norma, Em’s former wife.  It was the first encounter between the two women and Solitaire could hardly blame the divorced wife (aka “Victim”) for a certain display of overt hostility towards the new wife (aka “Home-wrecker”). 

To this day, Solitaire can feel the atmosphere crackling inside the limo.  Edith and Em were in the back seat, Norma in the passenger’s seat, and Solitaire on the jump seat, her face a few scant inches from Norma’s nose whenever Norma turned around, which was often because she and Em were having a horrific, ear-singeing argument about their son Zach.  Then a sophomore at a highschool in the Bronx, he had, it transpired, just been accused of selling pot to his classmates.  Em’s reaction was one of disbelief, anger and outrage, all vividly expressed, while at the same time still spasmodically sobbing and groaning and venting his grief for his father.  Solitaire, meanwhile, had her own priorities, which did not include being dissed.  No one, least of all Em, had bothered to introduce Solitaire and Norma to each other and Solitaire finally found this incivility intolerable.

“Excuse me,” she said the next time Norma’s nose swiveled in her direction, “I’d like to introduce myself –“ But that was as far as she got because Norma bored two holes in Solitaire’s head and looking through them, spoke directly to Em.

“I’m sending Zach to live with you in Moscow,” she announced.  Fortunately, the Fates had other plans, but it was a long time before the hackles lay back down on Solitaire’s neck.

Em said Kaddish for Ezra for eleven months and as far as Solitaire knows, he prayed for his father’s soul every day up unto the day of his own death.

9. HOW IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS?

When Solitaire first encounters this provocative question, a question posed not just once but four times during the Passover Seder, she is instantly electrified by its portentous but mysteriously elusive meaning.  She has been thinking about it ever since.

THE SEDER

Em’s daughter, Aviva, his eldest child, arrives on Thursday, three days after Em’s death.  Solitaire wishes she had come sooner, but Wednesday is Passover and Aviva and her husband, David, both practicing Jews, wish, naturally, to spend the Seder together in Seattle with their two sons. 

Solitaire, too, has a Seder, but it is a very different affair altogether.  In the first place, those present at this dinner – a small gaggle of goyim and non-observant Jews (Em’s sons) – have only the most elementary notion of what to do or eat or say or sing, let alone how to say or sing it in Hebrew, because the paterfamilias, the only knowledgeable Jew in the Tucson branch of Em’s family – namely Em – is now dead.

Em described himself as spiritual but non-religious.  Still, one of his grandfathers had been a Rabbi and both his parents were Russian-Jewish emigrees from stetls in Minsk.  Em had attended Yeshiva in Flatbush, where his mother taught Hebrew.  So he certainly knew the rituals and the language but failed to pass much of it on to his children, a dereliction he acknowledged, but half-heartedly defended.  Where, in a place like Djakarta, he asked, would he find a Rabbi to teach Zach the Hebrew responses with which to make his Bar Mitzvah?  Later, however, he admitted it was lack of conviction, not location, that had deterred him from his paternal duty, a malaise based on an aversion to rules, especially those founded on what he deemed false or outdated premises.    Any form of extremism, especially religiosity, he said, gave him the shudders.

But who does not love Passover?

It is the quintessential Great Escape drama, the nail-biter that has everything:  the unseen but all-powerful Yaweh;  the towering prophet, despotic pharaoh; enslaved Israelites; ten plagues – frogs, blood; boils, lice, locusts, hail, sick cattle, wild beasts, darkness and, finally and most horrendously, the murder of every firstborn child in the land, except for the Israelites whose houses, marked with a bloody X, are “passed over.”

Plague of blood 

As though this weren’t enough, as the song “Dayenu” says, we have Moses (who looks amazingly like Charlton Heston) parting the Red Sea,

drowning Pharaoh’s army, leading his people safely across the Sinai for forty years, keeping them alive on manna,

and keeping them from killing each other with ten rules of social etiquette that preceded Emily Post by over two millennia.



Any feast that celebrates these events had better be worthy of the name – and it is!  The fact that each guest is supposed to quaff four goblets of Manischevitz wine in a “reclining” position adds an undeniable existential edge to the proceedings --actually, anyone who can drink Manischevitz in any position is at risk – though of course, these days, people are far more likely to be reclining with a high-priced, big-bodied cab or Pinot Noir or who knows what or whom.   

Finally, that the hero of the evening should turn out to be a large unleavened, unsalted, tasteless  cracker called a matzah is a stroke of genius that makes this charming and moving celebration truly irresistible.

Solitaire remembers the previous Passover; Em, seriously ill by that time, nevertheless leads the Seder, singing in his weak but still melodious baritone, reading from the Haggadah in fluent Hebrew. 

            “Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam borei pri hagafen…”

       (Blessed are Thou, Adonai our God, Creator of the Universe, Creator of the     Fruit of the Vine…)

It is the muscular, musical language that Em so loves.

    “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.”

   Zach’s little girls, Lily and Marsha, are wearing their best dresses with pink sashes and their dark eyes are alight with excitement.  Lily finds the Afikoman (a matzah halved and hidden); Marsha, the youngest, reads the answers to the question, "How is this night different from all other nights?"  Solitaire is as let down as ever by the responses, which sound to her as illuminating as a grocery list.
            On all other nights we may eat chametz and matzah, but on this night, only  matzah.

            On all other nights we eat many vegetables, but on this night, only maror.

On all other nights we don’t dip even once, but on this night, we dip once.

On all other nights we eat and drink sitting up or reclining, but on this night, we all recline.

It is a warm night. The dining room windows are open and they can hear the sounds of the palms and the small Laotian temple bells Solitaire and Em acquired on a long-ago visit to Vientiane.  When the children open the door for Elijah the candles flicker in the wind, the flames wavering in the reflection of six silver goblets on the sideboard until, at last, they gutter and go out, and Em, exhausted, goes to bed.

Rising unsteadily on atrophied legs, he proclaims:

“L’Shana Ha’Ba-a B’yerushalayim!”

Next year in Jerusalem!  Perhaps it is true.  Who can say?  Everyone at this table knows that Em’s chair will be empty next year.  Everyone except Em.  And Solitaire.

If that was a sad Seder, this one is disastrous.  No one feels like going through with it, but they do anyway, mostly for the sake of the girls.  By dint of  The 30 Minute Seder, which Solitaire has either uploaded or downloaded from the Internet, they manage to muddle through the evening, but joylessly.

AVIVA

The moment Aviva arrives, Solitaire feels better.  She has an air of calm assurance and generosity of spirit that act as a balm on Solitaire’s troubled soul.  Tall and strong-boned with fair coloring, she has a warm smile and exuberant ash-blonde curls that she vainly attempts to tame with clips and scarves and various sorts of elasticized hair bands. She is a published poet, book critic, and a born organizer.  When Aviva and her family come to visit, she plans their daily itineraries, scheduling every minute as though this were the official visit of a congressional delegation.   Solitaire does not mind.  She sees this as a combination of diplomat's daughter and elder-sister syndrome,  as well as the tactic of a woman who takes seriously the responsibility of steering three large, energetic, willful men through life.  She is a Jewish mother in the best sense of the word.

THE TREE OF UNDYING LOVE

The family has decided to plant a tree for Em.  At a nursery on the eastern edge of town, they drive in a large golf cart past flats of marigolds and periwinkles – the few annuals that will survive the Tucson summer-- through prickly allees of barrel cactus and jumping cholla, gnarly coils of night-blooming cereus, past perfumed acres of candy-colored roses with names like “Peace” and “Tiffany” and “Barbra Streisand” (?), then strike deep into the herbaceous hinterlands, through root-balled and gunny-sacked groves of grapefruit and tangerines, purple shrubs of mountain laurel and Texas Rangers, until at last they reach the trees – dusty gums and ash, mesquite and acacias, peppers and jacarandas, cypress and willow and, yes, here it is – a weeping myrtle, the tree of Aphrodite and an ancient Greek symbol, so Solitaire has read, of eternal love. 

Solitaire has seen these myrtles on the University campus, where they have an impressive collection of old specimen trees.  An Austro-Asian exotic, it towers over its smaller bushier cousin, the bottle brush, its long fronds, tipped with whorls of scarlet flowers, trailing to the ground.  Em’s children buy it as a gift and arrange to have it delivered the following morning.  The tree man drags the myrtle out into the path and ties a “Sold” sign on it.  A gusty wind kicks up as they are leaving; Solitaire looks back as they jolt off in the cart and sees the tree, isolated from its brethren and standing alone, its long fronds drooping, swinging disconsolately in the eddying dust.

THE HEAVENLY HEIGHTS REVISITED

On the way home Aviva and Solitaire stop at the mortuary to say goodbye to Em.

As they pull up in front, Solitaire recalls a joke she heard on the radio about a sign outside the Agnostics’ Funeral Home which reads:  “Remains to be seen.” 

Wriggles and Mrs. Wriggles are not in evidence, but Wally is expecting them and leads them to a small antechamber off the conference room where Em is waiting for them.   A scarlet blanket is pulled up to the third button of his blue shirt and his arms are folded across his chest.  She would like to know if Em’s nether half is naked beneath the blanket (she still worries that he is cold), but is too timid to ask. 

Em may be just another corpse on a gurney, but to Solitaire he looks like the statue of a knight on a catafalque.  He is beautiful, his aspect youthful, his skin taut, his brow smooth, unworried.  Solitaire knows, because Wally has told her, that unless there is to be a “viewing,” the deceased are not embalmed before burning.  So if it is not embalming fluid or Botox that plumps up his veins and fleshes out his cheeks, then what is it?  Death?  The absence of care,  surcease of pain, the flight of the soul?  Or is it merely the miracle of gravity? 

Aviva bids farewell to her father.  In the final days of his life, she telephoned each evening to read him a poem.  “Goodbye, Daddy,” she says and kisses him on the forehead.  From a chair across the room, Solitaire watches this small tableau.  In profile, Em’s head is like that on a Roman coin.

Then it is her turn.  She bends down to him; his eyelids seem sealed shut – thank God!  Were they not, she would be tempted to look beneath those lids and what she might glimpse there is too terrifying to contemplate.  Close up, she sees that the purplish hematoma on his temple (acquired in hospital when he was dropped on his head by an inept aide) has been cosmeticized and lightly powdered.  His hair is neatly cut and brushed, his mustache trimmed; his cheeks, clean-shaven, are smooth as a baby’s bum.  With tentative fingers, she starts to stroke his cheek, and recoils.  Look at me, he seems to say, but not too closely ... and for God’s sake, don’t touch!  His skin is damp and unresilient with a jaundiced pallor like a pale cheddar overlaid on marble. When she kisses his lips for the last time, they are waxen and oh, so cold.

MELODY and MOJO

It is nearly five o’clock when Solitaire and Aviva return home on that April afternoon; the wind has abated; the late spring air is balmy and the white oleanders and blue plumbago bend in the breeze.  A neighbor, a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties, comes wheeling down her driveway on a bicycle, holding a sturdy, barrel-chested brown dog on a lead.  With a cheery wave, she steps on the pedal and rides off down the street, the dog trotting purposefully along beside her.  What a picture they make!  The girl, so glowing with refulgent good health, cheeks rosy, the short sleeves of her sun dress slipping off her golden shoulders, the skirt gathered up into her lap, exposing a length of calf and sandaled foot, her blonde hair billowing back beneath a wide brimmed straw hat from whose crown a red grosgrain ribbon floats gaily out behind her like a pennant from a spar.

 How Solitaire envies her!  So young, so vibrant, so full of life!  And she, Solitaire, so bereft, so drained, so sated with sickness and death.  How she yearns at that moment to be twenty-five again; to have the chance, with Em, to live life over and to do it right this time; to have life’s promise, with its myriad divergent roads, traveled and untraveled, lying all before them.  How glorious to contemplate!  How splendid!  She is nearly sick with envy of this girl.

But things are rarely what they seem.  As events are later related to her, the young woman, Melody, and her dog, Mojo, have scarcely rounded the corner and disappeared from Solitaire’s view when they encounter an elderly woman and her aged maltese, Carlito, making their way cautiously along the sidewalk.  Mojo, who proves to be not only sturdy and purposeful, but supremely strong and aggressive, wrenches out of his collar, leaps on the maltese and, lifting him in his jaws, mauls him to the point of death.

He is on the verge of breaking Carlito’s neck when Melody succeeds in collaring her dog – a pit bull/boxer mix, as it turns out -- and, jumping back on her bike, drags him up the street.   Well, okay; she has taken the only course open to her at that point, which is to get her dog out of the way – and then, of course, to return to the scene of the mugging and do whatever she can to rectify the situation.  The problem is that Melody does not return, not then or ever. The tale quickly makes its way round Solitaire’s small neighborhood – how Mrs. O’Reilly was left to deal with Carlito, hanging like a bloodied rag in the arms of his mistress, and how a fortuitous passerby drove them to a veterinary clinic where, dozens of stitches and thousands of dollars later, Carlito is patched together and miraculously survives.  A happy ending.  But when Mrs. O’Reilly, encouraged by the neighbors, arrives at Melody’s door to appraise her of the outcome and cost of her dog’s actions, she comes face to face with Melody’s husband (“or whatever”) who tells her to “clear off!”  Intimidated, Mrs. O’Reilly immediately backs down, refusing to press charges or even report the incident.

Solitaire’s heart goes out to the old lady and her little dog.  Still, it must be conceded that oral history is notoriously dodgy and maybe this story, passed along second or third hand, possibly losing or gaining ground with each telling, is in itself false or faulty, or at least unreliable.  Who can say?  Perception is all and, in the long run, perhaps the facts do not matter.

In Solitaire’s inner eye, nothing can ever deface her initial vision of the young beauty and her noble dog … “for ever panting, for ever young.” Like the maidens loth and lovers bold on Keats’s Grecian urn, they will remain as youthfully emblematic as when she first saw them -- forever innocent, forever beautiful, forever cycling, round and round against a cloudless sky, a sky as blue as Em’s shirt, on that perfect April afternoon.

                        “When old age shall this generation waste,

                              Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

                         Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

                        ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

                              Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”           

POSTSCRIPT

Solitaire is still thinking about the Seder question:  "How is this night different from all other nights?"

She is sure there must be more to this than meets the eye.  At last, she decides this is a form of Zen Judaism and that the question is in fact a kind of koan – deceptively simple and deeply profound.  She is, however, no closer to the answer.