we stared at each other at the end. He had been sitting straight up when I came in the room but now, very slightly he slumped to the left in his chair. Leto had gone to ring 911. “Can you hear me?” I asked him. “I know you can see me.” Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, “So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.” In my general state of confusion I was oddly comforted that in death he was in perfect easy character much as he would have been that evening if he had lived to sing “New York,” the song the people in Ravello often begged him to sing fortissimo.
Jim Carney who works for us at times kept me company while the newly arrived team from 911 hurled him onto the wood floor time and again. If he’d had a spark of life, all that pummeling would have extinguished it. When they finally finished, I thought they were going to take him to whatever hospital they had come from, so I said, “Could you take him instead to Cedars-Sinai, that’s his regular hospital.” One of the medics said, “He’s not going to a hospital, he’s going to the mortuary.”
Then Jim and I were left with Howard on the floor between us covered by a sheet, black socks on his feet. Leto wept. I envied him—the WASP glacier had closed over my head. It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away. During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks. I would not see him in any corporal form again until the ashes at Rock Creek Cemetery.
But, curiously, last night I finally saw him clearly in a dream—a frustration dream. We were in a side street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been but was nowhere to be found. Yet everything else was as it should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?
SEVENTEEN
Just as I decided that I was done with obituaries the Pope and Saul Bellow die. The mourning for the Pope seems weirdly irreal. Much is made of the conversions that he is given credit for on the African continent where his stern prohibition of contraceptives has crowded the Catholic heaven with African angels. Meanwhile the media in the United States, as always off the mark, treats him rather the way they did Marlon Brando, another superstar who was also never, as they say, not on.
If Thomas Jefferson had found nothing at all useful in grief, I found it weirdly energizing. Certainly, the aftermath of a death in today’s United States brings one into contact with all sorts of strangers: lawyers, accountants, morticians, insurance claimants, not to mention old friends in their thinning ranks and new acquaintances in their thickening ones.
Although I have played parts in a number of films I was never an actual actor and so, except for a school performance of
The Comedy of Errors
, I had never acted on a stage anywhere until some New York producers offered me the lead in
Trumbo
, a play based on the letters of the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The producers were rotating the part of Trumbo among a number of actors ranging from Richard Dreyfuss to Nathan Lane. After the storm of bureaucratic activity in the wake of Howard’s death, all I could think of was flight, in every sense. Work of any kind had always been my best refuge. Why not appear onstage for a week or two at the Westside Theater? I could never memorize in youth but
Trumbo
is a series
Jim Carney who works for us at times kept me company while the newly arrived team from 911 hurled him onto the wood floor time and again. If he’d had a spark of life, all that pummeling would have extinguished it. When they finally finished, I thought they were going to take him to whatever hospital they had come from, so I said, “Could you take him instead to Cedars-Sinai, that’s his regular hospital.” One of the medics said, “He’s not going to a hospital, he’s going to the mortuary.”
Then Jim and I were left with Howard on the floor between us covered by a sheet, black socks on his feet. Leto wept. I envied him—the WASP glacier had closed over my head. It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away. During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks. I would not see him in any corporal form again until the ashes at Rock Creek Cemetery.
But, curiously, last night I finally saw him clearly in a dream—a frustration dream. We were in a side street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been but was nowhere to be found. Yet everything else was as it should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?
SEVENTEEN
Just as I decided that I was done with obituaries the Pope and Saul Bellow die. The mourning for the Pope seems weirdly irreal. Much is made of the conversions that he is given credit for on the African continent where his stern prohibition of contraceptives has crowded the Catholic heaven with African angels. Meanwhile the media in the United States, as always off the mark, treats him rather the way they did Marlon Brando, another superstar who was also never, as they say, not on.
If Thomas Jefferson had found nothing at all useful in grief, I found it weirdly energizing. Certainly, the aftermath of a death in today’s United States brings one into contact with all sorts of strangers: lawyers, accountants, morticians, insurance claimants, not to mention old friends in their thinning ranks and new acquaintances in their thickening ones.
Although I have played parts in a number of films I was never an actual actor and so, except for a school performance of
The Comedy of Errors
, I had never acted on a stage anywhere until some New York producers offered me the lead in
Trumbo
, a play based on the letters of the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The producers were rotating the part of Trumbo among a number of actors ranging from Richard Dreyfuss to Nathan Lane. After the storm of bureaucratic activity in the wake of Howard’s death, all I could think of was flight, in every sense. Work of any kind had always been my best refuge. Why not appear onstage for a week or two at the Westside Theater? I could never memorize in youth but
Trumbo
is a series
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