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SCAN
Lie flat,
comes the command,
from a voice unsinging;
the voice starts to weep
and I blow it kisses.
OCTOBER 27
Dear Max,
I have been thinking of you and sending you, or trying to send you, powerful wishes of healing.
I loved your poems. You have such an ear, such a mind, such a beautiful singing ear and intellect. Thank you for the gift of them.
I am terribly terribly sorry about what seems to be the news of the artifacts. I am assuming that the fact that you emailed yesterday means that you are out of surgery. That is a comfort, and I hope you are resting and recuperating from the invasion.
I want you to write in any way that makes sense to you this semester.
Max, is there anything I can do to help? Happy to visit the hospital if you’re up for visitors, or do you need books or distractions? Or if there’s anything I can do for your mom while she is in New York during the hurricane?
We are all rooting for you,
Sarah
OCTOBER 29
Sarah,
I can’t tell you how much your note means to me.
I am in my room at home—tomorrow, assuming the hurricane doesn’t box me in, I will be back in Sloan’s to receive the protocol. I will be penned up there for two or three weeks. Then hopefully the treatment can be transferred to New Haven.
It would be great if you’re in New York anyway if you visited at the hospital. That would mean a lot to me. Bring me a book and inscribe it! Reading is good. Writing is about all I have.
Today was mostly breathing exercises and limping and coming off of the opiates, as well as the transfer to home. Strange dreams with lots of focus on skin texture. My uncle has flown in from Israel—he gave me some acupuncture, which unblocked a very preverbal chunk of fear and rage—I felt like I was a prophet channeling my tumor.
Max
That fall I was knee deep in rehearsal for a play of mine called Dear Elizabeth, an adaptation I wrote of the letters between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, that premiered at Yale Repertory Theater. It is strange now to reflect that just as I met Max, I was thinking keenly about the friendship between two writers, expressed through their letters. Bishop and Lowell found in each other’s minds a cure for a solitude particular to writers. When I read their letters for the first time, I found their friendship moving, and desperately wanted to hear their letters out loud. It had not been an easy play to write—I was trying to write while one child was vomiting, one child was screaming, and one child was imploring me to read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle out loud. At the time, my twins—Hope and William—were two years old and my big girl—Anna—was five.
And that was the state of affairs when I met Max; motherhood and writing had me feeling underwater much of the time. Meanwhile, Hurricane Sandy hit, rehearsals for my play were canceled for a week, no trains were running between New York and New Haven. I found myself stuck in New York at the same time Max was stuck at the hospital.
OCTOBER 30
Dear Max,
It certainly feels odd in New York. Thank God you’re uptown and were not at NYU. You must feel a little like Job stuck in the hospital during a hurricane. Like come on, what gives? And a hurricane too?
I want to come see you and probably can’t get to see you until the subways are more under control. Maybe this weekend if you are still in hospital then?
In the meantime, I’m supposed to be in rehearsals in New Haven for my play Dear Elizabeth and instead am madly baking at home (luckily we have power) and creating apartment-wide scavenger hunts to entertain the children.
I will try to think of some books that might entertain you.
Sending all good thoughts,
Sarah
NOVEMBER 4
Sarah!
I miss you, and the class. Seeing you this weekend would be wonderful. My mornings are spent in the hospital getting chemo drip and then I’m released to my apartment in the afternoons. It would probably be nice to spare you the childhood chemo ward (which is horrific) and the least functional part of my day, and see you in the afternoon.
I’m midway through the first run of chemo. The side effects seem to be accumulating, but I can talk and walk a little bit, and think clearly if with a marked slowing of pace. I’ll send you some of my writing.
I am so lucky to feel your warmth and concern. You are such a specific helpfulness in my life. Don’t know what I’d do without you.
Max
I visited Max after that surgery in New York, at his apartment on the Upper East Side, as soon as Hurricane Sandy allowed me to brave the subway. I brought noodle kugel and met his family. Max teased that though I was a Midwestern goy, my kugel passed his beautiful mother’s Israeli muster. Max was always good company, even post-surgery. I could tell he was furious if he wasn’t well enough to make the people around him laugh. If he was not well enough to make people laugh, he usually told friends not to come by.
I gave him Dear Elizabeth to read because he was wrestling with the ethics of quoting someone else’s letter in the play he was working on. I thought Max would enjoy reading Lowell and Bishop’s whopping fight about the ethics of Lowell using letters from his ex-wife in his book Dolphin.
Max was still very much my student—I gave him notes like “Put that speech in iambic pentameter.” “Bring in that scene rewritten with a twenty-five percent word reduction.” “Write a little song for that moment.” I would write him about a scene: “I love how specific and never arbitrary you are.” And he would write me about his hopes for a new scene: “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”
Max handed in his play at the end of the semester. It begins at an altar, and also features a scene in which a sick boy goes to get a new tattoo, but at the tattoo parlor, the tattoo artist is something of an analyst, and the boy and the tattoo artist speak in iambic pentameter. The boy says to the tattoo artist:
“So I have brought inside my little pouch, a little draft of a Hokusai crane.”
Max got a tattoo after every surgery. He wanted to make something beautiful out of something painful. They were all birds, modeled after different artists. One was a crane, inscribed on his head, inspired by the Japanese
