Diary of the Past Three Months

White Poodle by domat33f

I needed to write something. It was all I could think about. It’s like that at times, an urge, almost animalistic. My thinking starts to feel disorganized and messy. I need to put the pieces in place to understand what’s there. Sometimes I feel vaporous, immaterial; only when I start to type do I coalesce into a solid. My imagination is fueled by observations, eavesdropped bits of conversation, anecdotes from friends, sights I see out in the world. Unfortunately, I’d been in Las Vegas with bronchitis for more than two months—plagued by a hacking, discombobulating cough that prevented me from eating or talking—and hadn’t been able to see anyone or do much of anything because whenever I opened my mouth I would cough.

In the afternoons, when I grew restless and bored of my monotonous sick-perch on the couch, I’d walk downtown from my apartment to Fremont Street: past the ever-proliferating graffiti, over the putrid puddles of vomit, into the acrid stench of urine and spilled beer. (No matter how awful I felt, I got in 6,000 steps.) At one point, I told my husband I was thinking of writing about the homeless people I observed and engaged with on my regular walks. “No,” he said, “That’s too depressing. It’s the holidays. It’s Thanksgiving.” Meanwhile, the homeless man who lives in the alley behind my Las Vegas apartment building had put up a folding screen in front of his encampment.  Its three panels were covered with golden maize-colored fabric. “Home décor,” one of my neighbors quipped when he saw it. I had to admit it improved the place aesthetically but it also obscured whatever was happening on the mattress behind it, which I suppose was the point. One weekday morning, as I walked to the management office to drop off my rent check, I saw three women lurch forth from behind the screen, dazed, their centers of gravity unstable. They were high, obviously, but on what I couldn’t tell. Sometimes there are telltale signs of what’s affecting a person—motions that are frenetic or languid, words coming slurry or fast—but staggering around was obscure. Ok, perhaps this subject was too depressing.

But what should I write about? My never-ending cough? I coughed at night, after cold drinks, whenever I ate or inhaled too much air. I coughed to the point of choking, which felt enfeebling and embarrassing. I once read that women die by choking more often than men, because we get self-conscious and worried about distressing other people, and we go to the bathroom so as not to choke in front of anyone. Maybe that’s apocryphal—I tried to verify it and couldn’t—but it feels true. It happened to me in my early twenties, while dining with friends at a gourmet Mexican restaurant in New York City. I ate a ghost pepper that was on the plate for tantalizing, decorative purposes—it was part of the waiter’s shtick to performatively warn about it—and ended up in the bathroom gasping for air as this pepper of death seared what felt like third-degree burns all the way down my esophagus. My main concern was that I couldn’t bear choking in front of my friends, who were howling with laugher, like fools in their twenties, as I flailed around. By the time I’d locked myself in the tiny restroom stall, I was convinced that I might die. In Japan, I’ve read, hundreds of people expire every year by choking on mochi. How dark is that? Apparently, the sticky, gelatinous dessert seals itself around a person’s airways. In 2001, a woman in northern Japan saved her elderly father’s life by using a vacuum cleaner hose to suck a glob of mochi from his throat.

By the time I started writing this piece, I’d been coughing for a sixth of the year. It had been an odd year, one of disillusionment in my personal relationships, with friends and colleagues peeling off as if by some cosmic force. Every time the powers that be—the media, the establishment, the government industrial complex, call them what you will—picked up the metaphorical snow globe and shook it once again, bonds that had formed were severed, and unlikely alliances found themselves once again at odds. People were also acting out in desperate, anxious, grabby ways. I no longer trusted anyone. I felt vaguely seasick, as off-balance and disoriented as those drugged-up women careening around in the alley behind my apartment.

My husband and I flew to New York. The city is normally a place of great inspiration for me. As soon as I land, my heart starts beating in pleasant overstimulation. You overhear bizarre snatches of conversation there, have a ringside seat to the glorious human circus. We often stay at an old French-themed hotel off Madison Avenue, and I love observing the rich going about their eccentric uptown business. I once saw a man as old as time dressed in a dark three-piece suit; he was out for a walk with a servant on each arm, like some elegant boulevardier from a nineteenth-century novel. Another time, I spotted a woman in head-to-toe black designer clothing being dragged along by a pair of enormous, fluffy, snow-white poodles. In that city of dirt and grime, grooming them had to be a full-time job.

One of the more fascinating aspects of New York, at least to my mind, is that it is a city of people with intense, unpredictable obsessions—like keeping gigantic twin poodles pristinely clean. A few years ago, while faxing a work document at a Kinko’s in Midtown, I saw an odd, twitchy man photocopying multiple handwritten letters scrawled on notebook paper with frayed spiral edges; he was pulling them, one after another after another, out of a cheap purple suitcase, a magician yanking scarves from a hat. I leaned in to look, and saw, with a startled electric-shock feeling at the creepiness I was witnessing, that every single one of the letters was addressed to Taylor Swift. Oh, how I loved New York, where the wealthy, beautiful, benignly kooky, and frighteningly deranged converge!

But on this trip, I was overcome by a persistent melancholy. Everywhere we went, memories of my younger self seemed to push through the cracks of my current reality. The present felt overlaid on the past so lightly that traces of my former existence remained visible. There, as we walked through Murray Hill, was the sad pink cinder-block apartment with the frosted, dimpled 70s glass where I had lived with my college boyfriend. Here, on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, was the office of the tropical disease specialist who had cured the parasite I’d caught at a writer’s workshop in Belize, and where I’d spent so much time that I’d become a kind of unofficial mascot of the practice, with the receptionist inquiring after my romantic life and a sweet man who was the office factotum driving me back to work in his dinged-up old Volvo. I understood now, in my forties, why Gore Vidal had called his memoir, which he published at age 70, Palimpsest. When I read it in my twenties, the title made sense to me intellectually (I recall looking up the word) but was not borne out by my experience.

We went to visit my stepson, now a young man in his early twenties, and recently graduated from college. He was living in a small, airless, but remarkably tidy apartment he shared with two other large boys in the East Village. Seeing it, I was instantly transported back to all the cramped, dark, claustrophobic New York apartments I’d lived in, where I had spent all my time reading novels and bawling, over what I can’t recall. I remembered without fondness the Midtown sublet located above a Subway sandwich shop; the whole place reeked of the sweet, yeasty aroma of that particular bread baking—I still get nauseated any time I smell it. Across the street from that apartment were the Bloomingdale’s loading docks, where the beeping sounds of trucks braking and backing up began every morning at 5am. I also thought about the Upper East Side studio with one wall composed entirely of mirrors; a friend said it looked like a Chinese restaurant. And another in the East Village on Thirteenth Street: this one had large, lovely windows I covered with white paper I’d purchased at Dick Blick Art Supply because I was young and working all hours and could not manage to figure out curtains. When my soigné mother visited from Chicago and saw the papered over windows, she said the apartment looked like a mental asylum.

East Village, New York City, by Vincent Desjardins

One night after dinner with my stepson, my husband and I walked past that Thirteenth Street studio. There, I lived above my friend Catherine; we spent many nights running up and down the stairwell to each other’s apartments, bringing food or medicine or moral support. A few blocks down, on Seventh Street, was the dive bar where I had my first date with my photographer boyfriend, lied absurdly about my age (I was 23, said I was 27), and fell in love. There was the little public school on the corner where I waited in line for hours to vote for the first time as an adult. And the deli where I walked in on a holdup, then, on a split-second instinct, turned around and walked out. I felt like Wallace Shawn at the end of My Dinner With Andre, when he takes a cab home and the ghosts of his past selves and lives are present in every storefront he passes.

“Maybe you have Seasonal Affective Disorder,” my husband ventured solicitously, when I told him I was feeling pensive and nostalgic. He suffers from it himself. We spend winters seeking out sunlamps, tanning beds, and sunny vacations, so that he doesn’t wilt by early February. “It’s possible,” I shrugged. I have long been melancholic at the end of the year, when the days grow short and our bodies want to hibernate, yet we are going to parties where we get amped up on sugar and alcohol, plus vibrating with anxiety about the turning over of the calendar year. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I am over it, ready to assess the past 11 or so months—the numerous mistakes and, if lucky, the handful of triumphs—and then get in an Epsom salt bath and call it quits until January. One late-fall weekend during college, alone in my dorm and at a post-breakup personal low, I typed out a ten-page letter to myself, detailing everything I wanted to change in the coming year. A ten-page letter came so easily to me then, I thought now. I still didn’t have a piece to write.

I decided to get my hair cut. A fabulous haircut, like a steaming cup of diner coffee or a long, contemplative walk, can solve all your problems in the moment, however temporary the reprieve. I made an appointment online with a hairdresser I had been following on Instagram. In the austere matcha place across from her Soho hair salon, where I sat for a bit because I had arrived early to my appointment, I began fretting that I might start coughing uncontrollably as the hairstylist hovered near my head, grossed out, holding her scissors aloft. From my purse, I pulled a bottle of Robitussin I’d been toting around with me and took a couple of swigs. The discerning matcha-drinkers ordering their oat-milk lattes without sweetener surely thought I was some sort of low-life drug guzzler. I didn’t care; the idea of expectorating on the hairdresser was worse.

I have terrible anxiety about getting my hair cut, but the cough syrup assuaged that, too. Because of this phobia, I will go a year, sometimes more, without getting a trim. I once went seventeen months, so long my husband joked I looked like a pioneer woman who had just undone her bun. Call me neurotic, call me a control freak, but the fact is I’ve been on the receiving end of too many hideous haircuts to count. Some years ago, at the now-defunct Avon Salon and Spa at Trump Tower in New York City, I paid three hundred dollars for 90s-era Jennifer Aniston stacked, shelf-like layers. When, at my tearful request, the stylist sheared them off, I was left with a short, puffy, mushroom-hairdo that make me look like a newscaster or politician. But this time, I needn’t have worried: the stylist, in addition to being darling—blond, sparkly as a sequin, and fun to talk to—was also an artist of hair. I left in a swirl of sexy layers.

We went to a dinner party with friends. Not surprisingly, my haircut had not solved my overarching problem. At a French restaurant somewhere on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, my heinous, croupy cough continued to torture me. As we sat down, I felt a tickle in my throat, the telltale sign of that volcanic bark threatening to erupt, so I asked the waitress for a glass of water. I was terrified of hacking on a colleague’s elegant, rather regal wife, who was seated across from me. Why does a cough feel so humiliatingly déclassé? I tried to express to the waitress that I really did need some sort of liquid as quickly as she could manage it. “I only just put the order in,” she snipped, a cloud of annoyance passing over her face.

“She thinks I’m being too demanding,” I said to the friends seated around me, my voice straining with the effort of trying not to cough. I joked that an old boyfriend had nicknamed me “Demanda.”

One of my dinner companions gave me a quizzical look. “You don’t seem demanding,” he said, “You seem Midwestern with a touch of OCD.”

Later that night, back at the French-themed hotel, I replayed the comment for my husband, marveling that someone I didn’t know all that well could tell that I tended toward obsessive-compulsive. “It takes roughly five interactions with you to realize this,” my husband said. I laughed, because it was true. “Ok,” I said, waiting a beat until it felt appropriate to change the subject, “Any ideas as to what I should write about?”

On the flight home, the man across the aisle from me on the plane snored like a buzzsaw. It’s the end of the year, I thought, maybe he’s just exhausted, like I was, like everyone seemed to be. A few days earlier, during a group conference call I was on, one of the other participants had fallen asleep and began snoring thunderously; it took the call organizers ten minutes to figure out who it was. This plane-man’s rhythmic snuffling sounds were slightly more tolerable when I took a charitable view. With the ambient noise of his snoring in the background (at least no one would notice if I coughed), I tried to read a book, a novel about a woman, a wannabe artist, who invites a talented but irascible painter to come stay at her home; he ends up setting her placid life aflame. The book was very good, pretentious in just the way I like. 

As I read, I half-listened to a woman’s voice somewhere behind me tell her seat mate that she had just returned from Europe. Her boyfriend lives in Europe, she trilled again, in case her interlocutor had not heard the pivotal word. “Yur-ohpe,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth like a fancy hors d’oeuvre. For some reason, her pronunciation conjured for me an image of her sweeping a fur coat over her shoulders with a flourish. I noted that there is a type who loves to mention their travels to Europe: “I’m just back from Europe.” “My boyfriend just got a job in Europe.” “Did I mention we might move abroad—to Europe?” “Europe Europe Europe Europe Europe.”

Back in Las Vegas, as the end of the year unspooled, I continued to cough. I wrote a piece of journalism, did some reporting for my book, coughed some more. From my spot on the couch in my apartment, I could see the moon hanging low in the sky, like a full, pendulous breast. It was the darkest time of the year, and, if you were sensitive like I am, the membrane between this world and the next felt especially thin. Whenever I went online, I’d find myself encountering news reports and social media posts about people dying—friends of friends, relatives of friends, celebrities.

Were they dying of coughing? Not likely. But by now I was convinced that one could. All around me, I began to notice that others were hacking away, too. At a reading I attended, one of my first outings as soon as I could quell the eruptions with cough medicine for an hour at a time, the wife of a friend told me she’d had a cough for two months, and, because she was pregnant, couldn’t take any medicine. When I posted on social media that “One excellent weight-loss regimen is coughing for a month,” an old friend of my husband’s replied that he had also had the cough, and that it had been just awful for him. In one of my regular online doomscrolling sessions, I found a report of a mysterious “100-day cough.” I clicked on the article and learned this was another name for pertussis, or whooping cough. Could I possibly have pertussis?

Charred mattress by Amanda Fortini

On the seventieth day of my plague, my husband called me out to the alley at the back of our apartment building, where he was at the dumpster, taking out the garbage. The encampment was not just gone—the folding screen, the mattress, the blankets and collection of neglected, unidentifiable accoutrements that had been piled on it—it had been incinerated. All that was left was the blackened metal exoskeleton of the mattress, charred like a piece of barbecue left too long on a grill. Black soot from the blaze had clambered its way up the beige cinder-block wall that separated the whole setup from the house behind it. How had this happened, I wondered? Did the man living on the mattress accidentally set fire to it? It didn’t take a genius to imagine any number of scenarios in which that might have occurred. Or had someone in the neighborhood grown tired of looking at it, perhaps furious that they had to? My husband got a phone call and went back inside to take it, but I stood there for a long time, looking, rattled by the sight. My own worries seemed suddenly diminished. Late that night, reading my novel about art on the couch inside my apartment, I realized my cough had gone.