A Goodbye, At Least

By now, you may think all my memories involve the past century, the people who lived their lives there. But you know I’ve lived in your century, too, and in the first decade after the turn of the millennium, I met and married two women, one your mother and one other before her, Paula, thanks to whom I almost became a father more than once, years prior to becoming a father to you.

There was a time Paula was the center of my existence. Later she was its bane. Still later, I wished I could forget her. Any longer, I only fear she’ll be forgotten. Like almost everyone I’ve ever known, she lived a mostly quiet, minor life, far from the big events of history, and if the great and gory traumas of her time moved her, and they did, deeply, they shaped her only indirectly. But still she held her tragedy.

Within her own life, Paula was, like most of us, an emotional self-hypocrite, full of the very same contradictions and confusions that she frequently mocked or denied. She cared a great deal about her image and appearance, often telling me mournfully as we traversed our early forties what an awful thing it was to slowly age out of one’s beauty. (I invariably replied that I wouldn’t know, to which wisecrack she would respond tartly, “Exactly! You have no idea what it’s like.”) 

When I first met Paula, she was a smart, hardworking, and effervescent flight attendant who was impulsively kind to strangers, who inhaled serious novels and “cozy” murder mysteries, who shopped at thrift stores and garage sales almost exclusively, who’d been through a divorce and a recent bankruptcy, who'd been a public radio DJ, who'd lived in China and spoke Mandarin, who wanted badly to become a mother, and who nevertheless confided in me that one of her secret dreams was to one day be, or at least be perceived to be, “a real thin, rich bitch.” Despite that sort of fantasy, she frequently announced quite fervently that she didn’t give a fig for what anyone thought of her, that appearances were false currency. And she believed in all those things.

One of my more vivid memories from those early days with her is of leaving a restaurant where we’d dined with some casual acquaintances. Paula excused herself to go to the women’s room, and when she returned she was trailing a tail of toilet tissue. I didn’t notice it as we said our cheerful good byes, and if anyone else did, they didn’t say anything, but when we left the restaurant to cross the street, Paula was prancing happily in front of me. I told her she had a new appendage, but when she realized what it was, she only lifted it gaily and draped it like a shawl around her as she reached the farther sidewalk. Then she held it aloft as if she were an Olympian ribbon dancer and twirled it to the nearest trash bin, waving at the wide-eyed passing traffic as she went. 

When I caught up to her, she told me, a little breathlessly, “Who cares? By tomorrow morning people who saw me tonight with toilet paper hanging out of my skirt will start forgetting, and in a hundred years no one will know that I even existed, much less that I once publicly waved toilet paper around!” Every time since then that I’ve seen someone jut a chin and declare, “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me!”, I think of Paula dancing down the street with her streamer, passionately caring and uncaring simultaneously, and I wonder if anyone does remember that scene, other than me.

It was one of my little complicities in Paula’s eventual downfall that I enjoyed her company especially when she was like that, when she was just a little tipsy. She was always dramatic and funny; tipsy she was even more fun. Later, however, I had ample occasion to try to keep her company when she’d gotten well and truly drunk. Nights out were more and more dramatic but no longer so funny then, and they were certainly no longer fun.

In between lay the quartet of years in which we attempted pregnancies. In what seemed like a cruel irony to me, Paula got pregnant easily, especially for a woman in her forties, but the fetuses never turned out healthy. Somewhere in there, she began to despair.

After we gave up trying, after the last pregnancy ended in a neonatal fatal trisomy when we were forty-three, Paula accelerated her gradual descent. When someone’s on the way down thanks to addictions, their personality changes and it becomes increasingly difficult to know whether a particular illness, rage, or delirium is purely chemically induced, a sign of encroaching mental illness, or the coevolution of both. Increasingly, it doesn’t really matter what the answer is. The last two years of Paula’s existence veered wildly between happiness, affection, darkness, and madness.

I can remember one miserably long night near the end of our time together that I spent crouched on the floor by her side of the bed in the dark, watching the lights of the LDS Temple come on outside our downtown Salt Lake condo’s windows, listening to her mutter, curse, and accuse me, her mother, her sisters, her friends, everyone she knew of secretly hating her and wishing her dead, while I held her trembling hand, waiting for her to sleep. Finally dawn arrived, and Paula started snoring gently as the Temple lights blinked back out again.

Our last year under the same roof, Paula branched out in her quest for pharmaceuticals, building a list of doctors that she rotated through monthly, even weekly, with new complaints, a bee visiting reliable flowers. She had prescriptions for sleeping, for waking, for calming, for pain. The contraindications on the labels meant nothing. She joked she was Rasputin, that no combination of pills could take her down. And all the time, she drank. She was financially better off than she’d ever been, and she was thin, oh she was thin. Hair dyed red and stylishly cut, eyes angry as a hawk’s, she had reached the stage she’d once cheerfully, drolly fantasized. She projected “rich, thin bitch” wherever she went, and she was beginning to die of it. 

She worked a flight on Valentine’s Day, 2007. I had sent roses to her hotel room that morning, and she reported to me that during the flight she’d delightedly distributed them around the cabin to anyone who looked down, a touch worthy of her old self. When she got back to her base in Chicago that night, she called me terrified because she couldn’t remember where she’d parked her car. After I’d talked her calm and helped her locate it, she unwisely drove it to her "crash pad," god knows at how much risk. That same night she fell into her bathroom sink and injured her elbow. The next day she flew home to me in Salt Lake. She took a handful of pills as soon as she got home and fell into bed, but the next day I woke to find her staggering around the condo, cursing about her mother. She grabbed a butcher knife and threatened to cut her own neck. When I approached her, asking for the knife, she leaped toward me, threatening to cut my neck instead. Then she dropped the knife on the floor, disappeared into the bedroom for a few minutes, and reemerged in her uniform with her roll-on case. She wasn’t working that day but she stalked out the door, wobbling, and was gone.

We never spent a night in the same place again. I tried contacting Paula’s therapist for help, but no help came. I filed for divorce a week after she disappeared. For the next year, she dropped in and out of my existence. Her sisters would report an intervention in Houston when she showed up there, a rehab in Chicago, another in Baltimore. She left the airline. She hired an expensive lawyer then fired her. One time I stepped into an elevator in our building to find her crouched in the corner. She hopped out at the next floor and disappeared again. Almost a year after the incident with the knife, she showed up in Salt Lake City for an appointment with a divorce mediator. After the meeting, during which Paula sobbed uncontrollably without saying a thing, the mediator asked me privately not to go home that night as she’d overheard Paula talking to herself, making threats on my life. I went home anyway. Paula did leave a slurred and spooky message on my answering machine, but I never saw her again.

A month later, the divorce papers still unsigned, she died in a hospital in Indiana. A neighbor had found her unconscious on the floor of her apartment. Apparently she’d medicated a perforated stomach ulcer with a colossal drinking binge and septicemia had set in.

The sister who lived nearest there reached the hospital in time to get me on the phone and then hold her phone up to comatose Paula’s ear. What could I say to her as she was drifting away? I quoted a line we’d once promised to repeat if either was ever in danger of forgetting the other, from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

“Meet me in Montauk,” I said. Two hours later, she was dead. And right now as I write this, I wonder why I’m writing it. What am I trying to remember? Why include these memories, and just these, not others from a life lived for six often happy years with her, except, I guess, to consider how without that life and death, you would have never later been? Is that enough reason to write about her to you at all, if I'm not going to write enough? 

There are hinge moments, I suppose. The night that Paula died, her sister's frantic phone calls reached my cell while I happened to be at a movie with your mother, who back then was a friend I barely knew. I went outside to take the call, and your mother came out a few minutes later and drove me home. A couple of days after that, there were condolences and flowers at my doorstep from her, and a couple of weeks later we met to talk about what had happened to Paula and what was happening with your mother and her first husband, Brad. We ended up discussing Robert Frost's poem "The Sound of the Trees" and the carious landscape of mining ghost towns in the American West, including the town of Ophir in which your mother was conceived. You were far, far from inevitable yet, but you could say that you were already on the breeze. Not quite three years later, you finally landed.

That carved crabapple, Frost himself once said, "Everything I know about life can be summed up in three words: it goes on." But in a hundred years, she will have still existed, the woman who danced down the street with a ribbon of toilet paper, who handed out roses to strangers, carefree and caring simultaneously, even if no one then remembers.