The Beautiful Anthology (9 page)

After dinner, we walked together down the road to another building where there was going to be a reading. Our conversation from the dinner table had continued. In the middle of this, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped, put his hand on my forearm, and said, “My god! I hadn’t seen what a big, beautiful nose you have!”

“You think my nose is big?” I asked.

“It wasn’t apparent when we were looking straight at each other at the table, but here it is!”

“Here
my big nose
is?”

“Yes! And it’s beautiful!” He seemed genuinely excited, as if he’d found enormous bouncy breasts under a sweatshirt, or tumbling hair beneath a baseball cap. I vowed right then to buy every single one of his books even if I had no intention of ever reading them.

6. If you watched the show Six Feet Under, you know that every episode started with a death. They were wonderful deaths, sometimes funny, not always sad, usually fascinating. In one episode, a group of middle-aged women are getting ready to walk into something, maybe a movie or a concert. One of them gets a nosebleed. She sends her friends in ahead of her and stands on the sidewalk trying to abate the flow. And then she collapses. In the next scene, we learn that she had died from a massive blood clot due to a long-ago nose job. The fact that one can later die from a nose job was a thrilling discovery for me – forget being brave like Barbra, or bold like obese people who wear bikinis on the beach; I was saving my own life by living with this nose!

7. There are very few Big Nose Role Models in the world. There’s Sarah Jessica Parker (I’ve been told many times that I remind people of her but have never pushed the issue enough to find out if it’s the nose), Sofia Coppola (I was thrilled when she was in the Marc Jacobs ads), and … who? Name one. Find one. The list dwindles each year. Ashlee Simpson had what the famous writer would call a “big, beautiful nose!” and had it fixed. Ditto Jennifer Grey. Even Cameron Diaz, Gisele Bündchen, Megan Fox, and Jennifer Aniston, who weren’t even Big Nose Role Models, had what little they were born with reduced.

8. This essay would be much more appealing, correct in the feminist landscape, and mature, even, if I told you that I have accepted my nose, I love my nose, I worship The Nose! Instead, sadly, I must tell you my recurring fantasy: I’m hit by a car, or I’m in a building that explodes, or maybe I’m in a plane crash, and my nose is smashed.
It is essential that I get a nose job!
Also, the fat on my arms and thighs has somehow been blown away (the stitches leave no scars!) and my split ends are burned off. It’s all terrifying! Horrifying! Dramatic! But in the end, I look cute enough for the likes of Paul B.

QUENBY MOONE

THE QUIET LIGHT

I sat by my father’s bed. If there was one place in the house I was often sitting, it was there, next to him. Holding his hand, reading to him, listening to him reminisce about how still, after all these years, he hated his mother, or that he loved his grandmother, or that the light was fading.

This was sometimes metaphoric; Dad’s light was fading, the last embers cooling, as were his hands, his circulation now committed to keeping what remained of his vital organs ticking, with the consequence of deathly cold fingers and feet. Even the tip of his nose was cold, although that might be a feature of our family, since my nose is often cold, as well. I don’t read much into it, anyway. Sometimes the fading light was literal, my father lying in his living room, waiting for his last hours to unwind with the ebbs and flows of day turning to night and back again. There was little else that changed there from his vantage point; stillness enveloped our days, punctuated by visits by hospice workers, or strange mortalitydriven crises, and then back again into the tides of changing light.

This light might not be enough for some people. This light might be too slow in its ascents and descents: The coolness of morning summer dawn, shedding blue ripples through the curtains before spectrum changes of orange and pink, arcing up through the trees and over flowers, creeping along the vinca and lavender, sprays of crocosmia, touching spots of dusty earth and moving into the cracks of sidewalks, tipping farther north in the sky. Tinting and warming where it falls, the windows through which my father gazed, where my father lay, looking out into his garden with eyes that could no longer see.

But the light was enough for him.

My father, as the artist Charles Moone, spent his life looking at light as it fell across the water, as it trickled through the trees, as it revealed mysteries of skin on top of fabric in a life-drawing class, exposing the knob of an ankle or hiding the shape of an eye under a brow; this was Dad’s natural realm, and he was quite at home with the slow changes of light, including his own.

If one has never been a witness to death and dying, like I hadn’t, it seems we do nothing but fear its aspect. How do people die? Is it grisly? Gruesome? Painful? Is it slow, fast, horrible? Shocking and surprising? Eerily mundane?

It is all these things. What I hadn’t counted on was its beauty.

There were so many things I didn’t know when my father was given word that his time was up. We had worked through his cancer diagnosis for a year, but it was a zero-sum game: The cancer was bigger than any medical intervention.

I knew that hospice was something people had as they died; what it was or what took place during hospice care was completely mysterious. So when I was given the names of agencies to call, I didn’t know what was on offer.

It turns out that hospice is a lot more, and a lot less, than I imagined. Their involvement was imperative but, in the big scheme, limited. Two nurse visits a week, unless there was an emergency. On-call access to medical care twenty-four hours a day; they even dropped off nausea medication at 1 a.m. when my father couldn’t take his morphine because of a crummy tummy.

A physical therapist arrived to show my brother and me how to move Dad around in bed without throwing a disk; she came once a week to help us learn how to wrap a belt around Dad and plunk him on the loo, until it became clear that he would actually never leave bed again. And his personal aide, Ric, was perhaps the most important piece of the hospice puzzle and possibly the least romantic: Ric came twice a week to bathe Dad, swaddle him in new sheets, buff him up, trim his nails, comb his hair – what was left, anyway. Ric was, for us, a cheerleader when my brother and I were completely at sea; he told us raunchy jokes (presumably not usually a part of hospice service but imperative in our case) and encouraged us to believe that we were doing the right things at the right times. Ric was heroic to our very small universe.

But that was it: A total of four or five guaranteed visits a week from hospice workers. Emergencies were of course attended to, but if there was no emergency, then no visit. My brother and I were Dad’s only caregivers.

This left us with a lot of time.

Dad looked through his windows in his last days with eyes trained to see by years of teaching others how to see. An art historian and professor for over thirty years, his vision was tempered by light, could see the absence of it. Objects are meaningless without both, and so he saw both with clarity. Light and shadow were tangible to Dad, things that created shape out of nothingness.

At the end of his life, Dad’s eyesight became dim. His sight began to retreat into uselessness just like his circulation. But because he was trained to see light, when light was the only thing that remained, it still moved him. He traced lines in his sheets, which had become blurry, but his mind, still sharp despite all that befell him, created paintings with what light was left. He traced pictures there, like a child creating elephants out of clouds. “I see you there,” he said one day. I couldn’t; it was for him only.

My father watched from his window as the light tipped south; Dad was bedridden from mid-July, and by August, as his light was dipping, the light outside was sinking, as well. He noted this. He wanted to make it through the summer and the warmth of direct sun, but not longer. He didn’t want to be without light in the cold, long dark of Portland winter.

His eyes, with rings around them, still twinkled with impish delight at jokes we would tell. In midsummer, the sun was too far north to cross onto his bed by the window, but by August it began to creep forth across his sheets, splitting his body into islands of light and dark. The light fell over divots in his skin, his shin bones, his sheets.

His glasses, thick, ponderous, cumbersome, were now useless to Dad and so they were abandoned to his bedside table. I hadn’t seen my father without his glasses since I was a child; his face came forward, broke through the illness and suffering. I found the younger man from other days: strong cheekbones, arched brow, devilish smile. His beard, stark white, growing fuller with neither of his helpers (my brother and I) clever enough to master the task of trimming it, made him regal in aspect, a goodly King Charles lying in his chamber waiting for his end in peaceful repose.

My father’s hazel eyes turned cerulean, like the eyes of newborns; I thought I was making it up, that maybe his eyes had always been blue and I had made a mistake. His eyes became fogenshrouded wells that saw only the light and hints of shape but no form. My mother asked, “Did his eyes turn blue?” and I was relieved. I couldn’t believe I would have made up a basic fact like that. My father’s eyes turned as blue as the ocean, shades of twilight.

I sat by my father’s bed, shadows and light filling in the hours through which we waited for his end. And when it came, the light was blue, day only hinted at in the barest needle of light peeking through his thin linen curtains, the outlines of trees and plants mere suggestions to be filled in at some other hour. The stillness of the hour and the light was one in which Dad was quite at home, painting them in deep purples and blues, echoed in dawns and dusks, the bookends to each day, hinting at wonder without revealing too much.

In these quiet hours, in this quiet light, Dad was at home.

STEVE SPARSHOTT

FIN

Hello. welcome to the gents.

The men’s room, restroom, bathroom, as we don’t call it. The toilet, loo, lavatory, bog, pisser, or trap, as we do. “We” are British.

The Gents
– this word is never apostrophised, for some reason.

It doesn’t smell good in the gents. As any woman who’s ever ventured in there will tell you, “It
stinks!”

Well, yes, it does. In the gents, body-temperature urine is sprayed onto a cold ceramic or metal surface, and then it evaporates, filling the air (and, consequently, your lungs) with microscopic piss particles. As the night progresses, the streams in the men’s room become more forceful, more expansive, and less accurate.

Oh dear, you might be thinking. A British male talking about public lavatories; this must be yet another tale of a misunderstood homosexual aesthete plying his trade in the gents lav under Hyde Park Corner. I don’t actually know if there is, or has ever been, a public toilet under Hyde Park Corner, although there’s an underground car park there, which I’m sure is in regular use as a
pissoir.
If an indoor car park were to be built in the shape of a racetrack, or completely circular, in the absence of corners would men still mark their territory? On a Friday night, would there be drunk blokes running round and round, trying to find somewhere to relieve themselves?

Traditionally, Hampstead Heath’s the place to go for a bit of no-strings, boy-on-boy action. “Cottaging,” it’s also called. Toilet trading.

Just as every graphic designer is expected to have a favourite font, product designers are sometimes asked to name small, everyday objects that excite them. Paperclips are popular. You know key rings, or, rather, the steel loop that coils round on itself twice, the bit you wriggle and slide the keys onto? Those are good, too, and the design is actually unregistered; nobody knows who invented them. The simplest, most functional items have the most fans; my favourite’s the ball clasp or kiss lock: the beautifully simple latch mechanism on a purse, in which two brass balls slide round each other. I don’t want to sound like Insane Clown Posse, but when you think about it, zips are pretty amazing, too.