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David was
a hard-driving, constantly busy actor. Acting is a brutal profession
-- the work is high pressure, and the lack of work creates even
more pressure. David, however; seemed to thrive on the demands
of his career. A well-built man, he appeared fit and muscled;
he exercised regularly He played handball, squash, and tennis
and worked out at the gym lifting weights -- he never required
a stunt double. He was a veteran of more than 20 films, countless
television roles, and a distinguished stage career that brought
him regularly to Broadway and London. (At the time of his death,
he'd been flying back and forth between the miniseries in Seattle
and North Carolina, where he was a regular on Dawsons' Creek.)
He had been told there was no heart disease in his family
I was the
one with the family history of heart disease, the one with "symptoms."
In the months before David died, I woke sometimes at night,
my heart beating rapidly filled with anxiety Now I wondered,
Had I intuited something as David lay next to me in bed? Intuited
something about David's heart-and then internalized it? My friend
the renowned neuroscientist Dr. Antonio Damasio told me it is
possible that a sleeping person could register the irregular
heartbeat of a partner lying next to her -- the unconscious
brain could record and store an aberrant pattern of beats.
In the surge
of poems that began to flow weeks after David's death, I wrote:
...Something
woke me, night after night -- insistent,
reverberant -- a word
finally understood outside conjuncture:
heart. Instead of turning
to you, breathing next to me in the bed,
I put my hand on my own
chest, my
own pulse. I listened to the
hurried beats -- thought, afraid,
about the moving phrase of light on the
wall that I could not, at that time,
begin to decipher.
I'D
SENSED SOMETHING, IT WAS TRUE. Late at night I'd heard the word
heart as if a voice made of thunder, a strange below-the-surface
dream voice, were speaking it -- but I never thought it might
be David's heart that was failing. I put aside my night anxieties
and worked on my novel. I'd done research on cardiac death.
I'd even asked
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David,
who was a passionate, obsessed tennis player; about the possibility
of someone collapsing on the court in the way my character had.
He said it seemed plausible -- tennis is a truly exhausting
cardiovascular exercise. A cardiologist friend concurred: A
person with undiagnosed coronary artery disease could "irritate"
the heart with too strenuous exercise and precipitate arrhythmia.
So I gave my character Russell coronary heart disease -- an
essentially inoperable case, then let him add the deadly heart
speed and play his tennis game. And yet, despite all my research,
I remember thinking how unreal Russell's demise seemed to me,
how unlikely! My conscious mind denied what the unconscious
was telling it.
I spoke
to the physician who'd examined David for his pre-Rose Red
physical. She chirped on about his "low blood pressure" and
his "good, strong heartbeat." Then I recalled how I once leaned
against David's chest as we sat up in bed together reading,
then pulled away How rapidly how forcefully his heart seemed
to be beating, I said. He smiled his unforgettable smile and
pointed to his chest. "Strong heart," he said with a grin, "strong
heart."
No -- his
was not a strong heart, rather a heart so compromised that its
very defining function, the pumping of blood, was a struggle.
Why hadn't I thought more about that moment, considered why
a heart at rest was beating like that? I suppose because when
I looked at him worried, he laughed at me, brushing my fears
aside. But I believe that this fear resurfaced in a kind of
fictional equation. Art equaled life, and transformed the burden
of unconscious knowledge.
WHAT WE
DO WHEN WE WRITE REMAINS A MYSTERY. The imagination is a force,
a guidance system, an ungovernable power. It heats up a combination
of elements from life and from dreams -- with a flash of inspiration
-- and out of this furnace steps invention. We are so used to
news stories, firsthand accounts, eyewitness testimony -- what
we think of as the "authentic," it-really-happened like-this
reality But the imaginative process that produces poems and
narratives and novels (as well as the great transformational
style of stage acting my husband loved most) may bring to light
a deeper truth about our lives. This is what is so difficult
to explain.
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Somewhere
in my unconscious I interpreted the clues of my everyday life,
then the clues rose into that other dimension of imagining. We
cannot as writers not take in what we see. The clues themselves
are just details that strike us, stay with us -- a look on someone's
face, a shadow falling suddenly a moment of imbalance, a spoon
falling from a saucer. We cannot as writers turn away It is this
access to the unconscious that keeps charging the engine of creativity
Art says all we cannot say on this earth, all we are afraid to
acknowledge in our lives.
And what
a writer does is simply an intensification of what everyone
alive does. We all tell ourselves the story of our lives as
we go along. We all edit and reconstruct, denying what we can't
bear to acknowledge; we heighten what we wish to heighten, making
it work, making "sense" of the "facts," helping ourselves go
on. In telling our stories, we deny death, we defy death.
I think
back to 1981, to Florence -- the noon light pouring over us,
how we shook hands. What seemed so much like fate, I believe,
was sudden intuitive knowledge of another person -- and a sense
of where that knowledge would take me. Sometime before David's
death I began to know something unconsciously -- something unspoken,
something gathering force about him -- the fading I recognized
later in recent photographs. What I "knew" became what I imagined
--and what I imagined could not protect David or save him. The
person I knew and loved was not the person I made up in the
novel's pages. Perhaps, on one level, I believed that that wild,
invented, ungovernable character could alter the progression
of my husband's "disappearance." But art can't save us, it can
only "retell" us to ourselves: the pure narrative light of a
story a poem, shining on its characters as if they were immortal,
as if they're meeting each other outside of time.
OUTSIDE
RIGHT NOW I HEAR THE WIND CHIMES sounding. Their music reminds
me of David, always -- and reminds me to both release myself
from and hold myself to the moment of apprehension. .
Carol
Muske-Dukes's novel, Life After Death, was published
by Random House last June.
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