Jeff Porter - Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers

Michael Kreiser

JEFF PORTER is the author of Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling, the memoir Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, and coeditor of Understanding the Essay. His essays and articles have appeared in several magazines and literary reviews, including the Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and the Seneca Review. He loves cameras, dogs, and guitarsthough not in that order. He lives in Iowa City and teaches English at the University of Iowa.

Catherine Sebastian

Planet Claire is the second title from ANN HOODs nonfiction imprint with Akashic, Gracie Belle. Modeled after her experience writing the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, and named after her daughter Grace, Hoods imprint reaffirms for authors and readers that none of us is alone in our journeys. She is the author of the best-selling novels The Obituary Writer, The Knitting Circle, and The Book That Matters Most. Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the editor of Providence Noir.

Planet Claire

SUITE FOR CELLO AND SAD-EYED LOVERS

a memoir

JEFF PORTER

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM GRACIE BELLE

an imprint of Akashic Books curated by ANN HOOD

Now You See the Sky by Catharine H. Murray

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Published by Gracie Belle/Akashic Books

2021 Jeff Porter

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-846-1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-907-9

E-ISBN: 978-1-61775-869-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935825

All rights reserved

First printing

Gracie Belle

c/o Akashic Books

Brooklyn, New York

Twitter: @AkashicBooks

Facebook: AkashicBooks

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Website: www.akashicbooks.com

For Claire

I have never been here before: my breath comes differently, the sun is outshone by a star beside it.
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

O ne fine morning, without having done anything wrong, my wife Claire died. She sat in her favorite chair drinking coffee and shortly after collapsed in her study. Young and resilient, the needle on her life span hardly past midway, Claire died abruptly, as though I had been absentminded or had left the gas stove on or the door open. I looked up from the morning paper and she was gone.

That was a year ago. A year earlier my dog died. Claires death was sudden, unexpected. Milos was a slow death. We watched him go. Ill never be the same, Claire said. Me either, I said. And we werent. My wife and I were together for twenty-seven years. Then she was gone, in medias res. To say I was broken into pieces, that like Humpty-Dumpty I had fallen apart, is not entirely accurate. Nor is it entirely wrong. Entirely is a word that no longer works for me, if truth be said. That word no longer works either, because of its proximity to the other. Claire died and a part of me flew off somewhere else. To this day Ive been looking for both, my wife and runaway me. Loss upon loss.

Im lost without Claire, I said, why go on? My mind is a graveyard. Darkness and devils! Hyperboles sprung at me from everywhere. And yet here I am as alive as the next baffled soul. What followed her death was a year of profound gloom and heartache, obviously. But it didnt feel obvious. Grief is mysterious, bewildering, painful. I was miserable, still am. It was as though Id been slit open, stabbed by a large knife, and I savored the pain. There was blood everywhere, even in my dreams. One by one, I said to myself, we are all becoming shades, returning to the dark and wormy earth. I dragged my bones through the empty, tortured space of my life, a fugitive, my mind filling up with quotes from Shakespeare, Joyce, and Beckett. I am like a cork upon the tide, I thought, as if I might find solace in eloquence.

Claire was never fooled by eloquence. She was too keen to be tricked by a pretty sentence. Not that I didnt try. A meticulous scholar, she lived with tremendous focus. She was rarely distracted and never failed to settle unfinished business. Her planner was a work of art, each week precisely detailed with meetings, chores, events, birthdays, appointments, deadlines, passwords, expiration dates, account numbers, memos. Milos annual rabies shots (February 16). Dads b-day (March 25). JP Atlanta trip (March 29). See NYT hearing aid article + comments (July 20). Use UN Mileage Plus to book flights to France (September 18). Findlay Market: Blue Oven bread + English muffins (January 2). This was the work of a nimble mind. There was so much chaos in the world it was foolish to live without intention, and so Claire lived life scrupulously, more than anyone I know. To be caught off guard by death, with so much left undone, was worse than death itself. That was not in the plans. We looked forward to growing old. We would do this gracefully together. We would sip coffee in a Portland caf and watch the hipsters pass by. We would make fun of our eye wrinkles. Claire would learn how to play the mandolin.

What was in the plans were gardening, a new dog, travel, book projects, some well underway. There was always yard work. The lilac, damaged by early snow, had to come out. The smoke bush: trim back or remove altogether. There was the Beauchamp Pageant project, an illustrated biography of the Earl of Warwick, dating to the reign of Richard III. Another book on tragedy (ironically). So much to do and so little time. As a writer, Claire was graceful and sharp-witted. I loved her work, loved watching her write, pen in hand, bent over her yellow notepad, quietly in her study, at school, in the British Library. An efficient, unrelenting researcher she was, deciphering strange medieval texts with mysterious patience and insight. Her mind was a thing to wonder at, her coherence singular. I always felt I was her cognitive other, the guy whose feet went one way and whose brain went another. I am so distracted, so nonlinear. Wrong-way Charlie, she called me. Perhaps my unruly gestures will get a rise out of her, but thats not likely to happen. The dead rarely come back anymorebut who knows. Really, we know so little.

We know this. A typical human being possesses about eighty-six billion neurons. Its hard to do an exact calculation because neurons are so densely packed together, but right now I count only forty-four billion in my brain, barely half. The other half has gone missing. Im not exaggerating. People on TV exaggerate. People on TV talk endlessly, but Im tallying unique neurons in the Jell-O between my earsone hemisphere at a timeand com ing up short. Is it possible to live even a subnormal life with only half a brain? Theres the case of Jody Miller, who suffered life-threatening seizures as a young girl and had half her brain surgically removed. Jody not only survived the procedure (a hemispherectomy) but won a ton of awards and scholarships before graduating college. The left side of her brain was able to take over the role of the missing hemisphere. I havent entirely given up hope.