It was a tense weekend for Christians. It was a tense weekend for atheists, too. And in our daily communications (between New York and Houston), Christopher and I had to admit that it was a tense weekend for Texans, after three months of drought, high winds, and no humidity, and with a million acres already on fire. We sympathised, semi-hypocritically, but the truth was we hoped for continued or even intensified dehydration: we wanted no April showers in Texas, not over Easter and not for at least a month or two after that. We wanted a decent interval so that no one could run away with the idea that the Prayer for Rain had actually worked.
I flew there on May 4; and the Lone Star state was incorrigibly parched.*3
That night Hitch and I and Blue were settling down to dinner. Not in the Lone Star Hotel, and not in a party-hat Chinese restaurant, but on a broad lawn, attended to by loyal retainers and surrounded by fish ponds and fountains, statues and sculptures, flowers and bowers. And our hostess, Nina Zilkha (née Cornelia O’Leary), with her honeysuckle vowels, lent the occasion an antebellum air – the gracious South. Well, Texan Nina was gracious (and literary), but Texas itself, with its heritage of lawlessness, slavery, revolt, defeat, Jim Crow, big oil, packed churches, weekly death sentences, and its enduring thirst for secession?
Still, that evening it would have been quite reasonable to say (as Herzog said in the Berkshires), Praise God – in the sense of praise nature, or praise life. The Hitch was home from MDA. And on top of that we were looking forward to some harmless knockabout fun on TV: the first (of nine) Republican presidential debates.*4
Meanwhile the plates of melon and prosciutto were being laid out, and the bottles of wine. And this spread must have seemed almost abstract to Christopher, who had been nil-by-mouth for some while. I looked his way. Downward-averted, his face expressed something I recognised, and with fellow feeling: unwelcome self-absorption. The causes and symptoms of it in me were usually idly psychological; but in Christopher, just now, they seemed to be of the body.
He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t drink – and not so long ago (though that was over now) he couldn’t speak. What else couldn’t he do?
Christopher suddenly raised his arm upright and we fell silent.
He said faintly, ‘I can’t…’
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That expanse of real estate – tended by six or seven gardeners – belonged to an old friend of Christopher’s and mine, Michael Zilkha.*5 One of the many remarkable things about Michael, who is rich, left, and green (his business at the time was biofuel), is his habit of personally transporting you to and from the airport – a gallantry nowadays unthinkable even for newlyweds. The very first time I met him, at Anna Wintour’s apartment in 1979, he ended up personally transporting me to JFK (for my return flight to London). And when I arrived at Bush Intercontinental on May 4, 2011, Michael was waiting outside Arrivals in his new electric car. That day he dropped me at the hospital and took my suitcase on to his guest house, where the Hitchenses were already installed…
At MD Anderson I rode up to the eighth floor, as instructed, and a passing orderly pointed to Christopher’s room or wardlet. Which was empty. Returning to the central bay I asked the registrar.
‘Sorry,’ I said, thinking I must’ve misheard, ‘– he’s gone where?’
‘To the gym.’
‘The gym?’
Hitch had never gone to a gym in his life (though I suppose they might have made him look in there once or twice at boarding school). Nowadays he would hardly know how to say the word ‘gym’…In normal life Christopher was willing to take a long stroll now and then, a country walk with a pleasant destination in mind (a country pub, say), but readers can rest assured that he never, ever, took any exercise for the sake of it – and in gyms that was all anybody did. Frowning, I said,
‘What gym?’
‘The hospital gym. In the elevator press minus one.’
On the way down I thought about the first wedding of the Hitch, when we all went to Cyprus. Hitch flew in, and so did friends and relations, and we stayed in a beachside Nicosia four-star (where the toilets in the public spaces were designated Othellos and Desdemonas). Christopher never went near the sea or even the pool – where I, along with others of his coterie or clan, lay bronzing myself between dips and lengths (and sets of tennis). Whenever he came near us out there, often wearing a dark two-piece suit (but no necktie), his stride was dismissively brisk: he was heading for the shaded outdoor bar to meet some journalist or terrorist or Greek Orthodox archbishop. The near-naked torsos on lilos and loungers – it was all distastefully frivolous to him, this business with the body and its lotions and unguents, its narcissism, its hubris…
‘Well, Hitch,’ I said as we embraced. ‘Here you are in a gym.’
‘I know. I’m doing this under orders but guess what, I’m feeling almost keen.’
Blue and I sat on a plastic bench and watched. The vast space was occupied not by unsmiling young strivers in T-shirts and sweatpants but by vague wanderers in light gowns and pyjamas, who moved among the various contraptions (rowing machine, punchbag) sceptically, like cautious shoppers. Among them Christopher cut a relatively dynamic figure, mounting a fixed bike and going at it with real will and evident pleasure, his pale, thinned legs gamely whirring.
‘Look at him,’ we said. ‘He’s really on for it.’
A little later he approached a wooden contrivance in the shape of a freestanding staircase, cut off by a latticed paling on the fourth step. He mounted it, climbed it, backed down, climbed it, backed down; and after that he could do no more. He seemed surprised, puzzled, almost offended. Blue said quietly,
‘There’s
