Moral Hazard Read Free Page A

time when my judgment was suspended, my tastes in literature, or anything else, for that matter, irrelevant. I didn’t have the luxury. The reason was my husband, Bailey.
    After a youth entirely lacking in forethought, I had married. Married? Bedrock feminist? It happens. Sweet Bailey, dearest Bailey. Twenty-five years older than me, imprudent as I, but who cared? He was optimistic where I was pessimistic; enthusiastic where I was distrustful; charming, outgoing, where I was withdrawn, intense. He saw the point of me, not always discernible, and I would have loved him for that alone. He was always doing, always curious. He surrounded me with warmth.
    I haven’t put on rose-tinted glasses. We had our problems. George Eliot once wrote that marriage is awful in its nearness. I agree. Yoked together,
bound
, in a three-legged race with no finishing line.
    We lived on the Upper East Side in an apartment with milky north light, where the noise of traffic was dim, muffled, and we were happy beyond expectation. When the nearness, the three-legged race, got too much for me, I took off for a week or two, to write a travel story, do a profile, whatever.
    Bailey earned his living as a designer—books, magazines, CDs, posters—but he was also a collagist. He’d had shows of his collages over the years, but his work was not impersonal enough to make him a ranking artist, a contender. It was too engaging, too emotional. All of Bailey, his every idiosyncrasy, was in his collages.
    We had ten good years. Marvelous years. Then, he began forgetting. This was not immediately obvious to anyone but me because Bailey was expert in covering his lapses. He skimmed over them like a water-strider. Neurologists, I later learned, call this being “well defended.” Worse, his judgment became poor and his business sense, not good at the best of times, turned disastrous. His perception of the world splintering, his horizons warping, he became frustrated, scared, angry. He raged, pounded walls, accused me of all kinds of perfidy. This, the most trusting and uxorious of men.
    I will spare you the round of doctors we saw over the next two years. The very first, a neurologist, had known what it was: Alzheimer’s. He was reluctant to venture a diagnosis because it was too early and he had no definite way, except by elimination of other illnesses, of determining the disease. But when we returned to him, at the beginning of a long winter, he suggested, in addition to a battery of cognitive testing, a new procedure: a spinal tap to measure the levels of the protein that causes neurons to gum up, to knot and tangle, obliterating memory, undoing everything learned.
    In the waiting room, before the doctor gave us the final report, I sat hugging my overcoat while Bailey watched horrified as a thin, gray-haired, dapper man with a walking stick went around introducing himself to all and sundry, courteous, bobbing his head, smiling hugely, like a celebrity in front of photographers. When he finished his circuit, he started all over again.
    “Oh God,” said Bailey, “don’t ever let me get like that.”
    Bailey’s amyloid-beta protein level was through the roof. So sad, such a shame, especially for a vital man, said the neurologist, after he had dispatched Bailey to the examination room. Leaning back in his chair, fiddling with his fountain pen, surrounded by teetering files and potted phalaenopsids, gifts from grateful patients, he added, “You will have to say good-bye to the man you love.” Normally I might have asked if he wasn’t being unnecessarily melodramatic, but I had been catapulted into shock, the rush of air displacing my thoughts, my emotions. I sat mute.
    Do you know the Irish song that goes something like this?
Maids, when you are young / Never wed an old man.

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    I asked Bailey what the doctor had said. “A small part of my brain has gone wrong, and he’ll fix it,” he replied.
    A deep breath. “That’s not what he said at all.” And I