by Anne Roiphe
I missed the exact moment that she died but came a half hour later. I could see that life had gone, that her skin was a different texture, that her eyes were sinking back into her head and that she seemed to be a bluish color and her bright red nails—the manicurist had come the day before—seemed too bright, too loud, for the body that was shrinking into itself right there before my eyes.
It took me months to understand that the tragedy was her life and not her death, which had been without pain and had not caused years of suffering. It took me months to understand that there was nothing unusual in her dying. Yes, it was too soon, she was still young enough to have enjoyed so many things, but the cemetery where we buried her, on a hill overlooking the swift-moving Hudson River, was dotted everywhere with stones. My experience could not be unique. I put a stone on her grave. I grew up.
But now with H.’s death I find I am thinking about her again. Her cigarette in her hand, her eye makeup running down her cheeks, her mystery novels on her bed, the crossword puzzles she could do in moments, the way she smelled of powder and sweat and scented soap and her eyes would swell and the skin beneath them puff up when she wept, which she often did. I remember the bowl of ice by her bedside which she used with cotton wads to reduce the swelling. I remember waiting in the lobby while she had her hour with her psychoanalyst. He tried to rescue her I’m sure. He didn’t succeed. Now suddenly I think of her. She has been dead so long now. She never knew H. or the two children we had together. She would have loved my stepdaughter and taken her to tea at the Plaza and to Saks Fifth Avenue on shopping trips. She would have been surprised by how the story followed on after her death. Now once in a while I think of her at night. I try to think only kind thoughts. I am the only one alive to think of her.
Of course one’s children don’t live happily ever after although I admit I had some expectations that they might. I take from the table in the living room a large photo in a silver frame of one of my daughters in a wedding dress kissing a handsome groom and consider what to do with it now. I could put it in a bureau under a pile of old sweaters. I could put it in a drawer. I could wrap it in a bag from the market and leave it out the back door where it will disappear with the remains of dinner. I am not sure. I had loved the photo or the illusion that the photo gave of time frozen, white silk rustling, fortune looking kindly down. Divorce is not such an uncommon outcome, leaving me with two sons-in-law where once I had three. I had even considered it on the day the photo was taken. An Uninvited Wedding Guest. I saw Him in the corners of the dance floor. I saw Him standing stiffly at the end of the receiving line as I shook hand after hand.
Divorce has lost its capacity to surprise or scandalize. It still scalds. I put the picture in a closet on a high shelf. This is not a tragedy. I don’t have an exact name for what it is. Perhaps it is simply a short paragraph in the book of family life. I fight off a desire to put down the book.
Touch. I took it for granted. H. took my arm when we were walking in the street. He took my hand in the movies. He lay his head in my lap while reading the Sunday paper. He rubbed my shoulders when I was stiff. He wrapped his legs around mine while he slept. In the shower we soaped one another. In the kitchen we leaned into each other. And then, not as often as we did a decade ago, we did all those things that although most private are usual among human adults. We lay afterwards body to body, my head on his chest, his arms around me, breathing softly together: even the night before he died.
And now I think I may never know another man so well. I may never again even hold hands in a movie or feel an arm across my back. Many women live this way, old and young too: untouched. We know that babies if they are not held in human arms do not thrive. They do not smile or turn over, or stand. H. worked with babies whose mothers were too sad or dismayed by their own lives to hold their children. H. worked to help the mothers look into the eyes of their children. H. taught me that the human infant must be rocked and touched and wiped and soothed by another’s smell, flesh against flesh. I think perhaps at the other end of life this might be true also. Or else one dies quickly.
This, judging by the millions of elderly who do not die, at least not immediately, and not from lack of partners, cannot be true. But is it true for me?
I am constantly losing my keys, my glasses, my watch. I spend too much time each day looking for lost papers, for a pen, for a stamp, for a sock. It’s as if the physical world of ordinary objects is playing with me, maliciously teasing me. More likely I am playing with the physical world, using it to prove that I have indeed lost something, something that will not be found in the hamper or under the newspaper or behind the bookcase.
I am going to meet a friend at the theater. I am about halfway down the subway stairs when I hear my name. Someone is calling me. I turn around. I look up. K. in his T-shirt and shorts is standing above leaning over the railing. “Are you free for dinner tomorrow night?” he shouts down. “Yes,” I answer. “Come at seven, my apartment,” he adds and disappears. Unreasonably, I am pleased.
The next night I arrive at his door with a bottle of wine taken from one of the cases H. had bought that still rest at the back of my hall closet. K. is making dinner. His apartment is furnished in frat-boy style, dark, spare, no rugs, no curtains, no flowers. No woman since before the flood. We talk. I find out many things about him. He went to an Ivy League college. He played football in high school. He went to law school and became, in a desultory sort of way, a lawyer for musicians. He has no practice now. He jumps rope in the park to stay thin. He is learning to play the flute. His two grown sons are fighting over his wife’s legacy. He had divorced his wife several years before her death because, as he said, they “set to squabbling.” His dad had owned an auto repair shop in upstate New York. He had not married until he was nearly forty. He has watery blue eyes. He has the gentle way of large men. I am happy in his company. “Perhaps we can go to a movie together one night,” I suggest. “I could do that,” he answers. But then he never calls. When I see him on the street I smile and wave but do not stop.
There is no point in imagining what was so hard about calling me to go to a movie. I know it was not his dislike of me. I give up thinking about it. But what stays in my head is his story, the unfathomable parts as well as the others. I think about his two sons. I hold his life in my mind. Then I don’t.
I have noticed that I am becoming irritated all too often by friends I have known and loved for years. One says something very rude about my daughter and I say nothing but my heart grows cold toward her. I have bought theater tickets with another friend and on the appointed day she says she wants to meet me at the theater and then wants to go home to fix supper for her husband. She has allowed no time to visit with me. Is she afraid that what I have is catching? Or does she just not want to be with me, or is she thinking of the check at the café we might have gone to? I don’t know, but I begin to see her as an indistinct figure on a distant shore. I am irritated by another friend’s tales of her childhood woes. She repeats them again and again. I have heard them thousands of times. I feel impatient when she begins. I am angry at someone’s anti-Zionism. I am angry at another friend’s patronizing advice that I should buy new clothes. I should but I don’t want to. I am turning into a nurser of minor grievances, a person I have never been before. I may be observing the signals of the tsunami of anger that lurks within. I am envious of others, which is foolish. I am all too easily offended or bored.
I will try to be angry at what I am truly angry about and leave my friendships in calm waters.
LOOKING EAST I SEE THE MOON. IT IS A SMALL SLIVER UP in the sky. There are a few stars visible above the buildings and there is a red light blinking on a high rooftop, a warning light to low-flying airplanes. I stare into the windows across the way. I see the blue light of the televisions. I see a fern pressing against a pane. I see a silhouette moving across the window. A light turns out. I can’t see in anymore. Everyone for blocks around is asleep or lying awake in the dark.
I have lost some friendships over the years. Now I regret it. I have been too quick to anger and have pulled away when staying would have been a far better thing to do. Unlike my father I do not yell loud enough to frighten the banshees in the woods. I do not directly confront, or create scenes. When I am angry I pull away and like some ancient turtle take my head inside my shell where it cannot be seen or trampled. In fact I have a terrible if silent temper. Losing friends is natural enough. We change and our interests change and we admire less a person we admired most a while ago. It is easier to be friends with those who share our occupations, our politics, our neighborhoods, our mutual friends. It is hard to hold on to friendships when people move away to another state or to another world. I am a good friend but not constant. I can be frightened away easily. I have a bad track record of holding on. I regret this.
Among my condolence notes is one from a woman I had once considered dear: Y.
Another woman, a famous writer, a brilliant writer, a right-wing writer, a passionate woman, L., who reviled me, loathed me, loathed my bones, because of my views on peace in the Middle East had told Y. not to talk to me at a public meeting. Y. obeyed. She avoided my eyes at the lunch break. She walked away from me as I approached her. Y. would not be seen walking out the door with me. I felt betrayed. It was a playground thing, it happened over a decade ago. I was a lesser writer than the writer in whose good graces she wanted to stay. Y. and I, who once had lunch often, spoke on the phone constantly, discussed people and politics, in and out, stopped speaking. We lived a block away from each other. I missed her company. Now I held her condolence note in my hand and a warm flush came over me. I called. We arranged to meet at a local café. Y. had recently lost her father, who had been in his late nineties. Y. and her father had lived in the same building. Her father had escaped Warsaw shortly after Y. herself had escaped to England. The father and daughter had remained clasped to each other into the old age of both. There was about them both an air of tragedy past, of hard times endured, of a fear of the world, a dislike of the color red, the sound of jazz or rock, or glasses tinkling in the evening. They were gray people. Lust had been left behind or so it seemed. Now she seemed pear-shaped, nun-like, long gray hair, no artifice at all, like a woman who had never known love, but she had, if only of the not-very-long-lived sort.
We talk, Y. and I, about children and grandchildren, about her father, about her work. She has a collection of stories about to be published. As I leave her an hour or so later I am lighter of heart. My friend has returned to me. I call and make a date for lunch. On the appointed day I call. She is surprised to hear from me. “Oh no, I couldn’t,” she says. “I ate some strawberries and broke out in hives yesterday.” I had heard that before, years before. It was something she told me when she broke a date a long time ago. Then I had believed it. “Oh, well,” I said, “call when you are better.” Weeks went by. I am eating dinner with my stepdaughter and children in a local Mexican restaurant. I see Y. passing by. She looks in the window and sees me. I start to wave. She rushes off, turning her face away. I am in a discount clothing store on Broadway and I see her several racks away. She sees me. She rushes behind a screen and I see her furtively making her way toward the revolving door. She has pulled her scarf up over her face.
I called her again and we made a time to meet at a neighborhood place. “Did you not want to see me?” I asked, and then, as the café lattes arrived at the table, she told me: “I have a friend already, one good friend. I like my television and my apartment and I feel safe there. I do not need more friends. I would be willing to see you once a year or perhaps twice, but that’s all.” She is frank and abrupt. I had always admired this in her. She has no time for the usual formal bows or the common gestures in the dance of public flirtation. But she is telling me to go away.
But I don’t let it go. She is an odd person. I, in my depleted world, am now less. I had hoped for a return of our old friendship. Am I innocent in this matter? I remember that H. and I invited Y. five or six years running to our family Thanksgivings. Her children were then away at colleges in other parts of the country. My children were still at home. We also had a few friends at the table. H. cooked a huge turkey. Before the meal each person read a poem of his or her own choosing, including the smallest of children. Then one year as we were clearing the dishes, Y. said to me that she thought I was using Thanksgiving as a way of showing off my family, to pose my family, in front of those who had less. She thought she had been invited to be an audience to a scene of assumed family happiness and success. Were those my motives? Not in my conscious mind, but how could I have been so thoughtless as to imagine that she would want to share in our Thanksgiving when she had no husband and her children were away? Was there some element of gloating in this Thanksgiving invitation? In fact there may have been a competitive undercurrent to the friendship all along. We are both writers. She more amazing than I, but I too have published. Was envy in the mix of the friendship? Was I reaping what I had sowed?
On Broadway I see her. She is walking toward me. A heavy woman with wide hips, she is wrapped in a black shawl and carrying a big bag. There is a small dowager’s hump on her back. Her shoes are sensible, heavy. She doesn’t see me at first. And then she does and she turns around and walks in the other direction. At the corner she moves quickly across to the other side of Broadway; her steps are hurried. She doesn’t wait for the light to change. Perhaps a car will hit her or an approaching bus.
What I do know is that I have my own raw and jagged edges. This is a short story of friendship on the rocks.
H. and I had an old friend, or almost friend, N. He has died in Missouri. He was determined to be a famous artist, a great writer. Unfortunately determination has nothing to do with the matter. He knocked on the door for years and finally became a writing teacher whose students loved him, because he was wild and passionate about words on the page, and because he was funny, Jewish-comic funny, and because his religion was literature. In this he was a very pious man.
He played the flute medium-well. He played poker with us, and would have won more often if he wasn’t continually telling stories about famous writers he knew or reporting on conversations with ever-shifting agents and editors. Many things had happened to him in the last few years. He had heart trouble and prostate cancer and he walked with a cane and his voice was soft and blurred due to a stroke, but bravely he went on, out to dinner, to readings which he gave and parties where he sat in a corner and people leaned over to hear his words. His wife loved him. His granddaughter loved him. His students too.
He died after a heart operation in a Missouri hospital where he had contracted not one infection but three. I go to my shelves and pick up his novels. The books are there but unread by most of the public. They have serious themes that were common in our mutual youths, art as the only meaning in life, alienation as common as pollen in the air and sex as distraction from death. The obscurity of his novels is unimportant. The work of the writer is to write and most of us will be forgotten faster than you can say “eternity” and stamp your foot three times.
Many friends will mourn him. I see more death coming toward me. H. was not the last to die on this earth, in my world, among my friends and my family. My entire cohort will march in a line right off the cliff: a parade of souls going, going, gone. This does not come as a surprise. However, in this instance misery does not love company. I would have preferred it if H.’s death could have spared N. and all the others.
I have gone online to Match.com. I have answered their questions truthfully. I have sent in a photo or rather I had a daughter send in a photo because the technology is a little beyond me. I wait for a response.
Two hours later I have several responses.
I am dreaming now and in each of my dreams H. appears. He is holding the spaniel that we had before the children went off to college. The spaniel went blind in his old age and the children had lost interest in him years before. The dog’s eyes were always filled wi
th mucus, which I wiped with tissue again and again. I walked him three times a day. In my dream H. is smiling at me, or is it the dog that is smiling? Sometimes when I am awake I think of H. standing by the stove, sitting in his football-watching chair, pulling on his raincoat, searching the closet floor for his warm gloves. Last night we were together walking the streets of a city, maybe London. We are late for something. We are lost. Then H. turns down a side street and disappears. I don’t see him. I wake. I sit up suddenly. The cat jumps up. He was sleeping on my chest. My dreams are not nightmares, but they are not comforting either. I am always trying to get somewhere I cannot get, or open something I cannot open. I always knew that you couldn’t dream of the actual future or find portents of the days to come in last night’s sleep. But I didn’t know that you can’t change reality, not in an orderly meaningful way, in your sleep. That is a disappointment.
When I was a small child I was shy. I remember adults telling me to speak up. I remember the dread of a first day at school, a birthday party. But then the shyness passed. I managed in strange places with new people but now with H.’s death the shyness has returned. I am going to a party where I know a few of the guests but have barely met the hosts. There will be no challenges there. No one is going to say to me, who are you and what do you think you are doing here. No one is going to turn their back on me if I approach them. But an hour before I am to leave for the party I think perhaps I won’t go. It seems too much to enter a room with many people I have never seen before talking to each other. Why would anyone there want to open their circle to me? I could stay home and daydream. I could stay home and read. I could feel safe in my bed with my cat at my side. I could avoid the cold winter’s night. But I know that only a coward would stay indoors. I know that hours spent in the company of others are usually good hours. I like parties. I like to talk to people. I cannot listen to the bashful voice within me that trembles a little as I pick out something to wear for the evening, put on my coat and scarf, and check for my keys and leave my house.