Epilogue

by Anne Roiphe

  I have lunch with a friend and discuss her husband’s newest book and then I go to the dentist and have my teeth cleaned. My mouth is perfect for the moment. And in the evening I sit down to answer the e-mail. I do not present a long argument, although I know that Albany would like that. I just say I disagree. I think marriage is a hard matter, but no affection, no physical need that doesn’t cause hurt, is wrong or, if he wishes, ungodly. In fact, I say, if God is anywhere on this planet, He is in the love one human can feel for another, sexual love included. I don’t mean pedophiles. This exception weakens my argument but exceptions don’t so much prove a rule as erupt like mushrooms on the lawn after a rain. There. I send my e-mail and I go to bed.

  I think of all the e-mails I have received from Albany. The worldview is angry, furious even, as if some band of evil spirits had set fire to the Eden that once was home. There is a consistent lack of compassion in all the material, whether the subject is the intelligence of the poor, or the needs of the welfare mother, or the marriage of homosexuals. It is not the point of view that is so disturbing, it is the undercurrent of rage that burns and burns on. Why am I reading all these e-mails? Why am I ignoring what they say about the sender? But perhaps I am being provincial. If I can only have a relationship with a man who thinks as I do I will cut off most of the world. Perhaps I should be patient and see what comes next. I go to my computer. I look again at the photographs of the schoolboy with the suspenders on. I see the man on a hilltop in Korea, a big man, with the stance of a warrior. I see the sad-eyed man smoking a cigarette, a black-and-white photo of a man with a mind—handsome, but that is not the point, it is the brooding darkness, the poignant steam that comes from the lines in the face. Is it fury or sadness I see? I lean over my computer till my nose is almost against the screen. I want to protect this man. I want him to protect me.

  I KNOW MY DAUGHTERS WELL, BUT THERE ARE MANY PLACES our conversations do not go, where they would barricade the doors against my entrance. This is fair. Even if I have a god-given right to know everything about them, given the changing of the diapers, the milk from the nipple, the holding of small hands, the pushing on the swing, etc., I renounce that right, in the name of reality. I am willing to settle for a crumb or two, an afternoon of conversation. This is a bond that pulls and pushes at the same time.

  My daughters do call but their calls only make me thirst for more. I am greedy for their voices, addicted to their voices. This must stop, I tell myself. This will stop, I tell myself. Time will shift my attention elsewhere, I tell myself. However, at the moment I am staring at the clock. I will call after seven p.m. I will think of something to say, a reasonable reason for the call. Or perhaps I can hold off until tomorrow evening. Or they will call me? They usually do. Do they know how much their calls mean to me? I hope not. I expect so.

  It is the evening of my ancient biblical history class. I set off all wrapped up in my down coat, warm scarf, gray wool gloves. I head up the block, the wind off the river at my back. It is early and people are returning from work, briefcases, tote bags, hurrying along the street. There is a woman with two little girls, holding her hands. There is a man who lives in my building pushing his bike. There are the lights of cars on the avenue, the lights in the rooms around me. There is the black river at my back. I want to turn around and go back to my apartment. I don’t. I walk the few blocks along Broadway, past the Chinese-Cuban restaurant now filling up with customers. I hurry by the French bistro where H. always ordered the skate and cross the street in front of the Indian-owned newspaper store that sells lottery tickets. I walk carefully on a narrow path with scaffolding overhead where a new building is rising. At its base security guards are standing. Avoiding the wind, I cling to the walls of the grocery store where I see long lines at the checkout counter. I get on the bus and I want to get off but I don’t. I get to my class. I forget myself and the odor of aloneness that follows me around, I am swept into the invading armies from the East and the rebuilding of temples and the forced marches of souls away from their homes. I am alive. I go home content. I order dinner from the Mexican restaurant and I eat it in front of the television. I drink a glass of red wine.

  I send an e-mail to Albany. I have not asked him to visit. I have grown a little cautious. In my e-mail, I write that I think we may be too different from one another. I write that my worldview is not so much to the left of his as somewhere in another universe. I tell him how much I respect him but fear that our relationship has come to an end. He sends me another e-mail. “We will get past this too,” he says. “Don’t rush to judgment.” I am calmed. Perhaps it will be all right. I send an e-mail later that evening with a report on my class and I tell him the names and ages of my children. Hardly an hour has passed and there on my computer is his answering e-mail. He talks of the evil of the homosexuals who took over the seminaries in the 1960s and admitted only homosexuals to their priestly ranks and how they abused little boys and the cover-up that followed and the disgusting behavior of the homosexual priests and how they conspired to take over the Catholic Church. I certainly don’t approve of Catholic priests abusing little boys but we were talking about homosexuality, not pedophiles, not perverts. He has conflated the two. I puzzle. Was he abused as a child by a priest, perhaps a teacher in his Catholic military school? He talks about the way homosexuals want to unravel decent society, destroy children, etc. And now I hear him. He means it. Here is the heart of the matter. And I cannot ignore his voice. I think of him in his condominium in Albany raging at the forces in society that have pulled us into a more liberal and tolerant world.

  I think of him as a lion with a splinter in his paw. I would remove it if I could. But I know I can’t. In order to try I would have to get very close to his fangs, his open mouth, his huge weight. I know I can’t and shouldn’t try. I send him an e-mail. “We have to stop writing each other. I am sorry. This will not work. This is the end.” He doesn’t answer. He sends me more articles from the Weekly Standard. The next week brings me at least fifteen more links to right-wing radio hosts and others. I understand that all over America there are people reading and believing this material. It all has a conspiratorial ring, it all rages against some liberal souls who have undermined the decent and the good. I don’t read all the way through. I e-mail Albany, “Take me off this list, please.” He e-mails me back, “I did,” and that is that. I miss him. I miss his e-mails.

  Most of all I miss the possibility of him, the visit that we never had, my walk with his dog that never took place, the weight of his body against mine, which never happened. I wonder if I cut our dance short out of fear of change. I wonder if I was right in ending it. Was I a coward? A friend tells me that he was an unsuitable man, unsuitable for me and probably anyone else. I still miss imagining him.

  I have known others with his perspective. They have been my dinner partners, my friends’ husbands. I have enjoyed the fresh parry and thrust of argument. I wonder if it is a sign of age that I now don’t want to fight, don’t like the person who arrives, ready to battle, armed with his harsh views. I have heard it all before, and now, as I hear the volcano within bubbling at its core, the molten rocks shifting in the center, the anger that runs up and down the spine, makes the tongue sharp like a razor, I no longer understand the words. Whatever I may be looking for in a man it isn’t Darth Vader, and I fear Albany has gone over to the dark side.

  I do not delete from my computer the photos he had sent me. Not yet.

  The days seem to be getting longer again. The darkness arriving later, after the evening news. It is in the early evening, as I watch the people coming home from work, walking down the long block toward my building, as lights are turned on in the windows, as the lamp lights glow, I reach for the telephone. I need to talk about anything with anyone who will talk with me. I see the pale white moon, larger today than yesterday, hanging low above the avenue, barely above the traffic lights that change from red to green and green to red like the station lights of my brother’s train set
. I hear a siren wail. I used to ignore sirens, so many, so fast, appearing and disappearing in an instant. Now, I pause at each and consider, Who has had a heart attack? Who will grieve the person lying now on the ground, in a store, in a restaurant? Or has someone been hit by a car or has someone been stabbed or shot? I take a moment or two to consider all the possibilities. I listen now to the sirens, I wonder who was listening when the ambulance came roaring down our block for H.

  I am thinking that perhaps all this e-mailing and meeting of strangers is a pretense, a play at living, a diversion. Perhaps I do not want to find another mate. It seems so hard to exchange stories, to reach out your hand, to listen again and again, to attempt to come closer. I know that I might step away if anyone tries to come close to me. It seems too hard to begin again, to find out what movies someone likes, what their children’s names are, what memories haunt them, what enrages them, what soothes them. It seems too hard to bring someone else into my head. It is too hard to begin, to hope, to flare up one’s inner fires, to daydream the furnishings of a future that within days or weeks turns to ash. I’m done. Am I really done? We’ll see.

  I have two new friends. They are friends of friends who live in my building. They invited me to dinner. I talked too much, I think. I was pleased to be in their home. The man is an artist and he gave me a photo-drawing he has done. It is of a jar with green paint on it. It sits disembodied on a black background. I stare and stare at it. I cannot explain why it holds me this way. Some matters are not translated into words. I am going to the framer to have it framed. It is the first thing I have owned that has not been gathered with H. at my side. He framed our drawings. He chose our drawings. I was happy at his happiness but I hardly looked. This one is mine. I am suddenly appreciative of the eyes I have to see, the hands I have to hold this piece, the space it will take on my wall.

  I don’t open any e-mails from strangers. I suspect I will not find the elusive male companion in cyberspace. It is the disappointment in Albany that has convinced me.

  I have always wondered about hermits in their caves. How do their days go by? I am not a hermit. I say hello to the doorman every morning. I have a conversation with my cleaner at the corner when I drop off my cat-haired sweater. I have a long talk with a friend about a political column in the New York Times. I have a computer with e-mails on it from friends. I am expecting a friend from Israel to stay a few nights next week. I am having some friends over for dinner on Sunday and one of them is going to read Book Two of the new translation of Aeneid aloud in my living room. However, I think of myself, on my fourteenth floor, as growing moldy, undernourished, un-groomed. People make jokes about hermits. They are, to the degree that they actually exist, probably the mentally ill, the homeless, the ones hearing voices, that are on our streets, sleeping on the church steps, covered by filthy blankets and tattered shirts. I am not one of them. Any comparison is melodramatic, I know. Melodrama is a bad habit of mind. It’s the first baby step toward madness. I don’t mind ending up dead, but I do mind ending up mad.

  A friend tells me to buy some new expensive clothes. My friend says I could use sprucing up. I don’t want a man who wants me only if I am spruced up. “It’s just to lure him,” she says. “It’s just so he would want to get to know you.” But I don’t want a man who needs to be lured by the cut of my clothes. The issue goes deep into the vein of who I am, a natural woman, a woman without guile, at least the kind you wear. I am resistant to the idea of luring anyone. A lure contains a hook disguised by pretty feathers. The result is serious harm to the prey. Am I being stubborn about this? Am I making a mountain out of a new dress?

  I’ve noticed that my friends are now disappearing for a few weeks at a time or more. It’s not that they are abandoning me, it’s that they seem to be enduring private travails. Perhaps they don’t want to burden me with their own stories. They don’t want to talk about MRIs for suspected malignancy or the agonies of a child in trouble in another state or a very old parent in need of hospice care, or a major dental problem, or a loss of a job or hip surgery. But off they go, keeping their secrets. It seems as if the element of pride, the need to appear successful in all circumstances, affects the ties that link me to my world. I know something is happening. It is hinted at, but it’s not explained. I suppose this is normal. We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed and now in drearier days many stay indoors. Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other’s outstretched hand. I need that far more than I need to be admired. I am no longer interested in reputations, the reviews bad or good that have accumulated over the years, the social scene.

  I am the tiniest of stars in the most distant of galaxies, burned out. In part this is age, and not the kind of age where one becomes a tribal elder, bringing wisdom to the campfire. The other kind of age, where even the expensive benefit invitations with embossed fancy script, which I used to throw in the wastebasket, rarely arrive. I never properly appreciated the invitations to places I didn’t want to go.

  I have certainly not entered my second childhood in the Shakespearean sense. But I do notice that echoes of old events rattle in my brain. I wonder if I am especially vulnerable to unhappiness when I am alone because so many hours of my childhood were spent waiting for an adult to come near. Is there some interior accounting where the loneliness becomes more unbearable because it has been borne too much, a straw-that-breaks-the-back theory? Or is this absurd? If my iceberg father had appreciated me more would I miss H. less? I doubt it. Maybe if my father had admired me more I might have a better appreciation of myself now that H. is not here to hold me up when my knees buckle. However, given my particular childhood, I might have become a gym teacher or a blackjack dealer in Vegas or a suburban golfer with an unrequited crush on the pro.

  I couldn’t resist. I opened my e-mails. Someone has contacted me online. A widower. He wants fun, he says. His screen name is PlayingisGood. I read his profile. He lives in the suburbs. He is interested in all sports. He worked in business. He spends a lot of time at his gym. He is not my other half that Plato said was torn away at the beginning of time. I don’t answer.

  LAST NIGHT I WAS AWAKE IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE morning. The lights on the Empire State were blurred in a haze but the red light blinking at the top of the radio tower was bright enough. The windows all around me were dark but there were lights in the large construction site a few blocks over. I could see the blue light of a large television a block away. Some insomniac was staring at a pixel screen. In Elizabethan literature sex is called “the little death,” but I wonder if it isn’t sleep that mimics death more accurately. It prepares us for our absence. It lets us practice being not. That is an excellent reason to avoid sleep.

  Let me name my dead. H. first and foremost. H. the one that matters above all the others. But before H. there was my mother who died so long ago. Her closet filled with cocktail party dresses, at least three ball gowns, a host of black suits and a shelf with hats and another with shoes with heels as high as they could be. She had lost the use of her arms by the time the brain tumor caused the final convulsions, so for the last month of her life the packs of Camel cigarettes she needed had been removed from the bedside. I saw her head turn looking for them, again and again. She died with her makeup on her sink, her brushes and rouges and creams for moisturizing skin on the mirrored surface of her dressing table. She died with mascara tubes half used, gels for errant curls, boxes of pins for the hair, and a repair kit for broken nails in the event that she was unable to get to the manicurist. A ruby ring rested beside the monogrammed handkerchiefs on the shelf under the table’s long organdy skirt. She died as her husband’s mistress waited for the telephone call announcing her death. She died with her sisters ready to take the valuables from her jewelry drawer. She died with her daughter’s life in chaos. She died too young. She never knew H. She would have showered him with stock certificates and ties from Saks Fifth Avenue. She would have been content with him. She would have complain
ed that he had no capital. She would have worried about his disinterest in wealth. But she would have liked him. I know it.

  Next my father died, having remarried. His mistress got him for her own in the end. On his deathbed he told his illegitimate son that he was his real father and left him all his money, which had been my mother’s money but never mind. My father died unreconciled to his own death. He died without ever having played with his granddaughters. He died without wishing to bless or be blessed. “What was wrong with him?” I asked H. H. would not use the words of his profession on the people in his life. “Not a good man,” was all he said. I pushed him. “What would you label him, if he were your patient?” “He wasn’t,” said H. “Was he narcissistic, paranoid, borderline, all of the above?” I asked. H. said I could call him any name I liked.