by Anne Roiphe
I did not mourn him, although I was surprised that he had died, as if I had not believed that he was human, subject to the same ends as the rest of us.
Then a few years later my brother died of AIDS. I didn’t understand him, his passions or his moods, or his fierce dislikes or his insistence on the correct pronunciation of foreign words or his hatred of H.’s profession or his contempt for athletes as well as those who liked the outdoors or animals or trees. I knew he didn’t like me, not my mathematical ignorance, not my inability to speak Italian or Arabic, not my lack of attention to classical music. I knew he thought I was without merit and talked too much. I knew he didn’t like my children. He pointed out their flaws frequently. But his illness was stunning in its details. It was beyond acceptance, beyond grace. He had sores in his throat and lesions on his skin and fungus grew in his left eye. He was right to rail at fate.
There was between us the childhood we shared, the names we both caught in the obituaries, Sonnenberg, Bernstein, Cowan, canasta-playing friends of our mother’s, golf partners of our father. In faded photographs we each could identify the party guests at long-forgotten barbeques and birthday parties. We both had intimate knowledge of the unending hostility that raged through our home. All those things bound us together, even as they forced us apart.
H. stood beside me at my brother’s grave site. I could see his anger in the way he clenched his teeth, in the whiteness of his skin, in the purple vein that throbbed on his forehead. He held my hand in his glove too tightly. My fingers were crushed. He was angry at the illness, furious at the suffering it caused, and helpless before its power. H. did not like being helpless. He was silent for hours after the burial. I am left now as the last adult alive who was witness to these events. If I doubt my memory there is no one to confirm or deny it. Someone in a family must be the last alive. The question is whether this is the first or last prize.
My father, mother, brother are not ghosts in my apartment. They do not stand at the foot of my bed and glower through the night. H. is not hovering over me either. He would if he could of course, but he can’t.
When Aeneas fled Troy as it stood in flames, he carried his old father on his back and held his son by the hand. For his travels he had packed the household gods, his protections from a malevolent universe, despite the fact that his sacked city was itself evidence that these household gods might better be replaced.
Metaphorically speaking, we are all carrying our household gods, our parents on our backs and the flames behind us are not the last flames that we will see. H. tried to shield me. He did the best he could.
I am concerned about self-indulgence. It is so easy to fall into that swamp. I know ways to resist that error. If I use fewer words I risk it less. If I bind myself to the rock of reason I will survive the inner storm. If I don’t allow generalizations, clichés, through the gates I can protect myself from bad manners, from most sloppy thinking. But if I slam the door too tightly on the emotions that roll in and out with daily tides I will become robotic, mechanical, unrecognizable to my own eyes and useless to anyone else. Mawkishness, murky, exaggerated emotion, insincere because it has been heated up beyond truth, mawkishness is a sin against the mind. H. would hate it. He preferred the Dutch masters to the baroque Italian. He preferred Mozart above all. He cried sometimes, at movies, at a child’s illness, pretending he was not, tears misting up his glasses. I always knew why he was crying. Which was a good thing because he would never have told me. I promise myself that I will censor the sentimental in me. But I cannot depend on the fact that I will recognize it when it comes. Self-pity is the graffiti of the heart but not so easy to avoid. I don’t want to wallow. But I begin to see that wallowing is a chronic malady easy to condemn and hard to cure.
I will never leave this apartment for another. I will leave this apartment. Both convictions are strong and absolute and exist side by side in my head. I cannot leave this apartment because it is the place I lived with H. His drawings are on the wall. His robe is still in the bathroom. He was in my bed. These are his children whose photos are everywhere. His books are on the shelves. His spices are in the kitchen cabinet. The Persian and the Kurdish rugs we picked out together the year we moved in are on the floor. To leave this apartment would be to leave him, although he has left without me. To find a new apartment, a smaller one perhaps, would save me some funds and bring me into my own place, unshared, accompanied only by the memories that can be carried in my brain, not those that exist on the table or in the walls. I read the real estate section each Sunday. Perhaps I should move to a condo in South Beach or a shack in the mountains of North Carolina. Perhaps I should move to the other side of town. This city has two rivers, one on each of its sides. I now live on the west, but if I moved to the east I would be closer to the sunrise, the river would run to the sea underneath the black curved steel of the bridges. I would walk by the river and watch the barges float by. I circle advertisements with a red pen. But I do nothing else. I have not come to a decision. I am not ready to go anywhere. I could not bear to lose my home, not now, not for another one, one that would not have the scent of my life, no accumulation of secrets told, no sorrows, just walls and floors and windows. But on the other hand—
A man e-mails me from the match service. He has never been married. He lives in Park Slope in Brooklyn. He is a child psychologist. He sounds like a good person. He wants to travel. He likes walking in the park, so do I, but then so do most people, even serial killers enjoy a stroll in the spring. But he is looking for a woman whose outer age is a few years younger than mine. Perhaps he is older than he claims. I am not younger than I claim. I answer his e-mail. But why has he never been married? Why has he never had children? Do I really want to know the answer to this question? I fear it lies in the direction of depression or wounded expectations or anxiety uncontainable or medication needed or bad memories of childhood or war trauma and on and on my thoughts run.
How long, I wonder, does it take to know a man’s unspoken thoughts? I never knew everything that passed through H.’s mind. Maybe only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Maybe only the tip of the tip. But I did know that. He would not tell me if his cold bothered him. He would not tell me if he was worried about a child. He would not tell me if he was concerned about the tuitions or the taxes. Those were matters I guessed.
He had never learned to dance. When we tried, he stepped on my toes, bumped into me, wore a silly expression on his face that said, What on earth am I doing? He would have wanted to dance with me but his body wasn’t meant for it. His mind was too present. His muscles and tendons curled too tight. But when it came to leaning against me in the movies, taking my hand when the plot thickened, bending over me when I was at work at my computer and stroking my neck, when it came to making soup for me or watering a plant on my desk, his body and mind worked together.
How long, I wonder, does it take to know when a particular man wants to go home from a party, wants to have dinner, does, does not want to talk, wants to sleep? Longer than the rest of my life, I think.
It snowed last night. A light snow. I heard the scraping sound of the snow trucks on the avenue. I saw the frost on the windowpanes. I felt the icy air as it slipped in beneath the crack in the window I can’t seem to close all the way. On the street corners snow has piled up. I have to climb over mounds in my waterproof boots in order to make my way. The harsh, unforgiving wind blows off the river and pounds on my back.
I have breakfast with my psychoanalyst stepdaughter. We meet in a café near her apartment building. All is well with her. All is well with her children. Her life is good, perhaps it is perfect. She is going on a safari with her family in August. I tell her I am having trouble working. Writing is something I have done all my life, one paragraph after another. Now I can hardly sit before my computer for five minutes. My mind wanders away from the sentence I intended to write to a blankness, a stillness. I grow tired instantly even at nine in the morning. I am writing these pages, but slowly, lik
e a snail. I forget from day to day what I wrote before. I repeat myself. I stare at the wall. My stepdaughter thinks I’m depressed and should now consider antidepressants. Rethink my Paxil decision. But here’s the problem. I’m sure they would help. I believe in medicine. I am not for brewing teas from the bark stripped off a yew at midnight. I object to pharmacology only in its rudest advertising moments. The products are fine, the prices a different quarrel. But I can’t medicate a life crisis. I can’t heal a cut by sealing off my sensation of bleeding. I am tough as the clichéd nails. And if that’s a lie I prefer not to know it. I want to face squarely my own life story. Is this false pride? Is this ridiculous? I would say to a friend of mine who said these words to me, “Don’t be so moralistic. What is wrong with a little artificial well-being? There is no advantage to unnecessary suffering.” I think that’s true. My stepdaughter thinks that. She doesn’t have to tell me. I see it in her skeptical eyes. But she won’t tangle with my decision either. As we are talking I feel as if I might cry. I feel tears at the corners of my eyes. I have no idea why. I do not want to cry. I am not depressed. I am sad, a condition that seems entirely reasonable under the circumstances. I can’t find the napkin I need to wipe my eyes. My stepdaughter retrieves it for me from under the table.
I could go to a psychiatrist for help. But help with what? Many years ago a psychoanalyst opened up my soul and I made my way hour after hour to a more honest life. Now the doctor would simply be a comfort, an expensive comfort. It is not my unconscious that is making my days hard. It is not my past that is blocking my way. Perhaps it would help to weep a little in a safe place. I keep the possibility in reserve. Not yet. Not now.
After breakfast I walk back to my apartment. There the white rays of the sun appear between the gray clouds, a stream of light as in religious paintings, directing our eyes to the sacred in the midst of a riotous canvass. The cold air enters my lungs, and I see a puff of steam from my own breath. In the middle of the last century my mother used to be able to make smoke rings rise over my head as she exhaled, her cigarette dangling from her hand. I would count the rings, three, four, five. She could shuffle the cards and make them flip through the air and return neatly into a pack. She was afraid of flying, elevators that were not operated manually by a man in uniform, tunnels, germs on toilet seats, all bridges, dogs, cats, thunder and lightning, especially lightning. I, on the other hand, fear nothing, not even death.
Not true, I fear living too long, expiring in a nursing home after a stroke that takes away my speech. I fear that time is running out. But the truth is I fear all that in a vague way, similar to my belief in the 1950s that the Russians would one day drop an A-bomb on American shores.
I see a double stroller with sleeping twin babies, bundled up to their chins. How lovely they are, a common enough sight on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I see a little Chinese girl and her blond mother late for school.
As I walk, passing the Lebanese stationery, the discount clothing store, the flower stand, I feel restored, my arms are moving briskly. I am warm enough in my coat, my legs are going fast, over the already soot-stained snow blocking the crossings, I can feel the cold on my ears. They must have turned red, the sting is not unpleasant. I am riding time, I am watching the babies on their morning journey to the bagel store. I am watching the man with all his shirts over his arm enter the cleaners. I am still a part of it. I go shopping at a store on Broadway and find three wool sweaters and a skirt with brown polka dots, for the spring. It will be spring. These are the first clothes I have bought that H. will not have seen me wear. Inevitable that sooner or later my wardrobe would change. I will go home and call another of my daughters and talk about the school choices for my youngest grandchild and I will write about my morning, all of it.
I go to a Sunday luncheon party. Only couples and two gay men. We argue about the worth of this or that presidential candidate. We talk of housing bubbles and theater and the Oscars. We talk about war, but what is there to say about war, about this war that so shames us? Someone speaks of the end of our democracy.
Someone speaks of torture and the shredded Bill of Rights. The people of Iraq are dying by the score. H. would have looked longingly at the television screen behind whose gray face some ball game was awaiting his attention. He truly believed in the discontents of civilization, the ever-erupting savage mind. He truly wanted to watch the Sunday football game. I miss his mind, ego, id and superego, all of it.
I envy those who believe in a world to come. I envy those who believe that justice will come in the afterlife. I know that most of the world believes in some version of this story. It is hard to face death as an unending absence. But H. is altogether gone. He is not in heaven. He is not in hell. He is not waiting for his bones to come together and rise again from the valleys of Jerusalem. I think this now without pain. I think this the way one notices that it is raining outside and an umbrella will be necessary. I have developed a thick skin, or at least a usable scab. Or am I bluffing?
Out my window on the fire escape of the building next door I see a red cardinal, a male, a small streak of rusty red moving from rung to rung. He must live in the nearby park. He may be lost or he may not be. Where is his mate? Has he lost his mate? It must be a sign of approaching spring that he comes so close. I have never seen a cardinal here before. There is rain hitting on the windowpane. I look down toward Broadway and see the sheepdog that lives in the neighborhood. His owner stops to talk to a passerby. The dog wags his tail. I can see even from the fourteenth floor the dog is pleased. The rain falls on them all.
A letter comes in the mail from old friends from Boston, whom thirty years ago we met on vacation in Nantucket when all our children were young. I have only seen them once or twice since then. It isn’t Christmas or New Year’s, which is the usual time for such communications. The letter encloses a family picture. Lovely mother and father, two grown children each with their mates and three little children, grandchildren. The letter explains that the parents are still at work, the father as a neurosurgeon at a major hospital, the mother in a mental health organization. The daughter works for a private foster care group and the son-in-law is a journalist and the son is a paramedic and his Italian wife is expecting another baby. The faces beam out of the photograph. The background shows a living room with French doors opening onto a garden. A large fern plant has not a brown edge on a single leaf. Congratulations are in order. Congratulations for having raised a good family, because the children all live within a mile of each other and their parents, because there has been no divorce, no major illness, no misfortune that is visible on the faces in the photo. Because decent people have managed to survive the years looking pleased, because no child was afflicted with autism, no cancer cells took a life, no one fell into the pit of addiction or smoked till lungs burned. I stare at the picture. Why now? What is wrong that the mother and the father needed to send this picture now? What lurks under the couch? What haunts the bright smile of the mother? Is this a competitive missive? Look how much better my family is than yours, you, opener of my letter, read it and feel bad because your happiness can’t measure up to ours. More likely this letter was created in the boiler room of insecurity. Look, I have a good family too, just as good as I imagine yours to be.
This may not be the right way to read this letter. Most likely it was sent in some spirit of good will, a reaching out to old friends who do not live in the neighborhood. If H. were here he would either agree with my suspicions or not. He would ask me what mean-spirited thoughts are running through my head that I would consider this letter as if it were a gauntlet thrown on my table. He would think the sin of competitiveness mine, cast out against my correspondent. And so I suppose it is. He is not here so I have to figure out on my own that my family photo would have an empty space where he should be standing. It would show a divorced child. If our photo had a Dorian Gray magic it would be fading out, black and white, and we would all have deep shadows under our eyes. This hurts.
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nbsp; But that is beside the point. No photo could show the way our children, all but one, have stood with me, have moved in their own lives outward, how we have managed. I send the mother of the family in Boston a letter. “Bravo,” I say. But as I put it in the mail I wonder, what is wrong in that house?
My nephew calls. I have not spoken to him for over ten years. We agree to meet for coffee. There he is at the table. Love and guilt rise in me. Tentatively, anxiously, with great unease, we talk. A need not to feel guilt rushes over me. I want to tell him something important but I can’t find the words. “Forgive me” would do. I hope he hears those words behind the lines of words I actually say. We talk of his work, his life. He walks me home to my apartment building. Now he is back in my life. Now I am back in his. Is this the way two birds might cross in the same sky, wings not touching, in an instant each out of sight of the other? Or not?
It is Saturday and I have nothing to do until Sunday at one o’clock. At one o’clock on Sunday I’m having lunch with a man who contacted me on Match.com. At four o’clock on Sunday I am seeing my stepdaughter and her family and at seven o’clock I am having dinner with friends. But today is empty. I could have prevented this by calling this one or that one and making an arrangement, a movie to be seen, a lunch somewhere, but I thought enough is enough. I should manage a day or more by myself. After all, the other night after dinner some forty blocks away I got on the subway and came home without a fear, without a tremble, easily as if I had always gone everywhere at night alone.
I could read, I will try to read. I could go for a long walk. I will go for a long walk. Years ago when the children were very young we went each Saturday to the zoo. We bought kibble for them to feed the goats. We went to the carousel and H. would sit on a horse and go round and round with one daughter or another on his lap. The younger one wanted to ride by herself. The older one had to be coaxed and sat on her father’s lap with her lips pursed together and her body braced for disaster. I thought that I would spend every Saturday of my life at the zoo. But that phase passed and other phases passed, and now I am looking at the hours of the day as if they were endless dunes in an endless desert. There is nothing to do but start forward.