by Sigrid Nunez
A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you’d fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking up with someone.
I don’t want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It’s a cliché, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial—people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.
• • •
I am relieved that at least I am not invited to your house. (It is still your house.) Not that I have any particularly strong associations with the place, having been there only two or three times in the several years that it was your home. I do remember well my first visit, not long after you’d moved in, when I got a tour of the brownstone, admiring its built-in bookcases and handsome rugs laid over aged walnut floors, and being reminded how essentially bourgeois contemporary writers are. Once, over a superb dinner at another writer’s house, someone brought up Flaubert’s famous rule about living like a bourgeois and thinking like a demigod, though I’ve never seen how that wild man’s own life could be said much to resemble that of any ordinary bourgeois. Nowadays (the table agreed) the feckless bohemian had all but ceased to exist, replaced by the hipster known for his knowingness, his consumer savvy, his palate and other cultivated tastes. And fair or not, asserted our host, opening a third bottle of wine, many writers today admitted to feelings of embarrassment and even shame about what they do.
You who had moved there decades before the boom were disheartened to see Brooklyn become a brand and wondered at the fact that your own neighborhood had become as hard to write about as it was to write about the sixties counterculture: no matter how earnest one set out to be, the ink of parody seeped through.
As famous as Flaubert’s words are Virginia Woolf’s: One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Point taken. But the starving artist wasn’t always a myth, and how many thinkers have lived like paupers, or gone to paupers’ graves.
Woolf names Flaubert with Keats as men of genius who suffered fiercely because of the world’s indifference to them. But what do you suppose Flaubert would have made of her—he who said all female artists are sluts? Both created characters who take their own lives, as would Woolf herself.
• • •
There was a time—quite a long time, it was—when you and I saw each other almost every day. But in the past few years we might have been living in different countries instead of only different boroughs, staying in touch regularly but mainly through email. In all of last year we met more often by chance, at a party or a reading or some other event, than by plan.
So why am I so afraid to set foot in your house?
It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don’t want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.
• • •
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• • •
The only animal that commits suicide is also the only animal that weeps. Though I’ve heard that stags brought to bay, exhausted from the hunt, with no escape from the hounds, sometimes shed tears. Crying elephants have also been reported, and of course people will tell you anything about their cats and dogs.
According to scientists, animal tears are tears of stress, not to be confused with those of an emotional human being.
In humans, the chemical makeup of emotional tears is different from that of tears that form in order to cleanse or lubricate the eye, say because of some irritant. It is known that the release of these chemicals can be beneficial to the weeper, which helps explain why people so often find that they feel better after they’ve had a good cry, and also, perhaps, the reason for the enduring popularity of the tearjerker.
Laurence Olivier was said to have been frustrated because, unlike many other actors, he could not make tears on demand. It would be interesting to know about the chemical composition of the tears produced by an actor and to which of the two types they belong.
In folklore and in other fictions, human tears, like human semen and human blood, can have magic properties. At the end of the story of Rapunzel, when, after years of separation and misery, she and the prince find each other again and embrace, her tears flow into his eyes and miraculously restore the sight he had lost at the hands of the witch.
• • •
One of the many legends about Edith Piaf also concerns a miraculous restoration of sight. The keratitis that blinded her for several years as a child was said to have been cured after some prostitutes who worked in her grandmother’s brothel, which happened also to be little Edith’s home at the time, took her on a pilgrimage to honor St. Thérèse of Lisieux. This might be just another fairy tale, but it is a fact that Jean Cocteau once described Piaf as having, when she sang, “the eyes of a blind person struck by a miracle, the eyes of a clairvoyant.”
• • •
But for two days, I went blind. . . . What had I seen? I shall never know. Words of a poet describing an episode from her childhood, a period marked by violence and squalor. Louise Bogan. Who also said: I must have experienced violence from birth.
• • •
I thought I knew the Grimm story by heart, but I had forgotten that the prince tries to commit suicide. He believes the witch when she tells him he’ll never see Rapunzel again, and throws himself from her tower. My memory was that the witch blinded him with her nails—and she does threaten that the cat that got his pretty bird will scratch his eyes out, too. But it’s because he jumps that the prince loses his sight. There are thorns where he lands, which pierce his eyes.
But even as a child I thought the witch had a right to be angry. A promise is a promise, and it wasn’t like she’d tricked the parents into giving up their child. She took good care of Rapunzel, protecting her from the big bad world. It didn’t seem altogether fair that the first handsome young man to happen by could take her away.
• • •
During the period in my childhood when my favorite reading was fairy tales, I had a neighbor who was blind. Though a grown man, he still lived with his parents. His eyes were always hidden behind large dark glasses. It confused me that a blind person would need to protect his eyes from the light. What could be seen of the rest of his face was rugged and handsome, like TV’s Rifleman. He might have been a movie star, or a secret agent, but in the story I wrote about him he was a wounded prince, and mine were the tears that saved him.
—
“I hope this place is all right. It was so nice of you to come all this way.”
The trip, as she knows, took less than thirty minutes, but she is a gracious woman, Wife Three. And “this place” is a charming European-style café, just around the corner from your brownstone. (It is still your brownstone.) A perfect setting, I thought when I entered and saw her at a table by the window—not using an electronic device like everyone else who was there alone (and even some who weren’t), but instead contemplating the street—for such an elegant, pretty woman.
She’s the kind of woman who knows fifty ways to tie a scarf was one of the first things you ever told us about her.
It’s not so much that she doesn’t look sixty as that she makes being attractive at sixty look easy. I remember how surprised we all were when you first started seeing her, a widow nearly your own age. We were thinking, of course, of Wife Two, and of others who were even young
er, and how, given your proclivities, it was only a matter of time before there’d be someone younger than your daughter. We agreed that it must have been the battles of your second marriage, which you used to say had aged you ten years, that drove you into the arms of a middle-aged woman.
But even as I admire her—the freshly cut and colored hair, the makeup, the hands beautifully manicured as I know the hidden feet are beautifully pedicured—I am unable to suppress a certain thought, the very same thought I had when I saw her at the memorial event and found myself remembering a news story about a couple whose child had vanished while the family was on vacation. Days had passed, the child was still missing, there were no leads, and the shadow of a doubt had fallen on the parents themselves. They were photographed coming out of a police station, an ordinary-looking couple whose faces left no impression. What stayed with me was the fact that the woman was wearing lipstick and jewelry: a necklace—a locket, I think—and a pair of large hoop earrings. That, at such a moment, a person would trouble to put on makeup and jewelry astonished me. I would have expected her to look like a homeless person.
And now again, in the café, I think: She is the wife, she found the body. But here, as at the memorial, she has made every effort to look not just presentable, not just pulled together, but her best: face, dress, fingertips, roots—all meticulously attended to.
It’s not criticism I feel, only awe.
She was different: one of the few people in your life who wasn’t in one way or another connected to the literary or academic worlds. She had worked as a management consultant at the same Manhattan firm since graduating from business school. But hey, she reads more than I do, you used to tell people, in a way that made us cringe. From the beginning, polite but distant toward me, content to accept me as one of your oldest friends while herself remaining only my acquaintance. Better this by far than the mad jealousy of Wife Two, who demanded that you stop having anything to do with me or any other woman from your past. Our friendship in particular irked her; she called it an incestuous relationship.
Why “incestuous”? I asked.
You shrugged and said she meant that we were too close.
She never would believe we weren’t fucking.
Once, when we were on the phone, I said something that made you laugh. In the background I heard her complain that she was trying to read. When you ignored her and kept laughing, she became incensed. She chucked the book at your head.
You said no. You would agree to see me less often, but refused to drop me completely.
For a while you put up with the rages, the flying objects, the screaming and weeping, the neighbors’ complaints. And then you lied. For years we met on the sly, as if we really were secret lovers. Crazy making. Her hostility never waned. If our paths crossed in public, she would look daggers at me. Even at the memorial, she looked daggers at me. Her daughter—your daughter—wasn’t there. I heard someone say she was in Brazil, on a research project, something to do with some endangered—bird, I think it was.
Much unhappiness between you and your estranged only child, even less forgiving of adultery than her mom was.
She doesn’t understand, you said. She’s ashamed of me.
(What made you think she didn’t understand?)
But not a drop of resentment in Wife Two’s in memoriam piece. You were the light and love of her life, she’d said, the best thing that ever happened to her. And now, they say, she’s writing a book about her marriage to you. A novelization. Wherein perhaps I’ll learn whether you ever told her that, in fact, we did fuck. Once. Years ago. Long before she met you.
Barely out of school yourself, you had just started teaching. I was not the only one of your students to become your friend, and it was in that same class that we both met Wife One. You were the department’s youngest instructor, its wunderkind, and its Romeo. You thought any attempt to banish love from the classroom was futile. A great teacher was a seducer, you said, and there were times when he must also be a heartbreaker. That I did not really understand what you were talking about did not make it less exciting. What I did understand was that I craved knowledge, and that you had the power to transmit it to me.
Our friendship went on beyond the school year, and that summer—the same period when you began courting Wife One—we became inseparable. One day you startled me by saying we should fuck. Given your reputation, this should not have been a surprise. But enough time had passed that I was no longer anxiously waiting for you to pounce. Now came this blunt proposal, and I didn’t know what to think. I asked, stupidly, why. Which gave you a good laugh. Because, you said, touching my hair, we should find that out about each other. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us that I might refuse. Among all my desires at the time—and you could call it the most ardent time of my life—one of the strongest was to put my full trust in someone; in some man.
Later, I was mortified when you pronounced it a mistake for us to try to be more than friends.
For a while, I faked illness. For a while longer, I pretended to be out of town. And then I really did become ill, and I blamed you, and I cursed you, and I did not believe you could be my friend.
But when finally we saw each other again, instead of the painful awkwardness I’d feared, something—a certain tension, a distraction I hadn’t even been wholly aware of before—was gone.
This was, of course, precisely what you’d been hoping for. Now, even as you completed your conquest of Wife One, our friendship grew. It would outlast all my other friendships. It would bring me intense happiness. And I felt lucky: I had suffered, but unlike others I never got my heart broken. (Didn’t you? a therapist once goaded me. Wife Two was not the only one who found something unhealthy about our relationship, nor was the therapist the only one to wonder if it hadn’t been a factor in my remaining single all these years.)
• • •
Wife One. An undeniably true and passionate love. But not, on your side, a faithful one. Before it was over she had a breakdown. It is not an exaggeration to say she was never the same. But then neither were you. I remember how it tore you up when she came out of the hospital and immediately found someone else.
When she remarried you swore you never would. There followed a decade of affairs, most of them short-lived, but a few all but indistinguishable from marriage. Not one do I recall that did not end in betrayal.
I don’t like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.
• • •
Wife Three. I remember your telling us that she was a rock. (My rock, you said.) Oldest of nine children, who as a girl had had large responsibilities thrust upon her when her mother developed a disabling illness and her father struggled to hold down two jobs. About her first marriage I knew only that her husband had died in a mountain-climbing accident and that they had a child: a son.
This is the first time she and I have ever been alone together. Because I have only ever known her to be reserved, I am surprised at how talkative she is today, the espresso loosening her tongue like wine. She does that thing with her head, shaking it back and forth as she speaks, slowly back and forth—is she trying to hypnotize me? She seems nervous, though her voice is soft and calm.
You were not the first person in her life to commit suicide, she says.
“My grandfather shot himself. I was just a little girl when it happened and I have no memory of him. But his death was very much a part of my childhood. My parents never talked about it, but it was always there, a cloud hanging over the house, the spider in the corner, the goblin under the bed. He was my paternal grandfather, and it had been drilled into me that I should never, ever ask my father about him. After I grew up I did finally get my mother to open up a bit. She said his suicide was a total shock. There was no note, and nobody who knew him could come up with a single reason for him to do such a thing. He’d never shown signs of bei
ng depressed, let alone suicidal. Somehow the mystery made it worse for my father, who for a long time kept insisting there must have been foul play. My mother said he seemed to be more angry with his father for not explaining himself than for taking his life. Apparently, he expected reason from a suicide.”
You, on the other hand, had always suffered from depression. And never worse, she says, than in those six months last year, when you could hardly get out of bed in the morning and didn’t write a word. What was strange, though, was that you’d gotten over that crisis and, since the summer, at least, had been in good spirits. For one thing, she says, the long drought was over and, after many false starts, you were finally launched on something that excited you. You were at your desk every morning, and most days you reported that the writing had gone well. You were reading a lot, the way you always did when you were working on a novel. And you were physically active again.
One of the things that made you so depressed last year, she explains, was that you’d hurt your back moving some boxes and couldn’t exercise for weeks. Even walking was painful. And you remember his mantra, she says: If I can’t walk, I can’t write. But that injury had finally healed, and you were back to your long walks and running in the park.
“He was back to socializing, too, catching up with all the people he’d been avoiding while he was depressed. And you know that he got a dog?”
You had, in fact, emailed me about the dog that you found early one morning when you were out running. Standing on an overhang, silhouetted against the sky: the biggest dog you’d ever seen. A harlequin Great Dane. No collar or tags, which made you think that, purebred though it was, it might have been abandoned. You did everything possible to find its owner and when that failed you decided to keep it. Your wife was appalled. She’s not a dog person to begin with, you said, and Dino is a lot of dog. Thirty-four inches from shoulder to paw. A hundred and eighty pounds. Attached was a photo: the two of you, cheek to jowl, the massive head at first glance looking like a pony’s.