Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  At the school where I taught seventh-grade social studies, we waited daily for the results of the annual state exam. Would we be judged competent teachers or poor ones? Were our students exceedingly capable or merely below average? To pass the time, the science teacher and I put together a play for the spring assembly. The students lined up in neat rows under American flags, then ran full-tilt toward the stage, screaming, while I played the guitar. It was the Battle of Bull Run. Over and over we practiced it on the playground. Stand stock-still, sprint, stop on a dime. Again, and this time really stick your spot. In her introduction the principal celebrated our idealism and national spirit. Most parents worked, though the few that attended cheered politely. Three weeks from the end of our school year, I thought, Have we come to the end of another year already?

  I took the bus east to the lake, then south to Katie’s apartment. We had eaten lobster bisque a few weeks earlier in Lincoln Square. Now, I wanted to surprise Katie by making the same dinner at home. I stopped at the grocer behind Katie’s building for butter, cream, sherry and brandy, clam juice. I dug into the back of the deep freezer and found six gray lobster shells wrapped on blue Styrofoam board in tight plastic, one-quarter pound each, three for ten dollars. I bought two bottles of wine and a loaf of fresh bread.

  The windows in Katie’s studio fogged a little as I worked. The key, I thought, was to keep everything moving in a smooth procession. I found a small blue wire colander, which I balanced in the sink. I had boiled the shells for two hours, and now I needed to separate the stock from the boiled meat. The edges of the pot were hot as I lifted it from the burner. I turned to the sink and slowly, carefully poured the contents of the pot through the fine middle mesh. The lobster was translucent and fell off the shell into a neat pile. The stock poured into the drain. I had forgotten to put a pot under the colander. Even as I realized my mistake, I admired the sheen the liquid made on the steel as it bubbled and disappeared.

  I panicked. I refilled the pot. Perhaps some of the reserve fluid gummed onto the metal would come out with a second boil. The shells themselves were clean and shiny, steaming a bit. I dropped them back into the pot and scraped the meat stuck in the colander. I boiled the shells for half an hour, then did my best to follow the rest of the recipe.

  Now Katie’s small room reeked of fish and onion. Froth blackened under the coil. How had I managed to make such a mess? As a last resort I poured the watery mess into two bowls, dropped into each a tablespoon of heavy cream, and sprinkled a garnish of fresh tarragon. I pressed toast to the bottom of the bowls, so that the cream and tarragon seemed to float at the surface of a rich broth. I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and pulled over the futon—it was our bed, our sofa, our makeshift dining table—and lit candles, listening for the elevator. I paused Katie’s favorite song at the chorus, so that it might begin with her first steps through the door.

  Say it wasn’t the perfect marriage. When we were happy, we made choices, rather than decisions. When we fought, the distinctions became explicit and difficult. I don’t know whether this makes our life together easier or harder, less or more conventional, and none of this really is practical now; I am attracted only to the speculation, a grayness that yields neither color nor its absence. We looked at every option before us and followed out gut. One day, sure, we might plan for the long term. For now, we loved each other’s families, kept our confidences, came home most nights and watched television together, played cribbage and chess, walked our neighborhood to a restaurant or bar or café, with books or just to sit and talk, volunteered and saw friends together. We ran on the lakefront in Chicago, along the bay in Miami, and around the state buildings in Bucharest. We practiced the rituals of a marriage, and whatever our temperaments, however the reluctance, we enjoyed and found meaning in them.

  But this is speaking in summary, without particulars. Here is the moment of crisis and our coming through together three times, mobile, intact, and in love. First, north of Uptown, near the Chicago lakefront, touring the larger apartment where we would live for two years. Second, in a living room in Chicago, in a moment of ultimatum. Finally, in front of the People’s Palace of Bucharest, considering a job offer. Each time we are exhausted and afraid, a little older. We have talked out every detail, and now we look at each other. Katie is holding my hands and standing very close. I hate seeing her like this, as I know she hates, more than anything, feeling vulnerable. Do we really want to do this? she asks, and each time I know she really means, I know how much you love me, and I love you, and still, this might not work out. This might be a terrible, terrible mistake. And once we make it, we will not be able to walk it back, not really, not without consequences. And I will pause a moment, because I think it is rude not to seem to consider the question, but I know my answer. I will say, without hesitation, Yes.

  The ruby is more precious than the opal, and the rose gold is a higher quality than the white, but the opal ring is the one I like to take out and admire. It means our beginning. The pale blue has an aspect that changes with the light, sometimes green and yellow, at other times almost silver. I like thinking about the basement jeweler on Michigan Avenue and how close I felt then to my sister-in-law as we agreed Katie would like an opal best. I think that one day I will give this ring to one of Katie’s nieces when she marries, and she will wear it in Katie’s memory and be happy.

  For now, I keep the opal ring and the ruby. The box remains in a state of process, changing with time, perhaps—like Katie’s thin wedding band—to one day go missing and become lost.

  I keep the box. I will not give away the rest of these last few things that belonged to Katie and me. They will mean something else eventually, to whoever inherits or discovers them. And perhaps it is best to invent the connections between the dull and beautiful objects, to imagine the particulars rather than try to understand them. After all, they might mean nothing. Mere tchotchkes, curios—all the debris of a life—magnified and elaborated to a grief more clear than the corresponding life itself.

  Widowhood is the final carry-forward remainder of our marriage, the sequence of numbers that refuse to resolve in multiples or factors that mark a gap between what is remembered and what was lived. In the minds of many who loved Katie, long after her death, I remained Katie’s husband. Even after I lost the marriage, I took a great deal of pride in being her husband.

  Mid-October we flew into Milwaukee from Miami, rented a car, and drove southwest toward Moline, where Dave and Meghan would marry. Coming down I-94 we missed the interchange at Tomah and followed a series of back roads that paralleled soybeans and cornfields. Two teenagers in a Subaru told us that any left would take us to the highway. An hour later we were unsure if we would ever find the exit. Embankments, then gas stations, more cities: Ithaca, Lewiston, Rock Island, Ipava, Itasca, Ottawa. Losing the Chicago radio stations, Katie cycled through our CDs. We had no idea how much farther to Moline. Every time Katie restarted A Man Ain’t Made of Stone, I remembered more of the lyrics. While Dave and Meghan practiced their vows, we sat in the car singing “Digging Up Bones” and “Forever and Ever, Amen.” The next day we danced at Dave and Meghan’s wedding. I was an usher at their ceremony. After the toasts and cake, we said our goodbyes and called it a night. We flew back to Miami. It was the beginning of winter, and the humidity was just breaking.

  A therapist said to think of Katie’s death as a story. Name the parts that are too difficult, and then leave them out. Tell the story again and again, until those difficult parts come back.

  Is it easier to think of our life together as a collection of facts and events, rather than one complete, exhaustive sequence?

  I’m not certain that either Katie’s life or our life together had certainty and coherence; that how we lived was exactly the one life described in eulogies and tributes, with its tidy beginning, middle, and end, full of premature accomplishment. Katie’s death magnified her ambitious life and rounded off its edges. She died, as many people said, doing what she love
d. Had we lived together another year, another ten years, another fifty—had Katie lived at all—our time together, whatever its conclusion, might have all seemed a rather minor preamble.

  Only one perspective carries forward: my own. Katie can no more refute my account after her death than put forward her own. But she left a partial defense. In her journals Katie wrote regularly about her own sense of uncertainty. Could she be the wife I wanted? Why was our timing always off? Would we ever have children? Among descriptions of daily life, frustrations with work and family, records of jogs and yoga sessions, her perspective on marriage alternates reluctance and faith, self-doubt and self-recrimination. How hard she must have worked to meet me halfway, given all of her uncertainty. Then, I didn’t know to feel gratitude for it. Now, I cannot thank her. I knew that Katie felt uncertain about the institution of marriage and, sometimes, our own marriage. This part always came forward in fights and conversations. I had no idea—was I not listening? did I not want to hear it?—she judged herself so harshly for the critique.

  Young Americans

  1.

  Before Katie’s death, I saw our beginning clearly. I told the story about dancing at a party in Dhaka, both of us a little drunk and each of us saying something clever. I described the bus ride that next month and my taking the empty seat next to hers; how Katie pulled my arm over her and leaned into me so matter-of-factly that when my arm fell asleep I did not move it, not even as I lost feeling into the shoulder, so that we might keep talking about the families, hometowns, and friends back home we would most likely never meet, imagining ourselves and our lives in enough detail that we seemed to know each other instantly. Dinner the next night in Dhaka. The park where we finally noticed the security guard watching us. The morning a mutual friend looked at Katie’s neck and said, Man, this hangover sucks harder than Big John.

  I tell myself now that I will not reanimate a ghost; that if the fact of Katie’s death ends our life together, then I can make no sequence of events that does not also initiate tragedy. Why begin with optimism a story that must dissemble reluctance and violence?

  There is a competing claim to this logic, a way of making the past that seeks emphasis and invention, rather than sequence. Say it is the difference between closing down every possibility into some broad lie, on the one hand, and finding instead the feeling, however disjointed, that makes the senseless and violent end of a life something more deeply felt than the trivial anecdote of its sensational facts. Before Katie’s death, I would not think to make a distinction between how our life began and how the feeling of the marriage was invented and sustained. I didn’t have to make the distinction. The fact of our marriage, not Katie’s death, was the decisive moment of our life together.

  It feels good to tell an exceptional story about us, one that makes certain virtues essential—selflessness, service, privation—in unlikely places no one we knew had visited or was likely to visit. Katie and I were Peace Corps volunteers who fell in love in Bangladesh, made a life in Chicago and Miami, and then went abroad one last time to Romania, where we lived for the last year of her life. In such a story, we arrive, always, at another place. We are young, idealistic, selfless, hard-working. We are an idea of ourselves, fixed in that time, which is now lost forever.

  What were we doing in the middle of Bangladesh? We were dating. We were serving our country and changing lives. Bangladesh isn’t real; we said this to each other constantly. We lived in sparse, cement-walled rooms rented from our schools. We took buses, rickshaws, and two-cycle motor taxis to leave them. Smog made our phlegm black. Red circles marked wells drilled into arsenic. We tested our water and carried it in ten-gallon plastic barrels from the well to the front gate of our schools, where we taught hygiene classes and met with local politicians, who drew phonetic squares and drilled the z and j sounds.

  Zack drives John to the zoo in his Jeep.

  Joe jokes that Zahir zings the xylophone.

  My students said I looked and sounded like President Clinton: tall, young, and midwestern, with blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses. To them all Americans looked the same. When President Clinton visited that spring on his last world tour in office, the entire Peace Corps contingent stood in a cluster opposite the runway, watching Air Force One and waiting to greet him. We shook the hands of senators and aides as his procession arrived at the airport. President Clinton wore a new suit that afternoon, blue with a gold tie, tailored by a local Bangladeshi. He was leonine, wary. He looked each of us in the eye, and somehow he knew to stop and ask the volunteer from Arkansas where she had gone to high school. We smiled and cheered. Then, he was gone, up the stairwell, which rolled into a larger cargo plane further down the runway. Plane after plane disappeared into the night sky. Wouldn’t we leave Bangladesh so gracefully?

  In the beginning, when I hadn’t seen Katie for a few weeks, her face seemed sharper than it did the last time, her eyes a different blue. There was nuance in her voice, her laugh round and smooth in a way that I didn’t quite remember. Had her front teeth always had that gap? Was that scar over her left or right eye? Always, one of us had gained or lost weight. Katie wore raw silk and a hand-sewn cotton shalwar in public, covering her face, making her body shapeless. Sometimes I heard her voice before I saw her mouth. I thought of it as running the dub on a video: trying to synch words with lips. The effect lasted only a few minutes, but I remember thinking it was strange, that I could imagine someone so vividly in her absence that she might seem to become someone else.

  The Peace Corps was a finishing school, a nondenominational cult, a secular house of worship. We spoke in acronyms—RPCV, PST, IST, PCMO, APCD—that meant we lived on the other side of the world, where the water was not clean, the roads were not paved, and the people were impressed by our relative size. All of this distinction required a separate and secret code of efficient communication. Americans were tall and well fed. We nourished babies that thrived. On the walls of our rooms were photographs of handsome, wealthy people: family members, in fact, who lived in our family homes.

  When the Peace Corps conducted official business, its representatives arrived in enormous sport-utility vehicles, with tinted windows and chrome grills across the headlights. Officers and staff members in crisp shirts and bland ties wore expensive watches and, always, sunglasses. They broke into sweats immediately, because their cars in the monsoon heat had been cooled for hours to artic temperatures. But they spoke the language. They drank whatever was offered them. In this way the Peace Corps was an ideal, an argument, a mobile promised land working a methodical, slow reveal. We volunteers were its prophets, the elect ambassadors who made our country beautiful by example. We carried backpacks and wore sandals, but everyone seemed to understand that if we were threatened, a battalion of marines would arrive instantly and extract us into the sky.

  Katie applied to the Peace Corps, she said, because she hated hearing John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas! (War Is Over)” in shopping malls, at holiday parties, and especially late at night, by request, when she delivered pizzas in the Twin Cities. Why was the song following her, and what did it want from her? She didn’t know. She was not doing enough to help the world, she believed, because if she was doing enough, then John Lennon and Yoko Ono would not hound her to do more.

  I applied to the Peace Corps, I told her, because everyone I admired at my university was applying to the Peace Corps. It was a process to begin that took more than a year to complete, becoming more elaborate and specific with each successive interview, medical exam, and clearance, until the selected were understood to be, in every way, exceptional. I loved the sense of momentum and possibility. The experience and destination would change me, I agreed. I could think of it only in the abstract, how my time in the Peace Corps might make me vital and return me home transformed.

  It did not matter which region of the world I helped or whether I could locate it on a map. The country to which I was originally assigned, Mongolia, could very well have been the same c
ountry where I ultimately served, Bangladesh. I did not know the difference among Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In my naïve mind it was one giant amorphous movie set: rice paddy, monsoon, distant Himalaya. I believed that I would arrive anywhere on the globe and immediately solve problems. I was a young American abroad. The Peace Corps told me it was likely I would not only help people but also love doing so.

  In the weeks after Katie’s death, I felt that same uncertain inclination to optimism about a person I might one day become. I had plenty of opportunities to practice being that person, in public and private gatherings that honored Katie. In Bucharest Katie’s coworkers laid fresh flowers at her desk. A colleague spoke about Katie’s sacrifice to save lives the night she died and how her doing so followed the life of service she led in Romania and America. An icon of the Virgin Mary was presented by an Orthodox priest. I was given cake and wine to bring home to Katie’s family. When it was my turn to speak, I tried to say something about how our last day on that hike together had been ideal; how Katie loved to hike, and to be outdoors with friends, and she had spent a full day doing both; that I had loved doing those things with Katie and also seeing her so happy. I wanted to thank those colleagues for remembering her so well, and I also wanted to make their memory of us certain. How could we ever forget Katie’s spirit, I said, her generosity, smile, and laughter? How would we live after her?

  A week later, in Illinois, I laid over Katie’s ashes flowers from the fifty-odd bouquets at her funeral mass. Katie’s mom and I drank the bottle of wine. The outfit I picked for Katie’s cremation was ordinary, even familiar: the khaki pants and blue button-down she wore most days to work. I had thought briefly to have the body dressed head-to-toe in soft fleece. To see her in them would have meant she was warm and happy. I couldn’t do it. I was dressing Katie for the journey that would bring her home. I resolved myself to the ritual, thinking, This is another opportunity to honor Katie’s life.