by Yiyun Li
The front desk just rang and said there was a telegram for me. From Hetty. I told them to send it up tomorrow.
* * *
LUCY WAS HER FATHER’S daughter. All those tantrums, all those words, all those things they wanted but would never get—the world was a hurtful place for them, and no one could change it. But Roland was luckier than Lucy. Sidelle was not Roland’s mother. I am Lucy’s. That hardness in us makes us difficult mothers, but it makes us better women.
22 NOVEMBER 1969.
Sidelle died, at 16.13 by my watch, 16.16 as recorded by the nurse.
From yesterday morning on she did not regain consciousness. I was the only one who insisted on sitting with her. A few visitors came and went. I imagined her friends studying their calendars and train schedules. An outing would have to be cancelled, a dinner party postponed, a concert missed. But that is about all. The inconvenience her death causes will be minimal, just as Sidelle would have preferred. No fuss. A neat ending. And then onward with life.
I have no life here. Sidelle was my life in London. I wonder if I will ever return. In what form though? A black-clad man, old, frail, laying a bouquet of white lilies by a gravestone. That man would cut a melancholy figure on a film screen. That man would deserve a poem written for him, or a monologue in a play, or even an aria. But Sidelle is dead, and I see little point in keeping up with a performance that has always been partly for myself, partly for her. Was she truly the only audience, apart from myself, that I wanted to impress?
This afternoon, when Miss Otis, the nurse, came in to check on Sidelle, she told me perhaps it would be good for me to take a walk. You look pale, she said. Some fresh air will do you good. I refused, and she did not press further. The doctor said it would be likely today, she said. She told me to call her if there was any change.
There was nothing to do then. I thought of lying down next to Sidelle. Waiting for her death with her. But her bed was not much wider than a cot, so I pulled the chair closer and rested my head on the pillow, not quite touching hers.
I dozed off. I must have dozed off, because time passed. Then I was startled by her dying, which was not as smooth as I had imagined it would be. All human lives start with some sort of unsettlement, resistance, violence, so perhaps there is no surprise that a life may not want to leave without some resistance and violence, either. Subdued in her case, but not entirely peaceful.
I dispatched a telegram to Hetty. Mrs. Ogden died. Awaiting funeral arrangements.
According to Tessa Hutchinson and Sidelle’s solicitor, everything is in order. A neat ending it is. She arranged her death just as she arranged my life. Well. Sensibly. Devastatingly so.
29 NOVEMBER 1969.
More people showed up at the funeral than I imagined would, though this was not really a surprise. What did surprise me, though, was that everyone sounded as though he or she had had the most special relationship with Sidelle. Did the crowd in that church gaze at one another, thinking, like me, of his or her own loss that could never be understood by the rest of the world?
How do you feel, Roland?
—Feel? Not feeling much.
Sad at least?
—Yes, yes, sad. But the baby bird that fell out of the nest this past spring and was devoured by Hetty’s cat made me sad. A mediocre production of Othello Hetty and I went to last month made me sad. Reading some of my old diary entries makes me sad. But sadness is never a strong enough flavour for my emotional palate.
What is, then?
—Ah, but is that not my fatal problem? Nothing really is.
But do you want it: something stronger than nothing?
—The question is: Do I deserve something stronger than nothing? I used to think I would not be able to endure Sidelle’s death, but here I am, with not a single strand of hair turned greyer. Imagine Hetty looking for the tearstains on my handkerchiefs when I return. How disappointed she will be.
Perhaps you overestimate yourself. What if Sidelle’s death is too recent to make you feel its realness yet?
—She and I have put each other beyond the reach of death, don’t you think?
Are you sure, Roland?
—How else am I to live my life now, Roland?
How long has it been since I fell into this lovely habit of having a conversation between one Roland and the other Roland.
* * *
IN THE EARLY YEARS of my marriage I often thought about Sidelle. I didn’t know her at all back then, apart from the few things Roland had told me, but I thought of her as a competitor. I used to ask myself: What would Sidelle Ogden have done had she been in my shoes? Of course, I asked myself that when Lucy died, but I also asked it about smaller things. When Timmy fell from a swing and broke two baby teeth, I pressed the cotton ball to his mouth before taking him to the ER. In the waiting room I wondered, Would Sidelle Ogden feel disturbed by the sight of her child’s blood? A lady waiting nearby asked if I needed help. I thanked her and said no, and she had to raise her voice above Timmy’s crying to tell me that, had she been me, she would have broken down crying. I looked at her and thought, But you’re not me—and you’re not Sidelle Ogden, either.
I used to think she had something I didn’t have. It was luck, and I wanted her luck. I used to think if she had been born a girl on a ranch and if I had been born as comfortably as she was, she would’ve been a little girl from California Roland didn’t care to remember, and I would’ve had a free and glorious life.
But what is luck? It doesn’t matter that Sidelle was never Lilia, or Lilia was never Sidelle. Luck is being born with all four limbs and a brain and a heart. Yes, there are some who’re unlucky, but most of us have enough luck on our side. Not everyone can make the same something out of life. Sidelle and I, we are the kind of people who make the most out of any life. Luck is on my side as much as it was on her side. Roland and Hetty—now they were truly an unlucky couple.
When someone dies you feel sad for the life she will never get to have again, or you feel sad for yourself because that person will never be in your life again. I felt both things when Lucy died. Sometimes I couldn’t tell which was which, if I wanted her to live on for us, or if I wanted her to live because of what I knew by then, that life could be cold and harsh but it was never psychopathic. When Gilbert died, I felt sad mostly for him. He had deserved a longer life, more days with his children and grandchildren. I was relieved that I didn’t die before him. Not because I was selfish. But because if I died first, he would’ve been stuck thinking about his years without me, and about the life I missed. It’d have been like losing Lucy again for him.
I can always live without someone.
It was hard for Roland to feel sad when Sidelle died. He couldn’t be sad for her because she had lived and missed nothing. He couldn’t be sad for himself because—oh, Roland, let me be ungentle with you this once, but surely you already knew this: You were never really in Sidelle’s life the way you imagined.
31 DECEMBER 1969.
I have spent the past month rereading Sidelle’s letters to me. Nearly four decades of them. I cannot see myself obey her wish. To destroy these letters would be, next to destroying my own diaries, the closest gesture to annul my life.
* * *
I HAVE NO DOUBT the letters survived Roland’s death, but what happened to them after? Are they kept where his diaries are kept? And where that is, we’ll never know. But sometimes I also wonder if Peter Wilson burned the letters. A tragedy for Roland, but not so much for Sidelle.
18 AUGUST 1987.
Henrietta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987. Beloved wife of Roland V. S. Bouley. You did all you could, and were awarded a happy life.
Henrietta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987. Beloved wife of Roland V. S. Bouley. We did all we could, and were awarded a happy marriage.
Henriet
ta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987. Beloved wife of Roland V. S. Bouley. Of the world of thorns and weeds you cultivated a marriage as an ever-blooming flower.
Henrietta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987. Beloved wife of Roland V. S. Bouley. No one’s love cut deeper than yours. No one’s life healed as yours did.
Henrietta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987. Beloved wife of Roland V. S. Bouley. A woman without follies.
None of these can be carved on her headstone.
Perhaps I should keep it simple: Henrietta Margaret Bouley, 2 February 1913 – 18 August 1987.
Later.
Hetty died as she wished. At home, in her own bed, surrounded by no one, with her beloved husband under the same roof but not next to her.
In the past few months, she was increasingly resistant to admitting any visitor. Toward the end she allowed only the two nurses to see her in her less presentable state. Dr. Evans and I were spared the worst. Charitable patient, charitable wife.
This morning Marybeth, the younger one of the two nurses, said that she would call the doctor, while I should go to Hetty without delay. I went in. I thought of lying down next to her, being her husband for one last day. Just as I approached, she opened her eyes and stopped me from making myself a sentimental fool at her deathbed.
It looks like the fog will be gone soon, I said, pointing to the closed curtains. She shut and then opened her eyes, acknowledging the world that has sustained us all these years. I did not say more but sat with her, until she shut her eyes without opening them again, a sign that she wanted to be left alone.
I didn’t see her again until the nurses told me she had died. 15.33.
Later.
Sleep is not coming. Earlier I took a few old books off Hetty’s shelf, the ones she read when she was a schoolgirl. I randomly opened a book, and a few dried petals fell out. That sight startled me more than seeing her laid out, ready to be transported away from this life we have shared as husband and wife for forty-one years.
The book I opened and then closed for fear of intruding further upon the dead flowers is now on my desk. A Girl’s Guide to Amusing Yourself and Others. A girlhood manual for a life of fulfilment. I wonder if Hetty, once a disciple of the book, had long ago succeeded in becoming a true master of that art.
Despite the animosity Sidelle had once shown toward Hetty (and vice versa, though Hetty was good at brushing it aside), I wonder if she would have applauded Hetty’s life. Here was a woman of Sidelle’s calibre, who, having lived a life of no fussiness, put a perfect full stop at the end of that book called Hetty Bouley. What it took her to be herself I shall never know.
One wonders if she was one of the last treasures of her generation. I say that as though I do not also belong to the same generation. But in a sense I am not of any generation, and that gives one the illusion of always being young. Hetty, so deeply rooted in the life known to our mothers, our aunts, their mother, their aunts, was old before her time. A man and a woman from two generations: Such was the secret of our long-lasting marriage, made not for romance but for happiness. Must you go, Hetty? But let me not ask the question that only a fool would ask. Fools we are not. We have done well by each other.
Rather, I would say this: Must I go?
* * *
POOR HETTY. ROLAND HAD only good words to say about her.
Do you think Hetty was the woman Roland thought she was? I don’t. Hetty never needed Roland. She never needed anyone. Inside every Hetty there is always someone else, a woman like my mother or like Mrs. Williamson, and inside that woman you can find yet other women. Great-grandmother Lucille. My sister Lucille or Margot. A friend like Maggie. Sidelle. Lucy (how much of my life has been about Lucy—I only now understand it). My daughters and daughters-in-law. Like sets of Russian dolls. Infinite possibilities. How to entertain yourself and others—this is how: Always know that you have all those secret women inside you.
What about you two, Katherine and Iola. I don’t know. You must work that out yourselves. I think I have only enough time left to figure out this doll called Lilia. Roland was right about one thing. When you start writing about yourself, it feels like you can go on living forever.
Gilbert said I was the one to live with pride. Perhaps I do. Posterity, take notice. I’ve never asked anyone, not even Lucy: Must you go?
And that question Roland lived with every day of his life—I might as well order a gravestone with the question carved on it and have it delivered to his grave. Better late than never, don’t you think?
ROLAND VICTOR SYDNEY BOULEY
19 NOVEMBER 1910—19 JANUARY 1991
MUST I GO?
Yes, Roland, yes. We all must.
For Dapeng and James
and for Vincent, always and forever
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE WRITING OF THIS NOVEL was interrupted by life, and the book could not have been finished without friends and supporters.
Sarah Chalfant: Your consistency and care sustain my writing. Charles Buchan and Jacqueline Ko and others at the Wylie Agency: Your attention makes many things possible.
Kate Medina and the Random House team: Thank you for your tireless work on my behalf.
Simon Prosser and the Hamish Hamilton team: Thank you for your extraordinary insight.
Friends whose kindness and generosity have lightened the dark days: the Hughes family, Gish Jen, Lan Samantha Chang, Isavane Samanna, Susan Wheeler, A. M. Homes, Tracy K. Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cressida Leyshon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Noreen McAuliffe, Chen Reis, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Kerry Reilly, Patrick Cox, Rabih Alameddine, Benjamin Dreyer, Duchess Goldblatt, Taylor McNeil, Mary-Beth Hughes, Doris Ng, Hong-Sze Yu, Erin West, and many others.
Edmund White: Every minute spent with you is an antidote to life’s terror, indifference, and tedium.
Mona Simpson: Friend and ally through thick and thin—LMWM, LMWM, LMWM!
Elizabeth McCracken: Dearest Elizabeth! Another three hundred pages won’t be enough for all the love.
Amy Leach: Let kings assemble. Here you and I sit with our books; we have no other thrones.
Brigid Hughes: Anything I put down for you can only be a placeholder. Words do fall short.
BY YIYUN LI
Must I Go
Where Reasons End
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Kinder Than Solitude
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
The Vagrants
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YIYUN LI is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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