A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Now, Ray’s bureau drawer is empty. I have no idea why I have done what I’ve done. (Did I think that I needed the bureau drawer?) I feel sick, stunned. I could have run after the van and called for him to stop, I could have taken back the socks—(maybe)—but a kind of paralysis had come over me, I simply stood at the window staring helplessly as at Ray’s bedside when I’d arrived too late I had stood staring helplessly at Ray, my brain struck empty of even self-loathing, self-recrimination.

  The lizard-thing, the basilisk—that wants me to give up, to die—is staring at me, steady and resolute, waiting, from just a few feet away but I don’t look. I won’t.

  Chapter 46

  In Motion!

  Keep in motion!—here is salvation.

  And so in these hallucinatory weeks following Ray’s death I am determined to impersonate “JCO” as flawlessly as in the cult film Blade Runner the race of replicants impersonated human beings. I am determined to impersonate “JCO” not merely because I have contracted to do so but because—a fact I am not likely to acknowledge in the Q & A sessions following my readings/lectures—it is the most effective way of eluding the basilisk.

  And there is the stark blunt fact What difference does it make where you are, there is nowhere you will not be alone and all places are equidistant from death.

  Cuyahoga County, Ohio. March 4, 2008. Amid a blizzard—banshee-howling winds—there’s an almost festive air—giddiness, gaiety—when the plane bearing sixty or so ghastly-pale passengers westward from Philadelphia in the way of a small boat on a stormy sea lands—slightly lurching, wobbly—but not disastrously—on the snow-whipped runway at the Cleveland airport.

  I will try to feel good about this. I will try not to hear the mocking refrain running through my head There once was a ship, and she sailed upon the sea. And the name of our ship . . .

  Somehow it has happened, against the advice of friends, and my longtime lecture-agent Janet Cosby, that I have come to Cleveland to give a talk—“The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration”—for a fund-raiser evening sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. My appearance isn’t at the library but in the Ohio Theater, a quaintly restored movie palace of the 1920s with a midnight-blue-felt sky twinkling with stars—vast space is suggested, magical transformations as in a children’s storybook—a cavernous space of one thousand seats—of which only about half will be filled, as a result of this terrible weather.

  “Miss Oates! Thank you so much for coming! We heard about your husband, we’re so very sorry . . .”

  My hosts are women: librarians. Very nice people.

  Inevitably, everywhere—(yes, I can be quoted on this!)—the very nicest people you meet are likely to be librarians.

  How hard this is, however—maintaining my poise as “JCO” when I am being addressed, so bluntly, as a woman whose husband has died—a “widow.”

  How hard too, to change the subject—to deflect the subject—for I must not break down, not now. I know that these women mean well, of course they mean well, one or another of these women might in fact be widowed herself, but their words leave me stricken and unable to speak, at first. Accepting their condolences I must be courteous, gracious. I must understand that their solicitude is genuine, that they have no idea how desperately I would like not to be reminded of my “loss”—at this time, particularly.

  By degrees then “JCO” returns, or resumes—the precarious moment has passed.

  I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed:

  Yes my husband died.

  Yes I am very sad.

  Yes you are kind to offer condolences.

  Now can we change the subject?

  With eight or ten others, mostly women, I am taken to dinner at a private club close by the Ohio Theater; our hostess—clearly a donor with money—stares at me almost rudely during the course of the dinner as she interrogates me at length about my novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter, seemingly the only book of mine she has read. There are people for whom a work of fiction presents some sort of obstacle, or challenge—a portrait of lives or life views that differ from their own, and therefore require this sort of sharp interrogation. The situation is compounded by the fact that the woman is evidently hard of hearing, so that my polite-murmured replies draw blank stares, and her voice is raised, strident as she asks why, having been “middle-class” in Germany, did the Jewish family in my novel so quickly “give in” and “become peasants” in the United States? I am so taken aback by this question, and the curious stridency with which it’s asked, I have to think carefully how to reply. Because they were traumatized by their experiences in Germany, I say. Because they were made to flee their homes, they were uprooted, terrified—they suffered. The Nazis persecuted the Jews—you must know of this, surely? The woman stares at me. Is she seriously deaf? Is she being contrary, adversarial? Is she a snob? An anti-Semite? Or just obtuse? Yes, she says, with a disdainful expression, but they became poor so quickly, they lived in squalor. The father had been a high school teacher, he should have known better . . . How bizarre this is, how disagreeable, it reminds me of an astonishing remark made to Susan Sontag and me at a literary conference in Warsaw in the early 1980s, by a Polish translator—The Jews could have saved themselves from the Nazis. But they were too lazy.

  The other guests at dinner—the librarians—are listening in silence. I am wishing that I were alone—anywhere, alone!—even as I try to explain to the skeptical woman that a writer does not present characters as they should be ideally, but as they might be, plausibly; I am not about to tell her that The Gravedigger’s Daughter is based upon my grandmother’s life—my Jewish grandmother, the mother of my father—long before I knew her. The woman plying me with questions is clearly accustomed to being taken very seriously, for soon it’s revealed that she and her husband have “dined with the Bushes”—that is, George W. and Laura—at a $25,000-per-plate fund-raiser; her husband is a “staunch Republican”—an older man. Grudgingly she concedes, “I suppose it wasn’t easy to get a job over here. In the 1930s.” Yes, I say. That’s right. It wasn’t easy—“Jacob Schwart became a gravedigger because he had no choice.”

  Yet she repeats, as if this were the telling blow: “Yes but they gave in so quickly. That’s what I don’t understand.”

  I feel furious, wanting to say to her And how quickly would you have given in? A month, a week? A day?

  The other women seem embarrassed. The subject is changed. For the first time I think that maybe this was a mistake, coming here. Leaving home in a snowstorm, to give a presentation for a public library in Ohio—in a snowstorm. Clearly, I’m not in my right mind. This silly conversation with a stranger, a “staunch Republican”—what do I care about it, or her? What do I care what this woman thinks? I will never see her again, I will never return to Cuyahoga County again.

  The dinner continues, on a lighter note. I can tell stories—not about myself, or my fated Jewish ancestors, but of other writers, writer-friends, names familiar to my dinner companions who are eager to be entertained and keep telling me how “grateful” they are that my plane didn’t crash in the storm, or that I hadn’t canceled at the last minute—“That’s what we expected, you know.”

  Everyone agrees, vehemently. Even the woman who’d so disapproved of my Jewish family. They would have canceled in similar circumstances, of course.

  I can’t tell them that canceling wasn’t an option for me. Because if I had, I might have canceled the next engagement. And the next. And one morning, I wouldn’t get out of bed at all.

  By the end of the dinner I’ve forgotten the unpleasant exchange with the hard-of-hearing donor and am feeling almost giddy, elated. It’s as if Ray were present and were reminding me—If you were upset by her, you must care. You are not totally defeated, depressed. A depressed person would not become angry. This is good!

  There’s an ironic appropriateness to my presentation—“The Writer’s ‘Secret Life’:
Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration”—with its focus upon woundedness—especially in childhood. The writers of whom I speak—Samuel Beckett, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Sam Clemens, Eugene O’Neill among others—are brilliant examples of individuals who rendered woundedness into art; they are not writers of genius because they were wounded but because, being wounded, they were capable of transmuting their experience into something rich and strange and new and wonderful. Tears spring into my eyes when I quote Ernest Hemingway’s stirring remark—it’s so profound, I will quote it to the audience twice:

  From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason.

  (Hemingway was in his late fifites—nearing the end of his life—when he made this passionate statement to the young George Plimpton, interviewing Hemingway for one of the first issues of the fledgling Paris Review. The ringing idealism is at odds with Hemingway’s deeply wounded if not mutilated self—his twisted soul, his embittered and grudging spirit—yet, how powerful!)

  During the presentation I feel buoyed aloft—as always—as if my particular woundedness has been left behind, in the wings of the stage; but afterward, alone, after the applause has abated, and the book-signing is ended, and I have been driven back to my hotel—alone—this is the dangerous time.

  I would make a joke of it, if I could—“Honey? I’m here in Parma, Ohio. In a snowstorm—and on Snow Road. Don’t ask why!”

  Or: “There’s a gigantic bouquet in the room here—a strong scent of lilies—like a funeral home.”

  If I were to call Ray as ordinarily I would have called him at this time, this is what I would say to him, to make him laugh. And

  Ray would say—

  Don’t stay up too late working.

  Come back soon!

  I love you.

  It is a fact that I am in Parma, Ohio, but not quite truthful that I am, at the moment, at 2111 Snow Road, which is the address of the Cuyahoga County Library; I am in a very nice hotel in this Cleveland suburb.

  Nor is it truthful that I know what Ray might have said. Very likely we’d have spoken of the most mundane things . . . as usually we did.

  This is the first engagement away from home since Ray has died and thus the first night away from home when I can’t call him.

  How relentless, snow blown against the hotel windows! Banshee-howling outside! It was very kind of my librarian-hosts to leave the large beautiful floral display for me with its waxy-white lilies that emit the most exquisite sweetness . . . How sad it seems to me that there is no one with whom I might share these flowers, as there is no one with whom I can share the luxurious hotel suite, the “king-sized” bed the size of a football field.

  I am so lonely—I have no one to call back home—no one knows where I am, nor does anyone care; this is the most maudlin sort of self-pity, I know; yet—how to transcend it? I am not Camus’s Sisyphus—the “hero of the absurd” who resists the temptation to suicide by a stoic acceptance of his fate. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, says Camus. To which I would say Really? What would Sisyphus say for himself?

  In the somewhat drafty hotel room—near the tall narrow windows—the basilisk is hovering. If I turn my head, the thing retreats—the glassy stare, that look of terrible patience.

  Never would I contemplate “harming myself” away from home—of course. So I am safe here in Parma, Ohio.

  Yet so anxious and depressed, I have to call my friend Jeanne—but her daughter Lily answers—Jeanne isn’t home; I call Edmund White, who is home, in his apartment in Chelsea, New York City, and doesn’t even seem surprised that his writer-friend Joyce is calling him at 11 P.M. from Desperation, Ohio.

  How lucky I am, Edmund will talk with me at this hour! If there is a Mozart of friendship, Edmund White is the Mozart of friendship; the most sympathetic of individuals, open emotionally to his friends at any time; Edmund doesn’t judge, he who is beyond being judged as he is, by his own admission, beyond shame. In a startling passage in My Lives he has said of himself:

  In my pursuit of lightness, I sometimes feel like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested. If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now I can usually spot the next branch but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.

  That night lying in the enormous bed in chilly sheets I listen to snow flung against the windows like crazed neutrinos thinking I did it. I was here. I didn’t cancel. And now—next?

  Chapter 47

  In Motion!—“Still Alive”

  New York University, NY. March 6, 2008.

  Not in a howling blizzard but on a dank chill winter evening.

  Not desperately flinging my life into the sky but driven by car on the New Jersey Turnpike, exiting at the Holland Tunnel, a familiar landscape no more than two hours from home.

  Home! The thought makes me anxious, breathless. For no sooner am I away from home than I yearn to return to it.

  In a sense now, I am homeless. For the home, the place of refuge, solitude, love—where my husband lived—no longer exists.

  Where am I, why am I here, I must remind myself—Where there is nowhere to be, all places are equal.

  My friend Ed Doctorow is my host this evening. I am speaking/reading to a gathering of young writers in a “writers’ house” near the NYU campus. Today has been a good day, a “safe” day—earlier, I was teaching at Princeton; now, I am here in the writers’ house at NYU; it’s an interlude of several hours in which I am not obsessively a widow but another, freer individual—whom these young New York City writers perceive as “Joyce Carol Oates”—and though the identity is something of an imposture it’s familiar and comforting like my worn old down-filled quilted red coat that falls nearly to my ankles and has a hood inside which I can hide.

  This coat, my old red coat, purchased in Ray’s company years ago, reminds me of him, however. For this is the coat I wore daily in the winter, in many winters, as Ray wore one or another of his jackets from L.L. Bean. (These jackets, hanging now in the hall closet at home. Often I stare into the closet, I stroke the sleeves. My mind is utterly blank, baffled.) As being publicly and warmly greeted by Ed Doctorow, hugged and my cheek kissed, reminds me of Ray, so keenly of Ray, for never had I seen Ed Doctorow and his wife Helen except in Ray’s company also, over the years.

  I am trying to recall when we’d first met Ed and Helen. Possibly, when Ed taught a fiction workshop at Princeton in the late 1970s. We’d driven out to Sag Harbor, on the far, northern shore of Long Island, to visit the Doctorows at their country house.

  “It’s a pleasure to introduce my friend Joyce Carol Oates—”

  So Ed tells the young writers, of whom many are his students. There’s a festive air in this crowded space, the kind of excitement and nerviness that young writers—young artists?—exude. I would like to tell them that being an “established” writer—even a “major American writer”—(a designation that seems utterly unreal to me)—doesn’t bring with it confidence, security, or even a sense of who/whom one is.

  Do you know how a novel will end, when you start out?

  Do you ever alter the endings you’ve planned, when you get to the end?

  Who has been your greatest influence?

  A wild fear comes over me, something will happen to Ray’s uncompleted manuscript Black Mass—something will happen to the house in my absence.

  Vandals trashing the house. A fire . . .

  What are you working on now?

  How can you tell when something will be a story or a novel?

  Did you ever start out writing a story, and it turned into a novel?

  Did you ever start out writing
a novel, and it turned into a story?

  When did you know you wanted to be a . . .

  The blunt fact is: to be a writer, you have to be strong enough to write. You have to have emotional strength, and you have to have physical strength. Now that I no longer have this strength, it seems wrong of me to try to answer young writers’ questions like some sort of writerly Delphic oracle . . .

  (Surely the Delphic oracle knew very well that he was an imposter. Every oracle knows that he/she is an imposter. Yet—when others are asking you questions, and are eager to believe that you know the answers, who are you to break the spell?)

  Where do you get your ideas from?

  . . . your inspiration?

  Inspiration! Of all people I am singularly ill-equipped to talk about inspiration—I feel like a balloon from which air has leaked—deflated, flat. Yet I manage to answer the question plausibly—

  Ideas come from anywhere, everywhere. Personal life, what you’ve heard from others, newspaper accounts, history. . . .

  What is strange and unsettling in my life now, about which I can’t tell anyone—it would sound too utterly trivial, for one thing—is that I am overwhelmed by ideas for stories, poems, novels—entire novels!—that flash at me like those hallucinatory images that come to us as we sink into sleep; these ideas appear, flare up and effloresce and vanish within seconds virtually every time I shut my eyes. And I am certain that—if I had time—if I had time, energy, strength, “inspiration”—I could execute them, as I have executed so many story-ideas in the past.

  Maybe it’s a symptom of insomnia. Maybe it’s a symptom of grief. Maybe some sort of neurological fissure in the brain. Amid the clamoring of songs, lines from poems, part-heard voices and music . . . Never before in my life have I felt so “inspired”—and simultaneously so dispirited, exhausted; I haven’t even the energy to write down these ideas, let alone plot out ways to execute them.