A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

  His brush. For this is a masculine stance, I think. The bravado, the futility.

  Bravado in the very face of futility.

  It is terrifying to consider—maybe, one day, out of loneliness, desperation, and defiance—I, too, will make such a claim.

  Chapter 62

  Cruel Crude Stupid “Well-Intentioned”

  “Ohhh Joyce—you’re wearing pink. How nice.”

  Like a slap in the face, or a kick in the gut—this exclamation from a woman when we meet, in the company of several other women, following the memorial service for Robert Fagles in the Princeton University chapel. The woman is not a close friend of mine—rather more, an old acquaintance—for whom I’ve felt affection in the past though at the moment I want only to turn away from her, and run.

  What should I be wearing? Black?

  How dare you speak to me like that!—and how stupid of you, to mistake dark-rose for “pink.”

  Of course I manage to be civil. I suppose, I manage to smile. Only my friend Jane sees the shock, the hurt, the incredulity in my face.

  She means well. She doesn’t mean to upset you. She’s clumsy, awkward—she doesn’t know what to say, and she doesn’t know how to not-say it.

  Still, as soon as I can, I run.

  “Beginning again—like, a divorce—can be good.”

  Such a smile wreathing this man’s face, such affable vehemence in his voice—it seems contrary of me, to point out that my husband and I weren’t divorced—“I’m a widow. There’s a difference.”

  Still he persists: “Not an actual difference. Not literal. It’s ‘beginning again’—you can go in any direction.”

  “Really!”

  “The spouse is gone. That’s a literal fact. Whether he moved out or—whatever.”

  He’s a contractor whom I’ve called to the house, for an estimate on repairs. He’s a stranger to me though highly recommended by mutual friends. He is not someone whom Ray knew, nor did he know Ray. Hence his affable manner, his sense of certitude, as of a man who’d been divorced—dragged over the rubble, battered and humiliated—but over it, now.

  “The house is yours, you can do what you want with it. You can renovate, you can build an addition, you can sell. That’s the bottom line.”

  Is this real? This bizarre conversation? Or is it a perfectly ordinary commonsensical conversation, of the kind people have with women who’ve just recently “lost” their husbands, and I am overly sensitive, like one whose outermost layer of skin has been peeled off? I am trying not to be upset for of course this man, too, is well intentioned—he doesn’t mean to be crude, cruel, stupid—his meaning is Look on the bright side! Why be gloomy! Here’s a golden opportunity!

  By the time the contractor leaves, I’m feeling dazed, exhausted. His boastful little business card I tear into bits. His cheery over-loud phone messages I will not return. When, one day, his pickup truck turns into my driveway as if, impulsively, while he’s in the neighborhood he has decided to drop by, I run away to the rear of the house, far from the front door, and hide.

  “Ohhh Joyce! I was so sorry to hear about—”

  In the midst of dinner with friends in a Princeton restaurant, in the midst of smiling and laughing with friends, something like a predator-bird has swooped upon us having sighted me across the restaurant—(in fact I’d seen him, this individual, making his way to me)—and this time quickly I say, I hope that I am smiling as I say, a flash of scissors in my heart—“Not right now, please. This isn’t the right time, thank you.”

  ***

  Edmund White reports to me, a mutual acquaintance, a university administrator, regretting to him that she’d “never gotten around to sending Joyce some flowers”—and we laugh together at the remark, all that such a remark entails, as if flowers from this woman, any expression of sympathy or even acknowledgment from this woman, would mean anything.

  “I told her not to bother,” Edmund said. “I told her that you had all the flowers you want.”

  Earnestly a (woman) friend consoles me.

  “ ‘Grief’ is neurological. Eventually the neurons are ‘re-circuited.’ I would think that, if this is so, you could speed up the process by just knowing.”

  “We want to see you, Joyce! It’s been so long.”

  In another Princeton restaurant with friends—three couples, among them our oldest Princeton friends—it somehow happens that one of the men lifts his glass in a toast to marriage—long marriages—for each of the couples has been married more than fifty years; their conversation turns upon old times, old memories, in their marriages; at length they reminisce, one of the men in particular goes on, on and on; and I am miserable with longing to be away from these people, away from their unwittingly cruel talk that so excludes me as if they’d never known Ray, who had been their friend. How can they not know how they are hurting me? How, when they’d all known Ray well . . .

  “Excuse me. I have to leave.”

  For the first time since my husband died, I am crying in a public place, and must quickly depart, even as my friends stare after me; one of the men follows me, apologizing, meaning to be kind—but I can’t speak with him, I must escape.

  The first breakdown in public, and the last.

  “And what will you do now? Sell your house?”

  Chapter 63

  “If . . .”

  If I take my own life it will not be premeditated but impulsive.

  One day—more likely, one night—the loneliness will be overwhelming—more than overwhelming, purposeless—& I will be so tired—bone-marrow-deep tired—& the knowledge that this condition will not change but prevail, or become worse—& I will weaken, or maybe I will feel a surge of strength, a determination to finally get this over with—like one who has been poised trembling at the end of a high diving board—a very high diving board—and the depth of the water below uncertain—the surface choppy, shiny, plastic-y—& so—the cache of pills will be the solution.

  But how to leave this note? This stumbling note? For it must be clearly stated—

  I am not suggesting that life is not rich, wonderful, beautiful, various and ever-surprising, and precious—only that, for me, there is no access to this life any longer. I am not suggesting that the world isn’t beautiful—some of the world, that is. Only that, for me, this world has become remote & inaccessible.

  On shore, in a tangle of storm debris, & a lighted ferry or sailboat or cruise ship is pulling out—on the shore you stand watching as the boat recedes—sparkling lights, music, voices—laughter. If you wave at the boat, or do not wave at the boat, it comes to the same thing: no one notices, and the boat is pulling out to sea.

  Chapter 64

  “Never, Ever That Again”

  Dear Joyce,

  Oh please don’t think of giving up. Many people who value and need your friendship would miss you terribly. This may seem a little abrupt but I’ve begun to think that we might be friends, and I surely don’t want to lose a friend that I may have just found! And we don’t need to lose any more people with your sensibilities . . . I can’t imagine that you would want your life’s work to be colored by this great sadness. I tried to kill myself once—no one close to me knew or knows about it—many, many years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. I was under a lot of pressure in school taking advanced classes, working to pay for school, living with my girlfriend. I thought I could do everything—and very well—but I was overwhelmed. I didn’t follow the surefire, masculine Hemingway route . . . I took pills, which allow for a period of reflection before it’s too late. I did finally make my way to the emergency room where I was treated with shocking cruelty (to teach me a lesson?). And in the end, I wandered out of the hospital unnoticed, in the midst of severe hallucinations! (Which I find equally shocking.) Obviously I survived the attempt, and I will never, ever do that again. Even just seeing the sunlight is worth it . . .

  Please ta
ke care of yourself.

  G.

  Chapter 65

  The “Real World”

  Outside the bell jar of the widow’s slow-suffocating life is the “real world” at a distance remote and antic in its ever-shifting contortions—glimpsed in newspaper headlines, fragments of television news—avoided by the widow as one might avoid staring at the blinding sun during an eclipse.

  Exactly why this is, that the “news” so upsets me, I’m not sure. I don’t think it can be just that Ray was so avidly interested in the news, especially in politics. I don’t think that this is it, entirely.

  Where once I’d scrolled through the cable stations out of curiosity, and spent several months watching Fox News in the late evening, researching a novel set in “tabloid hell”—now I can’t bear to hear these monologue rants and “panel discussions” involving shouting and interruptions.

  In Princeton, New Jersey—where no one watches Fox News and my interest in such righteous enemies of “secular progressivism”/liberalism/Democrats is considered a quirk of the fiction writer’s skewed mentality—the sole topic of conversation for months has been the Democratic primary for the presidential candidate in the upcoming election.

  For it seems that half of Princeton is rallying for “Hillary”—the other half for “Obama”: at social gatherings there are endless discussions of the merits/demerits of “Hillary”/“Obama”—endless discussions of the merits/demerits of the candidates’ campaigns—endless discussions of the political/moral/economic/intellectual/spiritual bankruptcy of the Bush administration and how an incoming Democratic president might deal with this terrible legacy.

  Often there are sharp, highly vocal disagreements: a number of Princeton people are actively involved in each of the campaigns, fund-raising, speech writing, “consulting.” (One single, singular Princeton individual is “pro-Iraqi War”—a locally notorious Middle East advisor to Bush/Cheney.)

  It is astonishing how virtually the same words are uttered again, again and again—“Hillary”—“Obama”—with subtle, shifting variants. One would think that there is nothing in life, nothing of significance in life, except the Democratic primaries. Nothing except politics!

  Because they are not wounded people. Because they are free to care about such things—the life of the more-than-personal, the greater-than-personal—as you are not.

  In these gatherings I am thinking of Ray. I am seeing Ray.

  The vision of my husband in his hospital bed—in that last, deathly hospital bed—superimposed upon this living room, upon the bright-peopled gathering. I am thinking of how Ray has lost this world, he has lost his place in this world, he has been expelled from this world, even as, oblivious to his absence, the world careens on.

  If I should take my own life . . . In this setting, how forlorn, silly, sad, trite these words! In this instant, suicide is not a possibility.

  I am thinking of my friend in Minnesota—whom I have not yet met—who’d written to me so frankly and so kindly about trying to kill himself as an undergraduate—I will never, ever do that again. His calm caring letter is a rebuke to my desperation.

  I must think of grief as an illness. An illness to be overcome.

  And yet: how lonely I feel, amid my friends. I could be a paraplegic observing dancers—it isn’t even envy I feel for them, almost a kind of disbelief, they are so utterly different from me, and so oblivious. These are the people on the brightly lit ship putting out to sea, I am left behind on shore. Now wanting to think But your happiness too is fleeting. It will last a while, and then it will cease.

  As at dinner in New York City, in an Upper East Side restaurant, my friend Sean Wilentz and our mutual friend Philip Roth become quickly so engaged in a discussion—a heated discussion—in fact, an “argument”—that I am in the position of a hapless spectator at a Ping-Pong match, glancing back and forth between the men. Sean, who happens to be working for Hillary Clinton, is very critical of Obama; Philip, an ardent supporter of Obama, is very critical of Hillary Clinton. You have to be impressed, listening to these two, by the refusal of either to concede to the other’s point of view, as by the absence of any gesture of quasi-compromise—Maybe I’m mistaken, but—.

  I am thinking of how, the last time I saw Philip Roth, Ray was with me—of course. We’d come into the city and had dinner together at another of Philip’s favorite restaurants, the Russian Samovar. Philip told us then that he’d begun to feel lonely in his country house in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut—one by one his old friends were dying—the winters were particularly difficult. How remote to us at that moment, any thought that Ray—an “old friend” of Philip’s also though not a close/intimate friend—might be the next to die . . .

  It’s so, one always thinks that death is elsewhere.

  Though death may be imminent, it is imminent elsewhere.

  How I wish now that I could recall what we’d talked about, with Philip! As the men continue to argue—now the subject has shifted to the ever-iterated conundrum If Hillary is elected, where will Bill be? In the White House? Telling her what to do?—I am thinking of how we’d mostly laughed; Philip is very funny, when he isn’t passionately engaged in arguing politics; though Ray had strong opinions about politics he wasn’t argumentative, and he and Philip shared the same opinions at that time.

  Ray and I had never visited Philip in Cornwall Bridge though we’d visited friends/neighbors of Philip’s, years ago—Francine du Plessix Gray and her husband the artist Cleve Gray. Cornwall Bridge is a rural, very beautiful and very hilly northwestern corner of the state, not far from the Massachusetts border, an ideal place for a writer who is something of a recluse, or who values his privacy.

  I am thinking that I couldn’t bear to live alone, as Philip has done since the dissolution of his marriage to Claire Bloom years ago. A life so focused upon writing, and reading; a life of isolation in the interstices of which there are evenings with friends, and (seemingly short-lived) liaisons with younger women; a brave life, a stoic life commensurate with the claim the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.

  A line of Franz Kafka’s comes to my mind. The conclusion of “A Hunger Artist”—I never found the food I wanted to eat. If I had, I’d have stuffed myself like everyone else.

  For Philip, as for me—Kafka is a predecessor-cousin. Older, remote, iconic, “mythic.” Long before I’d known that my father’s mother was Jewish, thus I am “Jewish” to a degree, I’d felt this strange kinship with Franz Kafka: every aphorism uttered by Kafka is likely to be one lodged deep in my soul.

  No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door is intended only for you. Now I am going to shut it.

  The horror of the widow’s posthumous life washes over me. The door before me, the only door through which I can enter—will be shut to me, soon.

  Philip was very kind to have written to me soon after Ray’s death. Not once but twice.

  For I’d failed to reply, the first time. Philip’s letter of sympathy—succinct, very touching—I’d placed on a corner of my desk, where I saw it every time I approached. A plain sheet of white paper, a few typed lines—The few times we were together I was always impressed by his calm and his kindness . . . Your fortitude is such that you’ll go on but it must right now be a stunning loss. I am thinking of you.

  Scattered about my study in the way one might place precious stones in an ordinary setting are such sympathy letters and cards from a number of our friends. But the majority remain in the green tote bag, unopened.

  Very few of these letters have I answered. A strange lethargy overcomes me, a dread of the words a widow must write.

  Thank you for your condolences. Thank you for thinking of Ray and for thinking of me. . . .

  Words of such banality, futility! Like the “suicide note” scrolling in my head much of the day and night, which I assume I will have enough good sense/pride never to share with another person.


  If Hillary wins the nomination—

  If Obama wins the nomination—

  If the Democrats have a majority in Congress, finally—

  What a terrible legacy the Bush wars in Iraq, Afghanistan!

  When we part on East Eightieth Street, Philip and I hug each other. It’s a wordless gesture, as between two battered individuals. If I’d told Philip that Ray read Exit Ghost soon before entering the hospital from which he never returned, I did not tell Philip that, for me, the most riveting passages in the novel had little to do with the protagonist but with a Connecticut friend named Larry who, diagnosed with cancer, manages to smuggle one hundred sleeping pills into his hospital room in order to kill himself in a place where professionals are at hand to care for a corpse. In this way the considerate husband and father spares his family “all that he could of the grotesqueries attendant upon suicide.”

  I’m sure that “Larry” was a Connecticut neighbor of Philip’s—but I can’t bring myself to ask.

  The first time we’d met Philip Roth was in the summer of 1974. I’d interviewed Philip for the first issue of Ontario Review in a sequence of questions to which Philip wrote thoughtful answers. We walked in Central Park—dropped by Philip’s apartment in the East Eighties not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—spent several hours together. I remember the three of us laughing a good deal. I remember Philip’s customary wariness, watchfulness. But I’m not sure that I remember what I’d written at the end of the interview, about the interior of Philip’s apartment—his study filled with books including the classic Baugh’s A Literary History of England and, on a wall, a “somber, appealing photograph of Franz Kafka”—the identical photograph which, as an idealistic and literary-minded undergraduate at Syracuse University in the fall of 1956, I’d taped to the blank beige wall above my desk.