Chapter 66
Little Love Story
At a book signing in New York City, a tall figure in jeans, denim vest, blue cotton shirt with sleeves neatly folded back to the elbows presents me with seven books to sign for Lisette. It isn’t clear if the person is male or female, relatively young or not-so-young, a baseball cap has been pulled down to obscure part of his/her face.
“ ‘Lisette’! That’s an unusual name.”
“Yes. I think so.” The voice is low, throaty—a woman’s voice?
“Are you Lisette?”
“No. Lisette is my girlfriend.”
I glance up seeing it’s a woman—late thirties, or early forties—lanky-limbed, with short-trimmed sand-colored hair, a strong-boned face and pale eyes. Reticent by nature, perhaps—but something has triggered a sudden urge in her to speak to me, as if in confidence.
“Lisette loves your books, and I love Lisette. So I’m giving her these.”
“That’s very nice of you.”
At these public occasions my voice radiates a kind of warmth that surprises me. Is my widowhood a mirage, is this cheery smiling public-self my true self?
The widow’s vow—If I am not happy, yet I can try to make others happy.
“And what is your name?”
“My name? M’r’n.”
“Marian?”
“Mar’n.”
Grudgingly she speaks, in a lowered voice. As if, whatever her name is, it’s of little significance to her.
“And what do you do?”
“What do I do?—I’m retired.”
“You look too young to be retired.”
This is so. Now that I think of it, the pale-eyed woman in denim is much too young to be retired. There is something in the way she holds herself, cautiously, tentatively, that suggests the anticipation of pain, and the wish to forestall it; the stronger wish to disguise it. Her lean face is suffused with heat. “I used to drive a truck. Now I don’t. Lisette lives in Denver. I’m going to Denver to live with her.”
“Denver! That’s far away.”
Signing the title pages of my books, in the large clear Palmer script of my long-ago schoolgirl self, invariably I feel just slightly giddy, as if, at such moments, the grim facade of life is stripped away and what is revealed is a kind of costume party. I am the Author, the smiling individuals waiting patiently in line to have their books signed are Readers. Our roles provide a kind of childlike contentment like those food trays in which areas are divided from one another, so that foods will not run together. Signing books for readers may be the only times that certain writers smile.
“Not so far. I can drive. I don’t fly, but I can drive. I’ll fill my truck. It’s a one-way trip.”
I am signing the next-to-the-last book, a paperback copy of Blonde. It seems to me that the mysterious Lisette must be blond. I ask how she and Lisette met and the woman says, “We ran into each other. In a bookstore. I mean, we ran into each other—really! I stepped right into Lisette. Didn’t mean to hurt her, but—that was how we met.” The woman is speaking in quick terse syllables like one who hasn’t spoken in some time. Her voice is eager now, almost giddy. In the aftermath of a crowded reading the atmosphere is often festive; strangers find themselves talking to strangers, waiting for the line to move.
“And what does Lisette do?”
“Lisette don’t do, Lisette just is.”
This is so wittily put, we laugh together. The woman in denim is delighted to be queried about the mysterious Lisette.
“Well! Good luck in Denver.”
The woman takes up her books, in a crook of her arm. One of the books clatters to the floor and she bends to retrieve it, stiffly. She turns away and murmurs, over her shoulder, “Yeah thanks. I’ll be OK. Soon as I get to Denver I’ll be OK and when I get over this leukemia, I’ll be OK.”
Within a few seconds the woman is out of sight. I feel a powerful urge to run after her.
But what would I say? What words? I have not a clue.
I hope you will be happy. You and Lisette, in Denver. I am thinking of you. I will not forget you.
Chapter 67
Tulips
“Ray’s tulips are flourishing—so beautiful.”
In the sunny courtyard my friends are admiring a half-dozen vivid-red tulips, some cream-colored tulips, pink-striped . . . I am smiling as if the sight of the tulips—the fact of the tulips, though Ray is gone—is some sort of compensatory magic for the fact that Ray is gone.
Why should Ray’s tulips be here, and not Ray? Why should we be standing here, and not Ray?
Bitterness rises in me, like something undigested. It’s the bitterness/incredulity of the mad old Lear, after Cordelia has died.
What is the widow—any age, any state—but a variant of the mad old Lear.
Ray’s beautiful tulips, Ray’s beautiful crocuses, Ray’s beautiful daffodils and jonquils planted on a hill behind the house, on the farther side of a meandering little stream that empties into our pond. . . . Ray’s beautiful dogwood tree here in the courtyard, soon to burst into bloom.
I am trying not to think What mockery! This is all so trivial.
Of course I take care to hide my agitation from my friends who are such special friends, whom I love for their generosity, their kindness, their good sense and their warmth. These are individuals for whom Ray had great affection, if not love. I think yes—love. There is/was an (unspoken) love between them.
In the hospital when I’d suggested that Ray call Susan and Ron, at first Ray thought that he might, then he changed his mind: “It would be too emotional.”
Recalling this now, I wonder if Ray had had some awareness that his condition might be serious. That he might not be seeing Susan and Ron again.
“This was Ray’s happiest time of year. In a week or two . . . He so much liked . . .”
“ . . . his garden was so beautiful.”
Terrifying, the way the widow grasps at such things. This familiar metaphor—grasping at straws. Or is it rather—gasping through straws.
Trying to breathe. Just a little oxygen! Just to keep going.
Why?
How is the issue. Why can’t be asked.
Last night! Long I will recall last night.
Rarely has the urge to die—to become extinguished—been so strong as it was last night. In the home of old friends, who’d known Ray and me for nearly thirty years.
In this setting, that should have been warm, supportive—“safe” and not a “sinkhole.”
For somehow, as if they’d planned it beforehand—(which I’m sure they had not)—my friends did not speak of Ray at all. The husband spoke almost exclusively about politics—Hillary/Obama—Bush/Cheney—worse yet Princeton University politics—while I sat staring toward a window—reflections from the dining room table, in this window—trying to recall when Ray and I had been at this table last—when would have been the last time Ray was here; it was painful to me, that the husband not only made no mention of Ray but addressed me as he did the several other guests in his jocular-joshing way, as if whatever words tumbled from his mouth, however exaggerated, comical-surreal, provocative, were just a kind of show; an entertainment, a passing-of-time; a kind of academic/intellectual display not unlike the display of the male peacock, staggering beneath the weight of its magnificent full-spread tail. Almost calmly I thought This is unbearable, I will not miss this—wanting to flee the house, drive home and swiftly swallow down as many pills from the cache as I could, before I lost my courage—Anything! Anything but this—but as soon as I left the house and began driving—as soon as I stepped into this house—the terrible sensation lifted from me, as of a literal weight lifted from my shoulders.
“Honey? Hi. . . .”
For here is the place where Ray awaits. If Ray is anywhere.
When I am with people, an ache consumes me, a yearning to be alone. But when I am alone, an ache consumes me, a feeling that it is dangerous to be alone.
A
lone, I am in danger of my life. For the emptiness is close to unbearable.
With others, I am safe.
Not happy, but safe.
The basilisk, for instance, rarely follows me from this house. Amid a babble of people chattering of politics the basilisk seems to have no power, no presence. If we are asked How are you? we must not say Suicidal. And you?
Yet, my happiness is now other people.
The other day, at the university, I was genuinely happy, I felt a thrill—if short-lived, if pathetic—while reading one of my student-writer’s work; revisions by a young woman in one of my workshops. It was a pleasure to see how capably the writer had absorbed our criticism, how she’d revised her story to make it emotionally engaging, compelling . . .
And there are other student-writers this semester. Young writers whose work is significant, “promising”. . .
I must have faith in this connection with others. In these “relationships”—fleeting as they are.
But these relationships are fleeting. These relationships are not “real”—not intimate. You are deluding yourself, that a professional involvement with others can compensate for the loss of intimacy in your life.
“You should see a therapist”—“grief counselor”—“a local group, people who’ve lost spouses”—of course this is so, this is admirable advice, and yet—who can be trusted? In this age of memoir, can we trust even professionals not to violate confidentiality?
Recall that psychiatrist who’d treated Anne Sexton in the final years of her life. He’d had no qualms about violating professional ethics by talking of her, revealing a sick woman’s most sordid and pathetic fantasies, in interviews with Sexton’s biographer.
This is the era of “full disclosure.” The memoirist excoriates him-/herself, as in a parody of public penitence, assuming then that the excoriation, exposure, humiliation of others is justified. I think that this is unethical, immoral. Crude and cruel and unconscionable.
As the memoir is the most seductive of literary genres, so the memoir is the most dangerous of genres. For the memoir is a repository of truths, as each discrete truth is uttered, but the memoir can’t be the repository of Truth which is the very breadth of the sky, too vast to be perceived in a single gaze.
A friend urges—“You should write a memoir. About your life since Ray’s death.”
A friend urges—“You should not write a memoir. Not about such a subject. And not yet.”
Another friend astonishes me by saying, with evident seriousness—“By now, you’ve probably written the first draft of a novel about Ray. Or—knowing you!—two novels . . .”
Not a friend but a Princeton acquaintance confounds me by saying, with an air of hearty reproach—“Writing up a storm, eh, Joyce?”
It is amazing to me how others wish to believe me so resilient, so—energized . . . Mornings when I can barely force myself out of bed, long days when I am virtually limping with exhaustion, and my head ringing in the aftermath of an insomniac night, yet the joshing-jocular exclamations are cast on me like soiled bits of confetti—how infuriating, the very vocabulary of such taunts—Writing up a storm, eh?—since a review of mine has appeared in the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or a story written long before Ray’s death has appeared in a magazine; a newly published book, written more than a year ago, in a more innocent time.
Of course, people want to imagine the widow strong—stronger than she is, or can hope to be. It’s pointless—it’s just self-pity—to want to explain that the “old” self is gone, and the “old” strength; that sense of one’s self that is called proprioception—in the words of Oliver Sacks (quoting Sherrington) “ ‘our secret sense, our sixth sense’ ”—
that continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body . . . by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious.
Oliver Sacks, “The Disembodied Lady” from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
This is it!—that is, this is what is-not, for me, any longer. As one of Sacks’s patients tells him, in trying to describe this eerie sense of the crucial self being lost, inaccessible—“It’s like the body is blind.”
The soul, too, can be “blind.” Or what passes for the soul, in the sparking/spiking realm of the brain.
The healthy individual—the “normal” individual—experiences proprioception with no more awareness than he experiences oxygen when he breathes. The wounded individual, the widow, has been disembodied; she must try very hard to summon forth the lost “self”—like one blowing up a large balloon, each morning obliged to blow up the large life-sized balloon, the balloon that is you, a most exhausting and depressing effort for it seems to no particular purpose other than to establish a life-sized balloon to inhabit from which, in slow degrees, air will leak, over the course of the next twelve hours until one can collapse in “sleep”—some sort of blessed oblivion. But next morning, the effort must be taken up again.
Again, and again!
For the healthy, no particular effort is involved in being “healthy.” For the wounded, so much effort is involved in pretending to be “healthy”—the question hovers continuously, at about arm’s length, Why?
Our friends have left me with two pots of rosemary—“for remembrance.” I will plant one of these in the courtyard beneath the window where often I saw Ray, reading the New York Times, or spreading out work sheets, and the other in the Pennington cemetery, beside the marker at Ray’s grave.
Chapter 68
Please Forgive!
“Today. I will.”
If I make a kind of ceremony of it, perhaps I can do it. At least, I can begin.
I will sit in the courtyard—on a white wrought-iron bench beside Ray’s tulips—in a warm splotch of early-April sunshine—and open letters.
These letters—of sympathy, condolence—commiseration—kept in a green tote bag—a now fairly heavy/bulky tote bag—I have not been able to open. Thinking now calmly and with even an air of expectation, anticipation. I will do this. Of course I must do this. I am strong enough now.
February 26, 2008
I was very, very saddened to hear of Ray’s death. I remember him as such a gracious and gentle man. One felt—how can I put it?—safe in his gaze, beheld, and in the wonderful presence of a measured and assessing mind. With his enormous and straightforward integrity he affirmed through his very presence and being a human goodness I will never forget. Though I hardly knew him well, my life is richer for having been in his presence. I cannot begin to comprehend your pain or your loss but please know that you are very much in my thoughts. I remember once in Princeton seeing you and Ray by the side of the road—you had gotten off your bicycles to help a wounded animal—I think it was a baby deer. Or maybe the mother had been killed and you were rescuing the fawn. All these years and it still comes back into my mind . . .
This letter, from a poet-friend who has since moved from Princeton to New York City, is the first letter I’ve taken out of the Earthwise tote bag. Reading it leaves me shaken, biting my lips to keep from crying. How disorienting—how disembodying—it is, to be sitting here in the sun, on this morning in April 2008, yet pitched so abruptly into the past—you had gotten off your bicycles to help a wounded animal . . . On Bayberry Road, this was. Of course I remember. And I am ashamed—I have not replied to this beautiful letter, so thoughtfully composed. I have not even read it until now, and I have not replied, and weeks have passed, and I am ashamed.
So much has unraveled. So much, slipping from my control.
Suddenly I am becoming anxious. I wonder if this is such a good idea—opening mail. I call to the cats—“Reynard! Cherie!”—to keep me company. The kitchen door is ajar—one of the cats steps through hesitantly, warily—this is Reynard, the elder cat who walks stiffly; the other, Cherie, has become more trusting of me lately, perhaps recognizing, with shrewd feline wisdom,
that we have only each other now, Ray is not going to return to feed her breakfast and allow her to settle on his New York Times as he tries to read it, ever again.
Both cats appear, blinking as if dazed by the sun. Both stretch out on the flagstone terrace in the sun. Reynard’s tail is twitching, which means that he’s uneasy, suspicious. Cherie basks in the warmth, now rolling over, showing her pale-gray furry stomach, in luxuriant abandon. I want to call for Ray, to see the cats in the sun—Cherie would make him laugh.
Honey? Where are you? Come look.
A young buck outside my study window—wild turkeys making their way past the window—bright-red cardinals, blue jays and titmice in the birdbath: Honey, come look! Hurry.
Last June I ran to Ray’s study, to summon him to mine, to observe, at a distance of about twenty feet, a doe giving birth to two tiny fawns in a wooded area outside my window.
We watched in fascination. Here was an astonishing sight—the doe so calm, the births so seemingly easy, effortless; the tiny cat-sized fawns almost immediately on their spindly legs, capable of walking, if a bit unsteadily.
The rapacity of nature is such, newborn deer must be able to walk—to run—soon after birth. Otherwise, predators will devour them.
In Mercer County, New Jersey, there are no natural predators. In the fall/winter there is hunting, in designated places. But not in residential neighborhoods. Not here.
One winter, before such well-intentioned naiveté was outlawed by Hopewell Township, Ray spread out feed for deer on one of our stone ledges where we could observe them through the plate-glass walls of our living room and solarium. At first we’d been delighted by the several deer, including fawns and a young buck, that came to eat the feed; next day, the number of deer was doubled; next day, tripled; finally, so many deer, and so many cantankerous and noisy deer, including one fiercely aggressive doe who crowded out younger deer, snorting and stamping—“I guess this wasn’t such a great idea,” Ray said.
A Widow's Story Page 28