A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Next morning we discovered to our horror that the duplex was infested—mattress, bedsprings, sofa, chairs—cupboards, closets—the interior of walls; in a panicked flurry we moved out, to an apartment in a more upscale section of Beaumont which, on Ray’s modest salary, we could barely afford.

  Of such memories, the most intense intimacy is born.

  When you’re young, your worst blunders can turn into blessings. It was a terrible blunder to have gone to live in Beaumont, Texas—a terrible blunder for my husband to have accepted a teaching position at Lamar College where, at the end of the first semester, Ray Smith caused something of a scandal when he graded his Lamar students as if they were Wisconsin undergraduates, though he’d been hired to “raise standards” at the college; it was a blunder, and would have been a severe strain upon many marriages, for a newly married couple to live in so remote a part of the country where they knew no one, hundreds of miles from their families.

  Yet, somehow: our eight or nine months exiled in Beaumont were often idyllic, tenderly intimate, and certainly productive. In these months we became so extremely close, so utterly dependent upon each other, as we had not been while living in Madison, Wisconsin, and attending classes, that we were “wedded” in this way for life, as each other’s closest friend and companion.

  We established at this time the routine of our domestic lives: work through the day, a late afternoon walk, dinner, reading/work in the evening until bedtime. While Ray taught courses at the college in a great squat cube of a concrete building without windows—so constructed to save on air-conditioning costs, in the pitiless Beaumont climate—I dealt with my newfound solitude by reworking a manuscript of short stories and beginning a new novel, inspired in part by the starkness of the Texas landscape and my sense of being in extremis so far from all that was familiar to me. Both the short stories and the novel dealt with “philosophical” subjects—the exploration, in fiction, of ideas of predestination and autonomy, that had so fascinated me as an undergraduate at Syracuse.

  Never in my life had I been so isolated, in my attachment to the world by way of a single individual, my husband. Never had I had such uninterrupted time in which to work, for previously I’d been a student, and a student’s life is fragmented and driven by schedules; now, alone for hours, I could immerse myself in my writing, like one sinking beneath the surface of the sea. In such isolation I might have drowned—there were mornings, entire days, when I felt a touch of panic, that maybe I was making a mistake, another mistake, in so plunging into what had seemed to me previously far too risky to have considered—a writer’s life.

  Always it had seemed to me, and seems to me still, a kind of boastfulness, or hubris—claiming that one is a writer, an artist. In the sub-literary working-class world of my parents and grandparents, such a claim would have been greeted with disbelief, if not derision. The drollery of the Lamar public schools administrator is exactly the sort of reaction one might have expected in upstate rural New York in those years: “ ‘Phil-o-soph-y’?”

  In our (mostly) roach-free apartment in an outlying Beaumont neighborhood—Sweet Gum Lane was the luridly lyric street name!—I had time to read at length those writers who, in my undergraduate courses, had seemed to me so compelling, beguiling, haunting—Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Pascal, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Mann, Sartre, Camus. As it happened, one of my professors, Donald Dike, had taught the prose works of a writer of whom no one had heard— Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. When shortly after we met, Ray learned that I’d been reading Beckett as an undergraduate, and that I’d written an essay on Beckett’s prose trilogy which had been published in an academic critical journal, he’d looked at me with some surprise but smiled saying, “Well! You must be serious.”

  It might be, that I was serious. But my seriousness was never an impediment in my marriage.

  At Madison, and when he’d lived in Milwaukee, before starting graduate school, Ray had wanted to be a “writer,” too—it was then he’d begun the manuscript he would title Black Mass, upon which he worked intermittently for years. When he gave this novel manuscript to me to read it was piecemeal—some chapters he considered “less incoherent” than others—and some passages he thought might be “fairly good”—but overall, he was doubtful, and did not wish to seek encouragement from me, as his young adoring wife. “Whatever you tell me, it can’t be objective. You would want to shield me from criticism.”

  No, I said. Oh no!

  Yet, this was probably true. It is probably always true when we read something written by an individual whom we love, and do not want to hurt. Our wish is for these individuals to be made happy—our wish is that we are the means by which they are made happy—objective criticism does not flourish in such soil.

  For these reasons, and for other more personal reasons, I did not wish to give Ray my fiction. Ray’s response to my work was likely to be identical to his response to my cooking: Honey this is really good! Or, Honey this is excellent.

  Though Ray Smith was highly critical elsewhere, a controversial figure in the Lamar English department where in his first semester of teaching he’d failed more students than the rest of his colleagues combined, and gave many more Ds and C minuses, yet Ray was rarely critical of my writing; perhaps in fact he was never critical of the writing I gave him to read, but only just encouraging, enthusiastic. For more than four decades Ray read my nonfiction essays and reviews with the sharp remorseless eye of one trained by the Jesuits to detect grammatical inaccuracies and errors of logic—he was an ideal editor, one whose editorial comments are lightly marked in pencil.

  I am thinking now, in writing this—Ray will never see it. . . .

  Never again will I see his penciled unclear—the subtlety of ?.

  The ideal marriage is of a writer and her/his editor—if the editor is your closest friend and companion.

  In the interstices of my long writing days at a card table in our bedroom on Sweet Gum Lane, I decided to begin graduate studies at Rice University—at the time, Rice Institute of Technology—in Houston, some ninety miles away; it must have seemed, to one with a hope of teaching college, a necessary next step. I had no great love of scholarship or the kind of immersion in historical documents that is, or was, the essence of advanced graduate work in English literature, but I was eager to be self-sufficient; I did not want to be supported by my husband indefinitely; I thought it unfair, that Ray must work, in such unpleasant circumstances, while I had time to write. Each midweek I would take a bus to Houston, attend two graduate seminars, both with an emphasis upon historical documents—Shakespeare, The Eighteenth Century; Ray would drive in the Volkswagen to meet me, we would have dinner and stay overnight at a hotel, and drive back to Beaumont in the morning. How romantic this was! Simply to escape from Beaumont was a great relief—by contrast Houston was a city, and Rice was a beautiful oasis of a campus, a place of such prestige that, when I happened to mention to a faculty wife in Beaumont that I was taking graduate courses at Rice, the woman blinked at me in amazement: “Why, it’s real hard to get into Rice—you must be smart.”

  Abruptly I quit the Rice Ph.D. program when I discovered, on the bus trip to Houston one day, that a short story of mine that had been published in a literary magazine was listed in the “honor roll” of The Best American Short Stories 1962 edited by the renowned Martha Foley.

  It is likely that Ray read some, if not all, of the stories collected in my first book By the North Gate, since this book was dedicated to Raymond Smith. I don’t believe that Ray read my first novel With Shuddering Fall, most of which was written during our Beaumont exile.

  I remember reading to Ray one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, which I would use as an epigraph for With Shuddering Fall: “ ‘Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’ ”

  Ray asked me to repeat this.

  “ ‘Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’ ”

  Jesuit-trained, the shrew
dest of editors, Ray said: “ ‘Always’—I would circle ‘always,’ with a question mark.”

  And then there was the morning when I called Ray—from a pay phone at a nearby gas station—(we were too poor, in our Sweet Gum Lane apartment, to afford a phone)—to tell him the good news, in fact the unbelievably good news: By the North Gate had been accepted for publication by a New York publisher known for its “left-leaning” books—a succession of novels by James T. Farrell, for instance, as well as Saul Bellow’s first novel Dangling Man. It had been something of a shock to receive a letter—in an envelope—and not a returned manuscript, in a manila package; more than a shock, to read the first line of the letter—We are happy to inform you . . . instead of the more common We are sorry to inform you . . .

  Yet more extraordinary, I would be receiving an advance of $500—to us at that time, the equivalent of at least $5,000.

  Writing can be a descent into one’s deepest, most hidden and “profound” self, or selves; trying to be published, for a young writer, is not unlike fishing, casting out lines into an utterly murky mysterious stream in the hope of being “accepted”—the more fishing lines you cast out, the more desperation; yet also the more likely that something—something positive!—might happen one day. And so it was, with me.

  In the turbulent and pitiless publishing waters of our era, what would be the fate of such a collection of “philosophically”-oriented short stories written by an unknown young woman titled By the North Gate, with a return address of Sweet Gum Lane, Beaumont, Texas?

  What would be the fate of most “unsolicited” manuscripts sent to a New York publishing house?

  Of course, the small independent family-owned Vanguard Press has long since vanished, its considerable backlist acquired by Random House.

  That morning, calling Ray at college, my euphoria at such good news was dampened by a sudden rush of physical symptoms—my vision was blotched, my breath was shallow and my heartbeat erratic—my fingers and toes had gone icy-cold—bizarrely, my tongue was numb!—“I have good news but also bad news to tell you,” I told Ray, my teeth chattering, “—the good news is, my story manuscript has been accepted by Vanguard Press and the bad news is—I think that I am having a s-stroke . . .”

  Ray asked me to describe my symptoms. Ray said, “You’re just happy, and excited. Congratulations!”

  Chapter 70

  Blood in the Water!

  Joyce Carol Oates sincerely regrets that she is unable to read, still less comment upon, the many manuscripts, galleys, and books she receives, often of very high quality, which number into the thousands in the course of a year. She sincerely regrets being unable to enter into correspondences with individuals whom, in other circumstances, she would be delighted to know.

  Joyce Carol Oates sincerely regrets that she cannot give blurbs, except in exceptional circumstances, for she is overwhelmed with requests.

  Joyce Carol Oates sincerely regrets that, her life having unraveled like an old sock, she is unable to aid you in knitting up your own. Sincerely, she regrets!

  With the acuity of sharks sensing blood in the water, vulnerable prey thrashing about heedlessly, in the weeks and months following Ray’s death many strangers—alas, not only just strangers—write to me with requests that begin with the inevitable/identical/heart-stopping words I know that you must be terribly busy but . . .

  Now that the volume of sympathy letters and cards has abated—and I have not had a “sympathy gift basket” from Harry & David for weeks—it seems that this other sort of mail, that might be called supplicatory, if not precatory, is increasing at an alarming rate.

  I know that, deranged with grief, no doubt suicidal and in any case exhausted and not in your right mind, you might be prevailed upon to do a favor for me whom you scarcely know—but hurry! The deadline for dust jacket copy blurbs is next Monday.

  The unexpected side of widowhood is a lack of patience—a rise in irritability—(as irritability is the first rung on the stepladder of hysteria)—and so I am inclined not only not to reply to most supplicatory letters but to dispose of them outside, at the green recycling barrel.

  “Leave me alone! Why can’t you leave me alone!”

  Sometimes I am fooled—“fooled” is the apt term—by a letter that purports to be sympathetic So sorry to have heard about the death of your husband but is soon revealed to be a request for one or another favor; several times, these requests have come from individuals whom Ray had published in Ontario Review. The most persistent is a New York artist who has asked me to write about his work for an upcoming exhibit catalogue and when I explained—initially, apologetically—that I was so exhausted, so overwhelmed with responsibilities in the wake of Ray’s death, and far behind on my own work, that I simply could not do this, he wrote back to say But the deadline wouldn’t be until November.

  How like predator sharks these seem to me! How I resent them! Not just their aggressive callousness but their naiveté in imagining that any publication of theirs, any achievement, will make the slightest difference in their lives, or in the lives of others.

  Sometimes I am so upset, I pace through the house striking my fists together lightly, or not-so-lightly. I try very hard to imagine how Ray would react, if he were here to advise me.

  Honey, you’re just excited. Don’t take these people too seriously.

  “But—how can I not take them seriously? All this—these people—are taking up most of my life now.”

  Of course not. You’re exaggerating. Don’t upset yourself needlessly.

  “But—what can I do with all these letters? All these—manuscripts, galleys? I hardly have time to do finances—‘death-duties’—you left me so suddenly. How can I live my life, without you?”

  Now there is silence. I have spoken heedlessly, hurtfully. In life, I would not have spoken in such a way to my stricken husband.

  You will have to. You have no choice.

  This will be my new mantra. I hope that it will drown out another recent mantra that has gotten into my head like a moth trapped in a cobweb—a late remark of James Joyce—(is it from Joyce’s massive tombstone Finnegans Wake?)—“How small it’s all!”

  . . . will have to. Have no choice.

  And so, what I think I will do—what I will do—is see my Pennington doctor, and acquire from him a prescription for anti-depressants.

  Where there is blood in the water, yet there may be a thrashing, desperate-to-survive creature. I will be that creature, I will not give up.

  You will have to. You have no choice.

  Chapter 71

  Walking Wounded

  So near to death—yet still “alive”—the widow’s great surprise is that she finds herself in a vast company of what might be called the walking wounded.

  Of course, Ray and I knew that certain of our friends were taking anti-depressants. These were not secrets but were spoken of openly, conversationally—one or two had even written about their use of anti-depressants which had been both beneficial and not-so-beneficial, on the Internet. (One, a close poet-friend, experienced considerable initial benefits from an anti-depressant called Paxil, but, after a few years, when the drug began to lose its efficacy, terrifying side effects.) But now, in my nocturnal e-mail correspondence especially, I am learning that an unexpectedly high percentage of people I know are in fact “on” anti-depressants.

  What a shock! Some of the most accomplished, confident-seeming, healthy-minded and overall cheerful individuals of my acquaintance are not only taking anti-depressants but claim that they “could not live without” them; in fact, they are so experienced in psychotropic medications, from years of experimentation, that they provide detailed information for me, lists of medications, benefits and side effects. One of my most accomplished and cheery woman friends confides in me that she has become an expert in this area and will tell me exactly what to say to my doctor, so that he will prescribe not only the ideal anti-depressant but a secondary medication to be taken with the anti
-depressant. And everyone cautions me—the medication won’t begin to have an effect for as long as two weeks, and even then, its effect might be erratic for a while.

  Suffer, Joyce! Ray was worth it.

  How ashamed I am, to be so weak! For this is the great discovery of my posthumous life—I am not strong enough to continue a life to no purpose except getting through the day followed by getting through the night. I am not strong enough to believe that so minimal a life is worth the effort to protract it.

  Among the several anti-depressants friends have recommended is “Cymbalta”—a melodic name to suggest a distant planet not yet contaminated by the neuroses of Homo sapiens. And so in mid-April at about the time that it has become abundantly clear that a new season is imminent, and the freezing-numbing cold season of Ray’s death is rapidly vanishing, I begin, with much hesitation, and some hope, a regimen of one 30-milligram tablet a day.

  Added to which, in the night, an improvised assortment of supposed sleep-aids—mostly non-prescription like Benadryl.

  Added to which, through the day, a conscious effort to take on a new non-morbid attitude for instance: I have been in a car crash, and I am recovering . . .

  Chapter 72

  Dead Woman Walking

  Joyce Carol Oates author of . . .

  Rising from my seat—ascending a stage—this eerie muffled sense of language being spoken at a distance—as in a vacuum in which there is no sound only just vibrations to be deciphered by some mechanism in the brain—and blinding light, stage-light, obliterating the audience so that this might be—where?—how strange to be applauded, I know there is no mockery in this applause, as there has been no mockery in the lavishly generous things that have been said of me by the woman who has introduced me; this is not the domain of the ugly lizard-thing sneering Here is a woman utterly alone. Here is a woman utterly unloved. Here is a woman of no more worth than a pail of garbage. Why are you applauding such a woman, are you mad?