Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
A Widow's Story (29 page)
“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.
Alone, 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.
“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.
No more feed for the deer. For a while afterward they continued to show up, staring at our windows with expressions of mute animal reproach.
The strangest sight I ever called Ray to see, from my study window, will seem unlikely in the telling: a young fawn was making its way past my window and close behind it, an aggressive wild turkey was pecking at its heels. We watched in amazement as these two disappeared around the corner of the house—the fawn hurrying forward, the wild turkey close behind. Ray said, “If we hadn’t seen this, we would never believe it.”
Ray often said, “It’s very hard to get anything done in this house, with so much happening outside our windows.”
Now I am trying to recall—when was it that our poet-friend saw us, “rescuing” the fawn? Five years ago? Ten? We’d been bicycling on Bayberry Road when we discovered a seemingly abandoned tiny fawn by the roadside. Naively I brought the fawn home in my bicycle basket, wrapped in my sweater, and when we called the Hopewell Animal Shelter we were admonished for “interfering”—we should have left the fawn exactly where we’d found it, with the assumption that the doe would return, and would re-unite with her fawn.
“Yes, but what if she doesn’t?” Ray asked.
We returned the baby deer, in our car. We left it by the roadside. When we returned some time later, there was no sign of the deer.
The principle seems to be—
Don’t interfere with nature!
The next several letters out of the tote bag are not so upsetting—though very kind, very thoughtful expressions of sympathy. The widow is made to know that the death of her husband is a matter of others’ concern, not just her own; this is meant to comfort, to console.
We loved Ray so much. Ray was such a humane
,
dignified
,
astute
,
wise
,
and gentle man. It is a devastating loss. . . .
And this, from another former Princeton resident, a writer-friend now living in Philadelphia:
I am so sad that Ray is gone. I will miss his quick, bright eyes, his humor and his large spirit. When I was around Ray, I felt a sweet comfort from his kindness.
Death is so mysterious. When [my partner] died, I felt great solace in searching for words to express what I was experiencing, which felt brand new, a place I’d never been before even with all the death I’ve seen. Knowing how you write, you may already be completing the first of many novels that will help you explore what you’ve been experiencing . . .
At these words, I begin to shake. I am actually shaking with cold, with a kind of choked fury.
Knowing how you write
,
you may already be completing the first of many novels. . . .
Of course, this writer-friend doesn’t mean to be cruel. She doesn’t mean to seem taunting, mocking. I know that she means well—she has written a thoughtful and even profound letter which I must not judge from my own desperate perspective.
Completing a novel! I haven’t been able to complete a thank-you note!
The first several letters have been set aside. I know—I am well aware—that “good manners” oblige the widow to reply to each expression of sympathy—(unless the writer has indicated
Please don’t trouble to reply)
—but I am not ready to begin these replies just yet.
Blindly I reach into the tote bag. Mostly there are cards, some of them very beautiful seemingly hand-crafted cards, but there are many letters, both typed and handwritten. How stunned Ray would be, at this outpouring of solicitude!
I cannot comprehend that Ray has died. And now that this terrible, sad news can no longer be denied, I do not, and will not, understand the injustice of it. I selfishly think of justice in terms of myself, and Ray was much younger than me. Also, he was unusually trim and handsome. So, I assume he always attended to diet and exercise. And then, if goodness has anything to do with justice, Ray was a good, wise, gentle and extraordinarily courteous man . . . When I think of the quality of “calmness in the face of danger,” I would think right off of Ray Smith. Suppose Ray and I were in a little boat in Nantucket and we are about to sink in a Nantucket storm. Without knowing one thing about Ray’s knowledge of seamanship, I would bet on Ray to remain calm and to always make a correct decision.
***
I can’t get it into my consciousness that we will never see Ray Smith again. It can’t be true. You have both been so kind to us, you were the first people who invited me to dinner when I was in the middle of radiation . . . You welcomed us into your home and made me feel healthy and normal. You probably don’t remember that evening but I do. I sat next to Ray and had a happy evening. We didn’t talk about illness. Ray was so happy with his birds and his flowers and with you, his beloved.
***
Kate came by early this morning to tell me that Ray had died in the night, and we sat together in the kitchen, remembering that dear man, and trying to think how we could help you, and knowing we couldn’t. Liz said, “Back home we’d bake a ham and carry it round,” but that didn’t seem right, in Princeton.
***
I’m writing to express sorrow for your loss. I know the rare kind of relationship you and Ray had (have) is the only thing that can console even as it is the source of grief. Everyone respected him. In these terribly uncivil times, he was a true gentleman . . . It was actually soothing to talk with him. And I always loved seeing the two of you together. I could see how safe he made you feel. I hope you don’t feel unsafe now. If there is or will be some memorial charity in his name please let me know.
***
I was so deeply shocked and depressed to hear of Ray’s death. It seemed only yesterday that we spoke. I admired him so much—did you know that Ontario Review published my first memoir/short story . . . ? Over the years Ray’s (and yours) support have meant just about everything to me. The next issue of the Pushcart Prize will be dedicated to Ray, as will my remarks at Symphony Space on March 26 . . . a small tribute to Ray.
From a writer-friend who’d recently lost his adult daughter:
You and I know there’s nothing to say that does much good in the face of a fathomless sorrow. But I hope you’re writing again, or will soon. It’s difficult to write when there’s no joy. (I haven’t gotten started again, myself.) Yet it’s our only way out. Isn’t it? And you bring so much joy to others. We will crawl out of this, I am certain—eventually reach a point where we can live with a deep sadness, but live nonetheless. Know, meanwhile, that you have our love which will never go away.
From a former colleague at the University of Windsor, now a preeminent Canadian writer:
I remember Ray very fondly, not only because of all the work he did, along with yourself, in bringing out my first American collection but just because he was himself . . . I am sending this Mass card because of something Ray said to me years ago. He said that his father was prouder of him when he became an altar boy than when he received his Ph.D. So this is for the former altar boy who did achieve a Ph.D. and much more.
And another Canadian colleague:
I am so sorry about your loss and hope you can grieve freely and deeply . . . There is no possible consolation, I know. You were so completely together for so long. Over 30 years ago people used to see you together walking holding hands. This can only be very hard but please do not feel alone . . . When my mother died I adopted the Gestalt technique of saying to myself, whenever there was a surge of grief, “I choose to have a mother who is dead,” and that helped . . . After a while it is self-punishing to resist or regret what’s real.
***
Ray was a perfect man—a gentle soul and honest and sweet. I often thought of him as a perfect mate. He seemed so comfortable as the husband of a . . . woman writer. Few women writers have had someone like Ray. In counseling students and even my own daughters, Ray was one of my models for the “right kind of man.” I talked to them about a man who would be able to genuinely, without jealousy or selfishness, support their attempts and achievements as his own.
***
I will miss Ray but always feel his presence. He will forever be one of the threads that have created my personhood . . .
***
I haven’t written because I haven’t wanted to deal with knowing Ray won’t be on the phone again . . .
***
I realized that I had never seen you alone, without Ray—I have seen you always together. I cannot picture you apart . . .
Letters from widows!—these, I read avidly. Here is a special language, I am coming to understand.