Young Widower (3 page)

From Teatrul Act, I walk home and sit with Katie on our balcony, watching a funeral procession and drinking cold beer. From the Lincolnshire Theater, Katie and I drive home to Chicago, where our new life together continues to begin, a life I hope will become a marriage, which continues now as the story of Katie’s life and the fact of my grief after it. I stand in either place from time to time,
willing her story to become either elegy or narrative. The consequence of not keeping that impossible middle means some last part of Katie cannot close down into feeling and anecdote. It is the remainder of a grief that infinitely carries forward. It must be expressed.

Losing the Marriage

After Katie’s death, I kept two rings in a box. The first was white gold with a polished blue opal. The second was rose gold with an oval-cut ruby. I purchased the opal ring in Chicago for the anniversary of our first date and the ruby ring a year later in Chennai, during a six-week teacher’s trip to India. Both were supposed to be engagement rings. Four, maybe five times, I meant to ask Katie to marry me, then lost my nerve. Katie was ambivalent about marriage. I was eager to marry and terrified she might say no. We fought about what her reluctance meant for our relationship and future. Better, I told myself, to wait and try later.

Those first months after her death I wanted some of what belonged to Katie to remain my own. I wanted to keep whole and vital certain parts of her life that were already losing shape.

It was a waning effort. Memory and grief, I quickly understood, made no meaningful complement. Each time I took down the box from the shelf, I felt as though I was begging some last bit of juju.
Startle the sound of her laugh
.
Bring back her smile all at once
. Where was the general shock of grief, the certainty of missing the Katie I knew for seven years? I wanted to lie in bed all day and wallow; to wail and moan; to collapse, withdraw, and never recover.

I couldn’t do it. At the time I thought it meant the worst about my character and our marriage. I was insufficient to grief. I was a coward who would not face my feelings directly. I had never really loved Katie, and only a few weeks after her death I could hardly recall us. I preferred instead to dwell on the end of her life. Only much later did it occur to me that this should be what happens at the end of a marriage: I am able to lose it.

I say “losing the marriage” because I can no longer describe how I loved that life. It is no longer present for me.

This is part of what grief does to memory. The feelings are intercut with long gaps—the sound of a voice, the lost afternoon—that widen like dark spaces on film run too many times through the projector. The obligations are certain and particular—places, dates, words—but around them is only the suggestion of feeling: the image, bright light shining through it, a room refusing to stay dark.

I didn’t mean to lose the marriage, that center of a life we alternately celebrated and endured and for which we both made compromises, locating in a certain honesty the truth of why and how we loved each other; that it was a marriage, hard-fought and won.

I imagined that after, or maybe because of, Katie’s death the marriage would be magnified; a dignified widowhood would bring
forward its best parts in a kind of nostalgic wash. I fantasized about holding court with friends and family members, sharing colorful anecdotes about our honeymoon and intercontinental adventures, avuncular, sympathetic, entirely separate of Katie’s death and absence and the continuing life after it.

When Katie died, I was twenty-nine years old. She was thirty. Every two years we moved to a new place: Bangladesh, Chicago, Miami, Romania. We were volunteers in the Peace Corps, teachers in high schools, working professionals, and graduate students. Always, we tried to keep some option for the future unsettled, so that we might see ourselves as individuals joined in a common life.

A week before her death, Katie applied for a public health job in Malawi. I read about the country’s per capita income (low), foreign debt obligations (high), highlands (vast), infant mortality (egregious). Was Malawi a home I would come to like more than Romania or Bangladesh? Was it the place, unlike Chicago or Miami, where a more permanent-seeming life might finally begin? Could we have started a family there? Before Katie’s death, it did not seem important to make these kinds of choices. We either did not want the obligations, or we didn’t know we wanted them. Wherever we went next, I thought, someone will need a public health official, and someone else will want an affable English teacher. I will teach my classes. At the end of the school day I will cross whichever city to Katie’s office and wait while she finishes her work and shuts down her computer. Then we will head out together to dinner, for drinks, to the shops, to a friend’s house or the countryside for the weekend, maybe to the cinema to watch the latest American movie. And when her contract is finished, we will start to feel restless. We will consider our options, make a decision, and see what comes along next.

The medieval walled city, birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, was guarded that year, as it had been for centuries, by bell ringers greeting tourists in forty languages. Good friends, Dave and Meghan, visited from Chicago for the week, on their way to Hungary. We had planned the trip with them as much to watch the scenery as to see the place. It was spring. Snow still peaked the taller mountains off the track. We wore heavy jackets and drank long espressos as we rode the train through tunnels and valleys. We moved to the forward compartment of the new express rail—lightweight, sleek—and for the first half of the journey, we were the only passengers.

Dave and I sat together by the window, talking about Chicago. Much, he explained, had changed since Katie and I left our apartment in Uptown three years earlier. Our favorite bowling alley had closed suddenly that New Year’s Eve, sold to developers; a parking garage was already up in its place. Ross and Melissa were gone to Wisconsin for graduate school and engaged. Sarah and Jason lived now in Seattle. They had a son. Everyone else, it seemed, was headed for the near-north suburbs, commuting still to the city, but starting families.

Dave was handsome and modest, an exceptional bowler. He had the habit of genuinely apologizing when he won, as though he enjoyed the victory but hated beating me. He had recently been promoted, so he could finally start to pay down his student-loan debt and save for retirement, family, a house. They had purchased life, term, and disability insurance. They had written wills and advance directives, given powers of attorney, and named beneficiaries and legal guardians. Meghan would quit working, if she wanted to; they were thinking hard about having a baby sooner rather than later. Dave wanted a big family, like the one he had married into, but Meghan was less certain about a number. Mostly, he said, it would be a matter of timing. The clock was ticking.

Children and parenting was a conversation Katie and I could never quite begin. We doted on nieces and nephews. We were
good with babies. We had always imagined ourselves individually as adults with children. Together, we were less certain. How would parenting alter a life that valued speed, work, and travel? Would our children inherit, from either side of the family, certain illnesses and conditions? The prospect of caring long term for a sick or disabled child terrified Katie. She dreamed about it frequently.

Other considerations were less hypothetical. We had decided to marry as much to stay together as to continue a life we both liked. Would we really stay together long enough to raise a child? Did we want our longer life to follow those patterns that had established the shorter one? A lot of people seemed to be doing this, though now many of them were having babies. Wasn’t it so very ordinary to think about settling somewhere where we might want to work, live,
and
raise a family?

I was happy for Dave. I liked that he was so pleased. As I listened and took mental notes to fill in the details later with Katie, I wondered how she was managing what must have been a similar conversation with Meghan. Katie had noticed that trip how Dave and Meghan kept referring to themselves as “a family.” Their ambitions, like their marriage, were the beginning of something to which they were committed, rather than its continuation or end. I envied their certainty. Here was a corollary that said marriages worked with planning and thrived on certainty with the best of intentions. Like bowling with Dave, however competitive I felt, I couldn’t help rooting for the guy.

Katie was skeptical of the convention. Weren’t there other reasons to make a life together, and did the comparison between motives have to seem so stark? You need kids to have a family, Katie and I agreed later that night, and it didn’t feel so defensive as it does now. We took comfort in a certain resignation. Perhaps we worried: could that ever be us?

That first year in Chicago, when Katie wore the opal ring I gave her as a birthday present, I sometimes imagined it meant we
were
engaged. I enjoyed the fantasy. I told my brother, over nachos, that I planned to propose. And yet, when it came time to pop the question, the precious events I had so clearly imagined lost their sequence. I did not drop to one knee at our favorite restaurant, announce my intentions, and bravely smile. I knew Katie might say no, and I didn’t want my fantasy to end in rejection. So, instead, I hedged. I made more reservations. We walked out to Lake Michigan, along the path, and talked about how much we liked each other. I fumbled at the ring box in my pocket. I told her to open it, and when she looked up at me, uncertain, I said that by no means was I proposing marriage, but wasn’t it a fantastic ring?

Each time I failed to propose, our life continued. Katie liked the opal ring: its elegance and simplicity. And I liked very much that she liked it.

At the school where I taught seventh-grade social studies, we waited daily for the results of the annual state exam. Would we be judged competent teachers or poor ones? Were our students exceedingly capable or merely below average? To pass the time, the science teacher and I put together a play for the spring assembly. The students lined up in neat rows under American flags, then ran full-tilt toward the stage, screaming, while I played the guitar. It was the Battle of Bull Run. Over and over we practiced it on the playground. Stand stock-still, sprint, stop on a dime. Again, and this time really stick your spot. In her introduction the principal celebrated our idealism and national spirit. Most parents worked, though the few that attended cheered politely. Three weeks from the end of our school year, I thought,
Have we come to the end of another year already?

I took the bus east to the lake, then south to Katie’s apartment. We had eaten lobster bisque a few weeks earlier in Lincoln Square.
Now, I wanted to surprise Katie by making the same dinner at home. I stopped at the grocer behind Katie’s building for butter, cream, sherry and brandy, clam juice. I dug into the back of the deep freezer and found six gray lobster shells wrapped on blue Styrofoam board in tight plastic, one-quarter pound each, three for ten dollars. I bought two bottles of wine and a loaf of fresh bread.

The windows in Katie’s studio fogged a little as I worked. The key, I thought, was to keep everything moving in a smooth procession. I found a small blue wire colander, which I balanced in the sink. I had boiled the shells for two hours, and now I needed to separate the stock from the boiled meat. The edges of the pot were hot as I lifted it from the burner. I turned to the sink and slowly, carefully poured the contents of the pot through the fine middle mesh. The lobster was translucent and fell off the shell into a neat pile. The stock poured into the drain. I had forgotten to put a pot under the colander. Even as I realized my mistake, I admired the sheen the liquid made on the steel as it bubbled and disappeared.

I panicked. I refilled the pot. Perhaps some of the reserve fluid gummed onto the metal would come out with a second boil. The shells themselves were clean and shiny, steaming a bit. I dropped them back into the pot and scraped the meat stuck in the colander. I boiled the shells for half an hour, then did my best to follow the rest of the recipe.

Now Katie’s small room reeked of fish and onion. Froth blackened under the coil. How had I managed to make such a mess? As a last resort I poured the watery mess into two bowls, dropped into each a tablespoon of heavy cream, and sprinkled a garnish of fresh tarragon. I pressed toast to the bottom of the bowls, so that the cream and tarragon seemed to float at the surface of a rich broth. I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and pulled over the futon—it was our bed, our sofa, our makeshift dining table—and lit candles, listening for the elevator. I paused Katie’s favorite song at the chorus, so that it might begin with her first steps through the door.

Say it wasn’t the perfect marriage. When we were happy, we made choices, rather than decisions. When we fought, the distinctions became explicit and difficult. I don’t know whether this makes our life together easier or harder, less or more conventional, and none of this really is practical now; I am attracted only to the speculation, a grayness that yields neither color nor its absence. We looked at every option before us and followed out gut. One day, sure, we might plan for the long term. For now, we loved each other’s families, kept our confidences, came home most nights and watched television together, played cribbage and chess, walked our neighborhood to a restaurant or bar or café, with books or just to sit and talk, volunteered and saw friends together. We ran on the lakefront in Chicago, along the bay in Miami, and around the state buildings in Bucharest. We practiced the rituals of a marriage, and whatever our temperaments, however the reluctance, we enjoyed and found meaning in them.

But this is speaking in summary, without particulars. Here is the moment of crisis and our coming through together three times, mobile, intact, and in love. First, north of Uptown, near the Chicago lakefront, touring the larger apartment where we would live for two years. Second, in a living room in Chicago, in a moment of ultimatum. Finally, in front of the People’s Palace of Bucharest, considering a job offer. Each time we are exhausted and afraid, a little older. We have talked out every detail, and now we look at each other. Katie is holding my hands and standing very close. I hate seeing her like this, as I know she hates, more than anything, feeling vulnerable.
Do we really want to do this?
she asks, and each time I know she really means,
I know how much you love me, and I love you, and still, this might not work out. This might be a terrible, terrible mistake. And once we make it, we will not be able to walk it back, not really, not without consequences
. And I will pause a moment, because I think it is rude not to seem to consider the question, but I know my answer. I will say, without hesitation,
Yes
.