TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT, THERE I AM STANDING AT THE front door of my apartment. I have a key but will not use it. Instead I turn the knob, because I have left the door unlocked. I left it unlocked because I wasn’t sure I could make the key work. For the thirty-nine years of our marriage my husband always pulled out his key and opened the door when we returned from an evening out. During the day I left the door unlocked. We had a doorman. I trusted my neighbors. I found keys (so subject to loss, so hard sometimes to turn, was it right or left that it should go?) a man’s responsibility. Was this a sexual reading of the act, a pun of the unconscious? Perhaps. But now, more significantly, it was a protest against the loss of something far more necessary than a key: my husband, H.

 

It was not a beautiful bonzai. It was a scraggly dwarf of a few twigs that still held their green needles. Two of the branches were bare. Nearby there was a small stone and a tiny gray statue of a Chinese man, fishing. He wore a wide-brimmed peasant hat. My youngest daughter had given this plant to H. for Father’s Day two years ago. He had nursed it with Miracle-Gro, watered it daily. He shifted it around to catch the sunlight. He carried it with us to our beach home. He put fresh dirt at the four-inch porcelain Chinese man’s feet every few months. This bonzai had not died. It hadn’t thrived either. I wanted to throw it out. He protested. Don’t kill a living plant. Now brown needles fall from some of the branches. Today I throw it out. I know it’s still alive. It carries with it his affection. But no matter what I do, each day more needles fall. I do not have the gift. I do not love this stunted plant.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. This book is about the second. Although the division between the two parts is not a line, a wall or a chasm. Think of grief as a river that finally runs into the ocean where it is absorbed but not dissolved, pebbles, moss, fish, twigs from the smallest upland stream run with it and finally float in the salt sea from which life emerged.

I am now a single woman. There is no one at home to call when I am away. Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror. Nevertheless I indulge myself—heavy helpings of self-pity. Then I stop.

I am going out on a date. I have spoken to a stranger, a man, and arranged to meet him for lunch at a café a few blocks from my building. He sent me a letter in response to a personal advertisement my grown daughters placed for me in the New York Review of Books. It said that I was a writer. It said that I was attractive. They think so or else they were lying. They said that I loved the ocean and books. That was true. I didn’t read the ad. I was embarrassed. But I was pleased they placed it. Why not? Who knows what waits for me out there among the throngs of divorced and wifeless hordes who might be willing to meet me over the hill? Once I had read in an Edmund Wilson essay of his dislike of women past menopause. He said they were like dried fruits, withered on the vine. The juice was gone. I understood what he meant. Although the words stabbed my heart even then, before I was forty. What about your juice? I had written in the margins of the book. But I knew that crones were female and old men were kings, stallions, and producers of heirs. Saul Bellow had a baby at the age of eighty-three. He didn’t live long enough after that for her to play Cordelia to his Lear.

The stranger had written a charming letter. He loved books. He loved music. He had wanted to be a writer but had become a public relations executive. He was divorced and he was sixty-nine years old. His letter was on gray stationery with a red border. I will call him P.J. I phoned. His voice was very hoarse and faint. He told me he had reached up to a shelf in his closet for a suitcase that was filled with old books and it had fallen on his throat. I thought about beloved books stored in a suitcase. I agreed to a Sunday lunch.

The stranger met me at a bistro around my corner. I saw him approach. He was short and thin and he had a white mustache. He had a gait that was something like a trot. Like a pony, he moved steadily toward me. We ate our salads and talked. His hands were very veined and age-spotted. I didn’t mind, but he didn’t seem to be sixty-nine and a lie is like a broken step on the stairway to heaven. His voice was so weak that I had to lean into his space in order to hear his words. He told me he loved Proust and Stendhal and Thomas Mann. He had been divorced ten years. He didn’t want to tell me why. His hands shook and trembled. Did he have a disease or was he nervous? He never had any children. He wanted to retire to the Caribbean. He told me that customs had changed since I was a girl and asked me if I understood what was expected in today’s dating world. His hand was on my knee. His other hand was stroking my arm up and down as if it were a horse’s nose. We had known each other for exactly twenty-five minutes. How does a suitcase on a closet shelf fall on a throat? I tried to imagine it.

The stranger told me about his love of Melville. I am prone to like men who like Melville. He told me he had grown up poor in New Jersey and won a scholarship to Oberlin College. I like men who made themselves, men from families that spoke another language, that had worked hard so their children could have a better life. I moved my chair a little away from him to discourage all the stroking. He moved his chair after me. We talked about Billy Budd for a while. He asked me what I was working on. I told him. He seemed interested. He ordered dessert. I ordered another iced tea. His leg was shaking. I could feel it under the table, a steady tapping on the floor.

As I sipped my iced tea with P.J. and talked about the soldiers in Iraq and discovered that his politics and mine were identical, I realized that the man sitting opposite me was not my husband but a strange man whose hand was approaching my left breast. I pulled my chair back again. He pulled his closer.

I had looked at myself in the full-length mirror. I took in the scar on my left breast from the three operations for benign cysts that appeared over the years—each time with alarm, false alarm and days of renewed promise in the goodness of life. I saw that my body was soft and the skin from my upper arms hung in small ripples. I saw that my legs, once my pride and joy, had blue veins, at least on the back of my right calf. Like Father William, I was old and sagged where once I had been taut and firm. I noticed the folds under my chin. I noticed that my eyebrows had faded away. I saw that a face-lift might help. But I would never do that. It’s one thing to wash your face and quite another to cut it, or allow someone else to cut it. Each wrinkle, each line, each tilt of the eye belonged to me, contained the life I had led, the sadness of loss, the pleasure of birth, the wonder of the landscape, the pleasure of flying in the clouds in a four-seater plane at sunset, the cold of the lake in Maine where I learned to dive. Many of my friends had (what they called) work done, pouches under the eyes removed, excess fat pulled off and tucked behind the ears. They did look younger than I but they also did not look quite like themselves. Their expressions seemed pulled across their face as if they were on strings.

I knew that my beatnik style of no-style had long ago gone out of style. I had mostly given that up when I married H. I wore heels as high as my back would allow, believed in artifice, but only of the kind that caused no pain and would wash off in the shower. If I was old now, then so be it. Nature made it so and biology is not a personal enemy, just a fact. I would not insult it, or defy it. I was a perfectly normal old woman and so it would stay.

After all, the men I might meet on my way would have many folds, little hair, muscles that didn’t ripple, legs that could go just so far, and eyes that might need cataract operations, as well as prostates that interfered with their sitting through a movie. They too might have had a skin cancer removed, leaving a barely visible dent on their nose just like mine. True enough most of them will feel entitled to a younger beauty, a woman who can glow in the dark. But that changes nothing. I am a rock worn by years of incoming and outgoing tides. There are snails and crabs and tiny bait fish, dark green moss, seaweed bubbles, pebbles, a few shells, perhaps a mermaid scale, or an abandoned beer bottle in my crevices. I have been salted, pickled, brined, so be it.

The stranger called for the check. He insisted on paying. I am used to a man doing that. That’s why I never order an expensive dish. My father told me it is a dead giveaway that a woman is a gold digger if she orders lobster or steak. The espresso cups rattled in their saucers as the man stood up; the uneaten biscotti the color of rock and sand sat on a plate. I stood up. Suddenly the man has his spider arms around me and there in the café, with people at every table, he grabs me to him, holds me close and rubs his hands up and down my spine, kisses my mouth so I can hardly breathe, and slips his hands down the front of my blouse. Then he stops. “Was that good for you?” he says. “It was good for me,” he adds. I laugh. This was not a nervous laugh. “Are you laughing at me?” he said. “I am,” I said, and that was that.

 

Our daughters K. and B. have children of their own. One is a writer, one is a law professor. One is married, the other is getting divorced. These sisters are close. This means that a jungle of history lies between them, tying them together, binding them up. My stepdaughter J. is a psychoanalyst, a doctor, like her father, older than the others. But present in their lives, in my life: a necessity. Then there is E. She is the daughter from my first marriage, adopted by H. at the age of five. E. is a falling star, falling into drugs, falling into trouble, falling into AIDS, a brain wired for despair, but shining all the way, sparkling even, love glowing, on occasion dazzling. She writes too. This description applies as well to her biological father, perhaps not the loving part. When H. first met my daughter he knew she was a little girl with mile-wide rips in the soul. After a few months of our being with each other H. told me he hoped he could save her, that together we could save her. We didn’t, but we tried mightily.

K. and B. took a taxi together from Brooklyn, where they live a half a block apart from each other, the night my husband died. They appeared in the emergency room and wept. One took my husband’s Timex watch off his wrist and put it on her own. One stayed with me in my bed when we finally returned to the apartment in the early hours of the morning. J. spoke to the interns and doctors. She was the color of slate. Dark shadows appeared under her eyes but she seemed to know what to do. She (or was it her husband?) arranged for the funeral home to come to the hospital and retrieve the body. I was able to understand everything but unable to speak.

E. does not come to the funeral. She lives in Minneapolis. She has no photo identification, so she cannot get on the airplane. She has lost the copy of her birth certificate I had sent. She has misplaced her passport. She has no driver’s license. She wants to come but can’t. I know she is grieving in her own grieving way. I know how she and H. were together. I know how he cried when he thought she might die: breath pulled in, choked off, sounds, deep in his throat.

 

After great sorrow a formal feeling comes, so said Emily Dickinson. I think she must have been talking about the quiet and stillness that fills the mind, protecting it from inner storms, from bouts of fear. Not thinking is like pulling the blanket up over one’s head to avoid seeing the monsters in the room. It is like being on a train and watching the landscape sweep by, farm, granary, woods, path, road, hill, mountain, stream, bridge. While in a trance, boredom vanishes, time is brought to heel.

Also not sleeping. I have never been an insomniac. I have a peasant woman’s constitution or at least I used to. My soul goes to sleep at night and sometimes has bad dreams but has never tossed and turned till dawn. Until now. My legs move across the bed, searching for H. My mind races toward him but he is not there. I think of trivial things like where I put my sunglasses and whether or not my granddaughter at age two and a half understands that her grandfather cannot come to see her anymore. I take a Tylenol. I take two. I do not sleep. A great roaring is in my brain—it is as if I were trying to nap under the stars on the veldt as an approaching lion pawed the ground beside me. I tell my doctor. He sends me away with a prescription for Ambien. It works. I sleep an untroubled sleep all night but three nights later I wake at four and am unable to return to sleep. And then I wake at two and then I increase the dose of Ambien and I sleep again and a few days later at a higher dose I wake after a few hours. I become obsessed with sleep. I spend the day avoiding my exhaustion, afraid to close my eyes in case I steal sleep from the nighttime hours. My doctor switches me to Lunesta. It works on night three but by night five it is less effective than hot milk, which really doesn’t work no matter how many people vouch for its soporific powers. All I can talk about is sleep. Some weeks go by. I decide to go without any sleep medication, to recover my memory of what it was to sleep without fear of not sleeping. The first night without any Ambien at all I am up all night, and for five days afterwards I move like a zombie, sleepwalking in the daylight, haunting myself in the night. I go to a hypnotist who says he can help. I try his relaxation methods, thinking myself into a gentle place, but while I can calm my excited heart I cannot fall asleep.

And then finally I sleep again. I just sleep.

 

The shock has begun to wear off. I feel it recede. There are many hours of the day that I inhabit my own body, that I am not made of wood or stone. There are hours of the day when I talk on the phone with a friend and laugh at a story or absorb myself in the editorial pages of the paper just as if I were the same person I had always been. I turn off the lights at night. I am not uneasy in the dark. I rub my cat’s head as I always did. He sleeps in H.’s place beside me. I am not surprised when I wake and find him there. For days after H.’s death he sat on H.’s side of the bed and let out a strange sound, a cat sound, a small repetitive shriek. I remember to go to the grocery store. I buy supplies. Without the shock I feel exposed, as if I were a mollusk without a shell, a formless thing, veins showing, trembling naked on a rock, a predator’s next meal. My friends have all called and invited me to dinner. They have assured me that nothing has changed. They say it doesn’t matter if we are nine for dinner instead of ten. But now the phone is not ringing and I realize that I must call, arrange things, plan to go to the theater with someone, suggest a movie, go out into the world on my own.

But if I am out on the street I want to be home. If I am at dinner with a friend I keep glancing at my watch, how soon can I leave, how long until I am back in my apartment. If I am in my apartment I am anxious. I should go out. I need to be out. I need to go somewhere. If I am downtown I worry about the subway on the way home. Will it come? Will I be safe? I go to the theater with friends. I want to leave at intermission. I can’t concentrate. I am worried about how I am going to get home. If I am in my neighborhood I still worry. How many blocks away from my house am I? This anxiety, anxiety about nothing, no reason or sense to it, flows in and out of my mind all day. Did I lose my wallet? Did I leave someone waiting for me at a lunch I forgot? Do I have enough money in my bank account to pay my bills? Am I sick? Is my heart beating too fast? Will I have a stroke? Are my children unhappy? Do they need me?

When I was a child I went to a camp in Maine. In August on a clear night we would stay awake, singing songs and playing jacks on the bunk floor until the moon was high in the sky. Then we would put on our uniform blue sweaters and bring our scratchy wool blankets out to the flagpole, and slowly, as we leaned against each other, staring at the stars above and the moon making its way toward dawn, a pale light would appear at the northern end of the sky. It would grow higher and higher by the moment as we watched. It would now be tinged with pink and blue—or was it green?—and then perhaps purple as the lights shot up into the sky: Northern lights high above the pine trees. I was not frightened by the strange sky. I knew just where I was, on the damp ground of a camp by a lake in the woods. I was not afraid of the enormity of space or the smallness of my bones, although I was aware of both.

A counselor told us that the lights were the fingers of God, touching His creation. I was more impressed by the facts. Lights shone in my sky because in August the position of the moon was right, the stars in their constellations had moved, the weather was good, the North Pole was made of ice, white reflective ice. I understood that death was real and there would be no appeal when my time came. I did not know that it was someone else’s death that would shatter me, leaving me afraid of lost wallets, loud noises, strangers in the street.

The last time I saw those lights was the summer before I was seventeen and left camp for the last time. Perhaps I could go to Maine and find them again.

And so I am alone. Not really all alone. My children are a phone call away. Friends are near and available if I need them. But I am mateless and that changes everything. I have always, all through our marriage, been a writer, a professional woman who might lunch with an editor, breakfast with an agent, have appointments to keep, a destiny of my own, separate from H.’s, separate from my children, a place in my head where I had my own thoughts and obligations. But I overestimated my independence. I now suspect it was never there at all.

When I’m alone without a destination, a friend to meet for lunch or dinner, the hours drag on. I know how to fill them. I could go to the gym and exercise. I could read a book if my concentration were better. I could invent a story or write an essay or clean my closet of unwanted clothes. I could go to a movie alone. I do none of these things. I hang suspended over my life. The phone rings. I come back into my body. I am interested again in the elections, in the grinding byways of Israeli politics, in the value of this or that commentary, TV series, theater. I hang up the phone and within a short time I have faded again. Is this the thing about being alone that I must get used to—I am not here if no one sees or hears me. Like the proverbial tree in the forest I neither fall nor stand unobserved. But I am observing myself and that should be enough.

It isn’t.

There is a weight in my stomach as if I had swallowed a burned-out log: a taste of ash in my mouth.

H. returned home from his office around seven each evening. I would stand at my window on the fourteenth floor and watch him walking down the street. He wore his trench coat and an Irish wool cap in the winter. He walked fast. He was coming toward me. He would have his drink and we would talk. Not about his patients, that he would never do, although I would have listened. Instead we talked about our children, what worried them, what obstacles lay ahead. We talked in shorthand, whole paragraphs were left out but understood, whole pages quickly turned. We listened to the evening news. Then he would fix dinner. I stood at his elbow while he chopped or stirred. Now I don’t know when it’s time to eat. I don’t know what to eat. The day has no appointed end. It drifts off into the night.

In my cabinet I have a huge bulging blue plastic file folder in which I put the condolence notes I received. The most valuable of these are the letters from former patients whose names I did not know, whose stories I will never know. One after another they spoke of how much H. had meant to them, how he changed their lives, made it possible for them to marry, to have children, to make good on days that had gone bad. They spoke of his smile, his way of listening, his caring, his way of noticing the smallest changes in their manner or look. One man wrote of the support H. gave him for his homosexuality in an era when other psychoanalysts were trying to change sexual wishes, erase sexual dreams, turn people into pretenses of themselves, carrying painful or shameful secrets that H. knew should be neither painful nor secret. One man wrote of his long-held hope that one day H. could be the best man at his wedding to his partner. There were dozens of photographs enclosed in these notes, snapshots of little children, families on a picnic, girls in ballet shoes, a boy with a bow and arrow and an older one seated at a piano, an adopted Chinese child smiles and waves to the camera. In one way or another each of the photos said, “Not without him.” And now I am without him.

We had talked about this. He was born twelve years before I was. He was in good health and good mind but the possibility of widowhood haunted me. He said that it would be a compliment to our marriage, to his love for me and mine for him, if I managed this widowhood well and was able to enjoy my life with another partner or without. He expected that of me. He told me a dozen times in the last few years that I had made him happy. This was comforting but not comforting enough. The ash was still in my mouth. The log remained in my stomach. I considered that he had asked too much of me.

We had argued about the bedroom wallpaper. It had been on the walls when we moved into the apartment some eighteen years ago. The pattern was of repeated small bunches of flowers, blues and yellows, little touches of roses, and they were on a background of ivory and very dense, so that they seemed at a quick glance like a field full of wildflowers. This wallpaper spoke of New England inns and farmhouses in the plains. It was already dingy at the edges when we moved in. Increasingly the background turned to gray and there were peeling strips along the baseboard. I wanted to change the paper. H. wanted to leave it be. He was attached to it. He didn’t want to spend the money. He liked it. He saw no reason for change.

I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1899. A woman suffers from a terrible grief after giving birth to a daughter and is confined by her doctor to a bedroom with yellow wallpaper where she goes gradually mad until she kills herself. This novel is considered a primary feminist text. This is a story about how men impose literal and symbolic immobility. Here is a woman deprived of her own volition, chained to an infant, subservient to a husband and without hope. True, I said, dear Charlotte Perkins Gilman, true. I had been an early feminist. My mother had hobbled about on her Cuban heels while I had a first serve that whizzed past the boys. But I always had a tendency to wander from the political line. In the seventies I never considered that men were to blame for all oppression and I never believed that children were a burden. Mine sometimes were and sometimes were not.

I was raised, child of the forties, girl of the fifties, to flirt, to flatter, to flutter about. Those are traits that are hard to remove just because the climate changes. I admit to a desire, lifelong, to put my hand in a man’s hand and let him lead me through the thicket of taxes and insurance and such. I want to go walking in the woods with a man pushing aside the heavier brush. I want a man to call a taxi or help me over a fence. I have always thought of men as the necessary other. The only question in my mind has been which man and when I married H. the question was answered. Still drifting, avoiding memories, sitting on my bed and not moving, finding it hard to go to the store and buy the barest of necessities, I was aware that in this widowhood I could use a sharp infusion of feminist pride, a sense of my own power, a disinterest in attachment, a venturesome soul daring to walk my own path. My first not-so-firm step was to remove the old wallpaper.

A painter comes. The wallpaper is stripped and gone and in its place a new lemon wall shines in the morning sun. I wish H. could see it. He would have liked it after all. Now I have to decide if I am going to stay in this apartment or move, to a new city, to a little town, to a new apartment, near or further from my children and my friends. I make no decisions at all.

Except that I take an armful of H.’s suits and bring them down to my doorman to take to his church. I take H.’s old coats, the raincoat with its lining, the down jacket for weekends and country wear, and make a second trip. I don’t think about each jacket, when he wore it last, the blue suit for the wedding of one of the daughters, the white suit for summer occasions, the heavy wool sweater worn to the office on cold winter days, I push away any images that dare to approach. I carry the clothes in my arms as if they were old newspapers. Then I am exhausted and fall asleep on the couch. I am not so sentimental that I would keep clothes in a closet that might warm another man on a bitter winter’s night. I am not so intent on keeping the past in my closet that I would indulge my wish to keep everything just as it is. Nevertheless as I ride down the elevator with suspenders, shirts and tweed vests on my arm I feel robbed, absolutely robbed.

I remember the photographs of widows after World War Two, women in Florence and Sienna in black robes, with black scarves tied under their chins, with bent backs and heavy wool stockings, collecting wood or coal in baskets, or sweeping the steps or throwing buckets of muddy water into the streets. Today widows dress in their best clothes, wear all their jewelry and go out into the world to find a new mate, preferably one who can still drive at night. Will I join them? On the one hand I think it noble to attempt to regain what was torn away with the death of a partner, the sweetness of old love and the comfort of worn stories. On the other hand I may prefer to shut my door, play with my grandchildren, learn how to work my coffeemaker, also the Cuisinart, both jobs my husband considered his own.

 

A friend tells me that she has a friend whose widowed mother met a man at the 92nd Street Y senior club. They have been happily together for the last eight years. Of course, my friend adds, this mother is very beautifully dressed and is very careful with her appearance. I sometimes look like I slept in the woodpile behind the house. I live in an apartment, not a house, but all the same.

The moon pulls up as I watch it, from behind the apartment building on the east side of Broadway. It moves slowly into the center of my window and hangs there round, pocked, surrounded by space, black sky. A burst of smoke billows up and spreads out over the rooftops from a furnace in a building a few blocks away.

I was given by the funeral parlor several tall frosted glasses decorated with a blue star of David and containing memorial candles. I lit them. They burned for a week. At night I would sit in the dark and watch the light of the wick flicker back and forth. When they burned out I went back to the funeral parlor and asked for more. They gave me as many as I could carry. But when these burned out I put the glasses in the pantry cupboard on a shelf I can barely reach. Enough sentimentality.

What could be purer than death? There, not there. Fort, da, as Freud described a little boy throwing a ball under the bed and pulling it out again and again, attempting to understand his mother’s appearance and disappearance as she moved through her day. Despite all the poetry and all the melancholy sighs, death is simple, here, not here, not returning. I wonder if everyone leaves a trail behind when they go into the grave, a trail of resentment, financial knots, undone, unresolved matters, lunatic ex-spouses, unreconciled children. No matter how fiercely loved the children are, no matter how tenderly the relatives gather in a circle around a table, things go wrong. When a family contains stepchildren and divorced ex-spouses one always discovers mold in unexpected places. My love for H. cannot alter the fungal spread that stains our photo albums. The angels accompanying him to the throne of heaven are playing atonal music on their harps, although he loved Mozart and deserves Mozart, an eternity of Mozart.

The discordance comes from a lawsuit. I cannot write about why I am being sued for a considerable amount of money stemming from something in my husband’s past. I cannot write about this or else I could be sued. I will settle. My lawyer thinks I must. His brain is not unbalanced as mine may be. Nevertheless in my fantasy I take a sailboat to the Cayman Islands and live outside the law, an old gray-haired lady, browned and wrinkled, who arrives each day to pick up books she has ordered from Amazon. com. There at the sun-drenched dock by the turquoise sea in which coral reefs shimmer as fish of every rainbow color dash about, I will write postcards to those I have left behind. I will befriend drunken sailors, ex-cons, fugitives from white-collar investigations, and little children who dive for pennies when the cruise ships arrive. Or not.

My lawyer calls. Do I have any secret bank accounts? We went to psychoanalytic meetings in distant places. We spent summers by the beach, all the years of our marriage. We were content but the rugs were ragged, the house needed a new roof, the bills for crooked teeth were paid slowly and every once in a while the car insurance payment was late. We could have used a secret bank account. When my husband sent me flowers or brought out from his pocket a piece of costume jewelry he had found in a yard sale, there was always an accompanying card; it said, “From a Secret Admirer.” That was our secret, our only secret.

 

Something about this book that I must say here. It is a well-known fact that when anthropologists study some isolated native tribe on an island in the middle of a distant ocean their very presence on the island alters what occurs to the people they are observing. There is no such thing as pure observation uncontaminated by the act of observing. I am writing this book as I am living my days but the act of writing adds a flavor, a possibly distorting factor to the story. Sometimes I have a thought while I am having my morning coffee at our local Starbucks and I decide I want to write that thought down. The fact that I have a purpose, that I have a plan, which is to write, changes the experience I am having in Starbucks. Writing this book provides a floor under my experience. Having used writing to hold myself erect all my adult life, I am bold enough to believe that I cannot fall because of this word scaffolding that, all invisible, props up my days. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the fact of writing a book is not so life-saving as it seems. But it was necessary to acknowledge the fact of the book I am writing as I am living because without the book that I am writing which is the one that you are reading I would be a sorrier woman, a shell of a woman, lingering on.

 

THE MOON IS SHRINKING. IT IS THE SHAPE OF A FACE WITH a bulge on one cheek. Its color is faint. Clouds drift across it. It hangs above the sliver of the bridge I see in the distance out my bedroom window. The bridge has a small red light on one of its high points. I hear a dog barking on the street below, a deep and angry bark. I think of werewolves. If men can be turned into devouring wolves by the light of the moon, then women too can alter their shape. We can all become weretigers, werecats, werefrogs. Perhaps we do allow some beastly creature to emerge in our civilized breasts by the light of the moon. I feel tugging inside, a fury, a fury to slash, to harm, to run wild through the streets. I look in the mirror. I see only my familiar face. It is hubris to imagine the moon and its gravitational pull, its tidal forces, its mineral, gaseous, rocky back turned to our sun, would disturb the protein amino acid magnetic frictions of my human brain. But if I were a werewolf I would hunt down H.’s killer and rip him or her or it to bits. I would be ruthless, canny, foam at the corners of my mouth. I would do it. But a heart attack has no form, exists nowhere but in the arteries of its victim. I can neither slay it nor forgive it. I bite at my thumb as I do when I am angry: a bad habit.

 

I have an e-mail pal who lives in Fort Lauderdale. He sent me a letter in response to the personal ad in the New York Review of Books. We began a correspondence. He is a seventy-nine-year-old divorced ophthalmologist. He is retired and fighting a weight problem. His e-mails make me laugh. He’s a tough, odd, curmudgeonly old bird, that he tells me himself. He grew up in an immigrant family in Buffalo and went to New York University. I understand where he came from and how hard it is to move in America away from the family of the first generation into the world at large. I’ll call him L.D. He tells me that I should vacation in Florida and find a rich old man with a large paunch who will buy me baubles and such. I don’t mind paunches but I have no interest in baubles. He tells me I should come to Florida and he would take me to the Everglades to see the alligators. He says he has no hair. I don’t mind that he has no hair. He says he wants to leave Florida and live in a small town in New England and watch the leaves change color in October. He invites me to join him. I point out that we haven’t even had dinner together. L. walks along the beach in the mornings. He reports on his diet and his lapses from his diet. He spends his mornings in the library reading. He is a fan of Elmore Leonard. After a while he sends me e-mails with group addresses. I become one of a gaggle of his female online friends. I like his grouchy manner but he is too far away for a real friendship. That requires a face and a hand and the sight of a broken tooth at the back of a smile. L.D., I send my regrets but we have to stop e-mailing.

 

The moon hovers over the water tower across the way. Low in the sky. It looks like a clown’s teardrop. Tears are an interesting matter. I didn’t flood with tears when we stood by the open grave. I was too shocked, too numb, and besides I wasn’t sad, it seemed as if someone were operating on me and I was awake. I was without pain but without volition, without self. I didn’t flood with tears at home when all the friends and family arrived with food and wine and concern. I was watching that no one felt left out, that strangers were introduced and could talk to each other. I was making sure that the platters of sandwiches and cookies appeared from the kitchen and fresh coffee was brewing and I was not crying. Sometimes when I read the condolence notes, especially from patients who had loved H., tears welled up, some escaped, but mostly they were denied, a shift of place, an opening of the cabinet for a glass, a phone call, they disappeared.

Before H. died tears used to erupt from my eyes at TV commercials with children running into their father’s arms and dogs licking the hands of their owners. Tears used to flow at happy endings in movies and at sad endings at movies and many of my book pages are stained with tears. Tears apparently are easy when the situation that evokes them is pretend. Girls after all are allowed to cry even if it turns the nose red and the eyes become swollen. But when something shocking, real, happens it isn’t so easy to let tears fall. H. used to say that women often cried when they were angry. I suspect he’s right. But I am angry and I still don’t cry. I also haven’t torn my clothes or shaved my head or bayed at the moon. I understand those gestures belong to grief but they seem as alien as if I were to paint my body blue and dance stark naked down Fifth Avenue with bells on my toes. Tears seem to be unrelated to sorrow, at least my sorrow, which I feel like a weight in my chest, like a knot in my stomach, a dull pounding in my head. I wonder what other people’s sorrow feels like. Is it like mine, evasive, boarded up, avoided, ready to burst out, curled up, hidden even to the self? Also as I feel tears appearing at the edges of my eyes I become afraid. Is it possible that I could dissolve in tears? The body is 90 percent water, they say. What if all the inner structures, all the sinews and arteries and brain tissue collapsed as I cried, what if I couldn’t stop if I started? My task at the moment is not to float away, not to crumble or dry up or rot with water damage. My task is to manage.

 

My husband was a man consumed with his love for his children. I knew this before we married and had our own children. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at them. I could see it in his hands when he touched their heads. I could see it in his smile when he talked to them. He told me on our first date in great detail about buying his younger one a toy oven and how he kept it in his apartment for her when she visited because her mother would not let her take it home. We took children on our honeymoon. We were not always good parents. But we were always parents. That was the primary subject of our lives, even after the children grew up, even after we knew we had done well with some and not so well with others. We were only human, we told each other. We tried not to talk about our children all the time, hardly ever when we were with friends, but to each other we admitted our pride, our deep pride, our regrets, our mistakes. Our children were our fortune, our land, our nation. In other words we did what we could. We also knew our limitations. The children mourn him. Above all else he would have wanted to spare them that pain. I burn, fire rages in my brain when they speak to me of their memories, of their missing him. I listen quietly and nod, and sometimes add a few details to a memory that has faded over time. I am still a dutiful parent, the only one they have now.

 

I am forwarded the psychoanalytic publications that once went to H.’s office. I read them from cover to cover. I memorize the names of new medications. I read about new theories of transference and countertransference. I understand everything but I have no use for the information. There is no psychoanalyst in this house anymore. I search for case histories. In them the patients are given initials. They report their dreams. They have trouble working or loving or both. I read their secrets the way one opens a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps I will find a message meant just for me. I wonder why I am reading. I keep the publications in a corner of the bedroom. I look at the covers and sometimes I think I should throw them all out. I don’t.

 

I am going to Broadway to purchase coffee and a roll. Now I know how to make coffee but I don’t want to. Orange plastic ribbons run from one side of the street to the other. Police barricades prevent passage. Several cars with red lights spinning on their hoods are at both ends of the block. Two fire trucks are parked along the way, firemen move back and forth, their black plastic coats, their yellow stripes, their big hats, their boots moving around and around. I see a huge tree that has fallen on the roof of a Budget truck that was double-parked on the other side of the street. The truck’s roof is partially crushed. The tree’s branches are askew, its thick trunk is bent way over as though bowing to some unseen royal being. No, I can’t pass through. I walk around and go down another street.

That afternoon I walk to the corner. The street is cleared. No police, no fire trucks. I walk down the block toward Broadway and I see it, a huge chunk of sidewalk has heaved up and cracked down the center. The tree has been sawed off and all that remains is a circle of raw wood surrounded by a mound of dirt. I look at the rings in the wide stump. Its thick roots must have gone deep into the dirt and back underneath the brownstone buildings behind it. I stand there. I attempt to count the circles but I lose track. The tree may have been here before there were subways, before there were apartment buildings on Riverside Drive, maybe it was here when Henry Hudson sailed up the winding river not knowing where he was going or if he would return. How many wars ago did it root itself in the ground, how many babies in carriages rolled past it not noticing its height, its breadth, its breathing out oxygen into our air? It was gone in an instant. Fort, da, what made it heave up onto the sidewalk at just that moment? Two Hassidic Jews, one older than the other, in high black hats, white shirts, black jackets with the fringes of their tallith, hanging out over their pants, come down the block. They are heavily bearded with bushy eyebrows and black shiny shoes and pale faces, lavender shadows under their eyes. They stop by the tree and take out cigarettes. They pull out lighters, they smoke, inhaling deeply. I sit on the stoop behind them and watch. One finishes his cigarette and throws the still-lit end into the dirt by the tree. He grinds it out with his black shoe.

How could such a tall tree fall? It was not called to God, of that I am sure.

 

The phone: “This is Susie of the (name blurred) national polling institute. Can I speak to Dr. Roiphe on questions of national importance?” “He can’t come to the phone right now,” I say. Questions of national importance will have to go unanswered.

 

Once a long time ago we had a twelve-year-old daughter who had pneumonia and recovered. But soon it became clear that the pneumonia had left her with lung damage. For months we watched as she ran fevers at the end of each day and lost weight and coughed through the night, leaving dark green spots on the wall by her bedside, which I would wash off each morning. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, who had lost a child to tuberculosis. I thought of all the children who had died of polio and ear infections in other centuries where the death of a child was never a surprise. The doctors said that our daughter would not survive unless they removed the contaminated part of her lung. Deep in its tendrils the bacteria had settled and no antibiotic had the power to penetrate through the tangled brambles of tissue. We went to the hospital the day before her surgery. In the room next to hers a small boy was dying of leukemia and his father was a policeman and the police bagpipe unit came to serenade the child. The sound was meant to cheer but it didn’t. In another room a Hispanic family gathered around the bedside of a child with diabetes. At visiting hour the mother’s pastor and ten congregants came to visit the child. They lit candles and threw rice around the room in ceremonial passion. The nurses came to forbid the candles and demanded that the crowd of visitors leave. The pastor continued his chants. The candles continued to flicker, their lights casting shadows on the curtain pulled around the child’s bed. The nurses called security. The congregants blocked the nurses’ entrance to the room and when the security guards arrived the congregants singing in Spanish threw rice at their heads. Everyone was shouting. My daughter put her blanket up over her head. The candles burned on. I took my daughter to the elevators planning to flee. Then it was over and the pastor finding us in the lounge offered to come and repeat the ceremony for my daughter. One congregant kindly threw a bowl of uncooked rice under my child’s bed. I wanted H. but he couldn’t come because he was home with our other daughter who was of course in need of his company.

H. and I waited in the cafeteria for the operation to be over. It was supposed to take two and a half hours. Five hours later the doctor had not emerged. I did not let go of H.’s hand. Something had gone wrong. “Don’t imagine anything,” H. said. I nodded. But I was imagining everything. “I will die, if she dies,” I said. H. let go of my hand. “You will not,” he said. “That is unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t mean it,” I said. “You can’t threaten the universe,” he said. An hour later the operation was over. They brought her down to the intensive care unit, tubes with blood running from her side, a tube down her throat, but her color was pink. She was no longer the ashen green of her year of illness. H. brought me a container of watery coffee. We didn’t have anything we needed to say to each other. We just leaned one on another like people standing on the roadside shocked to be alive after an accident that crushed their car.

 

I feel a surge of envy when I see a woman about my age in a restaurant with her spouse, the two of them talking softly. Are they planning a vacation or worrying about their kids, a job lost, a divorce, a setback of mind or body? Are they talking about their friends, analyzing this or that foible, this or that peculiarity? Are they talking about the abductions in Baghdad or the CIA prisons hidden in byways of foreign countries? Are they discussing his blood pressure medicine or her next dental appointment?

I am becoming selfish. I can’t remember other people’s birthdays. I forget to ask about their children. I am self-absorbed. That is to say it takes all my energy to hold myself together. This may be a normal response to a great loss (I expect it is), but I do not like myself like this.

If I were a polar bear I would go into a cave and hibernate.

We are, however, social creatures. The need for touch is built into our biology. If the first mother had not swept her baby up into her arms and folded it into her flesh and fed it and watched over it, the helpless baby would have died, and with it the entire human experiment. H. believed in Darwin the way hedge fund managers believe in the market. He said we need a group for protection, for efficient food production, for survival. We are not single predators, we are not fish that mate without touching. Right now I think I am more fish than mammal.

I watch television without caring if the victim is avenged, if the murderer is caught, if the good doctor gets the woman of his dreams, if the serial killer gives himself up. H. could fall asleep watching television. Perhaps the drama in his office was sufficient. I always had to wait until the plot’s resolution. I had to sit through the commercials because I needed to know how the story ended. Now I don’t care anymore. This is not good but I have no idea how to bring back my appetite for story, my connection to the people in my life. Perhaps time will restore me, perhaps it won’t.

H. read every Trollope novel at least four times. He had his favorite heroines. Lady Glencora, Jane, Elizabeth. He was fond of the Pallisers one and all. When we married, his prize possession, not trusted to the movers but carried in his arms to our new home, was an old, brown-leather, yellow-paged 1894 edition of the Trollope novels that spread out across two bookshelves. He read and reread George Elliot. Sometimes when we were riding a distance in the car he would tell me the plot of Daniel Deronda in all its detail. It didn’t matter to him that I knew the story, had read the book. He liked telling it to me. I liked listening. Again and again he read Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the sea battles between the French and the English. His favorite character, Doctor Maturin, was a spy, an adventurer, a sailor, to whom he was particularly attached. If in my imagination I bore a certain lifetime resemblance to Nancy Drew, then he was Maturin, physician to the captain of the ship.

Born to immigrants in Brooklyn’s Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush, H. attended movies every Saturday afternoon, where he learned to speak without the Yiddish inflection of his parents or the Brooklyn accent of his neighbors. He told me that at a Saturday matinee double feature in 1936 he won a raffle and brought home a box of brand-new blue-and-white porcelain dishes to his mother.

It is amazing that the nineteenth-century world of English gentry could so hold his attention. He would not be pleased at my current disaffection from stories. He would be impatient with my wet mood. I assume he would understand that my mind is restricted in its play for good reasons. But he would not want such a condition to become permanent.

 

I once had a long-widowed friend who said that she loved her bed and her television and her kitchen and she felt well only inside her apartment. I thought this was sad, I thought that she had retreated too soon. But now I understand this better. It is becoming true for me too. The familiar forms a cocoon around me, asks nothing of me, provides me with a space to let my mind roam where it will. I am less anxious inside than out, less vulnerable, less apt to wonder what will become of me. I understand that at a certain age there has been enough adventuring, enough sailing forth. It seems right to curl up like a sick cat on a pillow and wait for the end. I see this and I fear this.

“Yes,” said Molly Bloom. “Yes,” say I. If anyone asks. Although I have my doubts.

 

I go to a Sunday-night dinner—it’s not just a dinner. For many years H. and I have gone to this house and watched the Giants football games with other fans and spouses. We have a betting pool. Each of us writes on a small card the name of the winner, and by how much. It costs ten dollars to enter. The cards sit in a large glass bowl in the center of the dining table. H., child of the Great Depression, hated to lose the ten dollars but was willing. Sometimes we held the dinner at our house. Often H. and I watched the Giants in our bedroom. He, covering his eyes when the other team threatened or walking out of the room if one of ours fouled or fumbled. H. reached for the sports section first thing in the morning. It was a lifelong habit. “Why would you read the sports section before the first page?” I asked. I never got an answer.

This time I go to watch the game without him.

Wives sometimes go into another room and talk or play Scrabble while the game goes on. Some wives leave after an hour. A few watch. I watch. I like the male talk about point spreads and injuries and weights and coaches’ failures, and the quick reports of what has happened on the field before it is explained to the television audience. I listen when one or another of them gives the reason for the red handkerchief tossed on the ground before the referee calls out to the stands. Sometimes the referee wearing his prison-stripe uniform yells, “Unnecessary roughness.” As if the entire game weren’t unnecessary roughness. I like the male jostling in the room: which baseball player hit the most home runs in 1974? Someone will know. Are there enough Jewish players in all baseball history to make a team? And then they start to name them. Such and such a player had a fractured tibia four years ago and hasn’t been the same since. They seem like a pack of dogs playing in the yard, yelping and nuzzling, a smell of wet fur in the air, licking and jumping. Without H. there I feel awkward. But then I don’t.

What I wait for is the moment when the quarterback swings back his arm and hurls the ball halfway down the field and his receiver, outrunning by a half a step his pursuer, puts his hands in the air and pulls down the ball, as if it was always meant to be in his arms, as if it was choreographed that way, and the crowd cheers and I feel for a moment as if anything is possible. Strange that large men can commit such acts of God-like grace.

I lose the football pool. I, like H., bet out of loyalty, not sense. The odds are always against me. There was a purity and an absoluteness in H.’s attachment to his teams. His heart could be broken by a dropped pass, a stumble at a crucial moment, a kick that fell short of the goal posts. This drama is the way some men play with fate. Sitting in the room before the television set, nibbling on cookies, I think of H. Not sadly. Not with pain. I just think of him. Love wells up from far within, the way the whale breaks, the spout shooting upwards, the smooth surface of the waves splinter into foam, the dorsal fin rises across the surface of the water. Glorious—even if the image is used in a TV ad for life insurance.

 

I see a play about a woman dying of breast cancer. Her life ends when one character whispers in her ear the best joke in the world, a joke so funny that the listener laughs to death. The conceit is both charming and grating. Would that death were so easy. I have thought about it. The window, pills, the ocean, the gas stove—I hold the idea in my mind, saving it for the right moment the way one might a good champagne, a piece of jewelry reserved for such a special occasion that it hasn’t yet arrived. Not right now. My children would grieve. I would not want to cause them pain. They should not have to lose two parents within a short time span. Aged orphans they will one day be but they should have time to get used to the idea. I am loathe to leave the story before its end, although I suppose I will in time, just not now. I still have friends I want to meet, movies I haven’t yet seen, books to read that might not even have been written yet. Old age with its dribble and tremble and watery eyes and half-hearing ears is not a delightful prospect, but erasure can only promise itself. The choice remains mine. I’ll take it when I’m ready. I won’t need a joke, especially when the joke’s on me.

 

A man calls me. He is a widower. He lives in Brooklyn. He is an acquaintance of a friend of mine. He is a doctor. His wife died five years ago of a long and terrible illness. He invites me to lunch on Sunday. He is an ear doctor who is still practicing a few days a week. He has just purchased a condominium in Sarasota and plans to spend ten days a month in Florida. I agree to meet him on Sunday. I begin to imagine myself in Florida reading a book by a pool. I think of the warm sun on my legs. I know about the malls and the golf games and the early-bird dinners but I am thinking of blue water and red flowers and palm trees. I am thinking of a man’s razor in my bathroom. I think that maybe I could slip myself into another life. Maybe. Sunday comes and I dress carefully, my best sweater, my new skirt. I look in the mirror, not too long. I am about to put on my coat when the phone rings. It is my lunch date. The tunnel to Manhattan has been closed for repair and he cannot make it into Manhattan. He’ll call another time. I go for a walk on Broadway. I am not going to Florida after all.

 

I had not imagined all the legal forms that follow the death of a spouse. Death certificates—tax papers, conversations with lawyers and accountants. I wander in a deep wood and I am way past the middle of my life. Have I made a major costly mistake, here or there or everywhere? Money is just money and I have not paid as much attention to it as I should have. This is my error. I tend to wait for rescue by a shining knight. Not this time.

 

I HAVE BEEN GOING TO CONCERTS WITH A MAN I’LL CALL M. I had known him when he was the partner of a woman I knew. They stopped seeing each other a few years ago. A friend of mine who knew him said she would call him and find out if he had a new lady friend. “Thank you,” I said. She told M. that I was widowed. She told him I would be pleased if he called and he did. M. is a retired divorce lawyer. He is also a pianist. Music is now his main passion. He has tickets to opera and tickets to concerts and a gadget that lets him hear any opera he wants on the nearest radio: a sweet soul this. He is a tall man with a softness to his body, but he walks fast, holds my arm tight. Not only is he fond of divas but he is also a baseball fan. He takes me to the Yankees game. He has me meet him in front of the stadium. He tells me what subway to take to get there. I walk with the crowd to the gate where he will be waiting. The crowds flow past. If H. were with me I would hold his hand tightly. I would not want him to lose me in this river of fans. The sky is a light blue and the lights on the stadium cast a yellow color across the faces of those approaching the ticket-takers. No reason to be alarmed, I tell myself. I know how to find my way back to my home. M. appears with tickets in hand. On a folded piece of paper on his lap he keeps track of every action on the field and marks down errors, successes, scores. We take the subway back to Manhattan and he tells me what stop to get out to take a bus to reach my apartment. He stays on the subway. I wave good-bye to him through the window as the train pulls out of the station.

Another night, after a Mets game, he takes me back to his apartment. It is small and cluttered with file boxes, old articles, notes, other people’s papers, the boxes rise toward the ceiling. Shelves are filled with CDs. The television is programmed so that the classical music channel plays all the time. The television is never turned off. To move to the kitchen one has to thread through the boxes around the piano. I see photos on his kitchen wall. He names his children for me. He tells me their occupations and what worried him about one of them and what pleases him about another. He asks me nothing at all. I ask him about his law partners. He answers directly. I ask him about his childhood and he tells me: the grief of losing a father, the shame of poverty, the pride of the school he attended on scholarship. He speaks of the religion of his childhood and why he left it. I ask more questions and still more questions. He does not ask me anything at all. I ask him where he likes to travel, where he has been that he returns to. He tells me. He still asks me nothing at all. Imagining that he might be too shy to inquire about my life, I tell him what comes to mind. He is not paying attention. I stop. He walks me to the subway and tells me what train to take to get home to my house.

Several concerts, four baseball games later, at my apartment I go to bed with M. Sitting near him, his hand on my shoulder, the leaning in, it happens, without my willing it, or not willing it. I thought it time. I thought I needed to know if the man was there under his clothes, behind the music he listened to, behind the commentators’ voices of all the baseball games he had watched and recorded on his TV. I thought the sweetness of him might carry me through. I thought I needed to know that my body can go with another body again. I was glad to go to bed with M. My shape was no longer a wonder to behold. Neither was his. My heart was beating fast, my desires rose. I was able to give and receive. But how strange it is to be in bed with a man who is not H. Am I betraying H.? I had never done so. I had declined invitations to lunch, an opportunity here or there while I was away on speaking trips, a psychoanalyst colleague of H.’s who sent me notes tucked into books he thought I might like. You cannot betray a man who is not living. I tell myself this. I firmly tell myself this. On the other hand you can betray the memory of the touch, the muscle of the legs, the mole in the center of the back, the slightly curved spine, the way the hair curled at the nape of the neck. You can betray the indentation of the man you had been in bed with night after night, good nights, bad nights, dull nights, year in and year out. Perhaps this is why in bed with M. I start to feel like a mannequin, a person who is there in this space but not there. This is not M.’s fault. He is tender. He is sweet. He is strong. I respond, or my body responds as it should. This is good but not good enough. My mind remains outside, above, away. I watch myself do things that seem normal but are not. I do not inhabit my body. Perhaps I need more time and distance. Perhaps I really am betraying H., although he would not think that, or would he think that—and just not tell me? My cat circles around the man, an arch in his back, a sound not entirely friendly coming from his cat throat. M. rests his head on the pillow that now belongs to the cat. I reach across M. to run my hand over the cat’s ears.

There is the idea in my head of the merry widow. I am not merry.

 

I can’t hang a picture on my own. I can’t open a tightly closed jar. I can’t work the clasp on my pearl necklace. I can’t get it open and if I get it open I can’t get it closed. Or can I?

I invite M. to the beach for a weekend. He talks politics with my friends. He listens to music. He does not like the sea. He does not want to walk about. His life is interior. The sun gives him a rash. But we are peaceful together. All around are photographs of my children and grandchildren. He doesn’t notice. So I pick up a photo of my two granddaughters and tell him their names. He turns his head away and does not look at the photo. It is true that other people’s grandchildren are superbly uninteresting. They are just children after all and the world has its fill of them. The special charge, the electric joy these pictures give a parent or a grandparent disappears when the eyes are colder, less kind. But most of us are polite enough not to turn our heads away when presented with a photo obviously dear to the presenter. I am feeling lonely in the house with M. I fix dinner. We eat and talk over the editorials of the day, the failings of the newspapers. He tells me stories of legal battles he has fought. He talks of lawyers who are so fabled ordinary people know their names. He does not ask about my work. He has read nothing of mine. A book I wrote, a memoir that I gave him when we first started dating, sits unopened on his shelf. I try not to be hurt. Why should he read my book after all?

He says, when I inquire, that he is not a literary man and worries that I will not respect his thoughts. But I am not a lawyer and I don’t worry that I should be. Is he insecure or just telling me an approximate truth, an untruth? I tell him he has expressed no interest in who I am. “Maybe,” he says. But still he asks me nothing.

When he packs to leave I am not sorry. I welcome back my solitude. Either I am not ready to place my hand in a different hand or this man has circled his wagons against the irritations of another soul, at least my soul. I will not see him again. He is decent and good and intelligent. He is calm and self-contained. He e-mails me, “Perhaps we could be friends?” I don’t answer the e-mail. He is a stranger and will remain so.

It occurs to me that I could write anything about him I like. He will not read it.

Sometimes at the end of the day I would read aloud to H. the page or two I had written a few hours earlier. He would sit on our black leather couch with his vodka in his hand and nod when he was ready for me to begin. He was mostly appreciative and always encouraging, except when he fell asleep. This happened often enough in the last years that I stopped reading to him. He rose before six and was gone by seven thirty a.m. He walked the twenty blocks to his office. He carried with him the book he was reading. I knew his mind was full of his own thoughts and mine must have served like the lullaby wheels of a train, round and round, clank and churn, clank and churn. H. had earned the right to fall asleep as I read. Also I might have been boring (all writers fear that they are boring, a violation of the first of the writer’s ten commandments). I was not afraid that H. would leave me because I was boring him.

This is the first summer since we bought the house that I have not wanted to walk along the water’s edge, watching the ocean come and go, watching the gulls circling for bait fish, watching the trawlers out at the edge of the horizon. For reasons I do not understand I am uninterested in the beach. I am unable to sit in a chair under an umbrella peacefully. I do not admire the little children who run about. I do not want to hear anyone else’s radio. I get cold with the sharp wind. I get bitten by black flies. Also I do not want to be alone on the beach, not even when the fog comes in and the terns scurry on their pin legs, in and out of the tidal froth. It’s too much for me, this ocean. I never go. Day after day I plan to go but I don’t. As if I had signed a pledge, do not enjoy, do not let the sun near the muscles of your back, do not wet your feet. Ridiculous. Perhaps I act this way because the house is going to be sold. Widow that I am, its upkeep will undo me. Widow that I am, I have no desire to travel the highways to reach the house. Widow that I am, I do not want to put my hands in the rocky dirt of my garden. I don’t want to replace a burned-out lightbulb. I don’t like this house without H.

But that said, it is also true that here we had Thanksgiving dinners, a Passover or two, with most all the children gathered. Here we played poker with boyfriends of my daughters who seemed permanent but weren’t. Here we talked about politics with a young husband who disappointed and disappeared. Here another daughter brought her new husband whom we had not yet met. On this table, with this stove, and this refrigerator marred by specks of rust on the door, common to houses so close to the sea, we made meal after meal. We cooked together, all of us. A daughter announced her pregnancy here. Another was married nearby. Friends filled the house, fish was smoked and grilled. Bikes were pulled out of the shed and stuffed back in among unused boogie boards and mildewed beach chairs, grandchildren slept in baskets, on couches, Scrabble pieces fell under the table, cookie crumbs were ground into the rug. Wet bathing suits hung on the shower pole, mice were in the cereal boxes, insects in the bag of flour. Also fights. This sister complains about that sister. This sister weeps for her dog who died. This sister feels ignored by the others. This boyfriend goes off on a bike ride and disappears for a full day. This is the place where one daughter and her husband decided we didn’t want them to stay longer in the house and became angry with us. This is where we brought one daughter home after an eye operation. This is the house where one daughter wept on learning that another was pregnant. This is the house that was invaded by rabid raccoons who jumped about inside the walls, a terrible stench filled two rooms until they were trapped, caught in steel jaws that left them lying open-mouthed, bloody, bones, fur, guts spilling, on our porch.

I no longer wanted the house. It was ungrateful of me. The tightness in my chest was not the house’s fault, although the blame must fall somewhere.

I have a strange virus. I have not had such a fever since long before I met H. Now this ache in the limbs, the rise in temperature, the need to sleep, the muscle cramps last and last. I am tested for Lyme disease. I don’t have it. I go by jitney to my doctor in New York. My liver is inflamed. My potassium level has sunk to an unacceptable low. I give more blood for more tests. The unnamed virus remains with me. I am alternately hot or cold. I try to go to a party but my head swims. I leave the party. I try to read but the lines dance on the page. If H. were here I would be coddled, calmed. He would make carrot-ginger soup. Am I sick because he is not here? They say that the immune system responds to crisis by shrinking. Has my immune system turned from plum to prune in the season since H. died? I know that everything is not a matter of psychology. On the other hand the body is not separate from the mind and this mind feels as if an ax has cleaved it in two. No wonder I have a virus.

After three weeks it does depart. I never learn the name of my tormentor. It would cost one thousand dollars, my doctor explains, to find its name. I am not that interested. I think of Adam in the first week of the world naming the animals as they walk past him. Was there also a parade of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic life forms crawling across the grass of Eden so that Adam could grant them their identity? I know I am fortunate—I could have been invaded by a million worse diseases, ones that might have consumed me altogether. But I am not grateful. The absence of H. seems, like an oncoming tide, to be covering more and more of my being with each passing day. Run, run to high ground, I tell myself.

I’m invited to swim in a friend’s pool. I don’t want to swim. I don’t know why. I am a good swimmer but now I dislike the idea. Why move my arms and legs about just to get from one side of the pool to the other? Why bother?

I think of other summers I have had that were less than perfect. In August, when I was three, my brother was brought home from the hospital. August has never been my favorite month. Once in August in the time of my first marriage I was alone in the city with my young child. My first husband was gone for good and the slightest sound could make me jump. I had dreams of falling objects, closet doors that wouldn’t open, cliché and bathos followed me everywhere. My friends were away. There was a heat wave that could kill. I sat at an outdoor table in a nearby coffee shop, sweat dripping down my peasant blouse, and chain-smoked Camel cigarettes while my child rode her tricycle around in circles by my feet.

I have trouble reading. I am an escape artist who reads newspapers, books, cereal boxes. But now my concentration is cracked. Stray thoughts disturb my peace. The bird song on the nearby tree makes me close the covers of my book. This bird has an unlovely voice, his call is loud and grating but his mate appears from the other side of the garden and sits on the branch nearby. Evolution has programmed her to admire his voice. H.’s voice when he spoke to patients was gentle and soothing. You could lean on that voice, you could depend on that voice. It was a big voice although he was not a big man. Under the words lay a melody, a promising harmony.

People come from time to time to see the house, potential buyers. When they come I leave and go sit in my car in the parking lot near the beach. I inhale the salt smell. I watch the mothers carrying wet and sandy children in their arms. I note their buckets and shovels and towels and flip-flops and beach chairs. I see the teenagers flirting with each other near the ice cream truck. I let my arm hang out the window and later I see that my elbow has turned red. The tip of my ear is also burned.

No one makes an offer. The market is bad, there are fourteen houses for sale within a four-block radius. I worry I won’t be able to sell the house. I worry I will be able to sell the house. I worry that I will lose my friends who live nearby. I will lose some of them. But I know from experience that with change other people will cross my path, other people with stories and bad habits and children who do or do not bring them pride.

The broker comes and goes and replaces his sign with a larger one. We are at the end of a dead-end street. No one sees his sign. The days are gold and the light is warm and silken. I should sit on the patio at my table where the umbrella with a print of roses going round will protect me from skin cancer while I watch the bees swarm and the black crows hang in the branches above. But I don’t go into the garden. Instead I sit on my bed. I wait until a decent hour to call my daughters. I also tell myself old stories. I embroider them with slight untruths. I wallow. This is unacceptable.

A friend asks me, “Are you used to your new status yet?” What does this mean? I would check the box that says widow if presented a form at a doctor’s office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. I no longer have a joint bank account. The joint is gone. I have changed our credit cards into my name. But status? Could it be true that a woman without a man is always at the edge of appearing as a figure of fun, a disappointed person like a nun or the obese girl who stays home the night of the senior prom?

There are millions of women who live alone in America. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed. They like the way they keep their cupboards, feed their dogs, stretch out on the couch, wash the ring off the tub, put the coffee cup in the dishwasher, always on the left, handle-side out. Never mind the howl of country music’s unrequited love, someone stamping around after midnight, lots of people are unmated and comfortable, feel no need to swoon into a microphone. Someone in a marriage must die first and many people live in single space peacefully.

But how do they do it?

I go to a luncheon. The guests stand on the lawn, glasses in hand, gazing down at three egrets who stand each poised on one leg at the water’s edge. I am introduced to a widow of some five years. “It’s horrid,” she says, “and it’s going to get worse. They don’t know, they with their husbands, they don’t know.” I nod. I know about some other horrid things too, that have nothing to do with losing a spouse, things that hover about the garden casting shadows here and there despite the high sun and the perfect weather.

 

A builder over the last two years has been constructing a huge house behind ours. Now it towers over my house. It looms above my red maple tree. The workers’ voices rise across the property line. I hear saws, hammers, small backhoes dipping their steel jaws into the dirt, trees falling down, the radio with its loud unreal conversations, music you can’t dance to, on and on. The house they are building is grand. There is a giant pool and a little pool house that abuts my now-leaning fence. Four big brick chimneys rise to the sky. There is a deck but little grass. Where will the buyers put their garden? I hear from my neighbor on the other side that the builder has sold the house. I hear that the buyers are from Colorado and are in oil or gas and have business interests in Russia. I hear from the man who cuts my grass that the new owners have bought the house to the left of them and have put in a bid for the house to the right of them.

And then they come to see my house. I am out. They come twice and they bring an architect and I whisper into my cell phone: They’re here again. Will they notice all the windows that do not close and the stain on the kitchen tiles that I can’t scrub off and the drainpipe that is crooked and the broken screen that the cat has scratched, through which mosquitoes and spiders arrive and depart? I meet her. She is a young woman from Texas. “How did you ever get so many books?” she asks. “My husband liked the house because of the books.” “I’ll leave them for you,” I say. At last they make an offer. They will have a family compound. They will have a little estate. They will have closed a circle. Now they will have grass and a Japanese red maple tree that turns orange in August and all my blue hydrangea bushes. They are not, they say, going to tear down my house, just fix it up, a new kitchen and new bathrooms and new closets and new floors and new wings and surveyors come and engineers come and I am ready to go back to the city and let the house go but I am aware that this sale is an amputation, a necessary amputation. Another one.

Now I have another lawyer. He is a real estate lawyer who has drawn up the contracts for the sale of our house at the beach. I would like to keep it as a place for the family to gather at holidays. I would like to keep it because I love the small stone statue of a child that H. bought at a yard sale and the morning light transparent on the grass. I love the pink blossoms on the dogwood tree that come just as winter fades. Then there is fog and the sea and the clams at the clam bar and I love my friends who invite me to dinner and worry that I am too alone. I am too alone.

But I cannot keep this house at the beach. Sometimes here at the beach I fear that I might die in my sleep and lie undiscovered for days.

I cannot keep this house because I cannot afford it.

This lawsuit pursues me, I need to be careful with funds, to protect myself from becoming destitute in my frail old age. I am not overly concerned. I have no enormous desire, no secret plan to live long years in an expensive nursing home, requiring help to boil an egg, someone to bring me medicines to calm my raging mind. I suppose it is a moral failure, this lack of appetite for life on my part, life of any quality. I admire those who grab it all, want every moment, fight cancer with every tortuous new treatment imagined, travel to the far ends of the earth pushing their walkers, tasting all foods as they arrive at the table, demanding more and more. I am simply not like that. I am too much of a realist to battle against the odds. Or I am a quitter.

Today there are people wandering through the house. They are picking up dishes and thumbing through our books and looking at the paintings. We are having a yard sale, my daughters and I are here, watching the strangers. The tables and chairs are being carried away and the canister I bought at a yard sale is being recycled to a plump man in a yellow shirt with golf balls on it. Someone wants my duvet and someone else wants the painted cabinet with roosters on the panels.

I am fond of my things, my accumulated things. The ceramic fish that rests on the table near the model ship, the wooden crane that has one blue eye and one black, the espresso cups from a trip we took to Portugal, the drawing of Jean Marais done by Jean Cocteau. But I am not so fond of them that I will not let them go. Like memories that are lost in the far recesses of the brain, like days that are swept away unremarked or unrecorded, I am willing to let objects leave with their new owners. This house must go and I will close the door on it with regret but without anguish.

What is the point of anguish? Certainly material things do not deserve a drama of their own. It is the unseen, still lingering, presence of the man who lived in this house with me that takes my breath away. My head swims. I need to sit down as someone takes the dollhouse we kept for our granddaughters and walks through the door.

If I were a cartoon character I would have stars circling my head and Xs for eyes. Actually I deserve a medal for bravery—or is my bravery foolishness or is foolishness the explanation of bravery? I find an old hairbrush behind a bureau—so that’s where it went.

H. loved his drawings and he loved his paintings and he hung them on the walls with great care and he was always convinced he’d purchased a treasure, something of real value. He loved the seventeenth-century Italians and the sixteenth-century Dutch and he loved paintings of women with curves and drapery and enigmatic smiles. I loved his loving his drawings. I myself lack a collector’s will, a joy of possession. It is a flaw of mine, not my only one. Standing outside the now nearly bare house, surrounded by my daughters and their daughters, and packing the car for our final departure, I look at the bare walls for the last time.

The drive back to the city takes forever because of the traffic. My daughter K. is with me. Her child sleeps in her car seat. Her head is tucked against the side. The child will not remember her grandfather although she will have photographs of him. There he is holding her a few hours after her birth. There he is with her mother and aunt and there he is holding a fish, a large fish, smiling with such pride you might think he had created the fish, not merely reeled it in. My friends have grandchildren. Sheepishly we show each other photos. It makes us feel like clichés to do this. We feel like characters in an old New Yorker cartoon, matrons with hats and wide hips who belong to garden clubs, not working women with titles of our own. Nevertheless we want to show each other our grandchildren. Is this the point after all? Will I live to see this child become a teenager? Will this child remember me when she has children of her own? H. would say that doesn’t matter. Don’t ask for more than you can get. Enjoy the sleeping child in her apple juice–stained shirt, clutching her precious blanket. Appreciate that she is not complaining about the length of the trip or the lack of amusements in the car, or the fact that we have no more boxes of apple juice.

I do not dream about the house. Sometimes I think about the ocean, walking along the ocean’s edge. Sometimes I think of the dunes. I remember the jellyfish floating in the waves. I remember the fishing boats with their huge nets rolled around the gears at the horizon’s edge. All this is permanent and returns summer after summer. The haze in the morning, the fog that rolls in from the North Atlantic sea, the driftwood blanched white, the abandoned balloons from a child’s birthday party, the bed of broken clam shells, the tiny stones with blue veins, the gulls with their grating caw, the half-buried red plastic pail, the ruins of a sand castle, return. I was the visitor, the one passing through. It’s time to go. H. would not complain that biology is biology, that beginnings have endings, that doors open and then they close.

 

I have lost weight. Enough so that my wedding band slips up and down on my finger. I play with it with my thumb. I turn it around and around. It is a simple gold band. I have worn it since we were married. I think I remember taking it off in the hospital when I gave birth to K. and B., or did the nurse put adhesive tape around it? You would think after all these years that it would have grown into my skin. It has not. I slip it off. I put it back on. I go out to dinner without it but rush home and put it back on.

The American Psychoanalytic Society always had its mid-winter meetings in New York, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The red carpets shone. The candelabra were golden, the staircases marble, the mirrors reflecting the tinsel-and-red ribbons of the Christmas season, and in the lobby psychoanalysts and their wives came and went, off to lectures, to symposia, to meetings on transference, transgender, techniques, termination, etc. In the hall outside the meeting rooms a long table sat lined with books written by the analysts in attendance or their colleagues long dead. Stacks of papers that were being delivered during the day were available for perusal. It seemed as if we were on a ship, Transatlantic, glittering in the air, sealed off from the traffic outside, from the concerns of others. Older famous analysts stopped to visit with their younger students and analysts remained students and supervisees for many years. It was a long apprenticeship to become an analyst, filled with ambivalent loves, secrets spoken, dissected, repeated, in rooms with volumes of Freud lining the walls, little statues of far-off civilizations sitting on desks, Oriental rugs on the floor. Secrets that meant that the older analysts knew the darkest thoughts of the youngest and the youngest yearned for the attention of the oldest. Some, who believe that psychoanalysis is a dead profession, may think that the ship we were on was the Titanic but to me it seemed like the inner chamber of the heart, the essential organ.

My five-year-old daughter, E., went to the movies with her babysitter and I went downtown to the Waldorf to meet H. We were going to buy the ring, the ring for our marriage, the ring I would wear ever after until death did us part. I rushed into the lobby. The uniformed doormen, who seemed both martial and like extras in an opera, stepped away to let me pass. I looked up the marble steps and saw H. coming down toward me. He was carrying a briefcase. His winter coat was swung open. He would not kiss me in public, not before his colleagues, not on the steps of the Waldorf lobby but when we emerged and walked to Madison Avenue on the way to the jewelry store, in the privacy afforded by the crowd, he did and I was safe, moored to this man. I pressed against his arm. I, thirty years old, believed that nothing was impossible.

On my fifth or sixth or eighth attempt I take the ring off and keep it off. I look at it in its box. I hold it in my hand but I do not replace it on my finger. I am not married anymore. I have no mate. I cannot keep twisting and turning that ring on my finger.

H. did most all the food shopping. He liked picking and choosing among the fruits and vegetables. He liked choosing the fish or the meat for the meal. He dawdled in the aisles checking prices and he read food magazines for recipes he clipped and would make on rainy Saturday afternoons while one ball game or another played on the television. Now that he is gone I have discovered that I am the world’s worst shopper. I buy things I think I want to eat and then they sit in my refrigerator ignored until green mold appears, when I throw them out. I buy too much milk and have no cereal. I buy a can of soup and forget it in the cabinet. I buy pasta that turns stale. I spend too much money. I buy paper towels by the dozens. It will take two of my lifetimes to use them all.

I resort to takeout food; the Cuban-Chinese restaurant on Broadway will deliver, so will the Mexican place a block away, and the Indian and the Turkish cafés around the corner. I overtip the man who comes to the door with a bag containing my dinner. “Make yourself a salad,” my daughter K. says. But I don’t want to. “Do you want to come for dinner?” my daughter B. asks. But she lives a forty-five-minute subway ride away. She is a law professor and comes home tired to her husband and baby and more often than not they eat takeout food too.

The thing about takeout food is that when it is removed from the kitchen of its origin it loses its balance. It becomes all curry or cumin or soy. Its colors fade like a flower picked in the field, pale before you are back on the path. A smell of paper carton or plastic wrap sinks into the sauce. Now I have enough takeout menus in my drawers to paper a room. My taste buds are complaining. All these Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Cuban deliverymen carrying my dinner to me, waiting at the door for my tip, they know my name, they smile at me, they wave good-bye as they wait at the elevator. It is not a sign of normal life when the takeout deliverymen become fond of you or your tips.

I do go to dinner at my stepdaughter J.’s home. She lives only ten blocks away. The family gathers around the table and the children talk about their violin lessons, their science projects, their rehearsals for the class play, college applications, debate societies. I listen and I see clearly that their home is a good place, just as it should be. I am welcome but irrelevant to the evening, like an extra waiting in the wings for the crowd scene. In this apartment there are no photographs of me. That is because the biological mother comes to dine, and will sit in the seat I am now in. Perhaps that’s why I lean back in my chair as if I were a ghost not fully visible. Of course I often turn into a shadow. I speak but am not speaking. I see but don’t record what I see. Here in this room I am safe, protected by this family, and a curious emotion springs up in me. I look around the table. Mine, I think. My dearest, without the word but with a heat that might bring tears if I allowed it. I don’t.

 

There is the problem of H.’s ties. For the eighteen years we lived together in this apartment they were on a tie rack on the inner door of my closet. Each time I opened the closet door they swung outwards. Each time I closed the closet door one or two would get caught and protrude into the hall. I would have to open the door and put the ties back in place. I give one away to this friend and another to a son-in-law and one to J.’s oldest child who is going off to college but many are left swinging on the rack, sticking in the door.

I take them all off and intend to give them away to a thrift shop. The pile lies on my bed, formerly our bed. I leave them there. At night I toss them on a chair. In the dark they look like vines crawling. In the morning I put them back on my bed. An hour or so later I take them carefully one by one and return them to the rack. I do not want to give them up, not yet. The same is true of the two-dollar bills that H. kept in an old wallet in his drawer. A patient has paid him in cash, all two-dollar bills, several months’ worth of sessions. He was amused. He said it was all right. He left me hundreds of dollars’ worth of two-dollar bills. I could use them. I could go to the bank and deposit them. I keep them in the drawer. Two-dollar bills are lucky, they say. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they, like the ties, stay.

Here is a difficulty I have not yet solved. The world outside my brain is as always in a woeful state. I am aware of genocide in Darfur, of women with dead babies in their arms, of refugees wandering barefoot in the dirt. I know that car bombs and snipers’ bullets and assassins who drill holes in their captives’ heads are not figments of my imagination and I know, and this is very personal, that Israel has blundered in Lebanon and that threats to its people abound. I know that need is everywhere and that if one listens carefully in the night air a pitiable sound rises to the stars. And my solitary state is hardly newsworthy, comment-worthy, significant in such a context. I know that the disruption and destruction of my life is neither tragedy nor pathos. But, and here is the rub, we do not live in the general mind, we abide in the details of our private stories. Mine matters to me and I have trouble staying at such a distance from myself that I can worry more about the orphans in Ethiopia than I do about who will have dinner with me tomorrow evening.

I have no right to complain. I complain.

I have an old friend whom I love despite or perhaps because of her unvarnished style. She calls to say, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.” I understand this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. I wouldn’t want to be in my shoes either if my feet had a choice. Nevertheless her comment rankles. Not because I would wish widowhood on her but because I feel diminished. I feel pitied, which is unpleasant. I hear her finding herself superior, which while fair enough, makes me cringe. Was there a better way for her to say that? “I understand how you must feel” might have been kinder but less accurate. “I’m so glad my husband lives while yours is moldering in the grave” would be accurate but even less polite. You would never say to a friend, “I’m so glad I’m not driving a Saturn like you, my Lexus is such a wonder.” You might think such a thing of course but you wouldn’t let the words escape your mouth. But the rawness of death, the jaggedness of this loss, as if a thunderbolt had split the tree on the lawn in two, this brought out the comment “I wouldn’t want to be you.” Who would?

 

I have taken to reading the travel and real estate sections of the paper with an unnerving zeal. I look at each picture of a house overlooking a lake or a mountain and I think maybe. Maybe Colorado with its wildflowers and red rocks, or maybe South Florida, where I see an affordable condominium with a view of the ocean and a terrace with a lounge chair. The sky is perfect blue and the ocean stretches as far as the eye can see. Then I see a gray-shingled house with a porch on an island in Maine. Could I live on an island in Maine? Maine has high pine trees, cones lie on the dirt paths. The steeples of churches announce the towns as you approach. There is a barrenness to Maine that stirs me. There is the lack of fresh paint on the walls of the local store. There are the dark long lakes and the mists that take forever to lift and the cold mornings even in August and the northern lights. I have always imagined myself in Maine. But now? Then there are photos of apartments in Tel Aviv, ones that look down on the beach, ones that are near the busy markets. I don’t speak the language except in my dreams when sometimes I hear myself in fluent Hebrew. I have no friends of my age there. I have nothing now to offer the country, except the trouble of burying me. The moment for the move to Israel came and went without my stirring. It is hard to move away. I see a photo of a small house on Lake Tahoe. I would like to be in a small house on Lake Tahoe. I would have a big dog, maybe two, a pickup truck. I would go to the local library and read and read. I would wear a squash-blossom necklace and turquoise bracelets on my arms. But I don’t know a soul, not within two thousand miles. The question is would I meet people? Would I? What if a widower lived down the road and came over to help me stack my firewood and what if we cared for each other? And what if no widower lived in the entire state and I sat by the phone waiting for my children to call? What if I found a senior citizens’ community and moved there? What if I missed all I have here and wanted to return and could not?

The fantasy of a new life plays in my head. It goes round and round, until it is stopped by a wall of reality. If I were twenty I would go. If I were twenty I would not hesitate.

I might hesitate. After all I’m still here in the same city that raised me. I have not seen the world. Well, thank God for movies. Sundays I read the travel section. Perhaps I should move to an island in Hawaii. Perhaps to New Zealand. Perhaps I should volunteer in an African refugee camp. If only I were a doctor or a nurse or even a teacher. They do not need writers in refugee camps.

I remember the time at the beach house we played poker by candlelight when the hurricane came. I remember H. standing in the driveway with a plastic bag filled with blue fish with their heads still on and their tails pressed against each other and the smell of sea and fish on his clothes and in his hair. I remember my stepdaughter nursing her baby on the couch. And then I forget.

What I want, really want, is my old life, in my same place, with H. by my side. All the rest is flight.

 

I am contacted by a man who knows my cousin. He is an engineer who has his own business consulting on automation. I see his photo. He has a warm face with a short white beard. He lives in Pittsburgh, which is very far from New York City. He is from Belgium and when we speak on the phone I hear an accent that makes me think of cobblestones and archways and cypress trees and sidewalk cafés. He tells me that he has been divorced for a long time. We talk about his work. I tell him about mine. He tells me that he would take me to walk the mountain trails near his home. He tells me that he likes to dance and would take me on a boat on a lake. He tells me that he is ready to love a woman with all his heart. I am touched. He sends me a long love poem he has written. It is atrocious. It is worse than a greeting card. I pause. I think that if I were to write anything at all about a mechanical object, a scientific subject, the construction of a bridge, it would be terrible too. I would write gibberish, so perhaps I should ignore the poem. I do. We go on talking. He tells me about his great car, a giant SUV that he uses to travel across the country in his consulting work. He tells me that he invented a kind of robot now used in manufacturing. I am impressed. We agree to keep talking. He sends me the pages of a romance novel he is writing online. I cannot read them. I explain to him that I read different kinds of books. He accepts that. We talk about meeting. I could take a train and we could meet halfway between his home and mine. I like his voice. I have grown used to hearing his message on my machine.

Then he tells me he will come into New York City and spend the day with me. He sends me his train schedule. He will arrive early in the morning and I will meet him at the station. I am pleased. I am a little excited. I think of walking in the woods. I think of the steel mills by the river. I think it doesn’t matter that he is a Lutheran and I am Jewish. Those distinctions belong to another time of life. He promises to tell me about his divorce when he sees me. He says he will explain the mistakes of his life. I will have to explain my own mistakes as well. I am prepared.

But then he says that his life was changed by Dr. Phil. I don’t respond. The conversation ends. I think about Dr. Phil. He has changed many people for the better, I am sure.

But I am of a different sort. Dr. Phil is like a leech on a fevered brow. I know he is popular. I just don’t belong with a man whose life was changed by Dr. Phil. I call Pittsburgh and explain that I can’t meet him at the train station. I have had second thoughts. My fault, I say. I am not ready, I say. I am still grieving, I apologize. I don’t say anything about Dr. Phil.

Then I wonder: Am I being small-minded? Am I cutting off a possibility because I am afraid of the new and the different? Am I just playing with the idea of a new life with no intentions of really claiming one? Perhaps I should ask Dr. Phil.

 

I remember the night we went to hear Anna Freud speak. The event was at an auditorium at a city college. She was small and dressed in black, with white hair. There were no empty seats. Psychoanalysts of all kinds had come to hear her, to applaud and to feel themselves close to the source, to pay their respects. This was before all the attacks on Freud. This was before it became clear to everyone that psychoanalysis was too expensive, would aid, if it would aid, only a very selected few. Psychoanalysts were pushed off their pedestals. Nevertheless I was a member of that community. I knew what they were talking about, jargon and all.

A friend sends me an e-mail. It has a single name on it. I call her to ask why she sent me that name. “I heard from my sister-in-law, the divorced one—that this B. is a man to stay away from. If someone introduces you to him, stay away from him.” My friend tells me that he’s been widowed for about three years. He’s a psychoanalyst. Why had my friend sent me his name? To warn me, she said, she was afraid I would be introduced to him since we had so many connections in common. I am intrigued. I Google him. I find the address of his office. I write him a note. I introduce myself. I suggest that we might enjoy meeting each other. What am I doing? This is not the way women of my generation behave. It is unseemly. It is also absurd. I have just been warned the man is no good and so I go rush toward him as if I wanted nothing more in the world than a no-good man. I drop my letter off at the post office.

The very next morning the phone rings. This is Dr. B., the voice says on the phone. He has a low, calm, reassuring voice. He liked my note. He is intrigued. He wants me to meet him at the Harvard Club the following evening for dinner. He will meet me in the lobby. I agree. All day I walk around holding his name in my mind. I think, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I remind myself not to anticipate more than a dinner. But all day the possibility of Dr. B. runs like a shiver down my spine.

It is raining the next night. I dress carefully. I put on shoes with heels and a gold buckle. I don’t care if my toes soak in puddles. I arrive at the Harvard Club and there he is sitting in a chair in the lobby reading a newspaper. He has a strong face, a head of silver hair, a warm handshake. We go into the club, the mahogany dark club, with its maleness everywhere and a certain sad look to the chandeliers as if time had passed it by. Its solemnity now hollow, like an inn in the mountains that has lost its clientele. We talk, Dr. B. and I. Perhaps I talk too much. He asks me how I heard about him. I tell him. Was this a mistake? I want to interest him. I ask him questions. I find out what there is to find out about a psychoanalyst, a doctor who is used to not answering. He went to Harvard. I know his kind. We talk about our children. Perhaps I talk too much. Perhaps not. Then he walks me to the door of the Harvard Club. He lives on the East Side. I live on the West. The rain is coming down in torrents. He says he is going away for a week on a trip with one of his granddaughters but will call me when he returns. I walk off in the rain, my umbrella over my head.

The next morning he calls before eight o’clock. “Who is the person your friend knew? Who is the source of the warning about me?” That name I had not told him. I didn’t want to tell him. I was embarrassed at my lack of tact. I had not been sworn to secrecy but still the entire conversation was indiscreet. But I gave him the name: a woman I didn’t know. He said to me again, “I will call you as soon as I return.”

But he didn’t call, not the next week or the week after. He didn’t break my heart. One dinner, a few hours’ conversation cannot do that. But I tasted disappointment. Yes, if I leave my house for encounters with strange men, rejection is a possibility, a likelihood, a certainty some of the time. This one I deserved. It does not startle me that I am not universally loved by all who have dinner with me. I am a writer and know that bad reviews are as likely as good ones. In my imagination I had already begun a time when this stranger and I would go to the movies together and more. But in this case my imagination misled me. Little harm was done, little grief will be spent on the matter. It was not meant to be. Nevertheless for the next month I worried the matter. Was it my age, my conversation, my manner? Had my flirtation skills grown rusty? Was I so used to being loved that I assumed the whole world would love me if I wished? And then that was that. Some weeks later I tell the story of the meeting with Dr. B. to an analyst friend of mine. She tells me that he had been brought up on charges before the medical society because he slept with a patient. This is not exactly akin to being an ax murderer but it repels and disgusts nevertheless. What luck he never called me back.

 

If I could keep my children from ever finding out that I had lifted my hand against myself, I would. They stand in my way.

 

H. believed what he believed. He did for his patients what he could. He knew that Freud, error-filled or not, had been among the first, artists aside, to explore the underground river of the human mind, where the unacceptable thought floated and the less lovely, more feral creatures lurked on slimy rocks. Freud was the one who told us that we were far more than our conscious minds, our sweetest selves are but a sham.

Which is how it happened that one morning I woke thinking of the ways that H. was less than perfect. We say only good things about the dead. A eulogy is a mud pie of compliments, of perhaps exaggerated compliments. A good eulogy makes the mourners feel uplifted. But eulogies do not serve as portraits of the dead. I need to be accurate.

H. always frightened me while driving and we drove the highways almost every weekend out to the beach and back; a trip that would take a normal driver close to three hours was often for us less than two and that’s because H. liked to be the front car in the pack. That’s because he drove fast and moved incessantly from lane to lane and nothing I could say would stop him. I had long ago decided that I would die in a car accident with him one day and accepted wordlessly all the swooping and the veering and the close calls. Still it made me angry sitting next to him that he indulged his racing-car fantasy, his World War One pilot fantasy, in the car with me, with the innocent cat in the backseat in his box, and some time on this earth still ahead of us. Yes, he was right, he did not die in a car accident and he did not harm me. He had driven over sixty years and no one was ever injured (a few cars were scratched or bent). But as a driver, behind the wheel, he was unkind.

He was not good at psychoanalytic politics and did not dodge and weave among the psychoanalytic entities that made careers for psychoanalysts. He did not follow any orthodox line altogether. He worked with infants, observing them with their mothers; he had original ideas and published original papers but he could not befriend those he did not like and he could not pretend to be accommodating. He was not. This is a virtue and a fault. He knew that about himself. He understood himself. It would have been better had he been a more worldly man. He would have enjoyed more of the honors his profession dispensed.

He did not believe in interfering in his children’s lives. They have to make their own decisions, he would say again and again, which sounds virtuous but sometimes made him seem an absence when he should have been a presence and sometimes stemmed from a desire to avoid controversy. He slept soundly on nights that I tossed and turned waiting for a child to return home, waiting for news of one sort or another.

Sometimes he was too silent. Sometimes when he was angry or upset he pulled into himself like a turtle and the shell was impenetrable. I had to wait, to coax him out, beg him to return. He would get angry while paying the bills, including his lifelong alimony to the wife he married first but shouldn’t have. He would sit soundlessly for hours at our desk with the papers spread before him. A more perfect man might have left me a life insurance policy. He had a policy for his first wife, which he was legally obligated to keep for years, and after that he was older and the policy would have been costly and we never quite had the extra funds. I understand but the idea stays in my mind. He should have protected me. It comes to me that a more perfect man would not have left me to send out death certificates. He also protested when I wanted one more child. Just one more. I didn’t insist. We had enough. He was right, we couldn’t afford it. But still I wanted another baby. A trace of anger burns across my brain.

But the worst thing he ever did was to die.

H. always did our taxes. He pored over the statements from the bank, credit card bills, and would list all possible deductions. He had folders and papers and a system repeated year after year. When all was done I signed the returns and mailed them. I have held tax papers in my hands but never looked at them. My eyes are virginal. Now I try to imitate old notes. Now I try to find out what he was looking for in the credit card bills. Now I am the sole taxpayer, the citizen, the one who should remember and mark down expenses and charitable contributions. My mind rebels. It is not just. It is not right. I was not made for numerical matters. This is his job. But he is not here and now I will do it, badly, but I will do it. Resentfully I will do it.

Psychoanalysis is an art as well as a science. Everyone says that. H. knew that. Still he wanted to be a scientist. He wanted to see if the child did indeed develop as the textbooks say, in the real world. That’s why he spent years observing mothers and their babies in nurseries at major hospitals. He, with a colleague, directed the nursery. He advised the mothers. He held the babies. He was in love with both infant and mother, with the bond that rose between them. He wrote down the ways a child could separate from its mother, how it ran toward and away, how its body reacted in fear to the mother leaving the room. He was an expert on infant sleep troubles and eating troubles and slow speech and he ran a nursery for troubled infants who had no physical disability but were not speaking or walking, whose eyes wandered about aimlessly. He worked with a staff to restore the crucial human connections, to bring these fragile babies back to life. He talked about how children react to the differences between the sexes and how it made boys and girls behave differently. This was a dangerous conversation in the early feminist years. He didn’t care. He saw what he saw and published it in papers. When he talked to me about what happened in his nursery, when he explained to me his ideas on anger or shyness in small children, his voice would grow even deeper and I was held as in a spell by a great wizard, a wizard who was my spouse.

 

A friend, not the first to do so, suggests I dye my hair. She says, “It will make you look younger.” It would. I should. Maybe I will. I don’t want to. If I were to do it, the color of my choice would be purple, punk purple, magenta purple, or perhaps I could get black and white stripes like a skunk. If I have not met a man to cherish for the remaining years, it cannot be because of the color of my hair, or can it?

 

Through the glass windowpane I see a man eating dinner alone. He has gray hair and a book on the table beside him. Why are we both alone? I see a man walking past the greengrocer with a cane and a cap on his head like the cap H. used to wear. The man is alone. I walk a little faster so I can see if he is wearing a ring. He isn’t. But that is not conclusive. He might be married. He might not. You can’t stop strangers on the street and ask them if they are married and if not would they like to stop for a cup of coffee. Too bad.

I receive a notice from the cemetery. I need to order a headstone. I need to send them money to dig the foundation for the headstone. I need to approve the words put on the headstone. I had asked H. if he wanted to be buried or cremated, a long time ago. He said he didn’t care. It would be up to me. I asked him why he didn’t care. He shrugged. It would make no difference to him. He was not one to follow religious traditions. On the other hand he would be perfectly respectful of anyone’s desire to do so. Cremation saves space on this earth for the living, which highly recommends it. On the other hand Jews have been buried under the ground forever, believing—some of them—in the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. I have no desire to visit a grave site. I have no illusions that I would be closer to him there than in front of my television or on my block, or standing on my subway platform. I do think that when I watch a Giants football game, I am nearer his spirit than when I lie limp on my couch, not thinking anything at all, but letting time wash over me, waiting for the day to end. But this kind of nearness is not literal, nor corporeal, nor in fact very convincing at all.

I decided to bury him in the ground because I thought it better for our family, because traditions are ignored at one’s peril, later they might seem important. This choice of mine is expensive. H. would hate the expense. I feel guilty. Is this wasted money? Of course it is, but done.

It is winter now. A mild winter but still no time for visiting headstones. We will go in the spring. I purchased two plots. One now used, the other for me. This will save my children anxiety. This will put my remains beside his—not that either of us will ever acknowledge the other.

I think of the ground that was dug by the employees of Mt. Eden cemetery—I see the small backhoe, the darkness of the earth. I am not afraid of death. I have no expectations of heaven or hell or judgment to come. But something chills me in the thought of him, no longer him, changing shape, losing tissue and sinew and becoming all skull, all bone, there below in the ground where I can’t touch him and he can’t touch me.

I see the decay. I see how little remains. I push the images away. They return. I see a hand, an eye socket, a bone. I don’t want to see this. I don’t have a choice. The images come now and then, prompted by what? I do not know. Is this a result of guilt? If it is guilt is it Eve’s guilt or some personal spasm of conscience? Is it the result of a lifelong bad habit of burrowing in the sore spots? I do not for a moment think it is H. I am seeing. I am expecting no rising, no bone rattling, no hauntings. Alas poor Yorick. I think it is Yorick I am seeing.

 

Perhaps I should have had him cremated after all and spread his ashes on the sea where he had gone fishing for blues summer after summer within sight of the Montauk lighthouse. But there seems something ridiculous about saying the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over the huge dark sea, even near the harbor. The prayer for the dead is a list of praises for the Lord and H. would have protested, why didn’t God take an extra day or two to create the world? He might have done a better job, he would say. He would especially have protested at his own unasked-for death. But we did say the Kaddish at the grave site and he would not have minded. Do what suits you, he had said when I asked years ago. I find the words of the Kaddish comforting, the rhythm of the prayer comforting, because it is ancient, it links us together in time. It is a prayer against despair because it is said aloud with one’s fellow humans. I don’t fool myself. This grave site is not for H. The ceremony that accompanied the body down its hole was not for H. It and the bill were for me.

I finally go to a movie alone. I choose my movie carefully. I choose one that H. would have wanted to see: the new James Bond. H. could watch James Bond movies over and over again. He was never bored by them, never found them silly, improbable, nonsense. All things I said at least to myself. Still I had enjoyed them, because H. was laughing, gasping, holding my hand. Now I go alone. The plot is not much, the beautiful girl beautiful, the exotic scenery exotic and the evil ones very evil. It seems strange to be sitting alone in the movie theater. I feel self-conscious. Of course no one is looking at me, not even when the lights were on, before the previews started. The ticket taker didn’t say, “What are you doing here alone, lady?” The young couple the row behind me didn’t whisper to each other, “Hope I don’t end up like that.” I recognize that the whisper is my own. Ten minutes into the movie I forget that I am sitting next to strangers on either side, and I am inside the film. James Bond is talking to me. That is the way with movies. I leave the theater with the throng of people arriving and departing all around me. I am glad I went to the movies. I can go alone whenever I want.