I HAD A HUSBAND. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome. I stood right next to him and I screamed at him. And then I got to the phone and called 911. The ambulance came very quickly. The medics broke down the door because I did not have the wherewithal to get up to let them in. They attached machines to my husband and counted backwards from three and the volts from the machine shook my husband and made his fingers stretch out into a perfect individualized ten, like he was reaching for something, like he was reaching for me. The medics, who had taken off my husband’s clothes and electrocuted him with their machines said, I am sorry, ma’am, there is nothing else we can do, and they put my husband on a stretcher and made to take him out the door, out our door, away from me, but I said wait, wait one moment, I want to say good-bye. And so I went over to the corpse of my husband and I looked at him, and I slapped him, and said, how dare you, how dare you leave me like this, all alone.
IN A VAST WHITE ROOM that was filled with charts and fake plants, a man in a cheap lab coat who looked very convinced of his own authority held out his fist to me. He said, your husband’s heart went like this, and he clenched his fist and then released his fingers from his palm and let them hang in the air and dangle. My husband’s heart wasn’t made out of fingers, I said, which did not please the doctor. It’s a metaphor, he said, a visual aid to help you understand what happened. I don’t need your help, I said, and I walked out of the white room and into the parking lot to look for my son.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1984 my husband and I went on a cruise in the Mediterranean that was supposed to trace the path of Odysseus. That’s how they pitched it to us. We went with friends, three other couples, couples we had known for a very long time. One of the funny things about being married, especially about being married in our insular, picnicking, block-partying, well-exercised group of friends was that people were made to pretend that each couple was one person, like most people were, in fact, only half of one person that only became whole when paired with a mate. We had no single friends. We went on the cruise with the couples. I liked most of the husbands more than the wives and everyone liked my husband more than they liked me. It was alright that way. I am aware that I am not very likable. I am troubled, however, by how much easier it was for me to be with the husbands, how much easier it is for me to talk with men. Were the women on the cruise my husband’s friends? Or were they my friends? Or were they only friends with us as a couple? Friends with only the double human unit we made whole? Maybe the couples were friends with the idea of us, the idea of Ray and Fran. In any case, it was the idea of Ray and Fran that went on the cruise with the couples. The only interesting parts of the cruise were when the idea deviated, when Ray and I went swimming by ourselves off the side of the ship and were left on shore for a night, by accident. What a happy accident! We were ourselves, instead of a couple, when we were alone.
I FOUND MY SON in the hospital basement, where they kept the bodies. He was looking at the body. When I got to the basement the man who oversaw the bodies said, in a very soft tone, you may want to call those who your husband was close to so they can come and see the body and gain a sense of closure. I didn’t say anything back to the basement-morgue man, because I was tired, and because I have never felt particularly obligated to converse with anyone, regardless of whether or not they have already initiated a conversation with me. I did not call anyone to let them know that they could come see the body. My son was there, which was enough. Besides, my husband’s body was mine, and while it was still around, albeit free of animation, I did not want to have to share it. There are so few things you can be convinced are yours. I stayed there late looking at his face. I became worried that I was letting him decompose, that keeping his filing cabinet open that long was going to crash the whole refrigerator. My husband was not old. He was seventy years old. And I was sixty-three.
I WALKED AROUND MY HOUSE, but could not look at the place where my husband had died and then found I was averting my eyes everywhere and that I could not look at anything. His death expanded from his chair to the carpets on the floor to the wood walls and the ceramic bowls in my cupboard. I looked into my bowl of cereal and I saw my husband. I looked into the grout in between my tile in our shower and I saw his hands. I heard him yelling from upstairs. I heard him yelling from outside. I started sleeping in a different bedroom, but that too became infected with him. I told my son I had to move, so he helped me find a smaller place, a duplex where I shared a wall with a young family so that I could hear people living on the other side of our shared barrier all day long and well into the night.
I DID NOT THROW my husband a funeral. I threw him a party. We burned his body and put it in a little box that I later sprinkled on the hills of a mountain where we used to hike. At the party people said, Franny, we’ll miss him, we miss him so much already. The couples from the cruise came and bowed their shoulders in unison and shook their sorry heads from left to right. They had handkerchiefs. All I could think about when I saw them were the handkerchiefs. Were they old? Or had they been bought especially for that night? We were getting to an age when people were going to begin to start dying. Perhaps the handkerchiefs were an investment. Perhaps the wives had gone to the department store and bought new ones and thought, quality over quantity, we are getting to that age, it’s a good investment because we will use them again.
WHEN MY HUSBAND DIED, I was so very young.
WE WERE BUILDING OUR HOUSE, Ray and I. We were going to build a house with our own hands. I was twenty-one and wore worn jeans and a black top that I had cut the collar out of so everyone could get a better view of my neck. You have to know what your strong points are, and then exploit them. I cut out all my collars. I had short dark hair that, if I wasn’t so slight, would have made me look like a man. I lifted stepping stones out of a truck bed and put them in a pile on the ground. Then I called over to Ray. I said, Ray, honey love, where should we put this here path? Ray smiled very widely and walked over to me from where he had been carpentering and got very close so that all I could see of him was his chest, and he took one of his big hands and with it gripped the back of my neck and took his mouth to my ear and whispered, Oh, Franny, I really don’t care. I didn’t exactly smile, but kind of made my eyes bigger than they usually were and lifted the right side of my mouth and then kissed him on his chest and walked away. I laid the granite stepping stones from the driveway to the would-be front door and then there were some extra left over, so I laid some down from the backyard into the wilderness that encircled the plot of land that would become our home.
WHEN WE FINISHED building the house, it was beautiful. It was a single-level ranch-style structure with a modern single-side slanted roof and a black-bottomed pool out back that was in an organic shape, a kind of wonky oval. It was the early 1960s and I have always liked color, so I decorated the house in bright Scandinavian prints and long grotesque shag rugs. Ray had, of course, hired laborers, people he picked up at the local gardening store, to help him build the structure, but we had mostly done it alone with the help of an architect friend whom we never, surprisingly, saw much after we finished the house. It didn’t seem that radical, at the time, to try and build something ourselves, something we could live in and maybe have a child in and call our home. My son insists that now it would be a clear social marker, a sign that we had certain beliefs that were not compatible with the rest of society and that we were intentionally removing ourselves from society with walls. It wasn’t like that. The building of the house was Ray’s idea. It was just a thing that seemed we might be able to do on our own, and why would Ray keep working his salesman job in the city when he could save money and build his own home and spend more time with me? It just seemed logical. It was like the choice to stay home with my son instead of hiring a sitter. If you like spending time with a child, and you don’t have money to spare anyway, why outsource labor that you enjoy? The summer we started building, we got the frame up quick and then put a tarp over the would-be living room and lived in it like a tent. We had a camper grill that ran on small canisters of gasoline and every morning we would wake up with the sun, and shower nude with the hose and then make coffee and eat something and get to work. Ray had a radio with which we listened to the local jazz station and memorized all the DJs’ names and by the end of the summer we were doing impersonations of Billy Drake and Bobby Dale and Sly Stone when we bought groceries. We’d take our beat-up station wagon to the Safeway down in South City and I’d be in the canned goods aisle with Ray and pick up some garbanzo beans and say, Slam! That’s where it’s at! and slap Ray on the butt a little and slide across the slick linoleum grocery store floor while seamlessly depositing the can into our modest cart of house-camp-summer supplies. We bought lots of things we didn’t need on those grocery trips. We bought cereal boxes that had funny names, like Lots O Nuts and a box of Jello called Slime Pie. We ended up mixing that funny green Jello box mix with water and feeding it to the birds. They loved it. The jays and the cardinals slurped it up like ice cream soup. Look, Ray! I said. The birds love us! Ray looked at the birds and then he looked at me and laughed and said, It’s a good thing I don’t really like birds, because I wouldn’t be surprised if that kills them. No, I said. No, look! They love it! But Ray insisted that the Slime Pie would make them die. I kept buying it and kept feeding it to the birds anyway, and the only dead jay I ever saw at our house was one that had been killed by our cat. They survived, I told Ray when the summer was done and we had our roof and most of our walls. Look at them in the trees! I said. They love me! Maybe, said Ray as he turned back to his task and tried to finish painting one of the front house panels before the last of the light closed in on our little hill and it turned dark.
AFTER RAY DIED, I lived in the duplex. I liked being able to hear the neighbor children’s young feet run back and forth. I imagined the children running very fast like small dogs, and then suddenly stopping, closing their eyes and falling smack on their faces fast asleep. I will admit that there were times when I put my ear to the wall, when I slid my pressed body from the first floor to the stairs, and up them, just to follow the family’s evening, to hear the father giving a bedtime story and putting his little boy and girl to sleep. I realized, after some time, that my mind was playing tricks on me. That I would hear conversations on the other side of the wall that did not exist. One day I had my head pressed to the side of the kitchen, and I heard the young husband and wife arguing about Slime Pie, why it was still on the grocery list, what a waste of money it was, and how it would surely kill the birds. My God, I thought, it’s Ray and I in that apartment, and I began to cry. I became very worried that I had invented the whole family, that I was, in fact, in a regular house, not a duplex, all alone. I rushed out into the front yard to make sure the house was doubled, to make sure that there were two front doors and a wall that was shared. I looked at the duplex. It was a building folded over, and duplicated. There was certainly another structure that was connected to mine. I rang the doorbell of the other front door. A handsome young man immediately came and answered it. Fran, he said, Fran, how are you doing? Is there anything I can get you? Do you want to come inside? No, no thank you, I said. I said, I am so sorry to bother you, I thought I heard someone inside cry.
IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME to distinguish which parts of myself are the original me, which parts of myself predated Ray, and which parts were developed while I was with him. And, for those parts of me that were developed while I was with him, how am I to tell which parts I would have developed on my own, without him, and which parts of myself never would have come to pass if I had never met him? For instance, I am a painter. I paint portraits of people, portraits of people I like, or people who I meet that interest me. I have sold some paintings for some money, and a gallery in the city, one time, even put on a full show of my work. However, I rarely show the people I paint their portraits, because I think that they would not like them, that they would be angry and insulted that I had painted them in such a way. They are not realist paintings, but they are most definitely portraits of specific people, and after I paint a portrait, it can be difficult for me to not think of the portrait as a summary of that person, which is why I have always liked painting people multiple times, because of course people change, and my understanding of people changes, so of course, over time, my portraits of specific people will be very, very different. In this way, I think of my paintings as a kind of thesis of my understanding of someone, and I can look back at all of my paintings that I have made of a specific person and see how my understanding of that person has changed. I started painting when I was a young mother, when I was twenty-four and was home all day all alone with Adrien, our infant son. While Ray was at work, I walked down the hill to a small convenience store and bought a cheap, child’s set of watercolors, and then I marched back up the hill with Adrien in my arms and the package of paint tucked under my arm. I put Adrien on the floor, on one of the faded shag rugs, and ripped out some pages from a notebook and painted him. I painted a can of peaches and a spoon, and wrote under the image ADRIEN, MAY 5TH 1966. I painted him each day for a week, and then I began to paint people I saw in the grocery store. I would put Adrien in the stroller and roll him down to the store, with the paints hidden in the bottom compartment of the stroller, and stand in the frozen foods section and watch people open the icy doors, and watch the small, cold clouds slick out of them, and watch the people hover over ice cream choices and frozen vegetable dilemmas. I eventually became very friendly with the grocery store staff, in particular, one man who was about nineteen who I suspect was in love with me. His name was George and on the third day he saw me in the frozen food aisle he brought me a stool to sit on. When he gave it to me, I looked at him very gratefully. I said, thank you so much, thank you, you have no idea what this means to me. And, the next day, when I came back, I gave him some cookies which I had baked at home the night before. In this way we became friends. In between stocking the shelves and mopping up messes, he would come speak to me. And I asked about his life, where his parents lived, if he had a girl and if he was happy with his work, doing what he was doing, doing what he wanted to do. He was very happy, and happier now that I was there, he said. I got in the habit of calling the store if I knew I was going to be absent and had to be elsewhere or had to stay home. I didn’t want George to worry. I wanted him to know I wanted to be there, I wanted to be in the frozen food aisle with him making my pictures, sharing an apple, talking about nothing, most of all not about Ray and my life in the house we had built with our own hands that now had a somewhat neglected front lawn and a roof that was not as structurally sound as we had planned.
I KEPT THE PORTRAITS in a large cardboard box in the hallway closet that housed the vacuum cleaner and other supplies that I couldn’t dream of Ray ever wanting. Still, he found them. He brought them out one night after dinner. He said, Franny, what are these? Where did they come from? He said, Franny, these are beautiful. Did you paint these? You have a gift, you must keep on with them, and we must get you all the supplies that you need. I never, in my deepest dreams thought that my paintings were about anything other than a misunderstanding, me, as a person, being somewhat defect and not really being able to understand people unless I tried especially hard. That is all the paintings were supposed to be, a tool for helping me better process the world that was around me. And here Ray was, telling me they were beautiful! That they were worth something! That I owed it to myself and others to keep on! Ray started telling people, friends of ours, about my paintings at dinner parties. One of the neighbors suggested that we turn the backyard shed into a studio, and Ray was enthralled. He came and met George down at the Safeway, and him and George got along so well, and Ray even hired George to do some yard work for us and invited him over for dinner, and all of a sudden the idea that I had ever been scared or ashamed of the work I was doing, the notion that I had been doing something covert and wrong, became absurd. People began to know this about me, they began to know that I made paintings, and then, all of the sudden, people introduced me as a painter and it was what I was. One of Ray’s bosses came over for dinner and asked to see some of my paintings, and I brought out one of the frozen food aisle portraits where I had painted a box of frozen peas against a red wash and written underneath WOMAN IN FUR COAT AND SANDALS in cursive script. Ray’s boss said it was fabulous, he loved it, is there any way he could pay me for it? Take it with him and hang it in his home? I said, absolutely not, it was a gift, he could have it, but the boss would have none of it and assured me and Ray he would pay one way or another, and he did, later that fall, when in November Ray got a corporate bonus of $1,000 that came in on his paycheck labeled FOR THE PAINTER. And so, in this way, I began to make things and people talked about me this way, as a person who made things, as a person who painted, and I liked that this was the way that I was known in our small, close-knit group of friends because it gave me a pass of some kind, where now it was all of a sudden more acceptable for me to be less likable, because I had other qualities that people seemed to think were of interest and were worth having around.
WHEN RAY FIRST TOLD ME in our living room that the paintings were good, I did not believe him. How could I believe him? I was horrified that he had found them and suspected him of making fun of me, or trying to control me in some way that I could not understand. I was very cold to him and I started to cry and said, you just leave me here all day all alone, you musn’t be angry at me, please don’t yell at me. Ray had never yelled at me. And I realized, later, that I was yelling at myself, that everything I feared Ray would say was something I had already said to myself in my head.
I WAS A GOOD MOTHER, although I did do things other mothers we knew didn’t do, mostly just benign things like taking Adrien on long walks alone, walking him down our hill and across our suburb to somewhat deserted parts of our city, like the shipyard, where we watched people and things come and go. If he was sleeping, I’d push his stroller down our hill and across many roads until I reached the overpass where, if you turned left, there would be rows of warehouses. There was a summer, the summer when Adrien turned four, when we went to the warehouses frequently. It was the summer I mostly wore a blue sundress I made for myself and a large straw hat, and Adrien wore the same purple and green block print jumper every day. Adrien and I, we’d just sit and watch the men loading and unloading bags of rice and tiles and textiles all day long, until around three-thirty, when we would begin to walk home and I would ask him questions about the scenery as we walked. Adrien, I would say, what do you see? And, at first, of course, he only said the usual things, like, I see clouds and a tree. So then I asked him to say what he saw beyond the things he saw, like, for instance, our hill we lived on. I would ask, Adrien, what’s behind our hill? And he would say wonderful things, like, a village of talking rabbits where the king rabbit has just been killed OR a beach where everyone’s bathing suit is made out of goldfish. Once, on one of our long walks, I asked him, Adrien, what is behind that tree? And he said, a man, a very dirty man that has stuffed animals and sleeps in the grass, but he is hiding. And there was a real man that I had not seen, which was very scary, and was maybe one of the only times where I have ever been instinctually worried about how, if something were to happen to Adrien, other people would think of me. They would say, that woman, that Fran, that woman. She got her son butchered by the warehouses, that woman. She practically gave him to the murderer, offered Adrien, her small defenseless son up for slaughter, that’s what she did. That was the thing with motherhood that caught me off-guard. I am not the type of person to really care what anyone thinks of me, but I found myself caring, very much against my will, what people thought of me as a mother. I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted people to believe I was a good mother, because I love my son very much, and, although I have always doubted my capability to do and be many things, I have always been quite sure that I knew how to properly love someone, and the idea that I might be bad at loving my son was very scary to me then, and it is, still, one of the great invisible monsters of my life that I have tried to battle, but it has always been unclear in this battle whether there ever was a battle and, if there was, whether or not I won.
WHEN ADRIEN BECAME AN ADULT, maybe two or three years after he graduated from college, it became obvious to me that he believed his father was perfect, which was of great annoyance to me. Ray was not perfect. I was frequently tempted to explain to Adrien all of his father’s flaws. I wanted to tell him, you know, he may seem open-minded in some ways, but don’t be fooled! The things Ray would say! You would be horrified. Here, just let me give you a list of the things I hate about my husband: his complacency. If the world suddenly turned bright blue, he would not be fazed; he would be accepting, which is completely unreasonable. He wouldn’t know why it was blue, and he wouldn’t care, or he would care, but only if someone told him to care, like me, like if I said, Ray! The blueness is killing the planet! Then he would say, well shoot, Fran, let’s do something about it. But he would never come to that conclusion all the way on his own, so you’d have to kind of help him there, which really, after many years, makes you wonder, it makes you wonder what it would take to make him realize on his own that something was wrong. Like when Adrien was seventeen and drunk-drove his car into a tree and then walked the rest of the way home and Ray said, let’s talk about it in the morning, maybe this can all be explained. No! There was nothing to explain except for what happened, a plain fact that Ray understood but could not fully, in its repercussions and possible causes, comprehend. Adrien could have killed someone, could have killed himself, but all Ray could see was that Adrien was hurt, upset, drunk. Whereas I, in that moment on our front stoop, on the welcome mat of our sagging handmade home, all I could see was a corpse, Adrien dead, an alternate history that had been so close to happening that it drove me mad. People should be driven mad, temporarily, when they see things like that, their son in a near-miss state. Sanity, Ray’s level-headed gait, was completely intolerable. Which brings me to another one of Ray’s flaws: his complete inability to condemn someone, even privately. I realize that the world we live in makes us, at times, have to interact with people that are less than savory, people who have different beliefs, different value systems, maybe even value systems that you know, critically, most definitely harm other people, like high-frequency traders, like oil corporation executives, like women with big diamonds hooked to their palms, what I am saying is that I realize that situations may arise in which one would have to fraternize with such company but when you get home and into the bedroom and you are free of the constraints for which politeness calls, you should be able to say to your husband, that man was awful. And your husband should say, yes, despicable, quite. Not Ray! My God, he gave the benefit of the doubt to everyone. A terrible mistake, by all accounts, a mistake that caused me to endure many unpleasant dinner guests. Eventually, with these people, Ray would slowly come around and admit they were terrible, but it took such a long time and then I was always left feeling awful, like I had forced badness on this person’s reputation, even though this person had brought about the badness all on their own. I told Ray this a million times, I said, look, here is the thing with people, you can tell if you have a really bad egg very quickly. There are many cues by which you can discern said bad egg. And very rarely, only very rarely, are those first-five-minute bad egg impulses not confirmed. It is kind of like feeling humidity, I told him, it’s just in the air and you feel it on your skin. But Ray never listened to this advice. He accused me of keeping mental judgment boxes where, once I decided someone was a bad egg, I put a transcript of every condemnable thing they ever said. This accusation was not true, I just remember when people say offensive things. Everyone does this, I explained to him, except, obviously, for you, who are so morally tone-deaf that I wouldn’t be surprised if you gave Lucifer a Nobel Prize. If he was in a good mood, Ray ignored everything I said and told bad slapstick jokes on repeat until I laughed or walked away and cooled off and resigned myself to living with someone who was morally deaf. If he was in a bad mood or tired, he just let me talk at him, talk him into the ground until there was nothing left of him. And he said nothing or, if he was very tired, he said, Fran, I am sure you are right. The only thing Ray never admitted I was right about was when I told him I wanted to leave him. He said Fran, you are wrong, how can I show you you are wrong. He kept saying, look at how much I love you, look at it. It was very difficult for me to look. Adrien was in high school and I was painting on larger canvases and questioning my medium, and there Ray was, stagnant, same as he always was, and I doubted him. I doubted his sincerity, but most of all I doubted his capacity to give any part of himself to me which, the longer I thought about our marriage, was what I really wanted. I wanted to have a part of him that no one else had. Ray always talked me down when I threatened to leave him, most often by physical force, the physical act of him holding me while I cried. He said, I love you, Franny, I’m just not the same as you which is why you can’t see it, I can’t do feelings like you, and our feelings don’t look the same which is why mine are hard for you see, but they are there, Franny, you’re really the only thing that ever mattered to me, you know it, I want you to know it, what can I do to make you see?
THERE WERE THINGS that made me feel very close to Ray and other things that made me feel so far from him, like we were animals of different species and the fact that we cohabitated, let alone mated, was completely bizarre. It didn’t seem that way at first, of course. At first we were just kids living in the city, making money as best we could away from our parents, living in small, cramped shared apartments and watching movie matinees until we were crazy enough to pool all of our resources and buy a small plot of land fifteen miles south of town. Back then, when we found each other, it was like we were the only two people in the world, the only two people at the party, the only two people in the building, the only two people in the whole damned city, it was incredible, a feeling I suppose many people have had, but it still felt very unreal and, well, I guess I was young (I was only twenty-one), but that feeling was enough and filled everything, every space of our lives and all the cupboards and all the food we put in our mouths. There was a closeness then, but it was different from the intimacy of me trying to leave, and there was no trace yet of the bizarre, any inkling that I would ever look at him and think, how on earth have we ever been able to communicate about anything, let alone anything of importance, like our home and our life and our son.
I BEGAN TO SUSPECT THAT Ray handled me like he handled discovering my paintings, like I was just one constant discovery, a never-ending box of surprises that, when discovered, was just a new turn in the road to be taken without blinking at high speed. Which, although it sounds glamorous, was actually not a good feeling. It made me feel like my husband could be in love with anyone, like if I hired a double and put someone completely different in my place, he wouldn’t even suspect that it wasn’t me. He would just think, here is the newest Fran! And continue on with the meal. The only time I could ever be sure Ray knew who I was was when we were making love. He always knew exactly what I wanted, and the older we got the more I could not remember if it had always been this way, or if he had just learned my body so well, refined the act of making love to me to such a fine-tuned skill, that he was able to play my body with such unhindered dexterity. And I wondered, also, if this was the way it was with all couples that put in the hours of twenty years, if it always got to a point where, physically, pleasure became easy, the only uncomplicated thing you could count on, a set of simple, uncomplex actions, or combination of actions that, without fail, yielded great temporary joy. His body, Ray’s body, was what was the realest to me. It was his body, not his mind, that I felt I was able to know in a way I will never know anything else. The body, after all, is an object that takes up physical space that one can touch and see and explore and remember and it changes, yes, but only slightly, and the changes usually make sense, as in, they can be seen as a logical progression, like how Ray’s hair turned from dark to white, like how the skin on his ass was firm and, later, like mine, had elements of paper, but the body makes sense in that way, whereas the mind, Ray’s mind, was unknowable, and the changes even more opaque. When we had sex, I knew I was coupling with some combination of Ray’s mind and his body, but mostly I just liked thinking of us as two bodies. It was simpler that way and easier for me to understand.
THREE YEARS BEFORE RAY DIED, he retired. My father had died the year before and left us some unexpected property and cash, and by then we owned our house free and clear. So we didn’t have much money, but we knew we had enough where we wouldn’t run out and even a little left over so that we could take a trip once a year to a place we had read about or had just, simply, always wanted to go. Ray was most interested in the national parks, staying domestic, doing long car rides to the center of the country where we could see the great mountains and bison and rainbow trout fish. I told him that the idea of driving to Wyoming was pathetically American and that I just didn’t know if I could stand it, even though, the truth was, I liked the mountains and I liked hiking and I was, in fact, very American, and the thought of seeing strange, archaic animals roam on vast plains didn’t seem all that bad. We can drive when we are old and eighty! I said. Let’s go on a plane! Alright, Ray said, we can go on a plane. So we agreed to save the trip to Yellowstone for later, and that summer we went to Tuscany for a month where we rented a small stone cottage on the edge of a vineyard that was once used to store barrels of wine. And the summer after that, we did the Odysseus cruise, and the summer after that we went to Sydney, and then Ray was dead and so he never saw Saddle Mountain or Republic Peak or the Needle or any of the other geological formations that he had read so much about in that small book he owned titled The Mountains of Our National Parks.
ONE NIGHT WHEN I WAS alone in the duplex, I watched a movie about dams, and how they were killing all the fish, and how if you wanted to see a steelhead trout, you had better come quick before they were all gone. And I thought, Ray would have loved these dumb fish, he would have talked about them with the neighbors, and known everything about them, and known where they were on the Snake River, and where they were spawning, and this movie, this would have been the catalyst if we had watched it together, this would have been the last straw, that was it! We were driving to Yellowstone for the fish and you know, you know, I would have loved it, although I might have pretended to go reluctantly just for Ray’s sake, to get him to smile extra and let me pick the music for the car and so I could put my head on his lap while he drove us all the way out into the middle of our country and then home.
EVEN THOUGH I DOWNSIZED when I moved to the duplex, I still had lots of room, so I made a pottery studio in the basement and set up my painting studio upstairs. Potting was new to me but I felt I needed something new, and the idea of creating something functional, something three-dimensional that one could put sugar or flowers in, was satisfying. I made large thrown bowls with ombré glazes and rustic white square plates on which, when the couples came over for dinner, I served fruit and cheese. At one of my duplex dinner parties, one of the husbands from one of the couples said, you know, Franny, have you ever thought about doing an artist residency? It’s a great way to travel, and you’d be with other people and your paintings are so gorgeous, you could have time to paint, and they are usually in beautiful places, and I bet you’d have fun. The husband who had said this was not one I particularly liked, but I had a certain respect for him, so I looked into it. One of the first residencies I found that was of interest to me was the National Park Residency Program and, sure enough, there were cabins in Yellowstone where you could live for the summer and paint and, to my surprise, the program accepted me and I went. So, in the summer of 1989, I packed my paints and some good, practical, outdoors outfits and I drove to Wyoming. The whole drive there I couldn’t help thinking of the fish from the movie, frantically swimming back upstream until they hit a dam. That was what I was sure I was going to hit when I got there, some giant concrete wall that wouldn’t let me in. On top of the dam I saw Ray weeping, his tears hurtling over the barrier, mixing with the rest of the river, crashing overhead faster and faster, crushing the fish, crushing me trying to get into the park. It’s not that I prevented Ray from coming to Yellowstone, that I said, oh no, I won’t do it, this is not something I want to do, I just didn’t do it with him in time, there hadn’t been enough time, I hadn’t known that there wouldn’t be more time. And so when I went, when I drove into the park and rolled down my window at the ranger’s checkpoint and showed them my resident artist’s pass I just felt this deep, deep sense of sadness that I think came from being faced with the fact that there were times when I could have done things to give Ray happiness that I deliberately did not do. And so Yellowstone became a kind of symbol in my mind for everything Ray had wanted that I had not given him: another child, a kind word about his mother, an evening in which I did not chastise some of the people with whom he worked, an evening in which I told him, Ray, I love you hopelessly, you have become a part of me, and now I feel as though I’ll never be alone. But doing these things, saying these things, was not, is not, how I would ever really do things, so perhaps if I had done them, given myself up to them, Ray would have recognized their out of character nature and made me stop.
MY YELLOWSTONE CABIN SAT a small walk away from another cabin that contained another artist, a composer, a man about my age, maybe a little younger, whom I would peek out my window and see, lights on, working through the night. His name was Barclay Rowland and he requested I call him B. I asked why he had two last names and he said, good question. He was very quiet, and very slim and wiry. He looked like he knew how to hike, so I asked him if he would like to go on a hike, and on a hike we went. We became friends, and in the evening I’d invite him over for vodka and lemonade on my small front porch. Each of the artist’s cabins had a rocking chair out front and, one day, finally, about a month into our three-month stay, B hiked his rocking chair all the way from his cabin to mine. He said, I am tired of sitting on the floor! I need a chair to have my vodka in! Of course we slept together. Sleeping with B, sleeping with a man other than Ray, was not what I thought it was going to be. B walked me inside my cabin and took off my collarless shirt (the strength still worked) and kissed me very softly for a very long time, too long of a time perhaps, and I began to get worried, like a teenager, that we would never get past second base. He did, eventually, put his hand in my pants and the rest was quick to follow, but it wasn’t urgent, and it was a bit belabored, and I found myself, more than I wanted, looking past his shoulder, to the opposite side of the room, my mind wandering elsewhere, away from me, into some far-off space.
B AND I PARTED WAYS very amiably. He wrote frequently, at first, and said he wanted to come visit, we could have another adventure together, but I wrote back reluctantly and eventually stopped my reply. The canvases I had worked on that summer had almost all been portraits of Ray, all fourteen of them. I was evasive with B about my work, when we were together. I only showed him a couple pieces, pieces steeped in symbols that could, I knew, be taken as graphic pieces, so I never had to explain to B what they were about, what I was circling around during our summer in the woods. B asked, of course, what they meant to me, but all I said was just that they were the images I saw in my sleep, dream sequences that came to me when I was between consciousnesses. I have, since that summer with B, slept with other men. But sleeping with other men has always been a bit tricky. I think the trickiness has something to do with my problem of understanding my own identity, which parts of it are me and which parts of it were Ray, and which parts of it were me that only developed because Ray was there with me. Sleeping with these other men, B and beyond, I just can’t help thinking during the act that they are fucking Ray and me, together, bringing us both pleasure, that I am somehow the physical embodiment of both myself and Ray at the same time. It’s not that I feel Ray is in the room, watching me, no, I feel that Ray is inside my chest, occupying half my brain, sharing the body that is taking place in the physical act. This is especially strange because, when Ray had been alive, when I had had sex with him, I had always been sure of my body, that it was mine, that I was in it, just as sure as I had been of his. So, to be compromised this way, unsure of who exactly was in me, was alarming, although, with time, I have grown used to experiencing this feeling and it no longer inhibits me, ever, from doing anything I desire to do.
ONE OF THE ROTTEN THINGS about having a body is that you don’t realize how many parts you have until they’ve all gone wrong. Aging has been fine, I don’t mind the looks of it and in a lot of ways I appreciate being able to look the way I feel, looking very old and very tired gives you a certain edge on things. And, also, being able to look heroic. I’ve been told I have that look about me now and I expect that I, old woman that I am, very well should. There is part of me, though, that suspects I have always looked this stoic, and now I am just old enough where a feeling of removed superiority is an acceptable attribute to possess.
I LIVE IN A HOUSE, now, that is surrounded by other houses inhabited by other people of an advanced age and a middle-aged woman named Maria comes in the mornings to help me get dressed and take me for a walk. Adrien comes and visits frequently with his wife and their little girl and small dog and I paint the lot of them in a family portrait at least once a year. I refuse to show Adrien the paintings, which is silly, I suppose, at this point, but Adrien’s wife, Ella, likes them, and makes sure they sit for me each year which makes me feel good, like I still have to do something, another year with Molly, their daughter, sitting patiently in the painting, another year where Adrien still has hair and that smile of his and his expertly placed arm. They offered to let me live with them when I admitted that I needed some help. No, I said, no. You have your lives and I have mine. I have my paintings, which as you know, I am deep in these days, and how would I get any work done with you there to distract me? Peering over my shoulder or around my side? In my home, which the staff calls Cottage 18, I do have a nice place to sit and paint. I still am drawn to painting portraits. I paint Sophia, my main nurse, and some of the other residents, like Demetri, an ex-contractor, and Gary, an ex-banker with expensive clothes. It is notable, however, that for the first time in my life, I have been moved to paint self-portraits. When I paint myself, I can feel Ray at the edges, around the back of the canvas, in between the paint and the thread, in between myself and what I really am. You hear all this talk of souls, especially in places like these, places for the elderly. They try to convince you, or they think it is comforting to hear that there is something within you that is unchanging, something that has been in you since you were born and that will live on after you die. Though I am not drawn to the idea of an unchanging essence, there does seem to be something to the idea that there are things that can change you, people who can place themselves in you and never leave. I mean, Ray’s been dead for decades, enough time for a whole other life to be born and ended, enough time for someone to completely change who they are and what they see when they wake up and get out of bed and walk out of their home into the street. I don’t tell Adrien this, but it still feels that there is a part of Ray in me, that he left something in me that I can’t shake off. Which makes me think about what I would be if I wasn’t what I am, what I would be if I wasn’t just Fran. Perhaps the couples were right, those old friends that needed so badly the idea of something, the idea of Ray and Fran, to invite us on their vacations and onto their front lawns. I resented this want of theirs so badly. I was myself, and I wanted it to be known. But maybe the idea of us was always the reality, the Fran, the mother, the painter was none without Ray, her level-headed mate, and maybe that’s why the self-portraits keep coming out like this, with ghosts in the corners and Jello boxes and rainbow trout fish. Or, maybe, I am truly just Fran. Ray died and left me. There is nothing of him within me. He sat down in his easy chair and closed his eyes and left through the top of his head. In that case, everything I see creep in at the edges of myself is only a wanting, only a desire to not be left with myself in Cottage 18, a desire to be more than a single person trembling, a wish to be forever coupling so that I am not just simply alone.