His Wife Leaves Him

by Stephen Dixon

  He gets up, turns on the night table light, goes to the bathroom, pees, drinks a full glass of water from the glass there and goes back to the bedroom, plumps up two pillows, smaller fluffier one on top of the other, gets on his back in bed and rests his head in the middle of them, reaches over to turn off the light. “So, Gwen, my little sweetie, what happened next?” he says. No, he thinks, better not talk out loud. Kids could hear and knock on his door and say was he calling them, or is anything wrong? So just in his head. “Gwen, my darling sweetheart,” he says in his head, “let’s do something we never did before and that’s to have a conversation in my head. I’ll speak, I’ll keep quiet while you speak, and so on like that. You remember everything, so tell me what happened next.” “You know what happened next,” she says in his head, “if I’m sure I know what you’re referring to. You called me, didn’t hang up, let my phone ring, and I answered it.” “But what did we say? I know you must’ve said ‘Hello,’ and I must’ve followed that with ‘Hello,’ but probably ‘Hi, it’s Martin, Martin Samuels, guy from the other night at Pati Brooks’ party, but really more so at her elevator and then in front of her building.’ But I forget what happened after—what we said—except with it probably ending with my saying ‘Do you think we can meet sometime soon for a coffee or drink?’ although with my probably saying right before that ‘Well, it’s been very nice talking to you,’ and your saying something like ‘Okay,’ and we set a date, time and place. But the rest. Help me; I want to go over as much of it as I can. To sort of relive it. Our first night, or night we first met. Because of what it led to. More than twenty-seven years. Twenty-four of them married. You may have loved someone more than me—in fact, I’m almost sure you did, two guys, but I never asked; didn’t want to put you in that spot—but you never loved anyone longer. So if not for that night, nothing. No kids. No life together, which might’ve been better for you. No thousands-of-times lovemaking. No Maine. No Breakwater Inn. No Hanna Anderson. No Georges Brassens. No France in ’81. No Riverside Drive apartment. No jogging nun running past. I’m saying all those noes for me. So no a lot. And also, long as I have your ear, or have you here—they’re so much alike, but what of it, right?—tell me, and this’ll be my only aside in this talk, and it feels like a real talk, doesn’t it?, other than for my nonstop monolog just now…you still there? I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t.” “I’m here. The talk feels okay: real enough in its way.” “So I was saying, my darling…asking, with that ‘tell me’ before, if you forgive me.” “You’re being so loving. The ‘sweetheart’; the ‘my darling.’” “Because I love you, why else? Do you still love me?” “Let me try to answer your tell-me question. There were, since my first stroke, so many things to forgive you for. Just as there were many things to thank you for.” “Not ‘so many’?” “Just many. Couldn’t have been easy living with someone so sick and often so helpless, and with a fatal next stroke, coming anytime anywhere, especially after the second one, looming over me. And my face, when it froze on one side for a while and my mouth got twisted. You like beauty. Without seeming immodest, I’m sure my prettiness was one of the principal reasons you went for me, and I felt I’d become too ugly for you.” “Not true. I never looked away from you. I kissed that twisted mouth.” “Not how I remember it. You kissed other places on my face.” “Other places on your body, maybe, but I definitely kissed your lips. To me, no place was off base.” “I know I had a hard time looking at myself in the mirror when I brushed my teeth or hair. I looked like old Mrs. Behrlich, do you remember her? But when she was almost a hundred and after part of her face got disfigured when she was mugged. I took you to see her twice. The last time when Rosalind was just a baby, since she was named after her.” “I forget that though now I remember it.” “But you could be sweet and I could be forgiving. I needed you. You kept me alive.” “You’re just saying that. By forgiveness, I was talking about that last night when I said such horrible things, one in particular. You heard. You know. I’m sorry. I miss you so much, something I should’ve thought of before that night: how I would. And I won’t be hurt or sink into deeper grief and self-hatred if you say you don’t forgive me. I’d deserve it. And what does it matter, right? I did what I so stupidly and viciously did and now I’m paying for it. I was out of my mind that night, not the first time but never so bad. Maybe I’d drunk too much, although neither is an excuse.” “If it’d be any comfort to you, Martin, what you say you said to me didn’t change anything. I was going to die soon—the ‘looming’—anyway. ‘Imminent’ is the word the doctor would have used if he’d thought it necessary to be truly honest with me. I’m not saying this to make you feel better. I knew I was doomed. We even spoke about it.” “No we didn’t. And you weren’t. And despite what you say, and I don’t mean to contradict you on this, you still don’t want to hurt me and in fact you do want to make me feel better. That’s nice. That’s wonderful. You’re a dreamboat and you always were. But I don’t see how, or for a very long time, I can ever feel better about anything, not just myself. But I do see through your white lie. Don’t ask me why you can’t be more convincing at it, and I’m not criticizing you for that. But you try to be, because that’s the way you are. Kind and generous. Gentle and gracious. This and that. Just about everyone said so in their condolence letters and notes. I didn’t read them—I couldn’t without falling to pieces—but the kids did, since the letters were to them too, and recounted a number of them to me. That you always wanted to make people feel good, no matter how sick or distressed you were. Your radiant smile. Your cheerful, warm disposition. Your attention to them and their lives. You lit up everything and everybody with your light, one said. Not original but nice and right. ‘She had a special luminous presence’—there’s that light again—‘and an inborn poetic spirit,’ another said. I like that one—and maybe it was ‘incandescent’—and wish I could tell you who it was from. Another was ‘A phenomenal composition of beauty and brilliance’—not ‘light’ this time—‘more than anyone I’ve known. But so relaxed with it,’ he goes on. ‘No show and never took advantage of her good looks and always played it down if someone mentioned it or remarked how smart she was.’ I know I hurried your third stroke along with what I said that night. And don’t tell me you didn’t hear what I yelled in the kitchen. Neighbors must have heard. You must have thought I was saying it more for you than me. I don’t remember the exact words, and though I’d hate doing it, I could give you a good paraphrase.” “I heard them but also can’t recall them exactly. They were unkind, that’s for certain. But I think said out of pity for my condition—so it was simply the wrong thing to say—and fear over my imminent third stroke and probable death and your frustration at not being able to save me and concern or uneasiness, or something, that you’d have nobody to take care of and you’d be living alone.” “You’re doing it again. Your generosity is hurting me more than your honesty ever could. My darling, my sweetheart, can’t we finally have it out but in the gentlest and most loving of ways?” “Better, let’s forget it for now, the time after that and maybe forever. Yes, forever. I’m beginning to get, much as you’d be surprised at this uncommon emotion in me, according to you, annoyed with this talk.” “Annoyed or disgusted?” “Do you want me to get angry too? I’ve been that. You’ve seen and heard it and despise it when it’s directed at you. Please.” “So what happened next?” “You called. I answered. You didn’t hang up before or right after I said hello. If you had, I wouldn’t have known it was you. After all, we’d just met. And there have been previous guys who called, I think just to hear my voice, but never said boo, I’ve no idea why.” “Your voice. And your dazzling smile. Both how lovely they were, people also wrote in their letters and notes.” “The truth is I barely thought of you since we parted in front of Pati’s building. Once, maybe twice. First time, while I was walking, that night, to the subway or bus. Which did I take?” “I think you told me the subway.” “While I was walking to either one on Lex, or whatever it becomes down
there—” “Fourth Avenue and Astor Place?” “I thought if I saw a bus coming, I’d take that, even if it’s slower than the subway to get to where I was going.” “Where was that again?” “I believe a piano recital at someone’s apartment, but my memory’s also hazy on that.” “Sounds right to me. But what also sounds right is your meeting somebody at an East Side art movie theater uptown.” “But I wondered while walking, or maybe on the subway—although now I’m almost sure I took the bus: I picture it—if you would call me and what I’d say if you asked to see me.” “You actually had doubts I’d call? It must have been obvious: I’d already fallen for you.” “No you didn’t. You couldn’t have. Too soon. Anyway, you were attractive, but dressed kind of peculiarly for a pretty spiffy party.” “I thought just three or four people from Yaddo, an informal dinner. Maybe takeout. I think I might have—I must have—brought a bottle of wine, and when I saw the kind of party it was, left it in the kitchen. It was a good thing I didn’t wear jeans. I almost did.” “You were also so nervous and acted a bit strangely when we first talked on the street, that I felt somewhat wary of you.” “Right after we parted, as you put it, I thought much of that about myself too. Even the clothes. As to how I acted: I was nervous. We talked about this before. You had that effect on me. You were so beautiful; the smile; your voice. The way you spoke and put things. And your gentleness and kindness and humility and refinement.” “Again, it was too soon, so I don’t see how you could have made such assessments of my character.” “Oh, no, I could tell. Plus something you gave off when I was looking at you at the party. And I was right, in all those things. I was also nervous when I first called. You know; but what did I say?” “You got on and said something like ‘Hi, it’s Martin—Martin Samuels from the other night? Pati’s party?’” “Sounds like me. That ‘Martin—Martin Samuels,’ and so on.” “‘I remember you,’ I said, and you said ‘That’s good. How are you?’ And I probably said ‘Fine, thank you, and you?’ which is what I invariably said in response to that particular question. ‘Fine,’ you probably said, ‘and I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner. I don’t mean tonight “sooner,” and it’s not too late to call, is it? and now I do mean tonight,’ and I said no. ‘I’d intended to call several days sooner, but I was working on a manuscript I needed to finish and it took longer than I expected to get it in shape.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘a manuscript? Are you an editor?’ and you said ‘Writer; fiction. Didn’t I tell you the other night?’ Or maybe you didn’t say that, but we somehow got into what you were and had been working on. That your literary agent said she’d like you to write one positive relationship-affirming story for the interconnected collection you gave her, before she submitted it to a publisher. Something showing why the couple, Jen and Willie, stayed together so long. For all the other stories—this was for Partings—with minor exceptions, she said, gave more of a reason why they should have split up years before. They were periodically compatible and loving and sexy to each other but also lots of complaints, fights, several tirades, Jen sleeping with other men, and she threw a glass at him twice and three different times literally kicked him off the bed while he was sleeping or falling asleep, resulting in a broken toe once. So you wrote it and hand-delivered it to the agent and were so tired from all that work, you said, that you wanted to rest up a day or two more before you called me. ‘Did she like it?’ I asked, and you said you haven’t heard from her yet but she’s usually very quick.” “You know that excuse for holding off calling you was pure baloney.” “I know. You told me about a month after we started sleeping together.” “I figured that was a good time. You were in my clutches; not on the bed but in life, so to speak. But that little lie sort of showed how nervous I was in calling you. And my fear, because I was so attracted to you and saw you, after a series of bad or wrong relationships, as my one big hope in finding a permanent love mate, that you’d refuse me if I asked you out.” “You’d finished that story weeks before.” “Two weeks before I met you. And the agent…I’m not coming up with her name—” “Danuta Ott. She was very bright and tall and nice. Married to a climatologist, lived in the Village on La Guardia Place. I think he taught at NYU. We went to a party she gave for her clients. Several big names were there—best sellers—and one, with a slab of meat in his mouth, made a pass at you.” “Danuta liked the new story and was waiting to hear what the publisher thought of the entire collection.” “I remember when it was accepted. That was a while after. It took so long. That night we had a celebratory dinner at a very fine restaurant, and you ordered a bottle of my favorite champagne. I think, over dessert, and when we shared a cognac or B and B, was the first time you told me you loved me.” “No, days before. A couple of times in bed. Maybe I was just renewing it in a romantic setting. Was there a candle on the table?” “If you’re being serious, how could I remember?” “But I think that night, in the cab coming home, you told me you loved me the first time. It took the champagne and scrumptious food and half an after-dinner drink to get it out of you.” “Not true; it wouldn’t. And I don’t remember the first time I said I loved you. I do remember that when I did say it, you said ‘You do? That’s great!,’ and I think you got teared up.” “You had tuna, I had salmon. I said, when we were deliberating what to order, ‘We could do better than two fish dishes.’ But you insisted on your tuna, and the most promising thing I saw on the menu that wasn’t way overpriced was the salmon. We shared, didn’t we?” “We always did.” “I remember the most delicious potato dish I ever had that came with your tuna and same with the watercress and couscous with my salmon. The appetizer, or appetizers, we had draws a blank. I think you said we don’t need one because you had a late lunch and you don’t eat much anyway, said more because you wanted to keep the bill down, but I ordered a radish, sheep ricotta, walnut and endive salad that came on two long kayak-shaped narrow plates. ‘I assumed you wanted to share it,’ the waiter said, ‘but I’ll bring it back to the kitchen to put on one plate if I was wrong.’” “You couldn’t have remembered all that.” “I did. Even that the radishes were sliced into paper-thin coins, but so thin that I didn’t know what they were and thought they were some other vegetable not listed in the menu’s description of the dish. Listen, it was a great evening; eventful, momentous, hence the extensive memory of it. Cab home? We never did that except if it was very late or raining torrentially or the last two months of your pregnancies.” “Your holding-off excuse gave me plenty to mull over. It was interesting and educating, I thought, what some writers—un-well-known ones—have to go through to get a full-length manuscript published, something I knew I’d have to go through one day with an academic publisher once I got my dissertation into book form. I never did. Lost interest. Old stuff. Wanted to write essays on subjects in and out of my expertise and do a few translations of important neglected works. I was lucky I got as far as I did in teaching.” “Because you were a terrific teacher. And original essays don’t count? And translated novels and literary memoirs with riveting and beautifully written introductions aren’t books?” “I’m sure to some, especially my former fellow grad students in the French department at Columbia, I’m considered a failure, after all the work I did to get a Ph.D. and nabbing a prestigious postdoc fellowship.” “Never. I’m sure to most you were a light in a murky field by not going along with the kind of academic gibberish and theoretical drivel you would have needed to use to turn your dissertation into a publishable book for a university press.” “My dissertation was already that. I thought you read it. I know I gave you a copy.” “ I started to and don’t know what happened. I think I read the first story, after reading what you wrote about it—the one about the woman who ends up having something like multiple orgasms from the stars—and went on to read the rest of the collection, I liked the first so much, and probably forgot to go back to your manuscript. I still intend to.” “Don’t waste your time.” “Maybe I could try to get it published by a commercial press—one of mine, for instance—by making it more plain-speaking and con
cise and deleting the footnotes and bibliography.” “Don’t you dare. It’s an old dead work I’m not particularly proud of, other than for having completed it and typing out all two hundred and eighty-five pages, so leave it that way. Besides, with all the new biographical and historical material published since then—I really only put the finishing touches on it in ’77, almost exactly a year before we met—it needs to be brought up-to-date, a task you’re untrained for and wouldn’t be able to do.” “I could try. You could guide and teach me. I’d do anything for you.” “Do you remember what you next said in your first phone call?” “Go change the subject on you.” “Do you?” “‘In less than ten minutes in your presence I was bowled over by you. Could you upright me? And I know we should go slow, but will you be mine?’ No, I don’t.” “You said ‘Enough about me and my dismal unpublishable work. I want to know about you.’ I said ‘“Dismal” is for you to judge—I haven’t read you, although I’m sure you’re being overly harsh on yourself—but why “unpublishable”?’ You said, ‘I just know. It’ll be repeatedly rejected, first by the mainstream publisher who brought out my last novel this past June.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘what’s that one called? I may be talking to someone whose book I’ve heard of.’ You gave the title. Leaving the Theater. I said ‘I’m unfamiliar with it, but it’s conceivable I read a review of it or saw an ad.’ You said ‘No ads. The publisher believed in word-of-mouth advertising, but apparently no mouths, either. But it did get a good pasting in the daily Times in a review of three crime novels. It wasn’t a crime novel but a novel partly about a possible crime. You never find out what happens to the woman—the narrator’s live-in girlfriend—who disappears on page two or three. The mistake in designating what kind of novel it was,’ you said, ‘occurred because the publisher must have decided it would sell better if billed as a serious crime novel rather than as a regular serious novel. What idiots,’ I remember you saying, ‘and how was it possible the reviewer didn’t pick up on what kind of novel it was? So he panned it for, among other reasons—he also thought it should have had numbered chapters rather than just paragraph breaks and many of the sentences were too long—for not abiding by the strictures and structure of a traditional crime novel. Well, of course,’ you said, ‘well, of course,’ getting heated. And then you said ‘Excuse me, I always get mad, when I’m not falling over laughing, when I think of that review.’ I said ‘Then why would you want to send your new book to that same publisher if they treated your last one so cynically?’ And you said ‘It isn’t so easy finding one for my work, even with a good agent, so I sometimes—well, at least that once—have to take what I get and hope for the best. But it’s true,’ you said, ‘this time if perchance my new work does get accepted, I’m going to insist, whoever the publisher is, big or small, or I think I’m going to insist—don’t hold me to it—that it doesn’t mislead the reader, but first the person who buys the books for the store, as to what genre the book belongs to—the modern genre—in the catalog and promotional material and publisher’s salesman’s spiel and jacket copy and word of mouth it tries to stir up. But again,’ you said, ‘enough about me and my work. What about you? What do you do? Literature?’ I said ‘Literature, but not like you. I’m an academic, overtrained for years to be one, and I fairly recently got my Ph.D. in it. I should have finished up three years ago but got stuck in Paris for all the good reasons and put off my writing of it.’ You asked what my thesis for my Ph.D. was on and I corrected you and said thesis is for a master’s, dissertation is for a doctorate, which is what I got. You asked what I do now and I said I’m presently on a postdoc and teaching two humanities courses on the college level. ‘Here or outside the city?’ you said, and I said ‘Here.’ ‘But you don’t want to say what university or college?’ you said, and I said, ‘What are you trying to say? I wasn’t trying to hide it. Why would I? I just didn’t say it. Columbia.’ ‘Ooh, fine school,’ you said; ‘quite a credit to you, teaching there.’ You really seemed impressed, which I found funny, though I didn’t reveal my amusement. Or maybe you only pretended to be impressed, to smooth things over after your ‘you don’t want to say’ question. ‘But a postdoc,’ you said. ‘What’s that, other than that I assume it’s some honor or award or bestowal of some kind you can only get after you got your doc?’ and I told you. Then you asked and we talked awhile about the author and the work of his I wrote my dissertation on. Camus, his only story collection, which you said you read and loved maybe twenty years ago—‘It’s got to be one of the best collections ever,’ or that’s what you thought at the time though can’t remember even one of the stories now—when Camus was all the rage, you said, and at the time when the book might have just come out in English and you think Camus was still alive and you were just starting out as a writer. I said ‘Nineteen fifty-seven was when the Gallimard edition came out and a year later Knopf published the English translation.’ You said ‘Yes, it would have been around then,’ though you didn’t take yourself seriously as a writer till ’60 or ’61, when you wrote your first stories you thought were getting to be something. ‘As you can see,’ you said, ‘three books, and maybe now a fourth, if I’m lucky, aren’t much in nearly twenty years of writing, and it’s not because I’m a slow writer or that my books are enormously long. All three and the new one are even quite thin. It’s because I wasn’t able to get a book published till three years ago, and the first two from the smallest of publishers after trying everybody, with and without an agent, for fifteen years.’ Then you asked about the finished manuscript of Camus’ that was in his briefcase thrown from the car that crashed or found in the mangled wreck. ‘A sports car,’ you said, ‘right? Heading back to Paris, though he had a return train ticket in his pocket, from some chic vacation spot in the south. In fact, Gallimard himself at the wheel, or son of Gallimard senior.’ I said I believed it was junior, but could be mistaken. And that manuscript, an autobiographical novel of his early days in Oran, has been published in France, or is to be published, and will no doubt be translated into English and brought out here. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘that I can’t provide more information on it. I have my scholarly lapses. I do know someone who read a reproduced typescript of it years ago and said it was very good, so you might, if you like his work that much, have a new Camus novel to look forward to. But I decided, a year before I even got my doctorate,’ I said, ‘to take a break from all things Camus except Exile, or as much as I could, after being immersed in almost every aspect of his work for eight long years. Many Ph.D. candidates grow to hate the writer they’re writing about, but by then it’s too late so they have to go on, sort of like continuing a bad marriage for the sake of the kids. It was my good luck—I didn’t choose it for this—that his fiction oeuvre, which I concentrated on, wasn’t huge, and all four books are relatively short, and one is really no more than a novella. Attending conferences and giving an occasional paper,’ I said, ‘if I was fortunate enough to be asked to, and writing reviews of books by other Camus specialists for academic and scholarly journals are things I have to do if I want to get a position in a university’s French department, but one where I wouldn’t have to teach the language, or not more than once a year.’ The thing is, I didn’t know if I believed you on the phone that first time—not that you read Exile but that you thought so highly of it. If you had, wouldn’t you have remembered at least one or two of the stories, no matter how far back you read them, for there are only six in the collection and not one alike? You even, in that conversation or another, compared the stories to the best of Hemingway and Salinger and García Márquez.” “It was true. I thought so then and think even more highly of them now. That I forgot them could have been a memory quirk or my nervousness in talking about them to an expert and coming out sounding like an ill-informed and overconfident jerk. I’ve taught the collection, as you know, and with your help, to my graduate students and several of the stories to my undergrads, especially the workers’ story and the one where the schoolmaster lets the Arab go.” “‘The
Silent Men’ and ‘The Guest.’ Lets him choose his own fate, among other reasons.” “Balducci, like the store, right?” “The old gendarme who hands him over to Daru?” “If that’s the schoolmaster, yes. I used to love it when you came to my class and gave a half-hour introduction to Camus and the book. The students also loved it, praised you to high heaven for weeks, and I learned something new each time you came.” “I guess I was keeping up on my research. But what I thought on the phone was that you were saying how much you like the book—” “Dubliners. Babel’s Red Cavalry stories. Really, in this century—I mean the last—it was right up there with the very best.” “—so I’d think we’d have much to talk about if we went out.” “Not so, believe me, and after speaking to you that first time on the phone, I didn’t think, and didn’t think you thought, there’d be a conversation problem. Want to hear what I also loved?” “Go ahead.” “It might seem silly. Tell me if you think so. That you spoke French fluently and knew enough German and Italian, and also Russian and Polish from home, to get by in those if you had to. I thought early on—because what was missing; English?—that if we ever traveled to Europe, a fantasy of mine with women I was close with that was never realized till I met you, I’d have my own personal interpreter, making the trip so much easier and more enjoyable. That once we got there, because my French was less than spotty, I could just sit back and relax and let you do, which you said you didn’t mind to, all the room reserving and travel arranging and restaurant ordering and bike renting and so on. And of course the fantasy was not to have an interpreter—that turned out to be a windfall—but to go to Paris and the Dordogne and Aix-en-Provence and Saint-Paul-deVence with a woman I loved and who loved me.” “I understand that. You didn’t need to explain.” “It was a great trip, the one in ’81, wasn’t it? It was near the end of it that I knew deep down we were going to marry and never separate. That was a wonderful thing to find out, even if you didn’t say it.” “It was a very nice trip, except when you got so sick in Nice and your first crippling sciatica later on when we were driving to Chartres.” “But I was with you.” “You also said in that call that you’d love it for someone to write a thesis or dissertation or just a long paper on your work. Not for the recognition. That you’d be interested—it’s still way too early for it, you said, three to four books and about seventy published stories, though you have a drawer or two of completed long and short manuscripts ready to be published—what an academic or budding scholar, and you of course didn’t mean me, would make of it. ‘I’m already the age,’ you said, ‘Camus was at the peak of his fame and had probably by then collected his Nobel Prize, though his getting it so young had to be the anomaly.’ ‘That would make you forty-four,’ I said, and you said ‘I hate saying it but I’m forty-two.’ ‘Why do you hate saying it?’ I said, and you said ‘I don’t know, but I’d better get on with it, right? If I’m going to make a name for myself in literature, which I swear is not one of my priorities or goals. I’m not ambitious; I just want to write. Good God,’ you then said, ‘that’s so self-serving to say. And didn’t I already say something like that to you once? I meant nothing by it. Forget I said it.’ And then, I think before I could say something like ‘If you wish,’ you said—and I found this curious, coming out so soon; after all, this was our first real talk—‘I didn’t mean to give you my age this quickly, because you might think I’m too old a guy for you. Oh, damn,’ you said, ‘I shouldn’t have said that either.’ But I said ‘I’m thirty-one. Close to thirty-two. A man forty-two, or even forty-four, and I’m speaking hypothetically here, isn’t too old for me if he doesn’t act a lot older than his age.’ Then you said ‘That leads me to a question.’ ‘Let me guess,’ I said, and you said ‘Okay,’ and I said ‘Only kidding. I have no idea why I said that. What?’ ‘And please understand,’ you said, ‘that I can be somewhat inarticulate on the phone. With someone, I’m saying, I’m not used to talking to and whom I’m hoping for a positive answer to my question—and by now you must be able to guess what I’m about to say—but do you think we can meet one afternoon or sometime for coffee and sit down and talk? Well, of course to sit down and of course it’s for talk,’ which I got a laugh out of and said ‘I’d like that, sure,’ or ‘I don’t see why not, and sitting down even better,’ or something like that. Both certainly sound like me. I mean, I knew there was no harm to it.” “So you sensed by the—I don’t remember our ever going over this, but we probably did—from our brief conversation at the elevator, even briefer in it, and then on the street and now on the phone that I wasn’t Mr. Masher or potentially dangerous in any way, like boring the pants off you for an hour, or what else?” “Nothing like that. I sensed you were serious and intelligent and candid and not glib or devious and had a sense of humor, and listened—this was important in my first or second impression; didn’t constantly butt in—to what I had to say. And I’ve always met interesting people through literature, so what would an hour over coffee cost me? It could even be stimulating and get my mind going, talking about literary and other things I haven’t talked about or not for a while. If it went well, I thought, or gravitated in that direction—and I wasn’t seeing anyone steadily at the time—we could do it again, maybe over lunch or dinner. If we didn’t hit it off—if in our first meeting we showed little to no potential for anything else happening or developing…Just was of little interest to you or me, then kaput and goodbye. Anyway, you said ‘So what’s the next step?—I guess a date and time and where to meet.’ You said you were available every day, since at the time you were working at home. I asked where you lived. You told me and I said ‘That’s perfect. This Wednesday, if the day’s still good for you, I have an appointment for an hour at two just a few blocks from you. So what if we meet at the Ansonia coffee shop a little after three?’ You said ‘How much after would you need?’ and I said ten to fifteen minutes. ‘Let me check my appointment book,’ you said. ‘Oops, I forgot I don’t have one. I keep all my appointments in my head, except medical and dental—those I write down on a piece of paper on the refrigerator door—but it gives you an indication just how busy my schedule is.’ I said ‘Why, you could still have a good memory,’ and you said ‘It’s good, all right; to some people, too good. But I forget a lot too. Particularly something cooking on the stove.’ ‘I do that,’ I said, and you said ‘Then we have something in common other than literature and living on the Upper West Side.’ ‘So,’ I said, ‘Wednesday, quarter after three, we’ll say? If I am detained, it’ll only be a few minutes, so don’t run away.’ Then I asked for your phone number in case something did come up preventing me from meeting you. You said—I forget what you said. Something like ‘Oh, don’t say that, but if it has to be, then I hope we can meet some other day.’ You gave me your number and said if I lose it, know that you’re one of about ten Martin Samuels in the Manhattan phone book but the only one with the middle initial V. ‘If you can believe it,’ you said, ‘I’m not the only one on West 75th Street. I’m between Columbus and the park and the other West 75th Street Martin Samuels, no middle initial, so he’s first in the phone book, is between West End Avenue and Broadway, I think number two-fifty. So you’ll recognize me?’ you said, and I said ‘I don’t see why there’d be a problem. You might even be wearing the same navy blue duffel coat.’ ‘Was that what I was wearing?’ you said. ‘Well, it had to be, since it was fairly cold that night, I think, and winter, and that’s my only coat, other than for a thin rain one. But good; you remembered. And I was only trying to be funny with that “recognize me” line, don’t ask me why. A bit compulsive, wouldn’t you say?’ I said ‘You spoke about that, in almost the same words, if I remember, by the elevator in Pati’s building, or maybe while we were riding down in it, not that I’m accusing you of repeating yourself. I don’t mind. I like humor and I love to laugh. I think I told you that about myself too. At least you were trying, and in your next attempt at it you might hit the target square in the circle,’ which I thought reasonably clever for a spontaneous
remark—I swear I’d never used it or thought of it before—but you didn’t laugh or even fake a chuckle or show any sign you got it. It’s hard to believe it went by you, knowing your mind now. Maybe you thought it was trite and you were being polite or didn’t want to risk spoiling anything for yourself with me. The last one would have been more like you,” “I don’t remember you saying it. But it was a good one and I would have said so if I’d heard it—it’s been said of us both that we speak too low, especially on the phone—or laughed or given you some kind of ha-ha. Or it could be I sneezed the exact moment you said it and my ears—you know my sneezes—were still ringing from it a second or two after and I didn’t hear you.” “I don’t remember any sneeze, but it’s possible you drew away from the phone to do it. But near the end of our first phone talk, I said ‘One more thing, and then I really have to go. Do you know the Ansonia Hotel, or maybe it’s just apartments now, and that the entrance to the drugstore, closer to 74th Street, is on Broadway?’ You said ‘You bet,’ or something. ‘The Ansonia’s one of my favorite buildings in the city. Did you know it’s mentioned in Bellow’s Seize the Day?’ “No, I never read it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been meaning to. My mother liked it so much she read it twice, second time right after the first, but she likes all of Bellow.’ ‘It’s a good book,’ you said. ‘Terrific dialog; one of those everything-happening-and-getting-resolved-in-a-single-day novels, or maybe it was over a weekend, and where there’s a yapping dog named Scissors…Bellow’s great with names. And a very affecting last few pages—but I probably shouldn’t say what it is if you’re going to read it,’ and I said ‘Go on; it won’t be for a long time.’ ‘Where the narrator becomes emotionally overcome at a funeral for a man he doesn’t know—he by chance was in a crowd of funeral-goers on the street and gets swept up by them into what I assume’s the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam and 76th Street…you must know of the place,’ and I said ‘All too well; my grandfather.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ you said, and that you brought it up. Then you said ‘But the book gets a little slow in places, so the length, or thereabouts, of The Stranger, a novella I loved except for the last part in prison. Like Camus, Bellow, skillful and smart as he is, can get too cerebral and philosophical for fiction, not a complaint other readers might have of them, like your mother, for instance. But a lot of readers,’ you said, ‘love that stuff and want to get intellectually charged up by the ideas and intelligent exchanges, in addition to liking the story and style. I think Bellow started out as an anthropologist, might even have gone on digs. But what I started out saying about the Ansonia—’ and I cut you off and said ‘Please be brief,’ and you said ‘I’ll save it for later, if you like, or skip it altogether,’ and I said ‘No, finish.’ You said ‘He has his main character—Willie—looking at it from the Beacon Hotel diametrically across Broadway, though the Beacon has a different name, but I don’t think the Ansonia does. And I read that from where he claims to see the Ansonia’s ornate towers and turrets on the roof, you can’t. Minor point, right?, so why did I bring it up? Incidentally, I used to deliver food orders to the Ansonia’s guests, also the Beacon’s but not as much, when I was a kid and worked for the C & L, a combination deli, bakery, restaurant, bar and catering service a block north of the Ansonia, same side of Broadway. It’s where Fairway is now. Do you remember C & L?’ and I said ‘No; to me Fairway has always been there, and every year getting larger.’ ‘Have you ever been inside the Ansonia?’ you said, and I said ‘Yes. What I remember particularly is the beautiful marble spiral stairway—huge, and I think one at each end, and both went up to the top floor. I used to take piano lessons there. The building got terribly rundown, though, or was the last time I was in it. So, see you Wednesday, Martin,’ and you said ‘I talked too much, didn’t I? Didn’t know when to stop, something I don’t normally do. I’m sorry,’ and I said ‘Don’t be. It’s only that I’ve got a ton of work to do. Goodbye,’ and you said ‘Bye’ or ‘Goodbye,’ and I hung up.” “That was it? Actually, a lot for a first phone conversation—any kind of conversation between two people—with many diverse subjects and not much idle chatter, I don’t think. Except for my big blabbermouth, and thanks for filling in most of what we said. I’d say we hit it off. What about you?” “I don’t remember thinking that. It was just a conversation, longer than most of mine on the phone and among the longest we ever had—you were usually fairly brief on the phone with me, businesslike sometimes, except when you were away for a few days and you became lovey-dovey—and often terse and occasionally abrupt. Anyway, one I wanted to end long before it did, because of all the things I still had to do that night.” “So what happened and what did we talk about when we met at the drugstore?” “Please, sweetheart, give it a rest. I no longer like this routine or format or whatever you care to call it—it really has no name.” “Headtalk.” “Martin headtalk. But it’s feeling forced and it’s also become tiring for me. No more. Good day or goodnight, but I’m going.” This was fun, he thinks. And comforting, interesting, other things. Best thing that’s happened to him since she died. He means it’s the one good thing that’s happened to him since then. Did it really happen, though? He thinks it did and then he thinks it couldn’t have; it’s crazy. Crazy, how? He doesn’t know? If he told someone he thinks it really might have happened, that he spoke with Gwen in his head, that they had a long conversation, a very long one, they might say he’s crazy, see a doctor, but don’t get worried, it’s part of his grief; why do you think they call it pathological? If he told them how responsible he feels about her death, they might also say it’s part of his grief. How? That he’s trying to concoct a way to get over his guilt. He doesn’t get that. Unresolved psychological issues, they might say, if he wants it explained medically. But it sounded like her: what she said and the way she said it, and also the way she acted to him was like Gwen would, and she didn’t seem to be angry at him anymore. He’d like to believe it was real and he could talk to her almost anytime he wanted to. Try it. “Gwen,” he says in his head, “was I really speaking to you before?” Listens. She doesn’t answer. “To put it another way,” he says in his head, “were we really speaking to each other and your part in it wasn’t made up by me? After all, we lived a long time together and were very close—I think you’d agree with me on that. At least close most of the time, although I don’t want to be putting words in your mouth that way too—so I’d know beforehand what you’d say a lot of times and how you’d say it. Just as you, if the conversation were to take place in your head, would know a lot of what I’d say before I said it and also the way I’d say it. That didn’t come out clear. What it comes down to is that if you told me our talk actually did take place, I’d believe you, and not just because I want to so much. Why do I want to? The obvious. So tell me, what do you think about all of what I just said, except for the stuff that wasn’t clear?” and he listens. She doesn’t say anything. And there was nothing in his head while he was speaking in it, when before, when she spoke, and even while he was talking, he saw her face, sometimes just vaguely, and her mouth moving a little same time her words were coming out. Face from when? Recent. Between the time of her last two strokes, he thinks, so one side of her face—her right? her left? He’s trying to remember; how could he forget it when it was such a short time ago?—slightly paralyzed, but not so much to make it difficult for her to speak or be understood. And photos wouldn’t help, since she wouldn’t let herself be photographed after her first stroke. “Don’t,” she said, when he tried to take a picture of her with the kids, “I look ugly.” “No, you don’t,” he said. “You just won’t look in the mirror anymore, so you don’t know what a doll you still are.” The kids would know if he doesn’t remember by the time he asks them. What a question, though. “Which side was your mommy paralyzed on?” Anyway, she looked good in his head. Well, she was always a good-looking woman. Her stroke, except for the first few weeks after, and age—she was almost sixty when she died—didn’t much change that. Beautiful skin. Few lines or wrink
les. Hair brushed back, either in a ponytail or over her shoulders—he couldn’t see behind her—just a faint touch of gray, or the beginning of it: a few strands in the middle in front—high wide forehead exposed, not wearing her glasses. Where are the glasses now? Just one pair, only broke the frames once in the about fifteen years since she started wearing them, though had the lenses changed every other year or less because her eyes were always getting worse, while he broke the frames of his glasses a number of times, usually by sitting on or rolling over them. In their eyeglasses case on the second to top bookshelf in her study, all the way over to the right. Took them off her the night before she died. Put them in their case and left them on her night table. It was days later he put them on the bookshelf. One of the kids had said “What do we do with Mommy’s glasses?” Doesn’t know why to the extreme right. Plenty of room in front of the entire shelf. Why on the second to top shelf? It was on eye level and he’d know where they were when he wanted them. What will he eventually do with them? Keep the case because he was always losing his, but the glasses? Maybe keep them too because in the future—both kids wear glasses—one of them could use the frame. It was pretty expensive, not like his, but then she did in all those years only have two. “Gwen,” he says in his head, “I was just remembering one of the times we got our eyeglasses together. You asked me if I thought your frame cost too much, and you were teaching then and I said ‘It’s your money too.’ And then I think we had lunch out after, which we always did when we had the new lenses put in, but never when we got our eyes examined. Then, because of the drops the ophthalmologist put in our eyes to dilate them and which didn’t wear off for hours, we just wanted to go home. Donna’s. In the same retail complex as the optician’s shop was in. Cross Keys. That’s all. Just a nice memory popping up. Restaurant lunches, which I remember better than the dinners. How come? And please tell me if I am tiring or exasperating you or both beyond the point you can take with my chatter. Or you can, if you don’t want to respond to that verbally, shake or nod your head to it, and whichever it is—the nod or shake, if I see it, and to either tiring or exasperating you or both—I’ll go on or stop.” Listens. Nothing, and no face in his head. “Not clear again?” he says in his head. “I wasn’t? And maybe even a little bit stupid? Well, we both know how I can be both those. I proved it that night, didn’t I? More than stupid. Lot more. Much worse. Despicable, almost unforgivable, it was so bad. I’m so sorry, Gwen, So sorry. But please, one more question, my darling, and you are my darling, you’ll always be my darling, and then I’ll let you go. Maybe till some other time, though I swear not today, or maybe I won’t try this means of talking to you again, seeing how you didn’t like it very much. Or just that it tires you. I only want to do what you want. It’s a very important question, though, and the one I want to ask, probably the most. That one long conversation I’m almost sure we had in my head? Did it mean—does it, you’re no longer angry at me or fed up with me or you no longer hate me, if that’s what it was and I admit I deserved, and I’m forgiven?” Listens. Nothing. “That didn’t come out well,” he whispers. “I’m saying, my darling Gwen,” he says in his head, “that last thing I said—not the whispering, if you heard it—didn’t come out well. But you have to know how much I want to hear you say that…that I’m forgiven for what I said to you that night—said in the kitchen, but it was probably meant to be heard by you—and if it’s possible, that you still love me. So please say something. I know I’m being pathetic. And the last thing I wanted was for it to come true, what I said in the kitchen. But all this has to show how important it is for me to hear you say both—‘forgiven,’ ‘love’—so I know that last time, when you called me sweetheart, or just said ‘sweetheart,’ the only time you said it in my head, wasn’t a fluke.” Listens. Nothing. Too tired to? That could be it. And she’s already said she’s had enough of it, so why’s he pushing her? “Gwen, is it that you’re too tired to speak?” he says in his head. “And why’d I say ‘Gwen’? Who else could I be talking to? But just say that, a single yes to my too-tired-to question, and we’ll call it a night.” Listens. Nothing. “Oh, Gwen,” he says in his head, “please come back to me, please. If you can’t, and I mean to my head to speak, then you can’t or just might not want to, and it’s wrong and dumb of me to try to pressure you to. So I’ll catch you some other time, I hope, okay?” and he seems to see her laughing in his head—no sound comes out—though the image is unclear. “Good, you’re back,” he says in his head, “And laughing, if what I think I’m seeing, I’m seeing. That could be a good sign, right?—between us, I mean.” Or who knows what her laughing, if she did, and it’s gone now, was about. That he’s such a fool, maybe, and never changes, though he thinks he does. That he’s such a dreamer, thinking he can talk his way out of what he did. “Live with it,” her laughing could have been saying. “As you said yourself: you deserve it.” No, she could never be so mean. But she could be frank to him and was a number of times, not holding anything back, really disturbing and even hurting him sometimes and not caring that she did or ever apologizing for what she said or mollifying him in any way. After listening to it for about a minute, he’d usually say “Okay, I’ve had enough. I don’t know how much you think I can take,” and walk away, sometimes out of the house, while she was still criticizing him. Though he’d later—hours, that night in bed if she let him sleep in it with her, the next day—admire her for having said it, difficult as it was to hear, and tell her so: “Excuse me, I want to say something. What you said to me today (yesterday)? I know I must have said this before, but you were right on everything. I’m terribly sorry for what I said. Please forgive me or if you can, try to start to?” And he remembers her saying once or twice something like “So, I finally got through to you. Not that your saying I was right or how sorry you are is going to make my anger at you fly away. You were awful, as bad as I’ve ever seen you, and for a while I truly disliked you and wondered why I stay married to you, and it’s going to take some time for me to feel good about you again.” “A kiss?” he said one of those times, and she said “We’re a long ways from that yet.” “Then just a little one, on the cheek?” and she said “Even that.” “So serioso,” he said, “which you should be and I respect it, and I wasn’t making a joke,” and she said “I don’t care either way.” But stop thinking about it. Makes him feel even worse than he was. That what he said those times to set her off also made her scream hysterically at him a few times, even when the kids were in the house, and cry after. Long cries, where he’d want to comfort her but knew she’d say “Get away.” The poor sweetheart. What she sometimes had to put up with with him. He had to put up with nothing. She was always great. Suddenly she’s in his head crying and he says out loud “Please, dearest; please don’t. Really, you should get out of there. It’s doing us no good. You too upset and me too sad.” She continues to cry, again without sounds, and then looks as if she’s sobbing. “Oh, no,” he says, “don’t. What did I do?” He blinks hard and keeps blinking to make his mind go blank. When he opens his eyes wide, she’s gone. Thinks: Maybe now’s a good time to get up to pee. And then he also won’t have to do it later when he’s feeling sleepy in bed.