by Anne Roiphe
Another night, after a Mets game, he takes me back to his apartment. It is small and cluttered with file boxes, old articles, notes, other people’s papers, the boxes rise toward the ceiling. Shelves are filled with CDs. The television is programmed so that the classical music channel plays all the time. The television is never turned off. To move to the kitchen one has to thread through the boxes around the piano. I see photos on his kitchen wall. He names his children for me. He tells me their occupations and what worried him about one of them and what pleases him about another. He asks me nothing at all. I ask him about his law partners. He answers directly. I ask him about his childhood and he tells me: the grief of losing a father, the shame of poverty, the pride of the school he attended on scholarship. He speaks of the religion of his childhood and why he left it. I ask more questions and still more questions. He does not ask me anything at all. I ask him where he likes to travel, where he has been that he returns to. He tells me. He still asks me nothing at all. Imagining that he might be too shy to inquire about my life, I tell him what comes to mind. He is not paying attention. I stop. He walks me to the subway and tells me what train to take to get home to my house.
Several concerts, four baseball games later, at my apartment I go to bed with M. Sitting near him, his hand on my shoulder, the leaning in, it happens, without my willing it, or not willing it. I thought it time. I thought I needed to know if the man was there under his clothes, behind the music he listened to, behind the commentators’ voices of all the baseball games he had watched and recorded on his TV. I thought the sweetness of him might carry me through. I thought I needed to know that my body can go with another body again. I was glad to go to bed with M. My shape was no longer a wonder to behold. Neither was his. My heart was beating fast, my desires rose. I was able to give and receive. But how strange it is to be in bed with a man who is not H. Am I betraying H.? I had never done so. I had declined invitations to lunch, an opportunity here or there while I was away on speaking trips, a psychoanalyst colleague of H.’s who sent me notes tucked into books he thought I might like. You cannot betray a man who is not living. I tell myself this. I firmly tell myself this. On the other hand you can betray the memory of the touch, the muscle of the legs, the mole in the center of the back, the slightly curved spine, the way the hair curled at the nape of the neck. You can betray the indentation of the man you had been in bed with night after night, good nights, bad nights, dull nights, year in and year out. Perhaps this is why in bed with M. I start to feel like a mannequin, a person who is there in this space but not there. This is not M.’s fault. He is tender. He is sweet. He is strong. I respond, or my body responds as it should. This is good but not good enough. My mind remains outside, above, away. I watch myself do things that seem normal but are not. I do not inhabit my body. Perhaps I need more time and distance. Perhaps I really am betraying H., although he would not think that, or would he think that—and just not tell me? My cat circles around the man, an arch in his back, a sound not entirely friendly coming from his cat throat. M. rests his head on the pillow that now belongs to the cat. I reach across M. to run my hand over the cat’s ears.
There is the idea in my head of the merry widow. I am not merry.
I can’t hang a picture on my own. I can’t open a tightly closed jar. I can’t work the clasp on my pearl necklace. I can’t get it open and if I get it open I can’t get it closed. Or can I?
I invite M. to the beach for a weekend. He talks politics with my friends. He listens to music. He does not like the sea. He does not want to walk about. His life is interior. The sun gives him a rash. But we are peaceful together. All around are photographs of my children and grandchildren. He doesn’t notice. So I pick up a photo of my two granddaughters and tell him their names. He turns his head away and does not look at the photo. It is true that other people’s grandchildren are superbly uninteresting. They are just children after all and the world has its fill of them. The special charge, the electric joy these pictures give a parent or a grandparent disappears when the eyes are colder, less kind. But most of us are polite enough not to turn our heads away when presented with a photo obviously dear to the presenter. I am feeling lonely in the house with M. I fix dinner. We eat and talk over the editorials of the day, the failings of the newspapers. He tells me stories of legal battles he has fought. He talks of lawyers who are so fabled ordinary people know their names. He does not ask about my work. He has read nothing of mine. A book I wrote, a memoir that I gave him when we first started dating, sits unopened on his shelf. I try not to be hurt. Why should he read my book after all?
He says, when I inquire, that he is not a literary man and worries that I will not respect his thoughts. But I am not a lawyer and I don’t worry that I should be. Is he insecure or just telling me an approximate truth, an untruth? I tell him he has expressed no interest in who I am. “Maybe,” he says. But still he asks me nothing.
When he packs to leave I am not sorry. I welcome back my solitude. Either I am not ready to place my hand in a different hand or this man has circled his wagons against the irritations of another soul, at least my soul. I will not see him again. He is decent and good and intelligent. He is calm and self-contained. He e-mails me, “Perhaps we could be friends?” I don’t answer the e-mail. He is a stranger and will remain so.
It occurs to me that I could write anything about him I like. He will not read it.
Sometimes at the end of the day I would read aloud to H. the page or two I had written a few hours earlier. He would sit on our black leather couch with his vodka in his hand and nod when he was ready for me to begin. He was mostly appreciative and always encouraging, except when he fell asleep. This happened often enough in the last years that I stopped reading to him. He rose before six and was gone by seven thirty a.m. He walked the twenty blocks to his office. He carried with him the book he was reading. I knew his mind was full of his own thoughts and mine must have served like the lullaby wheels of a train, round and round, clank and churn, clank and churn. H. had earned the right to fall asleep as I read. Also I might have been boring (all writers fear that they are boring, a violation of the first of the writer’s ten commandments). I was not afraid that H. would leave me because I was boring him.
This is the first summer since we bought the house that I have not wanted to walk along the water’s edge, watching the ocean come and go, watching the gulls circling for bait fish, watching the trawlers out at the edge of the horizon. For reasons I do not understand I am uninterested in the beach. I am unable to sit in a chair under an umbrella peacefully. I do not admire the little children who run about. I do not want to hear anyone else’s radio. I get cold with the sharp wind. I get bitten by black flies. Also I do not want to be alone on the beach, not even when the fog comes in and the terns scurry on their pin legs, in and out of the tidal froth. It’s too much for me, this ocean. I never go. Day after day I plan to go but I don’t. As if I had signed a pledge, do not enjoy, do not let the sun near the muscles of your back, do not wet your feet. Ridiculous. Perhaps I act this way because the house is going to be sold. Widow that I am, its upkeep will undo me. Widow that I am, I have no desire to travel the highways to reach the house. Widow that I am, I do not want to put my hands in the rocky dirt of my garden. I don’t want to replace a burned-out lightbulb. I don’t like this house without H.
But that said, it is also true that here we had Thanksgiving dinners, a Passover or two, with most all the children gathered. Here we played poker with boyfriends of my daughters who seemed permanent but weren’t. Here we talked about politics with a young husband who disappointed and disappeared. Here another daughter brought her new husband whom we had not yet met. On this table, with this stove, and this refrigerator marred by specks of rust on the door, common to houses so close to the sea, we made meal after meal. We cooked together, all of us. A daughter announced her pregnancy here. Another was married nearby. Friends filled the house, fish was smoked and grilled. Bikes were pulled out of the
shed and stuffed back in among unused boogie boards and mildewed beach chairs, grandchildren slept in baskets, on couches, Scrabble pieces fell under the table, cookie crumbs were ground into the rug. Wet bathing suits hung on the shower pole, mice were in the cereal boxes, insects in the bag of flour. Also fights. This sister complains about that sister. This sister weeps for her dog who died. This sister feels ignored by the others. This boyfriend goes off on a bike ride and disappears for a full day. This is the place where one daughter and her husband decided we didn’t want them to stay longer in the house and became angry with us. This is where we brought one daughter home after an eye operation. This is the house where one daughter wept on learning that another was pregnant. This is the house that was invaded by rabid raccoons who jumped about inside the walls, a terrible stench filled two rooms until they were trapped, caught in steel jaws that left them lying open-mouthed, bloody, bones, fur, guts spilling, on our porch.
I no longer wanted the house. It was ungrateful of me. The tightness in my chest was not the house’s fault, although the blame must fall somewhere.
I have a strange virus. I have not had such a fever since long before I met H. Now this ache in the limbs, the rise in temperature, the need to sleep, the muscle cramps last and last. I am tested for Lyme disease. I don’t have it. I go by jitney to my doctor in New York. My liver is inflamed. My potassium level has sunk to an unacceptable low. I give more blood for more tests. The unnamed virus remains with me. I am alternately hot or cold. I try to go to a party but my head swims. I leave the party. I try to read but the lines dance on the page. If H. were here I would be coddled, calmed. He would make carrot-ginger soup. Am I sick because he is not here? They say that the immune system responds to crisis by shrinking. Has my immune system turned from plum to prune in the season since H. died? I know that everything is not a matter of psychology. On the other hand the body is not separate from the mind and this mind feels as if an ax has cleaved it in two. No wonder I have a virus.
After three weeks it does depart. I never learn the name of my tormentor. It would cost one thousand dollars, my doctor explains, to find its name. I am not that interested. I think of Adam in the first week of the world naming the animals as they walk past him. Was there also a parade of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic life forms crawling across the grass of Eden so that Adam could grant them their identity? I know I am fortunate—I could have been invaded by a million worse diseases, ones that might have consumed me altogether. But I am not grateful. The absence of H. seems, like an oncoming tide, to be covering more and more of my being with each passing day. Run, run to high ground, I tell myself.
I’m invited to swim in a friend’s pool. I don’t want to swim. I don’t know why. I am a good swimmer but now I dislike the idea. Why move my arms and legs about just to get from one side of the pool to the other? Why bother?
I think of other summers I have had that were less than perfect. In August, when I was three, my brother was brought home from the hospital. August has never been my favorite month. Once in August in the time of my first marriage I was alone in the city with my young child. My first husband was gone for good and the slightest sound could make me jump. I had dreams of falling objects, closet doors that wouldn’t open, cliché and bathos followed me everywhere. My friends were away. There was a heat wave that could kill. I sat at an outdoor table in a nearby coffee shop, sweat dripping down my peasant blouse, and chain-smoked Camel cigarettes while my child rode her tricycle around in circles by my feet.
I have trouble reading. I am an escape artist who reads newspapers, books, cereal boxes. But now my concentration is cracked. Stray thoughts disturb my peace. The bird song on the nearby tree makes me close the covers of my book. This bird has an unlovely voice, his call is loud and grating but his mate appears from the other side of the garden and sits on the branch nearby. Evolution has programmed her to admire his voice. H.’s voice when he spoke to patients was gentle and soothing. You could lean on that voice, you could depend on that voice. It was a big voice although he was not a big man. Under the words lay a melody, a promising harmony.
People come from time to time to see the house, potential buyers. When they come I leave and go sit in my car in the parking lot near the beach. I inhale the salt smell. I watch the mothers carrying wet and sandy children in their arms. I note their buckets and shovels and towels and flip-flops and beach chairs. I see the teenagers flirting with each other near the ice cream truck. I let my arm hang out the window and later I see that my elbow has turned red. The tip of my ear is also burned.
No one makes an offer. The market is bad, there are fourteen houses for sale within a four-block radius. I worry I won’t be able to sell the house. I worry I will be able to sell the house. I worry that I will lose my friends who live nearby. I will lose some of them. But I know from experience that with change other people will cross my path, other people with stories and bad habits and children who do or do not bring them pride.
The broker comes and goes and replaces his sign with a larger one. We are at the end of a dead-end street. No one sees his sign. The days are gold and the light is warm and silken. I should sit on the patio at my table where the umbrella with a print of roses going round will protect me from skin cancer while I watch the bees swarm and the black crows hang in the branches above. But I don’t go into the garden. Instead I sit on my bed. I wait until a decent hour to call my daughters. I also tell myself old stories. I embroider them with slight untruths. I wallow. This is unacceptable.
A friend asks me, “Are you used to your new status yet?” What does this mean? I would check the box that says widow if presented a form at a doctor’s office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. I no longer have a joint bank account. The joint is gone. I have changed our credit cards into my name. But status? Could it be true that a woman without a man is always at the edge of appearing as a figure of fun, a disappointed person like a nun or the obese girl who stays home the night of the senior prom?
There are millions of women who live alone in America. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed. They like the way they keep their cupboards, feed their dogs, stretch out on the couch, wash the ring off the tub, put the coffee cup in the dishwasher, always on the left, handle-side out. Never mind the howl of country music’s unrequited love, someone stamping around after midnight, lots of people are unmated and comfortable, feel no need to swoon into a microphone. Someone in a marriage must die first and many people live in single space peacefully.
But how do they do it?
I go to a luncheon. The guests stand on the lawn, glasses in hand, gazing down at three egrets who stand each poised on one leg at the water’s edge. I am introduced to a widow of some five years. “It’s horrid,” she says, “and it’s going to get worse. They don’t know, they with their husbands, they don’t know.” I nod. I know about some other horrid things too, that have nothing to do with losing a spouse, things that hover about the garden casting shadows here and there despite the high sun and the perfect weather.
A builder over the last two years has been constructing a huge house behind ours. Now it towers over my house. It looms above my red maple tree. The workers’ voices rise across the property line. I hear saws, hammers, small backhoes dipping their steel jaws into the dirt, trees falling down, the radio with its loud unreal conversations, music you can’t dance to, on and on. The house they are building is grand. There is a giant pool and a little pool house that abuts my now-leaning fence. Four big brick chimneys rise to the sky. There is a deck but little grass. Where will the buyers put their garden? I hear from my neighbor on the other side that the builder has sold the house. I hear that the buyers are from Colorado and are in oil or gas and have business interests in Russia. I hear from the man who cuts my grass that the new owners have bought the house to the left of them and have put in a bid for the house to the right of them
.
And then they come to see my house. I am out. They come twice and they bring an architect and I whisper into my cell phone: They’re here again. Will they notice all the windows that do not close and the stain on the kitchen tiles that I can’t scrub off and the drainpipe that is crooked and the broken screen that the cat has scratched, through which mosquitoes and spiders arrive and depart? I meet her. She is a young woman from Texas. “How did you ever get so many books?” she asks. “My husband liked the house because of the books.” “I’ll leave them for you,” I say. At last they make an offer. They will have a family compound. They will have a little estate. They will have closed a circle. Now they will have grass and a Japanese red maple tree that turns orange in August and all my blue hydrangea bushes. They are not, they say, going to tear down my house, just fix it up, a new kitchen and new bathrooms and new closets and new floors and new wings and surveyors come and engineers come and I am ready to go back to the city and let the house go but I am aware that this sale is an amputation, a necessary amputation. Another one.
