Epilogue

by Anne Roiphe

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

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

  I cannot keep this house because I cannot afford it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I have no right to complain. I complain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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