by Anne Roiphe
I REALLY WISH I COULD WRITE ABOUT THIS LAWSUIT. I CAN only tell you that someone H. was obligated to now wants a piece of him, because of legal agreements forty-three years old, agreements signed long before I met H. and we married and made our life together. I can only tell you that the lawsuit went into mediation. My lawyers met with other lawyers with a judge who helps both sides negotiate an agreement. This is better than going to court. It is better than a long expensive fight. It means that I sit for hours on a bench in a glass office building in the middle of a distant suburb while in a room across the empty hall on the other side of a bank of elevators, the lawyers are fighting. Across the parking lot I see a Pizza Hut and a Toyota dealership. The floors are marble, the elevators rise and fall, bells ring. I sit with my son-in-law, who is kind enough to keep me company but surely has better things to do. Nothing seems to be happening. I am not able to eat or drink. I think how H. would shrink inside himself if he knew this was happening. He doesn’t.
I see my adversary exiting a door on the other side of the room in which I am now sitting, heading out for some air. I think unkind things. I would tell you what they were but I can’t because I might accidentally identify my adversary. Another lawsuit would follow. A rank odor of loneliness and chronic irritation follows this person about. Once I did feel love for the human being that is now turning away from me. Once I had hoped we would be friends for life. I was naive. I had thought simple goodwill could overcome the tornadoes of emotion that blow across family histories. I had ignored the lessons of Greek tragedy and old fairy tales and assumed that all would be well. I was mining the mountain for gold with a teaspoon. If I were a better person perhaps I could recapture the love that once I felt. I am not.
Some people use money to gain what they feel they were denied. Such people use the court system again and again to exact revenge. I know such people are more to be pitied than to be blamed but that is less true when you are the object of their legal endeavors. I have little pity here.
After five and one half hours the matter is settled. My lawyers have done brilliantly. Her lawyer will take much of her profit. Nobody’s life will change at all. I sign the papers in the lobby. I am tired, very tired. But the settlement is not nearly as huge as I had feared. In the settlement is a clause that protects me from further suits on this matter. My enemy cannot renew the attack. Relief floods through me. I want to kiss someone, my lawyer actually.
It’s only money. But it’s money H. had saved, worked for and wanted for his family. I have lost some of it, a small, tolerable amount of it. I can forget this now. But I won’t, not entirely.
It seems odd to me in a book about the loss of H. that I should be writing about money at all. I am not Edith Wharton. I am not Charles Dickens or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Money and real human loss should have nothing to do with each other and perhaps that would be true if H. and I had lived out our lives on a kibbutz growing tomatoes, appreciating the wonders of drip irrigation, but here in America money is not a vulgar subject or rather it is a vulgar subject but one we must indulge, admit into our most private moments, lie about: how much we want it, how much we need, where we got it, how we value it. We respect the self-made but envy the inheritance of others. Money is dirty but lack of money is filthy. It is not happiness. Money has nothing to do with happiness. But it does affect everything else. I think these things in the car on the way back to the city after the mediation. I think what a wonderful novel about money I could write if only I wouldn’t be sued if I wrote it.
This lawsuit has hung over my life, a cloud, a fearful haunting, for months now. It has frightened me irrationally. It has reopened a scar over which I keen. All the children and my friends will now pretend this never happened. Everyone knows who was on what side and what lies beneath polite smiles.
I go to a luncheon party. I see an old friend, a law professor. He walks slowly and with a cane and cannot stand for long. He tells me he misses H. because H. would always come over to him and sit with him and they would joke, their old, repeated jokes. He says most people do not join him on a couch but leave him alone. H. would make sure he had his drink. This conversation now brings a heaviness in my chest and then a rapid rising of tears. Quickly I ask my friend about the coming election, his expectations, his opinions. The subject changes, the flow of my tears reverses its direction. The heaviness in my chest remains.
I read in the class notes of my high school bulletin of a widow who was contacted by an old boyfriend from college who had read her husband’s obituary in the paper. She met him and they rekindled their young love and are now happily together in the college town where he is a professor. I have heard several stories like this. Do I have any old boyfriends who might be available? I have a first husband but he must be as unsuitable now as he was then and besides he married a much younger woman so he isn’t a widower. I try to remember. I can’t think of anyone. Bad luck I suppose.
I have a smallish skin cancer on the side of my face beside my right eye. I ignored it for a while. It bled a little. I went to the doctor, who sent me to a surgeon in the hospital to have it removed. They take it off, send it to a lab while you wait, and if the margins of their sample do not come clean, they take off some more, until they have it all: cancer vanquished. I could have a plastic surgeon standing by. I am not worried about a scar in a place a few wisps of hair would cover. I am not worried about my life itself because I have been assured such skin cancers are not threatening. The doctor scolds about the sun. Ah the sun that I have played in since I was a child, all the summers at the beach chasing waves in and out, all the summers at camp throwing balls as the heat caused sweat to run down my shirt. Ah the sun in the park where I watched my children climb and dig and put sticky fingers around melting ice creams. This is the same star that burned my face and gave me blisters when I was twelve and my mother and I stayed at a hotel in Miami Beach while she decided whether or not to divorce my father. She didn’t: a mistake. The doctor is talking about the same source of radiation that melts the tension out of my back when I spend a few days in Aruba or Puerto Rico, that sun is the one the doctor, a pale man with no sign of ever having worn sandals to cross the hot sand, regards the way I would an alligator in my bathtub.
H. would have gone with me to the surgeon at the hospital. He would have complained about having to cancel patients. I would have said, “I don’t need you. I can go alone.” He would have said, “No. I’m going with you.” Now I go alone. I sit for an hour in a crowded waiting room. Other people with bandages on their faces, arms, legs are waiting. Someone seems to be with each of them: a wife, a husband, a sister. I read the paper. I read the New Republic from cover to cover. Finally I am taken. The procedure is painless. I think about the umbrella we sat under at the beach and how I meant to stay in the shade but always slid outside into the warming sun. I tried to remember the brand names of the sunblock I had used. I always meant to reapply it after swimming. I usually forgot. The umbrella, the creams, the dark glasses I always removed immediately and placed on top of my head had always seemed to me impositions, restrictions on my freedom, prissy items. I wanted to be on the beach with my hair blowing wild and the sun beating down and my feet in the spray. This skin cancer was the price I paid.
I waited in the waiting room. I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and had a roll and coffee. I had a bandage on the side of my head. The cafeteria walls were painted a bilious green. The linoleum tabletops had long ago lost their luster. At the next table three doctors discussed their boats, which were each in need of repair. The plastic tray was brown and cracked. The long halls through the hospital, the silent people in the elevators, the ring of the cash register in the cafeteria, alarmed me.
I called my daughter in another borough and she offered to come and wait with me. I accepted her offer with some shame. Was it not my role to be with her when time was holding still, not the other way around? She took nearly an hour to reach the hospital and find me. When she did I was restored. I talk w
ith her about her work, about her child, about the new coat she wants to buy. I see her reflection in the glass window. I look only at her.
The surgeon needed to slice some more skin from the wound. At last I am called to the operating room. My daughter waits outside. It is done. We wait together another two and a half hours before the report comes that all is well. The surgeon will sew me up soon. My daughter leaves.
What I know is that this is not the end of my hospital visits. Odds are very high that I will be waiting alone in rooms like this again and again in the years that remain. I do not have H. to stand near me.
There is a widow who lives in my building. She is considerably older than I am. A pile of yellow-stained white hair rests on her head. She wears a large-brimmed straw hat in all weather. Her back is bent over at a forty-five-degree angle. She wears long, flowered dresses over a short, shapeless body, and black boots. She has a wide jaw and milky-blue eyes. She pushes a shopping cart, which also serves as a walker. There is a sign on the cart that says, IMPEACH BUSH. I see her coming and going. I should do more than nod and smile when I pass her. I should speak. But I don’t. She is like a storybook widow, perhaps a good witch. I, however, still look like most of the other people walking by. I don’t send off vibrations of misery, or addiction or bizarre thoughts. I am not rummaging through the garbage cans looking for redeemable bottles or items that can be sold on a blanket in front of the grocery store. I think I still look gainfully employed, ordinary, as if someone is at home waiting for me. Actually I think I should make some effort to get in touch with my inner witch. Perhaps this pretense at normalcy is weakening my immune system, tying up my brains, and fooling no one.
I go to lunch with another widow in my building. She has been widowed for over twenty years. She is a fund-raiser for a major hospital. We talk in the elevator about her exotic trips, safaris and visits to Nepal and boat rides to the South Pole. She has a bright smile. She tells me that she is finally ready to meet someone after all these years. For many years she preferred to be alone but now she has worked through the problems in her own therapy and is ready to be with another man. She has found someone through an online dating service but he wants her to pay for her own dinner. This disturbs her. After twenty years of widowhood I think I would be glad to buy the man his steak and pommes frites. But perhaps not. I am sure that I would not have lasted twenty years alone. I have already located the window in my fourteenth-floor apartment that would be the right one to open and lean out, too far, irrevocably too far. I have chosen a window on the alley behind the building so that there would be no chance I could fall on anyone, also I chose a window where the resulting mess of blood and bone would be seen by as few as possible. I have already considered this carefully. Would I take pills ahead of time to still the pain on impact? How many pills? The plan is not yet complete. It is a plan I hope not to execute, at least not for a while, but it comforts me to hold it in my mind. I am reassured that I do not have to live beyond my desire to live. H. said that the best way to end your life is in a closed garage with the car motor going. But I don’t have a garage. Perhaps the fund-raiser widow has never had that kind of dark thought, perhaps she is content with her shaggy dog who licks my hand when we meet. Should I get a dog?
I have lunch with the widow of a psychoanalyst, a colleague of H.’s, a woman I have known reasonably well. She is at least a decade older than I am. She was a refugee from Nazi Prague, hidden by nuns in a convent in Czechoslovakia. She was a beautiful young woman and is still a beautiful woman with dark, sad, distrustful eyes. I have hardly seen her since her husband died several years ago. This was careless of me, not deliberate. I feel guilty because I should have called her more often. I had not been a good friend. I don’t deserve her friendship now.
Now she tells me that she never cooks dinner anymore. She is glad not to be cooking. She eats her main meal at lunch and then sits with a snack in front of the television in the evening. She tells me that her children and grandchildren visit but they make a huge mess, they make a lot of noise and it is too much for her, this rushing about. She has stopped making dinners for the religious holidays, which had once formed the center of her family life. She belongs to a book club that meets once a month. She has a friend she has traveled with every summer for a few weeks. She still works a few days a week as a volunteer at the library where once she had held a job. She has a respectable life, but I can tell from her tone, from the flatness in her eyes, that although she is doing all she can, she is listless. She lives dutifully but not brilliantly, as a prisoner adjusted to their prison might do. She tells me that many of her and her husband’s friends stopped inviting her to dinner within a year of his death. This is the cruelty of the social world.
I ask her if she is having trouble sleeping. “No,” she says. “I sleep too much. I sleep usually ten hours at night and then a few hours in the afternoon and sometimes I doze in the morning. I have trouble staying awake.” She knows as I know that sleeping this much is a symptom of depression. “What would I do, with the extra waking hours?” she asks. I don’t have an answer. Suddenly I am not only afraid of not sleeping. I am also afraid of sleeping too much. There is no point in practicing being dead. There is also no point in staying awake just to convince yourself that you are not dead.
I have lunch with a good friend who tells me to join a club where writers go to have lunch at a long table and talk to one another. I say I will but I don’t. I don’t want to have lunch with strangers. I can barely manage to have lunch with friends.
H. wanted me to exercise three times a week so now I join a club. I try to go regularly. But one morning I am too exhausted from lack of sleep, another I forget completely, and then I have a cold or a meeting or a book to read. I will exercise when I can. Not now.
There is another widow in my building. Her husband was a principal of a school. She has not found anyone in the eighteen years since he died. We have coffee in her living room. If I press my face against her window I can see the bridge that spans the river to the west of us. I can see the black barge that sits in the river surrounded by ice blocks, stilled. She tells me that the man I saw her with on Broadway the other day, the broad-shouldered, mustached man, is a married lover of hers who was supposed to leave his wife but had just changed his mind. For a while we talk about men, their propensity for infidelity. We drink cup after cup of coffee. There is a sisterhood in the condition of widowhood but it has its limits. I want to hear good things about her life. She has none to tell me.
Over the years she has been with other men and when I passed her on the street or stood with her in the elevator she would blush a sweet pink color when she introduced me to this one or that one. She is a woman who has a goodness of soul, the kind that any child could recognize. And even she has not found a connection to a new man or contentment without one. She had not been ready to lose her husband, they had so many years ahead of them. Still I would have thought that she would by now have been in someone’s arms. “Being single sucks,” she says. Her words frighten me without surprising me. Of course it sucks but shouldn’t there be an end to it, when a widow can live happily ever after on her own? If life is a cabaret shouldn’t there always be another act, at least until there isn’t?
I go to meet V. at the information booth of Grand Central Station. I have no idea what he looks like. He has written to me after reading the personal ad in the New York Review of Books. He lives in a suburb. He is a widower. He is interested in reading and is taking courses in the classical world at his local university where he has become president of its senior citizen organization devoted to aiding the institution. He was a banker. He writes that he retired early because his wife had rheumatoid arthritis and was no longer able to drive but she wanted to keep working. She loved her days as a dietician and so he stayed home to take her to work. This touches me. Here is a man who loved his wife and acted on his love. This is good. This man does not lack a soul. I call him. At the very least he will not harm me.
/> Years ago when I was young I met young men by the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. They were coming to New York from Yale and Harvard and Amherst and Dartmouth and they were shining with possibility. We went drinking at the local clubs. We went to hear jazz. I kissed them good-night. I played at falling in love. I loved the parade of them, the smell of them, the scarves they gave me with their school colors. I liked it when they stared at my breasts and pretended not to. But now I am at the information booth and the commuters are swirling around and the ceiling of the railroad station is so high that it makes me dizzy to look up at the glass dome and I feel ridiculous. He is late. I am early. I am anxious by the time he arrives.
I see him first. A very small man with large ears that extend out from his bald head. Never mind, I tell myself. I do not look like a movie star either. He has small hands, one of which he puts on my back and directs me to the cafeteria dining room in the station. It is noisy. We have to shout at each other. He tells me his wife died of an infection from her rheumatoid arthritis medication. She became ill one night and died in the hospital the next day. He tells me how much she loved music and that he has endowed an annual concert in her name at the local high school. He was a manager of retirement funds. He is active in his Universalist church. He is the head of many committees. I am Jewish, I tell him. He says many Universalists are Jewish. Were Jewish, I think but don’t say. Could I ever be with a man who sits in a pew in a church? I who once wanted to live on a barge by the Seine and quote T. S. Eliot until the dawn, could I live in a suburban home and go to church on Sundays, even a church that makes less of Christ than most? I must not slam doors, I say to myself. I need a new world, I remind myself. He tells me that he is on a committee that purchases art for the local university. I am impressed. He asks me about my work, about my children. He listens carefully. We agree to meet again. He is off to an appointment at some bank. As we part, he kisses me on the mouth. I was just kissed by a strange man, I say to myself. It makes me want to cry, this kiss. It’s the wrong kiss, the wrong man.
