by Anne Roiphe
At the party I talk to strangers. I introduce myself and join the conversation. I am happy. I listen and I talk. Everyone is willing to talk to me. It is a room of sociologists and law professors. It is a room of politics and feminism and old flirtations. The guests have stories, divorces, children who broke their hearts, love affairs that ended in disaster, books that were mocked, academic rewards denied, illnesses borne bravely. I don’t hear those stories but they run through the party like ribbons wrapping everyone in a gentle companionship.
I am on my way to meet a friend near Columbia University for lunch. I walk past St. Luke’s emergency room. I pause. It is noon. The last time I was there it was nearly midnight. H.’s body had been placed on a steel table. His jacket and shirt had been cut off his body. His glasses were by his feet. His face was sunken and shrunk. I kissed him on the lips. I knew from the feel of his lips that he was not there. The emergency room was almost deserted. The too-bright lights cast almost no shadows. The doctors—were there two or three?—hovered about. It comes back to me now, a kind of flashback, an unwelcome intruder. I stand outside the doors and seem unable to move. I move.
One of the responses I receive on Match.com is from a fifty-six-year-old man. I e-mail him back. I say, “I am too old for you. But you seem terrific, you will be perfect for someone.” He e-mails me, “I like older women. My last girlfriend was seventy-four.” I consider this. I have a peculiar prefeminist reaction. There is something unholy about a man who wants a woman almost his mother’s age. It crosses some invisible boundary. Is he looking for a Simone Signoret? I do not reek of powder and smoke and perfume. I am not so worldly or wise. I do not seduce young men. Yes, an older man, a man who is protective of me, wiser in ways than me, bossy even, appeals. I recognize that I am out of date. My daughters do not care about the age of their men: way older, way younger, it has never mattered to them. But I am embedded in old-fashioned images. Fred Astaire was not a little boy to Ginger’s mommy. In the movie screen of my mind I do not see them leaping across my brain only to pause as Ginger ties Fred’s shoes. Humphrey Bogart was not Ingrid Bergman’s son. Audrey Hepburn was never older than anyone. I e-mail back. I repeat, I am too old for you. Then comes another e-mail, a handsome forty-five-year-old, an investment banker, with a house in the south of France and one in Delray Beach, Florida. I sigh. I am too old for him too, and even if that weren’t so, we are not from the same planet. It’s not just that he golfs and I don’t. He wants an older woman. He says so. I e-mail him back: thank you, but this wouldn’t work. He takes my word for it. A chicken can fall in love with a goat I’m sure. The lines are not so firm and there are no rules in romance but I am a product of my times. I don’t want to dominate and I don’t want to pretend I am something I am not.
In my mail I find another letter from my husband’s ex-wife. She has written it on her typewriter; the ribbon has faded so I can hardly read her missive. There are now no typewriter ribbons in the stores. Perhaps she could have found one on eBay. She sends back my check for half a month alimony and insists that because she was to be paid at the beginning of the month she is entitled to the full amount H. owed her for all of December. She wants it all despite the fact that he was not here to earn it. First I name-call, “Virago, witch, leech.” Then I notice I am more amused than angry. There is a nerviness in this; one almost has to respect the persistence, bow before the madness. I see a mind oblivious to all but its self. Next she will drag me into small-claims court. An adventure I suppose. I will not pay. If it is grieving widow against hostile divorcée, I think I win. But this is shooting fish in a barrel. Has she turned me petty? Am I small-minded or justified in resistance to this claim, a last claim after a long life of parasitical subsistence? It is amazing how many occasions arise in which decisions need to be made that call ethics into play. I hear this minor theme again and again as conscience knocks against will, even in so small a matter as half the alimony check.
I am my brother’s keeper. But am I my dead husband’s ex-wife’s keeper? That is the question.
I go to lunch with a man who has contacted me through Match.com. He lives on the Upper West Side as I do. He reads the same magazines as I do. He once lived in the same apartment building that I grew up in. His wife has died. His photo is slightly blurred but he doesn’t look like an ax murderer. He was a science teacher and then went into his wife’s family business. His children went to the school some of my grandchildren now attend. He grew up in Brooklyn very near where H. lived.
When I arrive at the café where we have agreed to meet he is standing waiting for me. I see on his face a look of deep anxiety. Is he afraid I am an ax murderer? He is a small man and looks like Woody Allen with a bad cold. God knows what I look like to him. H. was in love as a teenager with Ingrid Bergman. He didn’t seem disappointed in me. The man I will call A. explains to me that he does not like to eat in public restaurants because of the potential germs and unclean kitchen conditions. He explains that he needs to wash his hands three times and his dishes three times each. He rhythmically turns his head from side to side as he speaks. Perhaps this is a tic of sorts or is he taking a quick glance at his side looking for someone wielding a knife? His fingers drum on the tabletop. His foot jiggles. I talk about myself. I ask him questions about his children and his wife. She died of lung cancer shortly after the family business was sold. They had planned many trips they never were able to take. He describes releasing her ashes in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian wing, which had been one of his wife’s favorite places. He had slipped a packet of ashes into a small bag he strapped beneath his suit sleeve. When no one was looking he and his sons let the ashes out into the air. In the Egyptian wing there can be no other thoughts but thoughts of death and time and the human wish for eternal life. His intention was to honor his wife. However, I am now convinced that I need not visit the Egyptian wing of the Met ever again.
He tells me about his sons who are perfect and imperfect as all our children are. One has been strange all his life, brilliant but strange. The other suffers from dyslexia but seems to have a normal life, but I have not heard the whole story, not yet. Of course I cannot tell him the real long tale of my children’s lives. It would take forever. He couldn’t listen that long. He doesn’t need the information. I couldn’t begin to convey who they are, why they are who they are, in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. All I can do is let him know that there are stories that will be told in time. I can let him know that my children consume me and have since they were born. This is true for him also. I hear it in his voice. I hear it in the way he shies away from telling me the very most important of their secrets. We are two strangers at a table in a public place. How much easier it would be if we were dogs and could smell the truth about each other and then go run in the park back and forth, jumping and tumbling in the dirt.
He remarks again and again that I speak so fluently, so well. I am a writer after all. Everyone I know speaks in long full sentences that loop and dip and soar. This man knows many things I do not. He knows about fossils and has traveled to find them on distant shores. He knows about electricity and computers and objects foreign to me. He understands calculus. His mind is very good. I am liking him more and more. Then he tells me about his childhood home. He grew up poor, very poor he says, the youngest of six boys, and in the house there was violence, the police were called again and again. He shakes his head from side to side while telling me this. Gray waves of poverty and trouble and pain flow over us. His brothers left the house and he was the one who returned from a year in Israel, and cared for his diabetic blind mother in her final years. He mutters something about sexual abuse. Did I hear that correctly? Can I ask him to repeat it? I decide to let it go. Henry Roth knows this landscape. A. has had two serious relationships since his wife died. Both of these women had personalities that were too strong, too demanding and in the end he did not like them.
Suddenly I am tired. I want to go home. I have had enough. I feel his anger under the
words. I feel the anger that accompanies those who wash their hands three times to ward off evil, possibly their own evil. I cannot do this. Am I wrong? Am I aborting a romantic possibility for the wrong reasons? Am I superficial in not liking the tension in his face, the twitching, the tightness of his smile? Am I just afraid of a new person? This is very possible. Perhaps I do not intend ever to find a new companion. I will not see A. again.
When I was last in Jerusalem working on a book, before H. died, I stayed at the Inbal Hotel where many Orthodox young men and women held their first dates in the café on the main floor. In the early evening I saw them, girls as young as sixteen or perhaps a little older, boys who wore black hats and as much beard as their age allowed, white-skinned, leaning over the small tables, trying to do just what I had been doing, who are you, should you live with me for the rest of my life? It was a lovely scene, rife with hormones and the scent of marriage vows in the air, and as I watched from my table I could tell which dates were going well and which were not. I saw the girls smile and beckon with their eyes. I saw the boys wave their hands in the air as they spoke. I drank in great swallows of shyness, male and female, also great swallows of hope.
The waiters came and brought the green tea and the lights outside the windows gleamed and the polished wood tables served as perfect platforms to launch a new life.
But I can’t do this now. Not with A. with whom one would spend ever after, no matter that it’s a short ever after, dodging around the damage in his mind, skirting the danger of his anger, avoiding his disapproval, wiping and cleaning every surface so he wouldn’t be affronted. Besides there is even at my age, even after everything, a question of desire. I thought this would not matter anymore. I thought that companionship would suffice for my remaining days and I would be lucky to find that but there is the stubbornness of body and the peculiarity of desire. I will not be able to ignore it.
A. calls the next day. I sound friendly. I tell him I can’t talk. Perhaps tomorrow, I say. He hears me. And he doesn’t call again. Of course that’s my story. His might be that he found me not to his taste, not to his style, not what he wanted at all. I don’t mind if that’s what he thought. It is a blessing of old age not to care if someone should not choose to dance. I find to my delight that I have outgrown, or perhaps outlasted, the need for every eye to shine on me kindly.
I am asked to a luncheon and talk at the Jewish Theological Library, to view the rare book collection there. I go. There are only five of us around a table. This is a fund-raising effort on the part of the library. I am invited in hopes I will be helpful in nonfinancial ways. At least I assume so, or the fund-raisers have stumbled while assembling their targets. In the 1920s the seminary library had endured a fire. Fortunately the fire had been in a different tower from where the rare treasures had been stored. The librarian sits on one side of a table pulling boxes that look like books off a cart that sits by his elbow. He opens a box with frayed and jagged pieces of parchment on it. It is a prayer book from the sixth century. The scribe had written in such careful letters and such straight lines that it almost seemed printed. The pages came from the storehouse of old papers from the Cairo synagogue. Jews do not destroy holy papers. They bury them, and these among other relics had been found in the basement of the synagogue and retrieved before the Second World War. Of course I wanted to touch the pages, but you can’t. The smudge of fingers, the oil on the skin would damage the parchment. We are shown a wedding contract from the fifth century with words that translate into the same words that are on my daughters’ marriage contracts. We look at a small book that is illustrated with miniature figures and tells the story of Joseph in Egypt.
Again and again appeals are made to God to hear, to forgive, to bless. Again and again praise is offered to God from the pages, pages labored over long before the printing press came into existence. Meanwhile in the communities from which these pages come, plague arrived, oppression in the form of Muslim kings or officiates of the power of the government appeared. Again and again the praise to God occurs after storms and shipwrecks and military disasters, disease cuts off the life of young children and parents mourn their children and children mourn their parents and the seasons change and the years pass and the monarchs change but the prayers do not. Are they heard? Are they ever heard?
The prayers we said at H.’s grave I wrapped around myself to keep away the cold. But God: I tried but could not believe that God was there with me, with my children, on that hilltop, at that moment. H. believed in evolution, in random accident. I believe in evolution and random accident but I am not so sure that behind all that, the eons and the millennia, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, there isn’t some reason, some mind, some deity that began it all. Perhaps a cruel deity but a deity nevertheless. On the other hand when it comes to the God within, the voice of God that speaks in the wilderness, the one that hands Moses a good book on a mountaintop, that infuses Buddha or inspires Gandhi or walks on water or resurrects the dead, I am without the ability to see. My eyes are empty sockets.
I am not a scientist but I count myself a follower of that camp. I like harmony but am too attached to my jagged edges to merge with any God within or God without. Those who can have my full respect. Those who can’t are more likely to join me for a movie and a Chinese dinner afterwards. Yoga class results in stretched muscles. Those muscles just don’t stretch all the way to eternity.
So I will not take solace in God’s plan, God’s love, God’s good intentions. This is ungrateful of me. Creation no matter how long it took is good, just not quite good enough.
Which does not mean I do not value each and every scrap of parchment, each old Bible, each work of early printing press and ancient scribe. Artifacts, remnants of dearly beloved convictions, messages in bottles cast upon an eternal sea, they deserve respect. They evoke awe.
A SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WIDOWER CONTACTS ME ON Match.com. He has a kind face. He lives in Brooklyn. He says he is looking for a companion, a friend. I e-mail him. He e-mails me again. I give him my phone number. He calls. He has a gentle manner and a soft voice. I agree to meet him on Sunday at the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn. He is waiting at the gate when I arrive. We walk together through the paths that wind around the giant tulips, luscious reds and purples. We talk of our children and he tells me he owns a condo in Cancún and a cottage in the Adirondacks. First he worked as a longshoreman in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then he managed his wife’s family business for years. He was a pilot in World War Two. He takes my hand in his. “This is the first time,” he tells me, “since my wife died, that I have held a woman’s hand.” He purchases sandwiches and bottles of water and we sit on the grass on a hill above some children playing ball. Then he says, “I have to tell you I am not the age I entered on Match.com.” I am not surprised. A few years do not matter to me. He says, “I couldn’t enter the year of birth, because the program didn’t go back that far.” Now I am alert. “When were you born?” I ask. “Nineteen-eighteen,” he says. I do the math. He is eighty-nine. He is straight-backed, still handsome. His mind is there, his heart, the feeling heart, seems strong. But when he invites me back to his apartment in Brooklyn I make an excuse. When I get home I e-mail him that I am unable to bear another loss. He e-mails me back, “Seize the moment, let’s take advantage of what time we have.” He has a point. But I don’t want to. I am a coward. I am unkind. He tries a few more times. He finally e-mails me, “I must accept your decision.” He must. Important question: Do I, without ever quite admitting it to myself, require a man who has achieved in the world as H. did? Do I require diplomas and published papers as a prerequisite for my hand? If so, I am ashamed. On the other hand ambition and knowledge are part of who and what a person is or has become. Could I love a truck driver or a shoe salesman? Is it more sensible to be alone than to slide down the social scale? The answer to that last question is of course not. But can I do it? “Class” is such a loaded word, a Marxist word, a thing no decent American wants to talk about. But is it real
, real like age, real like your Social Security number? Is class my shadow that I can’t dodge no matter how I turn?
I go to dinner at my friends’ home. The man is a painter, the woman a journalist. Two other couples, old friends, are there. I am happy to be with them. I have a glass of wine. The artist’s paintings are on the wall, rivers of blue and green, leaf-like, water-like, fall-like, they float above us. I talk about Iran and our president and about the Picassos at the Guggenheim show of Spanish paintings. I ask about this one’s biography in progress of Rosa Luxembourg, that one’s article on art critics of the fifties. I ask the doctor at the table about hospice care and the right to die, and as I sit, with food on my plate, conversation, a bright slice of lemon in my water glass, a strange cloud comes over me. It is not the absence of H. I suddenly believe I am damaged and have been hiding the damage. As if I were wearing a wig, covering up the fact that I had blown off the top of my head with a handgun. It could be the drink. I am not a good drinker. These friends I have known a long time and each of them I love for different reasons. I know them so well that their stories are imprinted in my brain. I could tell them myself as it is with old friends. I am safe here in this room. If it weren’t for this hole in my skull I would even be content.
I used to read all the time. I spent a childhood in books. Now I read slowly. No, I still read quickly, but I put the book down after a few pages. I can’t concentrate. I resist being pulled inside the words on the page. I seem to think it too dangerous to embrace the words on the page. This is odd. My old escape, my familiar room in my brain, is no longer working well. It seems as if I have read everything before, that I know what the author is going to say before the author has said it. I have lost my pleasure in the path, in the plot, in the tone. This is serious. I cannot substitute broad jumping, or knitting, or baking, for the place that reading held, for the way that reading kept me together. I may just have to allow myself to fly apart until I can read again, the way I am accustomed to.
