by Anne Roiphe
I go with a couple I have known for many years to a fine Indian restaurant. The walls are covered in red velvet. We walk in under the drapes of brightly patterned tent with golden tassels binding up the fabric. We drink, we talk, we order food. Strange food, hot and spicy and sweet and cool to the lips, tikkas, tandoori lamb and chicken, naans, raitas, samosas. Old friends, we talk about people we know, we talk about the president of the United States. We pause to think of the war so far away. We talk about our children, what they are doing. We talk about our exercise classes. They talk about trips they are going to take to faraway places. I am enjoying this meal, these friends, this evening. When I return to my apartment and turn on the light and listen to the cat purring his usual welcome, I am not surprised that I am alone in the apartment. I look directly into the mirror and see my face. For the first time in months I do not turn my eyes away. Perhaps it’s the wine but perhaps not.
Islands of ice on the Hudson River and above them a heavy fog hangs. The water and the sky are the same color and impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Over on the other side I can barely distinguish the high hills that line the shore and the apartment houses that stand there with their multileveled parking garages and their small terraces. I have dinner with two friends after a movie. He has had thyroid cancer, she has had breast cancer. They both seem well and we discuss the covenant with God, and how to maintain it in the absence of faith. We discuss how it was possible for her parents, loyal Communists until the day they died, to have excused the Gulag and the purges and the famines and the murders of so many. “Hope,” my friend explains. She loved her mother and her father. “Lunacy,” says her husband, and I agree. We leave the restaurant and find a coating of white snow on the street outside. My friends hail a passing taxi and disappear, two heads together in the backseat. Snow is falling. I open my mouth to let the flakes fall on my tongue. This is not a dignified thing for a woman of my age to be doing. A man passes wrapped in scarves. He looks at me startled. I close my mouth.
Once, forty-six years ago in a snowstorm I had walked many blocks alone in deep drifts to the hospital to give birth to my first child. I was in my first marriage. I was twenty-four. I was carrying a typewriter back from the repair shop when my water broke. This is a memory that will disappear the instant I die, as my neurons will quickly shrivel and the synapses turn to dry proteins. It has no significance outside my brain. But now it fills my mind, the leaping forward of my life as my first child was placed in my arms, as I stood in the hospital room looking out the window at the park covered with white mounds of snow, the window streaked with blurred flakes, the ground pockmarked with the boot steps of passersby.
When I am alone all day, have gone nowhere, have spoken to no one, after it turns dark I remember the way it was when I was a child and I had a sickness. I was prone to ear infections, coughs and the usual disasters of childhood. My mother was afraid to enter a sick child’s room. She was afraid of germs and of doing something wrong that might harm the child. She would stand at the door and wave good-bye to me in the morning and good-night in the evening. The nanny who attended to such needs would bring me lunch on a tray and medicine when it was time but did not stay to play a game of cards or teach me how to knit. Sometimes, being sick, I would sleep, curled up, my head on the pillows. Sometimes I would play with whatever interested me at the moment. But mostly I read, and I read. My mother would send books into the room with the maid who lived in the little room in our apartment next to the cook’s behind the pantry. The days had a particular length, like no other days. The hours moved slowly. My pajamas became stained with food. My hair was tangled. I lingered over the last pages of the last book I had. What would I do when they were all read? How would the time pass? The evening darkness meant supper on a tray would soon arrive.
Now sometimes that comes back to me: the same sensation, the same slowness of time, the same unmarked hours. H. is not returning in the evening. I talk to a friend on the phone. I call one of my daughters. I try to read. I write. Still the time is sluggish, the shadows persistent and unfriendly.
NOW I AM RECEIVING E-MAILS AT THE RATE OF THREE A DAY from my new Albany friend from Match.com. He sends me more soup recipes. He sends me a photograph of himself and four or five other children age around seven or eight. I look in the child’s eyes. The boy is wearing suspenders. There are a few girls in the photograph. They wear the flower print dresses of another era. Their hair is curled and pinned with bows. He sends me another photograph of himself, now grown, standing on a scrubby mound with brush about his feet and a low-rising mountain in the bleak distance. He has a long rifle over his shoulder and an army coat that comes down to his ankles and a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. The photograph is labeled in bold letters, KOREA. That is the way we make our men. There is an arrogance in his posture. I like that. I am interested in that and in the size of him, as if no wind could knock him down. Several hours later another photograph appears on my computer. This one is of a man about thirty or is it forty, in profile, smoking, and the smoke rises upwards as if the photo were taken in a jazz club, or at a party, or in the midst of a conversation about the meaning of life. Ah, he is trying to seduce me with an old photo of the way he was once. This is ridiculous. But effective. After all we are not suddenly seventy—or rather our seventy is an accumulation of all the other ways we were, our five-year-old selves became our ten-year-old selves and so on and on and if we unpack our souls the whole album appears and every moment is a part of the following moment and we are all a continuum that includes all the ways we were that we have forgotten. Anyway that is my excuse for staring and staring at this photograph that does not lead me directly to the man who is e-mailing me, but is tantalizing nevertheless.
Perhaps we should talk on the phone, he says in an e-mail. We agree on a time, a day later.
He has sent me some strange e-mails. He seems to be on the Web gathering pieces from right-wing commentators. He sends me an article claiming that the weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq but that the delay at the United Nations allowed Saddam Hussein to take them all into Syria for safekeeping. A few hours later I receive another e-mail, on the inadequacy of the public school system and the need for vouchers and choice. I am not willing to argue about that. It is followed by an article against affirmative action. Which is followed by a piece on the bell curve and the lack of intrinsic intelligence in African-Americans. This is disturbing. I do not respond. “Why,” his next e-mail says, “are you not debating me? Why are you not coming up with counterarguments?” I answer, “Do you want a debating partner or a friendship?” He responds with a report on his trip to the nearby market, which has foods from all over the world on its shelves. He tells me he can cook a fine chicken Marabella. I think of it, this big man, with his almost-beagle dog waiting in the car, which is parked in a large lot at the mall. I see him in the aisles pushing his cart, gathering his spices together. I think of walking alongside him on this shopping trip. I don’t bother to read the entire next e-mail that arrives. It is about the implacable hatred expressed in the Koran and the basic evil that underlies all Muslim thought. I’ve heard this before. I am suddenly exhausted. Has my blood pressure dropped to a dangerous low?
I ignore his e-mail about the Koran. I don’t bother to tell him what cruel and immoral deeds can be found in our very own Bible. I don’t want to fight. I have something else in mind. He sends me an e-mail about the lack of patriotism among members of the Democratic Party. I send him back an e-mail and tell him I’m going to the movies with friends. Within moments he sends me an e-mail that says the New York Times prints only lies about Republicans and slants the news away from the truth. I don’t answer. I have my winter coat on, my scarf is around my neck. I will be late if I don’t leave immediately.
I turn off my computer.
How important are world events between a man and a woman? I suppose it depends on how passionate the two partners are about their political conviction
s. I am not indifferent or even cool. I am not a woman who normally can leave it alone and turn the conversation to the children or the school situation, or the economic news. I am more like a dog who must dig up every bone in the garden and gnaw it again and again, leaving the flower bed uprooted and worms crawling across every surface. But I tell myself that people have reasons for their beliefs. Perhaps his fierce ones are a sign of caring, not a sign of a fondness for authority and a respect for guns learned in childhood, a very different childhood than mine. I remind myself that I have known contributors to the campaign to exile snowmobiles from national parks who are cruel to their daughters and leave their wives on the equivalent of an ice floe in the Antarctic.
I lose my leather gloves. I always lose my gloves. Each winter I promise myself one pair only and each winter I need more. I stop in a store on Broadway to replace the lost pair. I have a moment of financial panic. I can’t do this. I can’t just buy gloves as if money were infinite, could be wasted on a whim because I am careless and distracted. I look at the gloves on the glass counter, smooth, soft gloves. I could just as easily have thrown away twenty-dollar bills as lost my gloves. People work hard for their money. I am ashamed of myself. When H. was alive I let him worry about waste and prudence and caution. I laughed at him for his miserly, Depression-born ways. But now I have lost the silver spoon I was born with. Now I have to be responsible.
But not that responsible. I can afford another pair of gloves. I will be able to pay the bills even if I lose my coat, my scarf, my boots and need to replace them all. This is a game I am playing with myself. Money is not the real subject. The poverty I fear is the poverty of soul that is mine. I buy the gloves. I promise myself to take good care of them. I forgive myself for the fact that I am not always clear on where the pain is coming from and what to do to stem its onslaught.
I had spent the day before making a soup for a Sunday brunch. I had chopped and peeled and bought cheese and smoked salmon. I was worried that my soup was too spicy. I was worried that I could not, not without H., bring the food to the table, open the wine bottles, brew the coffee. Then at night I had a terrible nightmare. In my dream I was somewhere out of town, somewhere where the trains were not running and no taxis stopped, and I needed to return to the city because I was expecting people to come to my house for lunch. How terrible it would be if I were not there. If they rang the bell and no one answered the door. My anxiety mounted, my heart pounded, as I saw the clocks in the town square and realized that I did not have time to return even if the trains began to run again. And then I was sitting on a bench and four people approached me. One of them was a strange woman. The others were lawyers with briefcases. The woman said, “We are going to sue you and take everything you have. You will be left with nothing.” A great panic swept over me. I woke up with a splitting headache.
My rational mind scolded my overheated brain for such a stupid nightmare. But then it came to me. Everything I had was gone. Everything that mattered to me had been taken. H. was gone. I was stripped bare. The dream was not a threat but a report. Of course, the “everything” here is an exaggeration, hyperbole, absurdity. I have my children and grandchildren. I have my work. I have my apartment with its books and its drawings and its furniture H. and I bought together. I have my photos and my memories and I have friends. I have, at least for now, my health. I have my cat. So it’s not accurate to say I have lost everything. I will not indulge in melodrama, at least not for long.
My soup was a success. It was not too spicy. It was just right. But in the next night I had another dream. The phone rang and I had trouble picking it up. It fell out of my hands. Finally after many attempts I put the phone to my ear. It was H. “I stumbled,” he said. “Are you all right?” I asked. I saw a great ravine and a river running beneath high rocks. He was on a trip. “Are you all right?” I repeated. He answered me, but I couldn’t understand his answer. I woke up. My pillow was soaking wet. He had stumbled up the steps to our lobby moments before he lost consciousness. If this were the century of séances and paranormal experiences I would believe he had been trying to contact me from beyond the grave. What I believed was that I had allowed his voice to return to my head. I had brought back his dying moment because I could. It did not shatter me. It was just a dream.
A psychoanalyst friend tells me that soon memories of H. will come to comfort me. He will be like an imaginary friend, a companion of my thoughts. I find that idea uncomfortable. It has a Hallmark-card quality. The odor of false witness is in the air. I remember the tie he wore to our daughter’s wedding when I see it on his tie rack. I remember the way he pushed back tears with his hands when we thought another daughter was going to die of pneumonia. I remember how he chopped onions at our kitchen table. I remember how he lifted a child up to feed the goats at the zoo. I am not comforted by these memories. I simply remember. He is not hanging in the air beside me, a voice whispering in my ear. He is not telling me to return to work. He is not going through the refrigerator throwing out moldy cheese. He is not watching over me, as the song says. He is not.
So now at the arranged time my new friend from Albany calls. He has a deep voice. Just the voice I imagined. He tells me that we need an antiballistic system and must break our treaties in order to develop one. The Chinese and the North Koreans will destroy us if we don’t. I disagree but I don’t want to argue politics. “Tell me about your childhood,” I say.
And he does. He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, one of eight children. His grandfather arrived here from a far corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and carried cement in large wheelbarrows to the construction workers on the scaffolding above. His father owned a bakery and was working all the time. His mother was bitter and never hugged a child. He was small-boned and slight and was always being beaten up by the other boys. His childhood was full of pain. I could imagine this boy on the streets of Trenton, the soot of factories in the air, the hardness of his mother’s life, the lack of play and tenderness. He told me he went to a Catholic military school. I hadn’t known there was such a thing. “I wore a uniform,” he says. “But the boys still beat me up.” Now he is six foot two but when he graduated high school he was just a bit over five feet. “How did you grow so many inches after high school?” I ask. “I just did,” he says. We stop talking; the conversation has gone on a long time. I like his voice. I like the gruffness of it.
The next morning I receive two e-mails from him about the takeover of European culture by the immigrant Arabs. It is predicted that in twenty-five years Notre Dame will become a mosque and the Louvre will be closed down. I don’t argue. How can one argue such a point? Where to start? I put the e-mail out of my mind. I notice a lightness in my spirit as I race toward the phone when it rings at the time we have arranged.
As I talk to him I sit in my favorite place in the apartment where I can see the Empire State Building over the rooftops. The sun is slipping down across the river. I can see the clouds above, growing pink with the approaching evening. I lean back in the chair and the cat jumps on my chest. With one hand I hold the phone to my ear, with the other I stroke the cat. “Why did you get divorced?” I ask and he tells me. A long time ago, in a suburban county of New York, he lived with his wife and three children. He had a best friend and the best friend had a wife and the four of them had dinner together often and their children played together. It was the early seventies. His wife was in therapy. One evening she told him the truth. She had been having an affair with his best friend. He moved out. He tried psychotherapy for a few weeks but it didn’t work out.
It was a time of chaos. Homes were breaking up everywhere. Women were leaving to discover themselves as potters or dancers. No one wanted to miss out on living to the fullest, discovering yourself. The discipline of family life seemed like a yoke on an ox’s shoulder. No one wanted to be the ox. My friend on the phone begins to talk about the damage that feminism did to the American home. I remind him that the American family was less than perfect before girls went
to medical school. I ask him about the neighborhood where he lives now. He tells me about the store where he shops for Asian spices. I see him in my mind’s eye. He wears the big hat that I saw in his photo. His grocery cart is filled. His dog is waiting for him in the car, nose pressed to the glass. I think to myself that he was hurt by his wife’s betrayal and I hope, a thin, wispy hope, a hope that could, if I were otherwise inclined, be the beginnings of a prayer. Could I make whole what had been torn asunder? Could I provide the balm for what still burned? His children, he tells me, were permanently harmed by the divorce, because his wife was unable to provide the discipline that the children needed. One boy disappeared into a world of drugs. She was working. She was not strong enough. He told her that. But she ignored him. He talks of other connections, a second wife who disappointed him quickly, a liberal woman who sent him e-mails for over two years.
The sky is now gray. Smoke from an incinerator a few blocks away is rising black toward the pale star that hangs above it. I have to be at a friend’s house for dinner in a half hour. I end the conversation. “Good night,” I say. “Until tomorrow,” he says, and I can hear my heart ready to race forward. I go to dinner like a teenager with an invitation to the prom secure in my possession.
“I have the perfect person to introduce you to,” says a friend. “Yes,” I say. “There is a problem though,” she adds. “Yes,” I say. “He is a prominent lawyer. You know his name. He was in the Clinton administration.” She tells me his name. I recognize it. His wife has died. “He told me he wants to find somebody,” my friend says. “What is the problem?” I ask. I imagine the answer. He has early Alzheimer’s. He has liver cancer. He is going to jail for some white-collar crime that was reported in the business section of the New York Times, which I keep meaning to read but don’t. She says, “He is exactly your age, but he wants a much younger woman.” “Oh, that,” I say. I shrug. I smile. I’m not surprised. I just forget from time to time that I have faded from the field. “I could introduce you,” she says, “maybe he would change his mind.” “No thank you,” I say.
