by Anne Roiphe
My cousin lives in a gated community built around a beautiful golf course, in Boca Raton. He is seventy-eight years old and divorced several times. He told me that in his community if a woman turns fifty she is considered beyond the pale. I believe him. He told me that he didn’t want to date a woman in her sixties, because in no time at all he would spend his days driving her to doctors. There is a toughness in that statement that surprises me in my sweet cousin but I suspect that the moving sewage that streams between men and women, the misogyny, the fear, the neediness, the rage, the helplessness, the lust, the failure of lust, of one or the other partner, creates such a stink that it’s a wonder anyone can cross the river to the other side. And people do. I see that they do it.
Some days now I feel calm and content, content for hours at a time. Some days I sink again. I lose interest in everything. I mope. I do not admire moping. Nevertheless I mope.
I hear from a doctor friend of mine that people who try to commit suicide by taking various sleeping pills, tranquilizers, antianxiety drugs, aspirin, whatever they can glean from their medicine cabinets, most often end up in hospitals, with stroke, with paralysis, with brain damage but alive and condemned to years of confinement to a nursing home. I wonder if this is true. Is it possible that this is just a way doctors have of warning us not to try to escape our lives? Like prison guards, they point to electrified fences. Who dares to test them? I don’t know how to check this information casually, without revealing my intense and personal interest in the subject. I know about the Hemlock Society but I find their recommendation of a plastic bag over one’s head almost impossible to imagine. It’s like putting your hand in the fire: wouldn’t you withdraw it at the first flush of pain? I wish I knew a doctor who would inoculate his patient with air if the time had truly come. But whose decision would that be? How many people jump to their deaths, either literally or figuratively, who six months later would be eating pasta at their favorite Italian restaurant with a new love in their lives if someone had only stayed their hand at the moment of momentary desperation? Some people kill themselves too soon. Some people kill themselves too late. I hope I will have the courage to act when I should act and the courage not to act if I shouldn’t.
I would ask my stepdaughter the physician to tell me the most efficient way to die but she would never give me an answer. She knows the answer. On any other subject I know she would tell me all she knows. On this subject she would not. She is a physician and sworn to do no harm even if harm would be doing good. Also she loves me. A complicated love, affected by torn loyalties, to be sure, but a love nevertheless. Does she love me enough to help me escape? Or does she love me too much to help me escape?
It would be inexcusable of me to put her in that vise. One does not squeeze one’s child, not ever. After all, I love her too.
Sometimes at night in bed I imagine sex, the kind we had, all the kinds we had. I discover that I have available in my brain images that suffice, will do. I am glad of this. It is not as good as the real event, as the real heat, sweat, rub and wear and tear of human part with human part. But it is reassuring to know that it has not gone from me, not all the way.
I think of the goddess Diana, mistress of the moon, mistress of the hunt, a dog by her side, a quiver of arrows hanging from her shoulder. In the modern city there is no Diana, there is no shrine built to appease her in the parks, there is no game for her to hunt. All that is left is the moon going on its way like the subways on their tracks. If I believed in Diana then I would believe in the underworld, a place across the river Styx where the dead floated without purpose through the remainder of time and I could imagine myself there possibly finding a shade I once had loved.
I read a book, at last I can read an entire book, in a reasonable number of hours. The book is a memoir by a young woman who finds God in an ashram in India. Good for her. Not for me. Western culture has eaten my heart and there seems to be very little I can do about it.
Sometimes I do wish I could transcend myself. I see H.’s gloves on the closet floor. In the outdoors-survival stores he searched for the thickest, warmest gloves he could find, because he had Reynaux’s disease, which turned his fingertips and toes blue in the cold. He said he wouldn’t die of it and he didn’t. But the disease caused him to wear double pairs of socks and thick black Thermasil gloves that were less than elegant. I see them now behind my summer sandals where they must have fallen months ago, and I feel a love uncontainable, a love for his fingers and his toes and his blood vessels that were not as competent as they should be. I feel his heavy-gloved hand as it tucks my windblown hair back behind my ear. His absence is for a flashing moment or two near intolerable and then becomes tolerable again. I might feel like Orpheus, who had lost for the last and final time Eurydice because he turned back to look at her. But I don’t. I feel instead a need to get some food in the house. I have forgotten again to buy milk and bread and cereal.
I sit down at my computer. It is not yet seven in the morning. I open my Outlook Express and there is another e-mail from my new friend in Albany. This morning he sends me an article on the outrageous conduct of professors in major universities who are silencing views that contradict their own. This may be true. But there is a grinding sound in this article. It reflects a grudge, a bitter bite that has been taken from the apple. I could write back and begin an argument on this but instead I write and say, “Tell me about your children.” I receive an e-mail almost immediately. He will call at noon. Noon is not so far away.
I am taking a class on ancient history in the land of Israel. I look around the room. I see primarily widows like me, gray hair, wrinkled skin, eyes behind thick glasses or freckled hands with veins raised like a relief map, showing mountains and valleys. I see a young woman with a sad face, stringy hair, no makeup, work boots; I see a middle-aged woman wearing a turban over what is likely a bare scalp. There are two men in the class. One is young and his hands are trembling. Medication, I think. The other is old and sweet and his mind creaks. Words escape him, meanings elude him, but he is there and always greets me with a smile that exposes his worn-out, crooked teeth. I am learning. I do the reading carefully. I am excited by the visions that come into my head. I am understanding something that was previously mysterious. There are exiles and captivities, and wars and emperors exacting tribute and kings that fall and kings that rise.
Why does this matter to me now? Why have I chosen this class? The city is full of opportunity for learning. I could do pottery. I could become a photographer. I could learn about medieval sculpture or Asian jewelry. I could find out about political theory or the development of Third World countries. Knowledge of all things is available to me. But this is what I wanted.
Also I wanted to leave my apartment. I wanted to do something I had not done before. I wanted to move forward into new territory both social and of the mind. But why ancient Biblical history?
The strangeness of the stories interests me but the familiarities comfort me. If it has always been the way it is now, then perhaps it will always be: something continues, someone returns from exile, someone plants a new orchard, someone holds a newborn baby. The conqueror comes, the conqueror falls. The long line of human error is oddly soothing. I read in Jeremiah, “My bowels, my bowels! I am pain at my very heart, my heart maketh a noise in me: I cannot hold my peace because thou hast heard, O, my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” I see it on the news each night.
I like my class. I like my fellow students. It is good at the end of your life to imagine the beginnings of history. The more I know of history the easier it will be to release my dear (dear to me) little soul into the eons, when the time comes.
I wake in the morning with my head pounding and my heart racing. There is no good reason for this. I feel overexcited, as if I am about to dive from a ridiculous height into a small barrel. Is it hormones that have no business running amok in my body at this time of my life? Is it a reaction to a nightmare that I can’t remember? Is it anxie
ty because I notice again that I wake in bed alone and I sleep alone? This is not a surprise. This is not a shock. It should not make my heart shake in my chest. Perhaps I am ill. But with what? I could call the doctor. Instead I take two Advil and wait for calm to return. Perhaps it is the taxes? I have an appointment with my accountant this afternoon. May the god of widows protect me from the government, leave me some spare change.
So I receive ten more e-mails in twenty-four hours from my friend in Albany. The phone rings at the appointed hour and we talk. He wants me to clean up my computer and he walks me through the process, giving me instructions in his deep, gruff voice. Oddly I feel as if we are dancing with one another as I press the key that he tells me to and then click and click again on my computer. He advises new software. He advises updates. I agree but don’t write down the names of the many additions he claims I need. I am dancing with my eyes closed. This is all right. Then I ask him again about his children. There is a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. My daughter, he explains, and begins a long story that is somewhat incomprehensible, probably because he isn’t telling me all, and possibly because he doesn’t understand it. His wife poisoned his relationship with the children. The daughter in high school began to talk to him on the phone and they became close. When she went to college he talked to her every day about her mind, her soul, her friends, his politics, his life, his Jungian theories, his belief in possible reincarnation. He was a part of everything she did and thought. And then she went to medical school and became a doctor and suddenly she pulled away and wouldn’t take his phone calls. Then she got married and she had two children and she wouldn’t let him see the children. He had never met them. “Why?” I asked. “What happened?” “She sent me a Christmas card last year,” he replied, “but I told her I didn’t want her cards. It was torture to see the photos of the children I am not allowed to meet.” “But what happened?” I asked. He did not answer. I think perhaps he was too much, too overbearing, too strong a force—or perhaps there was a history of something worse. I put that thought out of my mind.
I am thinking of inviting him down to stay with me for a few days. I imagine him driving down and bringing Cashew, his dog, the almost-beagle with sad eyes. I imagine him parking his car on my street. I imagine the terror my cat would feel on seeing his dog. I ask a good friend who lives a few blocks away whether she would take my cat for a few days if I have a visiting friend with a dog. “No,” she says.
I am invited to hear a pianist friend play in her home with a violinist she knows. I accept. The musicians play Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” No. 9. The violinist has a harsh but passionate tone but the pianist is perfect. I see her bending over the keys, looking somewhat like a painting of a nineteenth-century farm lady, shy, unassuming, colored like a sparrow, but underneath it all, the swells and dips of the music dominate, hint at bliss, promise more, withdraw the promise, pierce, roll forward, hurt even in its gentleness. My muscles, my veins, my tendons, my organs all respond. I sit on a chair in a living room where I had been so often with H. and I don’t think of him, I listen, listen as if I were an ear, not a mind. Usually I can’t hear music without intruding thoughts, observations, memories, words and more words, arriving uninvited. I wonder if I have changed, if the white water of grief has not worn out my critical, observing, commenting mind and left me smoother, like a blanket tucked in by a loving mother. After the music there is supper and instantly I return to my chattering self, my storytelling self, my excited-by-the-whiff-of-a-party self. But I don’t forget what it was like to listen. I promise it won’t be the last time music makes its way through the jumble of my brain.
This is the home of a psychoanalyst. Artists and poets, men of medicine, historians and museum curators have dined here. I look about the room. There are four people with serious cancers sitting near. Among the guests there have been more than half a dozen bypass surgeries. I know of at least one Parkinson’s sufferer, who sits in a chair at the far back. I know of one mother whose child was severely crippled by cerebral palsy. I know of another whose son is struggling with autism and a mother whose son is mentally ill and over on the bench by the Christmas cactus I see a father whose son is a drug addict and disappeared years ago. I smile and wave at the married man with a long ponytail and a gold earring whose mistress of long standing sits near me. I know of several unmarried childless middle-aged daughters whose disappointed mothers are standing nearby holding plates with pasta piled high.
I wonder why, with all the civilization in the room, so much went wrong, so many regrets hang in the casual gestures, the lifted wineglasses, the discussions of politics and biology that rise from across the room. Everyone here has been to Florence and Provence and Madrid and everyone here knows the names of at least three good restaurants in Paris. Is it dull of me to notice that sophistication, erudition, professional success is not a sufficient shield against the slings and arrows that keep arriving year after year? I do not believe that psychoanalysts failed their families in a manner worse or different from other people. I do not believe that shrinks are like choreographers, ones who can describe but can’t do. Accountants and investment folk, advertising and marketing people, salespeople and shopkeepers, basketball coaches and insurance agents have their sad tales as well. Out the window of this apartment I see the lamp lights in the park across the street blinking. I can barely see the dark water of the reservoir, and the stone wall that binds the park off from the avenue. Should we all have lived differently? And if so, how? How?
Now comes a slew of e-mails, two or three at a time from my friend from Albany. One is about the need to allow all citizens to carry handguns when they leave their homes. I e-mail back, “How are you? Do you like Dickens?” Immediately in reply I receive an e-mail. This one is a long article—I can hardly make my way through it, although I try—about the importance of the free market. I agree that the market should not be controlled by the government, but I’m not sure that means that government should abandon the health care of poor children or the bettering of schools. I’m not sure I understand economics well enough to have firm opinions. If the stock market in Hong Kong falls, am I in danger of losing my retirement funds and if so should I put them under my mattress? My e-mail friend does not answer my question on Dickens. Nevertheless I think about his coming to New York. I think about his face. I look again at the boyhood photos he has sent me that I have saved on my computer. I stare and stare.
I tell a friend about him. She is not impressed. “I would cut off all contact,” she says. I ignore her. She is passionate about her politics, which are not his, nor mine. “He’s probably an anti-Semite,” she says. He calls in the late afternoon. I curl up on my couch near a window where I can watch the owl who sits on a high fire escape across the way. “I know,” I say, “you are very pro-Israel in your fashion, but what about Jews, Jewish people I mean?” I ask. He says that his second wife was Jewish. They were only married for two years. She thought his father, who was living with them, was anti-Semitic. “Why?” I ask. “Because,” he says, “my father hardly talked to her. But that’s because he hardly talked. He was old. I took him to live with my brother.”
I ask him about his brothers and sisters. Of the eight of them, three are dead, two aren’t talking to each other. And he has lost touch with one of the others. That sounds normal to me. I like the low sound of his voice. I lean into it. I ask about Cashew. I tell him about the movie I had seen the night before with friends. We agree to talk the next day. The owl on the fire escape flies away, circles above in the sky and then disappears from view. He must have seen a rat in the park. I feel as if I have a secret, a good small secret deep within. I recognize the feeling from the first weeks of pregnancy, before I dared tell H., before anyone else knew, before it was confirmed by a rabbit who died for me. I fall asleep easily. I wake up and rise without (my usual habit) first running my hands over H.’s side of the bed as if I were confirming his absence.
What do I like here? The voice o
f the man is deep and rumbles from inside his chest. He is sure of what he thinks. He is odd, unconventional, a cook. He has large, sad eyes. He likes dogs. He is interested in me. He wants to know more about me. He is so other, so unlike anyone in my life. This is fine. He is slightly dangerous. Why? I sense it in his politics. I sense it in his many failed relationships. The danger should send me in the other direction. It doesn’t. He is appealing like a man who has been in a terrible fight and wouldn’t think of speaking of it. He is romantic—or is he evil? Is there a point at which these two qualities intersect?
I am an old lady but I can still flirt, tease, encourage, lead on, and play. In dancing school, when I was a girl, I learned that all you had to do to make a boy rush across the floor to ask you to dance a second time was to inquire about his favorite sport, to say something respectful about the position he played, to ask him about his summer camp or his winter vacation. If a boy begins to talk to you he is happy with you. My mother taught me that. Later is plenty of time to be yourself, to pick among the boys the one who most pleases you. The first job is to attract and for that you must reflect. I wonder if that is still true. My daughters are made of sterner stuff: perhaps, but perhaps not.
I receive an e-mail from Albany. It is about the outrageous demand of homosexuals to marry one another. It is about their intent to destroy marriage as an institution. It speaks of their filthy behaviors. Of course millions of people believe this. I, however, have not known any. I try to understand why the love of two men or two women for each other would harm anyone else. I don’t. I am repelled by the tone of the piece. It is angry and threatened and disturbed. Disturbed in all senses of the word, I think. Does he believe what he says in this e-mail? Of course he does, why else would he send it to me? Is this because he was raised Catholic, in Catholic schools? Can I ignore this e-mail? I want to. This is not a point that can be argued. No mind is going to be changed by logic or reason on either side. I think of my brother who lived his life with a cover story, with a lie, who was surly and bitter and often in a defensive crouch, or so I thought. Who would he have been if he had walked this earth with his own sexual nature fulfilled in love? H. would be patient with this irrational fear of the sexual other. He would find its source in our own childhood sexual confusions. I am impatient. The tone of the e-mail from Albany is ugly. All day I avoid thinking about it. I go for a walk.
