by Anne Roiphe
The man I am meeting is a seventy-five-year-old school psychologist. He lives on Long Island. He has never been married or had children but seems to want a relationship, late of course for this desire. I wonder what kept him single so long. He will have a story, a long story. I am curious but wary. Why is he looking for a companion now in his late life? Is he wanting someone to take care of him? It is unkind of me to think of this. If I begin to view approaching men as if they are predators then I will be ever alone, and not because it was fate or accident or anything of the sort. It will be because my soul soured before its time, my capacity to greet the world curdled. I called him at the number he sent me. Who knows, we may enjoy each other.
Sunday—I meet C. at a local café. He has traveled on the train to meet me. He does evaluations of small babies as well as therapy with all kinds of children who have run off the track, who show signs of misery that may later grow into deeper pits of sorrow. He is standing outside the café when I arrive, waiting for me. He is a gentle, sad man with dark, bushy eyebrows, an ex-boxer’s face, a wide chest; a child’s mischievousness plays across his mouth. We talk easily with each other. He wants to know me. He has read a book of mine. He asks the right questions, the ones that tell him where I came from, what has happened to me. I ask him the same questions. He is not eager to tell me anything beyond the bare details but I persist. Who were his parents, I ask. He moves his coffee from one side of the table to the other. He shrugs.
Does it matter in our adult life if a person is born and raised in a very different place from you? I don’t think so. Finally C. tells me that he was raised in six different foster homes and separated from his identical twin at age seven. He spent five years in an institution for troubled boys. His childhood is one that Oliver Twist would recognize. His adult years had been a struggle, to finish college which he didn’t do until his thirties, to find a profession, to make a place for himself, and in the course of all that he never found a woman, a woman he could trust or share his life with. And now? Now it may be too late. He loves to walk in the park, to read, to listen to music, but I wonder if the wounds are not still festering?
Also it may be too late for me to ever hold another man’s hand and think nothing of it, to walk beside him and know how his steps will fall. Is there a time when you can transplant your roots and another time when habits and custom and attachment to the old bind you, block you, keep you alone? I am not sure if I want to hold C.’s sad story in my crowded mind. I consider that I may die alone, pressing the life-alert button on the buzzer I will wear around my neck because I am afraid of strays with bleary eyes and men with long, sad histories. I am not sure about C. When I think of explaining myself to him, explaining my children, I sigh. He asks me if I would like to take a trip to Vietnam with him. I would and I wouldn’t. I won’t.
I am a hippopotamus sleeping in the mud. I must rouse myself, but the mud is what I know, the mud is warm and will not kill me. I can look at the familiar bush to the left and I can smell the familiar dead fish to the right and I can let the bird sit on my head if it should wish to pause in its flight. The effort to rise up and charge forward on my fat, stumpy hippopotamus legs seems more than should be required of an ordinary creature. I endure the sun. I wait for the rain to wash the dust from my hanging cheeks. Perhaps my blood pressure is low. Perhaps my potassium is low. Perhaps I have lost my nerve. No one ever said that nerve is a boundless renewable source.
Once I wore a red pinny and chased down the field swinging a hockey stick, back and forth after a tiny white ball all afternoon. Now I could nap from noon to sunset. Now I see no point in running until my chest is tight with pain. I see no point. Possibly because I lack teammates.
I pick up a copy of New York magazine and in the back I see two pages of advertisements for matchmakers. They promise to help you find your mate, any age twenty-five to seventy-five. They promise to be discreet. They promise a private meeting. This differs from e-mail matching only in that a real person (whose face is grinning at me from the ad) has to learn my name and cash my check for the service. How many disconnected people must there be in the world if a full two pages’ worth of matchmaking companies buy space to hawk their services. I can’t do this. Why not? Because I am a widow not a wallflower. While there is no label for male wallflowers, I suspect that the users of these services would qualify for the description. On the other hand this is a distinction without a purpose. Perhaps I am living in an age that has passed. There may no longer be parents and siblings and friends to introduce the single to each other. Our circles while larger may be weaker. It may take a village to introduce a widow to a widower but I don’t live in a village. Should I move to one?
I have guests coming. I open the cookbook and a recipe written on a scrap of paper falls out. It is H.’s handwriting, his illegible doctor’s scrawl. It is a recipe for glazed carrots. A wall tumbles down. I cannot stop the tears. Over a recipe? I attempt to distract myself. I pick up the newspaper. A levee has been breached: more tears. All right. I give in. This will be a morning of tears, tears without reason, tears that rise and flood, recede and rise again. I suspect tears. But what can I do, they have arrived. I trust they will go. I could call a friend. I don’t. These tears are not matters for a friend. They are private. Just between H. and me. Which under the circumstances means just for me. Tears do not wash away the debris they bring any more than rain empties the sky of water. I go to my desk. “Welcome,” says my computer. Writing stops the tears: immediately. I would never risk harm to my computer. Water might seep in and destroy a chip, an electronic pulse, a necessary connection. I type dry-eyed. I have restored the levee.
A man has e-mailed me. I read his profile. He sounds sweet. He lives in another state. He is a golf player. He talks of love. I’ll think about him later.
Some dear friends know a single divorced man around my age. Some years ago he left a wife, a fine-looking, intelligent woman, the mother of his daughter, and married a very young, long-legged Frenchwoman with whom he has a child now seven years old. The mother of the child has grown tired of him and wants to live alone with her child in Paris. I envy this man his seven-year-old son. I envy this man his ability to play in the fields of beauty and youth as long as it pleases him. The man knows me but doesn’t call. I am sorry that this man cannot see me. Once I was a long-legged girl, but “once” is not much of an invitation into the present.
I go with a cousin to see an apartment she might purchase in a neighborhood building. The apartment is on a high floor with views of the cathedral and the church steeple and the looping bridge across the river. We visit a friend of hers who lives in the building. The woman is about my age, a widow too, but she tells us that she is meeting her boyfriend in a few minutes. He has been introduced to her by her children who went to school with his children. She has his picture by her bed on the opposite side of her dead husband’s photo. I am jealous. She beams, she glows, she is joyous. Is this luck? I have never really believed in luck. A good man does not just fall out of the sky. You need to make such a thing happen. You need to be ready if such a thing does happen. You can’t be mean and grouchy, bitter or sad. You need to be able to catch your luck. When I was a child the carousel in Central Park had a wooden arm on its side from which rings hung and you could lean off your horse and reach for a ring. If you caught a gold one you could ride twice more for free. I would swing from my horse, one hand around its painted neck, time it as best I could, and extend my arm as far as it would go, the wooden beams of the building went up and down with the motion of the horses. But you had to reach and sometimes you missed and for years my arms were too short and when they were long enough the game was no longer so interesting.
At any rate I am jealous. A strange feeling I can hardly remember from girlhood. A knot forms in my chest. I smile at the woman. The loss of innocence occurs more than once.
The red cardinal has returned, his brown mate with him. They fly high above the garbage cans in the alley below. They sto
p to rest on windowsills and on the bars of the fire escape. He pecks her on the neck. She flies a few feet away. I throw open the window. The air is warmer than it has been. The season is changing. I am going around but not forward. Or perhaps I am. The roots under the dark ground bulge and push, long before a green shoot breaks the surface.
There was an architect who designed a beautiful synagogue near the sea in the town where once we vacationed. The synagogue was made of glass and a glowing honey-colored wood, pure as we all wish our hearts could be. Something however was wrong with the architect. One afternoon he went for a swim in the ocean on a deserted beach and he took off his clothes and folded them neatly next to his towel and went into the water and swam out to sea and when he could swim no longer he sank. It could be that he thought he would never build anything to equal his synagogue. Or more likely a depression with a monster’s face overcame him one morning at the breakfast table as he was pouring milk on his cereal. Perhaps his wife planned to leave him or he had just received a diagnosis of liver cancer or early Alzheimer’s. The local papers had no answer, or if they had it, they didn’t print it.
I think of myself in the ocean, the tide pulling me outwards, my limbs numb with the cold, the ocean is always cold. I brush away the seaweed that clings to my leg as if I were a log floating by. I open my eyes under the water but I see no fish, only the tiny debris of cell life, fish gill, spittle of ocean creatures. Do I want to get back to shore now that I have gone so far out that I cannot turn around? No one sees me. No one waves. At the horizon’s edge I see a boat, a fishing boat with trawler nets raised high. It is too far away for me to hail. I do not want to hail it. I drift. My arms are tired, my muscles ache. Virginia Woolf put stones in her pockets so she would quickly drop to the bottom. In an ocean it would be important to start at high tide, to swim out, far over one’s head, where you can’t put feet down and reverse direction at will. Is Spain really over there out beyond the edge, which isn’t an edge but just a curve, an illusion of a stopping place, a separation of sky and land?
I have an idea for a story. I keep the idea in a special place in my brain and I pull it out every once in a while to examine it, expand it, let it breathe. I am having friends over for dinner. I buy a piece of salmon from the fish store. I walk along Broadway and see that under the awnings of the Korean stores the daffodils are now sitting in buckets of water. There they are, a humble flower, cheap, persistent, yellow, a flower of the proletariat. I purchase a bunch along with green leaves. At home I place them in a glass vase in the middle of my dining table. My cat tries to eat the leaves. I chase him away. I know that as soon as my back is turned he will return to his feast and my flowers will not last the night. A cat is entitled to some pleasure too, a splash of color in his life, a leaf or two to munch. I understand. I speak to my daughters on the phone. They report no disasters, no new wounds of mind or body. This is good.
I wake at 2:45 in the morning. It is dark, but not dead dark, dark on the edge of mitigation. I no longer put my hand out to feel the empty space next to me. I know it is there. I listen to the sirens wail along the avenue. I pick up my New Yorker magazine. I want to read an article about the Sudan. But I am too tired. My head begins to throb. I cannot help those the Janjaweed would kill. I cannot make dictators desist and warlords retreat and land-grabbers grow modest in their needs. I am a widow who can grind her teeth in fury, who can write a letter to her president, e-mail a friend, or just wait for morning at the window, knowing that the blush of dawn will return over the East River when it is ready, good and ready and nothing I can do will rush the morning, or change the drip-drip of time, or rescue a child. Then I read an article about aging. I read about a woman in her eighties who lives alone and due to arthritis and stiffness in the joints has not been able to clean her own feet, so they have grown filthy, infected, cracked. She also forgets to eat and drink. Otherwise she’s fine. What upsets me more than her feet are the empty days she describes with no one coming to visit, no work to do, no one expecting her call. I don’t want my arteries kept open longer than my telephone lines.
So I consider the matter of my own body. It is still hale. I can bend and swoop and my knees are willing and my arms while not rippling with muscle are up to most tasks. My heart beats steadily. My eyes are clear. My ears hear. My fingers have no swelling in the joints, my legs are still firm. But I know the odds. A small vessel in my brain will break off from its branch and spill blood where blood does not belong. Or a clot in an artery will break loose and, like a hand over a mouth, the words will end. I will grow nauseous and break out in sweat and exhaustion will roll over me and I will or will not be near enough a hospital. Perhaps a cell will lose its fight with an antagonist and turn into its own enemy and replicate its cannibalistic self somewhere, breast, liver, pancreas, intestine, gland, frontal lobe. No matter how vigilant I am, how regularly I take my aspirin, take my vitamins, abstain from evil substances, the thing will happen. In the early hours of the morning when the street is mostly still, the lamp lights fuzzy in the dimness, the stars paled, the moon out of my sight, I can tell something is approaching. I’m waiting for it to announce itself. Whom will I call when it comes? Who will comfort me? I practice comforting myself, with reassuring words, with a drink of water, with a hand on the cat’s head. I might welcome the intruder when it comes. I could be ready. I could be waiting with my ticket in hand on the railroad platform for the last trip. I could hear the train whistle blowing down the track and with only a small shiver of fear, a wave of my hand to my daughters, move eagerly forward as the bells of the lowering guard gate sound.
Also I haven’t forgotten my window, the one that opens to the alley below. If I am not paralyzed or too weak to turn the handle on the window’s frame, I can avoid the worst. If I have the courage. If I don’t then I deserve what will follow.
In the afternoon I go to a concert with friends. I hear music now better than I ever did before H.’s death. I don’t know why but I guess that it is because music reaches behind or over words and words are less insistent in my brain, I can’t tell H. anything. This leaves a space for music to climb into my brain. At any rate I am grateful. Then last night I saw a wonderful movie. I wished I had written the script for that movie. I wished I had directed that movie. I could never have written that movie. It was about Spain at the end of the Civil War and about a child and the Resistance and an evil Fascist. (That is and is not an oxymoron.) It was a fairy tale. But you needed to know different things than I know in order to have written that story. Or is that an excuse? When I was younger I would have said, I can do that in my own vocabulary. Now I think I have such a limited vocabulary. Or has my imagination become ossified? Will it revive? I wished H. had seen that movie with me.
In the shower my mind drifts back to that lawsuit, settled some months ago. I was attacked. I felt attacked. If I were a cartoon figure, a bite would be taken out of my head. Not a large bite, significant only because I would look lopsided. The bite is not financial although that too. It is about having left, in my slimy snail-like trail, a really bad enemy. It’s about admitting the limits of my capacity to skip about gracefully. When I think of that lawsuit I feel ugly. Although I did nothing wrong, I did nothing extraordinarily right either. I imagine most people carry around a story or two like this. Not necessarily a lawsuit, but something that sticks in the craw, forms a burr on the bone, makes the soul creak as if it were older than it is. That is how we know we’ve fallen from grace, been expelled from the garden.
I have been contacted on Match.com by someone who calls himself Longingforyou. I can’t. I just can’t respond. Perhaps Longingforyou is my perfect mate, perhaps I am closing doors that I should leave open. But I can’t walk through that one. Also the same morning comes an e-mail from Friskyatnight. He is thirty-two years old and is looking for a woman from fifty to seventy years of age. The secret fantasies we all hold, fantasies that once would have remained in our brains, are now taken out for a vast Internet show-and-tell. Thi
s is interesting: inhibition may become a fossil found only in Amish communities. Repression may have gone the way of the dial telephone.
I find I do not immediately throw in the trash the brochures for trips that arrive from museums and alumna associations. I read them carefully. I daydream myself in faraway places listening to lectures on sculpture or the life of the starfish. I think about Paris and Florence and the rivers in Montana. Eventually after the brochures have sat on my table for several weeks I scoop them up and toss them out. But I am getting closer to packing a suitcase and going somewhere.
IN THE JEWISH TRADITION, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF A death there is a ceremony held at the grave site and the stone is unveiled and the family comes to see the stone at the grave site and prayers are said. H.’s death was in December but a year later the ground was frozen and it wasn’t possible to mount the stone. We waited until April. It is warm and the sun is welcome after weeks of rain, after a winter of a harsh wind blowing off the river. We drive in two cars, my children and their children, and we go to the cemetery some fifty minutes away. I wear my sunglasses. I need to protect my eyes from the sight of others. I need to protect others from the sight of my eyes. In the back of the minivan in which I am sitting, the son of my stepdaughter, my oldest grandchild, who has come down from college for the occasion, is discussing his girlfriend, who lives in Los Angeles. The subject turns to the Mets game the night before. His mother leans forward from her seat in the far back wanting to hear every word. His little sister is drawing on a pad in her lap. The middle child has barely opened his eyes, that sixteen-year-old mask on his face tells me nothing. I want to tell my son-in-law to drive me back home. I want to tell them I changed my mind. The other car with my two daughters, one husband and two little girls has already arrived at our destination and waits for us at the cemetery gates. I have arranged this not because of custom or religious law, neither of which would have impressed H. and neither of which binds me. I planned this excursion to the grave site. I must have had a reason. I search my mind but can’t find it. I say nothing and the car moves up the highway toward the cemetery.
