A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At the end of the evening Ed Doctorow walks with me to the car that will return me to Princeton. Warmly Ed hugs me, and tells me again how sorry he and Helen are, about Ray. He tells me that they’d expected that I would cancel the engagement and I tell Ed, “Oh but why would I cancel tonight? Where would I be if I weren’t here? I mean—where would I rather be . . .”

  Thinking I don’t really have a home. It doesn’t matter where I am, I am homeless now.

  This is wrong of course, for I have a home. And I am very lucky, as a widow, to have such a home.

  Think of the widows who are made truly homeless by the loss of a husband! Those for whom some sort of suttee might be the least of their sorrows.

  The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer.

  By identifying the books on the coffee table as “Ray’s books” I have tried to inject meaning into them, meaning that once inhabited the objects but has since drained out; as I have tried to inject meaning into the jackets, sport coats, shirts and trousers, etc., hanging in closets in the house—men’s articles of clothing, but belonging to—whom?

  The terror of mere “things” from which meaning has drained—this is a terror that sweeps over the widow at such times, ever more frequently since I’ve been traveling, and return home to the empty house.

  For no things contain meaning—we are surrounded by mere things into which meaning has been injected, and invested. Things hold us in thrall as in a kind of hypnosis, hallucination

  The entire house in which I live—in which I live now alone—each room, each article of furniture, each artwork on the wall, each book—and now, more visibly each day, for spring is approaching inexorably as a locomotive on a track, the snowdrops, crocuses, and tulip-shoots in Ray’s courtyard garden—has been drained of meaning. These objects, “things”—almost, I feel a tinge of hatred for them—resentment and revulsion. If I stare at something—a mirror, for instance—a scrim of some sort begins to obscure my gaze. Often I am light-headed, dazed and dizzy when stepping inside the house, even as I’m very very relieved—happy to be back: “Honey, hello! Hi! I’m home . . .” If I’m not careful I will collide with a chair, or a table; my legs are (still) covered in bruises; sometimes I am short of breath as if the oxygen in the house has been depleted, or some sort of odorless toxic gas has seeped in; I have difficulty with my balance as if the floor were tilting beneath my feet. The more I stare at a mirror, for instance the mirror in the dining room, on the wall contiguous with the kitchen, the more the reflection inside waves, blurs—is that a face? Or the absence of a face? For I too am fading. With no one to see me, no one to name me and to love me, I am fast fading.

  The art-works on the walls. The large oil paintings by Wolf Kahn. These are the most striking objects in our house, the eye moves immediately to them. Visitors invariably comment on the paintings—“So beautiful! Who is the artist?” Sometimes I stand staring, mesmerized. For this is the magic of art—it can pull us out of ourselves, it can mesmerize. Yet—perversely—I have been thinking of removing some of the art-works on our walls because they remind me too painfully of Ray—of how Ray and I purchased them, in New York City soon after we’d moved to Princeton. There are two quite large Wolf Kahn landscapes—a lavender barn, an autumn forest—as well as several pastels, all New England scenes in the artist’s striking impressionistic style. The lavender barn we’d bought in a Manhattan gallery, the others we’d bought, or were given, by the artist himself when we’d visited his dazzling-white studio in Chelsea. (Wolf Kahn’s studio is flooded with light because the artist is afflicted with macular degeneration and needs as much light as possible when he paints. Seeing immense canvases on the walls, all of them paintings-in-progress and all of them gorgeous pastel colors, dreamlike swirls of color, I was naive enough to ask Wolf Kahn what it was like to work in beauty every day, not to be snarled in prose like writers of fiction, and Wolf replied, with an air of explaining something elemental which I should have known: “The canvases aren’t beautiful to me. Beauty has nothing to do with it. I’m solving problems.”)

  Solving problems. Of course. This is what it means to be human.

  What the widow must remember: her husband’s death did not happen to her but to her husband. I have no right to appropriate Ray’s death. This swirl of emotions, this low-grade fever, nausea, malaise—what has this to do with true grief, mourning? Is any of this true grief, mourning? I must stop dwelling upon the past, which can’t be altered. I must stop hearing these teasing, taunting voices—Is my husband alive? Yes! Your husband is alive Mrs. Smith!

  I must take a pill tonight, or maybe a half-pill—but leave the other half here on the bedside table, with a glass of water, for 4 A.M. Just in case.

  Chapter 48

  In Motion! —“Mouth of the Rat”

  Boca Raton, Florida. March 9–10. Following the principle of it scarcely matters where the widow is, since there is no longer a place in which the widow is at home, I find myself in an utterly unreal—wind-whipped, “beautiful”—as glossy advertisements in Vanity Fair are “beautiful”—setting: Boca Raton!

  It’s the Boca Raton Arts Festival. To which Ray and I had been invited together, months before. Now, Edmund White has been kind enough to accompany me. And my friend former Modern Library editor David Ebershoff is one of the participants. This is an interlude of just two days that will pass in a blur like landscape glimpsed from a speeding vehicle—most memorably, following my reading one evening, guests at a reception are utterly shocked, incredulous and thrilled, wanting to talk about nothing else but the Eliot Spitzer scandal, only that morning headlined in the New York Times.

  For of course in this upscale Florida resort, populated by what appear to be mostly upscale Manhattanites, everyone reads the New York Times.

  “We know the family! Spitzer’s father—Bernard—such a wonderful man—a devoted family man!—he will be devastated.”

  “We know the wife—the wife’s family—”

  “How can a man do such things to his wife—”

  “—his family—”

  “—daughters—”

  “My son—he’s the same way! Just like Spitzer! These women—‘call girls’—these terrible women—the men can’t resist them, it’s terrible—my own son!—I know, he’s doing such things—he’s risking his family—what a terrible terrible thing—”

  “And him such a hypocrite—Spitzer—”

  “No one can stand Spitzer—a bully, a bastard—”

  “—snide, sneering—”

  “—like Giuliani—”

  “—Giuliani? Worse!—”

  “No, not worse than Giuliani—Spitzer’s policies are good—solid liberal Democrat—”

  “He’s a crook!—Spitzer. Whatever came of that investigation—his father ‘loaning’ him money—”

  “Campaign money—he spent on ‘hookers’—”

  “What happened to that?—that investigation—”

  “Imagine, the man spent $80,000 on prostitutes! He spent campaign money on prostitutes!”

  “Poor Bernard. I think of that family—”

  “Bernard? The father? He’s a crook, too!”

  “No, no he is not! He’s a good family man, a wonderful man—devoted—”

  “My son—he refuses to discuss his family life—he has no idea how he is risking his marriage—these ‘call girls’ are like cocaine—the married men can’t resist.”

  Such avid conversations swirl about us, Edmund White and I are fascinated and don’t at all mind being side-lined. Especially striking to us—as if Ethel Merman were to have stepped off a Broadway stage in full war-paint makeup, bejeweled and glittering, in expensive designer resort-wear clothes and hair the color and consistency of cotton candy—is the excitable woman so openly, so bizarrely speaking of her son to a gathering of strangers; to Edmund and me, most partic
ularly, as if being “literary” writers, we might offer some special understanding and insight.

  “Maybe this will knock some sense into my son’s head, what has happened to Spitzer. If anything like this ever happened in our family . . .”

  No one notices when Edmund White and I drift away from the reception, having signed as many of our books as we are likely to sign, in fact more copies than we might have predicted in such a setting. For here is a true-life drama beside which the stratagems of fiction are mere shadows. Nothing like another’s scandal, the devastation of another’s family and the collapse of a public career, to stir the heart.

  Almost, I’ve forgotten why I feel so—bereft.

  Why I feel as if I were just recovering from—what?—a nasty case of the flu?

  A friend has written to me this poignant letter—

  I had a nervous breakdown when I was twenty-eight and beside anxiety attacks, I had acute insomnia. It was because I was going through a huge internal sea change, and I remember that the insomnia was hell. It lasted for about six months and it was all I could do to hold onto the threads of sanity during the day. I felt unhinged and wondered if I would ever feel normal again. It was very frightening—and the symptoms sound similar to yours . . . I used to feel it was like a baby’s fontanel, where there’s a hole that closes up very slowly, and one doesn’t feel like one is on solid ground until the plates of the skull have finally grown together. While the hole’s still there, one feels as if one is falling into the chasm ALL ALONE. So (I think) it might be helpful to have some of your friends take turns staying in your house with you. I also think a grief group would help . . . You should know our hearts are totally with you and we’d like to support you in whatever way would help.

  Staying in my house with me!—these are haunting words.

  I am grateful, yet terribly embarrassed—and ashamed—to think that friends are talking about me—obviously, they are concerned about me—and I have hardly hinted to them how desperate, how frantic, how unrecognizable to myself I really am.

  Is it therapy of a kind, or is it a coincidence—(but in the mental life, as Freud suggests, there are no coincidences)—that the story I am composing, with such excruciating slowness, that will require literally weeks, months, to complete, is about suicide; a young woman poet abandoned by her lover, driven by depression/fury/madness to kill herself . . .

  The romance of suicide, for poets!—the heightened being, the ecstatic expectations that can’t be sustained, the engulfing by language, “music”—the terror that the “music” will cease.

  Or has ceased, without the poet quite knowing.

  But my story isn’t about a loss of “music”—or not entirely: it’s about a woman abandoned by her lover who is also the father of her child . . . a child whom she is contemplating killing, along with herself . . . and so the situation is very different from my own.

  Or at least, I want to think so.

  I am not going to commit suicide. I have not even any clear, coherent plan!

  For I’ve been told—warned—by a philosopher-friend that “taking pills” is not a good idea.

  You have no idea how many pills to swallow, he said. You become sick to your stomach and vomit, you lapse into a coma and when you wake up you’re brain-damaged—and now, you will never have the opportunity to kill yourself.

  What a bizarre matter-of-fact conversation this was! And we were in a restaurant, amid cheery convivial fellow-diners.

  I hadn’t told him about the pill-cache. Somehow he’d seemed to know.

  Or maybe—this is a sudden, chilling thought—accumulating pills is utterly commonplace, everyone does it and for the same reason.

  Foolproof ways to commit suicide, my philosopher-friend says, are few. A bullet in the brain, you might think—“But then, you might miss—and you need a gun”; inhaling carbon dioxide—“But then, someone might discover you too soon”; taking a few pills prior to affixing a plastic bag over your head which you take care to tie tightly—“But then, it’s so laborious and clumsy, you might panic and change your mind.”

  Suicide may be a taboo subject but speaking of it in such a way has its blackly comic element. One tries for a too-casual air, or a too-somber air. Even hinting at it one is likely to seem insincere, childish, hungry for attention.

  Of course I don’t mean it! I mean very little of what I say.

  Of course, I am a fantasist . . . You can’t possibly take me seriously.

  There is a philosopher—Leibniz?—who claimed to believe that the universe is continuously collapsing and continuously reassembling itself, through eternity. Whether he believed in God also, I don’t recall—I suppose he did, if this is Leibniz, in the late seventeenth century. As bizarre metaphysics go, this isn’t the most bizarre. To dismiss it as illogical, arbitrary, and unprovable is beside the point. And so I’ve come to think of my “self”—my “personality”—as an entity that collapses when I am alone and unperceived by others; but then, as if by magic, when I am with other people, my “personality” reassembles itself.

  Like one who must make her way across a tightrope, with no net beneath—quickly, before falling!—but not too quickly.

  Walking with Edmund White along the beach—tramping in the damp sand—on the eve of our departure from Boca Raton, Florida, we’re talking of Ray, whom Edmund knew well; and we talk of Edmund’s French lover Hubert who’d died of AIDS some years ago, of whom he’d written in his novel The Married Man with unflinching candor; how it seems to us, who have “survived,” that some part of us has died with those we’d loved, and is interred with them, or burnt to ash. Death is the most obvious—common—banal fact of life and yet—how to speak of it, when it has struck so close? When one dies, and another lives, what is this “life” that’s left over?—for a long time, Edmund says, it will seem unreal. It is unreal—set beside the intensity of the love that has been lost.

  And so how wonderful, to have a friend like Edmund, to whom I can speak of these things. And Edmund is the most cheerful of companions, and makes me laugh. And makes me forget the furious voice in my head This is wrong! You can’t enjoy this. If Ray can’t be here by the ocean, it isn’t right that you can be. You know this!

  Later that evening, we hear the astonishing young Chinese pianist Lang Lang playing Chopin. Still later, in my hotel suite watching Lockdown—a gritty, grueling cable-TV documentary set in a men’s maximum security prison in Illinois, which neither Edmund nor I has seen before—“These are people worse off than we are!”

  And maybe at 11 P.M. we will switch to CNN to see what the latest lurid revelations are, in the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

  Chapter 49

  In Motion!— “The Wonder Woman of American Literature”

  Columbia, South Carolina. March 19, 2008.

  And now I am in the warm welcoming company of Janette Turner Hospital who has invited me to give a reading at the University of South Carolina in conjunction with her enormous class in contemporary American writers—the novel of mine they’ve read is The Falls, but some have also recently read The Gravedigger’s Daughter—there’s a blur of applause, handshakes and smiling faces—I am feeling elated, afloat—for how easy it is, how natural to smile when others are smiling. The widow would have to be clinically depressed/catatonic not to respond.

  Miss Oates! You are my favorite writer, the first novel of yours I read was them . . .

  Miss Oates! I’ve read all of your books, my favorite is Blonde . . .

  My sister’s birthday is Sunday, please will you inscribe Happy Birthday, Sondra!—sign and date thank you . . .

  A buzz of voices, a roaring in my ears—though I seem to be smiling and in fact I am very happy to be here—whatever “Joyce Carol Oates” is, or was—I am very happy to be her—if this is the individual to whom such attention has accrued for this warm welcoming fleeting hour at least.

  I am trying to recall what it was like—this couldn’t have been long ago, a month and a day—to feel th
at I was alive; to feel that I was an actual person, and not this simulacrum of a person; to feel that, if I don’t retreat soon to my hotel room, I will disintegrate into bits and pieces clattering across the floor. And yet—such is the widow’s (secret) vanity, I am thinking that only now in this diminished but utterly lucid state am I allowed to see things as they really are.

  For when Ray was alive, even when he wasn’t with me I was never alone; now that Ray is gone, even when I am with other people, a crowd of other people, I am never not-alone.

  The cure for loneliness is solitude—as Marianne Moore has said. But how frightening solitude seems to me, now!

  Centuries ago writers hoped to attain a kind of immortality through their writing—Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with this hope—the last lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are almost defiant in the claim—

  Now I have done my work. It will endure,

  I trust, beyond Jove’s anger, fire and sword,

  Beyond Time’s hunger . . .

  Part of me,

  The better part, immortal, will be borne

  Above the stars; my name will be remembered

  Wherever Roman power rules conquered lands,

  I will be read, and through all centuries,

  If prophecies of bards are ever truthful,

  I will be living, always.

  —(Ovid, Metamorphoses,“Epilogue,” translated by Rolfe Humphries)

  In contemporary times—in the West, at least—it isn’t just that most writers no longer believe in anything like “immortality”—for either our books, or ourselves; it’s rather that such a claim, or even such a wish, has an ironic/comical ring to it. Who could have guessed, in Ovid’s time, in the first century B.C., that there would one day be a world in which the very term “Roman power [ruling] conquered lands” would be divested of all meaning, like the god of all gods “Jove.” It’s a sad comfort—far more sad than comforting—to know that one’s books are being translated, sold, and presumably read in many countries, even as one’s life lies in tatters; and what a mocking sort of “good news” it is to be informed, via email, on the eve of Ray’s birthday last week, that a long-anticipated exhibit of a collection of my books owned by the writer/interviewer Larry Grobel in Los Angeles has just been mounted in the Powell Library at UCLA under the title JOYCE CAROL OATES—THE WONDER WOMAN OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. (“ . . . over four decades she has written over 115 books, 55 novels, more than 400 short stories, over a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, eight books of poetry and thirty-plus plays. . . .”)