A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Where there is betrayal, there can be anger, rage. I am thinking with envy how much healthier, how much more exhilarating, such emotions would be, than the heavyheartedness of grief like a sodden overcoat the widow must wear.

  One of the—several-times-divorced—women tells us that her most recent husband cheated her of thousands of dollars, but that her lawyer advised her not to sue him: “It wouldn’t be worth it.”

  It’s shocking that this man—known to the community as a distinguished research scientist—seems to have been dishonest, duplicitous. From the way in which M. speaks of him, you would be led to believe that she despises him. Yet she’d left a previous husband for this man amid a flurry of Princeton scandal, some years before.

  Each had left an unsuspecting spouse. Each had deeply wounded the left-behind spouse.

  And E.’s tales of her traitorous companion of seventeen years! Robustly told, and funny.

  Wine helps. If one drinks.

  Amid this bawdy Wife-of-Bath talk how lonely I feel, how—inexperienced, naive. . . . It’s a fact that Ray was the first man in my life, the last man, the only man . . . Despite my reputation as a writer my personal life has been as measured and decorous as Laura Ashley wallpaper.

  The women turn their attention upon me. I’ve been so quiet. I can’t tell them I am so yearning to go home, to crawl into my nest. Even if I can’t sleep. I am so unhappy, here . . .

  Though really, I am happy here. I am “having a very good time” here. The women are wonderful company, E. has made a splendid dinner, there is something heartening about our being together—as if the glittering dining room table—candlelight reflected in the fine wood, slender glass vases of white flowers—were a kind of life raft, and we four in the life raft, on a choppy sea.

  M. asks if I am sleeping and I tell her that I’m not sleeping very well but that I’ve stopped taking a prescription drug to which I’d become addicted—just the previous night, I managed not to give in and take this drug; if I’d expected M., a professional woman with a medical degree of some kind, to be impressed with this remark, I am taken aback by the bluntness with which M. speaks, ostensibly to me, but for the benefit of the others: “You could be ‘addicted’ to that drug for the rest of your life and it wouldn’t be nearly so serious as going without sleep. If you don’t sleep your immune system will be weakened, you’ll be susceptible to illnesses and infections and your life expectancy will be shortened. If you don’t sleep, you die.”

  How like a curse this sounds to me, I sit stunned at the dining table, staring. How helpless I feel, like one about to slip from the life raft out of sheer weakness, exhaustion. If you don’t sleep, you die.

  M. speaks with authority. M. tells us that “morbidity studies have shown . . .”

  Morbidity studies! The words strike a chill in me. I’d been so determined to break my addiction to Lorazepam—as if this were equivalent to breaking an addiction to anxiety, depression, insomnia—the condition of widowhood itself . . .

  Driving home, I feel mounting anxiety, yet a kind of childish relief—I tried to break the addiction. I tried!

  Chapter 58

  The Intruder

  There is someone in the house! There is an intruder in the house! Carelessly she had not locked all the doors—again. And now, Death has entered through the rear door overlooking the terrace. Frightened and paralyzed she lies in her bed. Footsteps, in the hallway. Silently the door, kept ajar, is pushed open. A figure in the dark—a darkness ten times dark—for she has turned off the bedside light, evidently—and she has fallen asleep—has she?—in a state of anxious exhaustion—in a state of drug withdrawal—“derealization”—unable to move as the intruder approaches her. For Death is always he. Death is always mute and efficient and the most efficient way is to press a pillow over her face, her nose and mouth. No air! No oxygen! She struggles, panicked. This is not the Death she had fantasized. This is not the Death she had wished for. She will put up a struggle for she is an animal fighting for her life—the physical life, raw animal-life, that knows nothing of the luxury of loss, grief, melancholia. The struggling woman in her sweaty churned bed is unexpectedly strong but Death is stronger.

  Part V

  “You Looked So Happy”

  Though you loved Ray, very much, and could not imagine living without him, you will begin to discover that you are doing things that Ray would not have much been interested in doing, and you are meeting people you would not have met when Ray was alive, and all this will change your life for the better, though you might not think so now.

  —Eleanor Bergstein

  Chapter 59

  Too Soon!

  This is shocking to me—that the unremitting cold of the season of Ray’s death—New Jersey sky like a pot carelessly scoured, twilight easing up out of the drab earth by late afternoon—is yielding by slow degrees to spring.

  The widow doesn’t want change. The widow wants the world—time—to have ended.

  As the widow’s life—she is certain—has ended.

  A perverse sort of comfort, solace—that the winter has hung on so long, well into late March, early April.

  Standing in the doorway staring into the courtyard. How long I’ve been standing here, I have no idea. What fascinates me—what fills me with dread—are the small green tender shoots pushing through the snow-crust of the earth: tulips. Too soon! This is too soon.

  Ray’s tulips. Last fall he’d dug up this entire bed, and he’d planted dozens of tulip bulbs. On his knees in the soft dark earth utterly absorbed, contented, happy.

  A gardener is one for whom the prospect of the future is not threatening but happy.

  He’d shown me the packages of tulip bulbs, from Holland. Bright red, yellow-striped, purple-striped, white with pale orange strips like lace. He’d bought these tulips at his favorite nursery/garden center which is Kale’s Nursery about two miles from our house.

  Want to come with me?—I’m going to Kale’s after lunch.

  Usually, I’d said no. No thank you, I have work to do.

  Now I am sick at heart, remembering. What stupidity—madness—had blinded me, that I’d imagined there was work to do more important than accompanying my husband to Kale’s.

  In other beds, near the driveway, snowdrops are already in bloom—almost invisible, unobtrusive. Such small delicate bell-like flowers, almost you might mistake them for dollops of snow, or overlook them entirely amid the late-winter accumulation of rotted leaves, storm debris.

  And crocuses, which Ray had planted also: lavender, purple-striped, yellow, pale orange . . . Too soon! This is all too soon.

  These small early-spring flowers I would pick, just a few, to place in small vases on the dining room table, on the kitchen windowsill, sometimes on Ray’s desk.

  Now, the thought of picking flowers, bringing them into the house, is repulsive to me, obscene.

  Like preparing a meal in the kitchen. Sitting at the dining room table, eating.

  So much is becoming obscene, because it has not ended.

  “It isn’t fair. Ray would want so badly to be . . .”

  To be here. To be alive.

  I am thinking of how, that morning in February, I’d found Ray in the guest room, at the white Parsons table, wadded tissues scattered on the tabletop amid the sprawl of the New York Times. How I’d insisted upon taking him to the medical center. How I’d believed—we’d both believed—that this was an inconvenience, an annoyance—an interruption of our workday—but that Ray would be home within hours, or maybe by next morning.

  By the road to the contagious hospital—this line of William Carlos Williams reverberates in my head like a persistent rattle.

  And I am thinking, helplessly I am thinking, how terrible it is, that, when I’d driven Ray into Princeton, it was the contagious hospital to which I was delivering him, like a good wife. Taking my husband away from the home in which he’d been so happy, and delivering him—where? He’d trusted me, he’d been weak, sick. He h
ad not the strength to resist, or to question my decision.

  And now, the tulips. These tulips from Holland, that will outlive him.

  A kind of rage comes over me, almost I want to dig up the tulip bulbs, or cover the shoots with rotted leaves, dirt.

  If the widow could stop time.

  If the widow could reverse time.

  My mouth is parched, my lips feel chafed. There is the familiar sour taste of morning—the insomniac’s morning-after—this groggy/headachey/zombie state that follows an interminable night interrupted by periods of “sleep”—not the powerful Lorazepam which I have ceased taking despite S.’s advice but other medications, spaced through the night: at 11 P.M. maybe a Lunesta half-pill; at 4 A.M. a second half-pill, or, at a friend’s recommendation, one or two tablets of Tylenol P.M., or Benadryl—non-prescription drugs said to be non-habit-forming.

  How I dread being addicted!—an addict!

  Though the rest of my life is in ruins, yet—I am determined not to be an addict.

  Though I have come to feel enormous sympathy for drug addicts of all kinds, as for alcoholics, the walking wounded who surround us—these are ourselves, self-medicated. Their spiritual malaise is such, only powerful medication can assuage it. Otherwise, there is suicide.

  Where in my former life I’d seemed to believe, with a schoolgirl sort of moral certitude, that drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide—the general collapse of an individual—suggested some sort of spiritual dereliction, to be avoided by an act of will—now I believe the exact opposite.

  What astonishes me is that there are so many who don’t succumb. So many people who have not killed themselves . . .

  I am not sure if “suicide”—as an idea—was abhorrent to Ray, or whether Ray was indifferent to it. Not once do I recall Ray speaking of suicide as a philosophical issue, still less as a personal issue. Though I recall his having taught the poetry of Sylvia Plath, whose breathless incantatory lines are a summons to nullity, extinction:

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  I guess you could say I’ve a call.

  —“Lady Lazarus”

  It is the “almost unnameable lust”—of which Anne Sexton speaks in her poetry, as well—this wish to self-medicate, to the point of self-erasure.

  As if there were a terrible mistake, a fundamental error—that one is alive and the act of suicide is a correction, a “righting” of what is “wrong.”

  The widow feels in her heart, she should not be still alive. She is baffled, frightened—she feels that she is wrong.

  Standing in the doorway shivering staring into the courtyard at the tiny green tulip-shoots thinking these thoughts like one entranced. If Ray were alive I would not be here, I would not be thinking these thoughts; the fact that I am thinking these thoughts is profound, I must pursue these thoughts further. In the periphery of my vision the lizard-thing glimmers faintly—why should I need that?

  Now it’s late morning, now a stirring of the air, a scent of—spring?—yet the widow is near-catatonic, mesmerized. If the phone rings I will not have the strength to answer it but the ringing will rouse me from this trance. Oh who will call me, who is the friend who will think—Maybe I should call Joyce to say hello, poor Joyce!—she won’t answer the phone anyway.

  Chapter 60

  “Leaving Las Vegas”

  These entranced TV nights—remote control in my numbed fingers—the movie I seem to be seeing often, in fragments like a broken mirror, is Leaving Las Vegas.

  This was a movie we’d avoided seeing. Neither Ray nor I had had the slightest interest in it—the story of a terminal alcoholic. No matter that it had received very good reviews and people had spoken admiringly of it—we would not have wanted to see it, ever.

  Yet, unexpected, over the past several weeks since Ray’s death, it is Leaving Las Vegas that exerts a curious sort of spell.

  Sometimes it’s playing on two cable channels, at different times. In a single week, it is likely to be playing several times. I haven’t yet seen it from start to finish—(but now, I rarely see anything “from start to finish”—I’m too restless and my attention is too scattered)—but I’ve seen fifteen-, twenty-minute intervals, in a jumbled sequence with just enough continuity for me to make sense of the plot.

  As if only in such intervals is Leaving Las Vegas bearable.

  Things have meanings. All things have meanings. There are no coincidences.

  Some of the scenes I’ve seen several times. Just once, the final wrenching scene. And just once, belatedly, the opening of the film—a sequence that explains the protagonist’s self-destructive behavior even as it distances us from him and undermines our sympathy for him.

  Almost against my will I’m caught up in this blackly comic/tender-morbid account of an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter in his late thirties?—early forties?—who comes to Las Vegas after his wife leaves him, with the intention of drinking himself to death.

  Where previously I’d not had the slightest interest in Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning performance as the alcoholic “Ben Sanderson”—now I am mesmerized by it. Cage is not an actor for whom I’ve felt an exceptional admiration until now but this performance is riveting, utterly convincing. Still more, I’m drawn to “Sera”—a Vegas prostitute played by Elisabeth Shue who exudes a wan, about-to-be-extinguished sort of beauty. That Leaving Las Vegas is a romance despite its subject matter—that one comes to care for the doomed lovers—is unexpected. The devotion of the prostitute Sera for the doomed Ben is both outrageous, as the devotion of certain legendary Christian saints and martyrs is outrageous, and yet convincing. We don’t choose the people with whom we fall in love. The love we feel, is our fate. We don’t choose our fate.

  And: Because we had so little time left . . .

  After I’d seen the film piecemeal, it became evident that Sera has survived Ben and is recounting the story of her love for him. Her hopeless love for him.

  At the start of their relationship, Ben warns Sera Don’t ever tell me to stop drinking.

  Sera warns Ben Don’t try to make me change my life.

  Ben would drive Sera away, he’s even unfaithful to her—this man so saturated in alcohol that he’s barely potent sexually. It’s the unmitigated devotion of the woman to the doomed and unrepentant man that makes Leaving Las Vegas such a powerful movie.

  All that I’d disliked about the film initially, before I’d actually seen it, seems to me now irresistibly attractive. As I had disliked, or disapproved of, the “moral weaknesses” of those who self-medicate, and now feel that I understand them, and sympathize with them—For I’ve become one of these myself.

  My interest in Leaving Las Vegas increases when I learn that the novelist John O’Brien from whose semi-autobiographical novel the film was adapted was himself alcoholic, suicidal—(of course, who else could have written such an intimate account of this doomed life)—and that he’d committed suicide in the second week of the film production.

  What is touching, captivating—that Sera will stay with Ben, to the end. She will not desert him. She will not save herself by abandoning him. She expects nothing more from him than he can give her. To stay with him, the doomed afflicted man, for as long as possible. To understand that your time together is limited. To expect nothing more than—what is.

  Though we’ve been more intimate with Ben than with Sera yet it’s Sera who has outlived Ben. For the woman is likely to outlive the man—and to be the chronicler of his life/death.

  The woman is the elegist. The woman is the repository of memory.

  And so the film ends with a reprise of their relationship—Sera’s “happy” memories of the doomed Ben. We can see how a woman might be drawn—against her better judgment—to such a man.

  In sickness and in health. Till death do us part.

  Chapter 61

&nbs
p; “The Unlived . . .”

  But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.

  Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

  How I wish that I could believe these words!

  Brave defiant words that claim, for the writer, a privileged life of meaning, significance, and value beyond that of mere “life”—the claim that art is compensatory for the disappointments of life.

  Curled in the nest reading a bound galley of Philip’s new novel—which Ray had read shortly before he’d been hospitalized. I wish that I could believe this claim for art but I can’t—at any rate, it isn’t a possibility for me.

  Since Ray has died—died is a new word, I am almost able to use it without flinching—I’ve come to realize that my writing—my “art”—is a part of my life but not the predominant part.

  We revere a cult of genius—as if “genius” stood alone, a solitary mountain peak. This is false, preposterous.

  My life is my life as a woman, my “human” life you might say, and that “human” life is defined by other people; by the ever-shifting web, weave, waxing of others’ emotions; others’ states of mind that can’t be fixed, as their very existence can’t be fixed. Philip Roth’s claim is that “print on paper” endures in a way that life can’t endure, and maybe this is so, in a manner of speaking—(at least, for those writers whose work isn’t permanently out of print)—and yet, what chill, meager comfort!

  Here is an American predecessor speaking in a very different idiom, yet in a common language:

  A writer must live and die by his writing. Good for that and good for nothing else. A War; an earthquake, the revival of letters, the new dispensation by Jesus, or by Angels, Heaven, Hell, power, science, the Neant [Nothingness],—exist only for him as strokes for his brush.