A Widow's Story (20 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Though nothing means much to me, now. The possibility of being “encouraged” has become abstract and theoretical to me—“encouraged” for what purpose?
Your writing will not save you. Managing to be published—by Ontario Review Press!—will not save you. Don’t be deluded.
As with the trash, I dare not allow this mail to accumulate; you might (almost) say, the mail
is
the trash. Most dreaded, beyond even the Harry & David sympathy baskets, is that particularly nasty sub-species of ridged cardboard book-package in which a few publishers persist in sending books, bound with metal staplers thick as spikes. To try to open one of these monstrosities is an exercise in masochism—hurriedly I discard them with the dispatch with which one would thrust away a venomous snake.
Pleading
No! No more of this! Please have mercy.
Each week the trash cans are so filled that their plastic covers fall off, and clatter to the pavement as I wheel the cans to the road.
Why would Sisyphus push a boulder up a hill?—much more likely the poor accursed man was hauling trash cans up the hill, day following day,
in perpetuity.
Amid all this, what a joke—a cruel joke—that publishers continue to send me galleys and manuscripts requesting blurbs—yet more mail, packages to be torn open and recycled. In my state of absolute lucidity—which might be mistaken for commonplace depression—nothing seems to be so pathetic as these requests. Nothing so sad, so futile, so ridiculous—a blurb from
me.
If the name “Joyce Carol Oates” affixed to her own books can’t sell these books, how can the name “Joyce Carol Oates” affixed to another’s book help to sell that book? This is a joke!
My heart beats hard with resentment, despair. Though my effort seems so futile, like cleaning all the rooms of the house in preparation for my husband’s return from the hospital, turning on all the lights—or, turning them off—yet I can’t seem to stop, and the thought of hiring someone to help me, or even bringing anyone into the house for this purpose, is not possible. All I know is—I can’t let Ray down. This is my responsibility as his wife.
I mean, his widow.
I feel trapped. I am trapped. On the far side of our pond once we’d seen a young deer, a buck, shaking his head violently—his slender horns were tangled in what looked like wire. This is how I feel—my head is tangled in wire.
The reptile-thing—the basilisk—has been regarding me all this time with its glassy-bead stare, the bemused saurian eyes that penetrate to my very soul.
You know you can end this at any time. Your ridiculous trash-soul. Why should you outlive your husband? If you love him
,
as you claim? Don’t you think that everyone is waiting for you to die
,
to end this folly? Outliving your husband is a low vile vulgar thing and you do not deserve to live an hour longer
,
you are the very trash you need to haul away.
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell.
— Lucifer in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
—Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” from
The Myth of Sisyphus
Chapter 44
“Neither Joyce Nor I Can Come to the Phone Right Now”
Hello! Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now but if you leave a detailed message and your phone number
,
we will get back to you soon. Thank you for calling.
This phone message, recorded by Ray several years ago in a somewhat subdued voice, greets everyone who calls, since these days—in the late winter/early spring of 2008—I rarely pick up the phone.
Yes I hear the phone ringing and—can’t move to answer it.
The ringing phone paralyzes me, I can barely breathe until it stops.
I have to resist the impulse to run, when the phone rings.
To run away, to hide. Somewhere.
It’s true, we have caller ID—Ray installed it, in my desk phone—and so I should be able to screen unwanted calls and speak with my most cherished friends but often I am nowhere near this phone and my instinct is to back away, not hurry forward.
Often I am not in a mood to speak with even my most cherished friends.
Fear of breaking down on the phone.
Fear of draining friends’ capacity for sympathy.
Fear of useless behavior
,
futile & embarrassing.
No one has chided me for continuing to use Ray’s phone message, quite yet. Though several individuals have remarked upon it.
One has said it’s a “comfort” to hear Ray’s voice exactly as it has been in this phone message, for years.
One has said—delicately—it’s “a little jarring, distracting.”
One has said—“The voice on the answering machine is the uncanniest abstraction to deal with.”
To these remarks, I have said nothing.
In time it will be suggested—tactfully, delicately—by my closest friends, that I should change the recorded message. One woman friend has volunteered her husband, to do a re-recording.
This is sensible advice, but I seem not to hear it. I never respond to it, I simply seem not to hear it.
Though in a rage wanting to cry
Would you erase your husband’s voice from your phone message? Of course you would not!
It will be well over a year and a half before Ray’s phone message is finally erased, to be replaced by a (female) computer-voice that chills the blood. But through this hurricane-year 2008, Ray’s voice will prevail.
At the university, in my office at 185 Nassau I call our home number frequently. First I dial 9 for an outside line, and then the number. A curious sort of solace—that the ringing at the other end of the line is indistinguishable from the ringing I’d heard for years, when I called Ray from this phone. Usually I called my husband at home for no particular reason but to say hello, to murmur
Love you!
and hang up and now that it is futile to call, I am calling the number anyway.
Five or six rings and then a little click—and there is Ray’s voice—exactly as I recall it—as it had been in all those years I’d taken the recording for granted as if it were a permanent feature of the very landscape, or the oxygen surrounding me—
Hello! Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now but if you leave a detailed message and your phone number
,
we will get back to you soon. Thank you for calling.
Sometimes, I call this number more than once. My fingers move numbly like fingers “saying” a rosary.
Ray’s words have become a kind of poetry—the kind of point-blank plain-speech heart-rending American vernacular poetry perfected by William Carlos Williams in simple columnar stanzas. Keenly I attend to the accent of Ray’s syllables, the pause between words—almost, I can hear him draw breath, I can envision his facial expression as these several so-precious seconds out of his life of seventy-seven years, eleven months and twenty-two days is recorded—
Hello!
Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now
But if you leave a detailed message
and your phone number
We will get back to you
soon
Thank you for calling
But quietly then, I hang up.
No message.
How many widows have made this futile call—dialed numbers which are their own numbers
;
how many widows have listened to their dead husband’s voices again
,
again—again . . .
As you will too
,
one day. If you are the survivor.
Chapter 45
The Military Order of the Purple Heart
Keep in motion. Don’t break promises. Grieving is self-pity
,
narcissism. Don’t give in.
Each day I set myself a modest goal: to get through the day.
Isn’t this the fundamental principle of Alcoholics Anonymous?
One day at a time.
My friend Gloria Vanderbilt has consoled me
One breath at a time
,
Joyce. One breath at a time.
Gloria Vanderbilt, whose son Carter died in an unspeakable way, virtually in her presence.
Soon after Ray died Gloria came out to Princeton to spend some time with me—to commiserate, to give hope—and left in my keeping a small statue of St. Theresa which had been left to her by her beloved nanny many years ago when, as in a cruel fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, Gloria Vanderbilt was a child-pawn in a luridly publicized custody suit played out in the New York City courts.
This statue of St. Theresa is on our bedroom bureau. On my bedroom bureau. Where I can see it easily, from my nest in my bed.
Jesus! What on earth is a statue of St. Theresa doing in our bedroom?
Ray would cry in startled exasperation.
I’m gone a few days and—a statue of St. Theresa in our bedroom?
Like all permanently lapsed Roman Catholics, Ray much resented any incursion of his old “faith” into his post-religious life.
Yet: like all former Roman Catholics, Ray would know to distinguish between St. Theresa and the Virgin Mary.
How can I explain this statue of St. Theresa in our home, I can’t explain. Except that the statue is facing me, in my nest, across a distance of less than six feet.
March 3, 2008.
To Gloria Vanderbilt
The St. Theresa statue is astonishing in our bedroom. It exudes an air of antique calm and beauty. I can’t believe that you have given me such a precious part of your life. I told Elaine (Showalter) and several others who’d come to see it that I did not feel worthy of this gift and one of them said, “It speaks of Gloria’s love for you” which left me stricken to the heart.
Thank you so much,
Joyce
The basilisk!
Glassy eyes and chill saurian composure. Utterly still, its reptile heart scarcely beats.
Ugly lizard-creature that beckons me
to death
,
to die.
If I sleep a drugged sleep, the basilisk vanishes. But when I wake up—when consciousness blasts me like Mace—the thing returns.
Like the Cheshire cat in
Wonderland
—first, Alice sees the maddening grin appearing in mid-air; then, by degrees, the outline of the large graceless cat, that fills in.
So too the basilisk. The dead stare, that comes first; then, the rest of it.
If I take Lorazepam in the doses that have been prescribed for me I am sure that the basilisk will disappear. Or, if the obscene thing is hovering in my vision, I won’t be upset by it.
But if I take too much of this powerful tranquilizer—or the sleeping pills that have been prescribed for me—I will lapse into a deep sleep, possibly a coma and in this way, the basilisk will triumph.
So I am determined to
Keep in motion!
To keep my promises!
When Ray was hospitalized, we canceled our visit to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. But I think that I will honor the rest of my professional commitments and maintain the schedule of my former life so far as I can.
Cleveland, Ohio. Boca Raton, Florida. New York University.
Columbia, South Carolina, and Sanibel Island, Florida.
Readings, lectures, visits for which I’ve been contracted for months. My agent has suggested that she cancel all my obligations for the next half year but I’ve told her no, I can’t do that.
Pride in professional integrity.
Wish not to be viewed as weak
,
broken.
Fear of remaining home
,
alone.
Fear of being lost away from home.
Fear of breaking down among strangers.
Fear of being “recognized”. . .
March 5, 2008.
To Jeanne Halpern
I called you at about 10
P.M.
from howling-snowstorm-bound Cleveland last night, after my reading for the Cuyahoga County Library, which went well despite the terrible weather; in my hotel suite at the Ritz—a very grand suite, with flowers—I was overcome with loneliness and dread, that I couldn’t call Ray as always I’d done at these times . . . So I called you, and Lily answered; and I am glad that you were out because I would have been very emotional, and as it was I called Edmund White who quickly cheered me up with tales of his life and misadventures . . .
Much love,
Joyce
March 6, 2008.
To Elaine Showalter
Lovely to see you and English! Most of the time I am in a state of anxiety, however, about legal/financial matters, and life is looking quite grim. Even with medication, I just can’t sleep—I’ve taken a dose and a half of the medication prescribed for me, and I couldn’t be more awake, and I have to teach tomorrow, take a car to NYC and give a reading. . . . I guess that, without Ray, there doesn’t seem much point to anything I do. But it was lovely to see you and English both days. “Daylight” is my good time—the rest of the time, not so good.
Much love,
Joyce
Half-seriously I am thinking of sending an e-mail bulletin to friends
Please don’t laugh at me and/or be alarmed but is there any one of you whom I might “hire”—if you could overcome the scruples of friendship and allow me to pay you in some actual way—to keep me alive for a year
,
at least? Otherwise—
Of course this is only
half-
serious.
Of course I dare not hint at such desperation, gossip would run like wildfire through our circle of friends, and beyond, terribly beyond, concentric circles of close friends/“good”friends/friendly acquaintances/colleagues strangers to effloresce on the Internet, luridly highlighted for all to see.
March 6, 2008.
To Mike Keeley
Mike, thank you! Ray loved you so. He had no idea that he would never see any of us again—his last words (preserved on my voice-mail service) are so tender and upbeat. It just seems unbelievable to me. I am so yearning for a companion—even a fantasy or ghost companion (like Harvey the invisible rabbit) to dwell in this house, just to suggest not the reality of the man but some glimmering essence of him. Half the time, I think I must be totally out of my mind. At other times, like last night, I think I am relatively sane. I hope this gets easier. But the legal/financial side is overwhelming, and may crack me before the emotional side does . . .
Much love to both,
Joyce
My discovery is: each day is livable if divided into segments.
More accurately each day is livable
only if divided into segments.
The widow soon realizes that an entire day, as others live it—that vast hideous Sahara of tractless time—is not possible to endure.
Thus the widow is advised to divide the day into Morning—Afternoon I—Afternoon II—Evening—Night.
Mornings, one would assume to be the very worst times, are actually not so very bad since the widow is likely to remain in bed longer than “normal” people do. Since the widow is happiest—that is, happy—only when asleep—deeply asleep—in a tar pit-sludge-sleep predating not only any memory of the catastrophe in her life but any memory of the possibility of catastrophe—it’s likely that the widow will find it very difficult to get out of bed.
Get out of bed? How about—opening one’s eyes?
No one will understand—no one, except the widow—that the act of
opening one’s eyes
is an exhausting act, an act requiring reckless abandon, rare courage, imagination; by
opening one’s eyes
the widow has committed herself to another day of the ongoing siege, a hurricane of emotions that leaves us broken and battered yet determined to be, or to appear to be, resilient, even “normal.” Worst yet, after
opening one’s eyes
is the act of
getting out of bed
—requiring, in this weakened state, the fanatic drive and willfulness of the Olympic athlete.
At first, I could not force myself to open my eyes for a very long time, lying in a state approaching the comatose; listening with mounting dread for the sounds of delivery vehicles in the driveway, the footfalls of delivery men bringing (unwanted, invariably bulky and stapled) packages to the front door, and for the ringing of the doorbell; once, or more than once, well-intentioned friends came to see me, making their way into the courtyard and ringing the doorbell; when I failed to answer, cowering in the disheveled nest in my bed, strewn with papers, bound galleys, books from the previous night, the well-intentioned friends would naturally knock on the door—rap their knuckles sharply on the door—call, in voices meant to disguise their alarm: “Joyce?
Joyce?
” Sometimes it happened that I had only just fallen asleep at about dawn, and the intrusion—that is, the visit from the friend—the well-intentioned friend—came at about 9
A.M.
; sometimes, in the aftermath of my insomniac haze, when I’d given in at about 5
A.M.
and taken half of a capsule of a prescription sleeping pill—not yet Ambien, for I was hoarding Ambien, but Lunesta—the knocking would come even earlier, waking me from the tar pit sleep of utter, so exquisitely yearned-for oblivion with the blow of a sledgehammer to the head and rendering me paralyzed with despair, misery. At such times—and there are many such times in a widow’s slapstick-comedy life—it’s clear that if I were to actually summon up my courage to swallow down an “overdose” of drugs—if I’d managed at last to marshal all my energies in a reckless bid to “put myself out of my misery”—the gesture would come to a rudely abrupt ending with the unexpected arrival of the friend. “Joyce?
Joyce?
”
How terrible, the sound of my name. At such times. For to be
Joyce
is to be by definition
The one no one else would wish to be.
Joyce Carol Oates
has an even more mocking-melancholy sound, for the pretension of so many syllables.
What a joke!
Yet, I will behave reasonably, you can count on it. I will try to behave reasonably. In any case what choice do I have but to drag myself from bed scattering papers onto the carpeted floor, a bound galley or two, an offprint or two by Raymond Smith, tattered paperback copies of Pascal, Nietzsche, Spinoza’s
Ethics
(consulted as much for its sleep-inducing possibilities as for the thrill of a logician’s imagination turned to the challenge of
reducing the chaos of the world to unity
,
order
,
sanity
,
meaning
) and though my brain has become a sodden mass of gauze in which crazed thoughts teem like maggots, and I must have looked like a scarecrow dragged along a rutted road behind a pickup truck, yet I would lean out into the hallway—(in this single-storey house of mostly glass walls there is really nowhere to hide except the bathrooms, the furnace room, and one or two shadowy corners of other rooms)—calling to my friend a random and desperate response—“Hi! Hello! Yes I’m here! I’m all right—I’m fine! I’m
here!
”—adding with a forced little stoic-laugh, “I’m just not able to see you right now, I’m so sorry—I’ll call you, later.”
The friend responds: “Joyce?
Are
you all right?”
“Yes! Yes I am
all right
! I’ll call you later.”
Silently pleading
Please go away
,
for now. Please!
Thinking
Is there nowhere I can hide? Is there nowhere—except to die?
Another morning the phone rings—early—after a miserable insomniac night that has spilled over into the day like feculent water—the phone ringing in the adjacent room that is Ray’s study and for some reason instead of cringing beneath the bedclothes pretending not to hear I am moved to answer—for it might be “my” lawyer, or “my” accountant—one or another individual whom the endless requirements of
death-duties
have caused to appear in my life—I am suffused with anxiety thinking
I must answer this
—and so I stagger into the next room partly dressed, barefoot and shivering and it’s my brother Fred who lives in Clarence, New York, not far from our old, long-razed family farmhouse in desolate Millersport, New York—a rural community approximately twenty miles north of Buffalo—and of course I am happy to speak with Fred, my younger brother who has been such a solace to me, if but over the phone, and at a distance; my wonderful brother who was so attentive to our parents, in the latter part of their lives when they lived in an assisted-care facility in Amherst; but while I’m on the phone with Fred, a delivery man appears at the front door less than fifteen feet away, ringing the doorbell, rapping with his knuckles, and I am crouched in Ray’s study trying to hide, silently pleading
Please just go away! Go away and take whatever it is you have with you please!
