All of Us (35 page)

In order to work at all on the book during what was a bewildering time for us, we made the decision not to tell anyone about the cancer’s recurrence in the lungs. Instead of giving over to visitors and a parade of sorrowful goodbyes we could keep our attention on the things we wanted to do. And one of the things we decided to do was to celebrate our eleven years together by getting married in Reno, Nevada, on June 17. The wedding was what Ray called a “high tacky affair” and it took place across from the courthouse in the Heart of Reno Chapel, which had a huge heart in the window spiked with small golden light bulbs and a sign that read
SE HABLA ESPANOL
. Afterwards we went gambling in the casinos and I headed into a phenomenal three-day winning streak at roulette.

When we returned home Ray wrote “Proposal”, which carries the urgency of that time, the raw sense of life lived without guile, or that cushion of hope we count on to extend life past the provisional. Our having married anchored us in a new way and it seemed we had knowingly saved this occasion to give ourselves solace, and perhaps also to allow us to toss back our heads once more in a rippling cosmic laugh as from that “gay and empty journey” Kafka writes of.

This was also the time during which Ray wrote “Gravy”. The idea for the poem had come from a conversation we’d had while sitting on the deck facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, taking stock. “You remember telling me how you almost died before you met me?” I asked him. “It could’ve ended back then and we’d never even have met. None of this would have happened.” We sat there quietly, just marveling at what we’d been allowed. “It’s all been gravy,” Ray said. “Pure gravy.”

Many of the poems Ray had accumulated toward the book had been drafted during July and late August the summer before. Nearly a year later, in early July, enough finished poems had accumulated that we decided I should begin to arrange them into sections and to shape the book. I had done this with each of Ray’s collections of poetry and
also with most of his fiction. My perhaps primitive way of ordering a manuscript was to scatter the pages out on the living-room floor and crawl on my hands and knees among them, reading and sensing what should come next, moving by intuition and story and emotion.

We had decided to try to include the Chekhov passages. The stories had been so integral to our spiritual survival that, as with Milosz’s inclusion of Whitman in his book, Chekhov seemed a companion soul, as if Ray had somehow won permission through a lifetime of admiration to take up his work with the audacity of love.

One night I remember watching with Ray a composer being interviewed on television, and the composer was exclaiming that Tchaikovsky had lifted whole passages from Beethoven and offered them as his own. When someone had challenged him about this he had said simply, “I have a right. I love him.” Ray had jotted down this exchange, and I think this right-of-love figured heavily into his decision to bring Chekhov so boldly into conjunction with his own work. The Chekhov passages also bound Ray’s poetry to his fiction, his last collection having ended with the tribute of “Errand”. The Chekhov selections seemed to fall very naturally into place in the manuscript, keying and amplifying in a tonal and emotional way the poems Ray had been writing. At times, through Chekhov, Ray was able to give himself and others instructions for the difficult task of continuing under the certainty of loss (“Downstream”), or he could admit fears he might have stifled in order to keep the upper hand in his waiting game with cancer (“Foreboding” and “Sparrow Nights”).

The book, as we finalized my arrangement, fell into six sections. It began with poems retrieved from earlier publications, poems which, for one reason and another, had not been joined with more recent work. So just as Ray was bringing the time of Chekhov to bear on his work, he was carrying forward poems from his earlier life, and perhaps affecting both lives in their imaginative composition. I think in this regard that a passage he had marked in Milosz’s
Unattainable Earth
may illuminate Ray’s inner objectives:

There was an urge in Ray’s writing, in both the poems and stories, to revisit certain evocative scenes and characters in his life, to wrest from them if not release, then at least a telling anatomy of the occasion. In this book the early love poems hint at a dark element which is realized more fully in recent poems such as “Miracle”, “The Offending
Eel” and “Wake Up”. The son as an oppressive figure in former poems and in the stories “Elephant” and “The Compartment” reappears in “On an Old Photograph of My Son”, and although the pain is freshly present, there is the redeeming knowledge at the end of the poem that “we all do better in the future”. The theme of the dead child, which was explored so poignantly in his story “A Small, Good Thing”, is revived in the poem “Lemonade”, in which a child, sent by the father for a thermos of lemonade, drowns in the river.

The second section introduced a series of poems whose territory was suggested by Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “The Name”, about a loss of identity. Perhaps the best way to characterize these poems is by their dis-ease, the way in which a wildness, a strangeness, can erupt and carry us into realms of unreason with no way to turn back. Here the verbally abusive woman of his story “Intimacy” is joined by the physically abusive woman of “Miracle”. Drinking continued to motivate the rituals of disintegration in the poems about his first marriage, and he inventoried the havoc it had caused as if it had occurred only yesterday.

Childhood innocence is abruptly sundered in the third section with “The Kitchen”, which recalls the story “Nobody Said Anything”. There are poems in which the unknown is left fully intact, as in “The Sturgeon” and “Another Mystery”. The violence of working-class family life in “Suspenders” plays off a section from Chekhov about peasant life and the brutalizing of the sensibilities of children.

The hard question Milosz asks in “Return to Kraków in 1880” at the front of the fourth section—“To win? To lose? / What for, if the world will forget us anyway?”—challenges the poet’s sense of memory as an entrustment. And for Ray, of course, in facing his death the idea of whether one’s memory would persist importantly in the survival of one’s writing was also present. His poems suggest that an artist’s obsessions and signs, fragmentary and intermittent as they may be, exist in a world of necessity that transcends anyone else’s need of them. At the same time, poems like “One More” and “His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes” reveal humorously the haphazard nature of creation itself, and indeed the amazement that anything worthwhile should accumulate from such a scattershot process. There is also a prose record in this section of Ray’s first intimations of the literary life when he’s handed a copy of
Poetry
by an elderly man whose home he enters as a delivery boy. Here, as in “Errand”, it is the ordinary moment which illuminates the most extraordinary things. A magazine passes from one hand to another and the young would-be writer discovers, to his
surprise, a world in which writing and reading poems is believed to be a creditable endeavor.

The juxtaposition of contemporary time with the era of knights and chivalry in “The Offending Eel” is one we’ve seen before in the story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”, and also in the more recent “Blackbird Pie”. Such counterpointing seems to allow the contemporary material a fresh barbarism. In light of the Lowell quote that begins the fifth section—“Yet why not say what happened?”—we look with fluorescent starkness into the unrelenting, obsessive magnetism of “the real”, its traps and violences.

The poem “Summer Fog” in the same section was made all the more extraordinary for me because of something Ray said when he first gave me the poem to read. He told me he was sorry he wouldn’t be there to do the things for me that I was doing for him. “I’ve tried something here,” he said. “I don’t know if it works.” What he had tried was to leap ahead into the time of my death, and to imagine his grief as a gift to me against my own approaching solitude. It seems all the more moving that this was done at a time when his own death was, in the words of the poem, the “stupendous grief” we were feeling together.

The last section of the book deals with the stages of his awareness as his health worsened and he moved toward death. In “Gravy”, as I’ve mentioned, he displaces the devastating significance of death in the present by inserting the memory of a prior death narrowly avoided, when in 1976—7 he had nearly died of alcoholism. So in effect he uses his coming death as proof of a former escape; and death, he realized, once displaced by such an excess of living during the ten productive years he’d been allowed, could never be quite the same. Nevertheless, the introductory passages from Chekhov (“Foreboding” and “Sparrow Nights”) acknowledge an inner panic. Along with the matter-of-factness of “What the Doctor Said” and the “practicing” for death in “Wake Up”, there is the defiance of “Proposal”, and the two poems which rehearse the final goodbye—“No Need” and “Through the Boughs”. I hadn’t realized until three weeks after Ray’s death, as I went over the manuscript to enter corrections Ray had made before we’d taken the final trip to Alaska, that I had perfectly, though unwittingly, enacted the instructions of “No Need” the night before his death. The three kisses which had been meant as “Good night” had, at the time, carried the possibility that Ray would not wake again. “Don’t be afraid,” I’d said. “Just go into your sleep now” and, finally, “I love you”—to which he had answered, “I love you too. You get some sleep now.” He never opened his eyes again, and at 6:20 the next morning he stopped breathing.

The “jaunty” slant of the cigarette in the self-portrait “Afterglow” belies the consequences which have made this a last glance. Maybe it’s as close as Ray would let himself come to irony at a time when a lesser writer might have carved out a sad, edgy little empire with it. In the final poem, “Late Fragment”, the voice has earned a more elevated coda. There is the sense that central to the effort of the life, of the writing, has been the need to be beloved and that one’s own willingness to award that to the self—to “call myself beloved” and, beyond that, to “feel myself beloved on the earth”—has somehow been achieved. For a recovering alcoholic, this self-recognition and the more generalized feeling of love he was allowing himself was no small accomplishment. Ray knew he had been graced and blessed and that his writing had enabled him to reach far beyond the often mean circumstances from which he and those he wrote about had come, and also that through his writing those working-class lives had become a part of literature. On a piece of scrap paper near his typewriter he had written: “Forgive me if I’m thrilled with the idea, but just now I thought that every poem I write ought to be called ‘Happiness’.” And he was, in spite of not agreeing to such an early death, in the keeping of a grateful equanimity when we talked during those long summer evenings of what our life together as writers, lovers and helpmates had been.

By mid-July his last book was finished and I had found its title, taken from an early poem called “Looking for Work”. We didn’t discuss the title; we just knew it was right. We had been given a rather incredible gift shortly after our wedding and this, I think, influenced us in our choice. Our painter friend, Alfredo Arreguin, had been working on a large painting about which mysterious, tantalizing hints had been leaked at intervals to us by his wife, Susan Lytle, also a painter. The day before our wedding reception, Alfredo and Susan arrived with the painting strapped to the top of their car. The painting, once hung in our living room, proved to be of several salmon leaping midair toward a vigorous, stylized waterfall. In the sky, what Ray would call “the ghost fish” were patterned into clouds heading in the opposite direction. The rocks in the background were inhabited as well, studded with prehistoric eyes.

Each morning we took our coffee in front of the painting where Ray could sometimes be seen sitting alone during the day, meditating. When I look at it now, his particular aliveness seems imbedded there in the pageantry of a cycle we had seen played out year after year in the river below our house. In the painting the fish are heading upstream, bowed eternally to the light in a fierce, determined flight
above water, and above them the ghost fish float unimpeded in an opposing current, relieved of their struggle.

In Alaska, on one last fishing trip, we raised glasses of Perrier to toast the book, and ourselves, for having managed to finish it against so many odds. In the crucial last days of our work, guests had arrived for an extended stay and Ray’s son had come from Germany. We’d kept working, parceling out the day, until the work was done. “Don’t tell them we’ve finished,” he said to me—“them” meaning the guests. “I need you here.” So the book as pretext allowed us a few more precious mornings with each other before what would be the final onset of his illness. After our guests had left, we began making calls, trying desperately to arrange a trip to Russia to see Chekhov’s grave and to visit the houses of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. There were places associated with Akhmatova that I wanted to find. Even though this wasn’t to be, our planning in those last days was, in itself, a kind of dream-visit that lifted our spirits. Later, when Ray entered the hospital, we talked about what a great trip it would have been. “I’ll go there,” I said, “I’ll go for us.” “I’ll get there before you,” he said, and grinned. “I’m traveling faster.”

After Ray’s death at home in Port Angeles on August 2, the mail was heaped for weeks with letters and cards from people all over the world mourning his passing, sending me often very moving accounts of their having met him even briefly, things he’d said, acts of kindness performed, stories of his life before I had known him. Copies of obituaries also began to arrive from papers around the country, and one day I opened a packet from London with the obituary from the
Sunday Times.
The headline above the photograph of Ray with his hands in his jacket pockets reads simply: “The American Chekhov”. From the
Guardian
there was the possessive “America’s Chekhov”. I seemed to be reading these
with
Ray, and to be carrying his knowing of it. Either headline would have been accolade enough to have made him humbly and deeply happy.