Epilogue (23 page)

My stepdaughter thinks that. She doesn’t have to tell me. I see it in her skeptical eyes. But she won’t tangle with my decision either. As we are talking I feel as if I might cry. I feel tears at the corners of my eyes. I have no idea why. I do not want to cry. I am not depressed. I am sad, a condition that seems entirely reasonable under the circumstances. I can’t find the napkin I need to wipe my eyes. My stepdaughter retrieves it for me from under the table.

I could go to a psychiatrist for help. But help with what? Many years ago a psychoanalyst opened up my soul and I made my way hour after hour to a more honest life. Now the doctor would simply be a comfort, an expensive comfort. It is not my unconscious that is making my days hard. It is not my past that is blocking my way. Perhaps it would help to weep a little in a safe place. I keep the possibility in reserve. Not yet. Not now.

After breakfast I walk back to my apartment. There the white rays of the sun appear between the gray clouds, a stream of light as in religious paintings, directing our eyes to the sacred in the midst of a riotous canvass. The cold air enters my lungs, and I see a puff of steam from my own breath. In the middle of the last century my mother used to be able to make smoke rings rise over my head as she exhaled, her cigarette dangling from her hand. I would count the rings, three, four, five. She could shuff le the cards and make them f lip through the air and return neatly into a pack. She was afraid of f lying, elevators that were not operated manually by a man in uniform, tunnels, germs on toilet seats, all bridges, dogs, cats, thunder and lightning, especially lightning. I, on the other hand, fear nothing, not even death.

Not true, I fear living too long, expiring in a nursing home after a stroke that takes away my speech. I fear that time is running out. But the truth is I fear all that in a vague way, similar to my belief in the 1950s that the Russians would one day drop an A-bomb on American shores. I see a double stroller with sleeping twin babies, bundled up to their chins. How lovely they are, a common enough sight on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I see a

little Chinese girl and her blond mother late for school.

As I walk, passing the Lebanese stationery, the discount clothing store, the f lower stand, I feel restored, my arms are moving briskly. I am warm enough in my coat, my legs are going fast, over the already soot-stained snow blocking the crossings, I can feel the cold on my ears. They must have turned red, the sting is not unpleasant. I am riding time, I am watching the babies on their morning journey to the bagel store. I am watching the man with all his shirts over his arm enter the cleaners. I am still a part of it. I go shopping at a store on Broadway and find three wool sweaters and a skirt with brown polka dots, for the spring. It will be spring. These are the first clothes I have bought that H. will not have seen me wear. Inevitable that sooner or later my wardrobe would change. I will go home and call another of my daughters and talk about the school choices for my youngest grandchild and I will write about my morning, all of it.

• • •

I go to a Sunday luncheon party. Only couples and two gay men. We argue about the worth of this or that presidential candidate. We talk of housing bubbles and theater and the

Oscars. We talk about war, but what is there to say about war, about this war that so shames us? Someone speaks of the end of our democracy.

Someone speaks of torture and the shredded Bill of Rights. The people of Iraq are dying by the score. H. would have looked longingly at the television screen behind whose gray face some ball game was awaiting his attention. He truly believed in the discontents of civilization, the ever-erupting savage mind. He truly wanted to watch the Sunday football game. I miss his mind, ego, id and superego, all of it.

• • •

I envy those who believe in a world to come. I envy those who believe that justice will come in the afterlife. I know that most of the world believes in some version of this story. It is hard to face death as an unending absence. But H. is altogether gone. He is not in heaven. He is not in hell. He is not waiting for his bones to come together and rise again from the valleys of Jerusalem. I think this now without pain. I think this the way one notices that it is raining outside and an umbrella will be necessary. I have developed a thick skin, or at least a usable scab. Or am I bluffing?

• • •

Out my window on the fire escape of the building next door I see a red cardinal, a male, a small streak of rusty red moving from rung to rung. He must live in the nearby park. He may be lost or he may not be. Where is his mate? Has he lost his mate? It must be a sign of approaching spring that he comes so close. I have never seen a cardinal here be-

fore. There is rain hitting on the windowpane. I look down toward Broadway and see the sheepdog that lives in the neighborhood. His owner stops to talk to a passerby. The dog wags his tail. I can see even from the fourteenth f loor the dog is pleased. The rain falls on them all.

• • •

A letter comes in the mail from old friends from Boston, whom thirty years ago we met on vacation in Nantucket when all our children were young. I have only seen them once or twice since then. It isn’t Christmas or New Year’s, which is the usual time for such communications. The let-ter encloses a family picture. Lovely mother and father, two grown children each with their mates and three little children, grandchildren. The letter explains that the parents are still at work, the father as a neurosurgeon at a major hospital, the mother in a mental health organization. The daughter works for a private foster care group and the son-in-law is a journalist and the son is a para-medic and his Italian wife is expecting another baby. The faces beam out of the photograph. The background shows a living room with French doors opening onto a garden. A large fern plant has not a brown edge on a single leaf. Congratulations are in order. Congratulations for having raised a good family, because the children all live within a mile of each other and their parents, because there has been no divorce, no major illness, no misfortune that is visible on the faces in the photo. Because decent people have managed to survive the years looking pleased, because no child was aff licted with autism, no cancer cells took a life, no one fell into the pit of addiction or smoked

till lungs burned. I stare at the picture. Why now? What is wrong that the mother and the father needed to send this picture now? What lurks under the couch? What haunts the bright smile of the mother? Is this a competitive missive?
Look how much better my family is than yours, you, opener of my letter, read it and feel bad because your happiness can’t measure up to ours.
More likely this letter was created in the boiler room of insecurity.
Look, I have a good family too, just as good as I imagine yours to be.

This may not be the right way to read this letter. Most likely it was sent in some spirit of good will, a reaching out to old friends who do not live in the neighborhood. If H. were here he would either agree with my suspicions or not. He would ask me what mean-spirited thoughts are running through my head that I would consider this letter as if it were a gauntlet thrown on my table. He would think the sin of competitiveness mine, cast out against my correspondent. And so I suppose it is. He is not here so I have to figure out on my own that my family photo would have an empty space where he should be standing. It would show a divorced child. If our photo had a Dorian Gray magic it would be fading out, black and white, and we would all have deep shadows under our eyes. This hurts.

But that is beside the point. No photo could show the way our children, all but one, have stood with me, have moved in their own lives outward, how we have managed. I send the mother of the family in Boston a letter. “Bravo,” I say. But as I put it in the mail I wonder, what is wrong in that house?

• • •

My nephew calls. I have not spoken to him for over ten years. We agree to meet for coffee. There he is at the table. Love and guilt rise in me. Tentatively, anxiously, with great unease, we talk. A need not to feel guilt rushes over me. I want to tell him something important but I can’t find the words. “Forgive me” would do. I hope he hears those words behind the lines of words I actually say. We talk of his work, his life. He walks me home to my apartment building. Now he is back in my life. Now I am back in his. Is this the way two birds might cross in the same sky, wings not touching, in an instant each out of sight of the other? Or not?

• • •

It is Saturday and I have nothing to do until Sunday at one o’clock. At one o’clock on Sunday I’m having lunch with a man who contacted me on Match.com. At four o’clock on Sunday I am seeing my stepdaughter and her family and at seven o’clock I am having dinner with friends. But today is empty. I could have prevented this by calling this one or that one and making an arrangement, a movie to be seen, a lunch somewhere, but I thought enough is enough. I should manage a day or more by myself. After all, the other night after dinner some forty blocks away I got on the subway and came home without a fear, without a tremble, easily as if I had always gone everywhere at night alone.

I could read, I will try to read. I could go for a long walk. I will go for a long walk. Years ago when the children were very young we went each Saturday to the zoo. We bought kibble for them to feed the goats. We went to the carousel and H. would sit on a horse and go round and round with one daughter or another on his lap. The

younger one wanted to ride by herself. The older one had to be coaxed and sat on her father’s lap with her lips pursed together and her body braced for disaster. I thought that I would spend every Saturday of my life at the zoo. But that phase passed and other phases passed, and now I am looking at the hours of the day as if they were endless dunes in an endless desert. There is nothing to do but start forward. 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 trans-plant 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 my-self, 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 f light. 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 wallf lowers, I suspect that the users of these services would qualify for the description. On the other hand this is a distinction without a purpose.