Epilogue (6 page)

• • •

I had not imagined all the legal forms that follow the death of a spouse. Death certificates—tax papers, conversations with lawyers and accountants. I wander in a deep wood and I am way past the middle of my life. Have I made a major costly mistake, here or there or everywhere? Money is just money and I have not paid as much attention to it as I should have. This is my error. I tend to wait for rescue by a shining knight. Not this time.

I HAVE BEEN GOING TO CONCERTS WITH A M AN I ’LL CALL

M. I had known him when he was the partner of a woman I knew. They stopped seeing each other a few years ago. A friend of mine who knew him said she would call him and find out if he had a new lady friend. “Thank you,” I said. She told M. that I was widowed. She told him I would be pleased if he called and he did. M. is a retired divorce lawyer. He is also a pianist. Music is now his main passion. He has tickets to opera and tickets to concerts and a gadget that lets him hear any opera he wants on the nearest radio: a sweet soul this. He is a tall man with a softness to his body, but he walks fast, holds my arm tight. Not only is he fond of divas but he is also a baseball fan. He takes me to the Yankees game. He has me meet him in front of the stadium. He tells me what subway to take to get there. I walk with the crowd to the gate where he will be waiting. The crowds f low past. If H. were with me I would hold his hand tightly. I would not want him to lose me in this river of fans. The sky is a light blue and the lights on the stadium cast a yellow color across the faces of those approaching the ticket-takers. No reason to be alarmed, I tell myself. I know how to find my way back to my home. M. appears with tickets in hand. On a folded piece of paper on his lap he keeps track of every action on the field and marks down errors, successes, scores. We take the subway back to Manhattan and he tells me what stop to get out to take a bus to reach my apartment. He stays on the subway.

I wave good-bye to him through the window as the train pulls out of the station.

Another night, after a Mets game, he takes me back to his apartment. It is small and cluttered with file boxes, old articles, notes, other people’s papers, the boxes rise toward the ceiling. Shelves are filled with CDs. The television is programmed so that the classical music channel plays all the time. The television is never turned off. To move to the kitchen one has to thread through the boxes around the piano. I see photos on his kitchen wall. He names his children for me. He tells me their occupations and what worried him about one of them and what pleases him about another. He asks me nothing at all. I ask him about his law partners. He answers directly. I ask him about his childhood and he tells me: the grief of losing a father, the shame of poverty, the pride of the school he attended on scholarship. He speaks of the religion of his childhood and why he left it. I ask more questions and still more questions. He does not ask me anything at all. I ask him where he likes to travel, where he has been that he returns to. He tells me. He still asks me nothing at all. Imagining that he might be too shy to inquire about my life, I tell him what comes to mind. He is not paying attention. I stop. He walks me to the subway and tells me what train to take to get home to my house.

Several concerts, four baseball games later, at my apartment I go to bed with M. Sitting near him, his hand on my shoulder, the leaning in, it happens, without my willing it, or not willing it. I thought it time. I thought I needed to know if the man was there under his clothes, behind the music he listened to, behind the commenta-

tors’ voices of all the baseball games he had watched and recorded on his TV. I thought the sweetness of him might carry me through. I thought I needed to know that my body can go with another body again. I was glad to go to bed with M. My shape was no longer a wonder to behold. Neither was his. My heart was beating fast, my desires rose. I was able to give and receive. But how strange it is to be in bed with a man who is not H. Am I betraying H.? I had never done so. I had declined invitations to lunch, an opportunity here or there while I was away on speaking trips, a psychoanalyst colleague of H.’s who sent me notes tucked into books he thought I might like. You cannot betray a man who is not living. I tell myself this. I firmly tell myself this. On the other hand you can betray the memory of the touch, the muscle of the legs, the mole in the center of the back, the slightly curved spine, the way the hair curled at the nape of the neck. You can betray the indentation of the man you had been in bed with night after night, good nights, bad nights, dull nights, year in and year out. Perhaps this is why in bed with M. I start to feel like a mannequin, a person who is there in this space but not there. This is not M.’s fault. He is tender. He is sweet. He is strong. I respond, or my body responds as it should. This is good but not good enough. My mind remains outside, above, away. I watch myself do things that seem normal but are not. I do not inhabit my body. Perhaps I need more time and distance. Perhaps I really am betraying H., although he would not think that, or would he think that—and just not tell me? My cat circles around the man, an arch in his back, a sound not entirely friendly coming from his cat throat. M. rests his head on

the pillow that now belongs to the cat. I reach across M. to run my hand over the cat’s ears.

There is the idea in my head of the merry widow. I am not merry.

• • •

I can’t hang a picture on my own. I can’t open a tightly closed jar. I can’t work the clasp on my pearl necklace. I can’t get it open and if I get it open I can’t get it closed. Or can I?

I invite M. to the beach for a weekend. He talks politics with my friends. He listens to music. He does not like the sea. He does not want to walk about. His life is interior. The sun gives him a rash. But we are peaceful together. All around are photographs of my children and grandchildren. He doesn’t notice. So I pick up a photo of my two granddaughters and tell him their names. He turns his head away and does not look at the photo. It is true that other people’s grandchildren are superbly uninteresting. They are just children after all and the world has its fill of them. The special charge, the electric joy these pictures give a parent or a grandparent disappears when the eyes are colder, less kind. But most of us are polite enough not to turn our heads away when presented with a photo obviously dear to the presenter. I am feeling lonely in the house with M. I fix dinner. We eat and talk over the editorials of the day, the failings of the newspapers. He tells me stories of legal battles he has fought. He talks of lawyers who are so fabled ordinary people know their names. He does not ask about my work. He has read nothing of mine. A book I wrote, a memoir that I gave him when we first started dating, sits

unopened on his shelf. I try not to be hurt. Why should he read my book after all?

He says, when I inquire, that he is not a literary man and worries that I will not respect his thoughts. But I am not a lawyer and I don’t worry that I should be. Is he insecure or just telling me an approximate truth, an untruth? I tell him he has expressed no interest in who I am. “Maybe,” he says. But still he asks me nothing.

When he packs to leave I am not sorry. I welcome back my solitude. Either I am not ready to place my hand in a different hand or this man has circled his wagons against the irritations of another soul, at least my soul. I will not see him again. He is decent and good and intelligent. He is calm and self-contained. He e-mails me, “Perhaps we could be friends?” I don’t answer the e-mail. He is a stranger and will remain so.

It occurs to me that I could write anything about him I like. He will not read it.

Sometimes at the end of the day I would read aloud to

H. the page or two I had written a few hours earlier. He would sit on our black leather couch with his vodka in his hand and nod when he was ready for me to begin. He was mostly appreciative and always encouraging, except when he fell asleep. This happened often enough in the last years that I stopped reading to him. He rose before six and was gone by seven thirty a.m. He walked the twenty blocks to his office. He carried with him the book he was reading. I knew his mind was full of his own thoughts and mine must have served like the lullaby wheels of a train, round and round, clank and churn, clank and churn. H. had earned the right to fall asleep as I read. Also I might

have been boring (all writers fear that they are boring, a violation of the first of the writer’s ten commandments). I was not afraid that H. would leave me because I was boring him.

This is the first summer since we bought the house that I have not wanted to walk along the water’s edge, watching the ocean come and go, watching the gulls circling for bait fish, watching the trawlers out at the edge of the horizon. For reasons I do not understand I am uninterested in the beach. I am unable to sit in a chair under an umbrella peacefully. I do not admire the little children who run about. I do not want to hear anyone else’s radio. I get cold with the sharp wind. I get bitten by black f lies. Also I do not want to be alone on the beach, not even when the fog comes in and the terns scurry on their pin legs, in and out of the tidal froth. It’s too much for me, this ocean. I never go. Day after day I plan to go but I don’t. As if I had signed a pledge, do not enjoy, do not let the sun near the muscles of your back, do not wet your feet. Ridiculous. Perhaps I act this way because the house is going to be sold. Widow that I am, its upkeep will undo me. Widow that I am, I have no desire to travel the highways to reach the house. Widow that I am, I do not want to put my hands in the rocky dirt of my garden. I don’t want to replace a burned-out lightbulb. I don’t like this house without H.

But that said, it is also true that here we had Thanksgiving dinners, a Passover or two, with most all the children gathered. Here we played poker with boyfriends of my daughters who seemed permanent but weren’t. Here we talked about politics with a young husband who disappointed and disappeared. Here another daughter brought

her new husband whom we had not yet met. On this table, with this stove, and this refrigerator marred by specks of rust on the door, common to houses so close to the sea, we made meal after meal. We cooked together, all of us. A daughter announced her pregnancy here. Another was married nearby. Friends filled the house, fish was smoked and grilled. Bikes were pulled out of the shed and stuffed back in among unused boogie boards and mildewed beach chairs, grandchildren slept in baskets, on couches, Scrabble pieces fell under the table, cookie crumbs were ground into the rug. Wet bathing suits hung on the shower pole, mice were in the cereal boxes, insects in the bag of f lour. Also f ights. This sister complains about that sister. This sister weeps for her dog who died. This sister feels ignored by the others. This boyfriend goes off on a bike ride and disappears for a full day. This is the place where one daughter and her husband decided we didn’t want them to stay longer in the house and became angry with us. This is where we brought one daughter home after an eye operation. This is the house where one daughter wept on learning that another was pregnant. This is the house that was invaded by rabid raccoons who jumped about inside the walls, a terrible stench f illed two rooms until they were trapped, caught in steel jaws that left them lying open-mouthed, bloody, bones, fur, guts spilling, on our porch.

I no longer wanted the house. It was ungrateful of me. The tightness in my chest was not the house’s fault, although the blame must fall somewhere.

I have a strange virus. I have not had such a fever since long before I met H. Now this ache in the limbs, the rise

in temperature, the need to sleep, the muscle cramps last and last. I am tested for Lyme disease. I don’t have it. I go by jitney to my doctor in New York. My liver is inf lamed. My potassium level has sunk to an unacceptable low. I give more blood for more tests. The unnamed virus remains with me. I am alternately hot or cold. I try to go to a party but my head swims. I leave the party. I try to read but the lines dance on the page. If H. were here I would be coddled, calmed. He would make carrot-ginger soup. Am I sick because he is not here? They say that the immune system responds to crisis by shrinking. Has my immune system turned from plum to prune in the season since H. died? I know that everything is not a matter of psychology. On the other hand the body is not separate from the mind and this mind feels as if an ax has cleaved it in two. No wonder I have a virus.

After three weeks it does depart. I never learn the name of my tormentor. It would cost one thousand dollars, my doctor explains, to find its name. I am not that interested. I think of Adam in the first week of the world naming the animals as they walk past him. Was there also a parade of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic life forms crawling across the grass of Eden so that Adam could grant them their identity? I know I am fortunate—I could have been invaded by a million worse diseases, ones that might have consumed me altogether. But I am not grateful. The absence of H. seems, like an oncoming tide, to be covering more and more of my being with each passing day. Run, run to high ground, I tell myself.