Epilogue (8 page)

My five-year-old daughter, E., went to the movies with her babysitter and I went downtown to the Waldorf to meet H. We were going to buy the ring, the ring for our marriage, the ring I would wear ever after until death did us part. I rushed into the lobby. The uniformed door-men, who seemed both martial and like extras in an opera, stepped away to let me pass. I looked up the marble steps and saw H. coming down toward me. He was carrying a

briefcase. His winter coat was swung open. He would not kiss me in public, not before his colleagues, not on the steps of the Waldorf lobby but when we emerged and walked to Madison Avenue on the way to the jewelry store, in the privacy afforded by the crowd, he did and I was safe, moored to this man. I pressed against his arm. I, thirty years old, believed that nothing was impossible.

On my fifth or sixth or eighth attempt I take the ring off and keep it off. I look at it in its box. I hold it in my hand but I do not replace it on my finger. I am not married anymore. I have no mate. I cannot keep twisting and turning that ring on my finger.

H. did most all the food shopping. He liked picking and choosing among the fruits and vegetables. He liked choosing the fish or the meat for the meal. He dawdled in the aisles checking prices and he read food magazines for recipes he clipped and would make on rainy Saturday afternoons while one ball game or another played on the television. Now that he is gone I have discovered that I am the world’s worst shopper. I buy things I think I want to eat and then they sit in my refrigerator ignored until green mold appears, when I throw them out. I buy too much milk and have no cereal. I buy a can of soup and forget it in the cabinet. I buy pasta that turns stale. I spend too much money. I buy paper towels by the dozens. It will take two of my lifetimes to use them all.

I resort to takeout food; the Cuban-Chinese restaurant on Broadway will deliver, so will the Mexican place a block away, and the Indian and the Turkish cafés around the corner. I overtip the man who comes to the door with a bag containing my dinner. “Make yourself a salad,” my

daughter K. says. But I don’t want to. “Do you want to come for dinner?” my daughter B. asks. But she lives a forty-five-minute subway ride away. She is a law professor and comes home tired to her husband and baby and more often than not they eat takeout food too.

The thing about takeout food is that when it is removed from the kitchen of its origin it loses its balance. It becomes all curry or cumin or soy. Its colors fade like a f lower picked in the field, pale before you are back on the path. A smell of paper carton or plastic wrap sinks into the sauce. Now I have enough takeout menus in my drawers to paper a room. My taste buds are complaining. All these Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Cuban deliverymen carrying my dinner to me, waiting at the door for my tip, they know my name, they smile at me, they wave good-bye as they wait at the elevator. It is not a sign of normal life when the takeout deliverymen become fond of you or your tips.

I do go to dinner at my stepdaughter J.’s home. She lives only ten blocks away. The family gathers around the table and the children talk about their violin lessons, their science projects, their rehearsals for the class play, college applica-tions, debate societies. I listen and I see clearly that their home is a good place, just as it should be. I am welcome but irrelevant to the evening, like an extra waiting in the wings for the crowd scene. In this apartment there are no photographs of me. That is because the biological mother comes to dine, and will sit in the seat I am now in. Perhaps that’s why I lean back in my chair as if I were a ghost not fully visible. Of course I often turn into a shadow. I speak but am not speaking. I see but don’t record what I see. Here in

this room I am safe, protected by this family, and a curious emotion springs up in me. I look around the table. Mine, I think. My dearest, without the word but with a heat that might bring tears if I allowed it. I don’t.

• • •

There is the problem of H.’s ties. For the eighteen years we lived together in this apartment they were on a tie rack on the inner door of my closet. Each time I opened the closet door they swung outwards. Each time I closed the closet door one or two would get caught and protrude into the hall. I would have to open the door and put the ties back in place. I give one away to this friend and another to a son-in-law and one to J.’s oldest child who is going off to college but many are left swinging on the rack, sticking in the door.

I take them all off and intend to give them away to a thrift shop. The pile lies on my bed, formerly our bed. I leave them there. At night I toss them on a chair. In the dark they look like vines crawling. In the morning I put them back on my bed. An hour or so later I take them carefully one by one and return them to the rack. I do not want to give them up, not yet. The same is true of the two-dollar bills that H. kept in an old wallet in his drawer. A patient has paid him in cash, all two-dollar bills, several months’ worth of sessions. He was amused. He said it was all right. He left me hundreds of dollars’ worth of two-dollar bills. I could use them. I could go to the bank and deposit them. I keep them in the drawer. Two-dollar bills are lucky, they say. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they, like the ties, stay.

Here is a difficulty I have not yet solved. The world outside my brain is as always in a woeful state. I am aware of genocide in Darfur, of women with dead babies in their arms, of refugees wandering barefoot in the dirt. I know that car bombs and snipers’ bullets and assassins who drill holes in their captives’ heads are not figments of my imagination and I know, and this is very personal, that Israel has blundered in Lebanon and that threats to its people abound. I know that need is everywhere and that if one listens carefully in the night air a pitiable sound rises to the stars. And my solitary state is hardly newsworthy, comment-worthy, significant in such a context. I know that the disruption and destruction of my life is neither tragedy nor pathos. But, and here is the rub, we do not live in the general mind, we abide in the details of our private stories. Mine matters to me and I have trouble staying at such a distance from myself that I can worry more about the orphans in Ethiopia than I do about who will have dinner with me tomorrow evening.

I have no right to complain. I complain.

I have an old friend whom I love despite or perhaps because of her unvarnished style. She calls to say, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.” I understand this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. I wouldn’t want to be in my shoes either if my feet had a choice. Nevertheless her comment rankles. Not because I would wish widowhood on her but because I feel diminished. I feel pitied, which is unpleasant. I hear her finding herself superior, which while fair enough, makes me cringe. Was there a better way for her to say that? “I understand how you must feel” might have been kinder but less accurate. “I’m so glad my hus-

band lives while yours is moldering in the grave” would be accurate but even less polite. You would never say to a friend, “I’m so glad I’m not driving a Saturn like you, my Lexus is such a wonder.” You might think such a thing of course but you wouldn’t let the words escape your mouth. But the rawness of death, the jaggedness of this loss, as if a thunderbolt had split the tree on the lawn in two, this brought out the comment “I wouldn’t want to be you.” Who would?

• • •

I have taken to reading the travel and real estate sections of the paper with an unnerving zeal. I look at each picture of a house overlooking a lake or a mountain and I think maybe. Maybe Colorado with its wildflowers and red rocks, or maybe South Florida, where I see an afford-able condominium with a view of the ocean and a terrace with a lounge chair. The sky is perfect blue and the ocean stretches as far as the eye can see. Then I see a gray-shingled house with a porch on an island in Maine. Could I live on an island in Maine? Maine has high pine trees, cones lie on the dirt paths. The steeples of churches announce the towns as you approach. There is a barrenness to Maine that stirs me. There is the lack of fresh paint on the walls of the local store. There are the dark long lakes and the mists that take forever to lift and the cold mornings even in August and the northern lights. I have always imagined myself in Maine. But now? Then there are photos of apartments in Tel Aviv, ones that look down on the beach, ones that are near the busy markets. I don’t speak the language except in my dreams when sometimes I hear myself in f luent He-

brew. I have no friends of my age there. I have nothing now to offer the country, except the trouble of burying me. The moment for the move to Israel came and went without my stirring. It is hard to move away. I see a photo of a small house on Lake Tahoe. I would like to be in a small house on Lake Tahoe. I would have a big dog, maybe two, a pickup truck. I would go to the local library and read and read. I would wear a squash-blossom necklace and turquoise bracelets on my arms. But I don’t know a soul, not within two thousand miles. The question is would I meet people? Would I? What if a widower lived down the road and came over to help me stack my firewood and what if we cared for each other? And what if no widower lived in the entire state and I sat by the phone waiting for my children to call? What if I found a senior citizens’ community and moved there? What if I missed all I have here and wanted to return and could not?

The fantasy of a new life plays in my head. It goes round and round, until it is stopped by a wall of reality. If I were twenty I would go. If I were twenty I would not hesitate.

I might hesitate. After all I’m still here in the same city that raised me. I have not seen the world. Well, thank God for movies. Sundays I read the travel section. Perhaps I should move to an island in Hawaii. Perhaps to New Zealand. Perhaps I should volunteer in an African refugee camp. If only I were a doctor or a nurse or even a teacher. They do not need writers in refugee camps.

I remember the time at the beach house we played poker by candlelight when the hurricane came. I remember H. standing in the driveway with a plastic bag filled with blue fish with their heads still on and their tails pressed against

each other and the smell of sea and fish on his clothes and in his hair. I remember my stepdaughter nursing her baby on the couch. And then I forget.

What I want, really want, is my old life, in my same place, with H. by my side. All the rest is f light.

• • •

I am contacted by a man who knows my cousin. He is an engineer who has his own business consulting on automa-tion. I see his photo. He has a warm face with a short white beard. He lives in Pittsburgh, which is very far from New York City. He is from Belgium and when we speak on the phone I hear an accent that makes me think of cobblestones and archways and cypress trees and sidewalk cafés. He tells me that he has been divorced for a long time. We talk about his work. I tell him about mine. He tells me that he would take me to walk the mountain trails near his home. He tells me that he likes to dance and would take me on a boat on a lake. He tells me that he is ready to love a woman with all his heart. I am touched. He sends me a long love poem he has written. It is atrocious. It is worse than a greeting card. I pause. I think that if I were to write anything at all about a mechanical object, a scientific subject, the construction of a bridge, it would be terrible too. I would write gibberish, so perhaps I should ignore the poem. I do. We go on talking. He tells me about his great car, a giant SUV that he uses to travel across the country in his consulting work. He tells me that he invented a kind of robot now used in manufac-turing. I am impressed. We agree to keep talking. He sends me the pages of a romance novel he is writing online. I can-not read them. I explain to him that I read different kinds

of books. He accepts that. We talk about meeting. I could take a train and we could meet halfway between his home and mine. I like his voice. I have grown used to hearing his message on my machine.

Then he tells me he will come into New York City and spend the day with me. He sends me his train schedule. He will arrive early in the morning and I will meet him at the station. I am pleased. I am a little excited. I think of walking in the woods. I think of the steel mills by the river. I think it doesn’t matter that he is a Lutheran and I am Jewish. Those distinctions belong to another time of life. He promises to tell me about his divorce when he sees me. He says he will explain the mistakes of his life. I will have to explain my own mistakes as well. I am prepared.

But then he says that his life was changed by Dr. Phil. I don’t respond. The conversation ends. I think about Dr. Phil. He has changed many people for the better, I am sure.

But I am of a different sort. Dr. Phil is like a leech on a fevered brow. I know he is popular. I just don’t belong with a man whose life was changed by Dr. Phil. I call Pittsburgh and explain that I can’t meet him at the train station. I have had second thoughts. My fault, I say. I am not ready, I say. I am still grieving, I apologize. I don’t say anything about Dr. Phil.

Then I wonder: Am I being small-minded? Am I cutting off a possibility because I am afraid of the new and the different? Am I just playing with the idea of a new life with no intentions of really claiming one? Perhaps I should ask Dr. Phil.

• • •

I remember the night we went to hear Anna Freud speak. The event was at an auditorium at a city college. She was small and dressed in black, with white hair. There were no empty seats. Psychoanalysts of all kinds had come to hear her, to applaud and to feel themselves close to the source, to pay their respects. This was before all the attacks on Freud. This was before it became clear to everyone that psychoanalysis was too expensive, would aid, if it would aid, only a very selected few. Psychoanalysts were pushed off their pedestals. Nevertheless I was a member of that community. I knew what they were talking about, jargon and all.

A friend sends me an e-mail. It has a single name on it. I call her to ask why she sent me that name. “I heard from my sister-in-law, the divorced one—that this B. is a man to stay away from. If someone introduces you to him, stay away from him.” My friend tells me that he’s been widowed for about three years. He’s a psychoanalyst. Why had my friend sent me his name? To warn me, she said, she was afraid I would be introduced to him since we had so many connections in common. I am intrigued. I Google him. I find the address of his office. I write him a note. I introduce myself. I suggest that we might enjoy meeting each other. What am I doing? This is not the way women of my generation behave. It is unseemly. It is also absurd. I have just been warned the man is no good and so I go rush toward him as if I wanted nothing more in the world than a no-good man. I drop my letter off at the post office.