The Year of Pleasures (3 page)

“No. I’m not.” I moved away from her, into the living room, then to the bottom of the stairs, where I focused on the art glass there, willing myself not to cry.

From behind me, I heard Delores say, “Not a thing in the world wrong with being single. You ask half the married women in the world, they’ll tell you that. Probably more’n half, let’s face it!”

I turned around, and before I could speak, she said, “Oh. I see.” She moved one step closer, then two. “When did he die?” she asked, and when I told her mid-October, she inhaled sharply. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “This is way too soon for you to buy a house.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Can we go to your office now?”

“ ’Course we can,” she said, though she made no move at all. I walked past her, out the door, then waited for her to follow me. After a few moments, she did. She closed the door and locked it, checked to make sure it was secure. Then, “You just come along with me,” she said. “It’s not far. It’s easy. Just stay right behind me.”

I got in the car, wiped away two tears, only two, and pulled away from the curb to follow her ancient white Cadillac. I looked back at the house in the rearview, and claimed it.

My husband, John, age fifty-five, was handed his diagnosis of liver cancer by a newly graduated doctor—John’s own had just retired. “As I’m sure you know,” the young man had blushingly begun, and John said simply, “Yes.” We walked out of the office holding hands and cold to the marrow.

Near the end, I started looking for signs that the inevitable would not be inevitable. I watched the few leaves that refused to give up their green to the demands of the season. I took comfort in the way the sun shone brightly on a day they predicted rain—not a cloud in the sky! I even tried to formulate messages of hope in arrangements of coins on the dresser top—look how they had landed all heads up, what were the
odds
?

I prayed, too, in the way that agnostics do at such times.
Sorry I doubted you; Dear God, help us now.
I stood shivering on our back patio in the early mornings with my mug of coffee and told whatever might help us that now would be the time. I tried to believe with all my heart that a miracle would come—I knew I needed faith to stand alongside belief. I thought of how after John recovered I would tell everyone that I never gave up hope, and see? But my dreams betrayed me: John, shrunk to the size of a thumb, fell from my purse where I’d been carrying him and was stepped on. In another dream, I took a walk around the block and when I came back, my house was gone.

Three days before he died, John wanted to go to the hospital. In his pleasant private room with a river view, I sat beside him or lay in bed with him, leaving him only to shower or to use the bathroom. The sky stayed gunmetal gray; clouds hung low and threatening; birds flew by in formation, on their way to a kinder climate. Much of the time, John slept, and I studied him as I might a painting: his high cheekbones, his thin but sensuous lips, his overly large earlobes on which he’d once clipped old-lady rhinestone earrings as a finishing touch to his Halloween costume. I watched the subtle play of light on the folds of his blue pajamas—he’d insisted on wearing his own rather than the silly patient gown offered him on admission. In sleep, he kicked off the covers as always, and his winter-white feet were so innocent-looking. I felt fiercely protective of John but utterly helpless as well; when they came to draw blood, my only protest was to look away.

When he was awake, John was lucid, and he returned again and again to making a certain request. He wanted me to move to the middle of the country, to drive on the back roads to a small town I’d never heard of, and start over.

It was something we’d talked about doing together, and just before John got sick we’d invited a Realtor over to our Beacon Hill brownstone for what turned out to be a thrilling appraisal. We’d been ready to put things into motion, and we were excited in some fundamental way we’d not been for a long time. We appreciated the rich contentment of a good marriage and old habits; but there was something evocative and irresistible about our new plans; even the minor anxiety we felt about leaving Boston, where we’d always lived but for our college years, was more compelling than disturbing.

All of this had been my idea originally; born of what I’d call midlife stirrings. By that I mean there’d been no crisis, just a growing awareness that there were other ways of living that I longed to explore. I’d had my head down for a long time, doing something satisfying but ultimately repetitious. Now I wanted to go in a different direction. John had similar feelings and so had warmed quickly to my idea. We agreed that he would give up his psychiatric practice, and I would stop writing children’s books. We had both done well in our careers; we could afford to retire early if we wanted to, or we would find something altogether different to do.

We knew little about the Midwest—we had confined our travels to either coast and to Europe. But we had always been charmed by the people we’d met from there, and it seemed the right place to start a new life: exotic, at least to us, but not as difficult as, say, Prague. John confessed that he’d always wanted to own a little neighborhood grocery store and be on a first-name basis with all the customers—the Midwest seemed the right place for that. For my part, I told John I’d always fantasized about owning a store with a wide variety of beautiful and disparate things: unusual jewelry, handmade quilts and pottery, beautiful cookware and vintage kitchen linens, ultra-luxurious bath products, journals made of handmade paper, and small watercolors, exquisitely framed. What a Woman Wants, John suggested I call it. He leaned back in his chair that night, smiling and dreamy-eyed. “Maybe we really will open stores,” he said. “Or maybe we’ll sit around on some great big front porch and do not much at all.” Either sounded good to both of us.

John wanted to be sure I did what we’d talked about, even without him. “Follow through on this; it’s a good idea,” he told me. “It will be right for you. You’re going to have all kinds of people giving you advice. You’re going to be tempted to follow some script, to show some sense of propriety. Don’t do it. It will give me peace to know that what you will do is exactly what we talked about.” I began to cry and he took my hand and looked into my eyes. “You’re stronger than you know, Betta; you can do this,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen so often where one person dies and then the other dies in spirit. Don’t let that happen to you.”

“I won’t,” I said, though I did not exactly believe myself.

“And Betta? Try hard to make friends in the new place.” He lay back against his pillow and sighed. “I took you away from people. We kept too much to ourselves. I let you neglect your need for others.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said. But he put his hand over mine and said emphatically,
“I did.”

I reached up to smooth one of the wild hairs in his eyebrow and said softly, “I didn’t mind it so much, you know.”

On the last morning in the hospital, when we lay together in his bed holding hands and watching a glorious sunrise, he said, “I want you, even in sorrow—especially in sorrow—to find joy. Will you try?”

“Yes,” I said, watching the clouds lighten and wondering how that could possibly happen.

“I’ll help you,” he said. He was reading my mind again.

“Okay.” I leaned over and kissed the top of his head, thinking that if a forehead could look weary, his did.

A few hours later, he rested quietly as I sat in the Naugahyde chair next to his bed. I was reading aloud, poems by Neruda. A light rain was falling and you could hear the distant rumble of thunder. There was a name for such thunder, and I had been thinking I would ask John what it was as soon as I finished the poem. But I heard his breathing slow, then rattle. I looked quickly over at him, and he smiled at me, then closed his eyes. I watched for his chest to rise again. It did, several times, and then it did not. I took his hand and leaned closer to him. Inside my own chest, it felt as though someone were beating a rug. “John?” I said. I shook him. “John?” I felt a mounting sense of desperation. I had a question. I had one more question.
“John?”
One more question, and then if it would be all right, if I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like
when
was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.

I closed the slender volume of poems and sat still for a long moment. Then I leaned over to lay my head in the familiar hollow below his shoulder. After a while, I rang the bell for a nurse. I hoped Lonnie would come. She had been his favorite. And indeed it was Lonnie who came, and before she did anything, she embraced me. “He was such a gentleman,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You were very lucky,” she said, and to this I did not reply.

They let me say a final goodbye, and I put his clothes into the little suitcase we’d brought with us. I opened his bedside drawer and took out his watch and his glasses and his wallet. There was also a blue plastic denture cup, which was odd, because he had no dentures. When I looked inside it, I found three slips of paper. One said
green bowl.
Another,
carbon.
And the third I wasn’t able to quite make out, but I thought it said
gingerbread.
All of this I put into the suitcase as well.

I took a cab home because I did not trust my driving. It had stopped raining; the sun was bright. “Finally nice out, huh?” the driver asked. He was a middle-aged man, probably close to John’s age, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.

I swallowed, mumbled agreement, and pulled John’s suitcase closer to me on the seat.

The driver’s eyes sought out mine in the rearview mirror. “Let me tell you,
I’ve
had better days,” he said, and waited for me to ask why. But I stayed silent, stared out the window at the beautiful synchronicity of the rowers on the Charles. They would not be out there much longer.

When I arrived home, I wept, of course, walked around from room to room sobbing from a place deep in my gut. I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.

I made calls to arrange for John’s cremation and memorial service in a kind of removed way that I realized was necessary for performing such a task. I’d argued against his cremation even though I had asked that he do the same for me, should I be the one to go first. But that had been when our deaths were an abstraction. When it became clear that John was going to die, I’d changed my mind—I wanted him to be buried. “I want a place to
find
you,” I’d told him, and he’d said, “In time, you’ll find the place.” He’d asked me to release him to the ocean as soon as I got the ashes, and I’d promised I would.

I stayed in the house for a week after that, wearing John’s shirts during the day and John’s pajamas at night. Sometimes I felt on the far edge of reality, unable to understand the simplest things: an exuberant voice on the radio, an advertisement in the mail. The phone rang and I would look at it as if I were a visitor from a distant planet, wondering what sort of animal was making that irritating, repetitive noise.

Other times, I went numb, as though vultures had landed inside and picked me clean. At those times, I did not quite taste or see or hear or touch or feel. And at those times, I thought cautiously,
Is that it, then? Am I through crying? Am I healing already?
And then would come another tidal wave of pain, nearly nauseating in its force, that had me pounding and pounding on the kitchen table. I knew it was a common story, the loss of a husband, widowhood, but it was of no use to me to know how many had experienced this before me. I remembered an eighty-nine-year-old woman who’d lost her husband many years ago telling me in her shaky voice,
You still sleep on your half of the bed.
I learned that it was true.

Then around seven-thirty one evening, I suddenly became ravenously hungry. I didn’t want to cook and I didn’t want to go somewhere I’d been with John, so I walked to an Italian restaurant I’d never been to. It seemed darker outside than usual, the light from the streetlamps moody and insubstantial. I supposed this might be because of a thin layer of fog. But more likely, I thought, it was because I was walking in the dark by myself, something I’d not done in a long time. I could smell the sweet decay of fall, but it was warm, and I opened my coat to the moist night air.