A Widow's Story Read online

  I will water it, however! I will follow directions for its care and tending.

  Noting on the instruction sheet, at the bottom:

  Important: Decorative plant mosses should not be eaten.

  A widow may be deranged, but a widow is not that deranged!

  In the interstices of the monster gifts are practical things from friends—a trolley for the trash cans, now that trash has become a central concern of my life, from Jeanne and Dan; a bag of Odwalla blended fruit-drinks, which will be a food staple for months, from Jean Korelitz; still-warm casserole dishes from several friends—women-friends—left in the courtyard, on our front porch, which, too ambitious in scale for me to attempt to eat alone, I will store in the freezer for use in some vague future time. How deeply moved Ray would be, by this outpouring of grief among our friends. For Ray was so self-effacing, modest . . .

  Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.

  The phone is ringing—unanswered. Since the night of the call from the hospital, a ringing phone is hateful to me. Even with caller ID, I don’t answer it. Sometimes I walk quickly away, hands over my ears. Many of the calls are from friends—acquaintances—people with whom I should speak—but I can’t. I can’t bring myself to speak with them. My world has shrunk to a very few friends.

  Many phone messages are lost, erased. Only the phone message from Ray remains, through the end of the month, and two weeks beyond. This message, I listen to frequently.

  Hello this is your honey calling.

  Love to my honey and kitties.

  I listen to this message in the hope that I will hear a word or two that I hadn’t heard before. Or—an entirely new intonation to my husband’s voice.

  So often have I listened to this call, the syllables of Ray’s words are starting to sound frayed.

  “My husband died ten years ago. It doesn’t get any easier.”

  A woman at Mercer County Services addresses me in a no-nonsense voice. In desperation I’d called to get information about the recycling pickup schedule in our neighborhood.

  Why I seemed to know so little about the recycling schedule, I explained that my husband had always taken care of the recycling, and that he’d died recently.

  To a stranger, I could say this. I could say these words. I could utter the word die which I could not have uttered to anyone whom we knew.

  Driving then on the Pennington-Titusville Road. In icy rain determined to acquire more recycling cans—both yellow (bottles) and green (paper)—free cans, provided by the township!—since the two cans I have are nowhere sufficient for the siege of trash.

  Yet much of this new trash—the “sympathy gift baskets” with their spiraling handles, large enough to hold twin joeys—the unwanted food items themselves—is not recyclable. For this trash, which includes garbage, a commercial service is required.

  It’s good for the widow to be told—I think—that there are other widows in the world. Plenty of other widows. Like the no-nonsense woman at Mercer County Services who doesn’t offer sympathy so much as a nudge in the ribs. Get used to it.

  And now returning home on the Pennington-Titusville Road I feel my triumph at acquiring the several recycling cans—for free!—begin to deflate. I am thinking how odd this is, that I am driving here in the country—I am driving here alone—not once in our life in this part of New Jersey had I ever driven on this highway without Ray, and usually Ray was driving; we’d be returning from a trip to the Delaware River, or to Bucks County; an outing on the Delaware & Raritan Canal towpath, that runs along the river; we’d have been walking, running, or bicycling; for these were our favorite things to do together. I am thinking that never have I been alone so much, so starkly unmitigatedly alone, as I have been since Ray has died; never, since our marriage in January 1961.

  There is a terror in aloneness. Beyond even loneliness.

  And now, this is my life. This is what my life will be. This aloneness, this anxiety, this dread of the next hour and of the upcoming night and of the morning to follow, this dread of a vast avalanche of trash, useless unwanted trash spilling over me, filling my mouth, suffocating, smothering trash for which I am (perversely) expected to express gratitude, thanks; this will be the rest of my life, without my husband; this, unbelievable, impossible to believe, and yet—of course it is true: there is the Certificate of Death, as proof.

  When you are not alone, you are shielded. You are shielded from the stark implacable unspeakable indescribable terror of aloneness. You are shielded from the knowledge of your own insignificance, your trash-soul. When you are loved, you are blind to your own worth; or, you are indifferent to such thoughts. You have no time for such thoughts. You have no inclination to think Why am I here, why am I left behind, what am I doing here, why in the car driving on this highway, why trash cans rattling in the rear of the car and in the trunk of the car, why not turn the steering wheel sharply to the right, there are trees, there is the promise of quick oblivion—or—maybe not?

  That is the dilemma: maybe not. Maybe things would be worse. Actual pain, agony, brain damage, hospital, Telemetry—you don’t die in the car wreck but survive in a mutilated and disfigured state—a single eye remaining, swollen and near-blind and you open it to see Jasmine hovering over your bed, chattering in your face.

  The widow-life of low-grade misery is preferable to that.

  No hiding! Back from the Pennington-Titusville Road—back in Ray’s study trying to make sense of a morass of papers—ignore the ringing phone—ignore the doorbell ringing—but no, I can’t ignore the doorbell ringing—I must answer the doorbell ringing—I must put aside my misery out of courtesy for the delivery man on my doorstep—I must not scream at him Go away! Leave me alone!

  I must smile and graciously accept from him whatever it is—perhaps not a monster-package but something small, that will fit on the dining room table as a token of a friend’s sympathy and love, but even if it is a monster package I must accept it, reasoning that the sympathy-siege must end, soon—there is a finite quantity of sympathy in the world, and it is rapidly being used up.

  “Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please.”

  Advice to the Widow: Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and “elevated”—this is not Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Think instead Spike Jones, those unfunny “classical” musical jokes involving tubas and bassoons.

  Think of crude coarse gravel that hurts to walk on. Think of splotched mirrors in public lavatories. Think of towel dispensers when they have broken and there is nothing to wipe your hands on except already-used badly soiled towels.

  Chapter 25

  The Betrayal

  And one morning I am unable to bear it: the sight of the New York Times in its transparent blue wrapper lying at the end of the driveway. Through a break in foliage I can see it from a window in my study and even if only a glisten of the transparent blue wrapper is visible this glisten is enough to make me feel very weak, very bad. I am thinking of Ray reading the newspaper each morning of his life without fail. I am thinking of how surprised Ray would be to see how copies of the paper are accumulating unread. I am thinking What futility, what vanity! He cared so much for—what?

  Unable to make my exhausted way outside to pick up the newspaper(s) as I am unable to remove the newspaper(s) from the transparent blue wrapper as I am unable to read this incontestably great newspaper nor am I able to glance at its front page, its headlines which had the power to so absorb Ray as he returned to the house he would sometimes pause in the courtyard frowning over the front page until I called to him—Honey! For heaven’s sake come inside.

  The green recycling trash-container is already packed with “mixed paper and cardboard”—many pages of newsprint—magazines, bound galleys, wrapping paper, discarded mail. Too much newsprint! Too much heartbreak!

  Within a week of
Ray’s death I have canceled our thirty-year subscription to the New York Times.

  Chapter 26

  The Artisans

  Months ago in another lifetime it had been my suggestion to invite George Saunders to Princeton, to give a reading in our creative writing program series, and I would introduce him. Unfortunately this reading was scheduled for February 20.

  When Ray was first hospitalized, on February 11, I’d thought that perhaps someone else should introduce George because very likely I would be at the hospital at that time; then, as days passed, and Ray’s condition was “improving,” I told our reading series coordinator that yes, I could introduce George after all. But then, when Ray died so suddenly, the next day I had to contact our program coordinator to tell her that after all I couldn’t introduce George, though I’d prepared an introduction.

  Yet thinking perversely Maybe I can do it! I should try.

  I called our program director Paul Muldoon. I heard myself tell Paul in a calm voice that I would teach my fiction workshops that week, and that I would introduce George. I thought that I should do this. I wanted to behave “professionally”—I did not want to betray myself as weak, “feminine.” This seemed important. Like hauling trash cans out to the street and hauling them back again emptied, in order to be filled and again emptied, an effort of virtually no consequence or significance, an expression of Sisyphean futility. I thought If I can do such things, I am not crazy. I am not in pieces. I am not this new, different, shattered person, I am the person I have always been.

  Paul listened politely to me. Paul said, “I will take it upon myself, Joyce, to cancel your workshops. And Tracey will find someone else to introduce George.”

  George Saunders came, and read one of his eerie unsettling stories; the bleakest and blackest of humor, stark drop-dead dead-end humor, and the audience laughed, especially the undergraduates laughed—they who imagine that the bleakest and blackest of humor expresses a mode of existence in which, if put to the test, they themselves would be perfectly comfortable; and afterward at dinner, in conversation with my writing colleagues C. K. Williams, Jeffrey Eugenides, and me, George remarked that literary writers in the twenty-first century are artisans who have fashioned elegant friezes on walls, beauty of a kind to be appreciated by a very small percentage of people, and of course by one another; not noticing that the roof of the building is sinking in, about to collapse on our heads.

  Bleakly, blackly, we laughed. I laughed.

  Why?

  Chapter 27

  E-mail Record

  February 21, 2008.

  To Edmund White

  The days are not too bad, it’s the nights and the empty house that fill me with panic. Not continuously, more in waves that come unexpectedly. It is just so hard to believe that I can’t hear Ray’s voice again, or see him, in another part of the house . . .

  Did you say you were bringing work with you? What a good idea . . . I can try to “work” too . . . though it seems somewhat futile now, and fruitless. But just typing this letter is satisfying somehow. We are addicted to language for its sanity-providing . . .

  Much love,

  Joyce

  February 22, 2008.

  To Michael Bergstein (managing editor, Conjunctions)

  Ray has died—of pneumonia, after a week in the hospital. Our publishing is coming to an end—I am heartbroken and stunned.

  Joyce

  February 22, 2008.

  To Robert Silvers (editor of New York Review of Books)

  Thanks so much for your lovely letter. You have offered “anything you can do”—just keep publishing NYRB. That is a solace to me. During the tumultuous week of Ray’s hospitalization last week as his condition was said to be “improving,” I gamely came home and worked on the review of Boxing: A Cultural History for you until late in the night since I could not sleep anyway . . . And now I am trying to get back to the review, amid so many distractions, because, as Barbara Epstein felt also, in the end it is our work that matters, and our work that can be a solace and a lifeline.

  Much love, and continued admiration—

  Joyce

  February 22, 2008.

  To Richard Ford and Kristina Ford

  Dear Richard, and dear Kristina—

  I am doing all right. Jeanne & Dan have been wonderful. Dan checks on me via his cell phone/email—and Jeanne is giving very helpful advice re. a lawyer/will/probate court, etc., to minimize anxiety there. I had dinner with Jeanne & Gary Mailman last night. So long as I have one meal a day with people—at an actual table—with the social protocol of courses—the logic of “eating” makes perfect sense; alone, with no spouse, with no wish to sit at the familiar table, it seems faintly repellent . . . My favorite time now is sleeping—but it doesn’t last long enough.

  I feel so sad that so many little gestures Ray did—like planting dozens of beautiful tulips in the courtyard, taking such care with the art-work in the magazine—will outlive him, and maybe not mean so much to others . . .

  Much love to both,

  Joyce

  February 24, 2008.

  To Edmund White

  Just got back from a two-mile hike in the snow through the woods & around a lake! Except for Ron & Susan, I would never have done this . . .

  The night of Ray’s death, I took out all my painkiller pills—assembled over the years since I’d never used most of them—plus now I have my “sleeping pills”—and feel that I can use these if things become unworkable. Nietzsche said, “The thought of suicide can get one through many a long night.” But I feel such an affectionate tug for my friends—for just a few friends—that I would not seriously do this of course. It is more of a theoretical option . . .

  Some of my anxiety has lessened in fact since “the worst” has happened. I had worried terribly about my parents, too, for years. But they lived full lives and died at the right time, quite merciful deaths. Ray died too young. I just can’t grasp it.

  Thank you for being here yesterday. You are such a solace just by existing. I feel such love for you, I am infinitely grateful.

  Joyce

  February 24, 2008.

  To Gloria Vanderbilt

  The beautiful icon [of St. Theresa] is now on my dresser facing my bed . . . Each night I get through is a small triumph.

  Love,

  Joyce

  Part III

  The Basilisk

  Yes, it is a physical and emotional test of endurance. We shall speak further when we are sitting down face to face. In the meantime, my only advice is to sleep all you can and eat when and if you can. Grief is exhausting and requires the strength of an Olympic athlete. Just at a time when you can neither sleep nor eat. I wish you didn’t have to go through this. My heart is in your corner.

  —Barbara Ascher

  Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.

  —Gail Godwin

  Chapter 28

  “Beady Dead Eyes Like Gems”

  At first—glimpsed at the periphery of my vision, or shimmering against my eyelids when I shut my eyes—not an actual object to be seen—it’s confused with the flood of new, dreaded things that has entered my life since my husband’s death as a virulent infection enters a bloodstream—it is both there, and not-there.

  Sometimes the optical nerve generates patches of light resembling jagged wings, sparkly zigzag figures that soar and float about in your vision but gradually fade. (If you’re lucky and don’t have a brain lesion.) And there are the hallucinatory migrainous images—“fortifications”—“scintillating scotomata”—“scrolls”—“whorls”—“spirals”—“topological misperceptions”—about which Oliver Sacks has written an entire book titled Migraine. But this thing—if it’s a thing, exactly—seems different, more personal, more pointedly directed at me.

  At times it appears to be sheerly light, luminous. But it’s a dark-luminous like ebony. Yet not a smooth beautiful ebony, more a rough-textured ebony. Something glimpsed at the bottom of the sea? It is covered
with a rough shell, or scaly armor. Shimmering eyes—not-living eyes—beady dead eyes like gems.

  What does it want with me?—I wonder.