A Widow's Story Read online

  Thank you so much,

  Joyce

  The basilisk!

  Glassy eyes and chill saurian composure. Utterly still, its reptile heart scarcely beats.

  Ugly lizard-creature that beckons me to death, to die.

  If I sleep a drugged sleep, the basilisk vanishes. But when I wake up—when consciousness blasts me like Mace—the thing returns.

  Like the Cheshire cat in Wonderland—first, Alice sees the maddening grin appearing in mid-air; then, by degrees, the outline of the large graceless cat, that fills in.

  So too the basilisk. The dead stare, that comes first; then, the rest of it.

  If I take Lorazepam in the doses that have been prescribed for me I am sure that the basilisk will disappear. Or, if the obscene thing is hovering in my vision, I won’t be upset by it.

  But if I take too much of this powerful tranquilizer—or the sleeping pills that have been prescribed for me—I will lapse into a deep sleep, possibly a coma and in this way, the basilisk will triumph.

  So I am determined to Keep in motion! To keep my promises!

  When Ray was hospitalized, we canceled our visit to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. But I think that I will honor the rest of my professional commitments and maintain the schedule of my former life so far as I can.

  Cleveland, Ohio. Boca Raton, Florida. New York University.

  Columbia, South Carolina, and Sanibel Island, Florida.

  Readings, lectures, visits for which I’ve been contracted for months. My agent has suggested that she cancel all my obligations for the next half year but I’ve told her no, I can’t do that.

  Pride in professional integrity.

  Wish not to be viewed as weak, broken.

  Fear of remaining home, alone.

  Fear of being lost away from home.

  Fear of breaking down among strangers.

  Fear of being “recognized”. . .

  March 5, 2008.

  To Jeanne Halpern

  I called you at about 10 P.M. from howling-snowstorm-bound Cleveland last night, after my reading for the Cuyahoga County Library, which went well despite the terrible weather; in my hotel suite at the Ritz—a very grand suite, with flowers—I was overcome with loneliness and dread, that I couldn’t call Ray as always I’d done at these times . . . So I called you, and Lily answered; and I am glad that you were out because I would have been very emotional, and as it was I called Edmund White who quickly cheered me up with tales of his life and misadventures . . .

  Much love,

  Joyce

  March 6, 2008.

  To Elaine Showalter

  Lovely to see you and English! Most of the time I am in a state of anxiety, however, about legal/financial matters, and life is looking quite grim. Even with medication, I just can’t sleep—I’ve taken a dose and a half of the medication prescribed for me, and I couldn’t be more awake, and I have to teach tomorrow, take a car to NYC and give a reading. . . . I guess that, without Ray, there doesn’t seem much point to anything I do. But it was lovely to see you and English both days. “Daylight” is my good time—the rest of the time, not so good.

  Much love,

  Joyce

  Half-seriously I am thinking of sending an e-mail bulletin to friends Please don’t laugh at me and/or be alarmed but is there any one of you whom I might “hire”—if you could overcome the scruples of friendship and allow me to pay you in some actual way—to keep me alive for a year, at least? Otherwise—

  Of course this is only half-serious.

  Of course I dare not hint at such desperation, gossip would run like wildfire through our circle of friends, and beyond, terribly beyond, concentric circles of close friends/“good”friends/friendly acquaintances/colleagues strangers to effloresce on the Internet, luridly highlighted for all to see.

  March 6, 2008.

  To Mike Keeley

  Mike, thank you! Ray loved you so. He had no idea that he would never see any of us again—his last words (preserved on my voice-mail service) are so tender and upbeat. It just seems unbelievable to me. I am so yearning for a companion—even a fantasy or ghost companion (like Harvey the invisible rabbit) to dwell in this house, just to suggest not the reality of the man but some glimmering essence of him. Half the time, I think I must be totally out of my mind. At other times, like last night, I think I am relatively sane. I hope this gets easier. But the legal/financial side is overwhelming, and may crack me before the emotional side does . . .

  Much love to both,

  Joyce

  My discovery is: each day is livable if divided into segments.

  More accurately each day is livable only if divided into segments.

  The widow soon realizes that an entire day, as others live it—that vast hideous Sahara of tractless time—is not possible to endure.

  Thus the widow is advised to divide the day into Morning—Afternoon I—Afternoon II—Evening—Night.

  Mornings, one would assume to be the very worst times, are actually not so very bad since the widow is likely to remain in bed longer than “normal” people do. Since the widow is happiest—that is, happy—only when asleep—deeply asleep—in a tar pit-sludge-sleep predating not only any memory of the catastrophe in her life but any memory of the possibility of catastrophe—it’s likely that the widow will find it very difficult to get out of bed.

  Get out of bed? How about—opening one’s eyes?

  No one will understand—no one, except the widow—that the act of opening one’s eyes is an exhausting act, an act requiring reckless abandon, rare courage, imagination; by opening one’s eyes the widow has committed herself to another day of the ongoing siege, a hurricane of emotions that leaves us broken and battered yet determined to be, or to appear to be, resilient, even “normal.” Worst yet, after opening one’s eyes is the act of getting out of bed—requiring, in this weakened state, the fanatic drive and willfulness of the Olympic athlete.

  At first, I could not force myself to open my eyes for a very long time, lying in a state approaching the comatose; listening with mounting dread for the sounds of delivery vehicles in the driveway, the footfalls of delivery men bringing (unwanted, invariably bulky and stapled) packages to the front door, and for the ringing of the doorbell; once, or more than once, well-intentioned friends came to see me, making their way into the courtyard and ringing the doorbell; when I failed to answer, cowering in the disheveled nest in my bed, strewn with papers, bound galleys, books from the previous night, the well-intentioned friends would naturally knock on the door—rap their knuckles sharply on the door—call, in voices meant to disguise their alarm: “Joyce? Joyce?” Sometimes it happened that I had only just fallen asleep at about dawn, and the intrusion—that is, the visit from the friend—the well-intentioned friend—came at about 9 A.M.; sometimes, in the aftermath of my insomniac haze, when I’d given in at about 5 A.M. and taken half of a capsule of a prescription sleeping pill—not yet Ambien, for I was hoarding Ambien, but Lunesta—the knocking would come even earlier, waking me from the tar pit sleep of utter, so exquisitely yearned-for oblivion with the blow of a sledgehammer to the head and rendering me paralyzed with despair, misery. At such times—and there are many such times in a widow’s slapstick-comedy life—it’s clear that if I were to actually summon up my courage to swallow down an “overdose” of drugs—if I’d managed at last to marshal all my energies in a reckless bid to “put myself out of my misery”—the gesture would come to a rudely abrupt ending with the unexpected arrival of the friend. “Joyce? Joyce?”

  How terrible, the sound of my name. At such times. For to be Joyce is to be by definition The one no one else would wish to be.

  Joyce Carol Oates has an even more mocking-melancholy sound, for the pretension of so many syllables. What a joke!

  Yet, I will behave reasonably, you can count on it. I will try to behave reasonably. In any case what choice do I have but to drag myself from bed scattering papers onto the carpeted floor, a bound galley or two,
an offprint or two by Raymond Smith, tattered paperback copies of Pascal, Nietzsche, Spinoza’s Ethics (consulted as much for its sleep-inducing possibilities as for the thrill of a logician’s imagination turned to the challenge of reducing the chaos of the world to unity, order, sanity, meaning) and though my brain has become a sodden mass of gauze in which crazed thoughts teem like maggots, and I must have looked like a scarecrow dragged along a rutted road behind a pickup truck, yet I would lean out into the hallway—(in this single-storey house of mostly glass walls there is really nowhere to hide except the bathrooms, the furnace room, and one or two shadowy corners of other rooms)—calling to my friend a random and desperate response—“Hi! Hello! Yes I’m here! I’m all right—I’m fine! I’m here!”—adding with a forced little stoic-laugh, “I’m just not able to see you right now, I’m so sorry—I’ll call you, later.”

  The friend responds: “Joyce? Are you all right?”

  “Yes! Yes I am all right! I’ll call you later.”

  Silently pleading Please go away, for now. Please!

  Thinking Is there nowhere I can hide? Is there nowhere—except to die?

  Another morning the phone rings—early—after a miserable insomniac night that has spilled over into the day like feculent water—the phone ringing in the adjacent room that is Ray’s study and for some reason instead of cringing beneath the bedclothes pretending not to hear I am moved to answer—for it might be “my” lawyer, or “my” accountant—one or another individual whom the endless requirements of death-duties have caused to appear in my life—I am suffused with anxiety thinking I must answer this—and so I stagger into the next room partly dressed, barefoot and shivering and it’s my brother Fred who lives in Clarence, New York, not far from our old, long-razed family farmhouse in desolate Millersport, New York—a rural community approximately twenty miles north of Buffalo—and of course I am happy to speak with Fred, my younger brother who has been such a solace to me, if but over the phone, and at a distance; my wonderful brother who was so attentive to our parents, in the latter part of their lives when they lived in an assisted-care facility in Amherst; but while I’m on the phone with Fred, a delivery man appears at the front door less than fifteen feet away, ringing the doorbell, rapping with his knuckles, and I am crouched in Ray’s study trying to hide, silently pleading Please just go away! Go away and take whatever it is you have with you please!

  In my tattered paperback Nietzsche is the philosopher’s famous aphorism—The thought of suicide is a strong consolation; one can get through many a bad night with it.

  Nietzsche also said If you stare too long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  And, in the quasi-visionary voice of Zarathustra Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: Die at the right time.

  How often these aphorisms run through my mind, like electric shocks! And at unexpected times, like random shocks.

  Yet: even in his profound loneliness and the despair of his final, protracted illness/madness, Friedrich Nietzsche did not commit suicide.

  Nor did Albert Camus commit suicide. (By his own terms, Camus died a worse death—a “meaningless” death in a car crash, as a passenger. Suicide would have been preferable!)

  Do not think—if you are healthy-minded, and the thought of suicide is abhorrent to you—(as it was to Ray)—that suicide is, for others, a “negative” thought—not at all. Suicide is in fact a consoling thought. Suicide is the secret door by which you can exit the world at any time—it’s wholly up to you.

  For who can prevent you, if suicide is truly your wish? Who has the moral authority, who can know your heart?

  The basilisk’s stare!—that is the suicide-temptation. That, the very face of deadness, void.

  Yet while the thought of suicide is consoling, it’s also terrifying. For suicide is the secret door that, once you have opened it and stepped through, swings shut and locks behind you—never can you re-cross that threshold.

  The basilisk-stare is accursed. It is a temptation that must be resisted.

  In this way, thinking seriously of suicide is a deterrent to suicide. As it is to think of the posthumous consequences of suicide—what its effect would be upon others.

  My brother Fred, for instance. For I have recently made him the executor of my estate.

  As I am “executrix” of Ray’s estate, thus having inherited a matrix of responsibilities not unlike the responsibility one would feel carrying a pyramid of eggs across a lurching floor.

  Speaking to my brother I am thinking these thoughts but I would never share my thoughts with my brother, or with anyone; I would never impose such an awkward intimacy upon another. A few days ago I actually asked a friend what she would do in my place, thinking she would say I would kill myself of course and instead she said thoughtfully, astonishingly I think I would move to Paris. I would buy a flat, and live in Paris. Yes—I think that’s exactly what I would do.

  How bizarre this seemed to me! Like suggesting to a paraplegic that she take up cross-country skiing, or marathon running.

  (The only friend with whom I’ve spoken openly of such matters is Edmund White who has seen so many friends and lovers die of AIDS, and is, at the time of this writing, the oldest individual diagnosed as HIV-positive; dear Edmund who has, very likely, a cache of powerful pills like mine, accumulated over the years, and an appreciation of Nietzsche’s admonition to die at the right time . . . )

  The delivery man has gone away. The conversation with my brother has ended. Now I am “up”—the first hurdle of the day successfully mastered—I am feeling almost enlivened. I am thinking of how Ray usually got up between 7 A.M. and 7:30 A.M. He seemed to wake immediately, with no transition; one moment asleep, the next awake; while I woke by degrees, slowly, as if ascending from a deep region of the sea, to the lighted surface far above; leaving a darkly warm region of dreams for the starkness of daylight. Until this final winter when he’d seemed to have less energy Ray had gone running—jogging—for about two miles every morning, in all weathers—in addition to going out with me every afternoon (running, walking, bicycling, Fitness Center); but I’d never had Ray’s motivation to get up so early. And to run in the cold, even in the rain sometimes.

  Chiding him, fondly—“Your feet are wet! You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  March 7, 2008.

  To Jan Perkins and Margery Cuyler

  Is there anything like a “grief support group” locally? I may have to try this . . . I’m not sure that I can get through this alone. My personality seems to be falling apart. Especially at night. I am usually all right among other people but begin to fall apart when alone. I guess I can’t grasp it somehow, that Ray is really gone. That he isn’t just somewhere where I can’t see him. It just seems impossible . . .

  Perhaps something like an AA group—(sounds so Nabokovian).

  Sorry to go on and on about myself! That really is evidence of derangement . . .

  Love,

  Joyce

  Of the many things I did not tell my friends, I did not tell them of how, the day following Ray’s death, that night unable to sleep I cleared away approximately one-half of my clothes, from our bedroom closet.

  Not Ray’s clothes! My own.

  In a heap I threw dresses, skirts, slacks, shirts—sweaters—things not worn for a year or more. In some cases, a decade.

  Dresses I had worn, with Ray, long ago in Windsor. In Detroit. Dinner parties, festive occasions. There are photographs of the two of us, in our dress-up clothes. Looking so happy.

  In a fever to be rid of these clothes—clothes that had once been new—clothes I’d once took pleasure in wearing—on my knees with paper towels and Windex cleaning the dusty floor of the closet.

  A kind of rage is smoldering in my heart. Why am I so angry—jeering-angry—You are alone now. All this is vanity, worthless. What a ridiculous person you are! This is what you deserve.

  Clothes twisted into a heap, stuffed into a garbage ba
g, to be dragged out to the curb. So crucial it seems to me, to get rid of these things, not to give them a second glance, I don’t think to call Good Will, or the Salvation Army—or maybe it seems to me no one would want my clothes, no one would want me.

  Next day, after the trash has been taken away, and the clothes are gone, and my closet half-empty—I’m stricken with a sense of loss.

  Why did I do such a thing? Why, so desperately?

  Ray’s clothes, I have left untouched. Ray’s beautiful gray wool sport coat, his camel’s hair coat, his shirts still in the Mayflower laundry wrapper, his khaki shorts neatly folded . . . But there is a bureau drawer stuffed with his socks, I think that I will give away Ray’s socks, there is a veterans’ service organization I will call—the Military Order of the Purple Heart.

  Weeks later, I am staring at the Purple Heart card left in our mailbox. It can only be coincidental, I am thinking.

  We need small household items and your usable clothes. We raise funds for service, welfare, and rehabilitation work in connection with the members of the Military Order of the Purple Heart of the U.S.A. Those eligible for membership are any wounded, disabled and/or handicapped veteran, his/her surviving spouse, orphan or other survivor.

  Quickly I place Ray’s socks—(neatly folded after laundering, by Ray)—in a cloth bag. So many socks!—white cotton socks, black silky socks, checked socks. I can’t bring myself to give away Ray’s shirts, sweaters, jackets, neckties—but socks are minimal, lacking identity and significance.

  In other bags and boxes, more articles of clothing (my own), random household items like plates, glasses, vases, coffee mugs.

  None of these needs to be discarded but I think that I must donate more than merely socks to the veterans’ service organization. And when mid-morning a van appears at the end of our driveway and the driver comes to load things into his vehicle I feel a flash of terror, the sensation you feel when you realize you’re making a terrible mistake but it’s too late—too late!