A Widow's Story Read online

  The call from the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was to elicit from me a comment, a response, to this wonderful news, but I could only ask how the journalist knew this, how she knew so definitely; she insisted that she had her “sources”—this was not a mere rumor.

  I told her thank you but that I would wait for the official announcement.

  But I had won, the caller insisted. In a few hours, I would get a call from Stockholm!

  When I hung up the phone and told Ray what the call was he laughed and said, “That! Let’s go to bed.”

  Chapter 55

  E-mail Record

  March 17, 2008.

  To Edmund White

  Thanks so much for your phone call, I just wasn’t up to answering the phone at that time . . . Have been trying to get through the night without the drug [Lorazepam] & would prefer to be tired/groggy through tomorrow than “addicted” . . . have been panicky, sweating, anxious but have been determined not to give in . . . have been reading in bed & taking notes, which is somewhat calming . . . The cats are convinced that I am utterly crazy since I am up through the night as Ray & I never were; so they’ve been going outside, & coming back inside virtually upon demand.

  I think that you can tolerate your sleeping pills, obviously—but I am not used to any kinds of drugs, & the “suicidal thoughts” have certainly been powerful . . .

  I had a lovely long conversation with Gail Godwin earlier tonight, who’d lost her husband/partner of more than 30 years a few years ago . . .

  Much love to my traveling companion,

  “sleepless in Princeton”—

  Joyce

  March 17, 2008.

  To Richard Ford

  I can’t face any sort of commemorative event [for Ray] . . . I’m frightened of picking up the phone and it’s an old friend wanting to grieve with me—like tearing at my pathetic thin scabs with their fingers—though they “mean well”—I know!—but I just can’t face the prospect of friends coming here, & Ray not here; I would be just sick about it though Jeanne has thought it is a good idea, but I am not up to it, I hope Jeanne understands . . .

  What I take from Ray’s [phone] message is that he was utterly unaware of what would lie ahead. Maybe a medical crisis of a sudden spike in temperature—Jeanne says these virulent bacteria can sweep through the bloodstream & carry off even a younger person within hours. It’s terrifying. But Ray was perhaps spared this. (As Bob Fagles is not being spared . . . There is the true horror and tragedy.)

  I like to think that he just fell asleep—didn’t even know what was happening. High fevers cause delirium . . . He probably didn’t experience pain.

  My “writing” these days is mostly e-mails but just to a very few friends. Can’t use the telephone. . . .

  Isn’t Eliot Spitzer something! A welcome change . . .

  Much love to you both,

  Joyce

  March 22, 2008.

  To Edmund White

  I am so looking forward to you & our party. But such a misery of insomnia tonight, though I’ve taken the full strength of this drug, & just can’t sleep; & can’t imagine many more nights like this. There is such a yearning to swallow every pill in the bottle . . . Of course, one has to be a good example to others, including students. I am so worn out with tasks & obligations; I think it was a mistake not to follow Ray immediately, the night that he died. All this aftermath has been crazed with little let-up & meaning. Of course I much appreciate your presence . . . You have kept me going . . . If I could sleep just an hour or two, I’m sure that I would feel differently. It just seems impossible.

  These days just go on, on and on without end like that play of Sartre’s in which individuals’ eyelids have been removed . . .

  Much love,

  Joyce

  March 22, 2008, 4:08 A.M.

  To Doug Hagley [typesetter, Marquette, Michigan]

  None of these figures is very clear in Ray’s handwriting . . . This is all overwhelming . . . This insomnia is ravaging to me—just can’t sleep even having taken the full medication—truly I don’t know what to do but can’t imagine many more days—weeks?—of this. I had not realized that the [Ontario Review] publication would be so very difficult & wonder now at the feasibility of my having continued after Ray’s sudden death. I am in over my head, completely.

  Much affection,

  Joyce

  March 23, 2008.

  To Doug Hagley

  Thanks so much for your advice . . . I have to concentrate on getting through one day at a time, then one night at a time, and trying not to panic at the emptiness/loneliness. Though I am surrounded by friends—I can’t seem to get any of my old energy back, and I guess I am what one might call flat-out depressed . . . had no idea what it was like until now. I will be sorry when our collaboration ends . . . You have been a wonderful presence across the miles.

  I am meeting with our accountant tomorrow to ask about many things including the future of the OR Press. I suppose he will say as many have said, including you, that I shouldn’t make any decisions for a while.

  Much affection across the miles,

  Joyce

  March 23, 2008.

  To Gloria Vanderbilt

  . . . just came back from a brisk walk, and feel somewhat encouraged. My worst times are nights of course—I am trying different medications—ultimately, it’s probably best just to sit up and read or try to take notes . . . I have not been able to write in any formal way but have taken many fevered notes over the past weeks . . . everything dazed and deranged and unreal and seemingly without end. I love the beautiful St. Theresa figure, it suggests such calm and seems to rise above time. I think, It will outlive us all. This is only right.

  Today is Easter, and I am hoping to see “newness” in things. The past six weeks have been claustrophobic and leaden, and I am eager for some change!

  Love,

  Joyce

  Chapter 56

  The Cache

  Lorazepam—43 one-milligram tablets—“for anxiety”

  Methocarbamol—67 two-milligram pills—“for muscle pain”

  Citalopram—29 forty-milligram tabs—“for depression, anxiety”

  Vicodin Es—29 thirty-milligram tabs—“for pain”

  Propoxy—30 thirty-milligram tabs—“for depression, anxiety”

  Lunesta—18 three-milligram pills—“for insomnia”

  Ambien—30 ten-milligram pills—“for insomnia”

  Quinidine—5 two-hundred-milligram tabs—“for rapid heartbeat”

  Tylenol P.M.

  Benadryl

  Bufferin

  Advil

  Melatonin

  The widow’s drug cache, spread out on a counter, is a haphazard accumulation of years. Every American household must have such an arsenal of drugs hidden away in medicine cabinets, at the rear of shelves, in drawers. The earliest prescription listed here, quinidine, from a Princeton physician long since retired, is dated 1989. (Would the drug still be effective, after so long? How many would one need to take, to stop a heartbeat altogether?) The pain pills are more recent and the anti-anxiety/anti-depression, anti-insomnia prescriptions are all recent, and all mine.

  Such quantities of pills and tablets remain of these prescriptions, because very few of these drugs were ever taken as prescribed. A single Vicodin tablet and you feel as if you’ve been struck over the head with a sledgehammer—who could dare to take a second tablet?

  And so I am left with a rosary of pills. A single decade of this rosary and the subject will have vanished. The widow’s misery will have vanished.

  So deep a sleep, even the beady dead eyes like gems will have vanished.

  Otherwise, the widow is AWAKE. Never has there been such WAKEFULNESS as that which inhabits the widow’s skull like rapid gunfire. Lying AWAKE through the interminable hours of the night sweaty, frankly scared—not as an adult but as a child is scared—trying not to think of the remainder of my life.

  Calculating how long
I might have to endure in this posthumous limbo—ten years? Fifteen? Twenty?

  You have your writing, Joyce. You have your friends. And your students.

  Almost, such remarks sound like mockery. But of course no one intends to be mocking.

  You know, Ray would not want you to feel this way. Ray would want you to—

  But I am angry with Ray! If Ray were to appear in the doorway of this room, I would not speak with him.

  It was his carelessness! He let himself get pneumonia, and he let himself die. He left me behind—with this.

  The truth is, it was I—the wife, the widow—who left my husband behind.

  When you have abandoned the one who trusted you, there can be no solace.

  Your punishment is to be yourself: widow. This is a just punishment.

  ***

  “I can be strong. I can stop this.”

  And so tonight, I will not take another pill. Not another half-pill. No more hateful Lorazepam that makes my mouth dry as chalk and my eyes smart with tears. I am curled up in my nest, wool socks, a flannel bathrobe over my nightgown, for I am both shivery and warm, sweaty—the nape of my neck is slick with sweat; propped up in my nest against pillows, as I never did when Ray was alive, I am reasonably comfortable reading, trying to read—this new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, or is it the new translation of Don Quixote; and there, in the corner of my eye, Ray’s novel manuscript on the bedside table, beneath other papers, which impulsively I might read tonight—I might begin to read tonight—for the earnestly typed words are faint, and fading—the pages are at least thirty years old, perhaps forty years old; Black Mass was written before my young husband met me, and some years after we were married it was partly revised, or rewritten; the novel is a secret document, I am thinking; as my own writing, in a kind of code, is a secret writing; as all writing is secret, even as it is made public—“published.”

  I can be strong, I think. I can stop this.

  Whatever terrible thing is happening to me, inside me—I have the power to stop. If I can concentrate.

  Except—I can’t concentrate. Not as I used to. As, if I were required to jump out of bed, hurriedly dress and drive to the medical center—I don’t think that I could do it. Not now.

  Not again.

  Perhaps it’s a withdrawal symptom—being unable to get out of bed in the morning. (The very concept of “morning” is open to revision when one is depressed—“morning” becomes an elastic term, like “middle-age.”) Feeling arms, legs, head heavy as concrete. An effort to breathe—and what a futile effort! Never mind rolling a boulder up a hill like Camus’s Sisyphus, what of the futility of breathing?

  How easy it is, to turn on the TV. Switching through channels, hurriedly, never pausing for more than a few seconds. And how ridiculous life is, viewed as a sequence—a concatenation—of jumbled, random, and unrelated “scenes”: especially with the sound muted, these fragments of others’ lives—simulated lives—have no more significance than shadows dancing on a wall.

  For these, too, are fragments of lives. And many of the actors, in the older films, are no longer living. Ghost-actors, their faces “iconic”—though they themselves have long vanished.

  Though I would publicly identify myself as one who reads, and doesn’t frequently watch television, yet it’s true—I’ve come to be habituated to late-night TV—switching through channels in a kind of perpetual motion—a lurid Möbius strip of the soul. Court TV with its endless store of documentaries on forensics cases, trials, and celebrity murderers—Animal Planet, Turner Classic Movies, CNN, USA, TNT—you would think that insomnia would have proved fruitful, productive; in the way that, for some of us, fantasies of “sick days” summon the prospect of limitless indulgence in reading, all of Remembrance of Things Past, for instance, in the new translation, or a (re)reading of all of Jane Austen, the most delicious sort of escape; or, better yet, jotting down notes for a new project, or “catching up” on correspondence. Then, when you are finally sick, and must retreat to bed, really sick, with flu let’s say, you are so terribly weak, so unambiguously sick, it is all you can do to hold up your head, or even to rest your head against a pillow. Reading, so long imagined as a much-deserved reward, is suddenly out of the question, like jumping out of bed and dancing—running—to the far end of the house.

  And so it has been, with me. Despite my good intentions quickly I lose interest in rereading The Magic Mountain, yet more quickly in War and Peace—Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé which I’ve been meaning to read for years, since Susan Sontag so passionately recommended it to me, proves excruciatingly obscure, and boring; a few pages in a philosopher-friend’s book on Wittgenstein, inscribed to me years ago, are all that I can manage. As for Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov—these great works which I’d first read as a teenager now pass overhead like monumental cloud formations, utterly distant from me, unreachable.

  The TV remote control, amid the swirl of bedclothes in the nest, is reachable.

  Chapter 57

  Morbidity Studies

  Why is everything so—bright?

  Even through my eyelids—blinding-bright?

  Now in the aftermath of my heroic night of sleeplessness—when I’d imagined that I was triumphing over my (presumed) addiction to Lorazepam—this day is so endless, so wracked with headache, dazzling-bright yet splotched with curious lesions like tears in cheap stage scenery—I am thinking If only! If only I could sleep! I would lie down here, on this floor and I would shut my eyes and sleep for just a few minutes! If only—in this place where I have never before shopped, Shop-Rite on Route 1, dazedly pushing a balky grocery cart along endless aisles in glaring fluorescent light; my heart is pounding strangely and there is a high ringing in my ears for I’d been able to sleep no more than an hour the previous night sweaty and shivering in the rumpled nest rising several times to stumble through the house to turn down the thermostat . . . It’s unbearable to remain awake, yet what alternative?—when I try to sleep my mind races flashing like knives; my brain is a runaway wheel containing nothing, there is no content to my thoughts apart from the obsessive worry drug-addiction, insomnia—drug-addiction, insomnia; with true insomniac compulsiveness I’d actually risen from bed one night to look up, in Homer, the encounter of Odysseus and his men with the sea-monsters between whom they must sail:

  Scylla lurks inside [a cavern at Erebus]—the yelping horror,

  yelping, no louder than any suckling pup

  but she’s a grisly monster, . . .

  She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down

  and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,

  each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,

  packed tight—armed to the hilt with black death!

  . . . .

  beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.

  Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down,

  that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down—

  not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.

  . . . .

  Now wailing in fear, we rowed on up those straits,

  Scylla to starboard, dreaded Charybdis off to port. . .

  (Homer, The Odyssey, Book 12, translated by Robert Fagles)

  Where the life-struggle is stark, primitive, elemental—the terror is of being devoured alive.

  Where the life-struggle is more “civilized”—the terror is of being driven mad.

  If only! But I won’t.

  This evening, dinner at a friend’s house.

  This elegant house in Princeton from which my friend E. must soon depart—for her domestic/marital life, too, has collapsed.

  House, home, household—these are mysterious words, fraught with meaning. They signal conditions we take for granted until one day when, irrevocably, we can no longer take them for granted.

  E. has been one of my intense e-mail correspondents since Ray’s death. Late at ni
ght—very early in the morning—E. and I exchange our most intimate, inspired, lyric-surreal messages.

  Though E. doesn’t think of herself in my terms—she doesn’t consider herself quite so stricken as a widow—yet I feel a kinship between us. Both of us have lost our closest companions, both of us find ourselves suddenly alone.

  Living alone, in houses we’d each shared with another person, for many years.

  You could say, each of us has been in a car wreck. Our injuries are not visible, exactly.

  Who is to say—which is worse? To lose a husband to death, or to lose a husband because he has chosen to leave, for another woman?

  This evening at dinner there are just four people: four women: of whom three have been divorced—(each, more than once)—and one “widowed.”

  Much of the dinner conversation turns upon E.’s situation—the imminence of her expulsion from her beautiful house—her financial crisis—the ways in which her companion seems to have betrayed her trust.