A Widow's Story (12 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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?
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
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.
If I shake my head, the dark-shimmering thing disappears. If I rub my eyes, that are nearly always watering.
Unmistakably, my vision has deteriorated in the brief period of time since Ray was hospitalized. Driving in the dark home from the hospital, I’d begun to notice a softening of objects, a kind of haze.
Often my eyes are so flooded with moisture—tears perversely caused by overly dry eyes—that I have to blink repeatedly, but even then I can’t see clearly. A few years ago following Lasik surgery the vision in both my eyes was highly precise for distances, remarkable for one who’d been myopic for most of her life, now suddenly all that astounding vision is lost, corroding. A wave of panic—not the first of the morning, or even the hour—sweeps over me
But if I go blind? How can I take care of this household? What will become of us?
Vaguely it seems to me—when I am not thinking coherently—that Ray will be coming home from the hospital, eventually. After the car wreck, after a stay in Telemetry—I will be responsible for him, his well-being. I am eager for this opportunity to prove myself, as I’d failed so miserably just recently . . . In this vague fantasy, Ray is not fully aware that I’d abandoned him, in any case Ray is not one to criticize or rebuke.
Ray is not one to accuse
Where were you! When I needed you where were you! Why did you stay away so long! What did you think would happen to me
,
if you left me alone in that terrible place?
And then, I am beginning to think
He will be lost to me. He will disappear.
I am beginning to think
Maybe I never knew him
,
really. Maybe I knew him only superficially—his deeper self was hidden from me.
In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers—disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily/hourly basis!—it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?
In this way, I walled off from my husband the part of my life that is “Joyce Carol Oates”—which is to say, my writing career.
As he handled our finances generally, so Ray handled the finances generated by this career. As he didn’t read most of what I wrote so he didn’t read most reviews of this work, whether good, bad, or indifferent. Always it has astonished me that writers married to each other—for instance Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne—should share virtually every page they write; my friends Richard Ford and his wife, Kristina, not only share each page they write but read their work to each other—a test of marital love which one as “prolific” as JCO is said to be would dare not risk.
Perhaps it was naive, to wish to share only good news with a husband. I have always dreaded being the bearer of bad news to anyone—I take no pleasure in seeing another person pained, or distressed—especially not anyone for whom I feel affection.
Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
On his side, Ray shielded me from the more burdensome side of
Ontario Review
and our—to me—hopelessly complicated financial situation; he oversaw the household—does the roof need repairing? Does the house need repainting? Does the driveway need repaving?—somehow, Ray had access to this knowledge, that totally eluded me. While I oversaw housecleaning, Ray oversaw the outdoor care of the property. Once, in Detroit, when the subject of husbands came up, my women friends were incredulous to hear that, if something awful happened to me, I would be reluctant to tell Ray; still less could they believe that Ray would shield me from his problems. One of the women said enviously that her husband would never “let her get away” with not knowing his problems even if there was nothing she could do to help him.
But why? I asked.
Out of spite, she said.
And I’d thought
Then he can’t love you. If he wants to upset you.
Ray would never wish to upset me. Very likely Ray shielded from me all sorts of things I never knew, and will never know.
Maybe in fact Ray was very frightened in the hospital. Maybe he had a premonition that he would never return home—if he had, he would not have told me.
I don’t think that this is so. I think that he had no idea that he would die, any more than his doctors seemed to have known. But if it had been the case, Ray would not have told me.
Maybe our way of “shielding” each other from distress was inadvertently a way of eluding each other. Maybe there was something cowardly about my reluctance to acknowledge to my husband, the person to whom I was closest, that all was not perfect in my life—far from it, much of the time.
But then, I have walled myself off from “Joyce Carol Oates” as well. I can’t think that this has been a mistaken strategy.
In any case it isn’t one I can modify, at this point in my life.
But now I am thinking—obviously Ray revealed only a part of himself to me. Obviously, he kept much to himself. If he had not a “secret” life—(though possibly he had)—still there was an eclipsed side to his personality, of which I had no clue.
Where have you gone?
What has happened to us?
How can I reach you?—is there no way
,
not ever?
As in a dream of forbidden knowledge I am drawn to Ray’s things. Most rooms of our house are beginning to be difficult to enter but none more than Ray’s study—his “office”—for his presence is so strong here, I’m left breathless.
Maybe he has stepped out for a minute. In the bathroom maybe. Getting the mail.
Yet I am drawn to Ray’s desk, his files, the shelves of his closets stacked with manuscripts, documents, page proofs and cover designs of bygone seasons. Repeatedly I study Ray’s calendar as if in the hope of discovering something new, mysterious—it’s fascinating to me how assiduously Ray marked the days of his life, and how full most of the days were; and then, each day is crossed off with a triumphant black
X
. As if Ray had taken particular satisfaction in crossing off his days when they were completed. As if he’d had no idea that these days would be finite; that these
X
s made with a Magic Marker pen were accumulating into what would be his recent past; as if, beyond the next months—March, April, May—those wonderfully open, empty, blank days would never be filled.
I think with horror of the future, in which Ray will not exist.
Already it has been a week since his death. (How is this possible! Each minute has seemed excruciating.)
It isn’t just for emotional reasons that I must contemplate Ray’s calendar, of course. So much
Ontario Review
business is tied to the calendar—there is the deadline for paying the Hopewell Township property tax—a notation for a Culligan delivery—an appointment with Dr. S
_
—a dentist’s appointment—and (of course!) recycling days—trash pickup days. I begin to feel such sadness, such sorrow, I have to put the calendar aside.
The phone on Ray’s desk—Ray’s business line—begins to ring. Never would I pick up this receiver, for the caller will say
Is Ray Smith there?
Or
Hi Joyce. Can I speak to Ray please?
Sometime later, I’ll check the voice mail. Maybe. If I can force myself. Or maybe not.
It occurs to me now, I will search through Ray’s personal papers. I will read—(re)read—all his published work—what I can find of his writing projects. When we’d moved to Princeton from Windsor, in August 1978, Ray had brought a cache of writing projects with him, some of which he’d completed—an essay on the poetry of Ted Hughes, for instance. And other things—notes, sketches, a draft of a novel—parts of which I’d seen. Ray had lost interest in writing, very much preferring to be an editor and publisher, and had ceased thinking about these things, so far as I knew. But I am excited, for once—I am feeling hopeful. I think
I will get to know my husband better. It isn’t too late!