A Widow's Story (21 page)

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 bag, 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!

Now, Ray’s bureau drawer is empty. I have no idea why I have done what I’ve done. (Did I think that I
needed
the bureau drawer?) I feel sick, stunned. I could have run after the van and called for him to stop, I could have taken back the socks—(maybe)—but a kind of paralysis had come over me, I simply stood at the window staring helplessly as at Ray’s bedside when I’d arrived too late I had stood staring helplessly at Ray, my brain struck empty of even self-loathing, self-recrimination.

The lizard-thing, the basilisk—that wants me to give up, to die—is staring at me, steady and resolute, waiting, from just a few feet away but I don’t look. I won’t.

Chapter 46
In Motion!

Keep in motion!—here is salvation.

And so in these hallucinatory weeks following Ray’s death I am determined to impersonate “JCO” as flawlessly as in the cult film
Blade Runner
the race of replicants impersonated human beings. I am determined to impersonate “JCO” not merely because I have contracted to do so but because—a fact I am not likely to acknowledge in the Q & A sessions following my readings/lectures—it is the most effective way of eluding the basilisk.

And there is the stark blunt fact
What difference does it make where you are
,
there is nowhere you will not be alone and all places are equidistant from death.

Cuyahoga County
,
Ohio. March 4
,
2008.
Amid a blizzard—banshee-howling winds—there’s an almost festive air—giddiness, gaiety—when the plane bearing sixty or so ghastly-pale passengers westward from Philadelphia in the way of a small boat on a stormy sea lands—slightly lurching, wobbly—but not disastrously—on the snow-whipped runway at the Cleveland airport.

I will try to feel good about this. I will try not to hear the mocking refrain running through my head
There once was a ship
,
and she sailed upon the sea. And the name of our ship . . .

Somehow it has happened, against the advice of friends, and my longtime lecture-agent Janet Cosby, that I have come to Cleveland to give a talk—“The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration”—for a fund-raiser evening sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. My appearance isn’t at the library but in the Ohio Theater, a quaintly restored movie palace of the 1920s with a midnight-blue-felt sky twinkling with stars—vast space is suggested, magical transformations as in a children’s storybook—a cavernous space of one thousand seats—of which only about half will be filled, as a result of this terrible weather.

“Miss Oates! Thank you so much for coming! We heard about your husband, we’re so very sorry . . .”

My hosts are women: librarians. Very nice people.

Inevitably, everywhere—(yes, I can be quoted on this!)—the very nicest people you meet are likely to be librarians.

How hard this is, however—maintaining my poise as “JCO” when I am being addressed, so bluntly, as a woman whose husband has died—a “widow.”

How hard too, to change the subject—to deflect the subject—for I must not break down, not now. I know that these women mean well, of course they mean well, one or another of these women might in fact be widowed herself, but their words leave me stricken and unable to speak, at first. Accepting their condolences I must be courteous, gracious. I must understand that their solicitude is genuine, that they have no idea how desperately I would like not to be reminded of my “loss”—at this time, particularly.

By degrees then “JCO” returns, or resumes—the precarious moment has passed.

I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed:

Yes my husband died.

Yes I am very sad.

Yes you are kind to offer condolences.

Now can we change the subject?

With eight or ten others, mostly women, I am taken to dinner at a private club close by the Ohio Theater; our hostess—clearly a donor with money—stares at me almost rudely during the course of the dinner as she interrogates me at length about my novel
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
, seemingly the only book of mine she has read. There are people for whom a work of fiction presents some sort of obstacle, or challenge—a portrait of lives or life views that differ from their own, and therefore require this sort of sharp interrogation. The situation is compounded by the fact that the woman is evidently hard of hearing, so that my polite-murmured replies draw blank stares, and her voice is raised, strident as she asks why, having been “middle-class” in Germany, did the Jewish family in my novel so quickly “give in” and “become peasants” in the United States? I am so taken aback by this question, and the curious stridency with which it’s asked, I have to think carefully how to reply. Because they were traumatized by their experiences in Germany, I say. Because they were made to flee their homes, they were uprooted, terrified—they suffered. The Nazis persecuted the Jews—you must know of this, surely? The woman stares at me. Is she seriously deaf? Is she being contrary, adversarial? Is she a snob? An anti-Semite? Or just obtuse? Yes, she says, with a disdainful expression, but they became poor so quickly, they lived in squalor. The father had been a high school teacher, he should have known better . . . How bizarre this is, how disagreeable, it reminds me of an astonishing remark made to Susan Sontag and me at a literary conference in Warsaw in the early 1980s, by a Polish translator—
The Jews could have saved themselves from the Nazis. But they were too lazy.

The other guests at dinner—the librarians—are listening in silence. I am wishing that I were alone—anywhere, alone!—even as I try to explain to the skeptical woman that a writer does not present characters as they should be ideally, but as they might be, plausibly; I am not about to tell her that
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
is based upon my grandmother’s life—my Jewish grandmother, the mother of my father—long before I knew her. The woman plying me with questions is clearly accustomed to being taken very seriously, for soon it’s revealed that she and her husband have “dined with the Bushes”—that is, George W. and Laura—at a $25,000-per-plate fund-raiser; her husband is a “staunch Republican”—an older man. Grudgingly she concedes, “I suppose it wasn’t easy to get a job over here. In the 1930s.” Yes, I say. That’s right. It wasn’t easy—“Jacob Schwart became a gravedigger because he had no choice.”

Yet she repeats, as if this were the telling blow: “Yes but they gave in so quickly. That’s what I don’t understand.”

I feel furious, wanting to say to her
And how quickly would you have given in? A month
,
a week? A day?

The other women seem embarrassed. The subject is changed. For the first time I think that maybe this was a mistake, coming here. Leaving home in a snowstorm, to give a presentation for a public library in Ohio—in a snowstorm. Clearly, I’m not in my right mind. This silly conversation with a stranger, a “staunch Republican”—what do I care about it, or her? What do I care what this woman thinks? I will never see her again, I will never return to Cuyahoga County again.

The dinner continues, on a lighter note. I can tell stories—not about myself, or my fated Jewish ancestors, but of other writers, writer-friends, names familiar to my dinner companions who are eager to be entertained and keep telling me how “grateful” they are that my plane didn’t crash in the storm, or that I hadn’t canceled at the last minute—“That’s what we expected, you know.”

Everyone agrees, vehemently. Even the woman who’d so disapproved of my Jewish family.
They
would have canceled in similar circumstances, of course.

I can’t tell them that canceling wasn’t an option for me. Because if I had, I might have canceled the next engagement. And the next. And one morning, I wouldn’t get out of bed at all.

By the end of the dinner I’ve forgotten the unpleasant exchange with the hard-of-hearing donor and am feeling almost giddy, elated. It’s as if Ray were present and were reminding me—
If you were upset by her
,
you must care. You are not totally defeated
,
depressed. A depressed person would not become angry. This is good!

There’s an ironic appropriateness to my presentation—“The Writer’s ‘Secret Life’: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration”—with its focus upon
woundedness
—especially in childhood. The writers of whom I speak—Samuel Beckett, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Sam Clemens, Eugene O’Neill among others—are brilliant examples of individuals who rendered
woundedness
into art; they are not writers of genius because they were
wounded
but because, being
wounded
, they were capable of transmuting their experience into something rich and strange and new and wonderful. Tears spring into my eyes when I quote Ernest Hemingway’s stirring remark—it’s so profound, I will quote it to the audience twice:

From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason.

(Hemingway was in his late fifites—nearing the end of his life—when he made this passionate statement to the young George Plimpton, interviewing Hemingway for one of the first issues of the fledgling
Paris Review
. The ringing idealism is at odds with Hemingway’s deeply wounded if not mutilated self—his twisted soul, his embittered and grudging spirit—yet, how powerful!)

During the presentation I feel buoyed aloft—as always—as if my particular
woundedness
has been left behind, in the wings of the stage; but afterward, alone, after the applause has abated, and the book-signing is ended, and I have been driven back to my hotel—alone—this is the dangerous time.

I would make a joke of it, if I could—“Honey? I’m here in Parma, Ohio. In a snowstorm—and on Snow Road. Don’t ask why!”

Or: “There’s a gigantic bouquet in the room here—a strong scent of lilies—like a funeral home.”

If I were to call Ray as ordinarily I would have called him at this time, this is what I would say to him, to make him laugh. And

Ray would say—

Don’t stay up too late working.

Come back soon!

I love you.

It is a fact that I am in Parma, Ohio, but not quite truthful that I am, at the moment, at 2111 Snow Road, which is the address of the Cuyahoga County Library; I am in a very nice hotel in this Cleveland suburb.

Nor is it truthful that I know what Ray might have said. Very likely we’d have spoken of the most mundane things . . . as usually we did.

This is the first engagement away from home since Ray has died and thus the first night away from home when I can’t call him.

How relentless, snow blown against the hotel windows! Banshee-howling outside! It was very kind of my librarian-hosts to leave the large beautiful floral display for me with its waxy-white lilies that emit the most exquisite sweetness . . . How sad it seems to me that there is no one with whom I might share these flowers, as there is no one with whom I can share the luxurious hotel suite, the “king-sized” bed the size of a football field.

I am so lonely—I have no one to call back home—no one knows where I am, nor does anyone care; this is the most maudlin sort of self-pity, I know; yet—how to transcend it? I am not Camus’s Sisyphus—the “hero of the absurd” who resists the temptation to suicide by a stoic acceptance of his fate. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, says Camus. To which I would say
Really? What would Sisyphus say for himself?

In the somewhat drafty hotel room—near the tall narrow windows—the basilisk is hovering. If I turn my head, the thing retreats—the glassy stare, that look of terrible patience.

Never would I contemplate “harming myself” away from home—of course. So I am safe here in Parma, Ohio.

Yet so anxious and depressed, I have to call my friend Jeanne—but her daughter Lily answers—Jeanne isn’t home; I call Edmund White, who is home, in his apartment in Chelsea, New York City, and doesn’t even seem surprised that his writer-friend Joyce is calling him at 11
P.M.
from Desperation, Ohio.

How lucky I am, Edmund will talk with me at this hour! If there is a Mozart of friendship, Edmund White is the Mozart of friendship; the most sympathetic of individuals, open emotionally to his friends at any time; Edmund doesn’t judge, he who is beyond being judged as he is, by his own admission, beyond shame. In a startling passage in
My Lives
he has said of himself:

In my pursuit of lightness, I sometimes feel like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested. If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now I can usually spot the next branch but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.

That night lying in the enormous bed in chilly sheets I listen to snow flung against the windows like crazed neutrinos thinking
I did it. I was here. I didn’t cancel. And now—next?