A Widow's Story (27 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
These entranced TV nights—remote control in my numbed fingers—the movie I seem to be seeing often, in fragments like a broken mirror, is
Leaving Las Vegas.
This was a movie we’d avoided seeing. Neither Ray nor I had had the slightest interest in it—the story of a terminal alcoholic. No matter that it had received very good reviews and people had spoken admiringly of it—we would not have wanted to see it, ever.
Yet, unexpected, over the past several weeks since Ray’s death, it is
Leaving Las Vegas
that exerts a curious sort of spell.
Sometimes it’s playing on two cable channels, at different times. In a single week, it is likely to be playing several times. I haven’t yet seen it from start to finish—(but now, I rarely see anything “from start to finish”—I’m too restless and my attention is too scattered)—but I’ve seen fifteen-, twenty-minute intervals, in a jumbled sequence with just enough continuity for me to make sense of the plot.
As if only in such intervals is
Leaving Las Vegas
bearable.
Things have meanings. All things have meanings. There are no coincidences.
Some of the scenes I’ve seen several times. Just once, the final wrenching scene. And just once, belatedly, the opening of the film—a sequence that explains the protagonist’s self-destructive behavior even as it distances us from him and undermines our sympathy for him.
Almost against my will I’m caught up in this blackly comic/tender-morbid account of an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter in his late thirties?—early forties?—who comes to Las Vegas after his wife leaves him, with the intention of drinking himself to death.
Where previously I’d not had the slightest interest in Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning performance as the alcoholic “Ben Sanderson”—now I am mesmerized by it. Cage is not an actor for whom I’ve felt an exceptional admiration until now but this performance is riveting, utterly convincing. Still more, I’m drawn to “Sera”—a Vegas prostitute played by Elisabeth Shue who exudes a wan, about-to-be-extinguished sort of beauty. That
Leaving Las Vegas
is a romance despite its subject matter—that one comes to care for the doomed lovers—is unexpected. The devotion of the prostitute Sera for the doomed Ben is both outrageous, as the devotion of certain legendary Christian saints and martyrs is outrageous, and yet convincing.
We don’t choose the people with whom we fall in love. The love we feel
,
is our fate. We don’t choose our fate.
And:
Because we had so little time left . . .
After I’d seen the film piecemeal, it became evident that Sera has survived Ben and is recounting the story of her love for him. Her hopeless love for him.
At the start of their relationship, Ben warns Sera
Don’t ever tell me to stop drinking.
Sera warns Ben
Don’t try to make me change my life.
Ben would drive Sera away, he’s even unfaithful to her—this man so saturated in alcohol that he’s barely potent sexually. It’s the unmitigated devotion of the woman to the doomed and unrepentant man that makes
Leaving Las Vegas
such a powerful movie.
All that I’d disliked about the film initially, before I’d actually seen it, seems to me now irresistibly attractive. As I had disliked, or disapproved of, the “moral weaknesses” of those who self-medicate, and now feel that I understand them, and sympathize with them—
For I’ve become one of these myself.
My interest in
Leaving Las Vegas
increases when I learn that the novelist John O’Brien from whose semi-autobiographical novel the film was adapted was himself alcoholic, suicidal—(of course, who else could have written such an intimate account of this doomed life)—and that he’d committed suicide in the second week of the film production.
What is touching, captivating—that Sera will stay with Ben, to the end. She will not desert him. She will not save herself by abandoning him. She expects nothing more from him than he can give her.
To stay with him
,
the doomed afflicted man
,
for as long as possible. To understand that your time together is limited. To expect nothing more than—what is.
Though we’ve been more intimate with Ben than with Sera yet it’s Sera who has outlived Ben. For the woman is likely to outlive the man—and to be the chronicler of his life/death.
The woman is the elegist. The woman is the repository of memory.
And so the film ends with a reprise of their relationship—Sera’s “happy” memories of the doomed Ben. We can see how a woman might be drawn—against her better judgment—to such a man.
In sickness and in health. Till death do us part.
But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.
Philip Roth,
Exit Ghost
How I wish that I could believe these words!
Brave defiant words that claim, for the writer, a privileged life of meaning, significance, and value beyond that of mere “life”—the claim that art is compensatory for the disappointments of life.
Curled in the nest reading a bound galley of Philip’s new novel—which Ray had read shortly before he’d been hospitalized. I wish that I could believe this claim for art but I can’t—at any rate, it isn’t a possibility for me.
Since Ray has died—
died
is a new word, I am almost able to use it without flinching—I’ve come to realize that my writing—my “art”—is a part of my life but not the predominant part.
We revere a cult of genius—as if “genius” stood alone, a solitary mountain peak. This is false, preposterous.
My life is my life as a woman, my “human” life you might say, and that “human” life is defined by other people; by the ever-shifting web, weave, waxing of others’ emotions; others’ states of mind that can’t be fixed, as their very existence can’t be fixed. Philip Roth’s claim is that “print on paper” endures in a way that life can’t endure, and maybe this is so, in a manner of speaking—(at least, for those writers whose work isn’t permanently out of print)—and yet, what chill, meager comfort!
Here is an American predecessor speaking in a very different idiom, yet in a common language:
A writer must live and die by his writing. Good for that and good for nothing else. A War; an earthquake, the revival of letters, the new dispensation by Jesus, or by Angels, Heaven, Hell, power, science, the Neant [Nothingness],—exist only for him as strokes for his brush.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
His
brush. For this is a masculine stance, I think. The bravado, the futility.
Bravado in the very face of futility.
It is terrifying to consider—maybe, one day, out of loneliness, desperation, and defiance—I, too, will make such a claim.
Chapter 62
Cruel Crude Stupid “Well-Intentioned”
“Ohhh Joyce—you’re wearing
pink.
How nice.”
Like a slap in the face, or a kick in the gut—this exclamation from a woman when we meet, in the company of several other women, following the memorial service for Robert Fagles in the Princeton University chapel. The woman is not a close friend of mine—rather more, an old acquaintance—for whom I’ve felt affection in the past though at the moment I want only to turn away from her, and run.
What should I be wearing? Black?
How dare you speak to me like that!—and how stupid of you
,
to mistake dark-rose for “pink.”
Of course I manage to be civil. I suppose, I manage to smile. Only my friend Jane sees the shock, the hurt, the incredulity in my face.
She means well. She doesn’t mean to upset you. She’s clumsy
,
awkward—she doesn’t know what to say
,
and she doesn’t know how to not-say it.
Still, as soon as I can, I run.
“Beginning again—like, a divorce—can be
good.
”
Such a smile wreathing this man’s face, such affable vehemence in his voice—it seems contrary of me, to point out that my husband and I weren’t divorced—“I’m a widow. There’s a difference.”
Still he persists: “Not an actual difference. Not literal. It’s ‘beginning again’—you can go in any direction.”
“Really!”
“The spouse is gone. That’s a literal fact. Whether he moved out or—whatever.”
He’s a contractor whom I’ve called to the house, for an estimate on repairs. He’s a stranger to me though highly recommended by mutual friends. He is not someone whom Ray knew, nor did he know Ray. Hence his affable manner, his sense of certitude, as of a man who’d been divorced—dragged over the rubble, battered and humiliated—but over it, now.
“The house is yours, you can do what you want with it. You can renovate, you can build an addition, you can
sell.
That’s the bottom line.”
Is this real? This bizarre conversation? Or is it a perfectly ordinary commonsensical conversation, of the kind people have with women who’ve just recently “lost” their husbands, and I am overly sensitive, like one whose outermost layer of skin has been peeled off? I am trying not to be upset for of course this man, too, is well intentioned—he doesn’t mean to be crude, cruel, stupid—his meaning is
Look on the bright side! Why be gloomy! Here’s a golden opportunity!
By the time the contractor leaves, I’m feeling dazed, exhausted. His boastful little business card I tear into bits. His cheery over-loud phone messages I will not return. When, one day, his pickup truck turns into my driveway as if, impulsively, while he’s in the neighborhood he has decided to drop by, I run away to the rear of the house, far from the front door, and hide.
“Ohhh Joyce! I was
so sorry
to hear about—”
In the midst of dinner with friends in a Princeton restaurant, in the midst of smiling and laughing with friends, something like a predator-bird has swooped upon us having sighted me across the restaurant—(in fact I’d seen him, this individual, making his way to me)—and this time quickly I say, I hope that I am smiling as I say, a flash of scissors in my heart—“Not right now, please. This isn’t the right time, thank you.”
***
Edmund White reports to me, a mutual acquaintance, a university administrator, regretting to him that she’d “never gotten around to sending Joyce some flowers”—and we laugh together at the remark, all that such a remark entails, as if flowers from this woman, any expression of sympathy or even acknowledgment from this woman, would mean anything.
“I told her not to bother,” Edmund said. “I told her that you had all the flowers you want.”
Earnestly a (woman) friend consoles me.
“ ‘Grief’ is neurological. Eventually the neurons are ‘re-circuited.’ I would think that, if this is so, you could speed up the process by just
knowing.
”
“We want to see you, Joyce! It’s been so long.”
In another Princeton restaurant with friends—three couples, among them our oldest Princeton friends—it somehow happens that one of the men lifts his glass in a toast to marriage—long marriages—for each of the couples has been married more than fifty years; their conversation turns upon old times, old memories, in their marriages; at length they reminisce, one of the men in particular goes on, on and on; and I am miserable with longing to be away from these people, away from their unwittingly cruel talk that so excludes me as if they’d never known Ray, who had been their friend.
How can they not know how they are hurting me? How
,
when they’d all known Ray well . . .
“Excuse me. I have to leave.”
For the first time since my husband died, I am crying in a public place, and must quickly depart, even as my friends stare after me; one of the men follows me, apologizing, meaning to be kind—but I can’t speak with him, I must escape.
The first breakdown in public, and the last.
“And what will you do now? Sell your house?”
If I take my own life it will not be premeditated but impulsive.
One day—more likely
,
one night—the loneliness will be overwhelming—more than overwhelming
,
purposeless—& I will be so tired—bone-marrow-deep tired—& the knowledge that this condition will not change but prevail
,
or become worse—& I will weaken
,
or maybe I will feel a surge of strength
,
a determination to
finally get this over with
—like one who has been poised trembling at the end of a high diving board—a very high diving board—and the depth of the water below uncertain—the surface choppy
,
shiny
,
plastic-y—& so—the cache of pills will be the solution.
But how to leave this note? This stumbling note? For it must be clearly stated—
I am not suggesting that life is not rich
,
wonderful
,
beautiful
,
various and ever-surprising
,
and precious—only that
,
for me
,
there is no access to this life any longer. I am not suggesting that the world isn’t beautiful—some of the world
,
that is. Only that
,
for me
,
this world has become remote & inaccessible.
On shore
,
in a tangle of storm debris
,
& a lighted ferry or sailboat or cruise ship is pulling out—on the shore you stand watching as the boat recedes—sparkling lights
,
music
,
voices—laughter. If you wave at the boat
,
or do not wave at the boat
,
it comes to the same thing
:
no one notices
,
and the boat is pulling out to sea.