Epilogue (10 page)

that the whisper is my own. Ten minutes into the movie I forget that I am sitting next to strangers on either side, and I am inside the film. James Bond is talking to me. That is the way with movies. I leave the theater with the throng of people arriving and departing all around me. I am glad I went to the movies. I can go alone whenever I want.

I REALLY WISH I COULD WRITE ABOUT THIS L AWSUIT. I CAN

only tell you that someone H. was obligated to now wants a piece of him, because of legal agreements forty-three years old, agreements signed long before I met H. and we married and made our life together. I can only tell you that the lawsuit went into mediation. My lawyers met with other lawyers with a judge who helps both sides negotiate an agreement. This is better than going to court. It is better than a long expensive fight. It means that I sit for hours on a bench in a glass office building in the middle of a distant suburb while in a room across the empty hall on the other side of a bank of elevators, the lawyers are fighting. Across the parking lot I see a Pizza Hut and a Toyota dealership. The f loors are marble, the elevators rise and fall, bells ring. I sit with my son-in-law, who is kind enough to keep me company but surely has better things to do. Nothing seems

to be happening. I am not able to eat or drink. I think how

H. would shrink inside himself if he knew this was happening. He doesn’t.

I see my adversary exiting a door on the other side of the room in which I am now sitting, heading out for some air. I think unkind things. I would tell you what they were but I can’t because I might accidentally identify my adversary. Another lawsuit would follow. A rank odor of loneliness and chronic irritation follows this person about. Once I did feel love for the human being that is now turning away from me. Once I had hoped we would be friends for life. I was naive. I had thought simple goodwill could overcome the tornadoes of emotion that blow across family histories. I had ignored the lessons of Greek tragedy and old fairy tales and assumed that all would be well. I was mining the mountain for gold with a teaspoon. If I were a better person perhaps I could recapture the love that once I felt. I am not.

Some people use money to gain what they feel they were denied. Such people use the court system again and again to exact revenge. I know such people are more to be pitied than to be blamed but that is less true when you are the object of their legal endeavors. I have little pity here.

After five and one half hours the matter is settled. My lawyers have done brilliantly. Her lawyer will take much of her profit. Nobody’s life will change at all. I sign the papers in the lobby. I am tired, very tired. But the settle-ment is not nearly as huge as I had feared. In the settle-ment is a clause that protects me from further suits on this matter. My enemy cannot renew the attack. Relief f loods through me. I want to kiss someone, my lawyer actually.

It’s only money. But it’s money H. had saved, worked for and wanted for his family. I have lost some of it, a small, tolerable amount of it. I can forget this now. But I won’t, not entirely.

It seems odd to me in a book about the loss of H. that I should be writing about money at all. I am not Edith Wharton. I am not Charles Dickens or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Money and real human loss should have nothing to do with each other and perhaps that would be true if H. and I had lived out our lives on a kibbutz growing toma-toes, appreciating the wonders of drip irrigation, but here in America money is not a vulgar subject or rather it is a vulgar subject but one we must indulge, admit into our most private moments, lie about: how much we want it, how much we need, where we got it, how we value it. We respect the self-made but envy the inheritance of others. Money is dirty but lack of money is filthy. It is not happiness. Money has nothing to do with happiness. But it does affect everything else. I think these things in the car on the way back to the city after the mediation. I think what a wonderful novel about money I could write if only I wouldn’t be sued if I wrote it.

This lawsuit has hung over my life, a cloud, a fearful haunting, for months now. It has frightened me irrationally. It has reopened a scar over which I keen. All the children and my friends will now pretend this never happened. Everyone knows who was on what side and what lies beneath polite smiles.

I go to a luncheon party. I see an old friend, a law professor. He walks slowly and with a cane and cannot stand for long. He tells me he misses H. because H. would always

come over to him and sit with him and they would joke, their old, repeated jokes. He says most people do not join him on a couch but leave him alone. H. would make sure he had his drink. This conversation now brings a heaviness in my chest and then a rapid rising of tears. Quickly I ask my friend about the coming election, his expectations, his opinions. The subject changes, the f low of my tears reverses its direction. The heaviness in my chest remains.

• • •

I read in the class notes of my high school bulletin of a widow who was contacted by an old boyfriend from college who had read her husband’s obituary in the paper. She met him and they rekindled their young love and are now happily together in the college town where he is a professor. I have heard several stories like this. Do I have any old boyfriends who might be available? I have a first husband but he must be as unsuitable now as he was then and besides he married a much younger woman so he isn’t a widower. I try to remember. I can’t think of anyone. Bad luck I suppose.

I have a smallish skin cancer on the side of my face beside my right eye. I ignored it for a while. It bled a little. I went to the doctor, who sent me to a surgeon in the hospital to have it removed. They take it off, send it to a lab while you wait, and if the margins of their sample do not come clean, they take off some more, until they have it all: cancer vanquished. I could have a plastic surgeon standing by. I am not worried about a scar in a place a few wisps of hair would cover. I am not worried about my life itself because I have been assured such skin cancers are not threatening. The doctor scolds about the sun. Ah the sun that I

have played in since I was a child, all the summers at the beach chasing waves in and out, all the summers at camp throwing balls as the heat caused sweat to run down my shirt. Ah the sun in the park where I watched my children climb and dig and put sticky fingers around melting ice creams. This is the same star that burned my face and gave me blisters when I was twelve and my mother and I stayed at a hotel in Miami Beach while she decided whether or not to divorce my father. She didn’t: a mistake. The doctor is talking about the same source of radiation that melts the tension out of my back when I spend a few days in Aruba or Puerto Rico, that sun is the one the doctor, a pale man with no sign of ever having worn sandals to cross the hot sand, regards the way I would an alligator in my bathtub.

H. would have gone with me to the surgeon at the hospital. He would have complained about having to cancel patients. I would have said, “I don’t need you. I can go alone.” He would have said, “No. I’m going with you.” Now I go alone. I sit for an hour in a crowded waiting room. Other people with bandages on their faces, arms, legs are waiting. Someone seems to be with each of them: a wife, a husband, a sister. I read the paper. I read the
New Republic
from cover to cover. Finally I am taken. The pro-cedure is painless. I think about the umbrella we sat under at the beach and how I meant to stay in the shade but always slid outside into the warming sun. I tried to remember the brand names of the sunblock I had used. I always meant to reapply it after swimming. I usually forgot. The umbrella, the creams, the dark glasses I always removed immediately and placed on top of my head had always seemed to me impositions, restrictions on my freedom, prissy items. I

wanted to be on the beach with my hair blowing wild and the sun beating down and my feet in the spray. This skin cancer was the price I paid.

I waited in the waiting room. I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and had a roll and coffee. I had a bandage on the side of my head. The cafeteria walls were painted a bilious green. The linoleum tabletops had long ago lost their luster. At the next table three doctors discussed their boats, which were each in need of repair. The plastic tray was brown and cracked. The long halls through the hospital, the silent people in the elevators, the ring of the cash register in the cafeteria, alarmed me.

I called my daughter in another borough and she offered to come and wait with me. I accepted her offer with some shame. Was it not my role to be with her when time was holding still, not the other way around? She took nearly an hour to reach the hospital and find me. When she did I was restored. I talk with her about her work, about her child, about the new coat she wants to buy. I see her ref lection in the glass window. I look only at her.

The surgeon needed to slice some more skin from the wound. At last I am called to the operating room. My daughter waits outside. It is done. We wait together another two and a half hours before the report comes that all is well. The surgeon will sew me up soon. My daughter leaves.

What I know is that this is not the end of my hospital visits. Odds are very high that I will be waiting alone in rooms like this again and again in the years that remain. I do not have H. to stand near me.

• • •

There is a widow who lives in my building. She is considerably older than I am. A pile of yellow-stained white hair rests on her head. She wears a large-brimmed straw hat in all weather. Her back is bent over at a forty-five-degree angle. She wears long, f lowered dresses over a short, shape-less body, and black boots. She has a wide jaw and milky-blue eyes. She pushes a shopping cart, which also serves as a walker. There is a sign on the cart that says,
IMPEACH BUSH
. I see her coming and going. I should do more than nod and smile when I pass her. I should speak. But I don’t. She is like a storybook widow, perhaps a good witch. I, however, still look like most of the other people walking by. I don’t send off vibrations of misery, or addiction or bizarre thoughts. I am not rummaging through the garbage cans looking for redeemable bottles or items that can be sold on a blanket in front of the grocery store. I think I still look gainfully employed, ordinary, as if someone is at home waiting for me. Actually I think I should make some effort to get in touch with my inner witch. Perhaps this pretense at normalcy is weakening my immune system, tying up my brains, and fooling no one.

I go to lunch with another widow in my building. She has been widowed for over twenty years. She is a fund-raiser for a major hospital. We talk in the elevator about her exotic trips, safaris and visits to Nepal and boat rides to the South Pole. She has a bright smile. She tells me that she is finally ready to meet someone after all these years. For many years she preferred to be alone but now she has worked through the problems in her own therapy and is ready to be with another man. She has found someone through an online dating service but he wants her to pay

for her own dinner. This disturbs her. After twenty years of widowhood I think I would be glad to buy the man his steak and
pommes frites
. But perhaps not. I am sure that I would not have lasted twenty years alone. I have already located the window in my fourteenth-floor apartment that would be the right one to open and lean out, too far, irre-vocably too far. I have chosen a window on the alley behind the building so that there would be no chance I could fall on anyone, also I chose a window where the resulting mess of blood and bone would be seen by as few as possible. I have already considered this carefully. Would I take pills ahead of time to still the pain on impact? How many pills? The plan is not yet complete. It is a plan I hope not to execute, at least not for a while, but it comforts me to hold it in my mind. I am reassured that I do not have to live beyond my desire to live. H. said that the best way to end your life is in a closed garage with the car motor going. But I don’t have a garage. Perhaps the fund-raiser widow has never had that kind of dark thought, perhaps she is content with her shaggy dog who licks my hand when we meet. Should I get a dog?