Epilogue (11 page)

I have lunch with the widow of a psychoanalyst, a colleague of H.’s, a woman I have known reasonably well. She is at least a decade older than I am. She was a refugee from Nazi Prague, hidden by nuns in a convent in Czechoslova-kia. She was a beautiful young woman and is still a beautiful woman with dark, sad, distrustful eyes. I have hardly seen her since her husband died several years ago. This was careless of me, not deliberate. I feel guilty because I should have called her more often. I had not been a good friend. I don’t deserve her friendship now.

Now she tells me that she never cooks dinner anymore. She is glad not to be cooking. She eats her main meal at lunch and then sits with a snack in front of the television in the evening. She tells me that her children and grandchildren visit but they make a huge mess, they make a lot of noise and it is too much for her, this rushing about. She has stopped making dinners for the religious holidays, which had once formed the center of her family life. She belongs to a book club that meets once a month. She has a friend she has traveled with every summer for a few weeks. She still works a few days a week as a volunteer at the library where once she had held a job. She has a respectable life, but I can tell from her tone, from the f latness in her eyes, that although she is doing all she can, she is listless. She lives dutifully but not brilliantly, as a prisoner adjusted to their prison might do. She tells me that many of her and her husband’s friends stopped inviting her to dinner within a year of his death. This is the cruelty of the social world.

I ask her if she is having trouble sleeping. “No,” she says. “I sleep too much. I sleep usually ten hours at night and then a few hours in the afternoon and sometimes I doze in the morning. I have trouble staying awake.” She knows as I know that sleeping this much is a symptom of depression. “What would I do, with the extra waking hours?” she asks. I don’t have an answer. Suddenly I am not only afraid of not sleeping. I am also afraid of sleeping too much. There is no point in practicing being dead. There is also no point in staying awake just to convince yourself that you are not dead.

I have lunch with a good friend who tells me to join a club where writers go to have lunch at a long table and talk

to one another. I say I will but I don’t. I don’t want to have lunch with strangers. I can barely manage to have lunch with friends.

H. wanted me to exercise three times a week so now I join a club. I try to go regularly. But one morning I am too exhausted from lack of sleep, another I forget completely, and then I have a cold or a meeting or a book to read. I will exercise when I can. Not now.

There is another widow in my building. Her husband was a principal of a school. She has not found anyone in the eighteen years since he died. We have coffee in her living room. If I press my face against her window I can see the bridge that spans the river to the west of us. I can see the black barge that sits in the river surrounded by ice blocks, stilled. She tells me that the man I saw her with on Broadway the other day, the broad-shouldered, mustached man, is a married lover of hers who was supposed to leave his wife but had just changed his mind. For a while we talk about men, their propensity for infidelity. We drink cup after cup of coffee. There is a sisterhood in the condition of widowhood but it has its limits. I want to hear good things about her life. She has none to tell me.

Over the years she has been with other men and when I passed her on the street or stood with her in the elevator she would blush a sweet pink color when she introduced me to this one or that one. She is a woman who has a goodness of soul, the kind that any child could recognize. And even she has not found a connection to a new man or contentment without one. She had not been ready to lose her husband, they had so many years ahead of them. Still I would have thought that she would by now have been in

someone’s arms. “Being single sucks,” she says. Her words frighten me without surprising me. Of course it sucks but shouldn’t there be an end to it, when a widow can live happily ever after on her own? If life is a cabaret shouldn’t there always be another act, at least until there isn’t?

• • •

I go to meet V. at the information booth of Grand Central Station. I have no idea what he looks like. He has written to me after reading the personal ad in the
New York Review of Books
. He lives in a suburb. He is a widower. He is interested in reading and is taking courses in the classical world at his local university where he has become president of its se-nior citizen organization devoted to aiding the institution. He was a banker. He writes that he retired early because his wife had rheumatoid arthritis and was no longer able to drive but she wanted to keep working. She loved her days as a dietician and so he stayed home to take her to work. This touches me. Here is a man who loved his wife and acted on his love. This is good. This man does not lack a soul. I call him. At the very least he will not harm me.

Years ago when I was young I met young men by the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. They were coming to New York from Yale and Harvard and Amherst and Dartmouth and they were shining with possibility. We went drinking at the local clubs. We went to hear jazz. I kissed them good-night. I played at falling in love. I loved the parade of them, the smell of them, the scarves they gave me with their school colors. I liked it when they stared at my breasts and pretended not to. But now I am at the information booth and the commuters are swirling around and the ceil-

ing of the railroad station is so high that it makes me dizzy to look up at the glass dome and I feel ridiculous. He is late. I am early. I am anxious by the time he arrives.

I see him first. A very small man with large ears that extend out from his bald head. Never mind, I tell myself. I do not look like a movie star either. He has small hands, one of which he puts on my back and directs me to the cafeteria dining room in the station. It is noisy. We have to shout at each other. He tells me his wife died of an infection from her rheumatoid arthritis medication. She became ill one night and died in the hospital the next day. He tells me how much she loved music and that he has endowed an annual concert in her name at the local high school. He was a manager of retirement funds. He is active in his Universalist church. He is the head of many committees. I am Jewish, I tell him. He says many Universalists are Jewish. Were Jewish, I think but don’t say. Could I ever be with a man who sits in a pew in a church? I who once wanted to live on a barge by the Seine and quote T. S. Eliot until the dawn, could I live in a suburban home and go to church on Sundays, even a church that makes less of Christ than most? I must not slam doors, I say to myself. I need a new world, I remind myself. He tells me that he is on a committee that purchases art for the local university. I am impressed. He asks me about my work, about my children. He listens carefully. We agree to meet again. He is off to an appointment at some bank. As we part, he kisses me on the mouth. I was just kissed by a strange man, I say to myself. It makes me want to cry, this kiss. It’s the wrong kiss, the wrong man.

• • •

Some years ago we formed a dinner party group with four other couples. We met once a month at one of our houses and the host made a dinner, set the table with the best dishes, and we did this so that we could know each other better, become closer and closer. In a city, friends whirl about, one can go from month to month without speaking to those one holds dear and then you slip from their lives as they slip from yours. We had our dinners to hold on to each other. H. enjoyed cooking his best meals when these dinners were at our house. A week or so before the date he would take all the cookbooks and spread them out on our table and read through them, until he declared his menu. Now we are nine. I go alone. At the first dinner after H.’s death I did my best to join in conversation. The nineness of us was obvious. No one said anything, no one mentioned his name. I managed the evening well enough. I decided to cook myself for our next meeting, which was to be at our house—no, my house. I am not a cook. I haven’t the patience or the skill or the interest. H. loved cooking because he said it was like chemistry, his first passion.

But I take out the cookbooks. I make a list and gather my ingredients. I cook the meal. Everyone says it is wonderful but they would say that even if I had served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I look around the table. My friends are here, which seems right, good. A toast to H. is proposed. I join in lifting my glass. I am glad that I can say his name in public again. Not saying his name was unnatural. He did not vanish. I remember him. I need my friends to remember him too.

Some months go by and we are having our group dinner at a nearby house. But this time my friends are talk-

ing about the various remarkable trips they are taking or have just taken. One couple has just returned from a town in Mexico. They walked the cobblestone streets and visited the charming churches and took a course in Spanish. Another is off to the Caribbean to spend a week on the white beaches of Turks and Caicos. They spoke of other trips to Rome with their children, to Paris where the best restaurants were named. Another couple is going to the Arizona desert. The wife spoke of the trip she and her husband had taken a few years ago to South America where because of her work they were greeted at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car and treated as celebrities. There is talk of trips taken to Sicily and weeks spent in Asia and one man tells the story I have heard before of his journey on a private railroad car (provided by a famous judge) to the great Hindu sites and palaces in India. I sit silently. I have no trips planned. Someone is going to Istanbul in the fall. Someone else tells the story of a summer in Tuscany twenty-five years ago. I have heard this story before. I do not want to travel without H. I do not want to go out in the world alone at least not yet. My lack of a traveling companion keeps me homebound, boringly homebound.

Of course we went places. Best of all we went fishing in Alaska for fifty-pound salmon. H. would stare at the water willing the fish to take his lure. I would admire the puffins passing by. I shivered in the cold spray but the waiting was rewarded, the waiting itself on the gray sea, with the distant mountains, with the bear at the shoreline, with the dive of the dolphins at the boat’s side, was a memory I treasured. I also have a small stone with a fossil embedded in its center, it’s of a tiny fish, clearly a fish, now stained

orange. The stone sits by my computer. I don’t want to talk about my past trips. I suspect that I have washed ashore and will so remain.

This is not necessary. I could f ind a friend to travel with me. I could go alone. But I can’t, not yet. This conversation about f lights and exotic places—one couple has been to Bangladesh and another has met with the chief justice of South Africa—lasts and lasts, through the f irst course, into the second. I could change the subject but I don’t have the will. Also I am not sure it is fair of me to shift the subject when everyone else is enjoying the conversation. I am silent, which is rare. Then as I push the food about my plate, appetite gone, it comes to me, perhaps I don’t belong at this dinner anymore. Perhaps the coupled life of everyone else shuts me out in a way that I had not anticipated. This does not mean that I must lose my friends. It means that I need new friends who are not coupled, who have no trips planned. I see an advertisement on television for a cruise on a large white boat, a hotel with many stories that f loats across a brilliant blue sea. I see an orchestra, waiters bearing champagne on silver trays. A couple dances in the moonlight on the deck. She wears a pink chiffon dress and a wedding ring. If there are sharks swimming in that sea they are not caught in the camera lens. Where do widows go to pass the time? If only there were a camp for us like the camps for the overweight kids advertised in the back of the
New York Times Magazine
. I could start a camp, cabins in the woods of Maine for singles over a certain age.

• • •

V. calls again. He has waited a few weeks. I almost forgot him. He tells me he has been busy writing papers for his courses at his local university. We agree to meet on the next Saturday and go to the Metropolitan Museum after lunch. This is my favorite kind of Saturday. I think about the Universalist Church. I prefer a fiercer kind of religion if one is going to have a religion at all. I like a thundering Jehovah and can even understand a bleeding Christ, but a church that is nice and understanding and modern seems like a hospital lobby to me, an anteroom to the real story. At lunch he tells me about his family. He grew up on a poor farm in Nebraska. His mother had only a wood-burning stove until he was fourteen. He worked on the farm every day before he went to school. He went on scholarship to a liberal arts college in California and from there to graduate school to become a professor of history but at the time positions in academia were scarce and so he went into business instead. I think of him on the farm. This is the farm of my childhood imagination where Indians circled and good men and women worked with their hands to make a living from the earth while fighting off drought and locusts and the foreclosing bank and the storms that came each year. In my urban mind this farm was America, a real America. I could love a man who came from such a place, maybe.

H. came from Brooklyn and his parents were immigrants who worked in a cigar factory and spoke Yiddish and had escaped the czar’s edicts. I understood that. I knew that world. V.’s farm was a mystery, an alien mystery. This was becoming interesting. He asks me if I like hiking. I do but have not done a lot of formal walking around in the woods, not since my camp days. V. goes on group hikes up

the mountains of New Hampshire. He has a business appointment and has to cancel our afternoon at the museum. We stand outside the restaurant where we had lunch and a cold wind blows about my ears and my nose is turning red. He kisses me and holds me close. The hug seems to be a promise of future meetings. But perhaps it is a good-bye hug. Could I love this man? I could try, I decide.