Epilogue (19 page)

• • •

I had spent the day before making a soup for a Sunday brunch. I had chopped and peeled and bought cheese and smoked salmon. I was worried that my soup was too spicy. I was worried that I could not, not without H., bring the food to the table, open the wine bottles, brew the coffee. Then at night I had a terrible nightmare. In my dream I was somewhere out of town, somewhere where the trains were not running and no taxis stopped, and I needed to return to the city because I was expecting people to come to my house for lunch. How terrible it would be if I were not there. If they rang the bell and no one answered the door. My anxiety mounted, my heart pounded, as I saw the clocks in the town square and realized that I did not have time to return even if the trains began to run again. And then I was sitting on a bench and four people approached me. One of them was a strange woman. The others were lawyers with briefcases. The woman said, “We are going to sue you and take everything you have. You will be left with nothing.” A great panic swept over me. I woke up with a splitting headache.

My rational mind scolded my overheated brain for such a stupid nightmare. But then it came to me. Everything I had was gone. Everything that mattered to me had been taken. H. was gone. I was stripped bare. The dream was not a threat but a report. Of course, the “everything” here is an exaggeration, hyperbole, absurdity. I have my children and grandchildren. I have my work. I have my apartment with its books and its drawings and its furniture H. and I bought together. I have my photos and my memories and I have friends. I have, at least for now, my health. I have my cat. So it’s not accurate to say I have lost every-

thing. I will not indulge in melodrama, at least not for long.

My soup was a success. It was not too spicy. It was just right. But in the next night I had another dream. The phone rang and I had trouble picking it up. It fell out of my hands. Finally after many attempts I put the phone to my ear. It was H. “I stumbled,” he said. “Are you all right?” I asked. I saw a great ravine and a river running beneath high rocks. He was on a trip. “Are you all right?” I repeated. He answered me, but I couldn’t understand his answer. I woke up. My pillow was soaking wet. He had stumbled up the steps to our lobby moments before he lost consciousness. If this were the century of séances and para-normal experiences I would believe he had been trying to contact me from beyond the grave. What I believed was that I had allowed his voice to return to my head. I had brought back his dying moment because I could. It did not shatter me. It was just a dream.

• • •

A psychoanalyst friend tells me that soon memories of H. will come to comfort me. He will be like an imaginary friend, a companion of my thoughts. I find that idea uncomfortable. It has a Hallmark-card quality. The odor of false witness is in the air. I remember the tie he wore to our daughter’s wedding when I see it on his tie rack. I remember the way he pushed back tears with his hands when we thought another daughter was going to die of pneumonia. I remember how he chopped onions at our kitchen table. I remember how he lifted a child up to feed the goats at the zoo. I am not comforted by these memories. I simply

remember. He is not hanging in the air beside me, a voice whispering in my ear. He is not telling me to return to work. He is not going through the refrigerator throwing out moldy cheese. He is not watching over me, as the song says. He is not.

• • •

So now at the arranged time my new friend from Albany calls. He has a deep voice. Just the voice I imagined. He tells me that we need an antiballistic system and must break our treaties in order to develop one. The Chinese and the North Koreans will destroy us if we don’t. I disagree but I don’t want to argue politics. “Tell me about your childhood,” I say.

And he does. He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, one of eight children. His grandfather arrived here from a far corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and carried cement in large wheelbarrows to the construction workers on the scaffolding above. His father owned a bakery and was working all the time. His mother was bitter and never hugged a child. He was small-boned and slight and was always being beaten up by the other boys. His childhood was full of pain. I could imagine this boy on the streets of Trenton, the soot of factories in the air, the hardness of his mother’s life, the lack of play and tenderness. He told me he went to a Catholic military school. I hadn’t known there was such a thing. “I wore a uniform,” he says. “But the boys still beat me up.” Now he is six foot two but when he graduated high school he was just a bit over five feet. “How did you grow so many inches after high school?” I ask. “I just did,” he says. We stop talking; the conversation

has gone on a long time. I like his voice. I like the gruff-ness of it.

The next morning I receive two e-mails from him about the takeover of European culture by the immigrant Arabs. It is predicted that in twenty-five years Notre Dame will become a mosque and the Louvre will be closed down. I don’t argue. How can one argue such a point? Where to start? I put the e-mail out of my mind. I notice a lightness in my spirit as I race toward the phone when it rings at the time we have arranged.

As I talk to him I sit in my favorite place in the apartment where I can see the Empire State Building over the rooftops. The sun is slipping down across the river. I can see the clouds above, growing pink with the approaching evening. I lean back in the chair and the cat jumps on my chest. With one hand I hold the phone to my ear, with the other I stroke the cat. “Why did you get divorced?” I ask and he tells me. A long time ago, in a suburban county of New York, he lived with his wife and three children. He had a best friend and the best friend had a wife and the four of them had dinner together often and their children played together. It was the early seventies. His wife was in therapy. One evening she told him the truth. She had been having an affair with his best friend. He moved out. He tried psychotherapy for a few weeks but it didn’t work out. It was a time of chaos. Homes were breaking up everywhere. Women were leaving to discover themselves as potters or dancers. No one wanted to miss out on living to the fullest, discovering yourself. The discipline of family life seemed like a yoke on an ox’s shoulder. No one wanted to be the ox. My friend on the phone begins to talk about

the damage that feminism did to the American home. I remind him that the American family was less than perfect before girls went to medical school. I ask him about the neighborhood where he lives now. He tells me about the store where he shops for Asian spices. I see him in my mind’s eye. He wears the big hat that I saw in his photo. His grocery cart is filled. His dog is waiting for him in the car, nose pressed to the glass. I think to myself that he was hurt by his wife’s betrayal and I hope, a thin, wispy hope, a hope that could, if I were otherwise inclined, be the beginnings of a prayer. Could I make whole what had been torn asunder? Could I provide the balm for what still burned? His children, he tells me, were permanently harmed by the divorce, because his wife was unable to provide the discipline that the children needed. One boy disappeared into a world of drugs. She was working. She was not strong enough. He told her that. But she ignored him. He talks of other connections, a second wife who disappointed him quickly, a liberal woman who sent him e-mails for over two years.

The sky is now gray. Smoke from an incinerator a few blocks away is rising black toward the pale star that hangs above it. I have to be at a friend’s house for dinner in a half hour. I end the conversation. “Good night,” I say. “Until tomorrow,” he says, and I can hear my heart ready to race forward. I go to dinner like a teenager with an invitation to the prom secure in my possession.

• • •

“I have the perfect person to introduce you to,” says a friend. “Yes,” I say. “There is a problem though,” she adds. “Yes,”

I say. “He is a prominent lawyer. You know his name. He was in the Clinton administration.” She tells me his name. I recognize it. His wife has died. “He told me he wants to find somebody,” my friend says. “What is the problem?” I ask. I imagine the answer. He has early Alzheimer’s. He has liver cancer. He is going to jail for some white-collar crime that was reported in the business section of the
New York Times
, which I keep meaning to read but don’t. She says, “He is exactly your age, but he wants a much younger woman.” “Oh, that,” I say. I shrug. I smile. I’m not surprised. I just forget from time to time that I have faded from the field. “I could introduce you,” she says, “maybe he would change his mind.” “No thank you,” I say.

My cousin lives in a gated community built around a beautiful golf course, in Boca Raton. He is seventy-eight years old and divorced several times. He told me that in his community if a woman turns fifty she is considered beyond the pale. I believe him. He told me that he didn’t want to date a woman in her sixties, because in no time at all he would spend his days driving her to doctors. There is a toughness in that statement that surprises me in my sweet cousin but I suspect that the moving sewage that streams between men and women, the misogyny, the fear, the neediness, the rage, the helplessness, the lust, the failure of lust, of one or the other partner, creates such a stink that it’s a wonder anyone can cross the river to the other side. And people do. I see that they do it.

• • •

Some days now I feel calm and content, content for hours at a time. Some days I sink again. I lose interest in everything.

I mope. I do not admire moping. Nevertheless I mope.

I hear from a doctor friend of mine that people who try to commit suicide by taking various sleeping pills, tran-quilizers, antianxiety drugs, aspirin, whatever they can glean from their medicine cabinets, most often end up in hospitals, with stroke, with paralysis, with brain damage but alive and condemned to years of confinement to a nursing home. I wonder if this is true. Is it possible that this is just a way doctors have of warning us not to try to escape our lives? Like prison guards, they point to electri-fied fences. Who dares to test them? I don’t know how to check this information casually, without revealing my intense and personal interest in the subject. I know about the Hemlock Society but I find their recommendation of a plastic bag over one’s head almost impossible to imagine. It’s like putting your hand in the fire: wouldn’t you withdraw it at the first f lush of pain? I wish I knew a doctor who would inoculate his patient with air if the time had truly come. But whose decision would that be? How many people jump to their deaths, either literally or figuratively, who six months later would be eating pasta at their favorite Italian restaurant with a new love in their lives if someone had only stayed their hand at the moment of momentary desperation? Some people kill themselves too soon. Some people kill themselves too late. I hope I will have the courage to act when I should act and the courage not to act if I shouldn’t.

I would ask my stepdaughter the physician to tell me the most efficient way to die but she would never give me an answer. She knows the answer. On any other subject I know she would tell me all she knows. On this subject she

would not. She is a physician and sworn to do no harm even if harm would be doing good. Also she loves me. A complicated love, affected by torn loyalties, to be sure, but a love nevertheless. Does she love me enough to help me escape? Or does she love me too much to help me escape?

It would be inexcusable of me to put her in that vise. One does not squeeze one’s child, not ever. After all, I love her too.

• • •

Sometimes at night in bed I imagine sex, the kind we had, all the kinds we had. I discover that I have available in my brain images that suffice, will do. I am glad of this. It is not as good as the real event, as the real heat, sweat, rub and wear and tear of human part with human part. But it is reassuring to know that it has not gone from me, not all the way.

• • •

I think of the goddess Diana, mistress of the moon, mistress of the hunt, a dog by her side, a quiver of arrows hanging from her shoulder. In the modern city there is no Diana, there is no shrine built to appease her in the parks, there is no game for her to hunt. All that is left is the moon going on its way like the subways on their tracks. If I believed in Diana then I would believe in the underworld, a place across the river Styx where the dead f loated without purpose through the remainder of time and I could imagine myself there possibly finding a shade I once had loved.

• • •

I read a book, at last I can read an entire book, in a reasonable number of hours. The book is a memoir by a young woman who finds God in an ashram in India. Good for her. Not for me. Western culture has eaten my heart and there seems to be very little I can do about it.

• • •

Sometimes I do wish I could transcend myself. I see H.’s gloves on the closet f loor. In the outdoors-survival stores he searched for the thickest, warmest gloves he could find, because he had Reynaux’s disease, which turned his fingertips and toes blue in the cold. He said he wouldn’t die of it and he didn’t. But the disease caused him to wear double pairs of socks and thick black Thermasil gloves that were less than elegant. I see them now behind my summer sandals where they must have fallen months ago, and I feel a love uncontainable, a love for his fingers and his toes and his blood vessels that were not as competent as they should be. I feel his heavy-gloved hand as it tucks my windblown hair back behind my ear. His absence is for a f lashing moment or two near intolerable and then becomes tolerable again. I might feel like Orpheus, who had lost for the last and final time Eurydice because he turned back to look at her. But I don’t. I feel instead a need to get some food in the house. I have forgotten again to buy milk and bread and cereal.

• • •

I sit down at my computer. It is not yet seven in the morning. I open my Outlook Express and there is another e-mail from my new friend in Albany. This morning he sends me an article on the outrageous conduct of professors in major