Epilogue (4 page)

sweetness of old love and the comfort of worn stories. On the other hand I may prefer to shut my door, play with my grandchildren, learn how to work my coffeemaker, also the Cuisinart, both jobs my husband considered his own.

• • •

A friend tells me that she has a friend whose widowed moth-er met a man at the 92nd Street Y senior club. They have been happily together for the last eight years. Of course, my friend adds, this mother is very beautifully dressed and is very careful with her appearance. I sometimes look like I slept in the woodpile behind the house. I live in an apartment, not a house, but all the same.

The moon pulls up as I watch it, from behind the apartment building on the east side of Broadway. It moves slowly into the center of my window and hangs there round, pocked, surrounded by space, black sky. A burst of smoke billows up and spreads out over the rooftops from a furnace in a building a few blocks away.

I was given by the funeral parlor several tall frosted glasses decorated with a blue star of David and containing memorial candles. I lit them. They burned for a week. At night I would sit in the dark and watch the light of the wick f licker back and forth. When they burned out I went back to the funeral parlor and asked for more. They gave me as many as I could carry. But when these burned out I put the glasses in the pantry cupboard on a shelf I can barely reach. Enough sentimentality.

What could be purer than death? There, not there.
Fort, da
, as Freud described a little boy throwing a ball under the bed and pulling it out again and again, attempting to

understand his mother’s appearance and disappearance as she moved through her day. Despite all the poetry and all the melancholy sighs, death is simple, here, not here, not returning. I wonder if everyone leaves a trail behind when they go into the grave, a trail of resentment, financial knots, undone, unresolved matters, lunatic ex-spouses, unreconciled children. No matter how fiercely loved the children are, no matter how tenderly the relatives gather in a circle around a table, things go wrong. When a family contains stepchildren and divorced ex-spouses one always discovers mold in unexpected places. My love for H. cannot alter the fungal spread that stains our photo albums. The angels accompanying him to the throne of heaven are playing atonal music on their harps, although he loved Mozart and deserves Mozart, an eternity of Mozart.

The discordance comes from a lawsuit. I cannot write about why I am being sued for a considerable amount of money stemming from something in my husband’s past. I cannot write about this or else I could be sued. I will settle. My lawyer thinks I must. His brain is not unbalanced as mine may be. Nevertheless in my fantasy I take a sailboat to the Cayman Islands and live outside the law, an old gray-haired lady, browned and wrinkled, who arrives each day to pick up books she has ordered from Amazon. com. There at the sun-drenched dock by the turquoise sea in which coral reefs shimmer as fish of every rainbow color dash about, I will write postcards to those I have left behind. I will befriend drunken sailors, ex-cons, fugitives from white-collar investigations, and little children who dive for pennies when the cruise ships arrive. Or not.

My lawyer calls. Do I have any secret bank accounts?

We went to psychoanalytic meetings in distant places. We spent summers by the beach, all the years of our marriage. We were content but the rugs were ragged, the house needed a new roof, the bills for crooked teeth were paid slowly and every once in a while the car insurance payment was late. We could have used a secret bank account. When my husband sent me f lowers or brought out from his pocket a piece of costume jewelry he had found in a yard sale, there was always an accompanying card; it said, “From a Secret Admirer.” That was our secret, our only secret.

• • •

Something about this book that I must say here. It is a well-known fact that when anthropologists study some isolated native tribe on an island in the middle of a distant ocean their very presence on the island alters what occurs to the people they are observing. There is no such thing as pure observation uncontaminated by the act of observing. I am writing this book as I am living my days but the act of writing adds a f lavor, a possibly distorting factor to the story. Sometimes I have a thought while I am having my morning coffee at our local Starbucks and I decide I want to write that thought down. The fact that I have a purpose, that I have a plan, which is to write, changes the experience I am having in Starbucks. Writing this book provides a f loor under my experience. Having used writing to hold myself erect all my adult life, I am bold enough to believe that I cannot fall because of this word scaffolding that, all invisible, props up my days. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the fact of writing a book is not so life-saving as it seems. But it was necessary to acknowledge the fact of the book I am

writing as I am living because without the book that I am writing which is the one that you are reading I would be a sorrier woman, a shell of a woman, lingering on.

THE MOON IS SHRINKING. IT IS THE SHAPE OF A FACE WITH

a bulge on one cheek. Its color is faint. Clouds drift across it. It hangs above the sliver of the bridge I see in the distance out my bedroom window. The bridge has a small red light on one of its high points. I hear a dog barking on the street below, a deep and angry bark. I think of werewolves. If men can be turned into devouring wolves by the light of the moon, then women too can alter their shape. We can all become weretigers, werecats, werefrogs. Perhaps we do al-low some beastly creature to emerge in our civilized breasts by the light of the moon. I feel tugging inside, a fury, a fury to slash, to harm, to run wild through the streets. I look in the mirror. I see only my familiar face. It is hubris to imagine the moon and its gravitational pull, its tidal forces, its mineral, gaseous, rocky back turned to our sun, would disturb the protein amino acid magnetic frictions of my human brain. But if I were a werewolf I would hunt down H.’s killer and rip him or her or it to bits. I would be ruth-less, canny, foam at the corners of my mouth. I would do it. But a heart attack has no form, exists nowhere but in the arteries of its victim. I can neither slay it nor forgive it. I bite at my thumb as I do when I am angry: a bad habit.

• • •

I have an e-mail pal who lives in Fort Lauderdale. He sent me a letter in response to the personal ad in the
New York Review of Books
. We began a correspondence. He is a seventy-nine-year-old divorced ophthalmologist. He is retired and fighting a weight problem. His e-mails make me laugh. He’s a tough, odd, curmudgeonly old bird, that he tells me himself. He grew up in an immigrant family in Buffalo and went to New York University. I understand where he came from and how hard it is to move in America away from the family of the first generation into the world at large. I’ll call him L.D. He tells me that I should vacation in Florida and find a rich old man with a large paunch who will buy me baubles and such. I don’t mind paunches but I have no interest in baubles. He tells me I should come to Florida and he would take me to the Everglades to see the alligators. He says he has no hair. I don’t mind that he has no hair. He says he wants to leave Florida and live in a small town in New England and watch the leaves change color in October. He invites me to join him. I point out that we haven’t even had dinner together. L. walks along the beach in the mornings. He reports on his diet and his lapses from his diet. He spends his mornings in the library reading. He is a fan of Elmore Leonard. After a while he sends me e-mails with group addresses. I become one of a gaggle of his female online friends. I like his grouchy manner but he is too far away for a real friendship. That requires a face and a hand and the sight of a broken tooth at the back of a smile. L.D., I send my regrets but we have to stop e-mailing.

• • •

The moon hovers over the water tower across the way. Low in the sky. It looks like a clown’s teardrop. Tears are an interesting matter. I didn’t f lood with tears when we stood by the open grave. I was too shocked, too numb, and besides I wasn’t sad, it seemed as if someone were operating on me and I was awake. I was without pain but without volition, without self. I didn’t f lood with tears at home when all the friends and family arrived with food and wine and concern. I was watching that no one felt left out, that strangers were introduced and could talk to each other. I was making sure that the platters of sandwiches and cookies appeared from the kitchen and fresh coffee was brewing and I was not crying. Sometimes when I read the condolence notes, especially from patients who had loved H., tears welled up, some escaped, but mostly they were denied, a shift of place, an opening of the cabinet for a glass, a phone call, they disappeared.

Before H. died tears used to erupt from my eyes at TV commercials with children running into their father’s arms and dogs licking the hands of their owners. Tears used to f low at happy endings in movies and at sad endings at movies and many of my book pages are stained with tears. Tears apparently are easy when the situation that evokes them is pretend. Girls after all are allowed to cry even if it turns the nose red and the eyes become swollen. But when something shocking, real, happens it isn’t so easy to let tears fall. H. used to say that women often cried when they were angry. I suspect he’s right. But I am angry and I still don’t cry. I also haven’t torn my clothes or shaved my head or bayed at the moon. I understand those gestures belong to grief but they seem as alien as if I were to paint my body

blue and dance stark naked down Fifth Avenue with bells on my toes. Tears seem to be unrelated to sorrow, at least my sorrow, which I feel like a weight in my chest, like a knot in my stomach, a dull pounding in my head. I wonder what other people’s sorrow feels like. Is it like mine, evasive, boarded up, avoided, ready to burst out, curled up, hidden even to the self? Also as I feel tears appearing at the edges of my eyes I become afraid. Is it possible that I could dissolve in tears? The body is 90 percent water, they say. What if all the inner structures, all the sinews and arteries and brain tissue collapsed as I cried, what if I couldn’t stop if I started? My task at the moment is not to f loat away, not to crumble or dry up or rot with water damage. My task is to manage.

• • •

My husband was a man consumed with his love for his children. I knew this before we married and had our own children. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at them. I could see it in his hands when he touched their heads. I could see it in his smile when he talked to them. He told me on our first date in great detail about buying his younger one a toy oven and how he kept it in his apartment for her when she visited because her mother would not let her take it home. We took children on our honeymoon. We were not always good parents. But we were always parents. That was the primary subject of our lives, even after the children grew up, even after we knew we had done well with some and not so well with others. We were only human, we told each other. We tried not to talk about our children all the time, hardly ever when we were with friends, but

to each other we admitted our pride, our deep pride, our regrets, our mistakes. Our children were our fortune, our land, our nation. In other words we did what we could. We also knew our limitations. The children mourn him. Above all else he would have wanted to spare them that pain. I burn, fire rages in my brain when they speak to me of their memories, of their missing him. I listen quietly and nod, and sometimes add a few details to a memory that has faded over time. I am still a dutiful parent, the only one they have now.

• • •

I am forwarded the psychoanalytic publications that once went to H.’s office. I read them from cover to cover. I memorize the names of new medications. I read about new theories of transference and countertransference. I understand everything but I have no use for the information. There is no psychoanalyst in this house anymore. I search for case histories. In them the patients are given initials. They report their dreams. They have trouble working or loving or both. I read their secrets the way one opens a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps I will find a message meant just for me. I wonder why I am reading. I keep the publications in a corner of the bedroom. I look at the covers and sometimes I think I should throw them all out. I don’t.

• • •

I am going to Broadway to purchase coffee and a roll. Now I know how to make coffee but I don’t want to. Orange plastic ribbons run from one side of the street to the other.

Police barricades prevent passage. Several cars with red lights spinning on their hoods are at both ends of the block. Two fire trucks are parked along the way, firemen move back and forth, their black plastic coats, their yellow stripes, their big hats, their boots moving around and around. I see a huge tree that has fallen on the roof of a Budget truck that was double-parked on the other side of the street. The truck’s roof is partially crushed. The tree’s branches are askew, its thick trunk is bent way over as though bowing to some unseen royal being. No, I can’t pass through. I walk around and go down another street.