Saturday Night Widows (6 page)

I
knew
that. Chemotherapy had left his immune system too weak to fight a common cold. When I’d rushed him to the hospital on Monday, shaking with fever, I knew we were in trouble, and over the next several days, he slipped deeper and deeper into a coma-like twilight. By Friday, he hadn’t spoken in days, not since Tuesday when he woke up briefly to say what turned out to be his last words. “I love you,” he wheezed, and then something else that started with the letter S—I’ll never know—before he slipped back under.

Meanwhile, if I probed for any glint of hope, any suggestion of a solution, the doctor threw up his hands in exasperation and repeated, “Your husband has sepsis …” and then officiously hustled away. Just the day before, he had seen me approaching in the corridor and turned so hard on his heel that he lost his balance, throwing up his hands and waving his arms like pinwheels trying to right himself. My mom and I did a spit take as he did his best to restore his dignity. Deathwatch humor—you take what you can get.

Now I asked my friends in the hall to call some funeral homes for me while I stayed put on the end of the bed. I heard them as they whipped out their phones, eager to help, reaching the same few late-shift funeral home employees who would say, “Didn’t somebody else call about the same guy a couple minutes ago?” Nobody
knew quite what to ask, and everybody learned the same few things, which they reported back to me. Yes, someone would come to pick up the body, later that night or in the morning. Yes, they all would charge a ridiculous sum for this service. You’d think they were sending him to Tierra del Fuego and back. And they would all like to know what sort of funeral I was planning. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do.

It began to look as if the nurses might call security to give me the heave-ho, except someone finally showed up to break the stalemate. David Goldenberg was a psychiatrist who had managed a complicated cocktail of medications intended to keep Bernie’s mind on track as the cancer wreaked havoc in his brain, causing memory loss, confusion, anxiety, and sleeplessness. It was a wretched existence, profoundly dispiriting to a man who prided himself on reading obscure books on public policy and knowing every sideman who ever played with Ben Webster. Most people with brain metastasis live for only a few months. Bernie had lasted more than two years in this state, and the drugs helped keep him on an even keel. Dr. Goldenberg turned up at the hospital that night for a visit, and I took an easier breath. He would know what to do.

“How are
you
doing?” he asked briskly as he strode into the room. He pulled up an ugly plastic chair and sat opposite me. If he found it strange to speak to a woman who was perched on her deceased husband’s bed, her knees hugged to her chest, his face did nothing to betray it. I had drawn a sheet over Bernie by now to spare everyone from seeing him.

I told Dr. Goldenberg about the remote control running amok in my head.

“That’s actually quite normal at a time like this,” he said. I found
that information comforting. I might have been a mess, but I was a
normal
mess.

I told him I didn’t know what to do. “I feel guilty leaving Bernie in the hospital,” I said. “He hated it when I’d leave him here. He kept fighting, no matter what horrible procedures got thrown at him, so we wouldn’t be apart. I can’t walk away from him now. It seems my end of it shouldn’t be so easy.”

“It’s normal to feel guilty,” Dr. Goldenberg said. “There’s no avoiding it.” Then he got down to practicalities. “You don’t have to make any decisions right now,” he said. “You’re exhausted. Go home, get some rest, make some choices tomorrow. Your friends are all here. Let them help you. This isn’t a time to insist on doing every thing yourself.”

Granted, it didn’t take a medical degree to come up with this advice, but it had enough ring of authority to give me some backbone. Maybe a copy of the Yellow Pages would have accomplished the same thing.

After Dr. Goldenberg left, I took a crack at pulling myself together. I might have lost Bernie, my trusted guide, but I knew I couldn’t remain frozen forever in this void between what my life had been and the scary territory that lay ahead. Immobility was the act of a coward. I also knew that I’d have to push back against the guilt I would feel walking out of there. For some time to come, I could see, I would have to contend with this guilt, this new unwanted companion of mine, whenever I did what was necessary to keep on living myself.

I stood up, stepped out the door, and informed my little group of supporters that I would go now. They told the nurses I would arrange for a funeral home to come for Bernie tomorrow. Back at
the bedside, I said a few words to him, feeling the full absurdity of talking out loud for the first time in my life to someone who wasn’t there. I gathered his things, his glasses and his keys and his clothes, no longer of any use, in a hospital laundry bag. Then I kissed him. His skin was smooth and cold. One more moment. “Good-bye, sweetie,” I said, and turned away, hard.

I walked out into the hall. I didn’t speak. I didn’t look from side to side. I certainly didn’t think. If I had, I might have had to acknowledge what I was leaving behind me: a twenty-year union, the most important of my life, with a man who could never be replaced. I took one step ahead, then another.

I couldn’t know what awaited me beyond those steps, that it would take all my depleted strength, that it would be harder than anything I had known. My friends drew close. I could feel them encircling me like a ring around a dark penumbra. I summoned Bernie’s words from the start of this nightmare: I put my head down, and I went.

chapter
FOUR

i
t was too soon for me to form any coherent, conscious thought, but on some level, that was probably the beginning of my wish to find someone else like me. I had the first inkling that I might have found not one but five of them that January night of the first meeting of our group. On the surface, we weren’t much alike—we weren’t even at the same stage of widowhood. But there was something extraordinary about that meeting. It was heartrending but exhilarating, too. It filled a long-empty hole.

Let me put it this way. Have you ever been to a party where everybody shared their deepest feelings about everything closest to their hearts and then laughed until their insides hurt and then went home and stayed up all night as everything kept spinning in their heads—and they
weren’t
stoned? Me neither. Until the night of that dinner at Denise’s.

On the subway back home to Brooklyn I couldn’t stop going over and over the evening in my mind. Oddly, I kept coming back to the movie
Thelma and Louise
. One catastrophe in the first reel
and the characters were on the run, speeding toward an uncertain future, their identities up for grabs as they propelled themselves through one hair-raising scrape after another. Our gang at dinner wasn’t exactly on the lam in an old Thunderbird, but the death of each husband had set in motion a world-changing series of unfamiliar predicaments. All the women, we learned, were in the process of remaking, reinventing, and rethinking who they were and how they lived and where they lived and what they did and who they cared about and who cared about them—all the issues that overwhelmed me at first when Bernie died.

As Louise said to Thelma—or was it Thelma to Louise?—“We seem to have some kind of snowball effect going on here.”

But putting it all into words, telling anecdotes, framing it with humor, lightened it somehow, because, finally, we’d found women who knew exactly what we were talking about. Women who got the sorrow, women who got the jokes.

After that first hour, as Denise had said, there was no use pretending that what had happened hadn’t happened. We were comfortable talking about death and its aftermath—these were our lives, after all. There were no tears. But getting through the hard stories about what had befallen our husbands freed everybody up to talk about the stuff nobody else wants to talk to widows about, the messy stuff everybody was working on right then.

The challenge for me was getting a word in edgewise. Over dinner, I had planned to explain the details of my utterly amateur widows’ support scheme and ask the women whether they would be willing to risk it for a year. But faced with the formidable personalities assembled in front of me, I couldn’t get up the nerve. Why would the independent Tara conform to anybody’s schedule
but her own? Wouldn’t the busy Marcia find this a frivolous use of her time? And would all of them regard the idea of consorting with widows irredeemably glum? Dawn seemed to enjoy ample opportunities for dating. Maybe the others did, too, not to mention working, raising children, mastering the violin for all I knew. Every time I got closer to bringing up my idea, I backed off, and somebody steered the conversation further from my goal.

I lost my first chance when we moved into Denise’s jewel box of a dining room, where the walls were painted a glossy shade of vermilion.

“I love this red room … it’s so feng shui,” Tara said. “And I love the door.”

Denise was backing through it, carrying Tara’s salad from the kitchen. “That’s the reason we bought this apartment,” she said. “My husband saw this door.”

It was a swinging door, an original Art Deco beauty with a porthole in it, like the doors on classic ocean liners. Denise and her husband, Steve, had bought the apartment only two and a half years ago, a year before they married. The place was a wreck when they first saw it, and the door was lying on the floor with broken hinges, but Steve restored the door’s original luster, along with everything else.

“Steve could fix anything,” Denise said, pleased but wistful.

All that work had fashioned a room with informal charm, the unassuming product of the couple’s personal touch. The door, the red walls, the golden light from a vintage chandelier, and a flea market table lacquered in shiny black enamel imparted a cozy glamour. Our gathering took on some of that personality as we sat down to dine.

Steve’s death, we learned, had placed this home in jeopardy, because the mortgage was too steep for Denise to manage alone. Everyone she knew was urging her to move, but instead she was working like a demon to bring in more money, signing up new novels at her publishing house and loading up her nights and weekends with part-time jobs. Sleep would have to wait, not that she was sleeping anyway. She might need to rent out the second bedroom, too. A roommate at the age of thirty-nine—hardly anyone’s dream scenario.

“People tell me I should take a year off to recover from the trauma,” Denise said, “but I don’t have a choice. I will do whatever I have to do.”

Widowed after only a year of marriage, of course she would want to stay in this apartment, I thought. It was not only her home but a reminder of who her husband was, of who they were together. How could she let that go without a fight?

I considered my own home, an apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone full of period details I’d always found a bit grand for my humble modern life. Next to my grab bag of latter-day furnishings, the building’s parquet floors, high ceilings, and majestic moldings felt borrowed from a more formal past. Often I was struck by the tension between past and present there. That home had sheltered me through my marriage to Bernie and beyond. It was the place where I most felt his absence, the place where I most felt his presence. Every time I returned to that empty apartment in the months after his death, I dropped my bags and walked to the mantel, where I still displayed his photograph, a little overexposed. The washed-out light gave it a haunting, spectral quality. I felt the familiar yearning for his company, the urge to tell him everything that had happened.
We had shared everything, as happy couples do. I spoke aloud: “Hey, sweetie.”

My home was full of light, and its familiarity had been a comfort during the worst times. Yes, it had been expensive maintaining the place on my own, but like Denise, I wasn’t willing to give up something I loved because the person I loved was gone. Holding on there through so many momentous changes, I often wondered about the definition of home. Is it the place where you live, or is it the place where the people you love reside? And if the people you love are gone, where is home then?

Most of the women that night at Denise’s were wrestling one way or another with the question of where they belonged. “Ever since this happened,” said Dawn, “I feel like Dorothy in the
Wizard of Oz
, like a tornado has picked up my house and is spinning it around. I just want to know where it’s going to land.”

Where to land—it came up again and again as we squeezed tightly around the table, unveiling dishes and passing them family style, hand to hand. Lesley contributed chicken tartly perfumed with sliced lemons, rosemary, olives, and a South African chutney made with apricots. I had brought sinfully buttery mashed potatoes and sautéed brussels sprouts, a nice contrast, I hoped, with Tara’s crisp salad. Dawn poured a late-vintage Malbec.

That would have been the moment for me to present my idea for the group, but I let the opportunity get away from me again. Marcia told us she was facing a dilemma about her home, too. Like many couples with all-consuming jobs, she and her husband had relied on each other to make the most of what little time they spared from work. He had been the gregarious one, hosting clamorous parties on weekends at a country house that they owned. During the week,
with Marcia logging long hours at the office, they camped out in a basic city apartment that was more like a dorm room.