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Chapter 17 The Arrow

Returning to the lightless house beyond Princeton I feel like an arrow that has been shot—where?

The front door is not only unlocked but ajar. A single light is burning in an interior room—Ray’s study. When I push open the door to step into the darkened hallway it’s to the surprise of a sharp lemony smell—furniture polish. In a trance of anticipation I’d not only polished the tops of Ray’s desks until they shone but the dining room table and other tables through the house; on my hands and knees, with paper towels, I polished areas of the hardwood floor that were looking worn. Humming loudly and brightly I had done these things not many hours ago.

So happy you’re back home, honey! We missed you here.

By we, I meant the cats and me. But where are the cats?

Since Ray’s departure—since I drove Ray to the ER—both the cats have been wary of me, and have kept their distance even when I feed them. The younger, Cherie, has been mewing piteously—but when I approach her, she retreats. The elder cat, Reynard, by nature more suspicious, is silent, tawny-eyed. It’s clear that these animals are thinking that whatever has happened to disrupt the household, I am to blame.

In a brave cheery voice I call to the cats—though I am an arrow shot into space I am determined to convince them that there is nothing wrong really, and there is nothing for them to fear.

You will be all right. You will be all right. Nothing will happen to you. I will take care of you.

I seem to be forgetting why at near 2 A.M. I am not in bed but still awake and in a state of heightened excitement. My brain is a hive of rushing and incoherent thoughts. Stranger yet—friends are coming in a few minutes. At this hour! There is that slight jab of apprehension—the social responsibility of entertaining others, in one’s house—why?—and where is Ray, to help greet them? Numbly I am putting on lights—in the guest room, which is where we usually have visitors—an addition to our house built for my parents when they came to visit us several times a year—along one wall overlooking the courtyard there is the white Parsons table at which Ray frequently had breakfast and spread out the New York Times to read—now the shock hits me—But Ray is dead. Ray has died. Ray is not here. I am seeing our friends by myself. That is why they are coming.

In Ray’s hospital room I called three parties of whom one was asleep and didn’t pick up the phone and another, an insomniac, answered on the first ring; still another, also awake, picked up the phone and answered warily Yes? Hello?—knowing that any call, at such an hour, is likely to be bad news.

It is a terrible thing to be the bearer of terrible news!

It is a terrible thing to invade another’s sleep, to hear a friend murmur to his wife It’s Joyce, Ray has died and to overhear his wife exclaim Oh God.

This is what I did, this is what a widow does, though perhaps not all widows call friends, or even relatives, perhaps I am exceptionally lucky, I think this must be so.

My plaintive pleading voice. I’d left a message for the friend who hadn’t answered the phone—Jane? This is Joyce. I’m at the hospital, Ray has died. About an hour ago—I think it was. I’m at the hospital and I don’t know what to do next.

And now like a dream it’s unfolding—whatever is happening, that seems to have little to do with me—as the dreamer does not invent her dream but is in a sense being dreamt by it—helpless, stunned. Though my mind is racing and my heart is racing yet my movements are slow, uncoordinated. The sound of car tires in the gritty snow in our driveway is shocking to me, though I know that our friends are due to arrive at any minute. A flash of headlights across a ceiling makes me cringe. I am concerned that the house isn’t clean—that I’ve left things lying about—the wadded tissues that Ray had scattered on the Parsons table—did I throw them away?—(teeming with E. coli bacteria?)—I am uneasy at seeing our friends, and Ray not with me—they will feel so very sorry for me—it will cost them emotion, to feel sorry for me—the practical idea comes to me to set books out on a coffee table—the books I’d brought back home from the hospital. These are Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling, the bound galleys of Richard A. Clarke’s Your Government Failed You which our friend Dan Halpern is publishing.

These books—on the coffee table—we can talk about them—is that a good idea?

Also, the book on the cultural history of boxing which I’ve been reading to review. Which I’ve been working on this past week in the interstices of the vigil. Returning home from the hospital and trying to write for an hour or two before going to bed and trying to sleep. As if I must allow my friends to know Joyce is all right, Joyce is working even now. Don’t worry about Joyce!

I am not thinking clearly. But I am thinking. I am trying to think.

Our friends arrive shortly after 2 A.M., in one car. Susan and Ron, Jeanne and Dan and their fourteen-year-old daughter Lily whom Ray and I have known since her birth. When they step inside, and embrace me—it’s as if I have stepped into a violent surf.

Though our friends remain with me until 4 A.M. most of what we said to one another has vanished from my memory. Our friends will tell me that I behaved calmly and yet it was clear that I was in a state of shock. I can remember Jeanne on the phone, in the kitchen, making calls to funeral homes. I can remember my astonishment that a funeral home might be open at such an hour of the night. I can remember explaining to my friends how Ray died—why Ray died—the secondary infection, the fact that his blood pressure plummeted, his heartbeat accelerated—these gruesome words which I have memorized and which even now, at any hour of the day, along with my final vision of Ray in the hospital bed, run through my mind like flashes of heat lightning.

My friends are extraordinary, I think. To come to me so quickly in the middle of the night as they’ve done.

For the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling. The widow inhabits a nightmare-tale and yet it is likely that the widow inhabits a benign fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm in which friends come forward to help. We loved Ray, and we love you.

Let us help you. Ray would want this.