Читать книгу A Widow’s Story: A Memoir - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 28
ОглавлениеWhat my friend Jeanne has said is both true and not-true.
You don’t really—ever—say good-bye.
In the Pennington Cemetery at the intersection of Delaware Avenue and Main Street, a short distance behind the Pennington Presbyterian Church, there is a relatively new, grassy section in which, in a space identified as #551 West Center, a small marker reads
RAYMOND J. SMITH, JR.
1930–2008
Oddly, there are few other grave markers in this section. Except, a near-neighbor, an attractive large grave marker made of granite—KATHERINE GREEF AUSTIN 1944–1997, WILLIAM J. O’CONNELL 1944–1996. I stare at these words, these numerals, and conclude—A widow, who died of grief.
The contingencies of death have made SMITH and O’CONNELL neighbors, who had not known each other in life.
How strange it is, to see Ray’s name in such a place! It’s very difficult for me to comprehend that, in the most literal way, the “remains” of the individual who’d been Raymond J. Smith are buried, in an urn, beneath the surface of the earth here.
“Oh honey! What has happened. . . .”
In dreams sometimes it is revealed that what you’d believed to be so is not so after all. In life it is not often revealed that what you’d believed to be so is not so after all—yet there is always the possibility, the hope.
Because my mind is not functioning normally every moment is predicated upon the infantile hope This is not-right. But maybe it will become right if I am good.
No one is visiting the cemetery this morning except me. This is a relief! Though I am anxious when I am alone, yet I yearn to be alone; the empty house is terrifying to me yet when I am away from it, I yearn to return to it. Except now, in the cemetery where my husband’s remains—“cremains” (hideous word)—are buried, I am both alone and not-alone.
I am almost late for an appointment, I think. Maybe it’s probate court—Jeanne will be taking me—since Ray’s death my life has become a concatenation of appointments, duties—“death-duties”—making of each day a Sahara stretching to the horizon, and beyond—a robot-life, a zombie-life—from which (this is my most delicious thought, when I am alone) I am thinking of departing. When I have time.
Where some may be frightened by the thought, the temptation, of suicide, the widow is consoled by the temptation of suicide. For suicide promises A good night’s sleep—with no interruptions! And no next-day.
“I shouldn’t have left you. I’m so sorry . . .”
It’s a sunny-gusty day. Snow lies in part-melted skeins and heaps amid the grave markers which are of very different sizes. How terrible it is, Ray is here—it seems incomprehensible, here.
I tell myself with childish logic that if Ray were alive but not with me, that absence would be identical with this absence.
Which day this is, how many hours after Ray’s death, I am not sure—much of my mental effort is taken up with such pointless calculations—it is a mental effort exerted against the ceaseless buzz of word-incursions—fragments of music, songs—how best to describe my mind, perhaps it’s the quintessential novelist’s mind, other than a drain that has captured all variety of rubble—when my life is most shaken, the drain is heaped with rubble as after a rainstorm—there is little distinction between anything in the drain except most of it is to no purpose, futile and exhausting; nothing of what I “hear” is exactly audible, as it would be, I assume, in a person afflicted with schizophrenia; these distractions are merely annoying, when not cruelly mocking.
There once was a ship . . .
The name of our ship was
The Golden Vanity.
Like a metronome set at too quick a rhythm a pulse begins to beat in my head. It’s the beat, beat, beat of mockery—a sense that our life together was in vain—now it has ended—sunken into the Low-Land Sea as in the ballad’s melancholy refrain.
Most of the words of the ballad are lost to me. Only a few words recur with maddening frequency.
Sometimes seeing Ray with a faraway or a distracted look in his eye I would ask him what he was thinking and Ray would reply Nothing.
But how can you be thinking about nothing?
I don’t know. But I was.
How funny Ray could be! Though there was always this other side of him, as if in eclipse.
He would be so very touched, to know how our friends are missing him. How stricken they are, that he has died. A kind of family has come into being . . . It is horrible to think that Ray’s last hours were passed among strangers.
If he’d been conscious at the time, of what was he conscious?
What were his final thoughts, what were his final words?
Suddenly I am gripped by a need to seek out the young woman doctor who spoke to me in Ray’s room. I don’t even know her name—I will have to find out her name—I will ask her what Ray said—what she remembers—
Except of course she won’t remember. Or, if she remembers, she won’t tell me.
Better not to know. Better not to pursue this.
From the time of our first meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, it was Ray who was the more elusive of the two of us, the more secretive, elliptical. Some residue of his puritanical Irish Catholic upbringing remained with him through the decades, long after he’d dropped out of the Church at the age of eighteen; he disliked religion, in all its forms, but particularly the dogmatic; he disliked theology, particularly the morbidly arcane and exacting theology of Thomas Aquinas which he’d had to study at the Jesuit-run Marquette High School in Milwaukee.
The Jesuit motto—I do what I am doing.
Meaning What I am doing is justified because I am doing it.
Because I am in the service of God.
There was a side of Ray unknowable to me—kept at a little distance from me. As—I suppose—there was a side of myself kept at a distance from Ray, who knew so little of my writing.
What is frightening is, maybe I never knew him. In some essential way, I never knew my husband.
For I had known my husband—as he’d allowed himself to be known. But the man who’d been my husband—Ray Smith, Raymond Smith, Raymond J. Smith—has eluded me.
Or is it inevitable—no wife really knows her husband? To be a wife is an intimacy so close, one can’t see; as, close up to a mirror, one can’t see one’s reflection.
The male is elusive, to the female. The male is the other, the one to be domesticated; the female is domestication.
There’s a sudden trickle of liquid—blood?—on my wrist. Without knowing, I’ve been digging at my skin.
Rashes, welts, tiny hot pimples like poison ivy have erupted on the tender skin of the insides of my arms especially, and on the underside of my jaw; striations like exposed nerves have emerged across my back. Staring at these configurations in the mirror of my bathroom this morning as if they were a message in an unknown language.
Also in my bathroom arranging pill-containers on the rim of the sink counter. Painkillers, sleeping pills, an accumulation of years. Did such drugs lose their efficacy? Would their power be diminished?
I am thinking now I am so tired, I could sleep forever.
But there is no time. Already it is 10:20 A.M.—it is February 20, 2008—I must put together a packet of documents for probate court in Trenton.
“Good-bye, honey!”
***
The Widow is consoling herself with a desperate stratagem. But then, all the widow’s stratagems are desperate right now. She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing. For the fact is, the widow cannot accept it, that her husband is gone from her life irrevocably. She cannot accept it—she cannot even comprehend it—that she has no relationship with Raymond J. Smith except as his widow—the “executrix” of his estate.
A Widow’s actions might be defined as rational/irrational alternatives to suicide. Any act a Widow performs, or contemplates performing, is an alternative to suicide and is in this desirable however naive, foolish, or futile.
