Ray does look handsome—his cheeks are lean, and remarkably unlined for a man of his age—his forehead is marred by the faintest frown lines, scarcely visible in this light. As the nurse deftly shaves him, wipes away lather—I feel a sense of unease, that Ray is becoming adjusted to the hospital setting, ever more comfortable with the eerie passivity such a setting evokes—as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in which the young German Hans Castorp arrives as a visitor at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps, in the decade before the outbreak of World War I, and as if in fairy-tale enchantment remains for seven years.
After Ray is shaved he returns to the New York Times scattered across his bed. The visit to Radiology—he was gone for forty minutes—seems to have had no discernible effect upon him—one in a succession of hospital tests—at least not so invasive as others.
Both his arms are bruised, discolored from blood-drawing. Even for a stoic the constant blood-drawing is becoming painful but he doesn’t complain, Ray isn’t one to complain.
He seems not to recall his mildly delusional state of the other day, nor am I likely to remind him.
A room in a nurse’s house! How convinced Ray was, that this was where he’d been situated, for what reason he could not have said. I want to think that one day—maybe—when he’s well, and home—and the hospital vigil is but a memory—I will tell him about this notion of his, and we might laugh about it together.
And how does the remainder of this Sunday pass?—languidly reading, talking, listening to choral music played on a Sunday arts channel on TV. By coincidence this is the identical Sunday-afternoon classical music program that is broadcast on the radio, to which we often listen at home.
Once listening to a recording of Mozart’s Requiem Mass Ray had remarked in that bravado way in which, when you’re young, you might speak of dying, death as if you had not the slightest fear of it—“Promise me you’ll play that at my funeral.”
“But you said the same thing about Verdi’s Requiem Mass.”
“I did? I did?”
This was years ago. This was another lifetime. We were living on Sherbourne Road in Detroit, Michigan. We were living then in the aftermath of the so-called Detroit riot of July 1967—fires, gunshots and looting only two blocks away on Livernois Avenue—a nightmare cacophony of fire sirens, police sirens, random shouts and cries—National Guardsmen deployed to protect municipal property with rifles—an acrid smell of smoke, smoldering fires that lingered for days—this racial tinderbox of an American city as cliché-speech described it that was at the same time our home.
In the hospital, on this February afternoon in 2008, decades later I don’t want to think of this. Of our innocence, ignorance.
We’d been very happy in that house on Sherbourne Road where in an upstairs room—a former child’s room pink-walled and unfurnished except for a desk, a straight-back chair and a single bookcase—I would write my novel them while Ray commuted to the University of Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River in Canada.
I was teaching English at that time at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit-run institution at Six Mile Road, about a mile from our Sherbourne Road house. I loved my classes at U.D. and I was very friendly with most of my (mostly male) colleagues but within a year I would leave to teach, with Ray, at the University of Windsor where we remained from 1968 to 1978 in a single-storey brick house on the Detroit River across from Belle Isle . . .
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
In the late afternoon of Sunday, February 17, 2008—as dusk comes on, and deepens to night—it’s decided between us that I will go home early today, and return early in the morning. How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
Discharged to the rehab clinic on Tuesday?—a few days in rehab and then—home. By next Friday? Next weekend?
I kiss my husband good night. My very nice husband with his smooth-shaven jaws. It is not an extraordinary leave-taking for it feels so very temporary—I will be returning to this room so soon.
“Good night! I love you.”
February 18, 2008. The call comes at 12:38 A.M.
Waking me from sleep—a phone ringing at the wrong time.
There had long been the dread, when my parents were alive, and elderly, and their health crises escalating, of the phone ringing late—at the wrong time.
We all know this dread. There is no escape from this dread.
For finally I’d been able to sleep—in our bed, and with the light out—we’d been feeling so hopeful when I left the hospital in the early evening—the first time since Monday, I was able to shut my eyes, to sleep—and now this feels like punishment—my punishment for being complacent, unguarded—for leaving the hospital early—stunned and dry-mouthed I stumble from bed, into the next room—which is Ray’s darkened study—where the phone is ringing. And when I lift the receiver—“Hello? Hello?”—the caller has hung up.
A wrong number? Desperately I want to think so.
Almost immediately the phone rings again. When I pick it up it’s to hear the words, if not the voice—the voice is a stranger’s voice, male, urgent-sounding—that I have been dreading since the nightmare-vigil began—informing me that “your husband”—“Raymond Smith”—is in “critical condition”—his blood pressure has “plummeted”—his heartbeat has “accelerated”—the voice is asking if I want “extraordinary measures” in the event that my husband’s heart stops—I am crying, “Yes! I’ve told you! I’ve said yes! Save him! Do anything you can!”
The voice instructs me to come quickly to the hospital.
I ask, “Is he still alive? Is my husband still alive?”
“Yes. Your husband is still alive.”
And now I am driving into Princeton in the dark of night—along Elm Ridge Road—onto Carter Road, and left onto Rosedale—Rosedale, which will lead straight into the Borough of Princeton several miles away—these country roads so well traveled by day are deserted by night—there are no streetlights—no oncoming headlights—the roads are dark, snow-edged—I am thinking This can’t be happening. This is not real—this, the very summons I’d been dreading, I’d wished to think with a child’s faith in magical thinking that if I’d dreaded the call, if I’d imagined the very words of the call, surely then the call could not come—that would not be impossible!—though I am desperate to get into Princeton and to the hospital, I force myself to drive at no more than the speed limit—as I’d been careful to drive slowly and with as much concentration as I could summon, during this past week—for it would be ironic, it would be disastrous if I have an accident at such a time—when Ray is waiting for me—through a roaring in my ears the telephone voice has acquired a more urgent tone—almost, a chiding tone Still alive. Your husband is still alive. Aloud I say, “He is still alive. My husband is still alive”—in a voice of wonder, terror, defiance—“Ray is still alive”—such pathos in still, so provisional and desperate—this past week I’ve fallen into the habit of talking to myself, instructing myself—encouraging myself as one might encourage a stumbling child You can do it. You will be all right, you can do it. You will be all right! When I’d thrown on clothes in the bedroom, to prepare for this frantic journey, this admonishing voice had lifted in a semblance of bemused calm—Be careful what you wear, you may be wearing it for a long time.
In the ghost-white Honda I am veering over the yellow line into the other lane, for some reason I am having difficulty gripping the steering wheel—my hands are bare, the wheel is cold yet the palms of my hands are slick with sweat. I am having difficulty seeing,