to myself. I am in dread of losing control in a public place. Suddenly it seems to me—I’ve left my handbag behind—I can’t quite see what I am carrying, in my arms. A wave of panic sweeps over me—though how trivial is this!—how ridiculous—at the possibility of losing my handbag, my car key, house key.
This is the terror: I will lose crucial keys. I will be stranded, marooned. I see myself at the side of a highway—in the dark—frantically signaling for—what?—headlights rush past, blinding. Or maybe this is a dream. Recurring dreams of being lost from my husband are my most frightening dreams but this too is very frightening, for it is so very plausible. Ray is likely to be in charge of keys—to know where a spare key might be kept, outdoors—but now I am obsessed with keys, searching through my handbag for keys a dozen times daily. The relief of finding a key, which might have been lost!
In fact I will lose some things. I will discover that a pair of dark-tinted glasses is missing out of my handbag. They must have fallen out when . . .
I will leave behind Ray’s glasses! I will be utterly unable to comprehend how I could have overlooked them, hadn’t I held them in my hand . . .
Ray’s wristwatch—this, I haven’t left behind.
At the brightly lit nurses’ station—near-deserted at the hour of 1:43 A.M.—I tell one of the nurses that my husband is in room 539, and he has died, and what do I do now? It is the height of naivete, or absurdity, to imagine that the nurses are not well aware of the fact that a patient has just died in Telemetry, a few yards away; yet, I am trying to be helpful, I am even asking with a faint smile, “Do I—call a funeral home? Can you recommend a funeral home?”
The woman to whom I’m speaking—a stranger to me—looks up with a frown. I don’t see in her face the sympathy I’ve seen in the faces of some others. She says, “Your husband’s body will be taken down to the morgue. In the morning, you can call a funeral home to arrange to pick it up.”
This is so shocking to me—so stunning—it’s as if the woman has reached over the counter and slapped my face.
It! So quickly Raymond has ceased being he, now is it.
I feel that I might faint. I can’t allow myself to faint. I lick my lips that are horribly dry, the skin is cracking. Though I can see that the nurse would far rather return to whatever she’s doing at a computer, than speak with me, hesitantly I ask if she can recommend a funeral home and she says, with a fleeting smile, perhaps it’s an exasperated smile, that she could not recommend any funeral home: “You can look them up in the Yellow Pages.”
“The ‘Yellow Pages’?”—I cling to this phrase, that is so commonplace. Yet I seem not to know what to do next.
Another time I ask if she can recommend a funeral home—or if she could call one for me—(such a request, such audacity, I must be desperate by this point)—and she shakes her head, no.
“In the morning, you can call. You have time. You should go home now. You can call a funeral home in the morning.”
Deliberately, it seems, the woman does not call me by name. It is possible that, though the Telemetry unit is not very large, she doesn’t know my name, and doesn’t know Ray’s name; it is entirely possible that she never set foot in Raymond Smith’s room.
“Thank you. ‘Yellow Pages’—I will. In the morning.”
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
The nurse has returned to her computer but others at the brightly lit station watch me walk away, in silence. How many others—“survivors”—have they observed walking away in this direction, toward the elevators, in exhaustion, stunned defeat. How many others clutching at belongings.
In the elevator descending to the lobby I am seized with the need to return to Ray—it is a terrible thing that I have left him—I am filled with horror, that I have left him—for what if ?—some mistake—but sobriety prevails, common sense—the elevator continues down.
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