Our great American philosopher William James has said—We have as many personalities as there are people who know us.
To which I would add We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.
“I love you! I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Yet what relief—at mid-afternoon—to leave the ER at last—to escape the indescribable but unmistakable disinfectant smell of the medical center if only to step outside into a cold cheerless February day!
I feel so sorry for Ray, trapped inside. My poor husband stricken with pneumonia—obliged to stay overnight in the hospital.
A multitude of tasks await me—telephone calls, errands—at home I sort Ray’s mail to bring to him that evening—Ray tries to answer Ontario Review mail as soon as he can, he has a dread of mail piling up on his desk—as a Catholic schoolboy in Milwaukee he’d been inculcated with an exaggerated sense of responsibility to what might be defined loosely as the world—repeatedly I call the medical center—again, and again—until early evening—to learn if Ray has been yet transferred to the general hospital and always the answer is No. No! Not yet.
At about 6:30 P.M. as I am about to leave for the medical center, bringing things for Ray—bathrobe, toiletries, books—at his end of our living room coffee table are the books he is currently reading or wants to read—as well as manuscripts submitted to the magazine and the press, a burgeoning stack of these with self-addressed stamped envelopes for return—the phone rings and I hurry to answer it assuming that it’s the medical center, telling me the number of the room Ray has been moved to—at first I can’t comprehend what I am being told Your husband’s heartbeat has accelerated—we haven’t been able to stabilize it—in the event that his heart stops do you want extraordinary measures to be used to keep him alive?—
I am so stunned that I can’t reply, the stranger at the other end of the line repeats his astonishing words—I hear myself stammering Yes! Yes of course!—gripped by disbelief, panic—stammering Yes anything you can do! Save him! I will be right there—for this is the first unmistakable sign of horror, of helplessness—impending doom—blindly I’m fumbling to replace the phone receiver, on our kitchen wall-phone—a sickening sense of vertigo overcomes me—the strength drains out of my legs, my knees buckle and I fall at a slant, through the doorway into the dining room and against the table a few feet away—the sensation is eerie—as if liquid were rushing out of a container—the edge of the table strikes against my legs just above my knees, for in my fall I have knocked the table askew—heavily, gracelessly I have fallen onto the hardwood floor—I can’t believe that this is happening to me, as I can’t believe what is happening to my husband; behind me the lightweight plastic receiver is swinging on its elastic band just beyond my grasp as I lie sprawled on the floor trying to control my panicked breathing, instructing myself You will be all right. You are not going to faint. You will be all right. You have to leave now, to see Ray. He is waiting for you. In another minute—you will be all right!
Yet: my brain is extinguished, like a flame blown out. My legs—my thighs—are throbbing with pain and it’s this pain that wakes me—how much time has passed, I can’t gauge—a few seconds perhaps—I am able to breathe again—I am too weak to move but in another moment, my strength will return—I am sure that this is so—sprawled on the dining room floor stunned as if a horse had kicked me and the realization comes to me
I must have fainted after all. So this is what fainting is!
Six o’clock in the evening of February 11, 2008. The Siege—not yet identified, not yet named, nor even suspected—has begun.
Strangely, the Widow-to-Be will forget this telephone call. Or rather, she will forget its specific contents. She will recall—with embarrassment, chagrin—some small worry—that she “ fainted”—in fact, she “ fell heavily onto the dining room table, and the floor”—“but just for a minute. Less than a minute.” An ugly bruise of the hue of rotted eggplant and of a shape resembling the state of Florida will discolor her upper legs, her thighs and part of her belly—she will wince with pain—sharp pains—from crashing to the hardwood floor without cushioning the fall with her hands—but she will forget this terrible call, or nearly. For soon there will be so much more to recall. Soon there will be so much more to recall, from which mere fainting onto a hardwood floor will be no reprieve.
Now into my life—as into my vocabulary—there has come a new, harrowing term: Telemetry.
For Ray hasn’t been moved into the general hospital but into a unit adjacent to Intensive Care.
Telemetry!—my first visit to the fifth floor of the medical center—to this corridor I will come to know intimately over a period of six days—imprinted indelibly in my brain like a silent film continually playing—rewinding, replaying—rewinding, replaying.
These places through which we pass. These places that outlive us.
Vast memory-pools, accumulating—of which we are unaware.
Telemetry means machines—machines processing data—machines monitoring a patient’s condition—and I am shocked to see my husband in a hospital bed, in an oxygen mask—IV fluids dripping into his arm. Both his heartbeat and his breathing are monitored—through a device like a clothespin clipped to his forefinger a machine ingeniously translates his oxygen intake into numerals in perpetual flux—76, 74, 73, 77, 80—on a scale of 100.
(When a day or two later I experiment by placing the device on my own forefinger, the numeral rises to 98—“normal.” )
It’s upsetting to see Ray looking so pale, and so tired. So groggy.
As if already he has been on a long journey. As if already I’ve begun to lose him . . .
Despite the oxygen mask and the machines, Ray is reading, or trying to read. Seeing me he smiles wanly—“Hi honey.” The oxygen mask gives his slender face an inappropriately jaunty air as if he were wearing a costume. I am trying not to cry—I hold his hand, stroke his forehead—which doesn’t seem over-warm though I’ve been told that he still has a dangerously high temperature—101.1° F.
“How are you feeling, honey? Oh honey . . .”
Honey. This is our mutual—interchangeable—name for each other. The only name I call Ray, as it is the only name Ray calls me. When we’d first met in Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1960—as graduate students in English at the University of Wisconsin—(Ray, an “older” man, completing his Ph.D. dissertation on Jonathan Swift; I, newly graduated from Syracuse University, enrolled in the master’s degree program)—we must have called each other by our names—of course—but quickly shifted to Honey.
The logic being: anyone in the world can call us by our proper names but no one except us—except the other—can call us by this intimate name.
(Also—I can’t explain—a kind of shyness set in. I was shy calling my husband “Ray”—as if this man of near-thirty, when I’d first met him, represented for me an adulthood of masculine confidence and ease to which at twenty-two, and a very young, inexperienced twenty-two, I didn’t have access. As in dreams I would sometimes conflate my father Frederic Oates and my husband Raymond Smith—the elder man whom I could not call by his first name but only Daddy, the younger man whom I could not call by his first name but only Honey.)
Is the cardiac crisis past? Ray’s heartbeat is slightly fast and slightly erratic but his condition isn’t life threatening any longer, evidently.
Otherwise, he would be in Intensive Care. Telemetry is not Intensive Care.
Unfortunately room 541 is at the farther end of the Telemetry corridor and to get to it one must pass by rooms with part-opened doors into which it’s not a good idea to glance—mostly elderly patients seem to be here, diminutive in their beds,