Joyce Oates: A Widow’s Story: A Memoir

Why was this?—there are numerous reasons.

I regret it, I think. Maybe I do.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness.

But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

Thinking then, that night of the car wreck, and subsequent nights and days as phantom pains stabbed in my chest and ribs, and I despaired that the ugly yellowish purple bruises would ever fade, that, if Ray died, I would be utterly bereft; far better for me to die with him, than to survive alone. At such times I did not think of myself as a writer primarily, or even as a writer, but as a wife.

A wife who dreaded any thought of becoming a widow.

In the morning our lives would be returned to us but subtly altered, strange to us as others’ lives that bore only a superficial resemblance to our own but were not our own. It would have been a time to say Look—we might have been killed last night! I love you, I’m so grateful that I am married to you . . . but the words didn’t quite come.

So much to say in a marriage, so much unsaid. You reason that there will be other times, other occasions. Years!

That morning Ray called the Honda dealer from whom he’d bought the car and arranged to be picked up and brought to the showroom on State Road, to buy a replacement—a Honda Accord LX, 2007 model (with sunroof) which he drove into our driveway in the late afternoon, gleaming white like its predecessor.

“Do you like our new car?”

“I always love our new car.”

And so I would think He might have died then. Both of us. January 4, 2007. It might have happened so easily. A year and six weeks—what remained to us—was a gift. Be grateful!

Chapter 3 The First Wrong Things

February 11, 2008. There is an hour, a minute—you will remember it forever—when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong.

You don’t know—can’t know—that it is the first of a series of “wrongful” events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it. For after all it may not be the first in a series but only an isolated event and your life not set to be devastated but only just altered, remade.

So you want to think. So you are desperate to think.

The first wrong thing on this ordinary Monday morning in February is—Ray has gotten out of bed in the wintry dark before dawn.

By the time I discover him in a farther corner of the house it’s only just 6:15 A.M. and he has been up, by his account, since 5 A.M.

He has taken a shower, dressed, and fed the cats breakfast at an unnaturally early hour; he has brought in the New York Times in its transparent blue wrapper; he has made himself a spare little breakfast of fruit and cottage cheese and is eating—trying to eat—seated at our long white Parsons table; through our glass-walled gallery I can see him, across the courtyard, a lone figure haloed in light amid the shadowy room behind him. If he were to glance up, as he has not done, he would see me watching him, and he would see our dogwood tree in the courtyard transformed in the night, clumps of wet snow on the branches like blossoms.

In fact this is a white-blossoming dogwood Ray planted himself several years ago.

This little tree Ray takes a special pride in, and feels a special tenderness for, for it hadn’t thrived initially, it had required extra care and so its survival is a significant part of its meaning to us, and its beauty.

If in wifely fashion I want to praise my husband, or to cheer him if he requires cheering, I have only to speak of the dogwood tree—this will evoke a smile. Usually!

For Ray is the gardener of our household, not me. As Ray is an editor of literary writing beloved by writers whose books he has edited and published—so Ray is an editor of living things. He doesn’t create them or cause them to live but he tends them, cares for them and allows them to thrive—to blossom, to yield fruit. Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism. Though I love gardens—especially, I love Ray’s garden in the summer and early fall—it’s as an observer and not as a connoisseur of growing things that to me send cruelly paradoxical signals: the exquisitely blooming orchid that, brought home, soon loses its petals, and never again regains them; the thriving squash vines that, mysteriously, as if devoured from within, shrivel and die overnight. Ray is of an age to recall “victory gardens” in the early 1940s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—in his telling, there is an echo of childhood romance about such gardens, which everyone kept as in a communal civilian war-effort. Ray’s garden is a way of evoking these idyllic memories. How happy he has always been, outdoors! Driving to the nursery, to buy plants! And how eager for winter to end, that he might have the garden plowed and dare to set in early things like lettuce, arugula despite the risk of a heavy frost.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

You would see that all the growing things Ray has planted on our two-acre property, like the dogwood tree, forsythia bushes, peonies, “bleeding hearts,” tulips, hillsides of crocuses, daffodils and jonquils, are utterly commonplace; yet, to us, these are living talismans suffused with meaning. Thoughtfulness, tenderness. Patience. An imagining of a (shared) future.

A memory comes to me: in our shabby-stylish rented Chelsea duplex, in the belated and chilly spring of our sabbatical year in London 1971–1972, Ray is tending a bedraggled little clump of brightly colored nasturtiums on our small terrace. The potted soil is probably very poor, there are rapacious insects devouring their leaves, but Ray is determined to nurse the nasturtiums along and through a window I observe him, unseen by him; I feel a sudden faintness, a rush of love for him, and also the futility of such love—as my then-young husband was determined to keep the bedraggled nasturtiums alive, so we are determined to keep alive those whom we love, we yearn to protect them, shield them from harm. To be mortal is to know that you can’t do this, yet you must try.

Our sabbatical year in London was a mixed experience, for me. I was homesick, rootless. Unaccustomed to not working—that is, to not teaching—I felt useless, idle; my only solace was my writing, into which I poured enormous concentration—re-creating, with an obsessiveness that swerved between elation and compulsion, the vividly haunting oneiric cityscape of Detroit, in the novel Do With Me What You Will. Ray, however, thoroughly enjoyed the sabbatical year—as Ray thoroughly enjoyed London, our long, long walks in the beautiful damply green parks of London of which our favorite was Regent’s Park, and those parts of the U.K.—Cornwall, Wessex—we saw on driving trips. My husband has a capacity for enjoying life that isn’t possible for me, somehow.

There are those—a blessed lot—who can experience life without the slightest glimmer of a need to add anything to it—any sort of “creative” effort; and there are those—an accursed lot?—for whom the activities of their own brains and imaginations are paramount. The world for these individuals may be infinitely rich, rewarding and seductive—but it is not paramount. The world may be interpreted as a gift, earned only if one has created something over and above the world.

To this, Ray would respond with a bemused smile. You take yourself so seriously. Why?

Always Ray has been the repository of common sense in our household. The spouse who, with a gentle tug, holds in place the recklessly soaring kite, that would careen into the stratosphere and be lost, shattered to bits.