Joyce Oates - A Widow’s Story - A Memoir

On this Monday morning in mid-February 2008 the sun hasn’t yet risen. The sky looks steely, opaque. Approaching my husband I feel a tinge of unease, apprehension. Sitting at the table Ray appears hunched over the newspaper, his shoulders slumped as if he’s very tired; when I ask him if something is wrong quickly he says no—no!—except he has been feeling “strange”—he woke before 5 A.M. and was unable to get back to sleep; he was having trouble breathing, lying down; now he’s uncomfortably warm, sweaty, and seems short of breath . . .

These symptoms he tells me in a matter-of-fact voice. So the husband shifts to the wife the puzzle of what to make of such things, if anything; like certain emotions, too raw to be defined, such information can only be transferred to the other, the cautious, caring, and hyper-vigilant spouse.

More often, the wife is the custodian of such things. I think this is so. The wife is the one elected to express alarm, fear, concern; the wife is the one to weep.

Shocking to see, the smooth white countertop which is always kept spotless is strewn now with used tissues. Something in the way in which these wet wadded tissues are scattered, the slovenliness of it, the indifference, is not in Ray’s character and not-right.

Another wrong thing, Ray tells me that he has already called our family doctor in Pennington and left a message saying he’d like to see the doctor that day.

Now this is serious! For Ray is the kind of husband who by nature resists seeing a doctor, stubborn and stoic, even when obviously ill the kind of husband with whom a wife must plead to make an appointment with a doctor.

The kind of person whose pain threshold is so high, often he tells our dentist not to inject his gums with Novocain.

Ray flinches when I touch him, as if my touch is painful. His forehead is both feverish and clammy, damp. His breath is hoarse. Close up I see that his face is sickly pale yet flushed; his eyes are finely bloodshot and don’t seem to be entirely in focus.

In a panic the thought comes to me Has he had a stroke?

A friend of ours had a stroke recently. A friend at least a decade younger than Ray, and in very fit condition. The stroke hadn’t been severe but our friend was shaken, we were all shaken, that so evidently fit a man had had a stroke and was exposed as mortal, as he had not previously seemed, swaggering and luminous in our midst. And Ray, never quite so swaggering or luminous, never so visibly fit, is taking medication for “hypertension”—high blood pressure—which medication is supposed to have helped him considerably; yet now he’s looking flushed, he’s looking somewhat dazed, distressed, he hasn’t finished his breakfast, nor has he read more than the first sprawling section of the New York Times in whose ever more Goyaesque war photos and columns of somber newsprint an ennui of such gravity resides, the sensitive soul may be smothered if unwary.

Post 9/11 America! The war in Iraq! The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism! Avidly reading the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and Harper’s, like so many of our Princeton friends and colleagues Ray is one of those choked with indignation, alarm; a despiser of the war crimes of the Bush administration as of its cunning, hypocrisy, and cynicism; its skill at manipulating the large percentage of the population that seems immune to logic as to common sense, and history. Ray’s natural optimism—his optimist-gardener soul—has been blunted to a degree by months, years, of this active and largely frustrated dislike of all that George W. Bush represents. I have learned not to stir his indignation, but to soothe it. Or to avoid it. Thinking now Maybe it’s something in the news. Something terrible in the news. Don’t ask!

But Ray is too sick to be upset about the latest suicide bombing in Iraq, or the latest atrocity in Afghanistan, or the Gaza Strip. The newspaper pages are scattered, like wadded tissues. His breathing is forced, labored—an eerie rasping sound like a strip of plastic fibrillating in the wind.

Calmly I tell him I want to take him to the ER. Immediately. He tells me no—“That’s not necessary.”

I tell him yes, it is necessary. “We’ll go now. We can’t wait for—” naming our Pennington physician whose office wouldn’t open for another hour or more, and who probably couldn’t see Ray until the afternoon.

Ray protests he doesn’t want to go to the ER—he isn’t that sick—he has much work to do this morning, on the upcoming issue of Ontario Review, that can’t be put off—the deadline for the May issue is soon. But on his feet he moves unsteadily, as if the floor were tilting beneath him. I slip my arm around his waist and help him walk and the thought comes to me This is not right. This is terribly wrong for a man’s pride will rarely allow him to lean on any woman even a wife of forty-seven years. A man’s pride will rarely allow him to concede that yes, he is seriously ill. And the ER—“emergency room”—the very concession of helplessness, powerlessness—is the place to which he should be taken.

He’s coughing, wincing. His skin exudes an air of sickly heat. Yet the previous night Ray had seemed fine for most of the evening—he’d even prepared a light meal for us, for dinner; I had been away and had returned home at about 8 P.M. (This, our final meal together in our house, the final meal Ray would prepare for us, was Ray’s specialty: fried eggs, whole grain bread, Campbell’s soup—chicken with wild rice. I would call him from the airport—Philadelphia or Newark—when my plane arrived and he would prepare our meal for my arrival home an hour later. If the season was right he would also place on my desk a vase with a single flower from his garden . . . ) At dinner he’d been in good spirits but shortly afterward with disconcerting swiftness at about 10:30 P.M. he began coughing fitfully; he’d become very tired, and went to bed early.

Forever afterward I would think: I was away for two days. I was a “visiting writer” at U-C Riverside at the invitation of the distinguished American studies critic and scholar Emory Elliot, formerly a Princeton colleague. In these two days my husband had gotten sick. Ray would acknowledge, yes, probably he’d been outside without a jacket or a cap and possibly he’d gotten a cold in this way though we are told that this isn’t so—scientific tests have proved—that cold air, even wet, doesn’t cause colds; colds are caused by viruses; bad colds, by virulent viruses; you don’t “catch” a cold by running out to the mailbox without a jacket, or hauling recycling cans to the curb; unless of course you are exhausted, or your immune system has been weakened. In these ways you may “catch” a cold but it is not likely to be a fatal cold, possibly just a “bad cold” which is what my husband seems suddenly to have, that has spiraled out of control.

Yet another wrong thing—I will recall this, later—as I reason with my husband now in the kitchen where our two cats are staring at us wide-tawny-eyed, for how incongruous our behavior, at this twilit hour before dawn when we are usually in another part of the house—suddenly he gives in and says yes, all right—“If you think so. If you want to drive me.”

“Of course I want to drive you! Let’s go.”

So long as the ER is the wife’s suggestion, and the wife’s decision, maybe it’s all right. The husband will consent, as a way of humoring her. Is this it? Also, as Ray says, with a shrug to indicate how time-wasting all this is, our Pennington doctor will probably want him to have tests and he will have to go to the Princeton Medical Center anyway.

Without my help—though I’ve offered to help—Ray prepares for the trip to the ER. He doesn’t want me to fuss over him, even to touch him, as if his skin hurts. (This is a flu symptom—isn’t it? Our Pennington physician makes me uneasy at times, so readily does he prescribe antibiotics for Ray when a “bad cold” is interfering with Ray’s work; I worry that an excess of antibiotics will affect Ray’s immune system.)