Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Chapter 47
In Motion!—“Still Alive”
New York University
,
NY. March 6
,
2008.
Not in a howling blizzard but on a dank chill winter evening.
Not desperately flinging my life into the sky but driven by car on the New Jersey Turnpike, exiting at the Holland Tunnel, a familiar landscape no more than two hours from home.
Home!
The thought makes me anxious, breathless. For no sooner am I away from home than I yearn to return to it.
In a sense now, I am homeless. For the home, the place of refuge, solitude, love—where my husband lived—no longer exists.
Where am I, why am I here, I must remind myself—
Where there is nowhere to be
,
all places are equal.
My friend Ed Doctorow is my host this evening. I am speaking/reading to a gathering of young writers in a “writers’ house” near the NYU campus. Today has been a good day, a “safe” day—earlier, I was teaching at Princeton; now, I am here in the writers’ house at NYU; it’s an interlude of several hours in which I am not obsessively a widow but another, freer individual—whom these young New York City writers perceive as “Joyce Carol Oates”—and though the identity is something of an imposture it’s familiar and comforting like my worn old down-filled quilted red coat that falls nearly to my ankles and has a hood inside which I can hide.
This coat, my old red coat, purchased in Ray’s company years ago, reminds me of him, however. For this is the coat I wore daily in the winter, in many winters, as Ray wore one or another of his jackets from L.L. Bean. (These jackets, hanging now in the hall closet at home. Often I stare into the closet, I stroke the sleeves. My mind is utterly blank, baffled.) As being publicly and warmly greeted by Ed Doctorow, hugged and my cheek kissed, reminds me of Ray, so keenly of Ray, for never had I seen Ed Doctorow and his wife Helen except in Ray’s company also, over the years.
I am trying to recall when we’d first met Ed and Helen. Possibly, when Ed taught a fiction workshop at Princeton in the late 1970s. We’d driven out to Sag Harbor, on the far, northern shore of Long Island, to visit the Doctorows at their country house.
“It’s a pleasure to introduce my friend Joyce Carol Oates—”
So Ed tells the young writers, of whom many are his students. There’s a festive air in this crowded space, the kind of excitement and nerviness that young writers—young artists?—exude. I would like to tell them that being an “established” writer—even a “major American writer”—(a designation that seems utterly unreal to me)—doesn’t bring with it confidence, security, or even a sense of who/whom one
is.
Do you know how a novel will end
,
when you start out?
Do you ever alter the endings you’ve planned
,
when you get to the end?
Who has been your greatest influence?
A wild fear comes over me, something will happen to Ray’s uncompleted manuscript
Black Mass
—something will happen to the house in my absence.
Vandals trashing the house. A fire . . .
What are you working on now?
How can you tell when something will be a story or a novel?
Did you ever start out writing a story
,
and it turned into a novel?
Did you ever start out writing a novel
,
and it turned into a story?
When did you know you wanted to be a . . .
The blunt fact is: to be a writer, you have to be strong enough to write. You have to have emotional strength, and you have to have physical strength. Now that I no longer have this strength, it seems wrong of me to try to answer young writers’ questions like some sort of writerly Delphic oracle . . .
(Surely the Delphic oracle knew very well that he was an imposter. Every oracle knows that he/she is an imposter. Yet—when others are asking you questions, and are eager to believe that you know the answers, who are you to break the spell?)
Where do you get your ideas from?
. . . your inspiration?
Inspiration! Of all people I am singularly ill-equipped to talk about inspiration—I feel like a balloon from which air has leaked—deflated, flat. Yet I manage to answer the question plausibly—
Ideas come from anywhere
,
everywhere. Personal life
,
what you’ve heard from others
,
newspaper accounts
,
history. . . .
What is strange and unsettling in my life now, about which I can’t tell anyone—it would sound too utterly trivial, for one thing—is that I am overwhelmed by ideas for stories, poems, novels—entire novels!—that flash at me like those hallucinatory images that come to us as we sink into sleep; these ideas appear, flare up and effloresce and vanish within seconds virtually every time I shut my eyes. And I am certain that—if I had time—if I had time, energy, strength, “inspiration”—I could execute them, as I have executed so many story-ideas in the past.
Maybe it’s a symptom of insomnia. Maybe it’s a symptom of grief. Maybe some sort of neurological fissure in the brain. Amid the clamoring of songs, lines from poems, part-heard voices and music . . . Never before in my life have I felt so “inspired”—and simultaneously so dispirited, exhausted; I haven’t even the energy to write down these ideas, let alone plot out ways to execute them.
At the end of the evening Ed Doctorow walks with me to the car that will return me to Princeton. Warmly Ed hugs me, and tells me again how sorry he and Helen are, about Ray. He tells me that they’d expected that I would cancel the engagement and I tell Ed, “Oh but why would I cancel tonight? Where would I be if I weren’t here? I mean—where would I rather be . . .”
Thinking
I don’t really have a home. It doesn’t matter where I am
,
I am homeless now.
This is wrong of course, for I have a home. And I am very lucky, as a widow, to have such a home.
Think of the widows who are made truly homeless by the loss of a husband! Those for whom some sort of
suttee
might be the least of their sorrows.
The challenge is, to live in a house from which
meaning
has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer.
By identifying the books on the coffee table as “Ray’s books” I have tried to inject meaning into them, meaning that once inhabited the objects but has since drained out; as I have tried to inject meaning into the jackets, sport coats, shirts and trousers, etc., hanging in closets in the house—men’s articles of clothing, but belonging to—whom?
The terror of mere “things” from which meaning has drained—this is a terror that sweeps over the widow at such times, ever more frequently since I’ve been traveling, and return home to the empty house.
For no things contain
meaning
—we are surrounded by mere things into which
meaning
has been injected, and invested. Things hold us in thrall as in a kind of hypnosis, hallucination
The entire house in which I live—in which I live now alone—each room, each article of furniture, each artwork on the wall, each book—and now, more visibly each day, for spring is approaching inexorably as a locomotive on a track, the snowdrops, crocuses, and tulip-shoots in Ray’s courtyard garden—has been drained of
meaning.
These objects, “things”—almost, I feel a tinge of hatred for them—resentment and revulsion. If I stare at something—a mirror, for instance—a scrim of some sort begins to obscure my gaze. Often I am light-headed, dazed and dizzy when stepping inside the house, even as I’m very very relieved—happy to be back: “Honey, hello! Hi! I’m home . . .” If I’m not careful I will collide with a chair, or a table; my legs are (still) covered in bruises; sometimes I am short of breath as if the oxygen in the house has been depleted, or some sort of odorless toxic gas has seeped in; I have difficulty with my balance as if the floor were tilting beneath my feet. The more I stare at a mirror, for instance the mirror in the dining room, on the wall contiguous with the kitchen, the more the reflection inside waves, blurs—is that a face? Or the absence of a face?
For I too am fading. With no one to see me
,
no one to name me and to love me
,
I am fast fading.
The art-works on the walls. The large oil paintings by Wolf Kahn. These are the most striking objects in our house, the eye moves immediately to them. Visitors invariably comment on the paintings—“So beautiful! Who is the artist?” Sometimes I stand staring, mesmerized. For this is the magic of art—it can pull us out of ourselves, it can mesmerize. Yet—perversely—I have been thinking of removing some of the art-works on our walls because they remind me too painfully of Ray—of how Ray and I purchased them, in New York City soon after we’d moved to Princeton. There are two quite large Wolf Kahn landscapes—a lavender barn, an autumn forest—as well as several pastels, all New England scenes in the artist’s striking impressionistic style. The lavender barn we’d bought in a Manhattan gallery, the others we’d bought, or were given, by the artist himself when we’d visited his dazzling-white studio in Chelsea. (Wolf Kahn’s studio is flooded with light because the artist is afflicted with macular degeneration and needs as much light as possible when he paints. Seeing immense canvases on the walls, all of them paintings-in-progress and all of them gorgeous pastel colors, dreamlike swirls of color, I was naive enough to ask Wolf Kahn what it was like to work in beauty every day, not to be snarled in prose like writers of fiction, and Wolf replied, with an air of explaining something elemental which I should have known: “The canvases aren’t beautiful to me. Beauty has nothing to do with it. I’m solving problems.”)
Solving problems.
Of course. This is what it means to be human.
What the widow must remember
:
her husband’s death did not happen to her but to her husband. I have no right to appropriate Ray’s death. This swirl of emotions
,
this low-grade fever
,
nausea
,
malaise—what has this to do with true grief
,
mourning? Is any of this true grief
,
mourning? I must stop dwelling upon the past
,
which can’t be altered. I must stop hearing these teasing
,
taunting voices—
Is my husband alive? Yes! Your husband is alive Mrs. Smith!
I must take a pill tonight
,
or maybe a half-pill—but leave the other half here on the bedside table
,
with a glass of water
,
for 4
A.M.
Just in case.
Chapter 48
In Motion! —“Mouth of the Rat”
Boca Raton
,
Florida. March 9–10.
Following the principle of it scarcely matters where the widow
is
, since there is no longer a place in which the widow is
at home
, I find myself in an utterly unreal—wind-whipped, “beautiful”—as glossy advertisements in
Vanity Fair
are “beautiful”—setting: Boca Raton!
It’s the Boca Raton Arts Festival. To which Ray and I had been invited together, months before. Now, Edmund White has been kind enough to accompany me. And my friend former Modern Library editor David Ebershoff is one of the participants. This is an interlude of just two days that will pass in a blur like landscape glimpsed from a speeding vehicle—most memorably, following my reading one evening, guests at a reception are utterly shocked, incredulous and thrilled, wanting to talk about nothing else but the Eliot Spitzer scandal, only that morning headlined in the
New York Times.
For of course in this upscale Florida resort, populated by what appear to be mostly upscale Manhattanites, everyone reads the
New York Times.
“We know the family! Spitzer’s father—Bernard—such a wonderful man—a
devoted family man!
—he will be
devastated.
”
“We know the wife—the wife’s family—”
“How can a man
do such things
to his wife—”
“—his family—”
“—daughters—”
“
My son
—he’s the same way! Just like Spitzer! These women—‘call girls’—these terrible women—the men can’t resist them, it’s terrible—
my own son!
—I know, he’s doing such things—he’s risking his family—what a terrible terrible thing—”
“And him such a hypocrite—Spitzer—”
“No one can stand Spitzer—a bully, a bastard—”
“—snide, sneering—”
“—like Giuliani—”
“—Giuliani? Worse!—”
“No, not worse than Giuliani—Spitzer’s policies are good—solid liberal Democrat—”
“He’s a crook!—Spitzer. Whatever came of that investigation—his father ‘loaning’ him money—”
“Campaign money—he spent on ‘hookers’—”
“What happened to that?—that investigation—”
“Imagine, the man spent $80,000 on prostitutes! He spent
campaign money
on prostitutes!”
“Poor Bernard. I think of that family—”
“Bernard? The father? He’s a crook, too!”
“No, no he is not! He’s a good family man, a wonderful man—devoted—”
“
My son
—he refuses to discuss his family life—he has no idea how he is risking his marriage—these ‘call girls’ are like cocaine—the married men can’t
resist.
”
Such avid conversations swirl about us, Edmund White and I are fascinated and don’t at all mind being side-lined. Especially striking to us—as if Ethel Merman were to have stepped off a Broadway stage in full war-paint makeup, bejeweled and glittering, in expensive designer resort-wear clothes and hair the color and consistency of cotton candy—is the excitable woman so openly, so bizarrely speaking of her son to a gathering of strangers; to Edmund and me, most particularly, as if being “literary” writers, we might offer some special understanding and insight.
“Maybe this will knock some sense into my son’s head, what has happened to Spitzer. If anything like this ever happened in our family . . .”
No one notices when Edmund White and I drift away from the reception, having signed as many of our books as we are likely to sign, in fact more copies than we might have predicted in such a setting. For here is a true-life drama beside which the stratagems of fiction are mere shadows. Nothing like another’s scandal, the devastation of another’s family and the collapse of a public career, to stir the heart.
Almost, I’ve forgotten why I feel so—bereft.
Why I feel as if I were just recovering from—what?—a nasty case of the flu?
A friend has written to me this poignant letter—
I had a nervous breakdown when I was twenty-eight and beside anxiety attacks, I had acute insomnia. It was because I was going through a huge internal sea change, and I remember that the insomnia was hell. It lasted for about six months and it was all I could do to hold onto the threads of sanity during the day. I felt unhinged and wondered if I would ever feel normal again. It was very frightening—and the symptoms sound similar to yours . . . I used to feel it was like a baby’s fontanel, where there’s a hole that closes up very slowly, and one doesn’t feel like one is on solid ground until the plates of the skull have finally grown together. While the hole’s still there, one feels as if one is falling into the chasm ALL ALONE. So (I think) it might be helpful to have some of your friends take turns staying in your house with you. I also think a grief group would help . . . You should know our hearts are totally with you and we’d like to support you in whatever way would help.
Staying in my house with me!
—these are haunting words.
I am grateful, yet terribly embarrassed—and ashamed—to think that friends are talking about me—obviously, they are concerned about me—
and I have hardly hinted to them how desperate
,
how frantic
,
how unrecognizable to myself I really am.
Is it therapy of a kind, or is it a coincidence—(but in the mental life, as Freud suggests, there are no coincidences)—that the story I am composing, with such excruciating slowness, that will require literally weeks, months, to complete, is about suicide; a young woman poet abandoned by her lover, driven by depression/fury/madness to kill herself . . .
The romance of suicide, for poets!—the heightened being, the ecstatic expectations that can’t be sustained, the engulfing by language, “music”—the terror that the “music” will cease.
Or has ceased, without the poet quite knowing.
But my story isn’t about a loss of “music”—or not entirely: it’s about a woman abandoned by her lover who is also the father of her child . . . a child whom she is contemplating killing, along with herself . . . and so the situation is very different from my own.
Or at least, I want to think so.
I am not going to commit suicide. I have not even any clear
,
coherent plan!
For I’ve been told—warned—by a philosopher-friend that “taking pills” is not a good idea.
You have no idea how many pills to swallow, he said. You become sick to your stomach and vomit, you lapse into a coma and when you wake up you’re brain-damaged—and now, you will never have the opportunity to kill yourself.
What a bizarre matter-of-fact conversation this was! And we were in a restaurant, amid cheery convivial fellow-diners.
I hadn’t told him about the pill-cache. Somehow he’d seemed to know.
Or maybe—this is a sudden, chilling thought—accumulating pills is utterly commonplace, everyone does it and for the same reason.
Foolproof ways to commit suicide, my philosopher-friend says, are few. A bullet in the brain, you might think—“But then, you might miss—and you need a gun”; inhaling carbon dioxide—“But then, someone might discover you too soon”; taking a few pills prior to affixing a plastic bag over your head which you take care to tie tightly—“But then, it’s so laborious and clumsy, you might panic and change your mind.”
Suicide may be a taboo subject but speaking of it in such a way has its blackly comic element. One tries for a too-casual air, or a too-somber air. Even hinting at it one is likely to seem insincere, childish, hungry for attention.
Of course I don’t mean it! I mean very little of what I say.
Of course
,
I am a fantasist . . . You can’t possibly take me seriously.
There is a philosopher—Leibniz?—who claimed to believe that the universe is continuously collapsing and continuously reassembling itself, through eternity. Whether he believed in God also, I don’t recall—I suppose he did, if this is Leibniz, in the late seventeenth century. As bizarre metaphysics go, this isn’t the most bizarre. To dismiss it as illogical, arbitrary, and unprovable is beside the point. And so I’ve come to think of my “self”—my “personality”—as an entity that collapses when I am alone and unperceived by others; but then, as if by magic, when I am with other people, my “personality” reassembles itself.
Like one who must make her way across a tightrope, with no net beneath—quickly, before falling!—but not too quickly.
Walking with Edmund White along the beach—tramping in the damp sand—on the eve of our departure from Boca Raton, Florida, we’re talking of Ray, whom Edmund knew well; and we talk of Edmund’s French lover Hubert who’d died of AIDS some years ago, of whom he’d written in his novel
The Married Man
with unflinching candor; how it seems to us, who have “survived,” that some part of us has died with those we’d loved, and is interred with them, or burnt to ash. Death is the most obvious—common—banal fact of life and yet—how to speak of it, when it has struck so close? When one dies, and another lives, what is this “life” that’s left over?—for a long time, Edmund says, it will seem unreal. It
is
unreal—set beside the intensity of the love that has been lost.
And so how wonderful, to have a friend like Edmund, to whom I can speak of these things. And Edmund is the most cheerful of companions, and makes me laugh. And makes me forget the furious voice in my head
This is wrong! You can’t enjoy this. If Ray can’t be here by the ocean
,
it isn’t right that you can be. You know this!
Later that evening, we hear the astonishing young Chinese pianist Lang Lang playing Chopin. Still later, in my hotel suite watching
Lockdown
—a gritty, grueling cable-TV documentary set in a men’s maximum security prison in Illinois, which neither Edmund nor I has seen before—“These are people worse off than we are!”
And maybe at 11
P.M.
we will switch to CNN to see what the latest lurid revelations are, in the Eliot Spitzer scandal.