him. How stricken they are, that he has died. A kind of family has come into being . . . It is horrible to think that Ray’s last hours were passed among strangers.
If he’d been conscious at the time, of what was he conscious?
What were his final thoughts, what were his final words?
Suddenly I am gripped by a need to seek out the young woman doctor who spoke to me in Ray’s room. I don’t even know her name—I will have to find out her name—I will ask her what Ray said—what she remembers—
Except of course she won’t remember. Or, if she remembers, she won’t tell me.
Better not to know. Better not to pursue this.
From the time of our first meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, it was Ray who was the more elusive of the two of us, the more secretive, elliptical. Some residue of his puritanical Irish Catholic upbringing remained with him through the decades, long after he’d dropped out of the Church at the age of eighteen; he disliked religion, in all its forms, but particularly the dogmatic; he disliked theology, particularly the morbidly arcane and exacting theology of Thomas Aquinas which he’d had to study at the Jesuit-run Marquette High School in Milwaukee.
The Jesuit motto—I do what I am doing.
Meaning What I am doing is justified because I am doing it.
Because I am in the service of God.
There was a side of Ray unknowable to me—kept at a little distance from me. As—I suppose—there was a side of myself kept at a distance from Ray, who knew so little of my writing.
What is frightening is, maybe I never knew him. In some essential way, I never knew my husband.
For I had known my husband—as he’d allowed himself to be known. But the man who’d been my husband—Ray Smith, Raymond Smith, Raymond J. Smith—has eluded me.
Or is it inevitable—no wife really knows her husband? To be a wife is an intimacy so close, one can’t see; as, close up to a mirror, one can’t see one’s reflection.
The male is elusive, to the female. The male is the other, the one to be domesticated; the female is domestication.
There’s a sudden trickle of liquid—blood?—on my wrist. Without knowing, I’ve been digging at my skin.
Rashes, welts, tiny hot pimples like poison ivy have erupted on the tender skin of the insides of my arms especially, and on the underside of my jaw; striations like exposed nerves have emerged across my back. Staring at these configurations in the mirror of my bathroom this morning as if they were a message in an unknown language.
Also in my bathroom arranging pill-containers on the rim of the sink counter. Painkillers, sleeping pills, an accumulation of years. Did such drugs lose their efficacy? Would their power be diminished?
I am thinking now I am so tired, I could sleep forever.
But there is no time. Already it is 10:20 A.M.—it is February 20, 2008—I must put together a packet of documents for probate court in Trenton.
“Good-bye, honey!”
***
The Widow is consoling herself with a desperate stratagem. But then, all the widow’s stratagems are desperate right now. She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing. For the fact is, the widow cannot accept it, that her husband is gone from her life irrevocably. She cannot accept it—she cannot even comprehend it—that she has no relationship with Raymond J. Smith except as his widow—the “executrix” of his estate.
A Widow’s actions might be defined as rational/irrational alternatives to suicide. Any act a Widow performs, or contemplates performing, is an alternative to suicide and is in this desirable however naive, foolish, or futile.
“Oh Reynard! How could you.”
It seems that our elder tiger cat Reynard has urinated on a swath of documents which in my desperation not to misplace anything crucial among Ray’s many papers I’d spread out on the floor of his study.
A dozen or more manila folders, spread out on Ray’s desk and spilling over onto the floor—in block letters carefully designated MEDICAL INSURANCE, CAR INSURANCE, HOUSE INSURANCE, IRS DOCUMENTS (2007), BANK/FINANCES, SOCIAL SECURITY, BIRTH CERTIFICATES, WILL etc.—and sometime within the past several hours Reynard has surreptitiously defiled a copy of the death certificate and the IRS folder so that I must A) wipe the pages dry B) spray Windex on them C) wipe them dry again D) place them in our (unheated) solarium in the hope that by morning they will have A) dried B) ceased smelling so unmistakably pungent.
“Reynard! Bad cat.”
My vexed/raised voice provokes both cats to run in that panicked way in which domestic pets will run from irate masters on a hardwood floor—skidding, sliding and slithering—toenails scraping like cartoon animals. I feel a sudden fury for the cats—both Reynard and the younger long-haired gray Cherie—that they have ceased to care for me. In this matter of Ray’s disappearance they blame me.
You would think that, with Ray missing, they would be more affectionate with me, and want to sleep with me—but no.
Barely they condescend to allow themselves to be fed by me. Eagerly they run outside, to escape me. Reluctantly they return when I call them for meals and for the night.
The defiled IRS papers are not the first evidence that the cats are taking a particular sort of feline revenge on me since Ray’s disappearance, but this is the most serious.
Where grief couldn’t provoke me to tears, cat pee on these documents does. It’s the weeping of sheer despair, self-loathing—This is what I am, this is what I’ve become. This is my life now.
“Mrs. Smith? You can wait here.”
And here too—Mercer County Surrogate’s Court, Trenton, New Jersey—is a place where memory has accumulated in small stagnant pools of tears. Almost, you can smell grief here, an acrid bitter odor.
This high-ceilinged waiting room, inexpressibly dour! Rows of badly stained and uncomfortable vinyl chairs in which individuals sit impassively as in an anteroom of the damned.
Unlike the waiting rooms at the hospital, this waiting room holds not even the delusion of a happy ending. For these individuals, the death vigil has ended. We here are survivors, “beneficiaries.”
It’s evident that there are other widows here this morning. Several appear to be accompanied by adult children. Mostly these are black or Hispanic citizens, for this is Trenton, New Jersey. In their midst my friend Jeanne—in oversized designer sunglasses, shoulder-length blond hair spilling over the collar of her stylish winter coat—is a vivid and incongruous presence, drawing eyes.
Jeanne has explained what we are doing here, what “probate”
