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.
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
