of the hue of rotted eggplant and of a shape resembling the state of Florida will discolor her upper legs, her thighs and part of her belly—she will wince with pain—sharp pains—from crashing to the hardwood floor without cushioning the fall with her hands—but she will forget this terrible call, or nearly. For soon there will be so much more to recall. Soon there will be so much more to recall, from which mere fainting onto a hardwood floor will be no reprieve.
Now into my life—as into my vocabulary—there has come a new, harrowing term: Telemetry.
For Ray hasn’t been moved into the general hospital but into a unit adjacent to Intensive Care.
Telemetry!—my first visit to the fifth floor of the medical center—to this corridor I will come to know intimately over a period of six days—imprinted indelibly in my brain like a silent film continually playing—rewinding, replaying—rewinding, replaying.
These places through which we pass. These places that outlive us.
Vast memory-pools, accumulating—of which we are unaware.
Telemetry means machines—machines processing data—machines monitoring a patient’s condition—and I am shocked to see my husband in a hospital bed, in an oxygen mask—IV fluids dripping into his arm. Both his heartbeat and his breathing are monitored—through a device like a clothespin clipped to his forefinger a machine ingeniously translates his oxygen intake into numerals in perpetual flux—76, 74, 73, 77, 80—on a scale of 100.
(When a day or two later I experiment by placing the device on my own forefinger, the numeral rises to 98—“normal.” )
It’s upsetting to see Ray looking so pale, and so tired. So groggy.
As if already he has been on a long journey. As if already I’ve begun to lose him . . .
Despite the oxygen mask and the machines, Ray is reading, or trying to read. Seeing me he smiles wanly—“Hi honey.” The oxygen mask gives his slender face an inappropriately jaunty air as if he were wearing a costume. I am trying not to cry—I hold his hand, stroke his forehead—which doesn’t seem over-warm though I’ve been told that he still has a dangerously high temperature—101.1° F.
“How are you feeling, honey? Oh honey . . .”
Honey. This is our mutual—interchangeable—name for each other. The only name I call Ray, as it is the only name Ray calls me. When we’d first met in Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall of 1960—as graduate students in English at the University of Wisconsin—(Ray, an “older” man, completing his Ph.D. dissertation on Jonathan Swift; I, newly graduated from Syracuse University, enrolled in the master’s degree program)—we must have called each other by our names—of course—but quickly shifted to Honey.
The logic being: anyone in the world can call us by our proper names but no one except us—except the other—can call us by this intimate name.
(Also—I can’t explain—a kind of shyness set in. I was shy calling my husband “Ray”—as if this man of near-thirty, when I’d first met him, represented for me an adulthood of masculine confidence and ease to which at twenty-two, and a very young, inexperienced twenty-two, I didn’t have access. As in dreams I would sometimes conflate my father Frederic Oates and my husband Raymond Smith—the elder man whom I could not call by his first name but only Daddy, the younger man whom I could not call by his first name but only Honey.)
Is the cardiac crisis past? Ray’s heartbeat is slightly fast and slightly erratic but his condition isn’t life threatening any longer, evidently.
Otherwise, he would be in Intensive Care. Telemetry is not Intensive Care.
Unfortunately room 541 is at the farther end of the Telemetry corridor and to get to it one must pass by rooms with part-opened doors into which it’s not a good idea to glance—mostly elderly patients seem to be here, diminutive in their beds, connected to humming machines. A kind of visceral terror overcomes me—This can’t be happening. This is too soon!
I want to protest, Ray is nothing like these patients. Though seventy-seven he is not old.
He’s lean—hard-muscled—works out three times a week at a fitness center in Hopewell. He hasn’t smoked in thirty years and he eats carefully, and drinks sparingly—until two or three years ago he’d risen at 7 A.M. each morning, in all vicissitudes of weather, to run—jog—along country roads near our house for forty minutes to an hour. (While I lay in bed too exhausted in the aftermath of turbulent dreams—or, it may have been, simply too lazy—to get up and accompany him.)
How nice the nurses are, in Telemetry! At least, those we’ve met.
An older nurse named Shannon explains carefully to me, as she has explained to Ray: it’s very important that he breathe through the oxygen mask—through his nose—and not through his mouth, in order to inhale pure oxygen. When Ray does this the numerals in the monitoring gauge rise immediately.
There is the possibility—the promise—that the patient holds his own fate in his hands. In his lungs.
Once we’re alone Ray tells me that he feels “much better.” He’s sure he will be discharged from the hospital in a few days. He asks me to bring work for him in the morning—he doesn’t want to “fall behind.”
An anxiety about falling behind. An anxiety about losing control, losing one’s place, losing one’s life. Always at the periphery of our vision these icy-blue flames shimmer, beaten back by our resolute American sunniness. Yes I am in control, yes I will take care of it. Yes I am equal to it—whatever it is.
Ray clasps my hand tight. Ray’s fingers are surprisingly cool for a man said to be running a fever. How like my protective husband, at such a crucial time to wish to comfort me.
A young Indian doctor comes into the room, introduces himself with a brisk handshake—he’s an ID man—“infectious disease”—he tells us that a culture has been taken from my husband’s right lung—it’s being tested to determine the exact strain of bacteria that has infected the lung—as soon as they identify the bacteria they will be able to fight the infection more effectively.
In a warm rapid liquidy voice Dr. I_ speaks to us. Formally he addresses us as Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith. Some of what he says I comprehend, and some of it I don’t comprehend. I am so grateful for Dr. I_’s very existence, I could kiss his hand. I think Here is a man who knows! Here is an expert.
But is the Widow-to-Be misguided? Is her faith in this stranger in a white coat who walks into her husband’s hospital room misplaced? Would there have been another, happier ending to this story, if she had transferred her husband from the provincial New Jersey medical center to a hospital in Manhattan, or Philadelphia? If she’d been less credulous? More skeptical?
As if she too has been invaded—infected—by a swarm of lethal bacteria riotously breeding not in her lungs but in that part of her brain in which rational thought is said to reside.
February 12, 2008.
To Richard Ford
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