Lucy by the Sea (10)

—

I did not speak of this to William.

William likes to fix things, and this could not be fixed.



—

And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.





William tried to work online with his lab, but his assistant was no longer able to come into the lab, and they had phone calls about some experiment they had been trying to do, and he kept telling her not to worry. Then he said to me one day, “Screw it. The experiment was a stupid one anyway. I’m going to retire soon.”

“You’re really going to retire?” I asked. And he shrugged and said, Yeah, pretty soon, but he didn’t feel like talking about it; this is what he said.

But William was able to read. I was surprised at how quickly he read the books he had brought with him—novels, and also biographies of the presidents and other people in history—and also books he found in the bedroom upstairs. But I could not read. I could not concentrate.

Those first weeks I often took a nap in the afternoon and I was surprised when I woke up; I had no sense of falling asleep. And when I woke I did not know where I was.



—

William went out for his second walk in the afternoon, and when he came back I often went for my second walk. I would sometimes see the old man sitting on his front steps smoking, and he always said, “Hello, de-ah!” And I would wave and say, “Hello, Tom!” And then I walked back to the house, up the long driveway that was so rocky and where branches were like large spiders arched over it.

This is how we lived.

It was strange.

ii

What kept bothering me in particular was this: When I pictured my apartment in New York it seemed unreal to me. In some odd—indefinable—way, I did not like it. I mean I did not like to think of my apartment there; it unsettled me. But there was a sense that I was split in half. Half of me was in Maine with William. And half of me was back in New York in my apartment. But I couldn’t go back, and so that half of me was like a shadow—that’s the only way I can put it. When I thought of David’s cello leaning against the wall in our bedroom there, it hurt me—but more than that, I turned away from it, and this nagged at me more and more, this feeling. It made me very anxious, is what I am saying.





I spoke to my friends in New York on the phone. An older woman I knew had the virus, but she seemed okay; she had no sense of smell or taste and had a lot of body aches, but that was it. Another woman’s father had died of it. A couple I knew both had it and seemed to be recovering. One woman I knew did not leave her apartment at all.





The sadness on my chest seemed to rise and fall according to— To what? I did not know.



—

And the weather remained cold, bleak.



—

About my work I thought: I will never write another word again.





There was an old washing machine and a dryer in a back room and we took turns doing the laundry, there was not much to do, but I noticed that William washed his jeans every two days. I could not remember if he had done that when we were married; I did not think he had.





Four

i

Poking around in a back closet one day I found an old tablecloth and brought it out. It was round and it had faded flowers on it, and around the bottom of it were faded pink pompoms. “Oh, this is perfect,” I said, and I put it on the dining room table.

“Are you kidding?” William asked, and I said No, I was not.

ii

At times when I thought of my husband David, I noticed it made me angry to think of him. You have no idea what we are going through! I thought, angrily. I did not want to be angry with him, even though I know that is a normal part of grieving. But I did not want it. There was also this about David: He had not come to me in a dream and he had now been dead for almost a year and a half. When anyone else I knew had died, they always came to me in a dream, often more than one, and they arrived within a month or two of dying. It is always the same dream, they are in a hurry to get back to dead-land, but they want to know if I am all right, or sometimes they have a message for me to give to someone. This has happened to me so frequently that I stopped mentioning it to people—a friend of mine said once when I told her, “Oh, the mind does interesting things”—but I have always taken comfort in these dreams. Even my mother, in spite of how difficult she had been during my life, even she—years ago she had died—had come to me in a dream, twice she had come, and she was sort of anxious, as I said, to return to her place of being dead, but she had asked me if I was okay.

The same was true when Catherine—William’s mother—died.

But David—he was gone. It was as though he had just disappeared down a dark hole, and now I thought: Jesus, David! Come on!

iii

One night as we watched the news from New York City we saw the trenches that had been dug on Hart Island—this is in the western part of Long Island Sound, just off the Bronx—and we saw the many, many wooden boxes that were piled up in them: all the people from the city who had died of the virus and had no one to claim their bodies. I looked at the floor again, but I could not stop seeing the image in my head, the red clay dirt and the long pale wooden boxes one on top of another, unevenly placed in these deep, uneven graves. With the yellow excavators nearby.