His Wife Leaves Him

Sun every day. He always knew what was playing in town — movies, plays, music, museum shows — since there wasn’t that much. What’s true is that very few dance companies came through Baltimore, and like the one they finally went to, usually for just one performance and at night. And so they might have wanted to take them to other dance concerts but it was a school night, let’s say, or in some other way the timing wasn’t right. Also, the Garry Trudeau comic strip on the op-ed page of the Sun. That, he read first when he turned to that page. And in both papers, he’d say about half the letters to the editor. Although in the Times, all of them if they were on a subject he was deeply interested in and wanted to read other opinions of or get reinforcement of his own — the war in Iraq, for instance; torture there; tax laws that so one-sidedly favored the very rich; the current president. He wrote a few letters to the Times but always tore them up, two or three in the envelopes he’d already addressed, sealed and stamped. Other people were able to write these letters on the same subjects so much more articulately and succinctly and informatively than he and get their outrage across without, like him, sounding a bit crazy. And some of the papers’ op-ed articles and editorials and, in the baseball season, the sports pages. He never opened the Styles section of the Times or that other section in it the same Thursday, rarely looked at its Tuesday science section or the Sun’s health section unless there was an article on strokes or caregiving or something that might relate to his own health or talked about the aging process or memory loss or drinking too much or the vitamin supplements he takes or should be taking at his age. Starts every morning with one of several different pills, but he can take them later today or wait till tomorrow. No hurry. What’s a day or two? And what do they do for him anyhow? Forgets why he started taking them years ago. Gwen encouraged him to. But what’s folic acid and Vitamin E and B-50 for, and so on? Why not a different B, and why the E 400 pill and not another number? Gwen knew. Maybe he’ll stop taking them altogether or just take C and the baby aspirin once a day? Didn’t open the business section in the papers either unless, as in the Times, it was where the sports pages, and again only during baseball season, or obituaries were that day. He’s back in the house. Doesn’t remember walking to it or even opening the kitchen door to get inside and doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Few seconds? More than a minute? What else has he missed? Later he’ll ask one of the girls to get the newspapers from the driveway. He’ll say he doesn’t want to read them but they can if they want. They also might want to see what movies are playing. If they feel like it, they should go to one tonight. Might be a nice distraction, he’ll say, and he’ll be fine alone. Or just take the papers out of their plastic bags and put them in the recycle bag by the trash can. He empties Sleek’s water bowl into one of Gwen’s Christmas cactuses on the dining room windowsill. They’re so pretty when they bloom. There must be six or seven of them and they all started from pieces of a plant that had broken off, and the first one from a broken-off piece someone had given her when they lived in their first house, and they all always start flowering about the same time of the year. She fed them plant food a couple of times a year, and if he can’t find it — it came in a box with a little plastic scoop — he’ll ask the girls to go to a garden store and get the right one. Feels inside the water bowl. It’s not slimy, which it can get if it’s not washed with detergent every three or four times. He fills the bowl with fresh water and puts it back on the kitchen floor. Thinks: Didn’t he already do that this morning? Knows he thought of opening a new can of cat food and emptying half of it onto Sleek’s plate and putting the plate on the floor next to the water bowl, but only when he comes out from wherever he is. Cat’s gotten so picky. Won’t eat the canned food if it’s been sitting around on the floor for more than half an hour. What next? To do. Coffee he definitely wants and can use. What mug today? Big decisions he’s left with. Looks at the six mugs hanging on pegs attached to the bottom of the spice rack on the wall. Most of the spices are way past their “best by” date and should be thrown out. Will he replace them? Doubts it. Probably just the curry powder and cumin for soups and maybe the red pepper flakes. Last couple of years he really only cooked for her and for a few small dinner parties they gave, but otherwise he didn’t care what he ate. Didn’t he already think that too? Something like it. Nothing new to say. But he doesn’t think he’ll get interested in cooking again, unless it’s for the kids when they’re here. And all those special German knives and French pots and pans she had before they met. More things to give to the kids. For himself, if he wants something more than a sandwich or salad or quick soup he’ll make, he’ll rely mostly on restaurant take-out and prepared and ready-to-cook foods from the local food market. He has more mugs in a kitchen cupboard, no two alike, and he never uses the one he drank from the morning before. Any reason why? Seems silly. He should break the habit. All right, he’ll break it, but some other day. The ceramic one’s his favorite. There were two — a friend’s wife in Maine made them — but he broke one, or Gwen did, just a few months ago. The mugs were given to them as a good-bye gift the last time they saw the couple there. Gwen and he gave them that same day a copy of a book each of them wrote. “I never know what to inscribe,” he said to her, and she said “Just say ‘with love.’ You mean it.” “Is that what you’re going to say?” and she said yes and he said “Well, we can’t say the same thing. I’ll think of something,” but he forgets what. The couple — they’re both around eighty — lives year-round in the woods there, about three hours north of the cottage they last rented, painting and potting, and also don’t know about Gwen. He should make a list. The ceramic mug, and Gwen felt the same way, is not only nice to look at but to put his hands around, so smooth because of the special glaze, which might have been why it slipped out of whoever’s hands were holding it. Odd he can’t remember whose. But the black mug keeps the coffee hot longer; what he wants today before the kids get up: to just sit down in a quiet place and drink slowly. Its better heat containment — now that’s a fancy term for it and possibly a wrong one — might have something to do with what it’s made of, the thickness of it, maybe also the color; something, and the handle’s large enough for him to get his three fingers in, the only mug he has where he can do that. Gwen could do that with most of their mugs; he’s even seen her get four fingers in some, her fingers were so thin. Takes the black mug off its peg and puts it beside the coffeemaker on the other side of the sink from the dish drainer and rubber mat. Some heated-up soy milk with it, maybe half? Easier on the stomach. Too much bother, and then the saucepan to wash. Really has to scrub hard with the sponge to get all the soymilk off the bottom of it. But again, much better for the stomach so early. Nah, a quicker pick-me-up if it’s all black. Turns the coffeemaker on and goes into the living room, where he’ll wait till the coffee’s made. He’ll hear it, after all the water’s gone through: the hissing and steaming and a sound that’s almost like someone gargling. He sits in the Morris chair. No need to turn the floor lamp on. Most times before, when he sat like this waiting for the morning coffee to be made, he did it with something to read. Did he buy this chair or the Maillol print in his bedroom with some of the money from the first story he sold to a major magazine? Whichever it was, the other he bought with just about all the money he got from the first sale of a story to any magazine. Someone suggested he do that. His mother, he thinks: “This way you’ll always have a tangible reminder of your first acceptance” or “sale.” He got both so cheap. Chair in a used furniture store at the Columbus Avenue corner of the block he lived on, and the print — actually, a woodcut of a clothed peasant woman sleeping on her back in a field — at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth. Suddenly he thinks of a dream he had between Gwen’s first and second strokes, but when she seemed fully recovered. Now where the hell did that come from? he thinks. He wrote it down when he woke up from it. Gwen pushed herself up on her elbows — she’d been sleeping on her back, so the peasant woman? Gwen? — and said “Why’s the light on? It’s still dark out. You feeling okay?” and he said “Sorry. Dream I had. I want to write it down or I’ll lose it. It’s so interesting. I’ll tell you about it later,” and he finished writing it in the notebook he kept on his night table and shut the light and probably turned to her — she was already asleep on her side — and held her from behind and went back to sleep. It was one of several dreams he wrote down around that time and he must have read it when he woke up later or sometime after, and maybe a number of times. It seemed pretty clear what it meant then, but you never know. He remembers thinking it was one of the more vivid dreams he’d had with her in it. They were on Broadway, walking north on the west side of the street, between 115th and 116th Streets, which was a block away from where they had their Riverside Drive apartment till a few years ago. They were on their way to a restaurant on 117th Street and Broadway for lunch. There is no restaurant there; no side street, either; none till about a Hundred-twentieth. Just Barnard: a college dormitory or school building, he forgets which. He’d passed it many times on his way to or back from a garage farther north on Broadway. About twenty young doctors, male and female, all in lab coats, he thinks they’re called, or just white coats, the kind they wear when they make their hospital rounds. The doctors stopped at the 116th Street corner and waited for the light to turn green. They stood behind the doctors. Then he said “Let’s go around them. I’m sure they’re going to the same restaurant, and if they get there before us we won’t be able to get a table.” He put his hand on her back and guided her into the street and they started to cross a Hundred-sixteenth against the light. Cars going both ways had to stop so they could get to the other side. A couple of cars honked at them, and she looked alarmed. “Don’t be worried,” he said. “You’re with me. You’re safe.” They got across the street and he looked back. The light hadn’t changed yet and the doctors were still standing on the corner. Most of them gave Gwen and him dirty looks, as if they shouldn’t have gone in front of them and then crossed the street against the light. She said “They look angry. I don’t like people to be angry because of me or something I did. Maybe we should wait for them here and apologize.” He said “And let them get in front of us and to the restaurant first? You’re okay. It was nothing you did.” He took her hand and said “I love you.” She looked lovingly at him and said “I love you too.” “Good, we’re in love,” he said, “so nothing should really bother us,” and they continued walking, holding hands. When they were a few feet from the restaurant, he said “I know what I’m going to have. Their chicken salad platter, if they’re not all out of it,” and she said “And I’m going to have their fried oysters.” “Less chance they’ll have those left than my chicken salad,” he said, “but maybe you’ll be lucky. I hope so. I know how much you love them.” She smiled and said “You bet.” That he especially remembers from the dream. It was something he used to say a lot and she never did. But she adopted it the last few years and he, for the most part, stopped saying it because he felt the expression had become more hers than his, and he knew how much she liked saying it. No, that’s not quite it. Then what is? She used so few colloquialisms in her speech that he didn’t want to make her self-conscious of sort of stealing this one from him and stop saying it. No, that’s not quite it, either. He opened the door of the restaurant and stepped aside so she could get past him. The place was crowded. He took her hand again and led her to the one free table. The dream ended. Oh, there was a little more — they looked at the luncheon specials on a blackboard as they made their way to the table — but that was basically it. A nice dream. Long. Nothing bad happened. The doctors never caught up with them. The day was sunny and mild and the restaurant was brightly lit inside only by daylight coming through the windows. She was well, happy through most of it, and looked so pretty. They were hungry and about to eat. They held hands. They loved each other. But why didn’t they kiss? Would have been a nice way to end the dream or to happen right after they said they loved each other. But what he dreamt was good enough. He doesn’t know if he told her the dream when they woke up later that morning or after they got out of bed. If he ever told her. He told her just about all his dreams she was in except those where she died or was dead or very sick. Or if she was in one where one of the kids died. What’s that smell? Electric? As if a short, or something like that, and coming from the kitchen, it seems, and he gets up and goes into it. Coffeemaker’s sputtering, making almost hiccupping sounds. Thinks he knows what it is; same thing’s happened to him once or twice. Shuts off the coffeemaker, takes the carafe off the warming plate, shakes it, and nothing’s inside. Opens the water tank cover and looks inside. It’s what he thought. Dummy; dummy. He didn’t put water in the tank or a paper filter into the filter basket, so of course also no coffee grounds in the paper. He usually does all this the night before — sometimes even the afternoon before, when he knows he has enough coffee in his thermos for the rest of the day — so he won’t have to do it the same morning he’s going to make the coffee. It doesn’t make for better coffee. It might even make it worse, with the water staying in the tank so long, and who knows if the coffee grounds aren’t weakened or marred or something a little by being in the same closed compartment with the water all night. But he likes the idea of just walking into the kitchen the next morning and, without any preparations, pressing the on switch to get the coffee