His Wife Leaves Him

ide, then around three hours later to the side she fell asleep on, then around two hours later on her back, which is what he does every night and at around the same time intervals, give or take an hour. From what he could make out in the dark, her eyes stayed shut all three times. It’s now six-thirty and he tries to sleep some more, can’t, dresses, does some stretching exercises in the living room, gets the newspapers from the driveway and reads one while he has coffee. Looks in on her at eight, just in case, although it’s early for her, she’s awake and wants to get up. She’s still sleeping on her back. Usually she snores a lot in that position, but he hasn’t heard any. He goes for a run — a short one, as he doesn’t like leaving her alone, asleep or awake, more than fifteen minutes — showers and shaves in the hallway bathroom, and a little after nine, right after he listens to the news headlines on the radio, he goes in to wake her, or else she might complain he let her sleep too long. What he doesn’t need, he thinks, is for her to get angry at him over something else, especially when she just might wake up feeling much better toward him. She’s surprised him a few times by doing that; mad as hell at him when she went to sleep and pleasant to him in the morning, where he didn’t think he even had to apologize to her for what he’d said the previous night. One of those times she even grabbed his penis in bed and pulled on it awhile without him having to ask her to. Then she got tired and stopped. “That was so nice,” he said. “I wish you had continued and there was more of that, not that I’m not satisfied with what I got,” and kissed her — tongue in mouth, the works, and she kissing him that way also for about a minute. Then he put her hand back on his penis, but she said “I can’t. No feeling left in that hand anymore, and the other one’s useless.” Anyway, best behavior today, okay? From now on, all days. Even to the point of being oversolicitous to her, because he has to take care of her better and wants to convince her that his bad moments and irrational outbursts are behind him. He just has to make a stronger effort, and keep to it, to make sure they are. Now he doesn’t know if he should wake her. Eyes shut, face peaceful, covers the way he arranged them when he turned her onto her back: top of the top sheet folded evenly over the quilt. “Gwen? Gwen, it’s me, the terrible husband. Only kidding. It’s past nine o’clock. Not a lot past, but I thought you might want to get up. You usually do around this time. If you want to sleep or rest in bed another fifteen minutes or so — anything you want — that’s all right with me too. I’ve got about fifteen minutes of things to do in the kitchen and then I’ll come back. Gwen?” One eye flutters for a moment but otherwise she doesn’t move. She normally would by now after that amount of his talking. At least open her eyes to little slits and maybe mutter something or nod or shake her head. “Are you asleep or falling back to sleep? Does that mean you didn’t sleep that well last night, although you seemed to have. I turned you over four times at night, more times than I usually do, and you didn’t seem to have wakened once.” Doesn’t give any sign she heard him. “I’ll let you sleep, then, half-hour at the most, because we both have to get started sometime,” and leaves the room, but a few steps past the door, thinks “No, something’s wrong; she’s too still and unresponsive,” and goes back and says louder “Gwen? Gwen?” and nudges her and then shakes her shoulder, moves her head from side to side on the pillow, puts his ear to her nostrils and throat and chest and then parts her lips and listens there. Knew she was breathing but wanted to see if there were any strange sounds. None; she’s breathing quietly and her heartbeat seems regular. But it might be another stroke, he thinks. This is how it was the second time; came into the room, couldn’t wake her up. Pulls her legs, pinches her cheeks and forearm, pushes back her fingers and toes, says “Gwen. Gwendolyn. Sweetheart. You have to get up.” Calls 911 and says he thinks his wife has had her third stoke. “Anyway, she isn’t responding.” While he waits for them to come, he kneels beside the bed and holds her hand and stares at her, hoping to see some reaction, then stands and puts his cheek to hers and says “I never meant any harm to you last night, I never did. I blew my top, but it was only out of frustration, all the work I do, one thing after the other, so exhaustion too. But I was such a fool. Please wake up, my darling, please,” and kisses her cheeks and then her eyelids and lips. They’re warm. That could be good. Straightens up, holds her hand and looks at her and thinks wouldn’t it be wonderful if her eyes popped open, or just slowly opened, but more to slits, and she smiled at him and said “I don’t hold anything against you. And I’m sorry if I frightened you. I was very tired and couldn’t even find the energy to open my eyes and speak,” and he said “I was so worried. I thought you had another stroke. I called 911. I’m not going to call them off. I want them to check you over, make sure you’re okay. That is, if you don’t mind. Oh, God, how could I have acted the way I did to you last night.” “Don’t again,” he’d hope she’d say. The emergency medical people ring the doorbell and he lets them in. He leads them to the back, tries to stay out of their way, thinks he didn’t hear a siren before they came. Maybe the absence of one’s a good sign too. By what he said on the phone, they didn’t think it that serious. No, there must be another reason for no siren. That there was one but they turned it off when they got to his quiet street because they no longer needed it. They work on her for about ten minutes, say she’s in a coma and they’re taking her to Emergency. He says “I’ll go with you, if it’s all right. If not, I’ll follow.” He thinks, as they wheel her out on a gurney, that if she dies he’ll never tell anyone what he said to her last night. That he took out of her whatever it was that was keeping her going. That he killed her, really. He holds her hand in the ambulance taking them to the hospital and says to the paramedic sitting next to him “If she doesn’t come out of this, then I killed her by telling her last night, when she was awake in bed, that she’d become too much for me and I hoped she’d die.” The woman says “Don’t worry, that wouldn’t do it, and she’s going to be just fine.” “You think so?” and she says “Sure; I’ve been at this a long time.” “She’s suffered another major stroke,” a doctor tells him in the hospital, “and because of her already weakened condition, I have to warn you—” and he says “Her chances of surviving are only so-so,” and the doctor says “Around there.” He calls his daughters, stays the night in the visitor’s lounge. She’s in a shared room in ICU and they won’t let him be with her after eleven o’clock. “Even for a minute?” and the head nurse says “I’m sure she wants you there. It’s the other patient who might be disturbed by your back-and-forths.” Next afternoon he’s feeling nauseated because he hasn’t eaten anything since he got to the hospital, and says to his daughters “I gotta get something in my stomach; I’m starving. I’ll be right back.” He runs to the elevator, gets off it and runs to the cafeteria, gets a sandwich, unwraps it and wolfs half of it down while waiting on line to pay for it, thinks maybe he should get a coffee too, he’s tired, and goes over to the urns, thinks no, he hasn’t time and he’ll have to walk slowly with it or it’ll spill, and runs back to the ICU with the rest of the sandwich, hurrying down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. His daughters are standing outside her room and the younger one says — the older one bursts out crying—“Daddy, Mommy died.” “Oh, this goddamn fucking sandwich,” he says, and throws it down the hall, and says “What am I doing? Why am I such a jerk?” and goes after it and picks up all the pieces and the plastic wrap the sandwich was in and looks around for a trash can, doesn’t see one in the hall, goes into the men’s room a few feet away and dumps everything in the can there. He washes his hands and goes back to his daughters, both are crying now, and says “I’m sorry, for everything,” and hugs the younger one from behind while she’s hugging her sister. When did she get so tall, he thinks, for he used to tower over her and they’re now about the same height? Two doctors come out of the room, or they seem like doctors to him, white lab coats, stethoscopes around their necks. One walks over to them and says “Mr. Samuels? Dr. Bender. Because of the shock of the news, I’m not sure how much of what Dr. Kahn and I said was absorbed by your daughters before, so I’d like to also provide you with a few details of your wife’s death and what efforts were made to try and save her,” and he says “They’re smart, they understand everything, much better than me, so they’ll fill me in. Thank you for all your efforts,” and the doctor says “Our condolences, then, in your deep sorrow,” and goes down the hall with the other doctor, reading something on a clipboard he’s holding. “I don’t want to know,” he tells his daughters, “and I’d forget whatever he said. She died of a stroke; they said her chances were slim; she was very weak to begin with; that’s all that’s important.” “Maybe someday,” Maureen, his younger daughter says, and he says “No, no day; never tell me. And I’m sure I’d immediately forget what you said too. Don’t ask me why — I don’t know myself — but I’m inured, and always have been, to those kind of facts and terminology, so you needn’t bother.” Just then a nurse comes over and says “Your wife and mother’s to be moved to a private room so you all can be alone with her,” and he says “My wife and mother?” and Rosalind, his older daughter, says “Daddy.” “No, I really didn’t know,” he says. “Excuse me.” Soon after, a body’s wheeled out of the room and past them, completely covered by sheets. “That her?” he says to the nurse steering the gurney, and she nods. They follow the gurney to a single room at the end of the hall. The two nurses and aide who brought her into the room stay there, door shut, for about fifteen minutes, probably to clean her up, brush her hair, put a fresh hospital gown on her, make her look better than she did when she died, he thinks. Or maybe they did all that in the other room. If they brushed her hair, what brush did they use, since she didn’t come in with one. He’d like to have that brush. He’d put it in his dresser drawer, the top one, where he keeps his socks and handkerchiefs and underwear. Stick it in a ziplock bag first. Take it out every now and then, touch the hairs still there, maybe smell the bristles. The nurses and aide come out, the aide pulling the gurney behind him, and they go in and he shuts the door. People can still see inside through the large window in the door, but it’ll be quieter this way. Rosalind’s holding his hand — when did she take it? He thinks — and he says “My sweetheart, no slight, but let’s do this individually,” and slips his hand from hers and then thinks What did he mean? And she could have only been holding his hand to help him. Did he hurt her? He doesn’t want to look at her and see if he did, and it’d be too confusing to her if he now took her hand. He’ll try to explain it later to her. He looks around the room, out the window to the trees across the road, at the television set on a platform suspended from the ceiling, at a poster across from her bed showing the sequence of smiling and frowning and grimacing faces of pain, then at Gwen. She’s on her back on a regular hospital bed, sheet folded over her shoulders the way he did the covers yesterday morning after he got her on her back, her head on a pillow. She looks like a corpse, he thinks. The bedrail closest to the door is raised all the way, the other’s down. Must be for a reason, other than the nurses and aide forgetting, why both rails aren’t one way or the other. But what’s he thinking about that for? His daughters kiss her forehead and say things to her he can’t hear. He goes around to the other side of the bed so they all won’t be crowded at one side and looks at her and says “This is so, so…something. It’s hard to see her like this,” he says, without looking up at his daughters, “Not only my eyes, because of the water, but just hard, difficult to take. One day she’s alive — not well, but wide awake and talking and even for a few minutes, cheerful. I forget what it was. Some joke I made. I wish I could remember it. And the next day, or day after the next — I’m losing track — she’s like this, dead. I’ve had enough. I’ve said goodbye. That’s what they shooed us in here for, right? Said it yesterday. I knew she was going to die. No clear-cut reason. There was a change in her. And it’s not that she was suddenly dramatically worse. I just had a feeling. Okay, I’ll kiss her forehead.” He kisses it, looks at his daughters and says “Please permit me; I can’t do this anymore. I’m also confused. I’ve never felt worse,” and leaves the room and shuts the door and cries outside it. Hands over his eyes, deep sobs, for a minute, even less, and then wipes his face with his handkerchief, swallows hard because his throat aches and neck feels tight, and waits for his daughters. He looks down at the floor. If he had a book with him, one he was interested in, he’d read it, but he didn’t take one when he left the house. Maybe the first time in fifty years he left the house without a book he was reading or planned to start. Oh, there had to be other times, and he’s not talking about activities like jogging or grocery shopping, but even there he usually has a book with him in case he has to wait on a long checkout line. And he didn’t take one when she was rushed to the hospital after her second stroke. Like this time, he just never thought of it, or he thought it the wrong thing to do, looking for a book for later on while the emergency medical team was working on her. But he even had one at his parents’ funerals. Maybe even two if he was near the end of one, but books small enough to fit into his jacket pockets. Would he really read now? Well, he thinks he would. He hates hanging around with nothing to do and looking up and seeing people looking at him. Some of the patients and their visitors and most of the staff on the floor must know his wife just died. “Please,” he says to himself, “nobody come over and say how sorry you are for my loss.” His daughters come out ten minutes after he did. Ten, fifteen: about. “You kids okay?” he says, and Rosalind hunches her shoulders, Maureen shakes her head, both are wiping their eyes. “But you’re done now?” and Rosalind nods. “I really had a stupid thought while waiting for you. I wanted to have a book to read to pass the time.” “I apologize we took so long,” Rosalind says. “No, it’s not that; please don’t think it. It was just, I’m saying, such an odd thought to have so soon after Mommy died. Where’d it come from? I don’t know. I even thought of the book I wanted to read and why. Of course I never thought of taking it when I left in the ambulance with her. The biography of a writer I like. I’d go right to the pages — my favorite part in all biographies of writers — where we’re approximately the same age, if the writer’s lived as long as I have at the time I’m reading the book, and if he hasn’t, then to the last years of his life. I like to see how he conducted himself then and where he was in his work and getting it published and the reception to it or if he stopped writing for a while after so many years at it or just gave up. Or, like Melville, switched mostly to poetry, although he did write that last short novel that was found after he died — I can’t remember the title. My mind’s a blank. I know it rhymes with mud.” “You’re being facetious,” Rosalind says; “trying to cheer us up.” “No, I’m serious; I wouldn’t say anything light now. And the writer I wanted to read about lived well into his eighties. Parkinson’s. Died of pneumonia. Anyway, crazy, those thoughts at such a bad time, huh?” and Rosalind says “I don’t think so. I’ve had