His Wife Leaves Him

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Why’d he take so long to call her? A week, maybe a day or two more. Thought about calling her every day during that time. Three-four times a day. What’s he talking about? Five-six times a days, some days more. Had his hand on or near the receiver lots of times while thinking about dialing her number. Picked up the receiver a few times to call her but put it down. After a couple of days of doing this he knew her number by heart. The number eventually also became his number when he gave up his apartment and moved in with her. He still knows it though they haven’t lived in what he always called her apartment for years. 663-2668. Lots of sixes, so that could be why it was so easy to remember and it’s stayed with him this long. They loved that cheap spacious rent-stabilized apartment overlooking the Hudson, but were evicted about fifteen years after they moved to Baltimore for not occupying it often enough. Some New York City law which a landlord can take advantage of if he wants. They didn’t fight the eviction. Would have cost too much and they would have lost. He dialed the first part of her number several times but stopped and hung up. Or stopped and held the receiver awhile, thinking if he should go on with the dialing, before hanging up. At least twice he dialed her number and hung up after the first ring, and he thinks the second time after two rings. If this were happening today — if he’d only just met her and was thinking of calling her to arrange a date — he wouldn’t let the phone ring even once before he hung up. She’d probably, living alone — in other words, all their personal circumstances would be the same but it’d be 2006 instead of 1978—have caller ID and she’d be able to call back and might say something like “Excuse me, I don’t recognize your phone number and no name came up with it on my cell phone screen, but did you just dial me?” He’d heard her, from the next room, do that once after, he assumes, she looked at the cell phone screen and didn’t recognize the number that had just called her. The only other time, though — at least while he was around — she didn’t call back and said something like “Maybe that ring was a mistake, but if that person does want to reach me, he’ll call again.” With him, when he once called her from his office at school and had to hang up after the first ring when he suddenly realized he was late for a meeting with his department chair, she said “Hi. Did you just phone me for any reason and then decide it wasn’t important enough and hang up? Whatever it was, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to chat with you, even if nothing new or interesting has happened to me or our sweet little baby since you left the house.” Either she heard the phone ring those two times he dialed her number and then hung up, or she wasn’t home or was in the bathroom with the door shut — she once said she always closed it when she was on the potty, even when she was home alone — or some other place in her apartment far from the phone — at the rear of the kitchen by the service entrance and pantry or putting the garbage out by the service elevator — and didn’t hear the phone. The one phone she had was in the bedroom, at the opposite end of the apartment. Soon after he moved in he convinced her to have a phone extension installed on the kitchen wall so he wouldn’t, if he was there, have to run to the bedroom to answer the phone. “I hate missing calls,” he said, “and it could be good news.” He never spoke to her about his hesitation in calling her. Hesitation? Fear. He was actually afraid of what he might lose, or not gain, so “fear” used loosely — anyway, if the conversation went badly on his part. If he sounded like an idiot, in other words. On her part, who cared, long as she agreed to meet him. No, that’s not altogether true, but go on. It would have been different if he had felt sharp and confident and other things like that. But those seven to nine days or however long it was he didn’t call her he felt weak, vulnerable, nervous, worse, every time he picked up the receiver or sat down on the bed next to the night table with the phone on it or even approached the phone to make the call. He doesn’t know why he didn’t tell her why he took so long to call her. Yes he does. At first he thought — very early on in their relationship — she’d think he was a bit silly and even immature having had those anxieties about calling her, especially for a guy who, judging by his looks and maybe his recounting certain experiences — when he got out of college and so on — was obviously, if he hadn’t already told her his age, about ten years older than she. He also didn’t want her to think he had had any doubts about calling and seeing her. But after a few weeks of knowing each other — meaning, once they really started going together — he thought she would have said in response to his what-took-him-so-long confession, something like “Why the worry? If I gave you my phone number or the way to get it, that had to mean I was willing to meet you, at least for a cup of coffee.” But by this time he didn’t see any point in telling her, or would tell her or speak about it only if the subject of what took him so long to call came up, and even then he might lie or skip around the truth. “I’m not ready yet,” he thought after her phone rang once that first time, and he hung up. “I’m still not ready yet,” he said out loud the next night or night or two after that, after her phone rang once or twice and he hung up. “What will make you ready?” he said. “Just feel ready. But so far the whole thing’s making me crazy. Look at me. My stomach hurts. I’m sweating. I’m talking to myself. I’m still talking to myself. I’ve got to call her already, but I’m still not prepared for it. How do you get prepared? And you’re just dragging it out, substituting ‘prepared’ for ‘ready,’ when you know they mean the same thing. Like I said: Get prepared. Be ready. You have her number, so call and relax and let her phone ring and don’t hang up. Do not hang up. Even if she doesn’t answer the phone, you were at least ready for her to.” Wait a minute; didn’t he talk to her a little about it? Not about how he got her number. It was a while later. Weeks, months. By now they were a couple, being with each other almost every night. Most days he’d work in his apartment, then around five or six or seven he’d walk uptown to her apartment, usually along Broadway, which was livelier and had more to see than Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, or take the subway or bus. If it was raining hard or the sidewalks were icy, he always took the subway or bus. They were eating dinner in her apartment; duck, he remembers, which she cooked in a rotisserie her godmother had given her years before. She put down her fork, seemed deep in thought, then said something like “I was thinking. Maybe you don’t remember this. By the way, meat wasn’t undercooked? I’m relatively new at this kind of cooking, and have only used it once before because it makes such a mess.” “No, it’s good,” he said, “just right, perfect. You did it like a real rotisserie pro, and I’ll do all the cleaning up. You cooked, I’ll clean.” “It’s okay, I don’t mind. I hope you didn’t think I was complaining. But clear this up for me. How did you get my phone number to call me the first time? I’m glad you got it, of course, but did I give it to you on the street or did you get it from Pati or some other way on your own?” “Oh, boy, your memory’s getting to be as bad as mine. That could be what happens when you spend a lot of time with me.” “I don’t need that,” she said, cross, stern; she’d never come even close to acting like that to him before. He said “Sorry, I didn’t mean it as a slight. Truth is, I don’t know how I meant it. It was a stupid remark, if it was said without my realizing why it was said and what I meant by it. My apologies, honestly. Please accept them. Damn, our first disagreement or whatever you want to call it — where I made you angry at me — and all my fault. But not important, right? I hope not. You gave me your last name and the spelling of it and told me to look for it in the Manhattan phone book — that you were unique. You didn’t say that; I added it.” “So that had to mean I was willing to meet you for coffee or something simple and short like that, and we’d see how things went from there. But why didn’t I just give you my phone number rather than make you work for it? That wasn’t right,” and he said “I don’t think either of us had a pen and there was nobody around at the time to borrow one from.” “You, a writer,” she said, “who as far as I can tell has never left your apartment or mine without a pen and something to write on — never even gone to the toilet for any extended length of time without a paper and pen,” and he said “Maybe you were in a rush to get to wherever you were going — I know you once told me but I forget what that was — or wanted to put me through some serious test on my pursuance of…of…Jesus, why do I get hung up on big words and long rambling sentences; probably the phony in me. In a nutshelclass="underline" maybe you wanted to see if I’d make even that little effort to try to contact you. No, that’s not you. I don’t know why. Another thing that’s not important, do you agree?” Suddenly he has to pee. Can’t wait, either. Gets up, squeezes his penis to keep from peeing, rushes into the bathroom and sits instead of stands because the seat was down and he’s tired and he had a lot to drink tonight and most of it strong stuff and he feels a bit woozy, so thinks he might fall. Sitting down, he pisses a little on his thigh and the floor. This sudden urgency to pee is beginning to be a problem, he thinks. Something to do with his prostate? Worse? He once had prostatitis, more than thirty years ago, before he met Gwen. Only symptom was a few spurts of blood coming out of his penis one or two days, scaring him but there was no urgency to pee or anything different in his peeing, and he took some medicine for it a friend with the same condition had some extra of and it went away. He’s not going to call his doctor about it. If it continues, he’ll tell him at his next annual checkup. Or maybe he’ll put that one off — it was scheduled months ago — till next year, and maybe he won’t even go in for one then. He’s sick of doctors. Now that’s a funny expression. But he doesn’t want to see any of them. Saw them enough with Gwen, and all they seem to do — he knows that’s not all of it, but it seemed so with her — is put you through a slew of tests and medications and refer you to other doctors. Doesn’t think they did much for her but tire her out more than she already was as he dragged her from one doctor’s office and lab and imaging center to the next. Besides, this sudden urgency to pee could be from his drinking and maybe also, as sort of one thing setting off another, remembering Gwen mentioning the toilet in that business with his pen. It could also be his age, where he’s increasingly losing control of his bladder, just as his father did when he reached seventy or so, with nothing to do about it except pee more frequently though without waiting till he feels the need to. Prophylactic pees, once every other hour and a couple of times where he’d have to get up at night, so he wouldn’t have to run to the bathroom and wet his pants or his thighs and the floor. Or it actually could be his prostate, enlarged or inflamed or even cancerous, but the hell with it. Once you get to around his age, he’s read in a few newspaper articles, that kind of cancer is very slow growing, and the treatments for it could end up doing more harm to the body than leaving it alone. He thinks he’s got that right. Finished, no more drops or dribbling to come, he wipes his thigh and the bottom of his feet with wet toilet paper and then the part of the floor he peed on. Before throwing the paper into the toilet he checks the water for blood, is none, and goes back to bed. One thing he has to remember, he thinks, is not to become hypochondriacal. He’s bound to get sick one day, that’s a given, but for now he’s fine, not to worry, let him just have a little healthy time to himself. But what’s he going to do with his life from now on now that this whole thing is over and he’s really alone? In the morning. What is it, he thinks, resting the back of his head on the bed’s two softest pillows, that makes him want to sleep on his right side or at least start off in that position, rather than on his left side or his back? He never thought about this before? Thinks he has and that he even discussed it with Gwen, but forgets what he came up with. Oh, sure: the back’s easy for him to explain. It’s impossible for him to fall asleep that way. For thinking, okay. He’ll even get on his back in bed — either of his sides is no good for this — in the afternoon, not to nap but when he has a problem with something he’s writing and wants to work it out. He hasn’t written more than a couple of pages since Gwen died, and these over and over again. But when she was alive he used to say to her — she’d usually be in her study, working at her computer—“I’m going to take a break and rest awhile, so try to answer the phone, all right? I’m turning it off in our bedroom.” He’d take the paper out of the platen, cover the typewriter and put a paperweight or sea-polished stone he got off a beach in Maine or something heavy like that — the petrified wood his older daughter brought back for him from the Painted Desert — on the manuscript pages he was working on, and lie on the bed. The right side because, of course, that’s the side she ninety-nine times out of a hundred went to sleep on. Like him, before he had to do it for her, she turned over to the left side sometime at night. It was much easier for him to fall asleep if he could hold her or press up to her from behind. Her left breast. Both breasts. Left buttock. His hand between her thighs. So there’s his answer, no big deal, and he can’t imagine having discussed it with her. At the most he might have said something like, when they were lying in bed once, “I love holding you like this when we go to sleep. Don’t change it; stick with going to sleep on your right side.” He remembers she did once say she preferred falling asleep on her right side not only because her face faced open space, making breathing easier, rather than him and more bed on the left side, but also because she knew he liked to hold her when he was going to sleep and because she liked him to. “Otherwise, falling asleep,” she said, “one’s so alone.” So it’s obvious why, after twenty-seven-plus years of sleeping with her that way, why he still starts off on that side. And also…no, he was going to say it’s as if she’s still there sometimes, but he never feels that. Anyway, just a thought. But getting back to that first phone call, how do you get prepared to make a call like that, he thought, when you’ve little confidence you’ll come out sounding okay and you very much want to see this woman again? As he thought before: you don’t prepare yourself; you relax. You dial her number and wait for her to pick up and if she does, you say hello and your name and maybe where she knows you or you know her from and then jump right in talking about something you think will interest her. You might even say, not right away though, that old as you are, and you don’t want her to think you’re ancient—“Well, you know I’m not”—you still get a bit nervous and frazzled calling up a woman for the first time. Not that you call that many; you’re not saying that. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you could say, you haven’t called a woman for months, for a first time or one you know for a while. No, maybe that’d be too honest, he thought, and she’d think there was some hidden motive in his saying it. That he was trying to seem like someone he isn’t: right up-front, no hidden motives, and so on. Oh, he doesn’t know what. Instead he could say “Not