His Wife Leaves Him

rk, 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 that I do it regularly, calling up women, I want you to know, or calling up anyone. Phones were just never my best form of medium. I’m much better talking directly, with no, whatever you want to call it, interconnecting medium. There’s that word medium again,” he’d probably say if he said all that, “confirming to you, I’m afraid, my difficulty in talking on the phone. I wasn’t always like that, I want you to know. As a teenager I was a regular chatterbox on the phone with my friends and girls my age, infuriating my father, I can tell you, as he was pretty tight with money. Or maybe he was just being realistic, since you paid, I think, a dime a minute for a local call then, after the forty or fifty free minutes a month the phone company gave you.” But he wouldn’t even say that. Going into personal family history and his youth too soon, and most of the other stuff he’d sound silly saying and he’d get flustered trying to get out of it. Best: keep it simple and relatively quick. You’re relaxed, you’re ready, you dial and if she doesn’t pick up, you call again an hour or two later, still relaxed and ready, and if she doesn’t pick up then or the next time you call that night, you call the next day, and so on. But she has to pick up some time, unless she’s away, and even if she is, she’ll come back, and when she does pick up, you say “Hi, how are you?”—if she has been away, that’ll be his excuse for not having called sooner: he tried, her phone didn’t answer, he suspected she was away and decided to give it a few days—“it’s Martin Samuels, fellow you met at Pati Brooks’ party the other night, or should I say, in the hallway outside it, by the elevator.” Or better: “Hello,” or “Good evening”—no, too formal; just “Hello, it’s Martin…Martin Samuels, guy you met the other night in the hallway outside Pati’s party, both of us waiting for the elevator that didn’t seem to want to come. Did we ever figure out what the delay was all about? Anyway, how have you been?” and maybe, with her help, since he’s never been much good at initiating things to talk about on the phone, especially with someone he barely knows, the conversation will take off from there or just proceed naturally if maybe a bit awkwardly, but get better as it goes along. She might say something like “I’ve been doing okay, thanks, and you?” but the point is to get her to talk a little about herself and what she’s been doing so then he could respond to it. A new movie or museum show she might have seen that he’d seen also and they could talk about it, or if he hadn’t seen it — more chance of that with a movie, since he never goes to them alone — he could say “I’ve heard about it” or “read a review. Is it worth seeing?” Or he could try to come up with something else to get her to say what she’s been doing lately, he thought. Teaching. “How’s it going? I’ve never taught anything but junior high school for the Board of Ed for six years. Mostly per diem work, which wasn’t too awful because you just come and go in different schools and rarely see the same surly and sleepy and sometimes sweet faces for more than two days in a row. But for a year and a half I was a permanent sub, teaching language arts to eighth graders, the worst and most dangerous job I ever had, and believe me, I know: I once drove a cab here when drivers were being robbed and bumped off regularly.” If he did say that — maybe he wouldn’t say the cab part — he’d just be trying to bring her in and keep the conversation going — she’d probably say something like “What made it so bad?” “Knots in my stomach going home every day, and weekends ruined thinking about going in to teach Monday. And twice, a knife, pulled on me in class, and I had to physically disarm the kids, leading to the mother of one boy complaining to the principal that I ripped the kid’s sweater when I threw him to the floor and I’d have to pay for it. And one time I was going down the subway entrance after school and my least favorite student called me to look up and dropped a brick on my head. You probably saw the ugly scar my hair doesn’t cover up anymore because of my receding hairline.” He’d mention his growing baldness? Even in jest, why allude to it, possibly giving her more reason for turning him down? She already must think he’s a lot older than her. He’d more likely just say “which left a long scar on my forehead you might have noticed. Not so bad. My head’s full of them, most of them much smaller and on the sides where they don’t show, from when I was a very active but clumsy boy. I had that student suspended”—if she asked what happened to the kid, and if she didn’t, he’d just tell her—“and feared for the wholeness of my head for the rest of the school year, especially when he was let back in school after two weeks though not in my class.” She might ask why did he continue teaching if it was so bad? and he’d say “Money. At the time it was the best I could do and the long summer break gave me time to write. Not that I ever stopped while I was teaching, but did much less of it. But enough about me and my occupational hazards and adversities.” That’d be a good line if he got the chance to use it and it didn’t feel forced. “Tell me about your teaching. I want to know what it’d be like standing in front of a class without losing my voice every day shouting the umpteenth time for quiet, or not having to turn around every five seconds when I’m writing something on the blackboard, to prevent another head-cracking object thrown at me.” Then he could ask, if she didn’t bring it up, what are some of the books she uses in class and then talk with her about one of them he might have read — chances are always fairly good for that — or say he hasn’t read them all or maybe any of them, but one particularly he’s wanted to read, or if he’s read it, reread. “What’s a good translation of it,” he could say, “or maybe there’s only one? Wouldn’t I love to read even a semi-serious novel in the original foreign language. I’ve tried, in German and French, but couldn’t get halfway through them without going to the bilingual dictionaries a million times, even with Simenon and Remarque.” So, plenty of things to talk about. Her thesis and dissertation — what were they on? She could then say that would take too long to explain on the phone, and he could say “Then let’s meet. I’d like to hear about your work and what you’ve written, and if you’ve done book reviews or published some of your scholarly work, maybe I could locate them. I’m always interested in the art work and critical writings and such that people I’ve just met do.” He can be such a bullshit artist, he’s thought lots of times. Maybe less so now but plenty then. But whenever he is he tries to do it in a way where he doesn’t seem like one. Here, he’d just be trying to get over the early humps of his first call to her. Maybe, he thought, he should just say to her, without anything else about her teaching and writing and nothing about his, “I’m curious who some of the writers are that you teach, or did I say that the other night in front of Pati’s building? Even if I did — it sounds like something I’d ask because I’m always looking for something new to read — we talked for so short a time, we couldn’t have gone into it very much,” and then see where the conversation goes from there. If he does refer to his teaching and writing — even if he told himself not to, he could find himself doing it — should he slip in how, in his one free period a day in those schools, he used to, with a fountain pen, edit and then rewrite repeatedly, and never without making a change or two every time he rewrote the page, a couple of pages of a short story he was working on at the time, while the rest of the teachers in the teachers’ lounge were grading papers, writing lesson plans, napping, eating, smoking, talking, reading a newspaper, playing cards. It’d be a good anecdote, he thought, and again, without pushing it and if he could fit it into the conversation smoothly, give her an idea how committed he is to his writing. That he never leaves it home. In other words, if she asks what he m