This brings me now to a scene I witnessed a few weeks ago. I was on my way home, waiting for the next subway train, which was running late. There were rats scurrying over the tracks, nosing the trash scattered here and there. I could tell by how carefree they behaved that the train wouldn’t be coming within the next few minutes. So I sneaked a look around, seeing other people waiting, like me, on the platform. My glance was met by a pair of eyes brimming with tears. None had fallen yet, but they were on the verge. The eyes belonged to an adolescent girl who in her sadness was handing something to her mother. The bundle measured about a foot and a half long. I could tell its contents were delicate by how gently the daughter’s hands conveyed the parcel. It was drizzling aboveground, so they had improvised a raincoat for it, using a plastic bag. The mother took the bundle in her trembling hands, but before she could fit the bundle to her chest, the daughter grabbed it back nervously in a gesture that seemed almost violent. The mother snatched it back from her daughter and looked at her defiantly as she hugged the bundle close. Then the daughter cried, and the mother closed her eyes. Mother and daughter, widow and orphan, fighting like animals over the ashes of husband and father.
There I stood now, holding my own urn. Once I had it in my arms, I said goodbye to Jim’s family and called a cab to take me to the airport. We passed by a park blanketed in a layer of snow and I asked the driver to stop the car and wait for me. I felt like I was having a panic attack and needed to breathe some fresh air. I sat on a bench where the driver couldn’t see me. I put on my hat and scarf. It was unbearably cold, so cold that even dressed in thermal gear a person would suffer hypothermia before long. The anxiety, the cold, or both together made it very hard to breathe. I couldn’t detect the scent of my exhaled breath as it collected in my woolen scarf. It dawned on me that this wasn’t new, that I hadn’t been able to smell a thing during those last days I had spent with Jim either. Nothing. I’d somehow wandered into a world without odors. I used to tell Jim that thanks to him I’d learned how to love my own scent. I could smell myself on him and I liked it. But it had become impossible for me to perceive my own scent in this frozen place. But what scent? Where? On whose skin? It was as if Jim had carted off my olfactory sense without my permission, something he’d helped me develop so I could smell the angles of my own body. I’d now become a sanitized woman, a deodorant against my own self, a nose located eleven yards away from my face. I stared down at the urn on my lap. I held it between the heavy gloves, which were so thick I couldn’t even feel the contours of the urn. So I took one off and touched the ceramic, already dusted with frost.
The curve of the urn was like the contour of a pregnancy and I pressed it as tightly as I could against my belly. For a split second it felt as though they weren’t Jim’s ashes in my hands, but Jim himself in the period of gestation. Jim inside that urn, rounded like a five-month belly. Jim’s first kicks. His baby teeth aren’t visible yet, but they’re in place, just beneath his gums. His skin is still pink because of the absence of fatty tissue. Jim in my womb, doing a little somersault in response to the last times someone other than him had penetrated me.
I could have frozen to death in the cold, but he roused me. I looked at the ring Jim had given me on my finger. We never actually married, but he gave me a ruby about a year after we met, a symbol of new blood, of rebirth. I never knew whether Jim was alluding to our shared luck at having found each other, or the newness of my life with him, now that I’d finally achieved my sexuality. And I realized there in that frozen park that I would never know the answer, never could I be sure whether the ruby was a symbol for both of us or only me alone, always alone, despite all Jim had done to make me feel that he was and always would be my companion. I was about to put my glove back on and return to the cab when I noticed how red my hand had become from the cold, and how it was beginning to swell, in part because of my circulatory problems. I touched the ring. I hesitated a bit and my hand swelled a bit more, enough that the finger now felt the pressure of the ring. I had my answer. The ring hugged my flesh and told me that the red stone was a symbol for life, his and mine. At least that’s what I chose to believe then. I was sorry I hadn’t ever shared the news of my pregnancy with him, even if he might have interpreted it as a sign of instability, or what it surely was, the physical materialization of my desire to become a mother. Take it as he would, it was me, this was me and my desire, and I should have told him. I put my glove on and returned to the cab.
WHEN I GOT BACK TO NEW YORK, I was able to sleep a second time without panicking. Though despair filled every nook and cranny of my bed, Jim’s absence now acted as a substitute for my death phobia. If each one of the days he had been away had seemed like ten days to me then, now after his death, each day felt equivalent to ten weeks. Life now transpired in a kind of slow motion. And it finally dawned on me one night that the last penis to enter my body wasn’t Jim’s. Not even one of the last seven of them had been Jim’s. I felt like puking. I ran to the shower, soaped up, and scrubbed my whole body, as if so many days later, there could still have been some trace of unwelcome skin left. But everything dragged, everything moved so slowly. Those men’s tongues licked my skin at a snail’s pace, and left deliberate trails of saliva. I clutched a vase Jim had given me. I felt like smashing it against the wall. But I couldn’t. The rage bubbling up inside me didn’t show itself with sufficient energy. Even my anger was numbed. It was a submissive rage, cowardly, incapable of gathering even the ferocity to destroy a simple vase and provide a moment’s respite.
AND SO BEGAN A PERIOD of loneliness similar only to the loneliness I felt being shut up in the body that had been imposed on me. My life with Jim had taught me what great love could be, but I’d also become relatively comfortable, had stopped struggling with the question of whether I should be alone or if I should find someone for whom my past and my present were supportable. During ten years at Jim’s side I had enjoyed near completeness, but it had produced a kind of collateral damage, such as what happens when a person who has experienced turbulent times finally relaxes and lets herself go with the flow. Thinking back on how hard I struggled in the distant past as compared with these latter times with Jim, I realized I had become someone else entirely, someone much cozier, more on the side of those against whom I used to have to raise my voice to be heard. In the end, I guess, it came down to my collusion with the strong, the putative conventional people who led heterosexual lifestyles in plain sight. In that process I’d lost one of the defining structures of my life, feeling empathy for the weak, a sisterly tie to those invisible men and women. After Jim died, my condition began to collapse again. I was back to debating whether to remain single or otherwise be forced to explain until I couldn’t stand to hear myself speak about who I was and what could be expected of my wounds.