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We were married for almost 20 years before I left, and we have two daughters and we’ve been friends for a long time – how, I’m not sure. There are many terrible stories of divorce, but apart from the separation itself, ours is not one of them. Sometimes I thought I would die from the pain of our separation and the pain it caused my girls, but I didn’t die and I’m here, as is William.
Since I’m a novelist, I have to write this almost like a novel, but it’s true – as true as I can make it. And I mean – oh, it’s hard to know what to say! But when I report something about William, it’s because he told me or because I saw it with my own eyes.
So I will start this story when William was 69, which is less than two years ago.
Visually:
Recently, William’s lab technician had started calling William “Einstein,” and William seemed to get a real kick out of it. I don’t think William looks like Einstein at all, but I accept the young woman’s thesis. William has a very full mustache with a gray in white, but it’s kind of like a trimmed mustache, and his hair is full and white. It’s cut out, but it sticks out of his head. He is a tall man and dresses very well. And he doesn’t have that vaguely crazy look that I think Einstein seemed to have. William’s face is often closed with unwavering pleasure, except once in a long time, when he tilted his head back in genuine laughter; I haven’t seen him do that in a long time. His eyes are brown and have remained large; not all eyes remain large with age, but William’s eyes are.
Now-
Every morning William would get up in his spacious apartment on Riverside Drive. Imagine him throwing aside the fluffy quilt with its dark blue cotton cover, his wife still sleeping in their big bed and going to the bathroom. He would be stiffened every morning. But he had exercises and did them, went out into the living room, lay on his back on the big black-and-red carpet with an antique chandelier above him, pedaled in the air like a bicycle, and then stretched them that way. He then moved to the large chestnut chair by the window overlooking the Hudson River and read the news on his laptop there. At one point Estelle would come out of the bedroom and wave sleepily at him, then wake their daughter Bridget, who was 10, and after William took a shower, the three of them would have breakfast in the kitchen at the round table; William enjoyed the routine of it, and his daughter was a talkative girl who liked it too; it was as if she were listening to a bird, he said once, and her mother was also talkative.
After leaving the apartment, he walked through Central Park and then took the subway downtown, where he got off at Fourteenth Street and walked the remaining distance to New York University; he enjoyed this daily walk, though he noticed that he was not as fast as the young people who pushed past him with their bags of food, or the prams with two children, or their spandex tights and the headphones in their ears, the mats. them for yoga. a piece of rubber band slung over their shoulders. He took into account the fact that he could walk past a lot of people – the old man with the walker, or a woman using a cane, or even just a man his age who seemed to be moving slower than him – and that made him feel healthy and alive and almost invulnerable in a world of constant traffic. He was proud to walk more than 10,000 steps a day.
William felt (almost) invulnerable, that’s what I’m saying here.
For several days on these morning walks, he thought, Oh God, I could be that man! there in a wheelchair sitting in the morning sun in Central Park, a bench assistant typing on his cell phone until the man’s head fell forward to his chest, or he could be that…! with a hand bent from a blow, an uneven gait. “But then William thought, No, I’m not these people.”
And he wasn’t those people. He was, as I said, a tall man whose age had not added extra weight (except for the small belly, which was barely visible in his clothes), a man who still had his hair now white but full, and he it was William. And he had a wife, a third, 22 years younger than him. And it was not small.
But at night he was often terrified.
William told me that one morning — not two years ago — when we met for coffee on the Upper East Side. We met at a diner on the corner of Ninety-first Street and Lexington Avenue; William has a lot of money and he gives a lot of it and one place he gives it is a teen hospital, near where I live, and in the past when there was an early morning meeting there, he called me and we were going to meet briefly for coffee on this corner. On this day — it was March, a few months before William turned 70 — we sat at a table in the corner of this diner; shamrocks were painted on the windows for St. Patrick’s Day, and I thought — I really thought so — that William looked more tired than usual. I often thought that William got better with age. Full-white hair gives it a distinctive look; he wears it a little longer than before, and rises slightly from his head, with his large drooping mustache to oppose him, and his cheekbones protrude more, his eyes still dark; and it’s a little strange, because he will watch you completely – pleasantly – but then from time to time his eyes become briefly penetrating. So what does he get with that look? I never knew.
The other day at the diner, when I asked him, “And how are you, William?” I expected him to answer, as he always does, which is to say in an ironic tone, “Well, I’m fine, thank you, Lucy,” but this morning he just said, “I’m fine.” He was wearing a long black coat, which he took off and folded on the chair next to him before sitting down. His suit had been tailor-made since he’d met Estelle, and he’d sewn his suits to fit, so it fit his shoulders perfectly; it was dark gray and his shirt was pale blue and his tie was red; he looked solemn. He folded his arms across his chest, which he often does. “You look good,” I said, and he said, “Thank you.” (I don’t think William ever told me I looked good, or beautiful, or even good, in all the moments we’ve seen over the years, and the truth is, I’ve always hoped he would.) He ordered ours. coffee and his eyes circled the place as he tugged slightly on his mustache. He talked for a while about our girls – he was afraid that Becca, the younger one, was angry with him; she was somehow – vaguely – unpleasant to him on the phone when he just called to chat with her one day and I told him he just had to give her a place, she was settling into her marriage – we talked like this for a while And then William looked at me and said, “Button, I want to tell you something.” He leaned forward briefly. “I experienced these terrible horrors in the middle of the night.”
When he uses the name of my pet from our past, it means that he is present in some way that is not so often, and I am always touched when he calls me that.
I said, “You mean nightmares?”
He bowed his head as if considering it and said, “No. I wake up. It’s in the dark when things come to me. ” He added: “I’ve never had anything like this before. But they’re horrible, Lucy. They terrify me.”
William leaned forward again and set down his cup of coffee.
I watched him and then asked, “Are there any different medications you are taking?”
He frowned slightly and said, “No.”
So I said, “Well, try taking a sleeping pill.”
And he said, “I’ve never taken sleeping pills,” which didn’t surprise me. But he said his wife did it; Estelle was taking different pills, he had stopped trying to understand the handful she was taking at night. “I’m taking my pills now,” she said cheerfully, and in half an hour she was asleep. He didn’t mind, he said. But the pills weren’t for him. Yet in four hours he would often be awake, and the horrors often began.
“Tell me,” I said.
And he did so, looking at me only occasionally, as if he were still in these horrors.
One horror: it wasn’t named, but it had something to do with his mother. His mother — her name was Catherine — had died many, many years earlier, but in that nightmare he would feel her presence, but it was not a good presence, and it surprised him because he loved her. William was an only child and always understood (quietly) his mother’s fierce love for him.
To overcome this horror as he lay awake in bed next to his sleeping wife — he told me that the other day and it killed me — he would think of me. He would think about the fact that I was alive there, right now — I was alive — and that reassured him. Knowing that if he had to, he said, placing the spoon on the saucer of his coffee cup — though he would never want to do that in the middle of the night — he knew that if he had to, I would take a call from him. He told me that my presence was what he found most comforting and that he would fall asleep again.
“Of course you can always call me,” I said.
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