“Operating on a completely different plane, I smiled, kissed her once again, and said ‘See you in the morning.’ Then I left, happily. Never in my life had I been aware of something and yet totally unable to assimilate it. And never since. I drove across Paris that evening, listening to the radio, dancing in my seat. It was as if I were two different people, each in his own world. I suppressed my terror and grief to live in the illusion of the joy I had expected.
“Seldom have I been so euphoric, and yet all the while I knew. It was like Macbeth, only the opposite, as if a dagger were before me but I couldn’t see it. At nine-thirty I was in the middle of putting in the bracket for the television, when the phone rang. They made sure it was me, and then they – a nurse, someone whose voice I did not recognize – said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your wife has passed away.’
“I was holding a drill in my hand – a drill. The shock was no less than if I had been shot at close range. And yet I managed to call a taxi – I could not have driven – I managed to melt into the back seat, to tell the driver the address, to state to him that I didn’t wish to speak. I gave him fifty Euros and didn’t even turn around when he left his cab and pursued me to hand over the change.
“They allowed me to stay in the room with her for a while.” For a long moment, Jules was again unable to speak, but then he went on. “They had crossed her hands in front of her and tied them together with gauze so her arms wouldn’t fall to the side. And they used the same type of gauze to prevent her jaw from dropping. It was tied on her head so that she looked like the way people with a toothache used to be characterized when I was young. The nurses and the residents were not old enough to have seen that, unless they read old magazines. The knot was at the top of her head with two wings of white gauze sticking out into the air. It made her look like a rabbit. There should be a better way, when someone dies, to do what they did. They shouldn’t have done that to her. She wouldn’t have liked it.
“I kissed her, and, of course, she stayed still. Just as I had known and not known, I was split then, as I have been ever since, between wanting to follow her wherever that might be, and wanting to fight for life so that she would continue to live in my memory. I suppose the balance in the struggle between the two is what brought me here, because the state that it leaves me in is difficult to bear. But the fact remains – and although not a day goes by when I don’t dwell on it, not a second goes by when one way or another it does not run my life from an impregnable fortress within me – the fact remains that my wife, whom I love above all, told me she was dying, saw me walk away, and died alone. How can I ever make up for that? I can’t.”
“I understand,” Dunaif said, “why you might be set on punishing yourself for the rest of your life, and I’m sure that even if you don’t know it you’ve found many ingenious and imaginative ways of doing so.”
“I’d have to punish myself for eternity, and still that would be insufficient. They put a sheet over her and wheeled her away. They wouldn’t let me get into the elevator. Yet the doctor was kind, and said he’d stay with me as long as I needed him.
“When I left, it had started to rain. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wandered around La Pitié-Salpêtrière for hours – as you know, it’s like a small city – until in the middle of the night, without any plan whatsoever, I found myself on the Rue Bruant, leaning against the hideous, rough stone wall of the mortuary. It’s made of slag. The edges are sharp. I stayed there, in the rain, until morning, my hands pressed against the wall until they bled, because she was on the other side and I didn’t want to leave her. How can I have done what I did?”
AFTER A LONG pause, Dunaif asked, “Have you thought of suicide?”
“Is that a suggestion?”
Dunaif could not help but laugh, however sadly. “No, just the logical question.”
“I can’t count the times – whenever I look down at a river from a bridge. But I’m too strong a swimmer. I’d have to shoot myself before falling in, and having spent several years with the keen objective of not being shot, that’s something I’d never do. I detest drugs. I’m too neat and orderly to slit my wrists. You’ve seen what happens to the bathtub and the floor? It’s horrible.”
“I haven’t seen.”
“In the cinema.”
“Yes, in films. But is it just the method that deters you?”
“No. I’m immune. I tried it once, when I was seven. I thought I’d find my parents, and I was unhappy. In the house in Paris the attic was unfinished: my cousins dried their clothes up there. I took some clothesline, made it into my notion of a hangman’s noose, threw the line over a huge beam, slipped the noose over my neck, mounted a chair, and, with hardly any hesitation, jumped off. But it was always so moist in the attic that the line had rotted and it broke. When I hit the floor, that was the last of my suicide attempts. They’re out of the question, period. If I haven’t done anything of that nature by now, believe me, I’m not about to start.”
“It’s off the table?”
“Entirely.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. No suicide, just loyalty. To them all. Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it’s also the quality that gives life purpose. I don’t mean to speak in epigrams, but I’m French: I can’t help it.”
It wasn’t so much from what Jules said as in his expression that Dunaif knew his not-quite-patient was not in fact suicidal.
“Besides, I can’t leave now. My grandson, a baby ….”
Dunaif was used to newly divorced or unemployed patients who then made the discovery that they were depressed; to wives and husbands who had fallen in love with an outsider and could not decide what to do; and to intellectuals who had thought themselves into dark and narrow caves. This was different.
As if to stall or avoid, Jules looked around and read the room.
“Another death?” Dunaif asked.
“I hope not.”
“But?”
“It’s not up to me, not up to my prayers, not up to anyone except an immense tangle of facts, events, processes, mysteries – from the behavior of individual cells, compounds, molecules, and atoms, to the embrace of a mother or a nurse, to the scudding of clouds above a hospital where the life of a child hangs in the balance.
“If you think it either a matter of pure science, or of prayer, you’re wrong. It isn’t just that a treatment will be applied, like fixing the brakes of an automobile, or just that God will decide, like a judge or a king, or just a matter of chance. It’s all these things, and many that are hidden. It’s the operation of the whole, in more dimensions than we know, that must flow together in perfect harmony and with perfect rhythm. On occasion, perfection like that is apparent. It overflows in Bach and Mozart and it’s what’s in miracles, epiphanies, and great events. It’s what made Jeanne d’Arc sink to her knees. It’s what made Dante see light so bright it was all-consuming. The same visions possessed the prophets. The age we live in would call it madness.”