tell me if the lovers are losers …

tell me if any get more than the lovers …

in the dust … in the cool tombs.

Carl Sandburg, Cool Tombs

Recently a dear friend lost her beloved husband to leukemia. Coincidentally, I’d just finished reading a pair of memoirs, each by a woman novelist, centered around the death of a husband with whom the writer’s life and work had been lovingly intertwined. They were Gail Godwin’s Evenings at Five and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Both books deal with the great question: how to live when your heart is broken. Alongside the question, and around it, lie the broken-off pieces of your beloved’s recent life, which you have to pick up and dispose of somehow. Meanwhile you get the steady, impervious march of bureaucratic demands. It’s hard to get into this life and they make it a good deal harder to get out.

Meanwhile, I’d also been thinking about a different woman, a college friend who had died unexpectedly a few years before. For decades after graduation, we hadn’t seen each other. Then one day, she reappeared when I was sitting alone in the fountain restaurant of New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

     “You don’t remember me,” she said, “but years ago you loved me very much and I loved you very much.”

     “Renee!” I gasped, recognizing her under the thin veil of the years. She took the other seat at my table. I told her all that had happened to me since graduation – the whole long, unbelievable story. She took it in with the entire womanly attention that reminded me of her French and Jewish background. Then she told me parts of her own story. She’d stayed married to the college sweetheart I remembered. And, unbeknownst to him, from time to time she took lovers.

     “Are you very shocked?”

     “No,” I lied. (Of course not. Don’t you know how worldly I am?) Years before, when we were undergraduates in a different America, I’d asked Renee – sotto voce and very confidentially – if she thought it right for two people to sleep together before they married.

     “Oh, Edward and I have been sleeping together for years! Are you very shocked?”

     “No,” I lied back then too. Of course not.

When her daughter called to tell me of Renee’s death, I took the long train trip out to her memorial service. It included an amazing lineup of testimonials, from people I never heard of, whom she had quietly gone to enormous lengths to help! Greeting her grieving husband, I said to Edward that I’d never known that Renee was “a lamed vovnik, one of the righteous, one of the 36. She kept it from me!” (In rabbinic legend, the world is only permitted to continue because, in every generation, 36 righteous persons are found, typically living in obscurity.)

Our lives are mysterious. It was not till the other day, when the topic of Renee came up at our morning brunch – and I was telling Jerry that her sudden death and discovered double life left me with an unsolved question – that the answer suddenly struck me. 

Her childhood, lived during World War II in France, had not been an ordinary one. She and her mother fled through the rural depths of the country, moving from house to house, sheltered from the Nazis by French peasants. “They sympathized with Jews?” I asked her, prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

     “Oh no,” replied Renee, in her commonsensically French tones, as if to say, of course not. “We paid them!”

Now at last it came to me how to put the puzzle pieces – the 36nik with the double life – together. Her childhood, made emotionally safe because lived close to a loving mother, had passed in hiding. So for her, the hidden life had got confused with the safe life!

There was one other thing I told Renee that day at the Museum. I told her that I’d met Jerry, a new love who would probably be my husband soon. And then I told her one other thing: Jerry had had a dream that included a visitation from my first love of many years before, the communist in Paris.

When Jerry described what he wore in the dream, I recognized the man whom I’d seen again on a recent trip to Paris that I’d taken the year prior to meeting Jerry. In his present life-phase, he dressed differently from how he had in youth. More aristocratic, a bit foppish. Since I’d never liked the way he dressed, neither as a self-declared revolutionary, nor as a stylish aristocrat, I hadn’t described his sartorial changes to Jerry. 

In Jerry’s dream, wearing the getup of which Jerry had not been told, he said to Jerry that I was “a wonderful woman,” whom he could not have risen to the challenge of marrying, but that my experience with him had been of emotional use to me. I had learned something. (At this point, I forget what.) Anyway, in the dream he told Jerry that he could now fade back, because Jerry could do the job of true lover and husband in the way it was designed to be done. 

     “Oh,” said Renee, instantly understanding how I would take it. “That’s permission!”

The lives of women

require considerable decoding.

In the unisex currents of our day –

nothing supplies that decoding.