1. The Sudden Tide
1
The Sudden Tide
It is midnight. Off the right wing of the plane the moon floods with light a vast field of clouds, like cobblestones. Inside the plane it is dark except for a few dim lights and the exit signs. The stewardess moves quietly up the aisle, taking a blanket to someone. The man and woman next to me are apparently asleep. They have been quiet for a long time. I try to fit my legs into the cramped space allotted, but they are too long. The seat is too narrow. The pillow is too small to cradle my head comfortably against the bulkhead. In spite of the deep thrum of the engines, smooth and regular, I can’t sleep.
The woman beside me moves, opens her purse, finds something, leans back again. The man stirs. Neither says anything. There is a tiny click, then a clear flame, as the man reaches to light his companion’s cigarette. I can see the outline of his hand, the knuckles and fingers, the hairs illuminated for a few seconds. The woman draws, puffs a thin column of smoke. Another click. Darkness.
Only the most ordinary of gestures, meaning almost nothing, I suppose, to them. But for me, sitting there by the window looking out again at the cold stars, it speaks of a whole world that is lost to me now. A man and a woman. Together. His hand stretched toward her to help.
I am traveling alone. I am a widow. I remember another hand—a bit bigger than the one, with fingers strong for wrestling and carpentry, dexterous for drawing, tender for caressing. I can still see the square fingernails, and how the hair grew on the back of that hand. The man it belonged to has been gone for more than a year, long enough for me to have difficulty remembering how it felt when he touched me, how it was to put my hand inside his.
I lean my forehead against the glass and a great heaving tide pours over me, drowns me—as it has done a hundred times in the past year. But there are so many so much worse off than I. I remember that. How blessed I have been, to have been a wife even for a short time. Yet, in the most unpremeditated ways, in the oddest places and for the most absurd reasons, as I’m going about my business, generally calm, ever cheerful, that sudden tide sweeps in. It’s called loneliness.
Fifteen years later I am a widow again. Most of my tears were shed before he died, as I watched cancer take him to pieces. The funeral is a celebration of joy—he is at peace, free at last from what he called his “vile body.” We sing “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” the hymn which has (except in the newer mutilated versions) that wonderful line,
Death of Death and Hell’s Destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side.
I do not feel at all like crying—except for joy at the thought of Christ’s being the Death of Death. I did not cry at the memorial service for my first husband. It seemed very strange to onlookers, I’m sure—“She must be made of concrete!”—but I am not the only one who has experienced this. It often happens that those whose loss is greatest receive the greatest share of grace, mercy, and peace. This does not mean that they never cry, of course. But they do not collapse. Those who only watch and pray and try to put themselves in the place of the bereaved find it almost unendurable. Sometimes they weep uncontrollably, for their imaginations never include the grace.
So it happens for me at the funeral. The peace given simply passes understanding, and I am borne up by those intense prayers, as if on strong wings, far above grief.
But suddenly, one day as I am pulling something from the shelf in the supermarket, the tide sweeps in and I find myself sobbing. Happily no one seems to notice. If someone should, would my explanation (“My husband died three months ago”) make sense to him—here, in the supermarket?
In order to get to the hotel dining room, we have to walk past the disco bar. The noise is too loud to tell whether it’s music or what. The smoke is too thick to see who’s up there making the noise, but in the twirling mirrored lights we can see the writhing shapes on the dance floor. Male or female? I can’t always tell by their dress. They’re not touching. Their hands are moving back and forth in the air in front of them, their bodies gyrating, shaking, grinding. Occasionally one bumps a shoulder to remind another that he/she has a partner. A knot of men stands near the door. Four women sit sideways on bar stools, legs generously displayed, elbows on the bar, hands drooping over the rims of glasses, eyes ceaselessly scanning the room. There is loneliness in their eyes, the acute loneliness one senses, seeking one soul who might be an “answerer.”
It’s Saturday night. It’s where the singles come in this cow-town west of the Mississippi.
We (a third husband and I) pause, watch the scene for a minute, go on by. We sit in the dining room, thankful for quiet, thankful that we need not join the lonely crowd. We have each other, and it’s for life (a longer one this time, please God).
Why do they come? It can’t possibly be for the food or for what passes for music. They haven’t got dates. They are lonely hunters. What else do you do in Cowtown, or in New York, on a Saturday night—if you’re lonely?
In Toronto, for example, according to an article in an airline magazine, we learn that there are other options. You can join a singles club, call a dating service, go to a dance club or a dining club, or, if you’re “into” adult education, you can sign up for something called “culinary courtship,” which lets you eat a progressive dinner every six weeks, with each of four courses consumed at a different table with five or six different faces. If you want to lay out $695, you can buy six introductions to members of the opposite (or, according to your “preference,” the same) sex and be taught how to act, dress, and talk in can’t-miss ways to lure them. For a cool $1,000 you can get your name on a list that gives you a chance (not a guarantee) to be called by the Rich and Famous, i.e., men who make $100,000 or more (the article did not define Famous).
In Birmingham a hostess pairs her party guests and has a uniformed guard handcuff them together for the entire evening. “They had to swim and eat and do everything (except visit the restroom) together,” she reported, “but it never resulted in any permanent couplings.”
Near our home in Massachusetts, an enormous grocery emporium is sponsoring Singles Nights when the unattached can shop for food and each other. They call it the Meet Market.
The Personals columns of newspapers and magazines are a measure of the desperation men and women feel in their loneliness.
What is to be done with loneliness?