Husband

Prologue: Friday the Thirteenth “Sorry, Steve won’t want to wake up to talk about Brooklyn real estate,” I said, but Andrew insisted, so with the phone stuck between my ear and my left shoulder, I shook my husband. He didn’t respond. His right eye was open and a drop of blood hung at its corner. Maybe he would breathe better if I turned him over. I tried, pushing his body up until I saw that his stomach was blue, but he was heavy and stiff and fell back to his original position. The phone slipped, and I caught it. A space opened in my body, the way it had years ago, when, up on the ice-age rock, I had shimmied around the cliff to find that the next step was a thousand feet down. I said into the phone, “Andrew, I think he’s dead.” I wasn’t sure whether this was true or whether I just couldn’t talk to Andrew right now. Without waiting for a reply, I hung up. I had never imagined Steve could be dead, but his oxygen concentrator was chugging along, the cannulas were properly inserted in his nose, and he wasn’t breathing. I checked again. His skin was firm and cool. I had always thought I’d rather be a widow than a divorcee. Was it possible the authorities would think I’d murdered him? What had we done yesterday? Well, his surgery at the periodontist, then that-- was it a magnum? of white wine. And I’d walked to the pharmacy for a Father’s Day card and got his oxycodone prescription. Later, when I came home from choir practice, he was passing out on the phone. I helped him to bed--and poured more white wine in his glass when he begged. “Now you’ve gone and done it,” I said to Steve unkindly, because in truth it wasn’t my fault, he’d always been testing the limits. I’d tried so often to keep him alive, hiding the sugar cube with the LSD, pocketing the car keys when he’d had too much Scotch, driving him to the doctors, signing him up for the stop-smoking program at the hospital, but this time there was no saving him. I would have to tell Elizabeth and Sarah that their beloved dad was gone. Dear God, I desperately needed a nap. I had never called 911 but I didn’t know what else to do. “Where is your emergency?” a male voice asked. I felt like putting the phone down. I said, “I think my husband is dead.” When the police came, they asked what happened. I repeated periodontist, surgery, wine, oxycodone. But as the day, and afterward the months, dragged through the emptiness that had been our life together, I was haunted by that question, “What happened?” Friday June 13, 2008, marked the end of my marriage. I was finally separated from Stephen Myron Blackwelder—by death, even though at our wedding I refused to say “till death do us part.” At the beginning, I’d been uneasy about marrying him. Often afterward I thought I should divorce him. Too many days during our years together, the ties binding me to him were too painful to bear. And yet I remained his wife until he died. How had I stayed married for nearly 40 years, to a husband who was gay? To answer the question, I’d have to begin in the 1960s, when the loneliness of my high school and college years had led me to the University of Wisconsin, where eventually, I met a young man named Myron, whose mother, like mine, had decided he would be called by his middle name. 1. Adrift Between Lakes After the mountains of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my old green Rambler belched black smoke, mirroring my mood. It would have been better not to have let my professors talk me into graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. But Madison was pretty in 1965, and the dorm I was required to supervise had a view of wide Lake Mendota and its parkland. By the fall of 1966 I had completed my MA in English and semi-automatically entered into the PhD program, choosing to concentrate in the dramatists and poets of the English Renaissance. The program required me to take courses half-time. During the other half, I’d teach Freshman Composition for the first year; later there would be literature discussion sections. Feeling rich on my teaching assistant’s salary of $4,000, I began to wonder how the suffix PhD would look following my name. Meanwhile too many seminars discussed subjects like the pronunciation of final “e’s” in Middle English. Those days I knew the PhD was hopeless. Luckily I knew artists, who seemed to have more interesting lives. In college I had roomed with Susan, a painter, and now I was fortunate enough to meet a lovely, dark-haired sculptor who needed a roommate. Helen and I, plus an undergraduate friend, Linney, rented an apartment in a Victorian house not far from Madison’s other lake, Monona. In the big TA office in Bascom Hall, some of us English PhD candidates had to share a desk. I liked my desk mate, John, who was married. Together, John and I often stole glances at a TA on the other side of the room named Myron Blackwelder. John said he thought Myron might be queer. I thought queer, a condition we’d sneered at in high school, meant someone who had sex with men. In college we’d learned about Oscar Wilde. Back in Merchantville, NJ, where I’d grown up, a bachelor with a handlebar mustache had lived across the street from us; Mama emphasized the word bachelor when she mentioned him. Was he queer? Certainly he wasn’t a family man. Myron’s bleached blond hair was weird. I’d never met a man who colored his hair. But it didn’t make sense to me that a queer man would have a love life like Myron’s.