Who Am I? Who Was I?

..and do you hear hoofbeats?

My memoir, which I began more than a decade ago, is a meditation on marriage and mortality. Or loving and dying, to be even more succinct.

It started out as a widow’s memoir, but then I wasn’t a widow anymore, and it became something else. More like loving and living, actually, while acknowledging that the phrase “til death do us part” is no longer merely poetic.

I just today came upon a poem by Billy Collins called Sleeping on My Side and he says in a few words what I have tried to say in a few hundred in my memoir. (Thus are good poets and cartoonists the bane of prose writers, doing in a few words or strokes what we strive to do in many-worded essays and letters and book-length efforts.

Collins talks about sleeping in his bed at home on his side, facing west, and then sleeping in a hotel room on his side, and not knowing or caring which direction he is facing “as long as you are there facing the other way so we are defended in all degrees.” I have to confess to never having thought about the direction I faced on my side in bed — I think that now it is southeast and before that was west and before that was also west. But what I am more intrigued by is “you” — “as long as you are there.”

Who is “you”? For my purposes it is helpful to imagine that he’s talking about his wife, Suzannah Gail Collins, whom he married in 2019, the year before the book of poems which includes Sleeping on My Side was published.

It may seem like an obscure reference on my part — a husband (he was the poet laureate of the U.S.) and wife (she’s an attorney and much younger, and they live in Florida) sleeping in a hotel bed and facing away from each other — but it’s the phrase “so that we are defended in all degrees” that seals the deal for me. It’s the idea that two people can secure the universe better than one, back to back.

A lovely image it is, a man and a woman sleeping on their sides facing outward, secure.

But Collins knows that in a poem of substance, as all his poems are, things can’t be too easy.

The last two lines of the poem are:

“and my left ear is pressing down

as if listening for hoofbeats in the ground.”

What are “hoofbeats in the ground”?

I think they can’t be good.

I seem to be digressing here. I wanted this to be about writing my memoir and where I am in it and how it starts. But this is how writers write. Even the best of them, I’m pretty sure. They write themselves into corners and then they see a tad of dust and they go get the little sweeper that does corners and then they sit down again and they start anew. In the old days they scratched out the unwanted words with their ink pens or crumbled up the entire sheet of paper and threw it into the fireplace and started over. Now the unwanted words just disappear, a disappointment for historians.

My vision of marriage in my memoir may align itself to some extent with Billy Collins’ vision — I’d like to talk to him about those hoofbeats. My memoir involves precipices and walking along them, a metaphor I borrowed from Joan Didion, who once considered divorcing her husband while at a hotel in Hawaii where they had gone to think it over, and then didn’t. The idea is that even in a happy marriage the precipice is always there. Last night David and I watched the new Netflix bio of Martha Stewart, and amid all her beautiful flowers and food and business genius there were some very sad moments involving the unreliability of relationships, as when her longtime husband decided it was time for them to divorce and when her 15-year Microsoft billionaire partner, Charles Simonyi, told her as they were lying in bed together that he was going to marry a woman named Lisa.

What could be more precipice-like than that?

Martha Stewart, lying there in the bed, not facing west I imagine as Billy Collins is when he is at home, perhaps lying on her back and staring upward, did not know who Lisa was.

But love is why we do it. Love, love, love. In the end, love wins.

The title of my memoir is That’s What You Say Now.

It may be Billy Collins’ version of the hoofbeats.

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