the little things you do together
by Douglas Messerli
Toby Olson The Other Woman: A Brief Memoir (Bristol, England: Shearsman Books,
2015)
Sometimes it was a smile of pleasure, not just for the pleasure of your
company but her own personal pleasure in having been able to share something
with you—with others—such as a meal, a conversation, a joke. But then that
smile was sometimes a maternal one, the kind which, as a child, you might enjoy
seeing upon your mother’s face—a smile of some small pride in just being part
of your life, of her own life, of the joy of life itself. It was perhaps a
mysterious smile, but unlike Di Vinci’s Mona
Lisa, not flirtatious, never calling attention to itself; it might have
been, at moments, slightly mischievous, maybe just a little judging, but never
cruel, never the smile of anyone who felt superior.
And I can imagine the dancing woman Olson describes, although I never
saw Toby and Miriam dancing. I can see that graceful woman rocking in her chair
to music. I can imagine that!
Yet the woman Olson particularizes in his book is someone, after all, I
never knew, is a woman, as he puts it, who is “another woman,” someone who did
not even know herself, and certainly had great difficulty often, in those dark
days he articulates, in knowing who he was: Toby only occasionally, more often,
“My Father” or “the other guy”:
“Which one are
you?
“There’s more
than one of us?” I ask
“Well, yes,” she
might say, almost articulate. “There’s
you, Toby, and the other
guy.”
“I’m the middle
one,” I say. “That Toby.”
In the final chapter, Olson attempts
to imagine Miriam’s thinking, the shifting feelings of confusion, the
impossibility of separating time and place, of putting a name or identity to
anything or anyone. And yet, a sort of joyful displacement about it all, the
wonderment of being able, perhaps, to float through one’s own history with a
shift of a look, a word, a smell, an image: something like a constant Proustian
infusion of present and past. There might be a release in that or, as Toby
hints, a terror. But that terror, well, that too is the kind of terror that,
when we are lucid, creates the excitements of our life.
Olson’s ability to present himself as alternately achieving a kind of
personal “sainthood” in caring for his dying wife, and a man who also is angry,
jealous (even then) of her woman friends, worn out, fearful, and simply tired,
unable to sleep some nights and afraid, some days, to awaken, is remarkable in
its honesty and emotional intensity. This is not, strangely, a sentimental
story, yet there was hardly a page I could read with a dry eye.
And although this “memoir” centers on Miriam, his wife, it astonishingly
reveals a great deal also about its author’s personal history, his own lifetime
searches for a father who died too early, for a mother whom, he perhaps, still
longs for and, just maybe, sought out a little in his long relationship with
his wife.
I knew of Olson’s peregrinations, of his own brief troubles with the
law, of his early youthful drifting, but in this work I learned of how Olson
had become the so gentle man—not a gentleman of yore, but an always gentle,
athletic, constantly-in-motion lion-like being—he might almost have played the
Bert Lahr character in The Wizard Oz,
except he is so much more well-spoken and loquacious—that I knew him to be,
particularly when he, with understandable pride, served as a military nurse to
a patient wasting away, which the staff had dubbed “Nasty Jack”:
…covered to the
chest with a thin sheet, was a wasting-away
man, I thought it
was a man, whose bloated and unrecogniza-
ble as human face
was hanging with chunks of suppurating
flesh, his chest
running with thick fluids and blood….
Like a kind of male Mother Teresa,
Olson begins to wash the flesh, to talk with the man like a friend, to suture
the wounds, to abolish this monster’s distance from other human beings; and the
man heals, looking almost normal again until, one night, with his wife and sons
about him, he slips into death.
Olson tells this tale less to demonstrate a kind of sainthood—a not so
dismissible aspiration when one perceives that Olson’s first book recounts a
mythical-like salvation from a problematical adolescent childhood by imagining
himself, in The Life of Jesus, as a
kind of boy Christ—as to establish his credentials as Miriam’s final caretaker,
an individual unafraid of cleaning her deepest orifices, of implanting her
needed suppositories, of caressing, feeding, and carrying her off to her needed
destinations. It is, finally, the only way that someone like him—a loving
husband who has seen his wife become some “other woman, ”a woman he no longer
knows—can come to terms with his insurmountable loss.
My own uncle expressed what we often like to forget: when you lose your
life-long companion, to whom can you turn? “Women have other women,” my Uncle
Lloyd (now dead) complained, while American men, alas, even among those few
male friends who may still be living, “do not bond in the same manner.” To talk
of a wife you’ve lost, a male mourner might as well be talking about a woman
with whom you long ago had a passing affair.
I might suggest that The Other
Woman be required reading for anyone suffering in a similar situation,
except that, despite our knowledge that there are so many similar stories, none
of them can ever be the same. Each of them, as Miriam seems to insist in her
repeated chants, are a “little little
little little little” different,
a difference which is everything to the survivor—yet so little to the society
at large.
Los Angeles, May 27, 2015
Reprinted from Rain Taxi XX, No. 3 (Fall 2015), 18-19.
