From comfortable distanc.., p.53
From Comfortable Distances, page 53
I wanted to tell you everything. I wanted you to know me from the inside out. Only I no longer believe that I—any of us—can tell another person all there is to tell. We are too complex to simplify our lives into words, which are not the things or the feelings, but only symbols—representations of what is. And I believe that our stories have borders. There are points where we enter each other’s lives and points where we leave one another’s lives so that there is no one, all-encompassing story, but an array of stories—a host of starts and stops in a life. I no longer believe that we live sequentially but rather that our lives are a maze that we spend our lifetimes making our way through, each twist and turn a part of our path. If I could tell you only one story, it would be the story of how I have lived on the opposite side of a glass wall and how I always wanted to shatter the glass, to find a way in, a way through. To my father. My mother. God. You. Or maybe I’ve put myself on the opposite side of the glass and I haven’t let anyone in. I don’t know anymore. Maybe we are meant to break through the walls of others and let them break through our walls, or maybe the beauty of each of us is that we exist independently of one another and it’s not our job or our joy to know another but to know ourselves, to break through our own barriers, shatter our own glass and know our hearts and our minds and our souls.
Sometimes I wish that I could live two lives. One here with you and one on my own, exploring all that I was meant to explore. You may see that as selfish. There are choices in life. I’m aware of that. And yet I want it all—I want to experience all of the lives worth living. People make promises in life that they sometimes can’t live up to. I’m guilty of making promises that I didn’t live up to, although I don’t feel guilty so much as honest. What if it wasn’t that I was walking away from something by leaving the monastery but walking towards something? Every ending is the beginning of something new. That was inscribed in the first Bible I ever received from my mother, which she had received from her mother.
Chapter 56: The Bookends of a Life
It was in the silence of early December that Tess started to feel a shift from the inside out—a restlessness that propelled her forward. Sitting out in her backyard on an early Saturday morning with a down comforter draped around her, watching the tree limbs shake and shiver in the pre-January coldness, she felt as if she had been far away and was returning. How odd it was to be yourself, she thought, and yet not know all the things that you were made up of.
Buddhi pounced onto the tree overshadowing the deck and glared at Tess. His orange, tiger-striped fur was mangy again and he had scratches all around his eyes. He stared at Tess as if he were challenging her.
“Hello Buddhi in the tree,” Tess murmured. The sound of her voice, cracking in the cool air, startled her. And then Buddhi vanished.
Yesterday, while showing a house to a young, newly married couple, a couple full of hope and possibility for their life together, she had felt very definitely, that she was done. That she could only go on doing this for so long. She had showed them each room of the house, helped them to envision what they could do with each room—colors, lighting— and then locking the house up once they told her they wanted it, they were going to take it, driving them back to their car, she had felt as if she were an actor shooting the last scene of what had taken her years to perfect. There was no big dramatic moment, no lightning bolt. Just a very concrete knowledge: she was done. A few more appointments to finish out the year, and then this phase was over. Curtain closed. People moved on. That was how it worked. A time came when moving on was the only choice, the right choice. Every ending is the beginning of something new.
The snow fell all around her, lightly, softly, like whispers, but vanished as it made its way to the ground. To be of the earth, to know that there was a ground that you were searching for, a place to land, but not to hit the earth and leave a mark. The snow had a spiritual aspect to it. The wet flakes kissed her nose, her hands, and she had a sudden urge to be naked in the snow, to know that freedom. But as with all urges, her mind intruded: it was cold, she wasn’t much of an exhibitionist, her neighbors were close by. She could hear the cleaning lady doing something or other in her backyard—it sounded like sweeping. Tess craved exactly what she had: silence, the wind blowing, right now.
This much Tess knew: she was done with arbitrary days. She sought a destiny. She was done with reaching a point each day only to misplace the thought until so much later in the day. She was tired of false starts and the way she was always losing and finding herself. Always changing and always the same. Buddhi showed himself again, and suddenly Tess wanted him beside her. “Here, Buddhi,” she said. Their eyes locked and then Buddhi darted away and Tess felt an old familiar hollowness drift through her. She couldn’t pinpoint if she were hungry or tired or about to cry. Her mind began to race, searching for a to-do list, for something, anything to latch on to and then she remembered to breathe, to follow her inhales and her exhales and the angst began to dissipate, flowing out of her so that she sunk back onto her chair, tension releasing its grip on her body. People, places, events, came and went. The flow of life. The comings and goings. It was what had troubled her about her career, without her ever having been able to articulate it until that moment: each connection she had formed as a realtor led to a split. Getting to know the couples and helping them to find their dream homes, drawing up the contracts, consulting with them on mortgages. And yet once all of the paperwork was signed and she handed the new homeowner the key, the door she had opened for them, with them, closed on her.
It had never been hard for her to say goodbye to people close to her—she had said goodbye to her mother as a teenager and left Woodstock. She had said goodbye to one husband after another and had pretty much gotten on just fine without them, so that in the months following her estrangements, her lives with them seemed like someone else’s story. She had watched Prakash go. She had watched her mother go. And yet, they were all eternally intertwined, part of one another’s stories.
Her mother had often told her about the dances of life, how people had their dances to do with one another and when the dance ended, it was time to move on to the next person, the next song. That had been how her mother explained to a young, pre-adolescent Tess about her father’s departure from Woodstock and Tess’s life: their dance was over. For her mother, there was no apparent sense of sorrow attached to it, no sentimentality. Her mother had told her that people moved into ones lives and out of it with a sense of purpose, grace, kindness. Her mother had told her that a true companion left everything intact when the dance ended and if they didn’t, then steps had been missed along the way. Endings, she had told Tess, were inevitable and necessary for the next dance to begin. It wasn’t until Tess was away at college and the other girls’ fathers sent them money and flowers and other niceties, that Tess had questioned the dance image in regards to her father, for if her father and mother’s dance had ended, what did that have to do with the dance between Tess and her father? Perhaps their music had not yet started; perhaps their dance was yet to come. Like many dreams, though, Tess believed that she had tucked that one away somewhere between her own college love affairs and exams and graduation.
What if, though, it wasn’t that people were the dancers but rather that they were being danced? What if it wasn’t up to a person to start or stop a dance but if people were puppets in the dance of life? The more she lived life, the more she was beginning to believe that she, people, were not in control so much as they were part of the grand scheme of life.
The wind rushed past her and she nestled under the blanket, shaking her legs out on the lounge chair. She couldn’t remember a time when she had ever sat out in her backyard in the cold and yet it was stimulating—the cold gnawing at her while she camped out under the blanket, the warmth of her house a few feet away. When she was a young girl, she had loved to sit out on the porch swing in Woodstock, rocking herself, the roof of the house a shield as snowflakes trickled to the earth. Her neighbors had walked by and waved to her and once her mother had come out on the porch looking for her and finding her there, she had smiled and told Tess to keep warm, motioning to her to wrap herself in the throw blanket set there for that purpose. Her mother had let her be. Tess understood now what an accomplishment that was for a mother. How if she would have seen Prakash out in the cold, she would have told him he had to come inside. Her liberal up bringing had been a gift—a chance for her to develop and become whoever she was to become and she had been too blind to see that all those years. She had treated it as a curse. If only she could have redone it, relived it all, she believed that she would have been different, that her life would have been different, although she didn’t know exactly how.
The comings and goings of life. So many comings and goings. She believed there was a reason for all of the movement and would have liked to believe it had to do with growth, only she wasn’t sure. There was no way to measure growth in a lifetime—people grew older, taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, but there was no gauge to measure internal growth. She wanted to believe that she had grown—yoga had helped her with her life in the past few months—only who was to say if she grew internally or was only standing still, substituting one thing in her life for other things? It was hard to be honest with oneself and harder yet to surround oneself with people who could be objective enough to tell her the truth about herself that she was sometimes blind to.
After making love to Neal on Thanksgiving night, she had become needier of him again. She had warned herself that she would get hurt. That she needed to let him be free and yet she couldn’t help wanting him. Non-attachment. The Four Noble Truths—suffering due to attachments was the enemy.
Perhaps he would stay. The part of her brain that believed that people were unpredictable told her that. The part of her brain that believed people were predictable told her that he would leave. The thought of him leaving made her feel hollow, alone. She didn’t necessarily understand that as she had always been alone, while she was in relationships and out of them, and it wasn’t exactly as if she and Neal were a couple in any normal sense of the word. It was just that his presence made her feel protected. Loved in a way that had nothing to do with passionate love or maybe nothing to do with the concept of love that her mind had created. She would have never thought of herself as sentimental, but the thought of Neal’s leaving made her cling to the times they had shared—exploring Mill Basin, their first kiss in Central Park, the cruise to nowhere, their yoga practice under the stars.
The church bells were ringing. Outside, people were going about their business; inside Tess felt cold and tired. It was so hard to separate what was in her mind from what was real. And how did a person know what was real, what was an illusion? Why couldn't the world just stop for a few moments so that Tess could find her way and either choose to keep going or take a different route? Tess wondered if from here forward, the church bells would always remind her of Neal or if after some period of time, she would stop hearing them because she’d be too busy living in the next here and now of her life. A wave of emotion—sorrow, then stillness and then a slight perceptible joy—rushed through her, and she felt a truth coming to her, but she lost it, like how you lose a star when you blink. She wanted so badly to know what was ahead of her, but wondered if she were given the chance to know if she would instead choose not to know. Wasn’t that how it always was? We wanted what we couldn’t have but when by some chance of fate it was granted to us, we ran from it.
Chapter 57: Cross Encounters
“Finally. I’ve been waiting for you for over fifteen minutes,” Lyla said. She was walking in small circles at the corner of Dakota Place and 66th street, directly across the street from Tess’s house, well positioned so that she was blocked out of view by a tree.
“It’s cold out here,” she added.
“I didn’t know that we were meeting,” Tess said, the wind brisk and harsh on her face, her eyes tearing. She adjusted her scarf so that all the nooks of her neck were covered. Snow loomed from the white-grey sky.
“You could have rung my doorbell and come inside if you were out here,” Tess said.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” Lyla said.
“That’s not the case,” Tess said.
“You’ve been taking different routes on your walks the last few weeks. Don’t think I didn’t see you strolling around the neighborhood,” Lyla said.
“If you saw me and wanted to walk with me, you could have very easily have joined me or called me to meet you or whatever it is that most people would have done so that we could meet up,” Tess said.
“I’m not most people,” Lyla said, her feet moving quickly, her arms flapping at her sides as if she were gaining momentum to take off in her black bubble coat and her red ski gloves with matching red ski cap pulled down over her ears.
“When I didn’t hear from you, I didn’t think that you were interested in walking with me,” Tess said. “But I wasn’t intentionally taking different routes—I was just living my life.”
“You sound like a fifth grader. I didn’t think you were interested in walking with me,” Lyla said, mimicking Tess so that Tess didn’t know if she should laugh or wring her neck.
“I came out for a walk. The cold is punishment enough, Lyla. I thought that we were past this. I thought,” Tess said, stumbling over her words, “that we had become friends.”
“When someone purposely avoids another for weeks, friendship isn’t the word that comes to mind,” Lyla said.
Tess was about to respond, defend herself again, but Lyla had paused in front of a three-story mansion full of Christmas decorations—flashing white lights on each of the towering evergreen trees and a sleigh on the roof, complete with reindeer and Santa sitting at the reins, and a glass enclosed garage with the title Santa’s Workshop above it filled with mechanical elves that bent down, and hustled left and right, passing wrapped gift boxes to one another. At some point Tess had stopped, too, and stood a few feet away from Lyla as she took it all in.
“It’s hard to imagine Christmas is only a few weeks away,” Lyla said. “Time goes so quickly.”
They were moving again. Each house seemed to outdo the others with its gaudy and over-the-top Christmas decorations. There were ice skating snowmen on faux ice rinks and waving Santas who bowed to passers-by and enough lights draped around some homes to illuminate the Atlantic Ocean at night.
“If you were a Catholic, you would understand what you’ve done. I remind myself of that sometimes. You can’t know as you’re not a Catholic.”
“If you don’t mind, I will be excusing myself from this walk,” Tess said. “I came out for some fresh air, not for a lecture on all of my shortcomings according to Lyla Clay.”
“You will continue this walk with me,” Lyla said.
It was more of a statement than a threat. Tess quickened her pace to build up some heat. She could turn around, leave, head back home, but something in her wanted to hear what Lyla had to say. Her hands and feet tingled so that she had to keep making a fist and releasing it quickly to keep her fingers from freezing up. It was hard to imagine that a few months back everything in Tess’s life had been different—she had worked hard, lived a relatively quiet life. She never had to deal with the biting cold gnawing at her on a morning walk, because there hadn’t been any morning walks, not to mention older women who berated her.
“You should never have divorced Michael,” Lyla said. They were in a groove now, their breath creating tiny clouds before them. “He’s fun, easy to be around, interested, interesting.”
“I would be thrilled to set you up with him,” Tess said.
“He’s of the same world you are,” Lyla said. “Like belongs with like.”
“I’m glad that you have it all figured out, but let me help you with a key fact: I didn’t love him like that,” Tess said.
“Love,” Lyla said. “Love has nothing to do with anything. No one even knows what love is. We love the Lord, we don’t love other people. We enjoy them, we talk to them. Are you going to tell me that you love Neal?” Lyla said.
“Why don’t you ask Neal how he feels? Why are you always making this about me?” Tess asked.
“Neal is as naïve as a young boy. Before you, he was a virgin. He doesn’t know how he feels; he’s confused right now,” Tess said.
“I enjoy when you accuse me of corrupting Neal,” Tess said. “Let me remind you that he left the monastery of his own free will. He didn’t even know I existed back then. He debated it for months and then he left and meeting me was a consequence, not the catalyst,” Tess said.
“If it weren’t for you—” Lyla said.
Tess stopped and faced Lyla.
“What? If it weren’t for me, what? Neal would be back at the monastery? Neal is free to do as he pleases,” Tess said. “Let go of that nonsense that you’ve planted in your brain of me keeping him prisoner already. I’m living my life. I don’t control Neal. You do that,” Tess said.
