A serious staph infection put Ragan into the hospital for three nights, where I slept on the floor by his bed. The worst is now over. Ragan had a good afternoon and evening. This morning he is strong-voiced and happy. I slept at home and needed every minute in my bed. Now, back in my wing chair with the sun streaming through the shutters, I am full of quiet peace and gratitude.
In the years from sixty to seventy, my mother used to say often, are a wonderful decade. The chaos of career and child rearing is finished. Your children are companions. Friends are still, for the most part, alive and well. And there is a kind of creative contentment that runs through one’s days that is like no other time in life. The tide is in and the richness of the ocean is all around. But Ragan’s hospital stay gave me a look into the future. We are not young. One of us will be caring for the other, putting aside the joys of sex for the joys of service.
As we marked time in the hospital, we had long talks about our relationship that filled me with doubt again. To be such a person of the word, who thrives on its use and pronunciation, makes it hard to listen to Ragan, who speaks so fast that often I cannot hear the endings of his sentences. They have butter-knife edges.
That being said, we also have discussions that are deeply satisfying, where I don’t feel the differences. I worry that I am fighting off a clarity I don’t want because it might force me to end the relationship. And I am really appalled at the paucity of men’s relationships, the way they do not trust other men except when they are working as a team. Could this be why war is so intoxicating? Could this be why, when a job is over, the friendships men form dissolve so quickly, whereas with women the job is how and where we met, not why.
I must write this down: The fire has gone out. Flipping back in my journal to less than a month ago, you’d think that I was writing about a different man. What is wrong with me?
Most people, consciously or not, have a list of what they want in a partner. With Ragan, most of the big-ticket items on my list were checked off: scrupulously honest, generous, full of life, deep capacity and desire to love. But he was a Republican, educated at the U.S. Naval Academy, which was about as far removed from the philosophically saturated, small Catholic women’s college I attended as possible. He wasn’t particularly at home in what he called my “highly literate world.” As for conversation, he wasn’t against it, but he got lost quickly in the analytical thickets at my end of the exchange. Conversely, my brain wanted to explode when he tried to explain the simplest mathematical formulas, or tell me how energy was created by—I can’t even complete this sentence without revealing my inability to follow his explanation.
Up very early, yet I am glad for the additional hours. Ragan is probably going to be leaving my life. I have great respect and affection for him, but his needs for me are too strong.
It seems to me that many women, if not most, get to a certain age and want to get out from under the marital responsibilities that a husband necessarily imposes. So why would I be looking to assume them? My life is not lonely. It has a high degree of freedom and independence. A sexual life, while nourishing, is not essential. Independence is essential, even for women friends. My relationship with Francesca, for example, works because I do not rely on her for my life or entertainment. We are both free.
Nina Peace, a great soul in our town, died at fifty-three last night of a heart attack. The community is stunned. Amy, at Vintage Auto, wept in my arms when I ran into her at the bank. “She helped so many people,” she said. That is what everyone who knew her said upon hearing the terrible news.
This evening, reading about William Blake, I find this poem by him that fits her:
Seek Love in the pity of others’ woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care,
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
With the naked and outcast—See love there.
Several years before she died, Nina copied down the words below, by the writer Barry Lopez, and put them in a frame for our mutual friend, Pat:
In our best moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are benefitting by these acts. One of the great dreams of mankind must be to find someplace between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.
Living in a small town keeps the facts of life, that we are bound for the grave, squarely in front of you. Nina Peace’s funeral yesterday with her son, mother, and husband walking down the aisle behind her casket, confirmed this. I realized how much I love the people here, how much my story has woven itself into the stories of everyone in town.
One of those stories revolves around young Elizabeth Papoulakos, who burst into the house a few days ago to talk about her broken heart. She sat across from me, so young and elastic, like the curls that bounced on her shoulders. She is a slender flower, perfumed with whatever the latest body gel is, glowing with natural vitality, but her heart is breaking as she tries to imagine life without her boyfriend.
It occurs to me that we all have our keyhole on life. The size and shape of the keyhole determines how we view everything.
Reading a book by John Howard Griffin, Scattered Shadows, on going blind, is like food for me. After his sight was destroyed, he entered into a deeper, more spiritually intense life.
Blindness was a revelation because it exposed the enormous ability we have to be distracted by the things of this world, and the fundamental deficiencies of a strictly academic education. Being sightless demanded that I learn from experience in the most primal, clarifying manner.
Before he went blind, he tells the story of not having enough money to pay for lodging in Paris before his train departed. So he spent the night on the stone floor of a stairwell.
Instead of immersing it in myself, I was immersing myself in it. All I had done was change my attitude. I was still miserable, but it had become unimportant. I had ceased to be a person judging everything on the basis of pleasure or comfort. I had gone out of myself to the value of things in themselves, and I have never since been able to step back consistently into mere self-interest. This is the crucial difference, I believe, between the person whose life is monotonous and the one who is adventure-prone.
After Griffin’s sight began to deteriotate, a Benedictine priest who is blind counsels him:
Your main task will be to persevere. Remember always that word. Your main temptations will be against perseverance…. Sometimes our deepest wound comes from hurt pride in this, because we think we do not have some great gift to offer God and the world. But the important thing, in God’s eyes, is not what we have to give, but that we hold nothing back, that we refuse to give God even our wretchedness, our stubbornness, our littleness of soul. Sometimes these are the only things we’ve got, eh?
As Griffin demonstrated, he was never without supporting players who entered the stage with great precision as other players took their leave. Even the order of their appearance had an evolutionary sequence: the blind beggar, then the poet, then the monk. Each built upon the one before.
As we drove home from dinner last night, Ragan said, “I read somewhere that a relationship is over when one of the people starts paying the other back for favors.” He was referring to the check for $30 I had given him this morning to reimburse him for some books he had paid for. I protested but added “I’m not saying the relationship isn’t over, but the check has nothing to do with it.”
By the time we pulled up outside my house, the truth was clear. All the reasons I do love him were exhibited; his manliness, his love of me, his forthright honesty, his ability to feel. Yet he himself had nailed it in his last letter: the stimulation I need is not there. “You’re quite a woman, Phyllis. As they say in baseball, you can play all the positions.” I’ve never had a better compliment. “Right now,” he continued, “it’s man overboard. For a while I’ll be near the mother ship, but in time it will be too late to get back. I’ll have drifted too far away.” He did not say this hopefully, only realistically
. As he himself said, “All the pieces of the puzzle were not there.”
That night, as I watched him stride purposefully across the lawn in the dark to his car, I felt relief mixed with misgiving and then more relief. This was a wonderful man, but there were too many differences between us. By ending the relationship, I had dodged the bullet for both of us.
I am reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, where she talks about her seizures and how, like Tennyson and Bosch, they made her aware of the darkness “beneath the happy surface of things.” I see how pushing the darkness away can wind up obscuring deeper levels of perception. I do it instinctively all the time.
The book party for Ellen Goodman in Washington was a little hard on my ego. All the media lights—like Daniel Schorr, Nina Totenberg, Tom Oliphant, and Linda Wertheimer—were there, looking right past me. I felt pretty small and insignificant, as if I had already died.
There’s nothing like a Washington power party to trigger a person’s insecurities, make you feel like the unpopular kid at recess. But I remember one afternoon soiree, when I lived in Washington, held at the French ambassador’s house, on Kalorama Road, which reminded me of what everybody, powerful or not, really wants.
It was, ostensibly, a party for children who later were going on to the circus. But there were a lot of stock adult characters hanging around the hors d’oeuvres—elegant women wearing the self-aware expressions of faces that had been too much photographed, little circles of people clustered around the presently powerful. A tall, flawlessly dressed man in his midforties, with a bright red tie flung like a flag against his chest, strode into the dining room like a lord. “How arrogant he acts,” whispered my friend Alice. “I guess he hasn’t been indicted yet,” I whispered back. Pre-Indictment Man is a distinct species in Washington.
My ticket to this embassy party was Emily, a ten-year-old neighbor with Down syndrome who sometimes came over to my house to “play Dorfee” (Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz ), which involved trying on all my shoes to see which ones made the best sound when she clicked the heels together. Emily took one look at the center table laden with éclairs, cookies, and punch and knew just what to do. For the next half hour she worked the table like a pro, resting quietly on a side chair between courses. Finally, I decided it was time to interrupt the grazing cycle.
“Come on, Em, let’s go socialize. That’s what you’re supposed to do at a party.”
“Okay,” said Emily.
I spotted a young mother and daughter across the room and headed toward them.
“Hi,” I said. “We’d like to practice socializing. Can we socialize with you?”
The woman looked down at Emily and smiled. “Sure.” She extended her hand. “Hi, what’s your name?”
“Emily,” she said. Then there was silence.
“Now, Em,” I coached, “you must ask her a question back.”
Emily thought a moment, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and looked up into the woman’s face. “Do you like me?”
The woman looked startled and then amused. I gave Emily a hug. “That’s a great question, Emily, the one everyone else in the room is too afraid to ask.”
It strongly occurs to me that I am happier alone. This doesn’t mean I’m on my own. Far-flung and near-at-hand friends support me, give me meaning and understanding. But as Nikki said last night, at our age we want to be free. There is an exhilaration about it that expands one’s possibilities. Being partnered tethers you, and only a great love, such as I had for my mother or have for my children, enables you to endure it, make it bear fruit.
I am unusually aware of time’s passage. My friend Elizabeth, despite her on-going vitality at eighty, seems smaller, less indomitable; another close friend, Pat, is suffering from a leg that cannot support her. How fast we move across the stage. Thornton Wilder is so right. We don’t stay at the dinner table very long.
Last night, I missed the people who give me strength. Actually it was only one person, Mother. Coming down the stairs, I felt the emptiness on the ground floor, of my house and my life.
A Sunday alone. A few hours cleaning up the cottage and feeling the loss of Ragan—increasingly, as the days go by. It is an emotional and physical loss, and I know that it is not enough to make a cake. But it sneaks up on me when I see Gerry put his hand on Neale’s knee, or I slip into bed and remember the solid comfort of having Ragan beside me. So I am paying a price after all, which only seems fair.
Today I went to Charlottesville to hear Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, give a talk about his hospital and work in Haiti. I found myself put off by the people in the room. They were so drab and uninteresting looking, so nunlike and Catholic, reminding me of all the county-wide Catholic Action meetings I went to during high school, all those mimeographed sheets of bad songs and unkindled prose. But I was put in my place when, one by one, they spoke. How brilliantly colored and interesting they all were as soon as they opened their mouths! Human beings are always so much richer on the inside. An affection for each person grew inside me when he or she began to speak.
Lord, let me not be a complete creature of habit. Is there even a minute during my waking hours when I am not gratifying myself in some predictable way: toast, coffee, nap, book, telephone, bath? A thought I’ve expressed but not written down: Ashland is a good place to live if I am doing serious work because it does not distract me. But if I am living on the surface, going from one piece of toast to another, it is a wasteland.
Karen Armstrong’s book is so astonishingly apt, like the answer to the question and reproach at the center of my life. Here, or rather there, she is, a person unknown to me who is working away at her loom of words on my behalf, without knowing it. Her thoughts are the light I have needed to hold over my own conditioned mind to dissolve the threads that bind it.
When I was working in television, the phone rang constantly. I had to go to endless meetings to discuss shooting schedules and talk for hours at a time with colleagues about concept. But now ... the telephone rarely rang, and I would sometimes go for two or three days at a time without speaking to anybody. I was alone with my books….
At first this silence had seemed a deprivation, a symbol of an unwanted isolation. I had resented the solitude of my life and fought it. But gradually the enveloping quiet became a positive element, almost a presence, which settled comfortably and caressingly around me like a soft shawl…. I discovered that I felt at home in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and walk around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self…. Silence itself had become my teacher. —Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase
My feelings and thoughts have centered themselves on Ragan, who brought so much easy intimacy into my life. My head knows that my emotions are too strong to reason with. If he were here it would be hard to resist the pull of his arms and his tenderness, even though once my emotional needs are met my more demanding judgmental intellect wants to be fed as well, and this he cannot do. There is no recourse but to withdraw.
Again, Karen Armstrong:
The silence in which I live has also opened up my ears and eyes to the suffering of the world. In silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger and posturing that pervade social and political life. Solitude is also a teacher. It is lonely; living without intimacy and affection tears holes in you. Saint Augustine ... said somewhere that yearning makes the heart deep. It also makes you vulnerable.
The gift of Karen Armstrong’s book during this first week of really sinking into my mother’s life and letters (how closely those two used to be joined) is immeasurable. She leads my life, validates its worth, knows the cost, and understands the perils and rewards. She could not be a better companion.
Yesterday, after spending it transcribing the letters from Mother I’d saved, I realized there was a hole where all her letters from her
year in France in 1985 should be. I went back upstairs into my closet and found a thick file labeled MOM’S LETTERS, which doubles the amount of material I have to work with. I am finding what I need in abundance.
Missing in the above is my longing for Ragan, all the while distrusting it. Today in particular I have felt his absence sorely in the pit of my stomach, my arms, and my hands. It occurs to me that perhaps there has been a transfer of pain, that as I am feeling worse he is feeling better. This thought cheered me up and made me realize that I truly do care for him and always will. I just wish it were possible to come to a conclusion, the way one can when examining someone’s DNA or blood, that a person is right or wrong for you. Yet my ambivalence is, I think, false in the main. I miss him, yes. But nothing essential has changed, nor should it. He is fine the way he is, more than fine. But right now I am feeling the words that Karen Armstrong wrote: living without intimacy tears holes in you. If it is the right, true thing to do, I am willing to be torn. But right now what, humanly, I want to do is call him, hear his voice, feel his love. But I will not. It would not be fair.
Beverly Nichols’s book (Merry Hall), about his garden is responsible for my purchasing two crab apple trees and a Yoshino cherry.
An e-mail, finally, from Ragan last night. He was waiting for a letter from me. My head is empty this morning. The tide is out in every way.
I think I have gotten on the other side of longing.
I spent the day with more of Mother’s letters. In the process of tracking down her life, I caught glimpses of my own and felt ordered by the simple act of slipping letters into chronological order and seeing a story line emerge.
The Journal Keeper Page 17
