“My husband wants a divorce,” I said.
“Your husband is suffering,” Harry was certain.
“I doubt it,” I was equally sure.
“He has terrible guilt.”
“He should!”
“He has no choice.”
“Of course he has choice!”
Harry said affairs were no more than the “uncontrollable urge to flee.”
“I love Lee. I thought I knew him.”
“We never really know anyone.”
“Not even ourselves….”
“We fall in love to love ourselves.”
“So, all the mirrors in Steppenwolf?”
“He sees himself in every one; every character he meets shows him a different side of who he is.”
“Jung says we have a thousand selves….”
“More.”
Harry would sit down, say, “tell me a joke,” and I’d say, for example, “I was having dinner with my father when I made a Freudian slip. I meant to say, Please pass the mashed potatoes. Instead I said, You motherfucker, you ruined my whole life.”
Harry would laugh, loud enough that Freud would have been pleased. Freud says the kinds of jokes we laugh at expose our repressed wishes and longings.
“Did your father ruin your whole life?” I asked.
“No, I think it was war.”
“This word, I’ve never heard at Emporio Rulli.”
“Should I tell you a story?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m out on this hill in the dark with a bunch of soldiers. My buddy and I are trying to locate a target, where the shooting is coming from. He can see it and he points into the blackness, but I see nothing. He lines up his rifle, puts his cheek against mine, and tells me he’s going to shift his head a little to the left and I should look. He moves his head, just a little, to the left, and at that exact moment … comes the bullet … that kills him….”
Harry looked into my devastated eyes. “It was stunning, Jewel, so quick, no suffering.”
I didn’t want to go out on September twelfth. The day after 9/11, like everyone else, I was in shock. I went to the café because it was my habit. How else were we to behave, now that Americans were revealed as vulnerable, not invincible but targets, in the sightlines of a many-tentacled beast?
Harry was reading the New York Times at an outside table. I was stopped still on the sidewalk by the stacked photos of before-and-after skylines, showing where other large buildings surrounding the World Trade Centers had also collapsed, a striking record of the scope of the change. Harry was sitting with a very tall blonde wearing a red shawl and white turtleneck, lots of bracelets, a silver cross necklace. Her eyes were that clear, clairvoyant blue of the pure-at-heart. Of course they were talking about terrorism. She was supplying platitudes while Harry was knocking holes in her willingness to be comforted by notions such as spirit that cannot be broken, or government able to step up and represent our best interests, that the best in human nature was bound to prevail, especially in the face of surprise attacks from invisible evil.
Harry proposed (quoting Nietzsche, maybe) that total destruction might be necessary before good could re-emerge. Elsa disagreed, arguing that the world’s goodness remained intact.
“Yes, but it will have to strike back, commit murder, and that goes against the nature of goodness.”
I brought over my cappuccino, sat with them, and listened. Others came, drank coffee, contributed to the dialog, went on their way; we remained. Finally, Harry introduced me to Elsa, noting that we both had written books about the death of a child. Mine an infant with extreme brain damage, hers a two-year-old with cancer. Our stories entered the café on the same day war was declared. A young woman wearing skinny white jeans and high-heeled sandals, newly arrived, sat next to Harry unspeaking while Elsa and I went blow by blow with our experiences: diagnosis, responses, treatment, the law, the challenge of making ethical decisions in the face of such enemies.
She had killed her daughter with “a morphine bullet.”
I had gradually withdrawn mine from artificial feeding, “starved her to death.”
We had justifiable reasons.
We were both merciful.
We were both murderers.
We had waged war, learned the enormity of what we were fighting, taken action. Our goal was peace, via death, in our arms, at home.
Harry said this conversation was depressing, while his young mistress quietly pondered whether such a thing could ever happen to her.
In the face of the next war Elsa and I were veterans, calm, knew what to do.
Resist and surrender.
Be still and keep moving.
Love everything enduring and impermanent: music, talk, the beasts, the café, life.
Next time I saw him, Harry wanted to lend me a memoir he thought I should read and invited me to follow him home. He located the book then showed me around, downstairs to his grand piano. I was wearing my yoga sweats, mandala tee shirt, spa sandals; he had on tennis shorts and sneakers. He seated himself at the piano and played. I studied the book cover, his hands as they stroked the keys, and the strong muscles of his legs as he pumped the foot pedals. Music filled the sunny morning air and there was no evidence of beasts. They were either in lockdown, vanquished, or we had learned to live in peace with their presence among us.
Raven
You might say the streets flow sweetly through the night.
~ Xavier Villaurutia, Nostalgia for Death
David, Richie, and Raven were all together in San Miguel de Allende because Raven lived here now, and Raven was dying. I met David and Richie one night at Tio Lucas bar midway through their visit. Next day Raven drove past the three of us out walking in town and asked them later, who’s the babe? It’d been years since Lee called me Babe, and I liked it. We had one week. This created a glow around us, intensity to our time together that was a miniature, more frivolous mirror of Raven’s urgency. At the same time, we felt no hurry; the days were long.
I came here on my winter break from teaching and had created a schedule for myself because routines helped me feel more stable alone. The first few days I kept busy writing on my hotel balcony but the unfamiliar freedom of being away left me wandering streets or sitting in restaurants at odd times of day. I was learning new rhythms, the pace of the place: write early, Bellas Artes for cappuccino around 10, walk, visit the jardin around noon, Posada de las Monjas for siesta: nap, read, write, meet hotel neighbors, until at least past 7. Then slowly the nighttime streets of the cobblestone town came to life. Everyone gathered at the jardin, walking through or sitting on benches to watch the people go by. Teenagers and twenty-somethings were here to study Spanish, art, or Mexican culture. Worldly, retired Americans and Canadians came to escape winter or empty love lives, stretch dollars, or possibly, become someone else once more. In their midst: me at midlife, newlyunwed, traveling alone, for one week.
The night I met David and Richie I had been to a poetry reading (per schedule), was invited to join the poets for dinner but couldn’t handle the “group dynamics” and slipped away to Tio Lucas. I sat at David and Richie’s table in the bar where they were waiting to be called for dinner but they didn’t notice me. They were here for Raven and each other, plus (I later learned) they had wives at home and were practicing, after a number of lost marriages and relationships, being faithful men.
They paused from talking and found me there, “trying not to eavesdrop.”
“You grew up in New Jersey?”
“You’re Jews from New York? My ex is a Jew from Long Island!”
“You dance salsa? Let’s go dancing.”
We all had been at the same Ravi Shankar/George Harrison concert at Madison Square Garden in the ‘70s! It was like we’d known each other for years! I didn’t know which one to like more! Then their table was called and they politely went off to eat. Then Richie returned to invite me to join them, and so I did.
We discus
sed the menu, jazz, San Miguel, Raven, their wives, my ex, the midlife crisis.
One said it’s real; the other, not.
David called it, “Road not taken.”
Richie said, “Insatiable desire.”
I offered, “Paradise lost?”
David said, “Jung’s shadow.”
I told the story of Ricardo, the married Mexican Texan I’d met at my hotel two nights before. “He’s 40 years old with a toddler and a pregnant wife and comes knocking on the door to my room at midnight, begging: abre la puerta. Good thing, no is the same word in English and Spanish.”
After ceviche, more margaritas, arroz con pollo, carne y verduras, huitlacochtle (tasty black fungus mushrooms), and one shared helado dessert we agreed to meet in the morning, for cappuccino at Bellas Artes at 10.
The whole next day we walked the cobblestones, up and down the steep hills and stairs, studying views, a museum, tiendas, eating, drinking, talking. We kept meeting every day, falling in love with the place and each other.
On the fifth day Richie had to take Raven to the hospital and David and I sat out the afternoon and twilight on my hotel rooftop, chatting, sipping damiana, and smoking, close to an increasingly starlit sky, listening to music all over town, church bells, dogs barking, dialogs on streets below, hotel guests coming and going. Inside, we talked on opposite twin beds until three in the morning.
The air was charged after all the days and hours of languorous, revealing, verbal intercourse. Tonight we had covered (among other things) erotic poetry, the clitoris, his first fumbling experience with a college girlfriend, how it “didn’t work” and he went to the library to “study up” and they took their time and talked themselves through it until they were mutually satisfied.
“I now consider myself a pretty good lover,” he admitted, and described his wife’s body to me. “She’s not the type of woman I usually go for. They’d be more like you.”
I contained my longing, as he debated his “moral dilemma.”
With no more talking he moved us into a standing-up, very tentative hug-then-kiss where our bodies sensed each other, what it would be like, and our lips reached and searched and also held back before he pulled away then I said, “I’ll step back and make it easy for you to leave, how’s that?”
I took the step. And he left.
I went to bed with our desire: desire alone, pleasing, mutual, alive.
On my last afternoon in town I finally met Raven. The four of us sat at an outdoor table at the edge of the jardin and watched the people pass.
Richie said, “Ever heard the saying, man with many hats?” and pointed to a young Mexican selling straw hats, stacked on top of his head, reaching all the way to the sky. A marionette clown wheeled by on his little bicycle, mariachi music drifted around a corner, bells clanged forth from the parroquia tower, sun rays penetrated wispy clouds like spread fingers from divine hands.
Throat cancer made Raven’s voice quiet, head bowed into his neck as if surgery had reduced the distance or his ability to stretch up. David, Richie, and I ordered beer; Raven couldn’t join in because he had to consume everything through a tube. But he begged to taste and did so with a spoon then dribbled and reached for a napkin to wipe his mouth. When he spoke he was the local, and we leaned toward him to hear him better, the knowledgeable one with much to say, even as his body was slowly, as he spoke, deserting him.
“Enjoy this,” he was saying.
The old, hideous, guitar man strolled by our table and handed us a card with song titles: Cielito Lindo, La Bamba, Guantanamera, etcetera.
I handed the card to Raven: “You choose.”
But he couldn’t focus on the hand-printed words. All during our time together I watched him struggle to remain in the world with us, as he contemplated leaving it, still in his body, coughing, dribbling, uncomfortable in his posture. He knew he was dying, while David, Richie, and I fancied ourselves in the middle of life, and savored the scene, the sun, beer, good company, blissful in our bodies’ passions, hungers, and thirsts.
So we were able to pay attention to the ugly old troubadour as he sang through his stained, crumbling teeth:
que bonito el cielo
que bonita la luz
que bonito es el amor
~ in memory of Raven
Love Is Blind in One Eye
I gazed through the window of Piazza d’Angelo at the standing-room-only crowd of beautiful people, then with trepidation boldly entered the bar and inserted myself in their midst: Mill Valley affluent, fit, knew their wines, especially the California varietals. The chatter level was high and I tried to grasp the train of conversation so I could leap on. A lot of it was stocks. And tennis, renovations, best golf resorts on Maui, favorite Club Med spots. I was there fresh from a Book Passage reading on a Thursday at 8, too wired to go home and be alone. A soccer game played on three TVs behind the bar then the day’s news about sinkholes on the Richmond Bridge (over which I commuted), and the ongoing quest to capture Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.
The man standing to my right had a gorgeous profile. I liked the way he wore his collared shirts one over the other. He looked solid and comfortable, with the Chronicle folded and tucked under his arm. He ordered pinot grigio, that exotic name.
He asked what brought me here.
“To be around people,” I told him.
“Plenty of people here.”
“Don’t they have families?”
“Maybe not.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not exactly.”
“You have a family!”
“I live with my son and daughter.”
“Not their mother?”
“We’re in the middle of a war.” (For a second I thought he was referring to Bin Laden, whose bearded face had appeared in multiple on the bar TVs.)
“I know what you mean.”
“It’s a nightmare.”
And so we commenced to tell war stories in the middle of the happy, crowded scene.
A seat opened up at the bar, I sat down, and the warrior moved closer. This side of his face appeared newly wrinkled, maybe in the last year or so. The eye I could see was green. His outer collar was turned up over his freckled neck; dark chest hairs curled through the unbuttoned opening of his denim shirt; the sleeve of the dark wool overshirt brushed my shoulder.
His wife wanted everything he had: house, car, children.
“She’s jobless.”
He believed she was suicidal.
He wanted to do the right thing.
But maintain his right to his share.
“All the money came from me: my inheritance bought the first house, my investments paid it off, I have worked my butt off, I love my kids and I want to be their father.”
“I’m sure she wants that, too.”
“No. She wants me to pay for everything and be invisible.”
“That doesn’t sound fair.”
“I’ve been paying lawyers for three years.”
This was actually the first time he had “stepped out at night like this,” too defeated by the process to imagine he could have any kind of life apart from supporting children, his wife’s insanity, and attorneys. He’s been living in studio apartments but finally just put everything into this new house.
“Where?”
“Here.”
“So, you’re doing all right.”
“We’re working with a mediator now. I’m a little more hopeful.”
He couldn’t even face me, he was so mired in his situation, and then suddenly politeness compelled him to ask me about myself.
“Name’s Art, by the way. You are?”
“Jewel.”
“Pretty. So what’s your story?”
“We’re done with paperwork, no assets to fight over.”
“Kids?”
“One dead, one living, best kid ever.”
Compared to Art, my split with Lee was downright amicable. He dropped off and picked up Dale when he
said he would, deposited a tiny sum each month into our old joint account for child support (thank you), was holding his job, not threatening me with anything. I only suffered from the withdrawal of his love. And even that, I was getting used to; it wasn’t like a knife anymore, more like a spoon, my body yielding to it like ice cream left standing on the counter.
More wine and in between new and old stories in the middle of all the noise, Art started describing an old family photograph that showed his childhood family still intact: his mother, father, and their two children. Their summer cabin was visible in the background. The family posed on the dock on the shore of the lake. The afternoon was sunny. Everyone was smiling, healthy, young, their futures ahead.
Art and his big brother Steve were four and five, their parents in their late twenties. That night at dinner the big brother got mad at the little brother, as he often did, and with no more intent to do permanent damage than ever before, Steve aimed, then threw his fork as hard as he could across the table. Everyone watched in slow motion as the object hurtled through the short distance and the sharp tines caught the little brother in the right eye. It was fast, even in slow motion, and the impulsive action inflicted damage that would never go away. The boy was blind in one eye for the rest of his life.
“Not long after that day my mother was diagnosed with polio and got increasingly disabled until she died when I was twelve. My father was devastated, and had to let the cabin go, which had been in my mother’s family for generations. My brother was eternally guilty and became self-destructive in all the usual ways: drinking, smoking, and driving too fast, and was killed in a car accident at age nineteen.”
Of them all, the blind boy fared best. Found music. Married, had a family. Did well financially. Learned to adjust his profile so his best side was seen.
Art turned to face me then and I could see his white, blind eye.
A week later we met for coffee, his son skateboarded around the Mill Valley plaza where we talked, the morning passed, and I fell in love with them both. We sat talking for hours while the boy came and went around us. Art wanted to hear about me, my turn to tell stories, he said, and he listened more attentively than most men, as if to compensate for the eye that couldn’t see. I told him I’d published a book, a memoir about my baby who died, called Silvie’s Life.
Love Is Blind in One Eye Page 3
