Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  Jack’s father was stationed on an island in the Philippines after the war. He met Americans there who were charged with holding Japanese soldiers found guilty of war crimes and condemned to die. Somehow the American soldiers discovered that many of the Japanese prisoners were talented artists. The Americans showed the prisoners photos of their loved ones back in the States and asked the men to paint portraits from the photos. In exchange, the Americans gave the prisoners cigarettes and other luxuries to ease their last days. For the Americans, the exchange brought them closer to their families at home. For the Japanese, the exchange brought them recognition as talented and sharing human beings, not just animals caught up in the desecrations of war. The story reminds me of the line in Hannah Coulter, where even in the worst of the battle of Okinawa, there was “enormous pity that seemed to accumulate in the air.”

  Earlier in April I’d read Ruins by Achy Obejas, the story of an impoverished Cuban man in his fifties. Usnavy works every day at a bodega, filling the ration cards of the people who line up for goods: “Soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat.” He lives in one room with his wife and daughter, a room without windows and where the floor is always damp from leaks. The communal bathroom of their tenement is enveloped in a constant swarm of flies, and the entire building is on the verge of collapse. Every day, Usnavy hears about more and more Cubans taking to the sea, escaping to America in search of better food, better housing, and a better future. Friends of Usnavy build themselves a flimsy raft, but he will not leave Cuba.

  I could hardly imagine a person more unlike myself than Usnavy, and yet I identified with him. I sympathized with him and grieved with him. At the end, I found myself fervently hoping that his final wish could come true, to “die old and contented . . . in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.” Obejas made me feel that Usnavy was a part of my own self because she found what we shared in common: love, hope, faith. He loves his family, and I love mine. He has hope for his future, as I do for my own. He has faith in Castro’s revolution; I have faith in the power of books. The focus of our faith differs, but the support our faith gives to our lives does not.

  The main character in Philip Roth’s Indignation, Marcus, is another character with whom I have little in common. He is a Jewish boy from Newark experiencing college in the 1950s. And yet we are alike in how we love our parents, and hope for our futures. Marcus, like me, feels the weight of the trust that others hold in him. After Anne-Marie died, I wanted to reassure my parents and my kids that I would stay healthy. I wanted Jack to feel safe and secure in our marriage and for Natasha to call on me whenever and however she needed me. I willingly took on the responsibility of trying to assuage the pain and fear felt by those around me.

  But Marcus begins to feel overwhelmed by the ambitions that his parents have for him and by what his friends want from him. Filial duty, religious dictates, conventions of society, the rules at his college, the sexual demands of his fellow students: he cannot keep up with all that is expected of him, but he wants to, so much. In the end he rebels under the pressure, but his rebellion is his undoing. After he’s followed the rules for so long, the one time he breaks all expectations brings the very worst outcome. He learns that sometimes our “most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” I cried with the truth of that statement—life is so unfair—and with its consequences for Marcus.

  I finished Indignation sitting beside a yellow stretch of forsythia bushes in full bloom. The bushes line the back of our yard where there used to be a tangled mess of dead leaves and brambles, the property line marked by poison ivy, oriental bittersweet vines growing over misshapen pear trees, and weeds the size of bushes.

  The first spring after we moved in, I spent weeks raking out the leaves and weeds and clearing the patch of its choking brambles and vines. I pruned back the pear trees and tossed the bottles, butts, and cans I’d found scattered among the overgrown vegetation into a trash bucket. I dug up boulders the size of football helmets and used them to block off a space for bushes and flowers. Into the holes left behind by the boulders I planted tiny sprigs of forsythia, bargain buys from my local nursery. I planted bleeding hearts and daffodils. My arms became covered with the itchy rash of poison ivy. My knees were gray with dirt no matter how hard I scrubbed, and my back muscles ached at night in bed.

  As that spring warmed to summer, the forsythia turned green and grew fat and tall. The pear trees still bent at a funny angle, but their branches grew thick with leaves. Each spring since that year the daffodils and the bleeding hearts have come out again, every year more of them, and the pear trees have borne frothy white blossoms. The forsythia bushes burst out in yellow, brighter and bigger than the year before. I rarely prune back the wild branching. I love the way the yellow sprays reach out any which way for light and toss around in the wind. It is as if the bushes are dancing along the patch of lime green spring grass.

  Reading my book a day this year was clearing my brain the way my hard work had cleared the mess in my backyard. I had been caught in a bramble patch of sorrow and fear. My reading, sometimes painful and often exhausting, was pulling me out of the shadows and into the light. And I am not the only one clearing out weeds and poison ivy, or planting beauty, perennial flowers of hope. The world is full of us, digging and scraping, working for the day when the flowers come back like they are supposed to, blooming year after year.

  At the end of Little Bee, Sarah and Little Bee are on a beach in Nigeria. Little Bee falls asleep in the sun. She dreams: “I traveled through my country and I listened to stories of all kinds. Not all of them were sad. There were many beautiful stories that I found. There was horror, yes, but there was joy in them too. The dreams of my country are no different from yours—they are as big as the human heart.”

  Yes, Little Bee’s heart was the same size as Sarah’s. Just as my heart is the same size as the heart of Kulwinder Singh, and the heart of my father was the same size as the hearts of the couple in Regensburg who lost all their sons in the war. The hearts of the Japanese soldiers on the island in the Pacific were as big as the hearts of their captors. I am connected to the rest of humanity, not through a giant shared karma, but through our diverse experiences and yet communal emotions. By the size of our hearts.

  Reading was making me see that my own loss and confusion were matched around the world by others struggling to make sense of the unexpected, the feared, and the unavoidable. How to live? With empathy. Because in sharing the load of that fear and confusion, isolation and sadness, I could lighten my own. Already the burden is lifting. My own desires are reseeding, my own needs rerooting. I am in a garden freed of brambles and weeds, and I am not alone. There are a bunch of us out there, weed-whacking away and ready for the sun.

  Chapter 14

  Sex by the Book

  After twelve years of marriage, Laura had become permanently tired of his enthusiasm. She’d realized if you gave an inch you were in for the mile, that even if you were occasionally available, he’d assume the welcome mat was always on the stoop.

  JANE HAMILTON,

  Laura Rider’s Masterpiece

  IF DESIRE WERE ONLY AN IMPULSE TO CONTINUE THE SPECIES, manifestations of it would have ceased once my children were born. The fact that desire survived the painful physical experience of having children underscores that our desire for sex is more than just a biological urge. With six people to shop and cook for, four children to watch over, a house to keep relatively clean, and a book a day to read and write about, I was short on time and drained of energy. Sex should not even have been part of my vocabulary, and yet it was. Where did the desire come from?

  Early in my year of reading, I read A Celibate Season by Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. In the novel, a married couple with two teenage children spends ten months apart because of the wife’s career. Jocelyn and Charles have the whole of Canada between them, and with finances tight (and e-mail still in the early
stages), they decide to communicate only by letters. They have no doubts that they can maintain their loving connection via words alone.

  But as the months of their separation pass, they find that the connection cannot be kept through letters alone. Even a phone call here and there is not enough. The pain and loneliness of separation combined with the desire for companionship lead both of them to bouts of adultery. It isn’t falling out of love that has sent each into the arms of another; it is falling out of reach. Jocelyn has journeyed off without Charles, and nature abhors a vacuum. Another body must fill the empty space left by the vacant spouse.

  Jim Harrison in The English Major also sets his character out on a journey alone. Cliff is a sixty-year-old former farmer and high school English teacher whose wife, Vivian, has left him for another man. Cliff decides to visit all the states he dreamed about as a child but has never seen. He starts out on his road trip with an ordered plan of a specific route to follow and things to do along the way. His plan is blown off course by the unexpected addition of Marybelle, an ex-student. Marybelle hitches a ride with Cliff and becomes not only a fellow passenger on his journey west but an instigator of wild sex and unanticipated layovers.

  Cliff thinks a lot about sex. Why men want sex, why women do, and why desire flames up, fizzles out, and then starts up all over again. Cliff realizes that desire can be set off by something as simple as a smile. Sometimes the “worm” moves just because of a broad-backed waitress who beams (“not many women beam”) or the memory of a babysitter’s bikini-dressed bottom in his face one summer when she turned to get off the hot seat of his car: “Thirty years later her butt is still a vivid painting in my neurons.”

  I understood that. A remembered hand sliding across my thigh under the table of a college pub is enough to start the shivers down my spine. It is the power of memory—tactile memories of desire stirred—that gives potency to the descriptions of seduction I read in books. Even where there is no recorded memory, new sensations of desire can be felt through words alone. There was a time a few years ago when I thought about putting up a Web site of “get in the mood” stories for all the women I met who told me that their initially fervent ardor for their mates was fading away.

  “I love him,” one friend told me, “but I no longer want him.”

  I nixed the idea of writing to stir the loins of others because there were already authors who wrote so well about sex. Instead, I told my friends to have a glass of wine, read a juicy story of lovemaking from a good book, and then grab their beloved.

  “Read The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras or The Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin,” I suggested. “Or How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan.” Stella has to journey to Jamaica and find a young stud to find ardor again, but for those without a travel budget, books alone can bring the groove back on. Just in the past month I’d read Waiting in Vain by Colin Channer. There was plenty of great—and innovative—birds-and-bees action in that book. Enough to inspire blazing renewals of physical devotion in even the most dated of relationships.

  Such a book might have come in handy for Laura Rider, the main character in Jane Hamilton’s Laura Rider’s Masterpiece. For Laura, desire in a marriage has a shelf life. When the date is past, desire expires, gone for good. She loves her husband, but “just as a horse has a finite number of jumps in her, so Laura had used up her quota.” Laura takes “the welcome mat” off the stoop and lets her husband know sex is no longer an option between them. The only problem with Laura’s declaration of her spent desire is that her husband is not finished yet. He still wants sex, he wants it to be part of love, and he falls in love—and into bed—with another woman. Their lives fall into chaos, and people get hurt.

  Cliff in The English Major never tires of sex, but he does come to understand that “given more than enough sex you see that it isn’t the be all and end all of human existence.” Sex is just one of the bindings that holds a marriage together, but it is a pretty good one. Cliff and his wife come back to each other by the end of the novel, reeled in by the history they share, by their ease and comfort with each other, and by their festering mutual desire. As Cliff explains it, love, friendship, and an accumulation of years spent together count for a lot. But sex counts for something too.

  I never talked about sex with my parents or with my sisters, not as a teenager and not later, as a woman. When I was in high school, I listened as my friends offered hints and bits of information, but nothing they said seemed quite right to me. I found out what I needed to know from books. I read the hot and sweaty stuff, all heaving breasts, taut nipples, and long members, but often the writing was so bad I doubted I could trust the images. I read Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and laughed throughout, but I was not interested in having zipless, mindless sex.

  I went on a Graham Greene binge in high school, reading A Burnt-Out Case, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory. When accompanied by love, sex in Greene’s world is a gift from God, but it is always second to a greater love, love for God. Sex without love is a perversion of its purpose (to make life). Okay, sex with love, I understood the equation and I liked it. But when I went off to college I didn’t quite apply the equation correctly. When the sex happened first, I faked the love to salve my guilt over having loveless sex. Faked love brought melodrama into my life, marked by mood swings, drinking binges, and ugly scenes of very bad breakups.

  The book that saved me in college, many times and over and over, was Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer. The novel offers so much to emulate in the title character, Rosa Burger. Rosa is struggling to define herself and her future after the death of her father, a prominent antiapartheid activist. She is fleeing both the celebrity and the weight of inherited duty brought on by being the daughter of a famous and influential man. Rosa is tempted to remove herself from the socially responsible and politically committed life she grew up in and to carve out a quiet, uneventful existence for herself.

  At one point in the novel, Rosa travels to the south of France to visit her father’s first wife. There she begins an affair. She falls in love. But it is more the ease of the relationship, its privacy and its anonymity, that seduces her into love, rather than the man himself. There is nothing lofty or inspired in their love, only normalcy and peace. Rosa finds solace in being part of a couple among countless couples: “In the heat they had shut out, people were eating in soft clatter, laughter, and odours of foods that had been cooked in the same way for so long their smell was the breath of the stone houses. Behind other shutters other people were also making love.”

  Rosa considers settling in the south of France and leaving South Africa forever behind in her past: “It’s possible to live within the ambit of a person not a country.” But her past will not let her rest in a retired existence of satiety and comfort. She feels a connection to South Africa, and she returns to the country of her youth to fulfill the commitment made long ago by her father.

  Rosa became a guiding character for me, and informed many of my thoughts about my own life goals and dreams. Her understanding of love and sex as a place of quiet comfort and hidden joy resonated deeply, providing a jarring example to my own explosive and painful affairs. I slowed down, let love come to me, and, more or less (there was a learning curve), contained my desire within relationships of kindness and affection. I wasn’t always a loyal girlfriend, but when I cheated, it wasn’t because desire overcame my good sense. It was because love had faded and I was too much of a chicken to break off the relationship.

  I first kissed Jack on New Year’s Eve 1988. He’d been a good friend for months, both of us logging long hours at the law firm where we worked. The two of us were at the office on the last day of the year, and I’d invited him to come out with me to a big party in a mansion overlooking the Hudson. It was a black-tie party. For a joke, I gave Jack a blue-and-red polka-dot bow tie to wear. At midnight he loosened the ridiculous bow and then grabbed me with both arms, drawing me in close for a lon
g kiss. On the ride back to Manhattan he tried to work his way down the row of sixty buttons on my black velvet dress but had made it through only ten buttons—just below my clavicle—when the cab reached his apartment. One month later we were in Utah together, holed up in the honeymoon suite at the Snowed Inn. It was the only room available, and we took it as a benediction of our desire. Sex with love: the perfect equation.

  Maybe one day I’ll find myself wondering what someone else would be like. It is human nature, after all, to be drawn to an opposite of what you have in hand. As Antonya Nelson notes in her story “Palisades,” from the collection Female Trouble, “You wanted to be sitting in a comfortable leather recliner sipping fine wine and reading a passage of exquisite prose to your wise spouse for your mutual amusement, and you wanted to be having demeaning speed-demon sex in a seedy dorm room with a gorgeous soulless youth. . . . You wanted something solid; you wanted something fluid.” But wondering is not wandering, and my desire is not waning. What holds a couple together is more than just ardor—it is the confabulation of two, a conversation spanning years, sometimes carried out through words and sometimes through caresses.

  In the end, it is the acknowledgment of their years of mutual experiences—as parents, as friends, as husband and wife—that bring Cliff and Vivian back together in The English Major. They are each happy in their own space with their own interests, but acknowledge their ties of desire and a mutual history. Jocelyn and Charles from A Celibate Season also make it through their crises more or less intact. They come together again physically and mentally, bound by “all the little threads of concern and necessity” of their shared past. They never lost their ardor for each other. It’s more as if it were misplaced, and then found again.