The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  One afternoon, one of Lucy’s employees called to tell me that her staff wanted to have an intervention; they were all going to quit if she didn’t get help. She had been drunk at a meeting—many meetings, in fact. I said that didn’t make any sense: Lucy had been sober for more than five months. She quit so I could get pregnant. He said that he was sorry to be the one to tell me that that was not the case.

  Three weeks after I returned from Mongolia, Lucy left for rehab.

  For several days after she went away, I could not sleep in our bed. I went to Matt’s apartment and told him that no, I did not want to sleep on the couch, and that I didn’t want him to, either. I wanted to sleep next to him, where I could hear him breathing, so I would know that he hadn’t disappeared into the darkness with my spouse and my son.

  19

  All of my conjuring had led only to ruin and death. Now I was a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone.

  There was an element of purity to the experience that I could almost appreciate. I didn’t have to decide whether I wanted to be a mother. I didn’t care about freedom or sexuality or marriage or monogamy. I didn’t have to feel crazy when I couldn’t make sense of where Lucy was or why she seemed off or why she was always in the basement for such a long time. The information was all in and it was all terrible and there was nothing to be done to fix any of it. My competent self—so strong, since childhood, so perspicacious, always looking for opportunities, adventures, glory, always trying to protect me from defeat—had been crushed. The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.

  —

  I HAD RECEIVED A beautiful email from the baby’s father when I was still in Mongolia. Nature is wasteful, he had said. That’s why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

  At first, he wanted to try again. But then he didn’t. And then my downfall was complete.

  When I got on the plane to Mongolia, I was pregnant, living with my spouse, moving to a lovely apartment, and financially insulated by a wealthy man. A month later, none of that was true. Instead, I was thirty-eight, childless, alone, emotionally and monetarily unprepared to be a single mother. I’d become a cautionary tale, like the women Elizabeth Hardwick described in Sleepless Nights, who “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.”

  My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.

  At night I sat on my couch and sobbed so hard I screamed—on the couch the baby’s father and I had picked out together at a fancy store after I got my first book deal, when we were just becoming friends. When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.

  —

  GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled. A person would speak to me unkindly—or even ungently—on the street or in an elevator, and I would feel myself ripping apart, the membrane of normalcy I’d pulled on to leave the house coming undone. Better to stay inside my snug apartment, alone with the cats, where I didn’t have to pretend to be intact.

  My bedroom was taken up almost entirely by the bed and two drafty windows. It was like a ship bunk: In there, I was sailing out over the trees and rooftops of Chelsea through the purple dawn, into the cold night sky. Or at midday, after a vague fit of sleep, I would be called up on deck by the sound of children screeching with pleasure across the street in Clement Clarke Moore Park. Noon would become four in the afternoon; four in the afternoon would become four in the morning. The flow of blood, the draining and filling of the sky with light.

  There was a long hallway connecting that room to the living room and my tiny kitchen, and I would throw balls and toys back and forth for the cats to chase. Thank God for the cats, I thought, when they had the compassion to sleep next to me on the couch, or looked on curious but unfazed as I bawled. They were good companions to have in this strange new world of grief: nonverbal, affectionate, no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.

  —

  MY MOTHER CAME TO stay with me. We ordered spring rolls and Buddha’s Delight. When I asked her, “What will become of me?” she said, “You will be fine.” Sometimes she said, “You are not alone.”

  She slept next to me in her green flowered nightgown, one of the few she could find that had no seams in places that rubbed against the itchy scars that divided her torso into different districts: the buckled skin up north where there used to be two mountainous breasts; the slashed stomach where they took fat and tissue to reconstruct my mother’s left breast after her first mastectomy followed her first cancer. Several years later, they found a second cancer in her right breast, and my mother demanded that they remove both breasts, once and for all. She did not have them reconstructed. She’d had enough of hospitals at that point. She used to have two breasts and two lives; she used to seem unknowable. Life had eroded her body, her restlessness, her expectations, and left her somehow gentle and content.

  I was in my late twenties when she had her first cancer and my early thirties when she had her second. I was scared and sad and rattled both times. But I had not really allowed myself to contemplate what it felt like to be her, fighting death, as a single woman turning sixty, and then living with chronic pain and a body transformed by amputations. Since puberty, she had been aware of people’s (men’s) eyes on her breasts, taking in the remarkable size of them. Now she noticed their eyes taking in the remarkable absence.

  She had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision. Nothing has looked entirely the same since.

  20

  I packed Lucy’s things carefully into the corrugated cardboard boxes in which my warm leggings and special gloves for Mongolia had arrived weeks earlier from L.L.Bean. Part of me was tender as I contemplated which T-shirt, which pajamas, would be the most comforting for her to have at rehab. She should have her sneakers in case she wanted to start running again—which would be healthy, good for her. If Lucy could get back into athleticism maybe she’d have something to focus on and it would help. She would need sports bras and shorts, track pants and tube socks, which I rolled into tight little balls. She would want to look put together, too; keeping up appearances mattered to her. I packed her good suede shoes and her gray cashmere sweater. I folded her favorite jeans and packed them next to the blue plaid shirt I’d gotten her for Christmas one year, comfortable but sharp. She had been so happy when she unwrapped it—Lucy was the easiest person to shop for. Anything that would look good on a teddy bear appealed to her: She could never have enough corduroy or gingham.

  But then it was only a false front, wasn’t it—her wholesomeness, her reliability.

  The audacity of her disintegrating at this moment. How could you do this to me? The mounting horror of her debts—loans I had been unaware of, the cost of her treatment. It was your job to make me safe. The obvious necessity to sell the house on Shelter Island to pay for everything. Is nothing mine in this world? The indignity of an addiction counselor at her rehab—a stranger!—informing me that I should not call my spouse to demand the truth when lies unfurled themselves in my head: It was not what Lucy needed.

  What she needs? She’s the one we’re worried about? What does a girl have to do to be the victim around here?

  How dare she have been drinking all this time when she swore she was sober. I’d been sick with guilt about my affair for two years and all the while she was lying about this? I to
ld her—many times—“I feel insane.” And she never said, “You’re not crazy. You’re right.”

  I took the framed pictures of us off the wall and put them in a drawer. I spread my clothes out in both of our closets with abandon. I taped the box of her things closed and mailed it away.

  Part of me just wanted her shit out of my house.

  —

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN much good at making things up. I was good at seeing what was in front of my face and deciding what it meant, then writing about it so that others were swayed by my perception. How had I failed to perceive that Lucy had never stopped drinking? There had been a hundred shadows of her alcoholism. The empty beer cans I found—preposterously—wedged between the sink and the radiator in the bathroom on Shelter Island just a few days after I got home from Mongolia. (“Those must have been there from before I quit drinking,” she had said.) Where was she all the time? Why was she always tired, lying down to nap on the couch in the middle of dinner at a friend’s house? Why did her personality seem subtly but insistently tweaked half the time when she got home from work?

  Only much later did I see that it had never mattered which questions I had asked her or how shrewdly I had scrutinized her answers. Addicts lie. (This should not have been so difficult for me to understand: When I was addicted to lust, I lied all the time, sometimes to cover my tracks, and sometimes purely out of habit.)

  But whatever I had failed to comprehend about Lucy’s drinking was incidental, was nothing. How had I failed to perceive what was obvious to everyone else? You don’t fly to Mongolia pregnant.

  21

  My friend David Klagsbrun, who grew up around the corner from me in Larchmont, was turning forty that winter, and Matt and I drove up for his party in Katonah, where David lived with his wife and two young sons. It was good to be back in a car with Matt, the way we used to be all the time.

  The summer after our freshman year of college, I worked at a French restaurant in Larchmont and Matt sold a cleaning powder for septic tanks. In the evenings after dinner he would pick me up in his gray car at my mother’s house, and I’d roll us a joint—“Don’t make it too tight, Ar,” he’d say every time, and every time I’d say, “I got it,” and almost every time I would roll too tightly—and we would smoke it as we drove past David Klagsbrun’s house, past the parochial school on Weaver Street that looked like a fire station, over the bridge near the turnoff for that ersatz Hebrew school where I went when I demanded a bat mitzvah because everybody else was having one (and where once, when I was playing Tzeitel in our production of Fiddler on the Roof, I argued with the teacher about a dramatic point and he said, exasperated, “Do you want to direct this yourself?” And I said, “God, yes”). Then we’d coast into the Manor, the section of town with yards like parks and the kind of houses that make you stare with longing even when you are nineteen years old, as we were, and want nothing more than to get the hell out of the suburbs.

  There was the green Victorian with the great, peaceful porch; the Gothic-y Tudor that was Matt’s favorite; the sprawling white Mediterranean with concave red tiles mounded on the roof and a huge greenhouse on one side that I wished was mine. We would drift around in the quiet, leafy dark, gazing stoned and acquisitive at the houses, the hundred-year-old oak trees, the blinking green Gatsby lights out on Long Island somewhere across the sloshing sea. And it all felt like ours because we were in college now, and didn’t really live there anymore. We used to belong to that town, to be stuck there, but it had become our nighttime playground, a movie for us to drive around in.

  We were saving up that summer to go on a road trip to California. “California, Max!” we’d say, quoting Tony Roberts in Annie Hall. We left in mid-August with six hundred dollars each and drove for days through the endless spread of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the juicy green of Kansas. But we never felt cooped up. The car was our spaceship: We felt that inside of it, we experienced a different air pressure from everybody else.

  “I’m Lester the Nightfly / Hello Baton Rouge!” Donald Fagen sang on the car stereo. We talked about Matt’s brother, my parents, Emma, David Klagsbrun. Or jazz: Matt was always pleased if I could identify Sarah Vaughan’s voice on a song—he told me that when people say, “It sounds like Ella,” it means they know nothing, they are basically saying, “It tastes like chicken.” We were both into short stories that summer, so we talked about Lorrie Moore, J. D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill. That often spilled over into the main topic: who we were going to be when we grew up.

  I loved driving late at night when Matt was asleep in the passenger seat and I became all-powerful, immortal, with no need for sleep or food or conversation. I needed only gas and road, which went on and on, through the dark, through the rain and heat lightning, through the mountains and the sky. I remember the violet morning we crossed into Utah, and in the gathering light I could see that the land along the roadside was all white, though it was much too hot for snow. Matt woke up when I pulled over, and we got out to walk on the crunching mineral crust of the Great Salt Lake Desert, miles of shiny whiteness.

  A day later when we were coming into California it was very hot on the highway and we saw a little lake. We didn’t know if it was a reservoir or a pond or what, but we knew that it was ours. We parked and ran across the highway and took off our clothes and jumped in and the water was just the right cold, it smelled pure and perfect, and this was what we’d been waiting for our entire childhoods. There was no lunch or dinner, there was no job or school, there were no bathing suits or rules.

  —

  IN KATONAH, AT DAVID KLAGSBRUN’S fortieth birthday dinner, we met his new suburban friends. They were different from us, Matt and I felt, more grown-up (less fun). I made small talk on the cold front deck of the restaurant with a curly-haired woman, and she told me about her daughters and how exhausted she was all the time, and then something turned in her head and her face looked like it wasn’t sure what to do with itself. She said, “Are you the Ariel who all the bad things happened to?”

  I said that I was, and wondered how many other Ariels she could possibly have to choose from.

  She said, “Everything happens for a reason.”

  Technically, that is a statement of fact. The reason I was talking to that woman was that she was friends with David. The reason she was friends with David was that he’d moved to the suburbs, where he didn’t know anyone. The reason he didn’t know anyone was that his best friends (his real friends) had grown up with him in those same suburbs and vowed never to return, because even though Westchester is tranquil and wonderfully vegetated, there is an empty stillness that falls there every day from New Year’s until the crocuses come up that can suck the joy right out of life. Was that what she meant?

  I told the others about that conversation the next morning and we couldn’t stop riffing on it. The reason Matt was horny was that he hadn’t had sex in months. The reason he hadn’t was that every time he went on an Internet date, he found himself too worried about the inevitable breakup he’d have to initiate to initiate the sex that could precede it. David’s six-year-old came in from the yard, and he got in on it, too: The reason he was drinking juice was that he was thirsty. The reason he was thirsty was that he’d been running around with his brother, still in his footie pajamas (which also happened to be the reason that there was mud, everywhere). It was clear: Everything happens for at least one reason.

  It was fun. Sort of. The reason it was only sort of fun was that my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I’d been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.

  22

  An email arrives from Dr. John Gasson, Medical Director, SOS International Clinic, Ulaanbaatar. As promised, he has sent my medical report, which I need to submit to my insurance company. He has also attached a study on p
reterm birth that he mentioned when we were in the clinic. “Just in case you have any lingering doubt or feelings of guilt,” he writes.

  I ask him if it is normal that I’m lactating. He explains that the oxytocin that brings on contractions also signals the body to lactate. He adds that the “milk letdown reflex after a miscarriage is one of nature’s less kind tricks,” which I think is an elegant and apt way of putting it.

  Dr. John asks how I am feeling. I tell him that I am in hell. But the very fact of him asking, of being in communication with the person who was there that night, is a balm beyond any other.

  I thank him for asking. I thank him for being so kind to me at the clinic. I ask if it’s gotten even colder in UB. He says that it has, but that the real problem is the pollution: The colder it gets, the more garbage and coal people burn in the streets for warmth and the harder it becomes to breathe.

  He is in UB only half the time. He explains that six months of the year, he lives on the other side of the world in South Africa, in a cottage he built himself. There is a stable there that he put up for his horses, and next door, his two teenagers live with their mother and her second husband. When Dr. John is at home, he goes surfing early in the morning with his seventeen-year-old, and riding in the afternoon with his younger son when he gets home from school. “I do miss my kids and horses when I am away and that can be difficult,” he writes. “The kids will be leaving school soon and off to university. Then I will just have the horses to miss.”

  I tell him about the time I spent in Cape Town, about my Ethiopian driver, Zerihun, and how we walked up Table Mountain together when we had time between interviews. I describe the meeting with the track team out in the wind in Limpopo, the encounter in Pretoria with Caster Semenya.