The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother’s relationship with Marcus, Lucy’s relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.

  My job is to interpret, and to communicate my interpretation persuasively to other people. The idea that in life, unlike in writing, the drive to analyze and influence might be something worth relinquishing was to me a revelation.

  26

  “I was seventeen when I got conscripted into the army,” Dr. John writes. “I did a year and a half, then got an early release to go to medical school (which is why I ended up a doctor and not a veterinarian, which is what I really wanted to be). I was slowly coming to realize that I was fighting on the wrong side, so early release sounded like an excellent idea. The army was largely very boring, in a ‘not another fucking beautiful day in Africa’ sort of way. When it wasn’t boring you were getting shot at, so boring was generally preferable.”

  His favorite memory from that time was of swimming with some croupiers at the Victoria Falls Hotel when he was on leave. “I knew one girl well, she swam for the Rhodesia team, and the other girl was a vibrant redhead from England. The swimmer and I decided to head across to Cataract Island, which sits right in the middle of the falls…it’s spectacular, because you can go and stand on the edge and peer straight over the precipice, with huge volumes of water rushing past on both sides. To reach the island, you have to swim strongly across a section called Devil’s Cataract. Unfortunately, the English girl decided to follow us. We were over halfway across when this redhead went bobbing past, not making headway and obviously on her way straight over the edge of the falls. I swam after her and managed to drag her to the island, but we only just made it. It was really hair-raising: your eyes are at water level so you can’t see what’s going on but the water is going faster and faster and things are getting really noisy and turbulent and you can just feel this unbelievably massive power sucking at you. And all the time I am trying to decide ‘when am I going to let this woman go and just swim for it myself?’ But as you can imagine, that’s a very difficult decision to make, and fortunately I didn’t have to make it.”

  I think of Norman Rush’s novel Mating, and his description of approaching Victoria Falls: “Well before you see water you find yourself walking through pure vapor. The roar penetrates you and you stop thinking without trying.” His protagonist, a tough, lost American woman in her thirties, is “overcome with enormous sadness, from nowhere,” when she first sees the falls, and finds herself weeping wildly. She is a fierce character, an erstwhile Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who has marooned herself in Africa, yearning to accomplish something substantive and “feeling sexually alert.” At the falls, she has the urge to make herself “part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism,” by casting herself into the avalanche of water. “I started to edge even closer, when the thought came to me If you had a companion you would stay where you are.” This revelation destabilizes her. “Where was my companion? I had no companion, et cetera. I had no life companion, but why was that?”

  My companion is gone. Where is Dr. John’s companion? I think about how such a woman would dress and talk, what she would know and want.

  “After that, things got comical,” his email continues. “A spotter plane had seen all this going on and alerted the army, so the whole battalion, including my commanding officer, was standing on the banks of the Zambezi watching us make our way back. The English girl had lost her bikini bottom somewhere in the process (and as I mentioned she was a very vibrant redhead) so I felt obliged to lend her my swim trunks. Getting back entailed making our way over to the Zambian side and then walking up-river on the bank before swimming across. So there I was, a stark-naked white Rhodesian army boy escorting two girls in what was essentially enemy territory, being watched through a pair of binoculars by my commanding officer. It was on the eve of a leave period for me, which got canceled as punishment. That ended up being fortunate, because the following night a platoon of ours got ambushed and sustained heavy casualties, so having an extra medic they could fly in was useful. The rest of my war stories are really mundane and boring. Well, none of them involve red pubic hair, and I’ve always thought, ‘What’s the point of a story without that?’ Haven’t you?”

  27

  Finding yourself single when you’re used to being married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone. The risk is greatest when you are surrounded by intact couples and families. If you are among other single people and you feel yourself start to slip, there is always the possibility of grabbing on to another lone human.

  A month before her due date, Emma gets married. The reception is at a little restaurant in Pasadena. We sit outside under strings of fairy lights, the pricking scent of jasmine penetrating the cool January night. Mercifully, the party is small—most of Emma’s friends have come without their husbands and children, so it is as if time has turned back to the days when we were all single, when everyone was holding on to everyone else. I try hard not to drink too much or to cry.

  Emma and I always acted as if I were the slightly more together one. I had an easier time getting boyfriends in college. I was more strategic and dogged about my career when we were in our twenties, and figuring out how to live as an adult seemed to require all of Emma’s resources. We agreed on a narrative in which she was less adept at wringing what she wanted from the world.

  But now here she is, eight months pregnant, bursting with life in a white lace dress. Her beauty holds your eyes: her sweet small teeth, her pale skin and dark curly hair, her ladylike hands resting on the balloon of her belly. During the ceremony at the temple, it seemed like a wedding not just between Emma and her husband, but between both of them and their baby. The rabbi referred to “the three of you” throughout the service.

  I know that Emma feels bad about going into motherhood without me—I felt bad about going into lesbianism without her when I met my first girlfriend. We dislike being out of sync.

  “Do we look alike?” she used to ask people in college.

  “On a spectrum of heads,” my father told her once, “you’re not that far apart.”

  A girl at a bar in the East Village asked us, “Which one of you came up with the personality?” when we were jabbering at her one night soon after we moved to New York City. We loved that.

  The last time I saw Emma before the wedding was in August, at the beach in Massachusetts, when we were each in our first trimester. Her mother, Margaret, has a carriage house in an eighteenth-century whaling village where the houses have little plaques by the doors stating the years they were built and the occupations of their first inhabitants: mariner; distiller; gentleman. We met there, as we have every summer since college. In the mornings we went walking past the fields of Queen Anne’s lace. In the afternoons we drove to the beach, both swollen in our bathing suits. We discussed names, of course, but also holidays, birthdays, when she would come to New York and when I would visit her in Los Angeles, whether there was any chance the babies might dodge inheriting our hair, which is the same: curly like a sheep’s.

  We would be the godmothers of each other’s children. We would raise them as cousins. We talked about what it would be like the following summer, sitting with them on a blanket and dangling their four feet in the sea.

  My mother’s house on Cape Cod is not far from there; she came to dinner that night and brought an oddly shaped piece of yellow fabric she’d woven on her loom for Emma to use as a burping cloth. Though Margaret has a South African accent and my mother retains a vaguely midwestern inflection, flecks of Yiddish float through both of th
eir speech. They are the same size and shape (small, with fluffy silver heads of hair) and they both wear loose shirts and comfortable sandals. I watched them getting dinner ready together. It was easy to imagine our mothers in different clothes, in a previous generation, doing the same thing somewhere in Eastern Europe. None of us were very far from one another on a spectrum of heads.

  At Emma’s wedding, while we are eating the white cake together after my toast, she says, “Do you hate me for being pregnant?” And I tell her the truth. I feel that her child, in a lesser but still crucial way, will be mine, too.

  —

  LATE THAT NIGHT, Emma’s parents and I sit on her couch looking at a map of South Africa on the computer. We zoom in on the street in Cape Town named after Margaret’s aunt, Helen Suzman, the only female member of the South African parliament in her era, and, for thirteen years, the only member to oppose apartheid. (P. W. Botha called her a “vicious little cat.”) Emma’s father, Erroll, points out Muizenberg—“Jewsenberg,” people used to call it, he says—the beach where he learned to surf, just outside the city. And not far from there, we find Sir Lowry’s Pass, where Dr. John’s horses are waiting for him at the foothills of the Hottentots Holland Mountains. “It’s a very nice part of the world,” Margaret says, in that crisp, familiar accent I was so surprised and relieved to hear in a Mongolian clinic a few months earlier. We look for images of the area on the Internet and see green cliffs rising out of the sea. I imagine what it would be like to ride a horse through those mountains, to grip an animal with your thighs and have no choice but to hold on and hope.

  “The first time I really had a chance to ride was when I was about six years old,” John wrote me that morning. “We were on a coastal holiday in the Transkei at a secluded, slightly shabby resort. There’s a strong indigenous horse culture in that area, mainly for cattle herding on the dirt roads. The resort had a string of retired and grumpy old ponies and some shoddy tack held together by string. I used to drag my brother Greg down there two, three times a day to saddle up and go riding; if I couldn’t find him I would just go and hang out in the paddock on my own. One morning I wandered down there and as I wiggled through the fence they decided, as a herd, to come to me rather than the other way around. It was the first time I remember being truly happy after my mother died. One old mare leaned down very close and blew a gust of warm air from her huge nostrils straight into my face. I burst into tears. ‘Look her in the eye and blow your soul into her nose,’ a Xhosa groom told me later. I’ve done that with every horse I’ve met since.”

  He has three now: an old mare, a skinny white filly, and his favorite, a chestnut gelding. “The riding around Sir Lowry’s Pass is great, there are miles of paths through the local vineyards and olive groves. If you were ever in the Cape for a while, I could teach you to ride. You would love it.”

  Though Margaret and Erroll grew up in overlapping social circles in the Jewish community in Johannesburg, though they’d both heard of each other and knew members of each other’s families, they didn’t start dating until they’d left home and crossed paths in the United States. We marvel at the unexpected ways people find each other.

  28

  When I hear that someone has lung cancer, Did he smoke? comes into my head midway between the syllables can and cer. Obviously I don’t say it out loud, but I want to know, because I want to believe that if only my loved ones and I refrain from smoking, we will be ineligible for lung cancer (and, ideally, every other kind of cancer).

  “Have they figured out what happened yet?” people keep asking me about my own medical defeat.

  “Yes,” I tell them. “I had bad luck.”

  That is not what they want to hear. They want to hear that I had a bad obstetrician. Or that I took something you are not supposed to take, or didn’t take something that you are. They want to hear that I neglected to get an ultrasound. Or that I have some kind of rare blood disorder that can be fixed with the right medicine or surgery or iPhone app. They want to know what they have to eat to keep from being me.

  And since I have done something that sounds bad, people—even people who really love me—persist in saying things like “Next time, you’re not getting on any planes.” It doesn’t matter if I tell them that every doctor I’ve consulted has said unequivocally that there’s nothing wrong with flying when you’re five months pregnant. They want to believe that everything happens for a reason.

  Some people need to believe this to indemnify themselves—against miscarriage, or misfortune in general. Some people need to believe it so they can say, “You’ll get pregnant again and everything will work out fine,” because they want to comfort me.

  But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.

  When I was in my early thirties I wrote a profile of Maureen Dowd. She was the sole female columnist at The New York Times then, and had been the second female White House correspondent in the paper’s history. She had started her career as an editorial assistant in 1974, the year I was born, and now she was fifty-three, had won the Pulitzer Prize, looked amazing, and lived alone. I remember sitting in the insanely decorated living room of her brownstone in Georgetown—the walls were blood red, the bookshelves were crowded with feathered fans, old Nancy Sinatra record jackets, a collection of bubbling motion lamps, another of mermaids, a dozen vintage martini shakers, all kinds of toy tigers—and being intoxicated by her peculiarity, independence, and success.

  I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.”

  It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

  29

  A fantasy: I find a story in South Africa. Something fantastic, that my mind wants to chew up. (I have been reading about Julius Malema, the former head of the African National Congress Youth League, who inserted himself into the Caster Semenya debacle. He has just been sidelined by President Jacob Zuma, who was once his mentor, but Malema still has avid support in the townships, and he is about to go on trial for money laundering…) In my fantasy, I fly to Cape Town and Zerihun picks me up. We are happy to see each other, excited by the reactivation of our unlikely alliance. This time, I have plenty of contacts. We are on the job.

  But really, I’m on two. Dr. John and I plan to meet—somewhere unfussy, with paper napkins. When we see each other it’s exciting but comfortable; words pour from our mouths like they’ve flowed from our fingers onto the computer. We are connected, united. In my imagining, we laugh easily, even though he is wry and old and dashing and I am coarse and young(ish) and Jewish. Somehow, I feel lovely. I am not ungainly and leaking. I do not feel tears stirring in my sinuses. In his eyes (and therefore mine), there is still a coruscating light in me, I am not dead inside and I don’t kill what’s inside of me. The past is prelude and now we are leaving the restaurant and the fog is rolling out toward the Southern Ocean. When he kisses me, it feels natural, inevitable. It doesn’t feel like a stranger has his mouth on mine; he doesn’t taste old or male or alien.

  I go to see his cottage, and it is just as he described it in his letters: “I keep my horse riding tack and saddles on wooden brackets mounted on one wall, and there is usually a surfboard leaning in a corner and a wetsuit hanging in the shower. When I added the wooden loft as a bedroom, I forgot to leave space for the staircase; it now has what is essentially a ladder going up the one side. Chickens roost in the chimney’s ash trap and they emerge from their egg-laying speckled grey.” It is a home, but a wild home, cheerful, peculiar—like Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla, with a horse on the porch in an overgrown garden on the edge of town, where it “stood there ready and waiting for her.”

  And then what?

  I
move to South Africa? He teaches me to ride horses and I have his baby? I become a foreign correspondent! I start a whole new life, a life I never saw coming. Either that, or I am isolated and miserable, I’ve destroyed my career, and I spend my days gathering sooty chicken eggs.

  A different fantasy: I fly to Cape Town. It is not as I remember it. It’s just a place, not another state of being. I am panicky and agitated. I cry without warning, and once I start, I can’t stop. It is not at all clear that my story will work out. Now I have lost my powers in that department, too.

  Dr. John and I make a plan to meet. But in this fantasy, I arrive at the restaurant and find it intimidating and confusing: I don’t know if I’m supposed to wait to be seated and I can’t get anyone’s attention. I’m afraid of being rude, wrong, American. When John arrives he is a stranger. I don’t know him and I don’t really like him, or worse, I can tell that he doesn’t like me. Our conversation is stilted. I know (and he suspects) that I have come all this way for an encounter that isn’t worth having, and a story that isn’t worth telling, at least not by me. I have made myself ridiculous. My losing streak continues.

  And yet. “I have never seen the great migrations. I’ve got a really old Land Rover that I’ve owned since 1986 (and it was old when I bought it). My dream has been to nurse it up through Africa one day—Cape to Cairo, or some version of that epic. Not that it is very reliable; I insist on doing all my own mechanical work, and that is so emphatically not a good idea. But breaking down can be very rewarding. Zen and the art of…that kind of thing.”

  Here is a third fantasy: I go. My story is real and I believe in my ability to tell it well. I meet him, but it’s not a date. We become friends—we realize that we already are. I look up to him; I come to depend on his advice. He is like a big brother, like Neil Reardon or my editor John Homans (but with silver hair and blue eyes and stories about riding a horse to work in the Transkei to do Caesareans by candlelight). We keep writing to each other after I’ve finished my story and returned home.