The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  We are strangely important to each other for the rest of our lives. In this fantasy, he comes to visit me in New York from time to time. A few years after our first meeting, I go with him from the Cape to Cairo in his Land Rover. My kid comes, too.

  30

  Something is happening. Something very small and very new is sending up a shoot inside of me. It’s a sprout of surrender that feels somehow indistinguishable from safety. It is not emanating from a plan. For the first time in my life, I have no plan.

  I want it to grow. I want it to overcome me, like a bright vine swallowing a fading tree.

  Also, I want my son.

  I want to feel his mouth on my breast. I want to teach him the names of all the plants: Alcea, Nepeta, Alchemilla, Cimicifuga. I want to see him on his father’s lap and in my mother’s arms. I will never know another day when he isn’t missing, missed. I want my son. But I can’t have him.

  For Lucy I feel more tenderness and intensity than I can fit inside my chest. She feels like kin—like blood. I don’t want to be without her in this life. But our marriage is over. Slowly, we will become something else to each other.

  I don’t want to give up my home, the garden where I can remember planting every flower, the circle of stones that marks Paolo’s resting place, where he lies in an endless embrace with his sex bunny. But it isn’t mine to keep.

  I want to be fertile. I never want to expire.

  But death comes for us.

  What first? What else? What next?

  As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope.

  31

  The night before I left, Africa was golden and pulsating in my mind.

  I emptied the wool socks and maternity jeans from my suitcase, which I had shoved under the bed when I got back from Mongolia. I packed hiking boots, a bathing suit, my blue blazer for interviews, a stack of notepads, and the battered map of Cape Town I still had in a drawer with my passport, an adaptor, and some stray rupees.

  I called my mother the next morning from the airport, anxious. She said, “Get on the plane. You will be fine.”

  Maybe. Maybe I would get a great story from this trip—the best I’d ever written. Maybe not. Maybe I would fall in love again, and I would still get to be a mother. Or maybe it was too late, and I had already chosen, inadvertently and incrementally, to be something else. In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

  I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn’t come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself.

  Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.

  For AEN & EJJS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their generosity and kindness, I thank Jonathan Adler, Mark Alhadeff, Anne Banchoff, Jesse Blockton, Erica Malm Cooley, Jackson Cox, Simon Doonan, Benjamin Dreyer, Lauren Engel, Esther Fein, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Malcolm Gladwell, Erica Gonzalez, Alicia Gordon, Jenny Grant, Adam Green, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Cate Hartley, Julia Hine, Matt Hyams, London King, David Klagsbrun, Eric Konigsberg, Liz Lange, Shelly Levin, Robert Levy, Siobhan Liddell, Kate Medina, Deborah Needleman, Ed Pas, Beth Pearson, Anna Pitoniak, David Remnick, Meredith Rollins, Maer Roshan, Deb Schwartz, David Shapiro, Eric Simonoff, Annie Smith, Rene Steinke, Neil Tardio, Christine and Chuck Teggatz, Ahna Tessler, Jennie Thompson, Liz Thompson, Jacob Weisberg, David Zelman, Diana Zock, and Elisa Zonana. I would especially like to thank my friend Nick Trautwein.

  By Ariel Levy

  THE RULES DO NOT APPLY

  FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ARIEL LEVY joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and received the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 2014 for her piece “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She is the author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs and was a contributing editor at New York for twelve years.

  ariellevy.net

  @avlskies

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