Stride Magazine - www.stridemagazine.co.uk
Crows and Sparrows
In divorce, the gods drop you from their lap, and the force of the inevitable and adverse nudges you into the unknown, oblivious to your whimpers. Before you can protest or brace yourself, another source of harm and ruin shoves you into the body of the stranger beside you, so that you yourself become that stranger, first to the world, then to yourself. Alone, you wander into the forest of alienation where strangers introduce you to the age of self-help, Zen, and yogic self-centeredness. And although you strive to attain mental well-being, you, too angry for enlightenment, feel only discontented and rebellious. Or you seek spiritual elation in sex and food and sleep, but receive only disillusionment, the return of hunger, and another day. You cannot suppress the scorn lacing your mind and will; you cannot unearth your good, kind self. Instead, in spells, regret hammers against the inside of your head. Or consternation vibrates through your ribs, tingling your fingertips. In the aftermath of your marriage, you, pushed into a friendless world, roused to fear, and pacing with uneasiness, cling to the structure of yourself, hugging a kind of mannequin of yourself, and in the creepy grayness of dreaded daybreaks, you lay fraught and sleepless over what is to come. Sweaty and weary, you sigh. The fight of your life is on. First stop. My counselor.
I am full of confession this morning.
I tell Linda that at night, I fly the dark continent to my
small hometown built on a rocky river-cut peninsula that fits into
western "Who are ya?" I shout. " "What
are you?" "Beautiful
and strong and good!" "Right!" "Damn
right!" they surprise me by adding.
My
mother--I can see her now--laughs into tears.
With her cheeks streaked, she waves to me, her favorite, her
youngest. We share the same
spirit--I am her, and she feels me in her.
My father, with life in his old knees, stands out of his wheelchair,
to see his son, the favorite son of the Into the morning, while we sing and dance across the green,
the sun rising over the shoulders of the “And how do you feel about that?” Linda asks. Next stop. The gym.
It’s good for me, they say, releases my instinct as a builder.
My mind and body unite in a drive for motion.
Reason and impulse pull together.
Below my conscious level is this concentration for action;
deep in my nature is this feeling for the physical:
Over time, man has carpentered cities over valleys he has excavated
of stone. I am mind and body
and will, the three of them in rhythm.
I practically sing work songs on the calf machine.
Later, with my shirt off in the shower, involuntarily rubbing
my chest and shoulders and arms, I am an ape in my unconscious reflexes.
Although time, I know, will remove all trace of me, I am, today,
total. Next. The bookstore.
Time to go to work. Here I search among the customers for eternity
in one encounter; I expect
my soulmate to approach with a discounted paperback. At times, this bookstore, with its high glass
walls, seems to trap me like a fish in an aquarium, although, in shape,
it fits into the city, I often imagine, like another 55-gallon drum. All the while, between me and the customers
runs the counter of tact, behind which I am too timid and polite to
risk good relations. What can
I brave saying, during ten-second retail transactions, to grab the
heart of my rescuer? The rest of the great, adventuresome world lies
beyond me, through the spectacular pages of the National Geographic
I shelve. I am clerk #58. The booksellers,
I not always among them, work as if in a commune: owning the store jointly but cultivating it
individually. Gail manages
her personal boundaries better than her staff.
Frank--"Self. Self. Self.
You’re always thinking of yourself. Volunteer if you feel self-absorbed"--
despises the egotistical but accepts me only because of my kindly,
good humor. I have literary thoughts.
Living in Roark and I and others like us scale the heights of heaven
to ponder above these regions of hell on earth.
We are the climbers and the perchers, situating ourselves as
lone spectators of our infernal world.
We stand on the hood of this spaceship of earth, facing the
breeze of speed. We sit on rooftops, haul ourselves onto windy
cliffs, and fly small planes through the clouds; we shinny up trees
to reach widow's peaks, scrabble up goat trails to the mountaintops,
and shoot up elevator shafts to the clock towers of the city--all
to meditate above Pandemonium.
Then, as if overnight,
she arrives in your life, a beautiful lover. You rejoice in your amazement that a lovely
companion has saved you from solitude.
You grow younger, and both of you rush toward the future, to
redeem yourselves in the triumph of regained love.
You bound into the days ahead of you, spirited and smiling,
feeling great joy. Her name is Beth. She
is tough. All of my life I
have been drawn to tough, older women.
I do not want to know why.
So far, what we have discovered in common is that both of
us married our friends--hers later became an alcoholic, mine a victim. But the Wounded can Heal the Wounded, according
to her copy of the Kitchen Table
Book of Wisdom. At this early stage, she calls us "fitness buddies."
Every morning she jogs three hard miles out in the hilly suburbs where
she lives. Last month, she
did a 500-bike ride through She is a school teacher, and this is summer and her precious
time off, but she is not sunning herself by her pool, reading back
issues of School Arts to
find creative ways to teach art to 8-year-olds.
Why she works out several times a day--jogging in the morning,
biking in the afternoon, weightlifting in the evening--is none of
my business. Her husband resented her fit physique. Also, none of my business. She owns a Chesapeake-blue condo in the burbs, a cute 3-year-old
Honda, and earns 30 thou a year as an art teacher for a Catholic private
school where she has taught for the last 18 years; I rent a dingy
low-income efficiency downtown, ride the public bus, pretend to be
a freelance writer, and accept money from my parents. "Age. Just a
set of numbers, right?" she says, sucking on her water bottle.
I
do not respond. I am not thinking
about our ages. I am thinking
about our lifestyles. Around
us, the room is still. Even
the furniture looks petrified to hear what I am thinking. Play exhilarates intimacy. Play joins adults like kids. Play makes friends. I love her book The Kitchen Table Book of Wisdom. Romantic relationships begin and last, it tells
me, when kept fun and friendly. I am at her house. We
are lying in bed. She has just
told me that the Catholic priest at the private school where she teaches
has been her lover for the last few years.
I roll over and face here.
What am I thinking? "This
next chapter has already been written for me,” is what I am thinking. A Thornberg story… I also know that, by the way, this is one of those future-determining
moments. "A
priest?" I say. She
gives him a name. Tom. She
gazes off into the darkness, as if expecting, or deserving, to be
reproached. But I feel no righteous
anger--she has not betrayed me; amazed me, maybe, but not violated
my confidence. In her and, for that matter, in my life after divorce,
I feel no confidence at all. "A
priest?" I say to myself, lying naked where, last evening, he,
the priest, must have lain, his big wooly belly spreading and settling
like pie filling: I have seen
a photograph of him, a big, bearded man, shown to me, in undetectable,
surreptitious guile, as her "friend."
Who would have ever suspected that she is having sex with her
priest? Such an unthinkable thought, right? So
how is sex with this priest? That
is all I can wonder, lying there, where he, Tom the spiritual father,
the carer of souls, was and must have often been, his collar placed
properly on her nightstand. I look down my body, glad my stomach still appears
sunken. Beth still sits on
the edge of her bed, waiting for me to react in rage. "So
you love him?" "I'm
in the process of breaking it off with him," she says back. You cannot remember
when--how long ago and at which instant--you broke with yourself,
with your bond of faith and honesty.
When you hear planes whisking through the blue, see bright
taxis carrying excited families into the shopping district, and smell
tasty dinners in the hallway of your apartment building, with chatter
and laughter beyond the walls, you realize, as your heart withers
and hardens into a plum pit, you are alone--yet you are how you wanted
to become. It is just two evenings later. I am again lying on her bed, naked, when she
arrives with another development in my meditation on divorce--we would
become ugly with each other now. "I
feel guilty about this," she says, waking me. I
roll over to face Janus again. I
already know she is about to kick my heart out like the bottom of
a rusted bucket. "I
still love him." "I
think I should leave." I
am furious, or think I am, and rise to dress. "Wait…please.” Hers is a lazy, half-hearted plea to keep me, and only for
this gross mockery of me do I despise her.
As she attempts to stop me from leaving her condo, stepping
in front of me and grabbing
my hand as I reach for a doorknob, I feel we are acting in a prime
time romantic drama written by Danielle Steele. Then, the horror, the
unimaginable, starts. You cannot
hear her apologies over the pounding of your resentment. Soon petulant and quarrelsome, both of you feel
unseemly together, tarnished by arguments.
Discouraged by your sudden incompatibility, both of you agree
to give up, to break up. What
amazes and dismays you, in the days after you part, is how brief,
how fleeting, the relationship turned out to be.
As you remember it, the vehicle of the relationship, the passion
that I go to see Mary, an older, writer friend. I am an incubus, I tell her. "A
what?" She squints into
the sun blazing across the outdoor café, and from that I see for sure
that she’s too old to become my next victim. Is
anyone well-read today? I scoot
my chair closer and whisper my incredible secret to her.
My friend Crystal has identified this demon in me, I add. Old
Mare gives me the eye. "Is—was— No,
Mary
relaxes. "Because my friend
has a daughter named I
make some kind of face of mock disgust. "No,
but I think that's fascinating, really," she continues. She
is my Zen master of sorts. I
need her advice. I tell her
I am not keeping any of these "drained" women as friends.
Each, in the end, disdains me. "Well,
as a writer, you court rejection," she says, "so maybe these
conquests...maybe they off-set all that." I think about this. "Maybe
you're a satyr,” she says. I
smile: The old girl proves
herself literary after all. I
pull out my notepad to jot down the word: satyr. Bursting into the streets
to search for your savior, you become aware of the hopeless size of
the world around you--seeking companionship, you might walk for the
next 30 years. At the start, you pass only zombies of despair
huddled at bus stops, littered and grimy. (Divorce, you note, dropped you into the low-income
district.) Old scrub women
with massive baggy arms do not see the handsome youth in you anymore,
and young office women modeling smart outfits detect the trouble,
the desperation, in your stride. All
the world, it seems, senses your uneasiness.
Even bums eye your frightened soul like food.
Or you feel invisible, when not ugly.
Buses blow soot at you--you are too sensitive, you admonish
yourself. And too self-critical, you add. Downtown, attractive, moneyed couples snicker
at you. Uptown, predaceous
gays smile sinisterly at your vulnerable self-consciousness--you are
curious, they know, of how men comfort one another.
Day after day, fear and hope kick and slap and shake each other
in a tussle for your soul. When
you feel at your worst, crows fly low to cackle over you, "...John
Lonely, John Lonely, pessimism is you, John Lonely, John Lonely..." Tonight, the good and evil in me are in a dead heat. I balance myself on my bike on the In I phone my former counselor. Former. "Linda, why is everyone so afraid to laugh and love
today?" "People
are afraid of being hurt.” "Aren't they more afraid of not living?" "John,"
she addresses me officially, "are you interested in resuming
our sessions?" All
of my life I have yearned to be someone's hero, I tell her. "And
you have been," she reminds me.
“Several times. How's
the job going?" She is beginning to assess.
That kills it. Having
her on the phone, I grow desperate for her understanding. "We're all dying, Linda, dying in spirit."
Now I sound gravely troubled.
"I
hear you're hurting--" "I'm
not hurting," I quickly correct her.
"I'm perplexed." I worry whether I see the modern world
clearly: I perceive an edgy
land of incertitude, in which people remain unfamiliar, talk seems
generic, and feelings go unidentified.
Life, as it seems, has neither limits nor possibilities.
People are as vague as dreams.
They seem as constrained by caution and reluctance as the low-rise
apartment building and office parks interlocking over the land. People
breathe in caution. They warn
themselves not to laugh and love; they inoculate themselves against
danger and risk. We live our lives beforehand. "I
hear you, John. But I think
in your case," she says, "you
spend so much time being charming that you come off as if not having
a care in the world--now you’ve called me at home.
Come on Monday morning. Bring
a payment." Love drowns like a
sweet, pale girl too dazed to swim, her mouth bubbling out life, her
nightgown flowing upward beautifully in the cold black water.
"What do you want?" Phillip puts to me long-distance.
What
I want, I answer him carefully, is a good, complete friend and lover. I keep a picture of her in my head, in a vignette,
framed by maturity and wisdom. Is
my request of life reasonable? Or
do we just get what we can get. Modern
life entails this kind of oxymoronic free-for-all for possessions,
this materialistic brawl softened and disguised by laws and ethics. "Good women do not root through--" I am growing flustered in my search for a wise,
clarifying remark. "--through
the Dumpster of Souls." "Dumpster
of Souls..." Phillip repeats, almost singing the phrase. Then he tells me to scare myself, to step into
the body of another man. I could dress as Bruce Springsteen; I could impersonate Fabio;
I could portray Romeo; I could double for Nicholas Cage; I could pretend
to be F. Scott Fitzgerald; I could imitate Jackson Brown; I could pose as Van Goh. Or I could be John. I have plenty of advice, but no help. "Breathe
well," Craig, from his holy orb in my conscious, reminds me. "Respect
the dignity of each individual," Amanda, behind a tree in the
park, whispers. "Be true to yourself," In Melony’s house reads a plaque: "Live well, laugh often, love much." But in the end, all I can do is to think furiously to form
my mental picture of John. Sunday afternoons press
against your chest, as if your soul were in the vice of the week's
end and its beginning. You
feel short and slow and heavy, like a settling house.
Depression floats over the hemisphere of your brain like heavy
gray clouds. You pray to reach
Monday, to rejoin society in routine.
You pray to belong again. You
pray. Monday morning. Time
to see Linda. In her office,
I am heavy-hearted and fixed on the past.
My deceit of myself, I say, nearly cost me my place in the
world. In I talk about Craig. He
is my editor at Utne Reader. Well, he is not really my editor. More like he takes pity on me, as well as takes
my calls during which I whine for an assignment, and he gives me none,
smelling instability on my end. Instead,
he meets me for coffee, every third Friday, when he needs to feel
benevolent. "Sponge
people up," he smiles. "Don't
bat them away—and don’t forget to breathe." Whenever
I meet with Craig, I note his remarkable mellowness, first, for a
busy, important editor, second, as a father and husband and 46-year-old. I assume that as an adherent of the Utne thoughtfulness, he has gone peacefully
hippie over the years--or maybe by chanting as a Zen Buddhist he has
purified himself. Anyway, I
have noticed that he does breathe slowly, calmly.
In the coffee shop below his office, where he can keep me at
arm’s length, he sits breathing like the sea.
So self-controlled is Craig that he seems to balance, on his
head, a stack of a thousand bricks.
Living, for him, is restful.
In discussions, his mind hums like small, tight wheels on a
sporty coupe. I can learn from
him. But he is not my friend, I tell Linda.
My true friends are gone. Ted is in Hampton, Virginia. Walt went to Prague to be the editor of a revolutionary
newspaper. When he finally
called me back last week, he sounded different, himself screwy, full
of abstract chatter about spirituality.
The newspaper had folded, and he’s now running a yoga school.
Also, he is in love. I
don’t recognize him, nor he me. I ask Linda about the changes people undergo. "Well,
your friend Walt's been halfway around the world," she replies,
"and you--you've been to hell and back." I
shift, feeling wearied by it all.
"But
you are getting better,” she says. With
that, our eyes meet, and I actually wonder if she’ll co-sign a lease
with me. Take the next bus, she says. Love and safety will wait. Weirdness is not
my friend, she says, and there is no punk called fear. Inhale, exhale. See the beauty. Have friends. Be a Spartan sharing the distance. Be in the universe. There is no incubus, only crows and sparrows,
no life by cellophane, no lone spectators, only the audience around
us. I tell her I forgot to bring a payment. Back at the bookstore. "So,
are you taking a trip to Bermuda?" I ask easily and naturally
to a pretty woman needing a travel book about that place.
What thrills me about being a bookseller is cozying up to strangers.
We are walking along a corridor in the bookstore, as I am showing
her to the travel section. A
friendly, outdoorsy gal with a bouncy stride, she is naturally shining
her smile on me. "Yeah,
in February, with friends. It'll
be cool." "Oh,
sounds nice. Friends from work?"
My smile is equally jaunty and also a tad frolicsome, to
the extent that my small, innocent questions play around me like puppies. "No,
from church." "Church?" I stop--still and silent on the floor of the
store, like a toy man whose batteries have just run out. Without
her smile, her eyes enlarge into cold black buttons staring at me
in sudden uncertainty, quickly verging on alarm, for in her view of
me as a kind and helpful young guy is now a blind spot. Seconds
widen around the earth as I stand still.
My reaction has activated in her ears the store alarm. "It's just that it's nice to hear that," I finally
tell her. "If I may say
so." Joy,
like a puppy, jumps back into her arms and licks her face. "Oh I know," she gushes. "It's been the best thing in my life."
Religion, she is free to tell me, has delivered her from the
great modern mix-up. I
like her. Jackie, her name
is. She is, as they say, okay. "I
can't wait," she goes on. "A
whole week in Bermuda." She
is, for the moment, my own bright and warm Bermuda. "So," I resume, as if now asking her an important
question, "what'd you plan to do there, for a whole week?"
In the vaguest way, in my secret hope of someday outrunning
the ugly ostrich of loneliness, I am inviting myself along with her.
Jackie
and I are somewhere on the stairs taking us to the ground floor when,
in the blur of passing posts, she tells me that she is really going
to Bermuda because, there, her boyfriend can receive experimental
chemotherapy, their final resort against his leukemia.
The stairwell under me begins to shake.
"Oh,
it's okay," she assures me. "We've
been dealing with this for a long time." Okay? Death is a giant chasing them--I can hear it
above her now, pursuing her down these stairs like a beanstalk. "Are
you all right?" she asks me, smiling. I
say yes, but I am not all right. I
manage to find her a book and to make sure it’s the one she wants. But I’m glad when she leaves. I go upstairs and sit down in the lounge.
I don’t care who sees me. I am not a loner--but
I am lonely. And I am not as
courageous as I should be, in a lonesome world.
Many walk alone, I notice.
Many men, women. Actually,
I do not want companionship--what I want is courage. As I sit here, sunken in the lounge chair, I realize that
to feel and seem normal is to settle slightly.
Life after divorce, to put it directly, is a hard-boiled afterlife,
a tough existence after innocence and good conscience, a later period
in one's life when hope is stained.
Divorce seems both a brand on the shoulder and a wrinkle on
the cheek, a mark both of discredit and age. At 34, I am boating miles upriver of the great high falls;
at 44, I will arrive where the terrain begins descending and funneling
toward a gap in the mountains; at 54, I will reach the low sandbars
and rocky shores and slow, heavy water of the river shouldering in
a pool against the dam; at 64, I will hear, in the distance, the hiss
of the dragon living in the waterfall and will smell its zesty, organic
watery breath; at 74, I will
feel the showering mist of the roaring, angry falls, salivating while
it waits for me to fall into its mouth; at 84, I will drift to where
the water drops, then I myself will drop, at last, to the center of
earth. The vacation of life
will end on that Friday--but this is still only Tuesday, and I have
my cat to feed. |