thoroughly festaed
Friday 31 December 2004 | I like a cookie
It’s three-thirty here at Chez Zen and I’m curled up in bed imitating Herself—that is, lying here with my G4 on top of the duvet and pretending to work. She could be playing solitaire for all we know, but I don’t think she is; she’s a force of nature—as M. used to call me—but I don’t feel terribly forceful at the moment. I feel like a depressed, suicidal person, and can’t quite arrive at how this happened. As I lay sleepless and cold here in the dining room last night (tonight: hot water bottle!) and watched the moon track across the skylight, blaring in my eyes rudely, I thought with great clarity: The Pill. Whenever I live with a man, I get depressed. And whenever I live with a man, I’m also on the pill. Remembering that when M. would go on his two-month stints to Britain, I’d quit taking it and feel that miraculous surge of energy. I know it’s too simplistic to make a one-on-one mapping or correspondence out of this; I know that. I also threw my almost-empty pack of Ovcon-35 in the trash; never mind about Yasmin, I’ll try it later, and decided N.’s just going to have to use rubbers, though I’m terrified of my fertility—if, that is, we ever get it on again.
For (she continued self-centredly) we’ve had the two most dismal phone calls since I left home. The first was last night as I huddled out of the wind in the crook of the south side of this building, far enough away from Herself’s room, I hoped, though I could still hear her sneeze occasionally. I discovered I couldn’t hold the cellphone in my gloved hand so I had to take them off (gloves not hands) and then was violently Cold. It was a forty-five minute phone call largely consisting of me sobbing full-bore and accusing N. of heartless eviction every time he tried to console me.
Unnarrator [crying]: It’s all very well for you to tell me everything’s going to be okay, everything’s not okay, you’re in my house watching movies and I’m homesick and cold and lonely and I’m so mi-i-i-is-er-a-ble….
N. [bewildered, frustrated]: But we agreed on this in the therapist’s office—this was your idea!
Unnarrator [crying harder]: But how could you let me?
In the end I said I’d call him today and probably just come home in the morning; we hung up and I came inside and tried to sleep, failing utterly. Got up at half-six for zazen and service and hostile intestines (mine). Skipped breakfast, tried to work on book desultorily, met with Herself, switch to present tense.
We sit together on the ungainly ridiculous gargantuan leather sofa (a gay friend who died of AIDS left it to her in his will, some kind of perverse anti-Buddhist joke) and she wants to know how long I need to stay. I falter, fumble, fall silent, nearly crying again. She eyes me levelly, friendly but blunt. “You’re such an incredible woman, but you know you keep doing this. M. was brilliant and beautiful—but. And this young man is amazing—but. If you’re going to be in a relationship you need a man not a boy. And I know [laughs sadly, wryly] because I’ve gone through thousands of boys. So take a week, stay here, sit zazen, get stabilized. And I need you to work on my book, because I need to maximize my life!” [Said with energy and humor; it’s her recent conviction of her own incipient death thing.] I just nod, basically, for the entire fifteen-minute conversation. Then we try to figure out why I can’t connect to the Internet through the kitchen phone jack and she insists I use hers, up in her apartment—then insists I use her phone instead of the resident one to make calls from, though using her phone is not private in the least—me paranoid, wondering, she doesn’t want me back with N., doesn’t want us together? Did she hear me crying on the phone last night and doesn’t want me to talk to him? Does that mean he’s not welcome here to visit me? So confused; so much projection and speculation. I subside back into my dining room, pretending to work on the book, while she begins the abbot’s council meeting in the living room. I hear about five disjointed sentences about me before I hear her say sotto voce, Why don’t we move to another room, and they all leave. You know, she’s just in so much pain she can’t even…just needs a place to stay…you know this relationship is really…don’t know what will happen…in so much pain.
I creep at this point out to the phone and call N. who’s groggy and surprised I’m not already home by now. But how can I be; kind people have made up a bedroom for me out of a dining room with a massive mahogany table and ten chairs, and my robes and computer and papers bedeck it thoroughly. And Herself thinks he’s too young for me. I immediately start crying convulsively, or anyway so hard I can’t talk properly. I wheeze or whimper, I’m so confused. I say, I’m in so much pain all the time and when I try to talk about anything remotely sincere to anyone who remotely cares, I crack like ice and all this water comes running out. I admit to him that Herself said things which have confused me further (without telling him what they are) and now I just don’t know at all anymore. N. wants to know when he can come see me, I cry harder, I don’t know, whenever I talk to you I just cry and I can’t get anything done [and, she editorializes, I then have to spend an hour writing about it to feel any peace at all] and I don’t know and I don’t know, I’m so confused.
N. by this point also confused, saying I thought you just needed physical space to work but now it sounds like you need emotional space too. I can only clarify to the extent of, I always also need emotional space in order to work. We’d planned that he’d come tonight for the New Year’s Eve ceremony (zazen from ten to midnight, culminating in the 108 bells) but he doesn’t want to sit, he was hoping it would be a party and he could talk to/touch me, under the guise of socializing. I cry and cry, hoarsely, quietly, hoping the abbot’s council meeting can’t hear. He isn’t coming to rescue me. He doesn’t say You know what? fuck this, I’m driving over there. He just says, with what sounds like genuine tenderness: I’m so sorry you’re hurting, it’ll all be okay.
Bollocks. And yet. What kind of fruitcake secretly longs to be rescued, especially one of such advancing years? He also says: as your lover I want you here with me right now. As your vow-brother I want you to do whatever it takes to find home. I lose my temper, explode: I didn’t come here to find home! I came here to get work done! And within a minute am sobbing again, apologizing: I don’t mean to be mean, I’m just so wretched.
[An aside: Herself also encouraged me to go ahead and go to my movie reviewer job on Monday and Tuesday—I lied and said I would, then told the Arts Editor I’d already scheduled my Monday and couldn’t come in—because Monday is the day of the Great Application Conclusion and I for whatever reason don’t want to tell Herself about this just yet, so it’s all messed up as usual, I’m caught in my own web of lies! après George Constanza, where in the world will I go in this town where there’s high-speed access and I can do all the uploading and such necessary to the GAC, so screwed, why didn’t I just tell her, tell the Arts Editor, tell everyone everything, sometimes I so deeply and sincerely despise the dysfunctionally dissembling me.]
Where was I. Ah yes, romantic angst at midlife. So finally N. and I settle on the idea that he’ll go see the Jeunet flick with me tomorrow, so I can write the review Sunday. Temple closed for New Year’s so no problem there. I come back in the dining room, blow nose vigorously, chase away Persephone (beaming from three nights of ardent sex with her love), chase away an intrigued Nepali monk, chase away a besotted Housekeeper with a hoover and a space heater, work on Grief Chapter. Skip lunch, try and largely fail to eat a sandwich. Take Imodium. Throw away Ovcon-35 pack. Work on grief. Work. Work.
Is N. too young for me? Was M. too young for me? Am I making the same moronic mistake over again, changing merely an initial consonant, progressing like Mr. Dalloway in an iteration of M to N but not leaving the whole damn alphabet behind? Walking down the same street while trying to avoid the same hole? Is there anyone in the world who knows me well enough and is old enough to give sane advice about this? Is Herself a wise older woman who knows me and has been watching me for the last few years, knows my tendencies, knows my blind spots—or is she an unwise older woman who isn’t at all supportive of relationships and has never been in a successful one herself? Now that N. has a full-time job and will be going back to college in January, am I being silly to ask him to move out? Should we move in together, or is it foolish to trust him again, after I already did once—trusted him to protect my privacy, protect my need to write, protect my financial stability? Or was I reckless, not to take care of those things myself, rather than throw them incautiously into the caretaking of some unknown other, rather than yield my personal power to yet another penis being?
I don’t want to be judged for wanting sex and closeness, erotic connection and head games of the “safe, sane, and consensual” variety—for wanting the messiness and challenge of romantic partnership. Neither do I want to be STUPID. Neither do I want to hold grudges and insist dogmatically, geriatrically, on signs of stability, reliability, responsibility, before I agree to trust someone completely, or even enough to live with him. Like there’s some series of hoops he has to jump through. He resents this stance, on the rare occasions when I momentarily assume it, horribly; is terribly hurt by Herself’s assessment, doesn’t ever want to come to Chez Zen again—and she for her part I think has been hurt by his lack of initiative on the prison project, and his not supporting me. I want to ask her, why do you think he’s “very very young”—on what actions or inactions on his part do you base that? And am I supposed to decide similarly? even though I also see from him other actions (and inactions), other personae, than anyone else does? But is it foolish to decide to be with someone just because they’re a way with you in private, a way no one else will ever be able to witness—when no one else will ever really get it? Why would I have put up with the quitting-the-restaurant-job, the not-paying-two-months’-rent, the not-having-an-eight-hour-day-to work-in…actually as I type all this I wonder why I did put up with it…is sex really that compelling? oh dear…a full $1K later I admit to you, yes, it is, apparently, it really is.]
I have only one comment on which to end the debacle which was 2004, and approach the dizzying shiny novelty of 2005, may it be much less thrilling and entirely dull and predictable and sane:
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
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