the boy
Friday 26 August 2005 | I like a cookie
I met N. in the Zen monastery where Mandarin and her British spouse lived for two years (before Mandarin was diagnosed with celiac disease and started a clinical social work graduate program, before her Brit ran off with a she to whom Mandarin long disdainfully, furiously, desperately referred as “the Succubus”). I’d been in shock during four weeks of practice period at my own monastery and remained thus for the entire three weeks of my visit to Mandarin’s Beautiful Trench, blindsided and gobsmacked by the recognition that my marriage had almost completely disintegrated, and that I still loved Mandarin in a way that simply wasn’t in the least reciprocated.
The night of our arrival, I’d fallen dramatically all over myself and the pavement of a small seaside town as Mandarin and I sprinted across the street to our car, suddenly realizing we still had to get petrol and pick up other monks and we’d be terrifically late. I was carrying a styrofoam box of our leftover tater tots and somehow I tripped on nothing and went down all over the sidewalk, scattering organic potatoes everywhere and smashing them into my blue linen trousers—and splitting the skin on my knee wide open (though strangely the trousers weren’t hurt in the least). There were great gouts of blood and clear lymph and glisteny sclera or tendon and an impressive cut that probably needed stitches but wouldn’t have been able to keep them because of where it was located, right on a joint. Mandarin drove us on into the Trench where the next morning I discovered that I couldn’t bend my knee enough to do prostrations. I didn’t do a single prostration the entire time I was there, through memorial services and full-moon ceremonies; I executed a humiliated, furious standing bow.
I also couldn’t work in the garden, as I’d dreamed of doing for 15 years, because I could only work standing up. I couldn’t make beds, either, or help carry anything, or type in the office, because of my tendonitis (see above).
So every day for three weeks I helped prep vegetables in the kitchen. I was stonily wordless and hostile, sometimes taking meals by myself at the silent table, Mandarin looking over at me wistfully. I said nothing to her and she must have wondered why I was being so viciously moody. By night I read Byron Katie and Cheri Huber and tried to stop believing that what I thought and felt was true, tried to start believing that there was nothing wrong with me. By day I prepped organic zucchini and corn and peaches and garlic and tomatoes and spinach and dandelion greens and potatoes, and I didn’t talk or smile. I was grateful when we rough-chopped 5-gallon buckets of the fierce yellow onions, because then I could let tears fall onto the chopping board and no one would ask me any questions. I had various crew leaders and fukaten, who would explain how much of what they wanted and how they wanted it cut. Sometimes the crew leader was a very young monk we will call N.
It was late on the last night of the summer, the night before we all were to leave the Trench, and I still hadn’t packed. I found myself prowling around the courtyard and library and zendo, restless. I didn’t know in which cabin N. lived, or why on impulse I decided to knock on the door of the cabin where I’d lived myself when I first arrived. He came to the door. What’s your last name? I blurted. He told me, an open copy of St. John of the Cross hanging from his right hand, finger marking the place. Do you want to come talk to me while I pack? He did. I finished folding the rakusu and zipping the suitcase just as the electricity cut out for the night.
We sat in the outdoor smoking area by the creek and spent hours talking (under cover of the water’s burble and rush), smoking (him) and drinking tea (me) until I was so cold I had to wear his down jacket and we eventually went into the library and then his room and about two hours of sleep and a mysterious night of Not Doing Anything, and then we didn’t speak to each other for seven months because we were both embroiled in messy personal lives. But things stuck in my mind from that night, stuck and burned like cinders, sparks all mixed in with Cheri Huber and Byron Katie and a talk given by N.’s teacher, the gay Maine Episcopalian priest—and something said to me forcefully by my own Maine priest earlier that summer sitting in the swingset at the park:
If you can’t do it for you, then do it for me.
That night down by the creek, I’d said something offhandedly self-deprecating, the way the Unnarrator has always tried to be funny—a kind of I’ll cut myself down before you get the chance modus operandi—and very quietly, very matter-of-factly, he replied with a sentence which floored me and left me uncharacteristically speechless for an inordinately long while. I can’t remember his exact words; a large part of it was in his tone; but it was something like oh, that—well, you don’t really need to say that, do you—not here, not with me—it’s kind of extra, yeah? I didn’t feel judged or criticized or put down because of my entrenched self-cruelty; I felt oddly beloved.
I started writing on the flight out of Oakland, on backs of napkins and boarding passes and anything else I could find, for the first time in months and maybe years. I returned to Santa Fe, separated from my husband, and moved to a stone casita in Tesuque to think about things and to get a cat.
Six months after that night I’d finished a book, about it and him and my marriage and the girls and the casita and me, and I sent a copy to him in the Beautiful Trench. He wrote me back while I’d been taken captive in South Texas, where I was helping care for my godmother, who has late-stage endometrial cancer. He asked me to call him while he was in Missouri on his break. I was sleepless and starved, reeling from my godmother’s suffering and the end of my marriage and mourning the painful non-loss of the first two suitors who’d fitfully pursued me and been pursued by me without quite being able to cross over the line to where I lived and worked and breathed and wrote (one, the Film Critic, as far as I could tell bloody petrified; the other, the Librarian, extremely married). I called him.
N. has lived in Santa Fe for a year now, at times with me, right now about ten minutes away.
He is a boy of the ageless people, the fey folk, fair-haired and short, my height, slight, with world-colored eyes of blue-green speckled with tiny golden-brown continents. He’s the kind of person whom children spontaneously address, come running up to in the streets to show him their toys, tell him their news. And he works with children who have behavioral issues; he’s gentle in restraining his clients to keep them safe and eloquent in play therapy, enacting their difficulties in relating with the aid of Clem, a stuffed orange tabby cat. He teaches boys to speak the language of emotion, shows that biting and screaming, hitting and shoving, aren’t the only ways to tell other people what they’re feeling.
Last night we went for a walk around the block at dusk. The elementary school in the neighborhood was having a fall harvest party, but we got there just as it was ending. In his alleyway, a small gang of three kids raced up to us and began simultaneously yelling at him: “Guess what? She’s my friend!” “They’re coming to spend the night with me!” “Look at this—she gave it to me!” He hollered back, “That’s wonderful!” and we walked on. After a minute I asked, did you know them or something? He grinned sheepishly. No.
He reads the colors storming above people’s heads, and knows what’s around the corner before we turn it, if it’s going to be dangerous. His mother and father were so brawling and crazy when he was growing up that he’s uncannily able to sense violence before it starts. He identifies himself as a recovering addict with a deep red wound and sometimes he still tries to hide the edges of it by bathing himself in chaos and charm, and sometimes rage and blame. Sometimes he falls on the bed and weeps like a tiny frustrated girl, and then he is most himself, and afterward.
He wants more than anything to go to Naropa next fall and to become a therapist (he says, a heart-worker). He draws black-ink words and figures, which decorate his house, a dark green fairy hut behind the elementary school. His garden is bare of all but poppyseed waiting for spring. He once was a poet, and he still thinks he can decide not to be one.
I’ve fought harder with him (12 years my junior, and in this incarnation, male) than anyone else I’ve ever known. I’ve also experienced ritual-contained intimacy with him beyond the explicable. He walks in shadows without fear. To me, it’s as if three thousand years ago dark blue serpents entwined his wrists, but he doesn’t remember his name. He may someday be the father of Green, and I may be her mother. I gave him back my birthday gift, a wide ring of white gold, for safekeeping. If I wear it again, I want it split in two and I want him to wear the other half, as binding.
I do not know to whom I may be anchored, if anyone. He and Mandarin are the end points of a line in my mind, ranging in a spectrum like sunset playing along the edge of the distant purple Jemez, and the ripe squashed summer fruit smelling of rain, of wine, of mice lying all golden scattered on the sidewalk. Apricots: violets.
I suppose September 1 will always be my new year—the academic year is when my brain comes alive and still thinks, like a schoolgirl, of new pencils and notebooks, new readers and spelling books, new clothes and new bicycles.
In Santa Fe it’s marked differently, as alien sometimes as Christmas in LA. I drive home tonight to the grocery store in a light rain, and daturas are open, white-throated and mute, pale in the dark. Today I got divorce papers in the mail from my British boy, and I thought I was fine, like an animal on anaesthetic, until I basically fell into bed and couldn’t get up until long after nightfall. I called Mandarin, numbly; she told me an old friend wanted to see her in New York—not just an anyone, a someone, a smart, sexy man she once adored, and who adored her. The conversation turned and turned; I sobbed and told her I loved her and that she couldn’t call me the love of her life, the most important person in her world, and then plan on someday having another partner but yet not demoting me—it won’t work, I said, digging my hands into the duvet to steady my shaking voice, your new lover would find it weird and threatening, take it from me (thinking of N. more than once brought to tears by the existence of my relationship with Mandarin, to which he’s angrily referred as “your courtly love affair”).
Romantic friendship, Boston marriage, amour courtoise, platonic love. When is your friend not your friend? Can your love for her ever just be what it is?
I flee to the natural foods grocery store seeking retail therapy. I buy premenstrual chocolate bars with rose and evening primrose oil and blueberries, on sale. As I walk out to the parking lot I see my Trudell cover story in a newsstand and think with disbelief and a dim sense of pride, I wrote that (”…or did you type it?”). And drive home, my sixth senses tingling, Mark Knopfler singing “Baloney Again” with the crickets chirping in the background like rhinestone sequins spangling black velvet.
A fragment I wrote this summer while visiting Mandarin in Massachusetts, a line I stole from one night lying sleepless, our two chaste twin beds with matching blue dust ruffles, the box fan’s rattle:
the peloton corners waterily, waterlily, flock of fish, school of swallows
I call the boy when I get home, desperate to hear the story in a way that won’t pierce me any more. It’s been a long decade. To my surprise, instead of being jealous or angry, he listens completely and happily. Then he tells me a story about two girls. One of them always assumes they’ll be together again someday. The other never thinks of it. When the one finally gets her divorce papers, she calls the other, a part of her thinking, now I’m free, now we can try again, now I can want you openly, now we work and play alongside one another so easily and well, now we’re healthier and we can be together, now now now. She has this assumption and the other’s had no idea.
Stop thinking, he says softly, that she has something you want and she’s just withholding it from you out of spite or delusion. She doesn’t have it to give to you. She never did.
I cry and cry and cry and cry. But I don’t want to die. This is a good thing.
The next day I’m putting all my paper journals into the cabinet I’ve just built for them. After decades of schlepping around in plastic storage boxes and steamer trunks, my journals have their own cabinet. I open one at random, and to my astonishment read a dream in which two Christian men are holding me captive, trying to force me to admit my apostacy. [I have this or a similar dream over and over and over, and then I have it some more.] I’m being as glibly, persuasively godly as I can, embellishing my studies in philosophy to sound like religious studies, telling them about the beliefs of Kierkegaard and Kant, my knowledge of the Bible. They seem friendly and increasingly optimistic. I’m doing pretty well, I think with relief, when they take a break, go to get me water. I lean forward in my chair to read the notes that one of them has been taking on a pad of paper, expecting or hoping to see something about how they arrested me by mistake, how virtuous a young woman I am. Instead my blood runs cold as I read:
“…says she has always been this way. A Lesbianne.” I’m so terrified that I wake up.
This was a decade ago, when Mandarin and I broke up the first time. Somewhere around the same time, I dreampt of a girl who had five lovers.
A tree, a cat, a horse, a girl, a man.
When one of them lay dying, they all fell ill and began to fail—and I was the only person who realized they’re all the same being. She shouldn’t have to lose them all! I railed against no one. Not all at once—it isn’t fair!
How these mutilations haunt me. Emily’s letters to Susan, burned. Susan’s letters to Emily, burned. Emily’s references to Susan inked over, erased, cut out of the paper. Elsie Hill’s letters to Alice Paul, destroyed. Alice’s letters to Elsie, though, are still in the Vassar library. Mandarin and I sat in the Smith library reading a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, our heads almost touching as we bent over the page. Woolf’s fountain pen had an italic nib, and her handwriting is indescribably lovely and also nearly illegible. Virginia chid Vita for worrying about Harold, admitted she would do the same if it were Leonard, and then flirts with her in a postscript, telling her about a new lady friend and openly trying to make her jealous.
What will become of me, become of her, become of we, babe, yeah….
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