From Comfortable Distances (10 page)

“Right across from the
Yacht Club,” Neal said.

“Yes,” Tess said. She
moved past her neighbor so that they were closer to her other neighbor’s house,
the sloppy woman who had married an Israeli man. “I’m sorry for talking so much
today. I don’t usually tell people that I’ve just met my life story. I hope
that I didn’t intrude on your morning walk.”

“I enjoyed listening to
you and walking with you. I still have two more husbands to hear about.”

“I promise to spare you,”
Tess said.

Neal stood with his hands
clasped behind his back, as if he were ice-skating.

“Would you like to come
in for tea?”

“Oh, no. Thank you. I
need to be going.”

“Sure,” Tess said.

He turned to leave and
then stopped.

“If you didn’t leave
things behind, there wouldn’t be room for the new,” Neal said.

“I suppose so,” Tess
said.

Neal smiled, bowed his
head, and then he crossed the street. She liked the way his lean body moved,
his arms swinging slightly at his side. There was an economy to his movement, a
steadiness.

The cleaning lady was
watching her as she made her way to her porch and Tess had an urge to skip or
wave to her, only she didn’t. Better to let the cleaning lady think of her as a
flirt than crazy. As she opened her screen door, a gust of wind flicked cherry
blossom petals onto her porch and with them came a beat-up, orange-striped cat,
pouncing the falling petals in attack mode until it locked eyes with Tess. Her
initial reaction was to scat it away and yet the cat’s glare mesmerized her.
Could this be the same creature she had almost hit in middle of the road that
first day she had seen Neal walking in the street? No. She imagined there were
hundreds of stray, orange cats roaming the neighborhood. She had a sense of
loathing and intrigue towards this creature. Another gust of petals came flying
toward her porch, apparently spooking the cat, which darted off her porch as
quickly as he had appeared.

Tess turned the page of
the photo album in her lap. She leaned back against the bed board. There was
Prakash, standing in the driveway, waving back at her. He couldn’t have been
more than five-years old. It was before any of the divorces. He had been such a
happy little boy.

“Remember when you had
the big white parka jacket?” Tess spoke into the air, the speakerphone
microphone a few feet away. She laughed. “You looked like a polar bear.”

“You scare me when you
talk to me and look through old photo albums, Mother.”

“You scare me when you
call me Mother.”

“Are you in my room?”

Tess had left Prakash’s
room as it was when he left for college on the west coast. White walls with a
navy trim on the baseboard and around the window. The comforter was navy and
all of the accents were deep tan—pillows, frames, knick-knacks. A mixture of
Ralph Lauren nautical and minimalism. Something in her gut had told her that he
wouldn’t come back east, but she had decided against changing his room. She
liked feeling as if a teenager was still present. She lingered on his framed
black and white aerial view photos of the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges.
Three Frank Lloyd Wright books still sat on his desk along with a picture of
him and his college buddies at Berkeley. He had always wanted to be an
architect—even when he was a young boy.

“I can tell you’re in my
bedroom,” Prakash said.

“How can you tell?”

“For one thing you’ve got
me on speaker phone, and you always get this weird tone when you sit in my
room. Nostalgia overcomes you.”

“I’m an old lady, Kash.
Let your mom get her kicks thinking of you as a little boy. Wow. You should see
some of these pictures. Remember when you had the guinea pig? There are
pictures of you kissing it. I never realized how ugly guinea pigs were.”

“His name was Seymour.”

“Right. Seymour.”

“How’s the yoga going?”

Tess turned the page in
the photo album. “Okay. I took a few more classes.”

“Next time you come to
visit we can go to yoga classes together.”

Prakash had started
practicing yoga when he was a freshman in college. When he told Tess back then
that he was debating becoming a yoga teacher on the side—something to do in the
summer while he was doing an internship—her first instinct had been that he was
gay. That was before his manic girl dating phase began: one affair after
another.

“I’d like that.”

“You should come out here
for good, you know.”

“We’ve been through this,
Kash. I am not moving to San Francisco. The west coast makes me antsy. Besides,
what would I do out there?”

“Live.”

“My life is here, Kash.”

“Broaden your horizons,
Mom. Enough with your real estate junk. If you come out here, I’ll build you
your dream house.”

“Don’t talk to me about
broadening my horizons. I’ve lived a lot longer than you. What’s going on with
the girls? Find anyone you’re ready to settle down with and marry?”

“Like I’ve told you
before—you’ve had enough marriages and divorces for both of us.”

“You have such a way with
words sometimes.”

“Mom, I don’t want to
deal with a long term relationship. I’m fine—I’m having fun. Besides, I’m
married to my job now, like you.”

“For your information,
I’m not married to my job, Kash.”

“Admitting an addiction
is the first step to getting over it.”

“Thanks. I’ll consider
that. When you find someone you love, it’s a beautiful thing to make them your
partner. Life is too short to waste even a moment, Kash. “

“People who try to scare
you into believing that life is a flash are people who need to learn to mellow
out. I refuse to live my life as if I’m on speed.”

“I just don’t want you to
wake up one day and realize that you’ve watched your life pass by you without
experiencing everything.”

“Mom, really, do we have
to go through this again? This all applies to you, too, you know. Are you
really experiencing your life working away all day, all weekend?”

“My life is on the down
slope, Kash. I’ve already lived plenty.”

“In Brooklyn, sure.
There’s a whole world out there – so many options.”

“Point taken. We won’t go
through this again.”

“Thank you,” Kash said.

“But, it’s lonely not
having a partner in life,” Tess said.

“It’s hard for me to take
that advice from you when you have left one partner after another.”

“I guess I am not the
best role model,” she said.

Tess took the photo that
caught her eye out of the album. Prakash was sitting on the floor,
cross-legged, staring up at the person taking the photo. He wasn’t smiling or
frowning. He was pensive, and the look on his face—as if he was in the midst of
a higher communication—frightened her. She remembered a phase he went through
in which he had decided that he was going to become a Buddhist. He couldn’t
have been older than 12 or 13. Tess had reprimanded her mother—warned her that
if she kept infecting Prakash with her religion stuff that she was going to
forbid him from visiting her up in Woodstock.

“What did you do when you
used to go up to your grandmother’s?”

Prakash laughed. “I’m
glad to see we’re off the relationship tract,” he said.

“Did she teach you about
Buddhism?”

“I don’t think she taught
me about it so much as she just practiced it.”

“Did you think it was
silly—all her meditating and praying to idols?”

“Silly? No. Just the
opposite. I was interested in it. I don’t know. I guess it was a little confusing
with her being so into it and you being against it.”

“I was never against it.”

“I thought you were.”

“I wanted you to follow
your own path, Kash. I didn’t want my mom to persuade you.”

“My grandmother was not
one to persuade, Mom.”

Tess closed the photo
album, and studied the picture of Prakash up close one last time before she
placed the picture in a crack in the edge of the mirror in his bedroom.          

“Did she persuade you?”
Prakash asked.

“I think that she taught
me what she knew, what she practiced. So it wasn’t so much persuading as it was
being her daughter, living with her. I suppose that’s what all mothers do. They
expose their children to what they believe in and as a child, you either buy in
or you don’t.”

Tess leaned back on his
bed, positioning one of the throw pillows under her head, and closed her eyes.
What had she exposed Kash to? What had she believed in back then aside from
work and not being a Buddhist?

“You’re quiet,” Kash
said.

“I wanted you to follow
your own path, Kash. You know that, right? I didn’t want to force you into
anything,” Tess said, her voice gentle.

“I was a kid, Mom. I
don’t know if kids have their own path to follow, or maybe they do, just at a
certain age. When I went to visit my grandmother, she believed so strongly in
so many things.”

“Yes. She did,” Tess
said. She had been a blank slate to Kash. She wondered if she had seemed boring
to him in comparison to her mother.

“You still there?” Kash
said.

“I’m here.”

“Mom, it all turned out
okay,” Kash said.

She laughed. “If you say
so,” she said. Then, “Did you just hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That—a knocking—is that
on the phone?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Tess picked up the
portable phone, switching off the speakerphone. She moved from Prakash’s room
to her own bedroom, and stood adjacent to the window that overlooked the
backyard. She couldn’t see anyone out there. She moved into the hallway and
looked out the side window.

“Mom? What’s going on? Is
someone there? Are you okay?”

Outside, she saw a
person—it was a man—toss something up towards the window. Was it Neal? She
pressed her face to the glass and saw his bald head in the twilight. It was
Neal!

What was he doing tossing
rocks—were they rocks? —at her window.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I
have to go, Kash.”

“What the heck is going
on?”

“Someone is here for me.
I think it’s Michael.”

“Okay. Send my regards.”

“Sure thing. Can we
continue this conversation another time?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Love you,” she said.

She pulled open the
window.

“Neal?” she called.

He froze, but he didn’t
seem afraid to have been caught.

“Hello, Tess.”

“What are you doing? Why
didn’t you ring the doorbell?”

“I didn’t know if you
were busy.”

“Go to the front door,”
Tess said.

The moment she opened the
front door, there he was. His hands were behind his back now, as if he was
about to pull a rabbit from them, and for a moment Tess felt afraid. There were
so many crazy people around—what was she doing opening her door for this man?

“What’s going on, Neal?”

He pulled a bouquet of
roses, red black under the setting sun, and offered them to Tess.

“For you. I picked them
from my own garden. In honor of your patron, St. Theresa.”

They were beautiful—fully
bloomed. He held them out to her and looked down at the floor when she took
them from him.

“They’re gorgeous,” she
said. “Thank you. I don’t remember the last time someone brought me flowers.”

She had always told the
men in her life that she didn’t like flowers—that giving someone something that
died in a week was a bad omen. Now, though, holding this bouquet, she felt
intoxicated. She had never realized how powerful an effect flowers could have.

“Come in,” she said
holding the screen door open for him.

The neighbor who had
married an Israeli man was outside in her driveway with her six-year old son
who went to Yeshiva and always seemed to be in trouble from his mother. She was
trying to coax him to go into the house with her, but he seemed to want to run
up and down the driveway to avoid her. Once he saw Tess outside, he ran ahead
of his mother up the porch and into their house.

Neal pointed up at the
sky. The stars were beginning to appear.

“It’s such a gorgeous
night,” he said.

Tess came out onto her
porch in her bare feet and sat down on the top step. Neal sat down beside her.
The breeze came in waves. There was a softness to the air, a hint of summer
tinged with the coolness of the evening bay breeze. Holding the bouquet between
her knees, she wrapped her cardigan around her tighter.

“Are you cold?”

“Feels good,” she said.
Then, “I haven’t seen you around in a few days.”

“I’ve been writing
through the mornings,” Neal said.

“Your book?”

He nodded. “I usually get
to work by 3:00 a.m. and stop by 6:00 a.m. or so to take a walk, but when I am
coasting along, it’s hard to stop. This week I’ve been losing track of time, so
I’ve been letting myself go with it.

“You get up at 3:00 a.m.?”
Tess asked. She held the flowers clasped in her hands now. In the breeze, the
petals danced.

“I guess some habits
don’t die,” Neal said.

“You’ve been getting up
at 3:00 for a long time?”

“For at least 20 years,”
Neal said.

“Does everyone in Canada
get up that early?”

He looked at her for a
moment without saying anything.

“Look at the moon,” Neal
said. “Just a slither and yet so bright. Just a few more days until the new
moon.”

The night sky was a deep
navy blue, the stars suspended like snowflakes. Tess hugged herself; the sea
breeze became cooler. She felt the spring in every ounce of her.

“Want to go for a walk?”
she asked. She felt the residue from her talk with Kash. A walk would be good
for her, get her out of her head a little.

“Now?” he said.

“Now,” she said.

“I could go for a bit, I
suppose,” Neal said.

Tess was about to ask him
what he needed to do at home, but instead she picked up her bouquet and said
she would be out in a minute. She was learning that people’s private business
was probably better off kept private. Inside, she grabbed her ivory cable-knit
sweater, slipped on her white canvas tennis sneakers and took down the vase
from atop the refrigerator, and put the bouquet in it, adding some water. She
pressed one of the roses to her nose and inhaled deep and hard. Its sweet smell
was intoxicating.