From Comfortable Distances (13 page)

Yours truly,

Neal

Tess held her knees tight
to her chest and sighed, deep and loud. A monk. She laughed out loud and
scanned her kitchen—nothing at the window, nothing mysterious on the walls. She
almost expected to see a camera set-up zoomed in on her; some new reality TV
show about a woman finding out her new love interest is a monk. She laughed
again, this time her laugh winding into a moan.

A monk.

Tess got up from the spot
she sat in by the window, and went downstairs and out onto the backyard deck.
The cool May breeze rustled her hair. She looked up into the sky and without fail,
the stars sparkled down at her. It made sense to her and yet she felt lost, as
if someone had dropped her off in a maze, leaving her to find her way out of
it.

She laughed out loud
again, and whatever it was scurrying through the tree whose leaves shadowed
her, froze. A cat pounced from the tree and landed on the deck with a thud. In
the darkness its eyes glowed fire. Little by little, under the starlight, she
was able to make out its orange and white stripes. It looked to her like the
same mangy cat whose path had crossed hers on her front porch. It danced
forward, then back, as if it were walking a tight rope, trying to discern if
she were friend or foe. When the wind brushed the trees branches, the cat
darted.

A fugitive. That was what
Tess had felt like when she walked away from her marriages. It never mattered
who had instigated the breakup. In the end it wasn’t about placing blame but
about facing up to the fact that sometimes it was best to walk away—to let go
of what was and start over. If you never left the old, there would never be
room for the new. Neal had told her that.

It came back to Tess now,
that old, familiar
I cannot go on living the way I am living one more day
feeling. Not one more day. To jump off a bridge, to stand in front of traffic
was always her first impulse. The easy way out. Anything was easier than living
through change. The struggle of trying not to compare the here and now of your
life with what it had been the day before, then the week before, then the month
back. There had always been a glimmer of hope—no, not a glimmer. Hope wasn’t a
glimmer. It was more like a tiny hand breaking the surface of dark, thrashing
waves, pointing her forward, coaxing her toward something that she couldn't
quite see, making her feel as if there was a chance she could reach the hand in
time, pull it up from the water, rescue what lurked below.

When she had first
learned she was pregnant, some 32 years back, Tess had decided that she wasn't
going to keep her baby. She loved her husband and wanted her time with him
alone. She feared what a baby would do to them—create space, distance. Besides,
she didn't want to take a break from her career. Not then, after she had worked
so hard to get to where she was. For a few weeks during that first month when she
realized that she was pregnant, before she was ready to construct a plan about
this thing that was growing inside of her, she had dreamt that a hand was
reaching out to her, only she was never able to clasp onto the hand, never able
to save it from whatever it was trying to break away from.

The silence she had felt
inside those first few weeks of her pregnancy was both deafening and
claustrophobic at once. She felt trapped in her own body. Then there was the
fear that if she were to fall, get in an accident, she would have an explosion
inside. No, she didn’t want to have something blooming inside her, crawling and
pulling at parts of her she couldn’t get to. Feeling this strange creature's
every move made her feel as if someone was examining her and she couldn’t see
what they saw, only feel their frustration, their outbursts. The concept of
someone knowing her from the inside out, of her knowing someone from the
inside—of this creature sharing her mind and heart and her motions as it grew
inside her—overwhelmed her. She imagined the creature listening for her breath,
trying to fall in line with it. She imagined herself falling in line with its
breath.

It had seemed like so
much work. Too much work and pain and examination for any person to endure. She
hadn’t understood, had not yet taken a moment to consider an abortion as
anything other than a physical fix. She saw Neal in her mind, walking out the
door of the monastery, not looking back, and she thought of the morning when
she had woken up after having clasped the hand in her dream. There was no
longer a question of her keeping her baby then, but instead a knowing that was
nestled deep inside her. A connection. It was then that she realized that an
abortion would go deeper, remove something from her soul. And suddenly, she saw
an abortion as a loss of faith.  Even after her mind had made peace, decided to
keep the baby, there was a final moment of contemplation a few mornings later
when she saw a leaf dangling outside her window and told herself that if the
wind let up in the next sixty seconds and the leaf grew still, then it was
definite, she would keep the baby. A thought and a non-thought at the same
time. A silly promise and then the wind did stop and the leaf grew still and
she couldn’t remember what number she was up to, and she knew then, the way you
know you are going to cross the street even when the yellow is flashing don't
go, that she was going to keep the baby, that there had never really been any
doubt about her keeping it, that it had been a matter of her accepting her
reality and not fighting it. She knew that morning that she was going to name
her baby Prakash, the Hindu word for light. It had been a word her mother
taught her years back, although it wasn’t until after he was born that her mother
reminded her of the context. When she had been a little girl, Tess had asked
her mother why Prakash, an Indian man who lived a few houses from them, never
came to their home like the others did. Her mother had explained that he was
Hindu, not Buddhist, which would be like Tess going to a Catholic church. When
Tess had asked why he had an odd name, her mother had explained that it was a
beautiful name that meant light. In retrospect, Tess supposed that
subconsciously, she had wanted to create a barrier between her son and
Buddhism.

Tess had become so much
stronger once she had decided to keep her baby, and her new-found strength had
scared her first husband, Marc, who hadn't known there had ever been any
debate. Tess was able to see now that she hadn't let Marc into her life and yet
she had blamed him for staying at a distance. It was baffling the games people
played with one another.

Tess rubbed her belly,
deflated now. Me, was what she had thought back then, in her twenties, as
selfish as it was. My baby. Each time she examined her bloated belly in the
mirror, feeling it rise in her like the moon, she had thought
my baby
. 
But it was more than that, because in the selfishness, there was a sharing,
too: she would no longer be on her own. By accepting this baby into her life,
she was opening herself up to another human being that she did not yet know or
understand—that she may never know or understand.

Her baby, her Prakash. It
had almost been as if she had impregnated herself. It was her gift, her breath,
her burden, and she wasn’t willing to share. Not back then, at least. As much
as she wanted to write this all down here and now, share it with Neal, she sat
silent and still and focused on what his first step walking away from the
monastery had felt like. That had only been two months back. The newness of his
reinvented life. She smiled up at the heavens. Change was an act of bravery.
She smiled at Neal behind her closed lids. It seemed unimportant to drag him
backwards into her life. Besides, wasn't who she was an accumulation of all she
had been? She remembered what she had felt like inside the moment Prakash
pushed out of her–alone, utterly alone in the world, more alone than she had
ever felt when she was alone in the dark of the night, listening to her own
breathing. She imagined that this was what Neal experienced the moment he
walked into the monastery and away from the life he had been living. She
imagined that this was what Neal had felt the moment he walked away from the
monastery and boarded the plane back to Brooklyn after 23 years.

Neal’s shadow came into view beside
Tess as she toed the water's edge with her sneakered foot. There was something
in her that was fighting to keep life simple, to ignore the past and plow
ahead. That was the problem with letting someone into your life, with someone
letting you into their life—it made you both stop, reassess the directions you
each had taken.

“Tess,” Neal said. “There
you are.”

“Here I am,” she said,
turning to face him.

Standing beside Neal, she
was now able to articulate what it was that she had felt the first time that
she had met him in the chapel: that he was her comrade. Like herself, she saw
him now as a man who had lived a dual life—one that was expected of him and one
in which he dared to envision a different life. That was the odd thing about
learning about people in a behind the scenes way—once you came to face them,
you were never quite sure how to act.

Neal looked at her as if
he could walk right through her, keep going.

“Now you know,” he said.

“Yes,” Tess said. The two
of them were quiet and staring ahead, as if their next thoughts might fall out
of the sky.

“This morning when I woke
up, I stared at the picture on my night table—me standing beside the monastery
in my robes. If I lost that picture, there would be nothing to link me to my
life. It’s bewildering how fast you can wipe out your past.”

The water crawled up the
shore, staining the oiled sand a deeper gray before it retreated, soft and slow.
In the distance, waves bobbed, toppling over themselves. The current can take
your life, she thought, but it cannot take the life you’ve lived. She had
contemplated this thought for a long time, and she wanted to share it with
Neal, but it was as if she were in a trance. How was it possible that she could
think everything and nothing at the same time and yet amidst this static her
insides purred as if she were perched on a windowsill, safe from the world,
warm in the sun’s glow, taking it all in?

“This has been the most
peaceful time in my life,” she said.

Neal tossed a pebble into
the water. Circles opened out where the stone had vanished.

“Yes,” Neal said.

“A monk,” she said. She
smiled. It was easy now to imagine him in a robe—although she didn't know what
color robe he had worn—white? Black? She could visualize him dragging along in
his puppy gate, a prayer book in his hands.

“I'm not a monk anymore,
Tess. When I see myself in the picture with my brothers, I think
oh look,
there’s Neal
.”

He stared off into the
water, and again, she had an urge to touch him, bring his face to hers and kiss
his lips, as if with one kiss she could silence him, convert him to her lover.
But that wasn’t going to happen. They were friends. She was going to be his
friend and in a few months if he left, she would say goodbye and go on with her
life. She laughed so that Neal looked up at her. It tickled her the way that
she was wired. So typical, she supposed. The moment she knew he was off limits,
she wanted him more than she had wanted him the day before.

“How does one go from
being a monk for 23 years to not being one?”

“Monks are human, Tess. 
Regardless of what you do in life, your heart comes with you. Your internal
battles don't fade. The only difference from me living in the monastery versus
living outside of the monastery is that there, contemplation was part of my
job. Here, outside of the monastery, it's up to me to find time to be with
myself each day.”

Tess thought of her
marriages. Just because she had taken vows, it didn’t mean that her life had
changed. The truth was that she had kept on being herself—sometimes confused,
sometimes content, always questioning.

“What about women? Did
you miss them?” She wanted to know if that was part of his equation for leaving
the monks behind.

Neal nodded as if she
were asking him if he’d like more mashed potatoes. It was a non-committal,
indifferent nod.

“I didn’t want to get
married. It wasn’t in my cards.”

“Why? How did you know it
wasn’t in your cards?” He was gay. Wasn’t that what he was saying? “Did you
like women, Neal?  Before you entered the monastery, did you like women?”

 Neal paused. “Yes,” he
said.

“Did you ever have a
relationship with a woman?” She knew that she was crossing lines, that she
shouldn’t be asking, that he didn’t have to answer her, and yet she couldn’t
hold herself back.

“I had kissed some–in
high school, college.”

“Didn’t you want to be
with a woman?” Tess said.

“You mean did I want to
have sex?” Neal asked.

She looked down at her feet
before she met his eyes. She didn’t know why she was suddenly shy to talk about
sex. She was an adult. He was an adult.

“Yes,” Tess said.

“I was a devout Catholic.
I played by the rules. I dated nice Catholic girls who shared my beliefs—sex
wasn’t an option.”

“I see,” Tess said. A
virgin. Tess had never known a grown man who was a virgin. She looked away from
him. Thinking of him as a man who had never lain with a woman made her want to
keep him pure.

“To become a monk must
not have been an easy decision,” Tess said.

Neal took her in and then
closed his eyes and opened them, as if there was something he dreaded to say
but had to say regardless.

“I hated the monotony of
my parent’s life. Marriage seemed miserable to me. I wanted something more. I didn’t
want to graduate college and get a job and get married and have kids. The whole
concept of it depressed me. I didn’t want the life my parents had. I didn’t
want to be my father. He went to work and then toiled in his garden and woke up
and did it all over again each day.”

He paused and Tess didn’t
take her eyes from him. He seemed to be talking from somewhere deep within, a
place where she didn’t exist.

 “Maybe he was happy. A
lot of people like to live simple lives.”

“He seemed miserable,”
Neal said.

“Did you ever ask him if
he was miserable?” Tess said.

“No. We all lived within
our lanes, I suppose. My father was a quiet man—he wasn’t one to sit down and
tell me about his life.”

“Maybe there was more to
your father. More to your parent’s lives,” Tess said.

“I can entertain that
now. At 23 I didn’t.”

“He could have been
content,” Tess said.

“Yes,” Neal said. “I
never got to ask him. Once I joined the monastery, I never got the chance.”

“Do you regret that?”
Tess said.

“I’ve made it a rule not
to worry about regret.”

Her mother always said
that a life lived from one’s truth did not accommodate feelings such as regret.
Tess had always wanted to say,
yes, but in real life, people feel real
things and regret can be a very real thing
.

“You ran away from a life
that was monotonous and yet you chose a life—”

“That was monotonous,
regimented, judgmental.” He laughed. “I ran into what I was running away from.”

“What about the letter
you wrote me. About hearing God’s voice,” she said.

“It’s all true. I did
have a calling. I felt sure that it was the right path for me; the only path.”

“What does your mother
say about your being back?” Tess said.

“She’s doing the best
that she can, I guess,” Neal said. “She doesn’t say much. She’s been alone all
of these years since my father passed and now here I am.”

“Does she think you
belong at the monastery?” Tess said.

Neal laughed and stared
straight into Tess’s eyes, revealing an edginess that she hadn’t noted until
that moment.

“Do I think she’s happy
to see me? To have the company? Yes. She lives a relatively isolated life. And
yet, I think if it were up to her she’d have me on the first plane back to the
monastery.”

“Doesn’t she want you to
do what’s right for you at this point in your life?”

“She’s a religious woman.
Keeping me in her house is probably the same thing to her as a mother hiding
out her criminal son. She doesn’t want to mess with God; she doesn’t want to be
my accomplice.”

He had nowhere else to go
but back home to his mother. She studied her sneakered feet and moved one foot
in front of the other. It wasn’t a choice.

“I like you, Tess,” he
said.

One of her shoelaces
needed retying. She nodded as if in slow motion.

“I like you, too,” she
said. She would be friends with Neal, nothing more. A healthy, friendly
relationship. He was a middle-aged monk who lived with his mother.

 “Do you think that this is just
going to be a vacation from the monastery?” Tess said.

He squatted down and picked
up a wood strip scattered on the mud sand. He began to sketch what looked to
her like a circle.

“I left the monastery
because I couldn’t live up to my vows anymore. My life was, is, leading me
elsewhere. I took my time thinking things through. And then I asked to leave.”

“You were freed, just
like that?”

 “You make it sound as if
I escaped from jail.”

“You go back in a few
months.”

Neal traced the circle again. “In September I can ask for three
more months to discern my vows. After that, I have to ask the abbot to put my
dispensation though. The Vatican has to grant me a pardon and sign papers that
dispense me.”

If Neal
took the route he carved in the sand, he would go back to the monastery. The
trees sounded like rain, and Tess looked up to the sky.

“I won’t
be going back, Tess.”

Tess thought of her splits with her
husbands. Until she had signed the divorce papers, she had always felt as if
she was waiting for a sign from above that would tell her to either go back to
her marriage or let it be over. She had always believed that anything was
possible after the worst had already happened.

“You don’t know that,” she said.

“I can live as simply here as I did
at the monastery.  I can pray anywhere I am. I believe that God hears and sees
and knows us regardless of our zip codes.”

“The night I met you—you were at the
church.”

“Yes,” he said. “That night I had
found the scapula my mother gave before I went to the monastery. It brought
back a lot of memories. I put it on and then I road my bike to the church. I suppose
I wanted to see if I could get the feeling back.”

“Could you get it back?” Tess asked.

“When I was in your presence, I was reminded of why I
left the monastery. There was a freedom to you, a lightness. I forgot about the
scapula when I met you until you asked me about it when we looked at the
paintings. After that night, I put it away.”

Tess squatted, placing her hand on the sand, making an
imprint and pulling it away. What came to her was a vague, but haunting memory
of putting her wedding bands away in her jewelry box. The dismal pain of
divorce, the loss of hope, of faith, of love, that divorce was. And yet each
time she had realized that she was no longer in love with her ex-husbands, she
had felt herself floating, suspended between a state of lost and found. Each
loss had allowed her to find her way one step closer to the voice in her that
said yes, that said no. There were a lot of no’s: Tess had prepared herself,
warned herself,
no you are not going to do this again, you are not going to
let yourself fall in love again,
but the yeses abounded, because again and
again, there she was, a woman in love, a bride, a wife, and then as quickly as
the love came, like déjà vu, she was a woman out of love, a woman living alone,
rebuilding her life, trying to move away from guilt and loss. If Tess had given
up on relationships because they no longer fulfilled her dreams, hadn't Neal
done the same with his relationship? Hadn't they both shed skins?

“You don’t think that I’m done with
that life,” Neal said.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,
Neal,” Tess said. What was going through her mind was the fact that if this man
could walk away from God, how easy it would be for him to walk away from
another human being.

A pack of pigeons in the sky
scattered in random directions so that Tess didn’t know which one to follow.
She was trying to pinpoint the differences between standing next to someone you
were falling for and the silent, yet-to-be-spoken goodbye you felt inside when
were in the presence of someone whom you knew would not be in your life for
much longer.

She felt Neal’s eyes on her, but
didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious. She couldn’t remember the last thing
he had said. It didn’t feel fair—that she could ask any question of him when
she was not sharing her heart in words with him.

“Tess, I had gone to the church that
night to ask God what to do. And there you were. You silenced my questions with
your presence. I was in darkness, confused, searching for something, only I
didn't know what it was that I sought.”