From Comfortable Distances (22 page)

“We were just friends for
a long time. I saw him walking away from your porch a few mornings in the past
weeks. Is your ‘just friend’ spending the night now?”

“I wasn’t here those
mornings you saw him walking away because I was already at the office.”

“I suppose he was just
hanging out on your porch?

“He was leaving me
cookies if you must know.”

“Cookies?” he said.

“He bakes,” she said. “Did
you come here to interrogate me?”

“I came to talk to you
about this yoga teacher training nonsense that you’ve gotten involved with.”

Tess laughed.

“It's funny to you. Your
mother dies and now you intend to become a yoga teacher and decide to start
hanging out with a guy who is clearly a freak,” he said.

“I’m not
hanging out
with a freak, as you call him, and I don’t intend to be a yoga teacher.”

“Now you don’t want to be
a yoga teacher?” he said.

“Will you give me a
break—I’m trying something new, that’s all. What’s this really about?” Tess
said.

“You think I like
this—that I want to be here saying these things to you?” he said.

Tess held up her palm to
Michael as if she was directing traffic to stop.

“Right now I don’t want
to hear what you want.”

“What are you going to do
with your mother’s house?” Michael said.

“I don’t know yet,” Tess
said.

“Four acres, up in
Woodstock, about 3200 square feet house with balconies on each of the bedrooms,
all French doors. You would know better than me, but my guess is that you can
get over a million for it—maybe close to two. Someone could convert it into two
properties—a house and a store of some sort.”

“We'll see,” Tess said.

“Maybe I'll buy it,”
Michael said.

“I don't think so.”

“Are you sleeping with
the weirdo?” he said.

“No, I'm not sleeping
with him. Neal and I are just friends. Couldn’t this conversation wait until we
were in the office?”

“I just have a funny
feeling about him, Tess. I saw him with his mother yesterday; at least I
supposed it was his mother. They were in the supermarket. Just the way they
interacted. His mother seems like a nutcase. And he seems as if he's
sleepwalking or something. He functions in slow motion,” he said.

“We're all weird,
Michael.”

“You don't get it, Tess.
Trust me. If he's hanging out with you, he's falling in love with you. I
predict he's a goner, waiting for the right moment to move in for his kill.”

“Michael, not everyone is
in love with me.”

“No, but most men that
know you are,” he said.

“I'm sure that he's
planning to ambush me during one of our morning strolls,” Tess said.

“Perfect crime scene,” he
said.

Tess laughed. “Michael.”
She stopped.

“What Tess?”

“The weird guy as you
call him, is—was—a Roman Catholic monk.”

Michael laughed a deep
belly laugh so that spit came out of his mouth. “A monk?”

Tess handed him a napkin.
“He lived in a monastery for 23 years. He left the monastery in March. He's
only been back in town for two months.”

“Wow,” Michael said. “You’ve
outdone yourself this time, Tess. But I still say he wants you.”

“Michael, I barely know
him. He’s an acquaintance, someone who I’ve run into a few times,” she said.

Outside, the sun shone
bright. Tess stretched her neck left, right.

“And, we don't ask one
another too many questions—the best type of friend to have,” she said.

“What are you trying to
say?” he said.

“I need to get ready for
work,” she said.

“Tess—I miss you.”

She watched a pigeon
outside walk across the telephone wire. It moved deliberately, gracefully,
before it dove into flight.

“You don’t care,” he
said.

“Michael. Don't do this.”

“What am I doing, Tess?
Is it so wrong of me if I miss you, miss us?”

“No.”

“You just don't want to
hear it,” he said.

“We're friends, Michael.
Please. You're feeling nostalgic today, that's all.”

“We changed our lives for
one another, Tess. You forget that sometimes. I left my wife, you left your
husband.”

“We did that for
ourselves, not for one another. That's just where we were at back then. Now
we're at a new point in our lives,” she said.

“Now I'm slaving away at
your company while you’re busy becoming a yoga teacher and seducing a monk,” he
said.

Tess laughed. “I promise
that tomorrow you'll feel differently. You're just lonely today.” Tess stood up
and stretched tall, and while her arms were in midair, Michael hugged her tight
around her waist. She hugged him back.

“I’ll leave you to get
ready for work,” he said. “I hope you're right about today.” He kissed her
forehead and let her go.

He moved down the steps
slowly, as if he had weights on his legs. She lingered at the door for a moment
as he got into his car and drove away. Sometimes it was so hard to make sense
of life. She couldn’t remember why she wasn't with Michael, but when she thought
of waking up beside him each day, of going to sleep in his embrace each night,
it was enough to make her desperate to wash it all away. Michael had asked for
things that Tess could never give another person—permanence, security, herself.
When she was with him, she had always felt as if she was playing a game of tug
of war, trying to hold onto the parts of her that Michael tugged at. There was
no doubt for Tess—she was done with relationships. To think that you could form
a union with anyone other than yourself was a myth.

“Neal!” She must have
been sitting at the foot of the cherry-blossom tree and reading the
Yoga
Sutras
for over an hour, unless Neal was early for their date.

“I didn’t mean to startle
you,” Neal said.

“I lost track of time,”
she said. “I only meant to come out here for 15 minutes at most.”

He pointed to the cat by
his feet. “I’ve brought a visitor,” he said.

Tess's eyes met the cats
and in that moment of recognition, she understood that it was the cat that had
been crossing her path these months. The cat didn't take its eyes off Tess, so
that she felt as if she couldn't break the stare, either.

“He's been waiting by the
bushes surrounding my house each morning. When I start walking, he follows
me—at least for the first block or two. Today, he followed me the whole way
here.”

 “We know each other,”
Tess said. She held out her hand to the cat, and still, not taking its eyes off
of her, the cat began to sniff at her finger and then sat down beside her,
purring as he rolled onto his back, his belly to the sky.

“Hello, kitty,” she said.
“You always run away from me, don't you? But now you want to play. It's as if there's
a whole world in those eyes of yours, isn't there?” she asked.

The cat nuzzled Tess to
pet him and hesitatingly, she reached out and touched his fur.

“You’re not such a bad
cat,” Tess said. “Even if you look big and mean.”

He was pretty beat up—cuts
by both ears, crusted blood by his nose. She wondered if he had any diseases. “I
haven't had a cat since I was a little girl. My mother always had cats running
around our house.”

She scratched his head
with her fingers so that he closed his eyes, his purr growing louder. She hoped
he didn’t have fleas.

“He likes you,” Neal
said.

“Do you want some milk,
kitty?” she said, and the moment she began to make her way to her feet, the cat
darted full speed into the backyard.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t
mean to scare him away.”

“He'll be back,” Neal
said. “Cats remember kindness.”

“Maybe,” Tess said,
smiling at Neal, sad now that the cat had gone.

“I'm glad we're doing
this,” Tess said, pulling out of her driveway, glancing for a moment at Neal in
the passenger seat. The way he strapped in and leaned back in the seat made her
smile; he looked as if he were preparing for takeoff.

“Me, too,” Neal said.

She had run into Neal out
on the shore of Jamaica Bay a few mornings back. Watching the boats pass by in
the early morning, Neal had said
In More In Caelo
, going on to translate
it:
In the sea in heaven.
He had told Tess it was the motto of the
Intrepid upon setting sail. His father had always said it whenever they saw a
boat go by and then Tess was saying that she’d never been to the Intrepid and
neither had Neal, and so they made plans to spend the following Saturday of
Memorial Day weekend, one of her rare Saturdays off from yoga teacher training,
at the Intrepid Museum in New York City.

“My friend from yoga has
been talking about your cookies to everyone in Teacher Training and giving them
a taste. You've got a following. If you ever want to open up a cookie shop, it
would be a hit.”

Neal laughed. “Monk
Cakes.”

“Or the Cookie Monk.”

“The Cookie Monk,” Neal
said.

“We're laughing, but I'm
being serious. I could search for some reasonable real estate for you and we
could make it happen.”

“Somehow, I don't think
that God intended for me to leave the monastery to become a bakery owner.”

Tess was silent as she
stopped at the light. She didn’t know what to do when he brought up the
monastery. Was she supposed to ask about it? Ignore it?

Tess merged into the right
lane of the Belt Parkway and eased into the middle lane. Surprisingly, there
was no traffic. That was the great thing about holiday weekends—everyone that
lived in the city left so that there seemed to be more room, more air to
breathe.

“How was your lecture on
Thursday night?”

“Fine,” Tess said. “It
was on the
Bhagavad Gita
. Have you ever read it?”

“No,” Neal said. “But
I've heard of it.”

“It's about Arjuna and
his journey through life. He loses his way, and meets up with Krishna, who
helps him to find his way or his
dharma
.”

Tess merged into the left
lane and opened the back windows so that her shirt ballooned in the breeze. On
days like this, she wished that she could keep on driving forever.

“How's your book going?”

“I write a lot each day
and then I typically throw away all that I write once I re-read it.  It all
makes so much sense in my mind, but when I put it down on paper it seems trite.”

Neal stared out the
window and hummed “My Favorite Things” from
The Sound of Music
.

“What are your favorite things?”
she asked.

He lifted his chin up to
the sky and Tess had an urge to kiss his neck. He seemed so vulnerable at that
moment. She passed through the tollbooth and then they were in the mines of the
midtown tunnel.

“I like to see new
things. While I was at the monastery, everything was so familiar. That was okay
for a long while for me. But now that I’m seeing new scenery, I want to keep
exploring. There’s so much that I haven’t gotten to yet in my life.”

“It’s never too late,”
Tess said. She let go of her breath when she exited the tunnel and moved back
into the light of day. The sun shining, the sky clear blue, no schedule to
adhere to— already she was anxious that this day would come to an end.

Tess and Neal stood
before the labyrinth that spanned the black top of the 44th street pier. It was
perfectly outlined in white paint.

“On my thirteenth
birthday my mother created a labyrinth out of stones for me to pass through. I
had to find my way to the center and then find my way out of the maze while everyone
in our community watched me.”

“Every year thereafter, a
week or so before my birthday, she started laying down the rocks, making sure
that each of them was in their own lanes, and if it snowed and the stones got
covered over, she carved the labyrinth out of the snow. I walked the labyrinth
until my 18
^th
birthday.”

“The myth is that if you
walk to the center of the labyrinth and rest there for a few moments, you’ll be
inspired, and when you journey out and re-enter the world, you’ll have a new
sense of purpose.”

Neal entered the
labyrinth and searched for the route to the center. He beckoned Tess to follow
him and at first she smiled and didn’t move; she was hot. But then without
thinking, she made her way in and around the circle to the center and out.

“Am I supposed to feel
different now?” Neal said.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not supposed
to.”

“What's the cruise to
nowhere?” Neal said, pointing to the metal stand-up sign.

Tess shrugged. “I think
you go around the city and back.” Tess squinted to make out the small print. “Maybe
it’s a dinner cruise,” she said. “It leaves at 3:00 p.m. and returns at 9:00
p.m.”

“Want to go?” Neal said.

“And not go to the
Intrepid?”

“It's such a beautiful
day,” Neal said. “I wouldn't mind being out on the water.”

It was 2:45. They could
make it. The weather was glorious. The thought of being out on the ship
appealed to her.

“Last call for the cruise
to nowhere,” a ship hand called into a megaphone.

“Let's do it,” Tess said,
and she was on line to buy their tickets. “It’s my treat,” Tess said when Neal
took out his money purse.

They boarded the boat
laughing, as if they had gotten away with something. From the deck, the waves
flowed and retreated. When the motor started up, loud and choppy, she took out
two pennies and handed one to Neal.

“Make a wish as we leave
the shore,” she said, and as they pulled away, Tess closed her eyes and tossed
her penny in the water.

“Where is everyone going?”
Neal asked a ship hand, as people paraded past them.

“To the casino,” the man
said. “It's a gambling ship.”

Tess started to laugh and
Neal began to laugh, too, so that the ship hand looked from one of them to the
other and then walked away towards the crowd.        

“I'm fine out here,
unless of course you want to go to the casino,” Tess said.

Neal pursed his lips. “I’m
not much of a gambler,” he said, so that Tess laughed.

“I never got gambling,”
Tess said. “If you ask me, life is a gamble—the thought of standing around a
table and betting money on numbers or throwing coins in to a machine is beyond
me, unless of course it’s a parking meter.”

“We didn't gamble much at
the monastery,” Neal said.

“Champagne?” a deck hand
asked, holding out a tray.

“Sure,” Tess said,
watching Neal take a glass, too.

“To our very own memory on
Memorial Day Weekend,” Neal said.

“What shall we remember
about today?” Tess asked.

“That the past is past.”

“I'll drink to that,” she
said.

The boat sliced the
water, dividing it dead center. Tess imagined the boat on a tight rope as it
plunged on. She and Neal had pulled plastic deck chairs close to the side rail,
which they used as a footrest, stretching their legs out. The hum of the motor
was in her now, so that she felt the motion in her although she was sitting
still. The rush of the boat charging the water mesmerized her; she liked the
feel of moving ahead without exerting any energy. Neal peered out beside her.
She felt her eyes grow heavier, shutting intermittently, so that each time they
opened, she went through the who, what, why, when, where of consciousness.

“You folks still out
here?” the deck hand asked as he passed with a full tray of champagne. “It's
getting a bit chilly,” he said. “Sure you don't want to join the other folks
inside? There’s some food in there.”

Tess jumped in her seat
and turned to Neal. One of her legs had fallen asleep so that she felt the pins
and needles prick her when she tried to move it. She didn’t know how long she
had dozed off.

“I think we're fine out
here,” Neal said. He smiled at Tess. “Unless you want to go inside.”

Tess cleared her throat.
She felt cold, stiff. “I’m great out here,” she said.

“It tends to get crowded
in there,” the deck hand said. “If I could stay out here, I would. Let me clear
some of those champagne glasses away,” he said, offering Tess a fresh glass off
of his tray.

Tess took a new glass and
handed it to Neal, before she took another for herself. She loved the long days
that came with the approach of summer.

The deck hand and Neal
were discussing something—the buildings in the distance, the speed of the boat?

Her nose to the rim of
the glass, the champagne smelt syrupy; the bubbles fizzed to the top and she
felt a belch coming, which she stifled by putting her hand over her mouth. With
each plunge forward of the boat, they left a stream of foaming waves behind.
Tess felt the motion within her, which seemed to be magnified by the sweet
smell of the champagne. She bit her top lip, hoping that it would make her mind
work: should she drink this? Champagne had a way of making her feel light and
happy with her eyes open, and tired and shaky with her eyes closed. She
imagined herself riding the waves, going under. She caught her breath and put
the glass down. “Maybe I'll save this for a bit,” she said.

The deck hand smiled. “We
head back any minute now.” The moment he said it, they watched the boat cut the
water and turn, waves billowing and crisscrossing as the boat began to retrace
its route.

“How much does it cost to
ride on this forever,” Neal asked the deck hand.

“We have a while yet
before we dock,” the deck hand said. “Enjoy the rest of the ride. I'll be back
to check on you.”

The sun began to set.
Neal was out of his seat now, clinging to the rail. Tess wished that she wasn't
tipsy. In contrast to his black t-shirt and black chinos, from where she sat,
Neal's bald head dazzled in the fading light, as if it were oiled. In the shadow
of the sun’s rays, he looked otherworldly. It made Tess want to touch him to
see if he was real at the same time that it made her afraid to touch him, as if
she would tarnish him. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him
romantically out on the water. She wondered what his skin was like under his
shirt, how it would feel to have his hands caress her shoulders and suddenly, a
strange heaviness, like she had swallowed a bowling ball, came over her. I am
not just old, Tess thought, but pathetic. 55 years behind me and I still
fantasize about men that are all wrong for me.