From Comfortable Distances (23 page)

In a moment, she was up
close to him. His breath was hot and thick and it made Tess nervous. She wished
that she could sober up.

“Isn't it so strange how
the day disappears?” Neal said. “Where does it go?” Neal watched her eyes as if
he was trying to infuse her with his vision.

“Off to sea,” Tess said.
She wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. It could go either
way–sloppy and horrible, or sweet and passionate. It could be spicy and
seductive, too, but Tess couldn’t really envision that. There was something too
simple about Neal for him to emerge as a seducer. In fact, imagining him
seducing her made her laugh. Tess shook her head as if trying to realign her mind,
which was all over the place. She imagined that a man who had been celibate
wouldn’t be the best of bed partners the first time around. Tess would have to
be the teacher, and as much as that idea appealed to her, it scared her, too.

The engine roared louder
now, so that talking was futile; the pools of green-gray water mesmerized Tess.
The water whirled and spun and foamed against the boat. She couldn’t see
anything in the haze of the whirlpool and yet if she focused on a streak of
water she could see it being paved dead center, mending as it was left behind.
In the distance, streams of water bobbed to their own rhythm. She imagined the
water ahead calling out to her, its beckoning soft and airy, like the sway of a
hula dancer.

She could feel Neal’s
eyes on her and if she concentrated, she could see his eyes, the way his pupils
spread into his irises, little creatures unto themselves. Sometimes, looking at
him, she imagined his eyes slithering into her, looking around inside,
watching, learning about Tess.

The Statue of Liberty was coming into
sight, its green hue making it appear extraterrestrial in the half-darkness. It
was the first time since 9/11 that she was seeing the statue up close and what
came over her was a higher love for New York, for her life, for freedom. She
looked in the direction of where the World Trade Center had stood— empty space.
In the days following 9/11, her mother had asked Tess to come up to Woodstock,
and she and Michael did. Everyone functioned at a gentler frequency in the days
and weeks that had followed. There was a need to be surrounded by the people
one loved. In Woodstock her mother had led meditations that lasted hours and in
the evenings, satsungs in which everyone shared thoughts and memories and
feelings about the tragedy. Tess remembered listening to her mother’s followers
without participating. It wasn’t that she didn’t have feelings to share, it was
just that once she was in that setting, with her mother as a guru, she never
knew who to be, how to be. The water thrashed the boat harder now. Above, stars
began to fall in the semi-darkened sky. She was about to tell Neal that it was
the New Moon, a chance to start again, reinvent, journey toward fullness, but
when she opened her mouth to speak, no words came. Neal’s breathing was
shallower now, and Tess closed her eyes, peaceful and dreamy. 

She didn’t want this day to end, and
yet already, it was, the minutes passing, the night falling. It seemed
impossible to her that people found one another in this great big world.
The truth, Tess believed,
was that people clicked with those who were going in the same direction.
My-way-or–the-highway type of people. It was the equivalent of meeting someone
at a bus stop and sharing the ride. Neal was going her way—whichever direction
that may be—but it was more than that. Where he had been, where he was heading,
intrigued her; she could see herself searching for his path, wanting to stay on
his route.

The boat shifted so that she fell
slightly forward, closer to Neal. They were on a cruise to nowhere and
back—back, not necessarily the direction Tess sought, but nonetheless, a
destination. So what if he had been a monk? When the Viennese Waltz played over
the intercom, Neal reached out his hand for Tess and she looked around for a
moment to see if it wasn't somehow a joke, only the other people who had
gathered on the deck to see the night sky were a distance away. She took his
hand, and embracing Neal, she breathed in the cool night air, following his
lead. She stumbled for a moment, and Neal righted her. The water tugged at the
boat and Tess fell firm against Neal. They were still standing. At that moment,
that’s what had mattered most to Tess—that she had found someone that she
couldn’t knock over.

Neal touched her face, his fingertips
gentle as a feather, before he cupped her chin in his hand and tilted her face
up toward him. Her body reverberated with anticipation; she felt everything
inside of her coming awake.

“Tess,” he said, looking into her
eyes. In the pull and tug of the boat, their movements were clumsy.

She felt her heart racing.

“I’m afraid,” Neal said. His
expression was fixed on the floor now, as if he was no longer seeing or
hearing.

Tess brought his face back to hers,
his cheek smooth to her touch.

“I’m afraid, too,” she
said, looking into his eyes. In the coming darkness, his pupils grew dark and
wide, so that she could see her own eyes in them.

“I’m not sure what I’m
supposed to do,” Neal said.

 “What do you want to do?”
she said.

“I would like to kiss
you,” he said, and in a moment, Tess brought her lips to meet his—gently,
faintly, as if she were kissing the air. She pulled away and then Neal was
cradling her face in both hands, bringing his lips to hers, planting little
kisses so that she felt as if an animal was nibbling on her lips. She giggled
and held Neal around the waist as she pulled him to her and began to kiss him
passionately, seductively, on his neck, his lips.

When they separated, Neal
stared into her eyes and Tess tried to slow down her breathing. Everything
inside of her pulsed. She smoothed his chest with her hand and felt the
indentation of his ribs. His body was thin and well defined and something in
her began to hollow as if all of her was making room for him. He moved her in
front of him so that they both faced the water and draped his hands around her
waist so that she felt his breath by her ear and his body pressing against
hers. A voice in her head said: oh no, not this, please, but the boat kept
moving, rushing the water, slapping the waves as it made its way toward the New
York City sky line, and for the first time in a long Tess felt gratitude for
all of the possibilities that life held.

“It’s such big city,”
Neal said and Tess nodded, her head brushing against him.

The lights of the buildings
reflected in the water so that it glowed.

He whispered in her ear: “I
ordain you, Tess Rose, a woman that I like.”

The waves gushed all
around them, streaming into pools of whiteness that were smooth and calm. There
was a silence to the water that one could only see as one moved through it.
Standing still, you would never know its power, its peace. As the boat charged
the water, Tess saw herself plowing forward into this next phase of her
life—the journey would lead her through rough waters, but there would be calmer
waters, too. It was all mixed in—that was what everyone forgot when they
searched for their happy-ever-afters.

Tess turned to face him.
His eyes swam over her like the sea: restless and wild. No matter how scared
she was of him—of herself—in his presence, she felt something that she couldn’t
ignore: her fierce waters were growing calm.

“I ordain, you, Neal
Clay, a man that I like.”

In a moment, Frank
Sinatra was booming out over the loud speaker,
Start spreading the word, I’m
longing to stay,
and Neal held Tess close, dancing across the deck with
her, tripping over her feet.

“I should have warned you
that I don’t know how to dance.”

“You’re doing fine,” she
said, moving her foot before Neal could step on it again.

As they moved across the
floor, more people began to gather outside to watch as the boat approached the
New York City shoreline. A deck hand walked around offering passengers little
cups. When people started to toss confetti from the cups, Tess laughed. Some
began to toss confetti at Tess and Neal as they danced. He dipped her slightly
before he pulled her up and more people threw confetti at them.

When they docked,
New
York, New York
was still booming out over the loudspeaker:
These little
town blues, are melting away, I’m gonna make a brand new start of it in old New
York, and if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere…
Tess and Neal
stumbled against one another. The night was silent, still, the sky full of
stars. Tess and Neal held one another’s hands as if one of them would fall if
they were to let the other one go. When it was their turn to disembark, Tess
took a deep breath. Her life felt foreign to her, as if she was witnessing
someone else’s story. She wanted to pause before she moved on to the next
chapter, provide time and space for all that had happened to sink in, only the
thing about life, about living, was that it kept going, moving you from one
episode to the next. When she stepped from the plank onto the dock, Neal caught
her, steadying her first step onto land.

“Kissing passionately?”
Dale said.

Tess smiled, and in that
slight, involuntary movement, pressure from behind her eyes spread to her
temples. She imagined a herd of midget hammer men scrambling around up there,
taking turns whacking one another with their mini-hammers. Bam, bam, bam: a pulse
pounding her forehead. She didn’t know what had possessed her to get out of bed
that morning and meet Dale at yoga. Perhaps because Dale had woke her up at the
crack of dawn, and the fact that she had to talk to someone to help figure out
what had gone on the night before. 

“It’s not such a big
deal,” Tess said. “People get all sentimental every day.”

“I highly doubt that
ex-monks go around kissing women.”

“Maybe he’s just feeling
horny,” Tess said.

“No doubt about that,”
Dale said. “Poor guy hasn’t had sex—ever!”

“Can we move into the
shade?” Tess said.

They were in Union Square
Park eating corn muffins and drinking coffee. The benches all around them were
vacant and Tess breathed in, glad to have space. A squirrel eyed Tess’s muffin
until she flecked off a piece of it and tossed it his way.

“You shouldn’t have done
that,” Dale said. “Now we’re going to be ambushed. And, might I add, if you’re
going to give your muffin to the squirrels, I wish you’d offer it to me.” Tess
smiled and placed her muffin bag beside Dale on the bench.

“Tell me more,” Dale
said.

“An ex-monk likes me,
what can I say?” Tess said.

“Do you want to rip his
clothes off?” Dale said.

“If I say I do, does that
make me a pervert?” Tess said.

Dale nodded and Tess
leaned back in an overly dramatic motion so that her neck was exposed to the
heavens.

Dale pulled Tess forward
by her shoulder. “I’m just kidding!”

“When I took him home
last night, he told me that he was going to tell his mother about me,” Tess
said. “What do you think he’s going to tell her?”

“He’s going to tell her
that he plans to have wild, passionate sex with you,” Dale said.

“Why am I even talking to
you about this?” Tess said.

“I bet he’s going to tell
her that he likes a woman—something like that,” Dale said.

Tess shook her head. “His
mother called me this morning at 7:00 a.m. Who calls at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday
morning?”

“She beat me by a half
hour. What’d she say?” Dale said.

“That she wanted to come
over to talk to me,” Tess said.

“No!”

The swaying of the waves
still barged from one end of Tess’s head to the other. “Can you be seasick from
a cruise to nowhere?” Tess said.

“When are you meeting
her?” Dale said.

“Just so happens I’m not
going into the office until later tomorrow as I have some houses to show down
the street. She’s coming over at 10:00 a.m. sharp.”

“Do you think she’s going
to welcome you to the family or threaten you?” Dale said.

“She wanted to come over
and meet me this morning. When I told her I had plans, she acted as if she had
caught me two-timing her son.”

“Are you going to make
breakfast for her?”

“Perhaps you’d like to
come over and make it. Or maybe I should invite Michael over to make breakfast.”
Tess laughed. “What have I gotten myself into?”

“It’s going to be fine.
What’s she going to do?” Dale asked. “Threaten you?”

“I feel as if I’m back in
grade school.”

The sun was sharp and
strong on Tess’s back. She wiped her brow and pulled her hair up off her neck.
The pounding in her head came and went at intervals, as if her brain was in
snooze mode.

“In a few weeks’ time,
we’ll be laughing about this: Tess, the ex-monk, and his mother. Great material
for a sit-com,” Dale said.

“Come on,” Tess said. “Let’s
walk. I need to get out of the sun.”

“How about going for a
drink?” Dale said.

“Very funny,” Tess said.

“Really. There’s nothing
like a Bloody Mary to make a hangover go away.”

Tess clasped her elbow in
Dale’s. “What the hell, right? I’m already a doomed woman. Lead the way, my
dear.”

Out of the Midtown tunnel
and onto the Gowanus highway, “Sex World” was the first billboard Tess saw. It
advertised live girls and adult fun. How did one seduce a virgin? Sex with Neal
didn’t seem right. How did love and sex become synonymous in her life? She
didn’t understand why she couldn’t love someone of the opposite sex without
thinking about having sex with them. Perhaps that’s why she had succumbed to an
affair with Michael: her loving him had led her to make love with him, and
after making love with him, she felt as if her love for him was something
tangible, in the flesh. Maybe she wouldn’t have sex with Neal. Thinking that
filled her with a sense of relief. She belched and tasted the Bloody Mary at
the back of her throat. Perhaps not having sex with Neal would work the same
way—be more fulfilling, easier. Anyway, didn’t one reach an age when they could
decide once and for all they were over sex and romantic love? Oh, who was to
say? She imagined that even if she decided that she was through with sex and
love she’d fall victim to it at some point down the road. At least that’s what
her track record predicted. Perhaps, though, with Neal it would be different.

She turned on the radio
and scanned the channels looking for something soothing to divert her attention
from sex and Neal—not only was she old and foolish, but now she was becoming a
pervert, too. Commercials, weather reports, and more commercials. She turned
the radio off and switching into the right line to veer towards the Belt
Parkway, she maneuvered her cell phone from her bag and turned it on. Three new
voicemail messages. She pressed speakerphone: one from Michael:
Hey, call me
back
. One from Prakash:
Hi Mom—it’s your own and only son—give me a ring
when you have a minute.
A second from Michael: W
ill Tess, the CEO of
Best Reality call back Michael, when she has a yoga break?
Tess wondered if
Tess the CEO of Best Reality was different from the Tess who was the mother of
Prakash, or the Tess who was the wife of four husbands at one time or another.
She liked thinking of herself in multiples, like she was a deck of cards, and
could deal people a different hand depending upon—depending upon what? Was it about
how much people could offer her, or was it the luck of the draw?

She squinted in the glare
of the sun, and there it was again—her head flaring up reminding her:
if you
drink, you will pay
. Was this the price for becoming a yogi, Tess wondered?
One could no longer enjoy a drink without suffering consequences? Or perhaps it
was a mini-Neal inside of her trying to get her attention: now that I like you,
I will not let you forget, bam bam bam.  Tess turned off the Belt Parkway at
11N and suddenly all that had been familiar—the roads, the Kings Plaza Shopping
Mall looming in the distance—seemed changed to her. She was back at the
previous night, driving down 66th street in the dark, making a right on Mayfair
Drive, and pulling up in front of Neal’s house. The curtains had been drawn,
and the moment that Tess stopped the car, the figure that had been looking out
the window fled. His mother was at the front door instantaneously, fiddling
with the lock, Tess supposed, because then she inched open the screen door. The
way his mother stood there like that, in her robe, not moving, reminded Tess of
a greedy trick-or-treater waiting to collect.

Neal had turned to Tess. “So
I guess I should tell mother about you,” he had said.

She hadn’t known what to
say—did Neal expect her to say anything? “Sure,” she had said, unable to take
her eyes off of the open door and his mother.

“Until we meet again,” he
said.

“Goodbye,” Tess had said.
When Neal walked up the porch, his mother opened the door wider, as if she was
a Venus flytrap getting ready to strike. When he was inside, the wooden door
closed, then the screen door slammed shut, blocking Tess out. Tess felt a
momentary loneliness and it was unlike other spurts of loneliness because she
could articulate it: on the water, she and Neal had been a unit. They had been
dreamers on that boat, adventurers amidst those seas. On land they were
separate.

It was hard to imagine
that episode had been less than 24 hours ago.

The moment Tess walked up
her porch steps, the cat sprang at her from inside the tree shading her porch,
so that she jumped back, almost losing her balance. The cat watched her, as if
Tess was a strange creature that he was inspecting. His lips were lined in
black, so that it looked as if he had just been lapping chocolate ice cream. In
the sunlight, she could tell that he was old. He glared at her like an angry
old man and suddenly she wanted to shoo him away, only the way he meowed—long
and slow, with an upward arc at the end, as if he was deranged—made her feel
sorry for him.

“Hello kitty,” she
whispered and once again, the cat fled, looking back at her before it vanished
past her neighbor’s house and then out of sight.

When she walked into her
house, her cell phone rang.

“I just wanted to check
that you got home okay,” Dale said.

“I did,” Tess said. “Home
sweet home.”

“Just sleep it all off,”
Dale said.

“My encounter with the
crazy cat, the Bloody Mary’s or the Neal story?”

Dale was silent for a
moment: “Everything,” she said.

“Sounds like a plan,”
Tess said. Then, “The house phone is ringing. Probably Michael; I should get
that. Farewell, my dear,” Tess said.

She picked up her home
phone on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“This is Neal’s mother.”

Tess cleared her throat. “Mrs.
Clay.”

“You said that you had
plans today.”

“Yes. I just returned
home.”

“I see. Well, I’m
confirming our talk tomorrow morning, Monday.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Fine, I will bring my
egg salad to eat.” Was Tess supposed to say what she would eat? What she would
have available?

“10:00 a.m. sharp,” his
mother said.

The way his mother
annunciated
sharp
made Tess have to place her hand over the receiver to
catch her breath. Tess was beginning to understand the extent of her crime
against the Clay family.

“10:00 a.m. sharp is
fine,” Tess said, and a wave of nausea, like she was on the boat again, drifted
through her. Then his mother hung up, so that Tess was left bracing the
counter, the phone in her hand. It was a few minutes before she turned the
portable phone off and placed it down.

She imagined Neal’s mom
snooping around her house the next morning with evaluating eyes. The
countertops would have to be waxed; the crumbs under the dishwasher would have
to be mopped up. Tess was about to pick up a sponge, and then she stopped. If
his mother saw the crumbs, passed judgment on Tess and her home because of
them, so what? Were dropped crumbs proof that your life was untidy and out of
control? Tess gripped the counter, trying to steady herself. Suddenly, what she
needed was to be out of her house again. She moved to the table slowly, picked
up her bag and her car keys and in a few moments, she was backing out of the
driveway.

The Religion section in
the 17
^th
street Barnes and Nobles was filled with books on
Christianity: T
he Idiots Guide to Being Christian
,
The Christian
Encyclopedia, All You Ever Wanted to Know about Christianity
. There were
three people looking at the books in the section: two old ladies and one young
girl. She wished that there was somewhere that she could go right now where she
could sit down with someone who would explain all she needed to know about
Benedictine monks.

Tess pulled one book off
the shelf called
Benedictine
, another book about religious callings, and
one by Thomas Merton—
The Seven Story Mountain
—that one of the employees
recommended. She sat down with them in the café section and glanced out at the
lawn of Union Square Park where just a few hours earlier she and Dale had sat
talking. Each day was so many things. Her mind was restless; she read sections
from one book and then another, as is she was trying to put together a puzzle.

In the first few
sentences to
The Seven Story Mountain
Tess learned that Merton had been
a college teacher. So there it was—the decision to become a monk was one that
could come to any man. What Tess didn’t understand was how a man could truly
seclude himself from the hurdles and challenges of society. Wasn’t the true
test to be able to keep your faith when you lived in the midst of chaos? Tess
moved to the next book laid out before her:

As Benedictines, monks
lead a strict contemplative life that separates them from what modern culture
proclaims to be essential elements of human happiness: parties, TV, sports,
restaurants, fashionable clothes, homes, cars, vacations, even families….