From Comfortable Distances (25 page)

There were times when Tess thought
that she needed to leave this house, this world that she had built around
herself, or perhaps that had built itself around her. It was hard to tell if
one was the gatekeeper or the prisoner of one’s domain. In this house, where
she was sitting now at the top of the steps, she had watched one husband leave
after the other. She had raised Prakash in this house, and then watched him
walk down these steps and leave, too. And yet she persisted here.

The cat strolled up to her now and
lay down across from her. She hadn’t checked yet if he had used the litter box
that she had bought for him on her way home from her appointments. He studied
her for a moment before he closed his eyes and spread out, his paws moving
towards her. She reached out to pet him and at first he flinched and was about
to strike her with his claws, but then looking into her eyes, he softened and
lay back. Tess sighed. “See, I’m not so bad.” The cat looked up at her again
before it fell back. “His mother is bad,” Tess said. “Evil.”

Tess moved through the kitchen and
wandered her halls, passing in and out of the bedrooms. It suddenly struck her
as silly—Neal a few blocks away, at his mother's house. The cat followed her
into Prakash's bedroom, and jumped onto the windowsill, looking out before it
turned to look at her. She was sure that there was something being spoken from
this creature’s eyes. She felt a gratitude passing between them, and yet she
couldn’t distinguish who felt gratitude for whom.  The cat's glowing
green-yellow eyes made her feel as if she was on fire, and it began to
cry—helpless little yelps. Tess no longer saw the cat but felt the vibration of
its plea and then, she didn’t know if she blinked, or if the cat was spooked,
but it fled from the room suddenly, darting past her. She lay down on Prakash's
old bed, her mother’s afghan wrapped around her like a shawl, and closed her
eyes.

It was almost midnight when she woke
up and she was reminded of the times in her childhood, when after a tantrum she
would lock herself in her bedroom and snuggle in her bed, falling asleep.
Outside, the sky was total darkness.  Her dreams came back to her in flashes.
Something about her in a car that Prakash was driving. She grabbed the cordless
phone and went out onto the porch. The air was fresh, cool, the street
desolate.

She remembered days when she would
sit on the porch waiting for Prakash to come home from a friend's house. She
would be thinking of the houses she had to show, scouting her brain for
possible matches, and then she would see Prakash's big head and those black
eyes staring at her and it would make her very still. His eyes had the power to
make her focus on him and lose everything else. They were the eyes of a wise
old man. When he was a toddler and she was vacuuming or cleaning, she often
felt something penetrating her, and she told herself that she was being silly,
that Prakash was in his room, napping, until she turned around and there he
was, on the floor, his thumb in his mouth, watching her. She always froze, half
expecting him to start speaking to her in a deep old man’s voice, and in those
moments, she felt as if he knew things about her that she had yet to learn.
When Prakash had smiled at her, she had felt safe and good—as if he validated
her existence.

“How are you, Mom?”

“I'm sitting on the porch
thinking of you,” she said.

“What are you thinking?”

“How I used to be afraid
of you and in awe of you when you were a baby,” she said.

“I thought that you still
felt that way about me,” Prakash said.

“If I tell you something,
promise me that you won't react,” she said.

“Don't tell me you're
getting married again,” Prakash said.

Tess hadn’t realized she
had plucked some foliage from the evergreen tree beside her until she feathered
her ankle with it.

“Mom? You still there?”

“I met someone. I’m not
in love and we are not getting married. He reminds me of your grandmother,”
Tess said.

“Oh, no,” Prakash said.

“I met him a few months
back, before we were all in Woodstock.”

“I’m listening.”

“He's an ex Roman
Catholic monk who lived in a monastery for the last 23 years. He's from Mill
Basin and his mother is a witch who thinks she has to protect him from me.”

Prakash laughed into the
phone—a small laugh and then an all-out cackle.

“Just when I think you're
insane, you go and convince me that you are,” Prakash said.

Tess laughed. “I never
said I wasn’t nuts.”

“What are your plans for
this guy?” he asked.

“Am I supposed to have
plans for him?”

“No. But you’re telling
me about him, so there must me some motive.”

“I just wanted you to
know,” she said.

“Don’t fall in love with
him, Mom; you know where that route leads.”

“Kash, I am not falling
in love with him.”

“Is that a cat meowing?”
he asked.

 The cat was at the door now, trying
to nuzzle it open. For a moment, she imagined the cat living in the house and
that she was the outsider. She waved to the cat and the cat stood watching her.
She pulled the door open and he dashed out, past her and down the driveway.

“I've taken in a stray cat. Or
rather, he seems to have decided that I'm his keeper,” Tess said.

“Let me guess—his name is Buddha.”

“He doesn't have a name yet, but I
think you just gave him one. Buddha,” she said.

“How about Buddhi, after my stuffed
monkey that I was obsessed with?”

“Buddhi,” Tess said. “You carried around that
stuffed monkey until it lost all of its fur. Buddhi it is,” she said, and the
moment she spoke it aloud, the cat paused in the driveway, looking back at her,
before he darted across the street.

“A monk,” Prakash said. “In Mill
Basin of all places.” Then, “can someone leave a monastery and be done with it?”

“It’s like going through a divorce, I
suppose,” Tess said. “Feelings change, and you find a new way to live your life.”
The cherry blossom shadowing the porch swayed in the breeze so that pink-white
pedals sprinkled Tess's shoulder. Against her fingers, they felt like velvet.

“You there?” Prakash said.

“Do you think that life is random,
Kash, or that we meet certain people for a reason?”

“I don’t think anything is random,
but I don’t think we can always make sense of why things happen. Sometimes it
doesn’t all fit together until years later.”

“I don’t want to be the woman who
keeps making mistakes, Kash. I want my life to make sense.”

“Only you know what makes sense for
your life.”

“But I don’t always know,” she said.

“Does anyone, Mom? Aren’t we all
trying to figure it out?”

She bit her top lip. “I guess. I wish
sometimes that there was someone to tell me what I was supposed to do, what
comes next.”

He laughed. “No you don’t. If I or
anyone tried to tell you what you were supposed to do, you would insist on
figuring it out for yourself.”

“Yes. I guess you’re right.”

“It’s bedtime for you,” Kash said.

“I wish you were here,” Tess said.

“Like you’ve said to me many times:
tomorrow is a new day and you are going to feel differently.”

“Tomorrow is a new day.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, Kash.”

Tess sat holding the phone in her
hand. Looking up into the falling sky, she wished that she could propel herself
upwards, beyond, see what lay ahead. She wished that she could pick up the
phone and call her mother, hear her voice. She thought of going inside to get
the urn, to try to sync with her mother in that way, but no, she wasn’t ready
for that. She wasn’t ready to revisit the urn, which she had hidden away in a
top shelf in her closet, alongside her cashmere cardigans. The urn was full of
death. Tess focused, trying to visualize her mother—her long wavy black hair,
her deep brown eyes, her olive skin. Tess lay back on her porch so that the sky
was her ceiling
.

People were born to
change, adapt—that’s what Tess believed. She thought of her husbands, each one
of them falling away from her life like a leaf in the wind. “Let go,” was what
her mother had advised Tess when she told her of each divorce. Tess had let go,
jumping from the ledge of her life again and again, free falling. Wherever she
had landed, she had picked herself up and began anew—it hadn’t been a choice,
but a necessity. Life kept going whether you were in the game or not.

Tess didn't know how long
she had been staring into space. She sat up, scanning her driveway, the yacht
club across the street, the sycamore trees lining the sidewalks, their shadows
mirroring 66
^th
street. The crickets chirped. “My life,” she said. “This
is my life.” She closed her eyes; sometimes this is what her life felt
like—total darkness. She couldn't have imagined that her life would lead her in
the directions that it had—each path had led to another path, sometimes Tess
kicking and screaming en route, other times an eager traveler. She liked
thinking of each person on his or her own path. There had been times in her
life that thought had made her feel lonely. Now, it felt empowering. She looked
up into the great big sky and made a wish upon a star—
may I continue to find
my way and live my truth, whatever it may be
—before she went inside,
leaving the world behind.

When the car door slammed shut in her
driveway, Tess looked up from the page she was reading in
A Path With Heart
.
That was funny. 6:30 am. She glanced at the cat sitting at her feet before she
made her way into the living room, crouching by the window. Neal waved a little
wave to his mother, picked up his brown oversized rucksack from the sidewalk—it
looked to Tess like a body bag—and walked up the three steps of Tess's porch.
He rang the doorbell. What in the world? She tightened her bathrobe and made her
way to the door.

“Tess,” Neal said. The way he said
her name, as if he had been looking for her in a crowded carnival, made her
smile.

“Good morning,” Tess said. The
cleaning neighbor lady was out by the curb organizing her bags of garbage in
the pails. For a moment, Tess had a sinking feeling that Neal had come to say
good-bye—that he was leaving Mill Basin, heading back to the monastery.

She motioned him inside and the
screen door slammed closed behind him.

“You're packed,” Tess said. The cat
stood at the top of the stairs.

Neal nodded. “I am,” he said. “I
mean, I did—pack.”

“Are you going somewhere?” she said.

Neal looked at her as if he didn't
understand.

“My mother told me….” he turned to
look behind him now, as if his mother would be waiting for him in the
background, but she had pulled away the moment Tess opened the door.

“She told you what?”

“She told me,” Neal said, looking
down at the floor, “that you asked her to bring me here.”

“Bring you here for what?” Tess said.

“To stay with you,” Neal said, and
suddenly Tess understood. This was the game his mother would play. Send him off
to her and see what she would do. Furry rose up in her throat, so that she had
to take a few deep breaths before she spoke again. She gripped the railing with
one hand, creating a barrier from where they stood to upstairs.

“Neal, why did your mother send you
here?”

Neal took a deep breath and looked
deeply into Tess’s eyes.

“Do you know why she sent you here?”

“I guess—” he paused. “She doesn’t
want me to sin under her roof.”

Tess used the railing to lower
herself down and perched on the steps, shaking her head. No, no, no.

“Neal, you should go. For your
mother’s sake, for your sake, you should go back home. I’m not—”

“I’d like to stay,” he said. “For my
sake.”

Tess shook her head. “It doesn’t work
this way, Neal. You don’t just show up at a person’s house, this isn’t—I don’t
want this. We kissed, Neal. That’s all, a kiss.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll go,” he said,
picking up his sack. “You’re right, I’ll go.”

“If two people want to live together,
Neal, they talk about it, it’s a joint decision, they don’t just show up—no one
shows up at someone’s house,” Tess said. “You’re a grown man.”

“Tess, I understand. This was stupid.
I should have spoken up to my mother. I should have come to talk to you first.
I’m sorry.”

“It’s none of my business, Neal, but
your mother. She needs to let you make your decisions. You’re not a child.”

He nodded. “I was wrong in thinking
that coming back home was the next move for me. At the monastery I was
ascribing to their ways and here it’s my mother’s ways.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it all
out,” Tess said, and the moment she said it, she cringed and closed her eyes as
if to erase this scene. Her comment was harsh, yet that was how it worked. She
wasn’t his keeper. No one was. People figured things out.

He studied her with those blue eyes.
His hair was beginning to grow in; Tess supposed that he hadn’t shaved it for a
few days. Harmless. He was harmless. Childlike. Vulnerable. And attractive. Annoyed
as she might be, she was attracted to him.

“I hope we can still be friends,”
Neal said.

His last residence was a monastery.
She shook her head. He might as well have been living on Mars. She thought of
his breath on her neck, the tenderness of his lips and something like
excitement, anticipation filtered through her.

“I don’t see why not, Neal.”

She heard the beep of her blackberry
telling her she had an email. Work. She had to get ready for work. She had
promised Michael she’d get there early this morning to go over some paperwork.

“I could drop you back home on my way
to work,” she said.

“I’m fine to walk. Thank you,” he
said.

She nodded her head and stood up on
the stairs.

“I’m sorry, Tess. This is awkward.”

She nodded again. The guy had nowhere
to go — if he went back home right now, it was likely he’d have to listen to
his mother’s insanity.

“Look,” she said. “If you just need a
place to stay for a day, I can put you up downstairs. Later today, you head
home, talk to your mother, and go from there.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you out,
Tess.” His chin tucked into his chest, he peered up at her.

No, she was not going to plead. She’d
made her offer. A man who showed up at her house was not going to get away with
giving her shy and awkward.

“As you choose,” she said.

“I mean I don’t want to inconvenience
you,” he said.

Monk or not, all men were alike—they
needed to feel wanted. She studied him for a few moments before she realized
she was biting her bottom lip.

“It’s just for a day, Neal,” she
said. Surely Neal's mom would come to claim him before the day was over.

“Thank you,” he said, his eyes
meeting hers. “I won’t be in your way.”

 “I’ll be at work and then yoga. I
need to get ready to go into my office, but let me show you downstairs, and I
need to get you a key and show you how to work the alarm.”

Spare keys were in her bedroom night
table—she had learned to put them there after a string of local robberies in
which house workmen stole spare keys from kitchen cabinets or countertops. She
dashed into her bedroom and scrutinized the bright fuchsia walls. Years back,
she had the walls painted the bright, vibrant hot pink on a whim, the way she’d
try on a nail polish color and then take it off, and paint her nails the same
old whitish-pink nude. The ecru walls of the rest of her home were
professional, clean, a perfect setting for the mahogany-framed black and white
photos that lined them. Photos of 1920’s jazz culture—pixie girls, flappers,
musicians. Sometime over the years she had stopped seeing the photos, but
whenever one caught her eye, she would smile at the familiarity of the image,
like an old friend there before her.

She hadn’t known she
would keep the fuchsia color until one day had passed and then another, and her
painter, calling her a week later, asking her when she wanted him to re-paint
her bedroom, had seemed shocked when she instructed him to add a second coat of
the fuchsia versus painting her bedroom walls the same bland ecru. Nothing
seemed to look right on her fuchsia walls except for the mirror on the wall
facing her. She liked having bare walls in the room in which she slept—it made
her feel expansive. All of the accents in the room—the comforter, pillows, the
frames lining the dark chocolate brown French antique furniture—were a rich
creamy off-white that soothed Tess. The contrast of the shocking fuchsia and
the deep brown furniture worked for her—it was an adventurous combination.
Michael had found it sexy, said that the room showed the hot and seductive side
of Tess, which made her cringe now, as did most thoughts of intimacy with
Michael. When she was done, she was done. Neal. Keys.

Tess showed Neal how to open and lock
the front door without setting off the alarm, and how to shut off the alarm if
it should go off. Should she be doing this? She hesitated more than once—what
if he made a backup set of her keys—but he seemed so harmless. She couldn’t
imagine him bringing any malice to her, although she would be sure to lock her
closet, where she kept her jewelry, and now her mother’s urn, and take that key
with her. He complied when she asked him to demonstrate that he could handle
the door locks and alarm on his own.

She led him downstairs to the
basement, and showed him the study and the den. It had been weeks since she’d
stepped foot in the study. Each time she opened that door, she imagined, just
for a minute, that she was going to see Prakash sitting there at the desk. It
had been his study up until the time that he left for college.  Her ex-husbands
had never used that room, and Tess was never sure why. She guessed it was the
same reason that she never used that room. Whenever she was in there, she felt
shut off from the rest of the world, as if she was in a fallout shelter. The
room was scattered with bookcases full of Prakash’s college textbooks, some
architect books, and stacks of old realtor magazines. There were a few mahogany
wood filing cabinets that were full of old Best Reality papers.  There was a
matching wraparound desk, a thick burgundy leather couch surrounded by two windows.
When Prakash was in high school, he had sat on the couch talking on the phone.

Neal looked around the room as if he
had struck gold. He felt the cold, hard leather of the couch, peered out the
window, examined the books in the cases.

“This is perfect,” he said. “I can
write in here.”

Tess’s forehead creased. “For today,
sure,” she said, nodding.

Just as he sat down on the couch, the
cat crashed into the room and jumped up onto an arm of the couch, panting, and
lied down. Neal smiled and petted him.

“You like it here, huh? The couch
must feel cool on your back,” Neal said. The cat wiggled under his touch, and
snuggled up to Neal.

“You’ve got a companion,” Tess said. “Poor
kitty—so cut up,” she said squeezing one of his paws gently.

“Have you named him yet?”

“My son suggested Buddhi.”

The cat squinted up at them. His eyes
seemed to say
I know everything
.

“You like being called Buddhi,
fellow?” Neal asked him. It was funny to Tess how everyone's voice changed when
they spoke to an animal, almost as if they expected the animal to talk back to
them if they hit just the right chord.

“Well, you should be all set then,”
Tess said. “I need to hurry up.”

“I’m all set,” he said.

“I’ll leave you to do what it is that
you do,” Tess said. It was hard for her to imagine the passion she had felt for
him on the boat just days back. “And the locks and alarm—”

“Yes, I’ll be sure to be diligent and
lock up if I go out.”

“The police will be here in a minute
if anything happens,” Tess said, once she said it, regretting it. “What I mean
was if the alarm—”

Neal nodded. “I understand,” he said.
“Everything will be fine.”