From Comfortable Distances (33 page)

“Neal, you should probably go,” she
said.

“Is that what you want?” he said.

“This isn’t right for you, Neal,” she
said.

“I like you,” he said.

“Neal,” she said, stepping back from
him.

“What couldn’t be right for me about
liking you, Tess?” he said.

“If we–,” she said.

“Say it,” he said. He traced her
collarbone with his pointer finger so that chills ran up Tess’s spine. She let
him pull her closer, so that his hands braced her hips.

“If we go any further, you may regret
it,” she said.

He shook his head. “What I would
regret is not being here with you.”

“There are certain things that you
can’t undo once you do them,” she said.

“Do you like me?” Neal said. His
breath was warm; his lips were moving closer to her own.

“I want to do what’s right,” she
said. The blueness of his eyes seem impossible to her – Caribbean ocean blue.
She traced his lush and dark eyelashes with her fingertip and then moved on to
his eyebrows. She loved the way his features formed his face; there was a delicacy
to him and yet the way he held her, he was a man.

He kissed her tenderly at first and
then full force so that it was easy to lose herself in the passion and yet
there was something in her that kept bubbling to the surface—fear? Reality? She
didn’t want to have an affair with a man who was only on a temporary leave; a
man who didn’t have affairs; a man who was married to God; a man who was going
back to the monastery in a few months’ time.

“You should go,” she said, pulling
away.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go.”

Tess sighed and straightened her
shirt. She nodded. She moved to the counter to get a glass.

“Water?” she said and Neal nodded.
She poured them each a glass and gulped hers down, Neal taking a sip.

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

“You didn’t,” Tess said.

“I should get going then,” he said,
but neither of them made a move.

She didn’t know when she had become
so moral. It was rare that she wanted to be with a man. She was 55-years old
for goodness sake. Why shouldn’t she have some fun now and then?

“What’s so funny?” he said.

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she
said.

“Can I see you again?” he said.

 “As long as you behave.”

“As long as I behave?” he said, their
eyes meeting one another’s.

And then they were kissing again, Tess
kissing him hard now, and Neal pulling her closer to him so that she felt all
of his body against hers.

“I want you,” he whispered into her
ear.

She was trying to forget that he was
a virgin. That he had never been with a woman.

“I want you, too,” she said. “I just
don’t want you to regret this.”

“No,” he whispered, kissing her neck
from top to bottom so that all the flesh on her back and arms turned to goose
flesh. She let out a slight moan and pulled his face to hers so that she was
kissing him again. How in the world he was so sexy, she had no idea.
Please
forgive me God. Please forgive Neal
.

In her bedroom, he pulled Tess’s
shirt off and began to kiss each inch of her flesh, so that her body was a
mixture of chills and heat. When her bra came off, she unbuttoned his shirt and
massaged his hairless chest until he pulled her against him, his hands kneading
her back so that their flesh melted into one another’s. Sweat began to pool
down her cleavage and her back and she felt him massaging it into her. She
didn’t remember ever feeling this turned on, this hot for a man. She began to
kiss his neck and then moved up to his ear and in a moment he was kissing her
ear lobe and then biting it ever so gently, so that she heard herself moan
again. He moved backwards to the bed and made his way onto it, pulling her down
with him so that she was on top of him until he climbed on top of her and his
lips found hers again, their tongues meeting like waves. “Neal,” she whispered
in his ear. He shivered and grew harder in between his legs as he pressed
against her and again, he began to kiss her neck delicately, so that all of her
wanted him, here, now.

“Tess,” he whispered, his breath sending a chill through her
so that her whole body shuddered. She looked into his eyes, kissing his lips,
and seeing him that way, his eyes so close to her own, their bodies against one
another, creatures of desire, she didn’t care if he was a monk. He was a man
and she was a woman.

Neal pushed her to the side and began
to unzip her pants before she took over, pulling them off, her panties still
on, while she fumbled with the button on his pants, which he opened and then
unzipped and pulled down. They lay on their sides facing one another while Neal
smoothed his hand up and down Tess’s torso, his palm passing over one nipple
and then the other before he lingered there, raising his other hand, so that
his palms caressed her nipples. Tess was alert, her insides tingling with
anticipation from his touch. She traced his belly button before she moved down
and lightly stroked his underwear. In a moment his hand was in her panties.

His breath hot in her ear, he was
saying her name and she reached into her bedside drawer—please, she thought,
let me still have condoms.

“What's wrong?” Neal said, and she
shook her head as she pulled out a single condom and opened it. Neal was still
as she pulled off his underwear and peeled the condom over him, bracing her
hands on his chest as she sat upright on him, helping him to move into her
before she began to circle forward and backward, slowly at first, their bodies
merging, and then harder, so that in a matter of seconds, their bodies created
a delightful friction and then he maneuvered his way on top, situating her
below him.

“You feel so good,” she said, and now
she was squeezing her legs around him, shifting her body so that she could feel
all of him moving into her. It didn’t seem possible to her that he could be
this good, this sexy.

“You feel incredible,” he said, as he
continued to thrust, and then she knew he had hit his magic moment and she
tried to join him.

“Oh,” he said, and she closed her
eyes and felt him moving with her. Her legs were tingling, then he was panting
and there was another “Oh, Tess,” and she felt everything inside of her
flaming, rushing, tingling. “Neal,” she said. And then he collapsed on her
chest, their flesh soaked with sweat, so that they both laughed and then he was
kissing her lips, giddy, so that she could feel him smiling as he kissed her. 

He smoothed her curls from her
forehead and kissed her there.

“I don’t believe you’re a virgin,”
she said and he laughed.

“You’re the sexiest woman alive,” he
said. He cupped her chin in his hands and kissed her lips hard, moving his lips
back and forth against them.

“I'm glad that I waited for you,” he
said.

“Shhh, don’t say that.”

“I am.”

“No, it makes me feel as if I did
something wrong.”

“Are you still worrying about that?”
he said, his hands exploring her body as he pulled her tight against him and
she snuggled in the envelope of his arms.

She remembered nights when she had
gone to sleep next to Michael with her back to him. It was nice to want to be
close to someone, to feel safe like this. She kissed the crook of his neck and
glanced at him one last time. His breath hummed, and the drowsy way he moved
his head, she felt him drifting off. She closed her eyes and rested her face on
his smooth, firm chest, trying to fall in line with his breaths.  In a few
moments, the crickets serenading her, she lost the earth.

Tess had gone through a range of
emotions, it not yet being 7:00 am. She had woken up in the middle of the night
in the nude, disoriented and disheveled, her neck slightly stiff, before she
remembered that she had gone to sleep beside Neal, who was no longer there
beside her. She had seen his note on the kitchen table that he would meet her
in the morning by the water and that she should sleep tight. She had checked
the front door and saw that he had locked it, which confused her as her keys
were on the kitchen counter, until she realized he must have taken the spare
key?

She had put on a night gown, and
gotten back into bed feeling anxious, restless, turning up the air conditioner
to cool her down. The next day’s to-do list surfaced as it always did when she
knew she should sleep, but couldn’t, and she sat up to catch her breath. 3:00
am. She still had some hours to rest before she had to tackle it all.

When she resurfaced some
hours later, the thought of going into work struck her as impossible. No, her
mind was too busy to add any new information outside of her and Neal. She
called into the office and left a message on her assistant’s voicemail that she
couldn’t make it in, something had come up and that she would be in later this
morning.

At Jamaica Bay, Neal
stared off into the direction of the water, the sun not yet risen floated in
the background, as if it were mustering all its strength to rise and spread
across the sky. Seagulls congregated and scattered. Her heart raced at seeing
him, and she forced herself to take a few deep breaths. He turned to her as she
approached him and she felt something in the pit of her stomach sinking. He
smiled and all the passion of last night came back to her; she couldn’t help
but smile back. Relief, that’s what she felt at seeing him. Relief tinged with
desire and neediness to be near him, to know that he was in it with her.

“Where do you think
they're all going?” Neal said.

The seagulls spread into
flocks now, all heading in the same direction, at different altitudes,
different speeds.

“Off to their next destination,
I suppose,” she said.

She wanted to touch him,
to hug him, but she remained still. Watching the seagulls leave, she thought of
his leaving in the middle of the night, of his leaving to go back to the
monastery. She wondered if having an affair was part of his agenda all along.

“Can I ask you something?”
she said.

His expression was
pensive, his eyes warm. He nodded.

“When did you think about
having sex with me?” she asked.

Neal laughed and then,
his eyes on Tess, whose expression remained steady, he cleared his throat.

“Last night was one of
the most special nights of my life. I didn’t take it lightly, Tess. I’ve been
thinking about you nonstop.”

“Answer my question,
Neal.”

“I thought about sex that
first day that I saw you in your car.”

Tess shook her head; she
felt a hurricane rising up in her. No, this isn’t what she wanted to hear
although she had asked it.

“You were a woman. A very
attractive woman. It was probably the first time in decades I felt—”

“What? You felt what?”

“The feelings that a man
feels for a woman. I liked you the minute I saw you.”

“Was your plan to have
sex with me before you went back to the monastery just to see what it would be
like?”  

He shook his head. “Tess,
no. I didn’t have a plan. I like you. I feel as if you’ve helped me.”

“Helped you?” she said.

“It didn’t come out
right, Tess.” He moved to put his arm on her shoulder but she backed away from
his reach. “What I meant was—when I saw you that first time I was busy thinking
about God and my vows, and meditating if I was doing the right thing and when I
saw you I stopped thinking about that.”

“Because I made you think
about sex,” she said. She laughed; it sounded preposterous to her.

“I wanted you in my life
that first time I saw you. I didn’t have it all figured out and didn’t intend
to seduce you or anything of the sort, but I wanted you in my life.”

She laughed again. The
seductive monk.

“Well, you got what you
wanted, right?” she said. She felt herself on the verge of tears and cleared
her throat. What was going on with her?

“Tess, it’s not like
that. There is no conquest for me. I wanted to be in your presence. When I’m
with you the monastery and that whole life seems impossible to me.”

“So I keep you from the
monastery – that’s my role?”

“What I’m trying to say
is that when I’m with you, I feel like a man who likes a woman and that type of
man has no place in a monastery.”

The tears began to build
up in her throat again. She stifled them with a cough and then another cough.
What had she done? Who in the world would have sex with a 45-year old virgin? A
man of God? And now he was saying because of her, he knew he didn’t belong in
the monastery? She needed space. She began to walk towards the dock. Michael
would have called this one of her menopause moments.

“Tess!” Neal called,
walking toward her. “Wait, please.”

She sat down by the edge
of the dock, studying the muddied water lapping the dock’s poles. She saw an
outline of herself in the water, but no details. In a moment Neal sat down
beside her so that she glanced over at him. Here it was: she had feelings for
this man and already felt him leaving her. Going back to where he came from.
She didn’t have the energy to like someone.

“What we did last night
shouldn’t have happened.”

“I’m glad it did.”

She shook her head.
Something like disgust rose up in her—her mind was in conflict between the
enjoyment she had experienced last night and the uneasy feeling that she had
done something wrong. Something that she couldn’t undo. How was it he didn’t
feel the same conflict?

“Don’t you worry if you
did something wrong?” she asked.

“I did everything with
the Lord in my heart,” he said.

This was too much for her
to process – now God was involved in their sex.

She wanted to shake some
sense into him. “Aren’t you going back to the monastery in September?”

“I wrote and asked for
another three months.”

Tess didn’t realize that
she had been holding her breath until he spoke the words. He was going to stay.
For now. She was searching for a folder in her brain to store this information.
He was going to stay for a bit longer. And then he would leave.
This was temporary. All of it was
temporary. A sigh from deep
inside of her escaped and
Neal reached for her hand and clasped it in her own. But wait, what if they
didn’t grant him another three months? That was possible, wasn’t it?

The sea gulls were moving
back towards them, and for a moment Tess thought they were going to land right
by their feet, as if to be witnesses.

“Do you think they’ll
approve it?” Tess asked. This was the problem for her with falling for someone:
her mind skipped ahead, began worrying about all the possible outcomes that
might or might not ever happen. Falling for someone meant trying to control the
future.

“Yes,” he said. “They
already did.”

Three months was 90 days.
Anything was possible in 90 days—she could fall madly in love with him, fall
out of love with him. She loosened up. A sense of calm came back over her.

“What did your mother
say?” Tess said. She wasn’t sure if she meant about his going home in the
middle of the night last night or about his extension. He tossed a pebble into
the water and then picked up another and began to sketch in the sand.

“She’s struggling,” Neal
said.

“About me or you not
going back yet?” Tess said.

“About my not going back
yet, I’m sure; and most likely about you to some extent.”

 The water tip toed up to
the shore and then darted away.

“I somehow imagined that
she’d be happy about my being back,” Neal said.

Tess thought of something
that Prakash had said to her about her break up with David — he had been in his
twenties by then—that after a certain age you didn't want things to be so
haphazard. You wanted to believe that you knew what to expect.

“She was used to her
life, Neal. You changed her reality.”

“She was so sad when I
first left for the monastery—she said that she was losing her only son and I
wanted to comfort her, but what was there to say? It wasn't about her—it wasn't
about me, either,” Neal said.

Neal tossed the stone in
his hand into the water and it made a splash, sending nearby pigeons into
flight.

 “It was about life. I
had to go. There was nothing else for me to do but follow the voice that was
leading me,” Neal said.

“You need to give your
mother time,” Tess said.

“I don’t know if that’s
the case for her, Tess.”

“What does she think of
me?” Tess asked.

“She doesn't understand.
You can't be hurt by what she thinks—she doesn't know you,” Neal said.

Tess stared straight
ahead. “I don’t want to be an obstacle for you,” Tess said.

“You’re not an obstacle,”
he said.

“Maybe not now, but in
the future—”  

“Right now we’re living
our lives, Tess. That’s all we can do.”

The water dragged up the
shore, slow, lazy. It reminded Tess of the school children she saw walking into
the elementary school each morning.

Tess tried to imagine
what it was like for Neal to walk up to his porch his first day back, ring the
doorbell. How his mother felt when she saw him standing there with his duffel
bag. How it felt for him to walk into his house after being gone for
twenty-three years, to cross that threshold. How it felt for him to sleep in
his bed that night.

“Do you miss the
monastery Neal?”

He stared off into the
distance: the waves were gentle, a muddy green as they trickled up the shore.
Beyond, she was able to see the cars on the Mill Basin draw bridge.

“When I think of my time
there, of walking through those fields, of working in my garden, of eating
meals, morning, noon, and night with the brothers, it seems like it was all in
some other life time. It’s as if that reality couldn’t possibly exist amidst
this reality,” he said.

He chucked a shell into
the water. The ripples mesmerized Tess.

 “If I didn’t leave, I
would have never known that all of this was waiting for me,” he said.

Tess thought of her
relationships. How each time she moved past one there had been a whole new
reality that she embarked on. The sun cut the clouds, its initial rays a deep
russet as it streaked the sky, and she had a fleeting sense that there was
something more—something ahead that she was yet to do in her life time,
something that would make this chapter, too, fade.

Neal touched her shoulder
and Tess jumped. “You okay?” he asked.

She took all of him in:
the layer of sea mist on his forehead, his translucent eyes, his peach fuzz
head of hair, his long and sturdy fingers.

She nodded. “I’m fine.
I’m just trying to figure this out. It’s new for me, too.”

Neal nodded. Tess
fingered the sand and drew two stick people at a distance from one another.

“What do you miss most
about the monastery?” she asked.

“My mentor, Father
Demetrius,” Neal said. “He was—is—the assistant abbot,” Neal said. “That’s like
being the vice president.”

“He sat with me during
the afternoons that first summer I spent out on the prairie and told me about
his life—about how he was an undertaker for over 20 years before he found his
home at the monastery. He’d been married at one time, too, but he had decided
early on that marriage wasn’t right for him. The way he put it was that he had
spent too much time trying to please his wife and not enough time trying to
please God when he was married. For a long time he had loved being an
undertaker, loved being there for people in their time of need, but after a
while, he felt that each time he sold someone a coffin, helped them to plan a
funeral, a part of him was being locked away in a box and buried.”

A stray pigeon inched its
way closer to Tess right now. She locked eyes with it, telling herself that if
it stayed, Neal would stay. If it flew away, Neal would flee, too.

“He went through
chemotherapy three times in the past few years—the cancer just wouldn’t go
away, kept spreading from his lymph nodes to his breast. We saw him go through
some really hard times, but he never once complained, never once stopped being
there for us. He’s in remission now. I worry sometimes that if he passes, I
won’t be there to say goodbye to him,” Neal said.

“Have you been in touch
with him since you’ve been home?” Tess twisted her torso around, looking for
the pigeon. There he was, behind her, bopping around.