From Comfortable Distances (35 page)

Dale nibbled on the pieces of the
oversized chocolate chip cookie that she had spread out on the napkin in front
of her. She sat across from Tess at a table nestled up by the front window of
The Bakery. Tess looked from Dale to the scene of passersby outside. She
couldn’t decide if she felt as if she were on display or if the people passing
by were on display. She could tell that Dale was processing what to do with the
information that Kyle had called Tess that morning. Their two-week break was a
day or two from being up. “What did he want?” Dale said.

“He was asking about apartments—if
anything new had come up.”

Tess sipped her tea. She took the
cover off of her tea to cool it and the steam rose up out of it. For a moment,
she felt as if she was getting lighter, clearer, watching the steam vanish.
Friday—finally, the end of what had been a long and tiresome week in her life.

“So he’s still looking for a place to
live,” Dale said.

“Want my opinion? And I don’t think
one has to be too much of a detective to figure this one out,” Tess said. “Kyle
was searching for information on you. The apartment stuff was his way of easing
into a conversation with me.”

“What’d you tell him?” Dale said.

“I told him about some apartments
that were on the market, sent him the email links to take a look at them and
told him to call me if he’s interested,” Tess said.

Dale was playing with her cookie,
breaking it up into more pieces, searching for chocolate chips.

“Has he called you?” Tess asked.

“He’s into sending me emails and text
messages now,” Dale said.

“And?” Tess said.

“And, I don’t know. I read what he
writes me but then I’m powerless to respond to him. I have this lethargy when I
think about writing back to him. Of course I don’t know what to say because I’m
not sure what I feel. My life is fine without him. Sometimes I can’t even
imagine that I was with him,” Dale said.

“I can relate to that feeling. It’s
how I felt about all of my ex-husbands after each divorce,” Tess said. “Out of
sight, out of mind”—that’s what Michael used to say to me. Of course since I
always got to see him, he felt that I was still thinking about him.”

Dale looked over at Tess’s watch.

“We’ve got about fifteen minutes,”
Tess said.

“What do you think I should do?” Dale
asked. Her eyes were intent on Tess.

“If I was in your situation I would
keep on going and trust my feelings. Sooner or later you’ll know what to do. I
don’t think that you have to rush anything. And you certainly don’t have to put
pressure on yourself.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Dale said. “I
hope. It’s just so hard to keep on going with so much unknown and unsolved in
my life.”

Tess smiled. “My dear, we all have
tons of unknowns and unsolved issues in our life. Thinking we know the answers
is the real joke. But the answers do come. All you have to do is live and they
happen.”

“How’s the monk?” Dale asked.

Tess glanced on either side of her to
take inventory of who was sitting alongside them: all strangers. She took a
deep breath and told Dale everything that had happened over the past couple of
weeks: the kidnapping by Mrs. Clay, the sex on the 4
^th
of July, the
not-quite sleepovers.

“You’ve kept this from me
for all of these days?”

“You were in the
Hamptons!”

Tess glanced at her watch
and stood up. “We have to go. Yoga time.”

Once outside, “Do you
think he's going to stay?” Dale asked.

Tess shrugged her shoulders, the cool
evening air invigorating. She linked her hand in Dale’s elbow. “It’s a big
mystery. Right now, he’s here until December. After that, his abbot has to
write to Rome to get him an official pardon from the Pope.”

“The Pope? What? This is the stuff
soap operas are made of. But if he has fallen for you, Tess, and I am sure he
has, he’s staying.”

“Remember, I’m up against his mother,
the wicked witch of Mill Basin, and the Pope.”

Dale paused, bringing Tess to a stop.
“Like you told me, Tess. The answers will come.”

“I know. And I also know that nothing
lasts forever.”

Tess started walking again and Dale
fell in line beside her. There was a hint of fall in the air. The season of
unrest and edginess. The season of transition and change.

Swarms of people were walking down
the city streets. Work people done with their day, moms with their children,
groups of teenagers in uniforms on their way home from some extracurricular
school activity, she supposed. Everyone had somewhere to go. Tess liked the
busyness right now. She liked how easy it was to get lost in all the action, to
let it keep her moving.

Dale paused by the tables of earrings
and necklaces and belts that were being sold on the street in front of the yoga
studio. She picked up a chunky gold medallion necklace and exaggerated its
weight before she put it back down. She held up a spiked red leather belt and
Tess shook her head.

“It looks like a collar for an evil
dog,” Tess said.

Before pulling open the door to the
studio, Dale turned to her. “He probably won’t go back, Tess.”

“How does everything get so
complicated, Dale? One moment I’m enjoying life, the next moment psycho mother
is stalking me and I have to worry if a monk is going to go back to his
monastery.”

“Que sera, sera,” Dale said.

“Amen,” Tess said.

Church bells began to ring in the
distance and as Dale held the door open for her, Tess paused a moment—their
tinny chimes sounded to her as if they were from another era; there was a
beckoning element to them.  She thought of
The Sound of Music
, the ominous
sound of the church bells toward the end, as the family made their escape, but
at that instant Dale released the door and Tess moved inside before it slammed
on her.

My dearest Tess, I have
reached a point in which preaching to others no longer fulfills me.
I ask that you read my pages, as I
leave them for you, one section at a time. Perhaps the only way to really know
one another with any truth and honesty is in a behind- the-scenes way. I hope
that my writings will help you to know me and perhaps, understand me.
The truth is, Tess, that
I don’t have any answers. In my own garden, there are just daily questions.
What I can offer you is my story. What going to the monastery was all about for
me and what I discovered there. I believe that if no one knows your story in
life, perhaps you will never be known.

Fondly,

Neal

In Your Own Garden

Finding Your Way

It took me a long time to realize
that life is all about accepting the unknown and learning not to expect. It's
when we expect that we lose our focus and become fixated on goals that are
figments of our imagination. The beauty of each act is in the doing of it. Of
course this is an easy concept to preach, and a much harder one to practice.

As a young monk, I prayed each day,
my goal being very clear to me: I wanted to know God, to be at one with him.
Each time I prayed, I waited, believing that THIS would be the day that God
would come to me—speak to me, through me, guide me. I sought my own goals in
praying to God and lost sight of everything else. After a few years of waiting
and wishing, my faith began to dissolve and as a result, I began to doubt God and
my calling to serve him.

 It was at that time, when I had hit
a low, that a transformation occurred. I stopped looking outward for a sign,
and began looking inward. I asked myself what it was that I sought in life and
realized that I already had everything that I wanted: my health, a supportive
community, and hours each day to read and come to know myself. The less
attached and concerned I became with results, a funny thing happened—the more
immersed in my prayers I became. In time, my prayers were heart and soul and
action all in one. It was in that focus and honesty that God did come to me—not
as a voice or a face, but a presence as gentle and as subtle as a breeze.

And yet, once I found God, the soft
guiding God of my life, there was no major shift in me, just a silence that I
hadn’t been able to hear before. Each day, I prayed and toiled in the fields
and tended to my garden. Looking back, I guess that I had deceived myself into
believing that when God came to me my life would change as it had done many
years back, when his voice led me to join the monastery. When I reconnected
with God at this later date, nothing much changed—my life was still full of the
same hurdles as it had always been. The only difference was that I was no
longer searching, but living.

On the days when I struggled, I
wondered if my being at the monastery was a selfish act or if in fact it was my
calling in life and if God still wished for me to be there in his house. I
worked in my garden, tending to the weeds and making sure that the soil around
the tulip bulbs was most and firm, and waited for God to come and console me
and tell me, YES, you belong here. God never told me that.

One May night, two years ago, on my
42nd birthday, after I had been at the monastery almost two decades, I had a
revelation. It was after nightfall, when we said our last prayers of the day
and were supposed to be in our rooms, reading and contemplating. I stared out
my window at the towering evergreen trees waving in the wind like shaky old
men, and closed my eyes as the coyote’s song infiltrated the fields. I prayed
for the safety of all the smaller animals that might find themselves in the
coyote’s path. It was in one of those moments of pure love and concern for
others, that I realized that no matter how much we may want someone else to
experience our lives for us, feel our pain and fear, console us, they cannot.
In truth, we are all alone. It was that night that I came to understand that
God is not a force who can provide us with answers or take away our loneliness.
God is the strength within us that helps us to surpass our fears, helps us to
be strong not only for ourselves, but for others, too. It was that night, after
all those years of living within the walls of the monastery, that I came to
know—not just accept, but know—that each of us is an image of God and our job
is not to wish for others to remove our pain or to add to our joy, or confirm
our actions, but to live our lives without any expectations and to always tend
to our garden first, for it is only after we weed ourselves and nourish our
soil that we may bloom, and in turn help others to do so.

In the coyote’s song that night I
came to understand that God is our mirror: if our faith in Him is strong, His
faith in us flourishes; if our faith in Him begins to falter, then His faith in
us falters, too. Our connection to God is reciprocal and everlasting. To wait
around for God to give us a green light is to forget that we are already on the
same journey. When we go, God travels with us. When we stop, God stops, too.

If I had begun to suspect that
perhaps I was not destined to live the remainder of my life at the monastery,
it was on that night—the day of my birth some 42 years back, May 6th—that I
realized that life was not always about a straight path, but that sometimes
there was a crooked progress to our lives, and it was not something to be
ashamed of, but rather something that we needed to accept. People would and did
get lost along their ways, and it was only in getting lost that there was a
hope of getting back on one's path. I prayed that night as I got into bed and the
owls began to cry, reminding me that there was a time each day for everyone to
be heard, that I would be able to accept not only my crooked progress, but the
crooked progress of others and to appreciate that crooked progress as much as I
appreciated my straight- path progress. For a moment, as I fell asleep, my mind
deflating after so much thought, I remembered the tulip stems in my garden
whose weakness I had tried to undo by placing sticks up against their stalks,
trying to change their direction and make them straighter, stronger. There was
always in this great big world the chance that some force, some presence,
without asking any questions, would try to help you find your straight path.

“Are we almost done with standing
poses?” Neal asked.

Tess paused mid sun salute to wink at
him and then kept going, her body flowing into plank, then chataranga, into
upward facing dog before she spoke. “If you want to be, sure.” And then she was
in downward facing dog and jumping through into a seated position.

Neal made his way to a seated
position on his mat. “How you do that fancy jump through thing is beyond me,”
he said.

“It’s a repetition thing. One day it
just happens.”

“Practice makes perfect, right?”

Tess smiled at him in his white
undershirt and navy Adidas track pants. She wiped the thin layer of sweat from
her brow. It was a brisk September evening and she had turned the heat on to
warm up her home. Now she was hot. She couldn’t tell if it was menopause or the
heat or the yoga, but her body was damp all over and she liked it. After so
many years of no physical activity, she liked feeling as if she was getting in
a workout, liked feeling a relationship with her body again, the aches and
stiffness in her joints from activity.

“Practice is the key,” Tess said.

She wondered if Neal was thinking
what she was thinking; thoughts that belonged in the bedroom and not on a yoga
mat. That’s what he did to her – turned her on in some foreign way.

“After about the twentieth sun salute,
my middle aged body says no more,” Neal said.

Tess laughed. “We did not do twenty
sun salutes,” she said. She was leaning forward now, inching her hands toward
her toes in a deep forward bend. Pachimotinasina. “Anyway, you have ten years
on me. I’m the one with the middle aged body,” she said.

Neal was doing as she did and leaning
forward, his hands barely making it to his knees. “Ouch,” he said. “This is
what I get for going for a jog today.”

“You’re tighter than usual. And since
when do you jog?”

He fell on his back, bending his knees, and reached and
pulled her so that she fell back beside him. They looked at one another on
their sides, Neal smiling so that Tess smiled.

“I jog as of today,” Neal said. “I
always used to jog, but then I guess I stopped for a few years. Or maybe a few
decades,” he said so that they both laughed. “But today I decided to start
again.”

“Why today?” she asked. Her voice was
light and gentle. It felt nice to be resting on her back. She had to get rid of
the stucco ceiling downstairs one of these days. Jeesh. She didn’t know how she
had let it go for so long. Who had stucco ceilings anymore? No houses she sold.
She’d put it on her to do list.

“Why not today?” Neal said. “It was
brisk and cool and I felt the inspiration to go do it. Thirty minutes. I’d like
to say thirty minutes of bliss but today it felt like –”

“Hell,” Tess said. She leaned on her
side so that she sat facing him. “I said it, not you.”

“I was panting like a big sweaty dog
during and after, but I felt great,” he said. “I’m going to give it a try again
tomorrow. Thirty three minutes.”

“Why thirty three?” she asked.

“Just because,” he said.

“I see,” she said.

“I’m putting you to sleep.”

“Nope,” she said. “I’m relaxing.”

He adjusted himself to his side so
that he faced her directly. He moved a stray tendril from her face to behind
her ear. “You have the prettiest hair color,” he said. “It’s ginger. Or
cinnamon. But more ginger,” he said. He twirled the tendril around his finger
now.

“I started to read what you left for
me,” she said.

He nodded. She reached to touch his
face with her hand, tracing his eye socket down to his cheekbone and then
moving her finger over his lips. It was hard sometimes to remember that he was
a person, that he was more than just the feelings and thoughts she had of him.
He was a person sitting across from her who she liked and with whom she had
been intimate. A human being with his own active mind and complexities. He
kissed her fingertip with his lips. A soft, slight kiss.

“You have a lot of good things to
say,” she said. “I liked what you said about the crooked progress of life. My
life has been pretty crooked.” Tess laughed and Neal kissed her finger again
and then he was sitting up and rolling over to her yoga mat so that she laughed
some more.

“One mat per customer,” she said.

“I want to share your mat,” he said
and she scooted over, making room for him so that their bodies were close
together, their faces inches apart. All Tess could take in were his blue eyes
that reminded her of the Caribbean right now, of diving into a foamy white
ocean.

“I love spending time with you,” he
said. “I love talking to you.”

Tess didn’t move her eyes from his. “Why?”
she asked. His pupils spread so that they were almost taking over the blueness.

“I get to be myself with you,” he
said.

“Who were you at the monastery?”

“A man following rules.”

“Who are you in your mother’s house?”

He laughed. “A man following rules.”

Tess brushed his cheek with the back
of her palm. “Sounds like a lot of rules everywhere.”

“No rules with you,” Neal said.

Tess laughed. “Yet,” she said.

He wrestled her onto her back
playfully, his face looming over her.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you never know what
you’re getting yourself into.”

“What do you think I’m getting myself
into?”

“Hmm.” She could have told him that
he was getting himself into a steamy relationship in which she could see
herself becoming insatiable. She laughed deep in her throat. For a moment she
was silent as she debated, what am I getting myself into?

He waved his fingers in front of her
eyes. “Tess to earth,” he said.

“Do you believe in points of no
return?” she asked.

He studied her, his eyes taking all
of her in, first her face and then traveling down her body in her tight black
yoga top and tight black yoga pants. She blushed, suddenly conscious of her
body. He steadied her chin with his hand and then smoothed her hair off of her
forehead and kissed her there.

She didn’t believe in points of no
return. She had learned that no matter how deep you were in, it was always
possible to back out – that had been true for her in love and in business
matters.

“Do you?” she said.

“Do I what?” he said. His fingertips
were massaging her ear lobes and then moving down to her neck. Slow rhythmical
movements.

“Believe in points of no return?” she
asked.

“I think I know what you’re asking
me,” he said. He kissed one cheek lightly, then the other cheek, a symmetry to
his movements.

“What am I asking you?” She whispered
now, letting herself be pulled into his seduction, letting him have his way
with her, her pulse rising with anticipation. She had been asking him if there
was any way back for him at this time. Back to his old life, back to the
monastery.

“I don’t have the answer yet, Tess.”

She nodded, his lips hovering over
her own and then moving up to her eyelids, kissing each one, so that she felt
herself easing up even more behind closed lids. She smiled and felt his finger
tip tracing her lips, which made her smile broader. He was her lover. For now,
that’s what they were, lovers.

He leaned down over her and covered
her lips in his own, kissing her lightly at first and then harder, so that she
felt her insides come to life, and rolled closer to him, their bodies pressed
together. She loved this about them: how they seemed to fit, how their joining
wasn’t awkward, but comfortable. She pulled him closer to her and then his hand
was up her under her shirt and he was caressing her bare back. Gooseflesh
spread and she eased into his touch, craving it all over so that she began to
caress his back, his skin soft and smooth, and then she wanted his shirt off so
that she could feel his flesh against hers and in a moment she was pulling off
his shirt and then he was pulling hers off.

“I could kiss you for hours,” he
whispered. “Hours and hours.” He moved his lips from hers for a moment so that
she craned her neck from the floor to reach his lips, only he pulled further
away, so that she couldn’t reach him.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

“I bet that I’m not the only man
who’s said that to you.”

She laughed and let her head fall
back down to the floor.

“Neal,” she said, and then his lips,
his person was closer to her again and he rested his head on her chest, so that
she felt the racing of her heart against his cheek.

“That’s funny to you,” he said.

“No, not funny.” She stroked his
growing-back, silky straight hair with her hand, her fingers arranging strands
this way and that by his ear. “I wish I met you a long time ago. And yet, I
think I met you at just the right time. I wasn’t always who I am now; you may
not have liked me if we met any other time.”

“Have other men said that to you –
about wanting to kiss you?”

 “I don’t know. Maybe. What does it
matter, Neal?”

She leaned up, her head bent, and
kissed him on the cheek. “Right now, I want you to kiss me,” she said. “No one
else.”

Neal faced her again and began to
kiss her slowly, passionately, so that she couldn’t contain the excitement, the
pure desire that rushed through her body. As if he could sense the shift in
her, the neediness, he began to undress her right there, pulling off her yoga
pants and then pulling down his own sweatpants, his hands exploring her body,
right there on her yoga mat.

Afterwards, their bodies relaxed, he
rested his head on her belly, so that they pulsed, ever so slightly, with each
of her inhales and exhales.

“It matters,” Neal said. “It matters
because I wish you were in it with me – I wish this was our first experience
together.”

“It is, though, Neal. No one has ever
been like you.”

His hand traced the inside of her
thigh so that she quivered.

“You’re cold?” he said and she shook
her head although he couldn’t see her.

“No,” she said. She glanced down at
him on her naked body and had the urge to cover herself but then feeling his
hand move along her lower back and then her mid-back, the feeling passed. She
liked this – being exposed with him.  

“I like you, Tess,” he said.

She was silent for a few minutes,
thinking and not thinking. Taking in the moment, the two of them exposed in the
fading light of day. She smiled. How could she ever practice on this mat again
without reliving this scene?

“I like you, Neal,” she said, but a
darker thought was passing through her just then. So what that she liked him?
What would come of it? She had liked men before; what had ever come of any of
those feelings, those relationships?

He stirred, and moved up to her now,
so that they rested side by side and she felt her body stiffen. She wondered if
he had sensed the shift in her. He began to smooth over the profile of her
body, his hand swooping at the indent of her waist as he made his way from her
hip to her breast and she felt herself soften, lose herself against his touch
which both nurtured her and made her feel safe, secure, desirable.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I like being here with you,” she
said, at which he pulled her close to him, his arms cradling her.

“Are you comfortable? Should we go
into my bedroom?” she said.

They lay silent for a few moments,
until she peeked up to see if he were sleeping.

“Neal?” she whispered.

“Uh huh,” he said.

“Do you want to go to bed?” she
asked.

“I need to go soon,” he said.

“Home?” she said, and he nodded.

“You can stay,” she said, suddenly
feeling desperate for him not to leave her. “For a little bit?” She said.

“For a little bit,” he said.

They got up from the floor slowly,
Tess gathering their clothes as Neal rolled up the yoga mats and placed them in
the corner, and then Neal was following her up the stairs and Tess felt
self-conscious again – she couldn’t remember a man ever following her naked
from her downstairs to her upstairs, and she was grateful that the lights
upstairs were off. They stumbled into her bedroom, laughing, Neal bumping into her
more than once, and fell onto her bed, undoing the covers and sheets as they
got inside and held one another close. It didn’t take long for Neal to be
excited again, which got Tess excited, and then they were kissing passionately
and making love – a dreamy, desirous love in which Tess let go, gave into him,
gave into her desire and moaned once and then again, in harmony with Neal’s
moans. There was a recklessness to their actions; she couldn’t define exactly
why or how, but she felt it in her being. Reckless abandon was the phrase that
came to her; a phrase she had never identified with any of her actions.