From Comfortable Distances (49 page)

My mother came outside
the moment the taxi pulled up—she had most likely been perched at the
front door—her “lookout
post” was what my father used to say. She walked up to the driver with her
wallet as I was gathering my suitcase from the trunk, and I felt awkward to let
her pay him, yet I didn’t have much money with me—just the remains of the
hundred dollars that Father Demetrius had given me for my journey. When the
driver pulled away, there we were standing face to face. My mother looked to me
like my mother, only her hair was cut shorter than I had remembered it and her
face was more drawn so that it gave a frailer appearance. Looking into her
eyes, which were neither questioning nor challenging, I knew that I was exactly
where I needed to be in order to sort things out.

Dear Neal,

I survived the yoga test.
You told me I would be fine and I appreciated your comments, but I still
couldn’t imagine myself standing up in front of the room and teaching yoga.
More than completing the test, though, I enjoyed myself during the practical
exam. It made me feel happy to guide people through an experience that I
believe settled them. I felt peaceful witnessing them become peaceful.

I have thought long and
hard about my fear of teaching yoga to a group, and I believe that it has to do
with the thought of tapping into a part of myself that is not my comfort zone,
and letting people see me as something other than a business woman. What
happens in life, or what has happened in my case, is that for a long time, I
have hidden behind a title. A realtor. That title enabled people to know what I
did and allowed me to hide anything else that I was. In everyday life, people
never asked me what I cared about, or for, or anything of myself. Everyone that
I interacted with was generally a prospective home
buyer
, and so we
talked to one another and interacted at a topical level. I think it’s only with
my son that I ever ventured into other territory – the territory that includes
soul searching and what I’m about – the things that matter to me in my life.

Much like you, Neal, I
have lived a safe life. I have kept the real me tucked away and gone through
the motions in many respects. I’ve taken chances in real estate and in marrying
and divorcing, I suppose, but those chances couldn’t really affect my soul. I
don’t think that I ever truly let anyone in. I mourned the losses in my life
like anyone else, but now I am beginning to understand that what I mourned had
to do with attachment rather than anything deeper. I suppose what I am trying
to say is that nothing or no one has ever affected my soul before, and teaching
yoga, being so vulnerable in front of others – it has impacted me in a profound
way.

There’s so much that you
don’t know about me. That’s the thing about life that often bewilders me. We
are all here doing it together, and yet we never truly have a chance to tell
one another about ourselves. Or maybe that’s just how I’ve lived my life –
rushing from one event to the next. I do believe that my mother knew things
about me innately, without my ever telling her, but I wish I had talked to her
more – not just the small talk, but that I had gotten into the details with her
– told her about my fears, my passions; let her guide me in her way. I
understand now that her insight would have been invaluable to me. How foolish
we are at times to let things slip away in our lives – because there is not
always a second chance.

You have shared so much
about yourself with me, but I understand that what you shared are just moments
and thoughts and feelings captured at those moments. What is it that we as
humans can truly share with one another, other than experiences, moments of bliss,
moments of pain, and if we’re lucky, moments of understanding?

There were so many
memories that I shared with my mom, but what plays in my mind beyond all of the
others is that morning that I drove up to Woodstock a few days before she
passed. I had no idea that morning that her end was so near; I don’t believe
that she knew either. That morning, we sat out on her front lawn on blankets
and she sang her song, “I never promised you a rose
garden,” and I sang
along. I never knew why she loved that song as she did, but she had sung it to
me for as long as I could remember. She had all of her spiritual songs that she
always sang to her congregation and hummed around the house, but whenever she
would come into my bedroom at night to tuck me in and sing me to sleep, that
was the song she sang. Maybe there was more to it than I ever understood. I
never promised you a rose garden…it serves as a reminder to me that happiness
is something that I, you, all of us, have to work towards, to earn. It’s never
promised to any one of us.

I wonder in some ways if
the song was linked to my father and their relationship. He brought her over to
the US. I’m sure they were in love and I’m sure that she had hoped and wished
for a certain type of life – a life that she had believed they would share in
together. I don’t think my mother would have brought me into this world if she
hadn’t have believed in the bond between my father and her. She was too deeply
spiritual – too much a believer in the universe and in the power of transcendence.
And when that relationship failed – when the life she chose to pursue was not
the right life for my dad, and he left, I suppose it’s what stuck with her –
that life was not a rose garden. That there would be hard times and that it
wouldn’t be easy and beautiful all the time. I don’t know. I’m filling in the
blanks. When I was younger, I hated my mother in some respects, as I believed
that her spirituality is what drove my father away. I tried as hard as I could
to distance myself from her as I didn’t want to be like her. I didn’t want to
turn into her.
I told myself that if she were like the other moms, a regular
person, that my father would have loved her, that he would have stayed. Now, I
understand that it was my father’s loss to leave my mother. That he gave up a
life that could have been filled with a love without barriers, a true love, if
he had been willing to believe, to trust, to accept. But he had his own path to
pursue. And I know that after the hurt, after the pain of his leaving her, my
mom was able to wish him well and mean it – she was able to believe in his
goodness even if he had hurt her; she was able to get past the hurt and love
him in a new way; a way that didn’t wish for or want anything of him. A way
that enabled her to believe that their paths had crossed as that was what the
universe wished for and that their paths had frayed as that too was what the
universe wished for. They had done their dance was what she would have said if
I asked her. She would have said, what more could anyone in this world ask for
than to have their dance with another human being?

Thank you, Neal, for
listening to me. Thank you for knowing me.

Tess

“Thanks, I’d love to come
in for tea,” Michael said.

He walked past Tess and
up the stairs into the kitchen.

“My housekeeper has taken
over my kitchen to clean, so tea is off limits at my place. And I know the
freak isn’t here because I just saw him and his freak-o mother get into her car
by her house and drive away. Are you going to come upstairs and join me, or are
you expecting someone else?” Michael said.

Tess pushed the front
door closed and made her way up the stairs.

“Look, Michael—” Tess
said.

“I got your resignation
letter,” Michael said, pulling it out of his jeans pocket and flapping it at
her. “You’re one surprise after another these days, aren’t you?”

He pulled his sweatshirt
up and over his head. “It’s hot in here,” he said. He was wearing a t-shirt
that said,
Have more fun in bed
, with the word
Sleepy’s
sprawled
across the top.

“Your shoes, Michael,”
Tess said.

He looked down at them
and back up at Tess suspiciously. “What about them?”

“Please take them off.”

“Are you kidding me?”
Michael said.

Tess held out her hand, motioning
Michael to hand her the letter and his sweatshirt as he took off his shoes.

“Is this some new yogi
thing?” he said.

“Is your t-shirt some new
sex ploy?” Tess said.

“You’re a funny gal,
Tess.”

“All through growing up,
my mother was insistent that we take off our shoes before we entered the
house—for her it was about oneness with the earth and not bringing the dirt
from outside into one’s sacred space. Don’t you remember leaving your shoes on
the porch when we went up there? Anyway, being at the yoga studio so much, I’ve
gotten to appreciate the ritual of being barefoot.”

Michael shook his head.

“What?” Tess said. “You
wanted an explanation and you got one.”

“Since when do you write
me letters about your life decisions that involve me? At least when you wanted
a divorce you told me to my face,” Michael said.

“I’m ready to talk. I
wrote you a letter so that you could digest it. I knew you would react just
like this.”

“How else should I react?”

“You should be on a
daytime soap opera,” Tess said.

Michael sat down at the
kitchen table in his chair. When they were married, he had always sat in that
chair. It was funny, Tess thought, but even after time had passed and things
had changed, you would catch a glimpse of a person in a certain way and for an
instant, it would seem as if a time machine had transported you backwards.

“It’s a good thing I
didn’t put on socks with holes in them today,” he said.

“You don’t own socks with
holes, Michael,” Tess said.

He motioned to the teapot
on the stove with his chin. “Tea still hot?”

Tess shook her head and
turned the stove on. She sat down at the table across from him. “Few minutes,”
she said.

“Do you want to tell me
what the heck your letter is all about?” Michael said. “And if I belong on a
daytime soap, you certainly should be the star of one.”

She had written it up
last night at work and had dropped it in his garage mail slot on the way home
from work, where she knew he’d see it in the morning when he went to pull out
his car.

“It’s about exactly what
it says. I’m strongly considering moving back up to Woodstock for the New Year,
and in order to make that a reality, I’m turning the business over to you to
manage. We’ll still coordinate and I’ll still make some decisions I’m sure,
come into the office now and then, but you’ll be the in-house CEO,” Tess said.

“Let me get this
straight. You're leaving your company not to mention your home for the last 30
something years, to move up to Woodstock and teach yoga?” Michael said.

“I’m not leaving anything
first of all. I’m just making some changes so that I can live a life that’s in
accord with who I am today,” Tess said.

“
Who you are today
?
Am I missing something because I still see Tess sitting across from me,”
Michael said.

“People do change over
time, you know, as in priorities shift and so forth. Look at you—you were a
high-powered corporate attorney in Manhattan, and now you live in Brooklyn and
are a lawyer at Best,” Tess said.

“Oh, I get it. People
change, as in you were sane of mind and now you’re not. As in you loved running
a business and now you want to become some sort of Mother Teresa and teach
yoga,” Michael said.

“You are so off base,
Michael, that I won’t even waste my breath on your stupidity,” Tess said.

“Let me ask you this. I
see you every day. When did you make this decision?” Michael said.

“It was brewing, but last
night was when I sealed it. That’s when I wrote the letter. So basically,
you’re the first to know,” she said.

“Aren’t I lucky?” he
said. His chin jutted up at the ceiling and he closed his eyes as if he was
breathing something in. It reminded Tess of how he looked when he
slept—vulnerable in an exhausted way.

“You’re a goddess in this
industry, Tess.” His mouth moved, his face and neck still in the same position.
“You make an incredible living. You’re willing to toss that all away?” 

“What good is the money
doing me if I’m always working?” Tess said.

“Always working? You just
played semi hooky for months with your yoga stuff.”

“I’m glad that you
consider 60-hour work week’s semi- hooky,” Tess said.

“You seem to forget that
you love it, too. Don't tell me you’ve forgotten that. I’ve been there with you
every time you close a house. You glow. This yoga stuff has really brainwashed
you,” Michael said.

“Michael, nothing has
brainwashed me. It’s okay for a person to want to change things, to take some
chances. Anyway, who are you worried about—you or me? You'll do an amazing job.
The agents will be thrilled to work with you. I have total faith that you can
run this business as well as I did, if not better,” Tess said.

“Tess, I’m a lawyer,”
Michael said.

“Right. And you’ve been
working with our agents for three years now. You have nothing to worry about,”
Tess said.

“You’ve been brainwashed,”
Michael said.

“Call it what you will.
How I see it is that there’s only so much living that you can go on doing
without stopping to see what’s really going on in your life,” Tess said.

“I just want you to be
aware of what you're doing.”

“Trust me, Michael, I am.”

The teakettle began to
whistle.

“I suppose that's another
sign,” Michael said.

“Cynicism doesn’t suit
you well,” Tess said.

He stood up, took cups
from the dishwasher—”Clean?” he asked and Tess nodded. He put in the tea bags,
poured the steaming water into it and brought the steeping hot cups to the
table. The steam rising between them fixated Tess. She imagined for a moment
that she and Michael were suspended within it and that when it dissipated, so
too would the heaviness of this conversation.

“I’m just trying to
understand you, is all,” Michael said. He was leaning forward now, his eyes
intent on Tess. In the heat of their relationship, it had been this expression
he had worn before he pulled her face to his and kissed her. Tess moved her tea
bag around in her cup. She could feel that Michael’s eyes were downcast now,
too.

“You know a person for so
many years, you were married to them for Christ's sake, living with them,
working with them, and then they start changing their life all other the place,
leaving you to pick up the pieces, and you wonder what the heck is going on
with them. I think that my concerns are pretty valid,” Michael said.

Tess leaned back in her
chair, her eyes meeting his. His drama was putting her over the top—she had
often felt that she was the husband and he was the wife in their relationship
and she felt precisely that way right now. She cleared her throat to make
herself sound more serious—she knew that if he sensed her lightness of heart
for even a moment, he would erupt.

“If you think I should
sell Best Reality, fine, I will. But I really think that you can run it, no
problem,” Tess said. “And you’ll certainly be compensated very well, I might
add.”

“You know, sometimes you
truly infuriate me,” he said.

Tess couldn’t conceal her
smile.

“Don’t even think about
being cute,” he said. “The fact that I’m having this conversation with you is
pathetic to me,” Michael said.

“Pathetic?” Tess said. “The
fact that I want to get on with my life and do what’s right for me, is far from
pathetic, Michael. In fact, what’s pathetic is your berating my decisions.”

“I’m not berating your
decision,” Michael said, his face all kinds of sour. “I’m just trying to keep
you from ruining your life.”

“If you don’t think
you’re the right person to run my business, no problem, Michael. I’m sure that
it won’t be hard work to find someone who’s capable and enthusiastic to run a
multi-million dollar business.”

“It's not about me
running it. Be reasonable. If you leave, your company will lose its best agent.
You’re the master house seller,” Michael said.

“Somehow I don’t think
that’s what I want on my tombstone—
Master House Seller
,” Tess said. “You
of all people I would think can understand. You left a Fortune 500 firm because
you wanted out of the high-pressured corporate insanity. If I remember
correctly, that’s what you told me when my ex-husband introduced us. Now it’s
my turn to wake up. I am not going to let a job and money dictate how I’m going
to live the rest of my life. There's a whole world out there, Michael. Life is
not about working in an office and running around all day, scrambling to please
other people. Life is about—”

“What is it about? Tell,
me, Tess. What's it all about?”

“Living,” Tess said.

“And helping people to
find houses, interacting with people from all walks of life each day isn't
living?” Michael said.

“Sure, it is, but I think
of living differently now. It's having time to take two-hour walks each
morning—watching the sunrise. Living is about connecting,” Tess said.

Michael sipped his tea,
watching her closely.

“This is about him, isn’t
it?” Michael said.

“Neal? He has no idea
that I’m planning to go to Woodstock.”

“So when were you
planning to tell him? The day you leave? Or let me guess, you’re going to write
him a letter telling him so?” Michael said.

“All I need to know is if
you’re open to running Best or not,” Tess said.

“Just don't get so far
away from yourself that it’s impossible for you to get back to yourself,”
Michael said.

When Michael had divorced
his first wife, he had told Tess that he felt as if the real him had been held
hostage at some far away territory while he was married to her.

“Michael, this is about
getting back to me.”

Michael picked up the
letter and folded it into a paper airplane. He sent it off in Tess’s direction.

“I’ll give you a week to
think this through a bit and then we can revisit,” Michael said.

“You’ll give
me
a
week?” Tess said.

“Just because it seems
like a good idea today, doesn’t mean it will seem like a good idea tomorrow.
Trust me, I learned that the hard way,” Michael said.

“What does that mean,
you
learned that the hard way
? What are you referring to Michael?”

Michael stood up and
laughed. He slipped on his sweatshirt and loafers.

“Michael?”

“Use your imagination,
Tess.”

“Now you’re blaming your
present situation on decisions you made with me? Are you saying you regret
having married me?”

“No,” he said. “You’re
the one who likes to make it clear that you regretted marrying me. How we could
have just stayed friends and not complicated things,” Michael said.

“Michael, everything
happened how it should have,” Tess said.

“Please,” he said. “What
I was referring to was taking you to the yoga studio—I thought I was doing you
and me both a favor that night. If I ever thought yoga would be the cause of
these shenanigans –”

“Taking me to that studio
was the best thing you ever did for me, Michael.”

“Save it,” he said as she
followed him down the stairs.

“You’ll owe me big time
if I help you with Best,” he said. “As in major.”

She smiled at him and he
grabbed her face with both hands and kissed her succulently on the lips before
she could pull away.

“Michael!” she said,
licking her lips where he had bit them. She tasted blood.