From Comfortable Distances (53 page)

“I miss you,” he
whispered in her ear, kissing her lobe gently and making his way down her body
with faint kisses, before he made his way back up to her lips.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,”
she said.

“I care about you, Tess
Rose,” he said, his hands tracing her figure before he began to move under her
clothing and feel her flesh. She moaned softly.

“I care about you, Neal,”
she said as the back of his palm smoothed her cheek and made its way down her
neck before he lifted her clothes off of her. He pulled away for a moment,
taking her naked body in and then leaned up and over to shut off the light on
her night table, darkness enveloping the room as he pulled her onto him.

In Your Own Garden

What I Remember When I Remember: Before the
Monastery

If my father were a
season, he would be late fall, days before winter: crisp, cold, more dark than
light.  He was in many ways a mystery man to me. I had always wanted to find a
way into him, to know his heart, his mind, but as a child, then an adolescent,
in my awkwardness, I didn’t know how to get closer to him. He lived in his
world and there I was in mine and it seemed like our worlds would never
collide, and in his lifetime, they never did. When I was about eight or nine, I
used to watch him from my bedroom window in his garden out back, on his knees,
pulling weeds and pressing the soil so softly with
his
fingertips in the
spots he had planted seeds, making certain that the soil was well packed and
moist, I suppose. He had never touched me with that gentleness.

Sometimes I think he was
more afraid of me than I was of him. Each time he was in my direct proximity,
I’d panic, worrying about what questions he might ask me and if I would have
the right answers for him, and if I would bore him so that he would want to get
away from me as quickly as possible. He never seemed to be much of a father
man—he was quiet, to himself, and spent hours of his downtime reading and
organizing. He was always organizing something—the tool shed, the knick-knacks
in the garage, the bathroom cabinets. Perhaps it was his way of controlling
things.  From an early age, I intuited that I would never be a father; or
perhaps it was that I never wanted to be like him.

When my father knew I was
leaving for the monastery, there was a sense of disbelief in his eyes when he
spoke to me, and later I understood that look, both stern and inquisitive, to
be more of a sense of wonder. He never asked me why I was going away; rather,
he focused on the minutia of my decision—did I have my plane tickets and the
phone numbers for the monastery in a safe place? Did I pack the right clothes
for the brisk Canadian winters? In the days right before I departed for my life
at the monastery, he became more restless, moving around the house as if he had
someplace to be at all times. He started one project and abandoned it for the
next, so that my mother cleaned up after whatever he had started. It was then
that I began to question if he had ever wanted to be a man of God—I’m not sure
what elicited those thoughts but something in my soul brought it into focus,
more of an intuition than anything else. Perhaps I was following a route that
he had dreamed of. It wasn’t completely ungrounded: he went to church a few
times a week, read the Bible in the early mornings, worked hard at his hardware
stores and lived simply, preferring his time in his garden to playing golf or
tennis like folks in the neighborhood did, or watching sports games on
television.

The story I composed in
my mind went something like this: perhaps my father had wanted to be a man of
God but couldn’t commit, or his family wouldn’t accept it or perhaps as a young
man, he had not received a sign from God beckoning him and then there was my
mother who he had known since grade school and liked enough and then when
everyone else was getting married, he succumbed to the pressure of fitting in
and then she was pregnant and then I came along and a life time of wanting and
waiting for a signal from God was suddenly thrown off course due to
responsibilities that popped up along the way. A wife and child to take care
of, a mortgage. The bookends of his life confining him. I could have asked my
father if he had lived the life he dreamt of. I could have learned about him
while he was still alive, but I never asked.

When there was frost and freeze
in his garden during the winter months, he sat a few feet away from it in a
lawn chair in the early mornings, steam rising from his mug of hot water and
lemon, which he always drank, seemingly watching the garden for I don’t know
what. Perhaps he was looking for life, movement. Warm in my bedroom, still in
pajamas, I watched him out my window, positioning myself carefully so that if I
sensed him looking up, I could tuck myself away from his line of vision. He was
so close by and yet we kept our distances from one another. It’s odd how people
living in such a close proximity do that—we study one another from afar when
it’s so easy to move closer. I wonder now if he was praying or meditating with
his eyes on the garden, as I often did in my garden in Canada. I had wanted so
badly to sit beside him while he watched his garden, but I never went
downstairs. I never made the attempt, never even explored his garden when he
wasn’t home for fear he’d know. In my mind, it was his sacred spot and as much
as I wanted to move into his life, I respected what I believed were his
boundaries.  And yet, where did respecting his boundaries get me? Farther away,
I suppose.

The thing about life is
that you can’t repeat the past—life flows, it goes on. My father was here and
now he’s gone. I had the chance to know him, and now I don’t. I often wished at
the monastery that I could freeze time, make the world stop if only long enough
for me to think a thought through before the church bells rang and beckoned me
away. I wished there was a lever to pull to stop the earth, to allow me to be
in a time and place for just a bit longer, to linger. But there’s not. In the
last few weeks, I have let go of trying to control the unknown or maybe it’s
that I’ve accepted that it’s bigger than me. Life and the what-will-be’s are
bigger than all of us. I’m beginning to understand that it’s not the unknown
that I fear—in fact, none of us can fear the unknown as it’s unknown to us.
Rather, it’s my fear of losing what I know that paralyzes me, keeps me holding
on to what is, from moving into the future. Each phase I arrive at grows
comfortable and then I don’t want to move on, as I am afraid of losing the
comfort and having to start again. I am afraid of the prospect, I suppose, of
being uncomfortable.  And yet, life must flow. Life does flow. I must flow in
order to keep growing, keep experiencing, keep living.

I wanted to tell you
everything. I wanted you to know me from the inside out. Only I no longer
believe that I—any of us—can tell another person all there is to tell. We are
too complex to simplify our lives into words, which are not the things or the
feelings, but only symbols—representations of what is. And I believe that our
stories have borders. There are points where we enter each other’s lives and
points where we leave one another’s lives so that there is no one,
all-encompassing story, but an array of stories—a host of starts and stops in a
life. I no longer believe that we live sequentially but rather that our lives
are a maze that we spend our lifetimes making our way through, each twist and
turn a part of our path. If I could tell you only one story, it would be the
story of how I have lived on the opposite side of a glass wall and how I always
wanted to shatter the glass, to find a way in, a way through. To my father. My
mother. God. You. Or maybe I’ve put myself on the opposite side of the glass
and I haven’t let anyone in. I don’t know anymore. Maybe we are meant to break
through the walls of others and let them break through our walls, or maybe the
beauty of each of us is that we exist independently of one another and it’s not
our job or our joy to know another but to know ourselves, to break through our
own barriers, shatter our own glass and know our hearts and our minds and our souls.

Sometimes I wish that I
could live two lives. One here with you and one on my own, exploring all that I
was meant to explore. You may see that as selfish. There are choices in life.
I’m aware of that. And yet I want it all—I want to experience all of the lives
worth living. People make promises in life that they sometimes can’t live up
to. I’m guilty of making promises that I didn’t live up to, although I don’t
feel guilty so much as honest. What if it wasn’t that I was walking away from
something by leaving the monastery but walking towards something?
Every ending is the
beginning of something new
. That was inscribed in the first Bible I ever
received from my mother, which she had received from her mother.

It was in the silence of
early December that Tess started to feel a shift from the inside out—a
restlessness that propelled her forward. Sitting out in her backyard on an
early Saturday morning with a down comforter draped around her, watching the
tree limbs shake and shiver in the pre-January coldness, she felt as if she had
been far away and was returning. How odd it was to be yourself, she thought,
and yet not know all the things that you were made up of.

Buddhi pounced onto the
tree overshadowing the deck and glared at Tess. His orange, tiger-striped fur
was mangy again and he had scratches all around his eyes. He stared at Tess as
if he were challenging her.

“Hello Buddhi in the
tree,” Tess murmured. The sound of her voice, cracking in the cool air, startled
her. And then Buddhi vanished.

Yesterday, while showing
a house to a young, newly married couple, a couple full of hope and possibility
for their life together, she had felt very definitely, that she was done. That
she could only go on doing this for so long. She had showed them each room of
the house, helped them to envision what they could do with each room—colors,
lighting— and then locking the house up once they told her they wanted it, they
were going to take it, driving them back to their car, she had felt as if she
were an actor shooting the last scene of what had taken her years to perfect.
There was no big dramatic moment, no lightning bolt. Just a very concrete
knowledge: she was done. A few more appointments to finish out the year, and then
this phase was over. Curtain closed. People moved on. That was how it worked. A
time came when moving on was the only choice, the right choice.
Every ending
is the beginning of something new.

The snow fell all around
her, lightly, softly, like whispers, but vanished as it made its way to the
ground. To be of the earth, to know that there was a ground that you were
searching for, a place to land, but not to hit the earth and leave a mark. The
snow had a spiritual aspect to it. The wet flakes kissed her nose, her hands,
and she had a sudden urge to be naked in the snow, to know that freedom. But as
with all urges, her mind intruded: it was cold, she wasn’t much of an
exhibitionist, her neighbors were close by. She could hear the cleaning lady
doing something or other in her backyard—it sounded like sweeping. Tess craved
exactly what she had: silence, the wind blowing, right now.

This much Tess knew: she
was done with arbitrary days. She sought a destiny. She was done with reaching
a point each day only to misplace the thought until so much later in the day.
She was tired of false starts and the way she was always losing and finding
herself. Always changing and always the same. Buddhi showed himself again, and
suddenly Tess wanted him beside her. “Here, Buddhi,” she said. Their eyes
locked and then Buddhi darted away and Tess felt an old familiar hollowness
drift through her. She couldn’t pinpoint if she were hungry or tired or about
to cry. Her mind began to race, searching for a to-do list, for something, anything
to latch on to and then she remembered to breathe, to follow her inhales and
her exhales and the angst began to dissipate, flowing out of her so that she
sunk back onto her chair, tension releasing its grip on her body. People,
places, events, came and went. The flow of life. The comings and goings. It was
what had troubled her about her career, without her ever having been able to
articulate it until that moment: each connection she had formed as a realtor
led to a split. Getting to know the couples and helping them to find their
dream homes, drawing up the contracts, consulting with them on mortgages. And
yet once all of the paperwork was signed and she handed the new homeowner the
key, the door she had opened for them, with them, closed on her.

It had never been hard
for her to say goodbye to people close to her—she had said goodbye to her
mother as a teenager and left Woodstock. She had said goodbye to one husband
after another and had pretty much gotten on just fine without them, so that in
the months following her estrangements, her lives with them seemed like someone
else’s story. She had watched Prakash go. She had watched her mother go. And
yet, they were all eternally intertwined, part of one another’s stories.

Her mother had often told
her about the dances of life, how people had their dances to do with one
another and when the dance ended, it was time to move on to the next person,
the next song. That had been how her mother explained to a young,
pre-adolescent Tess about her father’s departure from Woodstock and Tess’s
life: their dance was over. For her mother, there was no apparent sense of
sorrow attached to it, no sentimentality. Her mother had told her that people
moved into ones lives and out of it with a sense of purpose, grace, kindness.
Her mother had told her that a true companion left everything intact when the
dance ended and if they didn’t, then steps had been missed along the way.
Endings, she had told Tess, were inevitable and necessary for the next dance to
begin. It wasn’t until Tess was away at college and the other girls’ fathers
sent them money and flowers and other niceties, that Tess had questioned the
dance image in regards to her father, for if her father and mother’s dance had
ended, what did that have to do with the dance between Tess and her father?
Perhaps their music had not yet started; perhaps their dance was yet to come.
Like many dreams, though, Tess believed that she had tucked that one away
somewhere between her own college love affairs and exams and graduation.

What if, though, it
wasn’t that people were the dancers but rather that they were being danced?
What if it wasn’t up to a person to start or stop a dance but if people were
puppets in the dance of life? The more she lived life, the more she was beginning
to believe that she, people, were not in control so much as they were part of
the grand scheme of life. 

The wind rushed past her
and she nestled under the blanket, shaking her legs out on the lounge chair.
She couldn’t remember a time when she had ever sat out in her backyard in the
cold and yet it was stimulating—the cold gnawing at her while she camped out
under the blanket, the warmth of her house a few feet away. When she was a
young girl, she had loved to sit out on the porch swing in Woodstock, rocking
herself, the roof of the house a shield as snowflakes trickled to the earth.
Her neighbors had walked by and waved to her and once her mother had come out
on the porch looking for her and finding her there, she had smiled and told
Tess to keep warm, motioning to her to wrap herself in the throw blanket set
there for that purpose. Her mother had let her be. Tess understood now what an
accomplishment that was for a mother. How if she would have seen Prakash out in
the cold, she would have told him he had to come inside. Her liberal up
bringing had been a gift—a chance for her to develop and become whoever she was
to become and she had been too blind to see that all those years. She had
treated it as a curse. If only she could have redone it, relived it all, she
believed that she would have been different, that her life would have been
different, although she didn’t know exactly how.

The comings and goings of
life. So many comings and goings. She believed there was a reason for all of
the movement and would have liked to believe it had to do with growth, only she
wasn’t sure. There was no way to measure growth in a lifetime—people grew
older, taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, but there was no gauge to measure
internal growth. She wanted to believe that she had grown—yoga had helped her
with her life in the past few months—only who was to say if she grew internally
or was only standing still, substituting one thing in her life for other
things? It was hard to be honest with oneself and harder yet to surround
oneself with people who could be objective enough to tell her the truth about
herself that she was sometimes blind to.

After making love to Neal
on Thanksgiving night, she had become needier of him again. She had warned
herself that she would get hurt. That she needed to let him be free and yet she
couldn’t help wanting him. Non-attachment.
The Four Noble Truths
—suffering
due to attachments was the enemy.

Perhaps he would stay.
The part of her brain that believed that people were unpredictable told her
that. The part of her brain that believed people were predictable told her that
he would leave. The thought of him leaving made her feel hollow, alone. She
didn’t necessarily understand that as she had always been alone, while she was
in relationships and out of them, and it wasn’t exactly as if she and Neal were
a couple in any normal sense of the word. It was just that his presence made
her feel protected. Loved in a way that had nothing to do with passionate love
or maybe nothing to do with the concept of love that her mind had created. She
would have never thought of herself as sentimental, but the thought of Neal’s
leaving made her cling to the times they had shared—exploring Mill Basin, their
first kiss in Central Park, the cruise to nowhere, their yoga practice under
the stars.

The church bells were
ringing. Outside, people were going about their business; inside Tess felt cold
and tired. It was so hard to separate what was in her mind from what was real.
And how did a person know what was real, what was an illusion? Why couldn't the
world just stop for a few moments so that Tess could find her way and either
choose to keep going or take a different route? Tess wondered if from here
forward, the church bells would always remind her of Neal or if after some
period of time, she would stop hearing them because she’d be too busy living in
the next here and now of her life. A wave of emotion—sorrow, then stillness and
then a slight perceptible joy—rushed through her, and she felt a truth coming
to her, but she lost it, like how you lose a star when you blink.  She wanted
so badly to know what was ahead of her, but wondered if she were given the
chance to know if she would instead choose not to know. Wasn’t that how it always
was? We wanted what we couldn’t have but when by some chance of fate it was
granted to us, we ran from it.