Real Life (17 page)

Even after so many years, when we met we didn’t touch, although we moved close to each other as if we thought we should or wanted to. Or maybe it was only the normal social urge to shake hands or hug or brush cheeks. But we didn’t, both speaking at once about going inside the bar or going somewhere else or being sorry to be late or I’m always early.

Lawrence has been in an ashram in New Mexico, near Los Alamos, for the last fifteen years, and I was surprised at how much he drank, no polite nursing a light beer, but three, maybe four whiskies and more, that he smoked the entire time we were together. “I didn’t think they allowed that in an ashram,” I said to him, trying to be wry, amused by his life choices, sort of removed from him, as if he was someone I barely knew, instead of the person whose physical presence in my life is inconsequential because, although I tried for ten years to erase him from my memory, he had become, when I wasn’t looking, a part of my very essence, of the inescapable texture of my soul. Such is his presence in my life that though Lawrence and I have no children, I am not surprised to find that my two with my second husband look a little like Lawrence. At least I see Lawrence in them every day. For obvious reasons I’ve never told anybody this.

“They don’t,” he said, and looked at his cigarette in something of the way I must have been looking at him, as if it were an independent creature that had lit itself and sprung into his fingers, he couldn’t quite think how, but accepted the fact with resignation, just another manifestation of Buddha. “I don’t smoke or drink when I’m there.” We were silent, remembering the long-ago nights drinking in the bar with friends, the pub we said then, when we were students. I’ve sometimes thought
Lawrence had a drinking problem, he certainly drank a lot when we were young, before drugs came along. I drink more now, though, than I ever did then, and as for drugs, I hated them. By the time they were part of our lives I was getting tired. I wanted only to go home and sleep, or to go for a solitary walk down a country lane.

I had set myself, before our meeting, to be removed from him, cool, I had shut off my heart—don’t laugh—anyone who has suffered, really suffered, can do this. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. But I knew I had to protect myself from him because I knew I still loved him, that I will go to my grave loving him more, not less, every year. It is no fault of mine.

Now Lawrence is a holy man and I, a writer, am learning the niceties of moderate fame, the dimensions and intricacies of it, the protocol, you might say. I want to ask him about holiness, how it feels, the spiritual life; I want him to take out his heart, open it, and lay it out on the table so I can see the wheels and cogs, the turning of it. I imagine the parts as dull brass, worn, but with glints of gold moving against a rosy background. I can see us sitting there, bent over it as it lies open on the brown bar table. We stare at it in silence, Lawrence adjusting the glasses he now wears, me perhaps surreptitiously taking out the small pad and stubby pencil I always carry, scribbling a note in the shorthand I have invented that nobody else can read.

But I thought it was better to go for particulars.

“Why don’t you have relationships with women?” I asked him.

It was gloomy in the bar, the way that bars are deliberately badly lit so that customers will let down their guards, feel an intimacy with each other, with the waitress and the bartender, feel for a while safe, so that they won’t want to leave. It was a small place and there were only a few people scattered in twos and threes at the other tables. I moved closer to Lawrence so
we could talk without being overheard. In this small city, my hometown, strangers know me.

“Because I’m too destructive with them,” Lawrence replied, as if it cost him little to say this, only a hesitation giving him away. I wanted to ask him, Do you still love me? but I didn’t. I knew he would say he does, and I knew, too, that this would be true, but in such a way as to be of no use to me. That is one thing I have learned in the fifteen years without him.

Lawrence rarely looked at me, while I leaned close to him and didn’t take my eyes off him. He told me he was being sent by his “community” to Somalia to work with the hungry. It occurred to me that Los Alamos would be the perfect place for the Second Coming of Christ. I said this.

“An apparition out of the desert in silver boots,” I suggested.

“With bright blue eyes,” Lawrence added. “Not milky brown ones.”

“A white chiffon scarf around his neck, blowing in the wind from the atomic blast,” I offered.

“You’re thinking of Wayne Newton,” he said.

“No, Sam Shepard in
The Right Stuff.”

I didn’t like what was happening. I hated talking to him as if he were just an old friend, I hated the way he wouldn’t say the things I’d waited fifteen years to hear, but I knew I would hate it more if he said them. I began to think the meeting was a mistake for both of us, although how could it be?

Thinking about it afterwards, or rather, trying to write about it, I want the Lawrence character to say to the woman, “Are you happy?” He didn’t though, and I realize now that the question comes from movies or second-rate novels. It is perhaps the one question real people would never ask each other. It is too intimate, too hard to answer, too much to ask of anyone. In fact, it occurs to me it is a silly question, as if happiness were a steady state one might finally rest in through judicious life choices.

Looking at Lawrence, I can see that fifteen years in an ashram, learning to be holy, making holy choices, have not made him happy. As for me, marrying again and having children and a career, although I am not unhappy, have made me lose track of what happiness is. Of what I once thought it was, when I was young and thought I knew with clarity what it is and, of course, that it was achievable. It seems so strange to me now that I didn’t notice then that no one older than me was happy, that no matter how others behaved, when they looked away their eyes grew dark.

When Lawrence phoned and asked me to come out and have a drink with him, I didn’t ask him why. Another silly question that a screenwriter or playwright, imagining this occasion, might put into the mouth of a character. But not asking him why, believing I knew why, didn’t mean that I knew what to expect. My heart had behaved erratically from the moment I’d heard his voice. I fluctuated from seconds of a rage so deep I had frightened myself to an aching desire that was worse. Having settled on distancing myself, when I saw the sadness in the set of his face, I was glad that I didn’t care that he isn’t happy.

When I stood waiting for him outside the bar and saw him come around the corner, my first thought was of how he was smaller than I remembered in every visible way, thinner and shorter, altogether diminished physically. I didn’t mind that he was smaller, it was only that I half expected it in the way the farmhouse kitchen was smaller than I remembered and the convent full of killer nuns where I had the misfortune to begin school. But when I said to him that he was thin and asked, “Are you well?”—now that is a reasonable question, authors—he said that he runs five miles a day and works out, that he has never been so fit. And there was a flicker of something in his eyes beyond pride; I suspect it was delight.

I leaned closer, trying to see him clearly in the bad light and shadows.

“Do you remember the time we went to Banff and Lake Louise for that weekend without telling anybody?” he asked.

“In a borrowed car,” I said, looking wryly off toward the glass wall where, in a better light, people were walking by. “And you broke your arm—”

“And it blizzarded for three days and we couldn’t leave—”

“And Gerry never forgave us for not getting his car back for a week—”

But what I remembered was that thirty years ago there was no place more beautiful than Lake Louise buried in snow, the lodge half closed, nobody around. I remember especially that the only sound had been water trickling at the edge of the lake where for some reason it hadn’t frozen over. And Banff not yet a tacky, tourist-ridden, expensive fake, but a real town where people went quietly about their lives. But it clings to me, over all these years, the distant crystalline sound of running water in the frozen, snowy wilderness.

“The last time I was at Lake Louise you couldn’t see that famous view for people. This is not hyperbole,” I said, but I could see he wasn’t listening. I found I didn’t want to talk about Banff. All right, I said, to all the bad authors of the world. All right.

“Why did you want to meet me?” I knew I sounded irritable. I was surprised at the quickness of his reply, as if he’d asked himself that question and had memorized the answer.

“I missed you,” he said. “You were an important part of my life and I missed you.” I found I didn’t know what that meant. Was it an oblique way of saying he loves me? Or was it a way of saying he doesn’t love me, never did? Or was he thinking he had to tie up all the loose ends because he would never be back again, that he would stay the rest of his life in Africa, that
soldiers would shoot him, or he would contract a disease, that he would die there?

I realized with the detached part of myself that the group of social workers who had just seated themselves at the next table recognized me. They murmured to themselves and I heard my name. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, or how I knew they were social workers. I filed that away to mull over another time.

I didn’t want to reply to Lawrence’s remark. It was too terrible. I remembered suddenly him turning from me, crying in that awful way men used to cry, as if crying were like giving birth, saying, “It seems to me that everything I’ve ever wanted …” And what did I feel, because I had refused him something and caused him finally to cry? I think I felt somewhat pleased with myself, and astonished, not being acquainted yet with a world where you expected to get what you want.

But then he’d been angry, scathing over my dogged virginity. It was no use though, I was still too attached to my parents, my mother in particular, to recognize any man’s claims on me, even one I genuinely loved. Looking back, I felt only shame, shame and wonder at the stupidity of that young girl I once was. It made me wonder if I ever knew what love was, or what it was for.

Lawrence was still not looking at me and I wondered if he remembered how much we’d once loved each other, after we’d gotten over that hurdle, and whatever others there were that I’d forgotten. Is escaping the past his reason for going to Africa? But that would be out of a romance novel and I could see he hadn’t a romantic notion left in him, any more than I have. We are long past that sort of thing, the two of us.

“Why did you come?” Lawrence asked, and I thought, Now that is a question I wouldn’t have thought of if I’d been writing this scene. I almost told him that, but one of my failings is my desire to be charmingly shocking, and something powerful
was taking over between us. It was in the air, making it thick and hard to breathe, the darkness was deepening, and in the shadows his face grew more beautiful; perhaps what I thought was sadness was instead a kind of wisdom. I resisted my shallowness, knowing I am capable of more. It took me a minute to frame my answer.

“Because I still love you,” and rage boiled up in me again and I wanted to hit him. But pity for him hushed me. At least I didn’t have to go to Africa.

I wanted to pay attention then, to how I felt: I held still and concentrated on what was going on inside me. For too many years I was in too big a hurry, I sped through my feelings, I hadn’t time to absorb one when I was off in another one. No wonder I never knew what I thought; I didn’t even know what I felt. And the world, when I was young, was such a mystery to me. I never anticipated anything; it seemed to me that life had no form or pattern that I could discern, no clear spots, only darkness and shadow and unexpectedness. I stumbled from place to place doing pratfalls like a clown, tripping over things that weren’t there, bumping into invisible walls I might have walked through, hiding in terror from the trivial and courting wide-eyed the dangerous.

I am no longer afraid, and if I still don’t understand, at least experience has made me better at prediction.

And surprisingly, he didn’t say anything. He only blinked and, I thought, resisted the urge to look away. I saw I had wounded him. Why should I care about his suffering? I asked myself.

It was on the day he phoned me and asked me to meet him for a drink that I realized that it is an invariable law of the universe that whatever one wants the most is always the one thing that one cannot, not ever, have. That this is the nature of desire, it seems to me a good thing to finally realize. Looking at
Lawrence, I thought this must be something he knows too, that this must be the reason he is going to Africa.

But then, before I felt fully arrived, we were parting. Lawrence butted out his cigarette, and I saw by the gesture, a certain finality to the movement of his wrist, that he had just again renounced smoking. He leaned back, coughed, gave me a funny, wavering smile. Did I smile back?

We rose, walked single file out the door, Lawrence first, then me, because my purse strap had caught on the table’s corner and I stopped to free it. We stepped outside into the deserted hall and faced each other. Lawrence moved toward me as if to hug me, but a mean part of me resisted. The thought that I would probably never see him again freed me from my own unyielding nature and I allowed him to hug me, even hugged him back a little.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll write.” I didn’t say anything, though I wished he wouldn’t, but then I thought, He probably won’t anyway. We said something more, maybe it was goodbye, and he turned and walked away. I watched him cross the cavernous mall. I was thinking about postmodernism.

Although I suppose you could say that as a writer I’ve sometimes achieved postmodernism, and though I can explain it fairly clearly, I’ve never really understood its nature. I thought, Maybe this, in the end, is really all it is about, that hoping to find in others a reflection of ourselves that will at last make everything clear, we discover instead that, like trying to understand love, we find there is only a bottomless spiral into blackness.