Bedtrick

Last week I reminded D. about Canada and he answered, Clive Owen. One of Owen’s movies we both love is entitled Duplicity. No one is who they seem to be.

When we were together we often spoke in code to one another. For days on end we couldn’t remember the name of the actress in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, a movie we both love because no one is who they seem. We’d come up with Lee Remick when it was Eva Marie Saint. From then on whenever either one of us couldn’t remember something, the other would say “Lee Remick,” and we’d laugh as code for the problem and the movie we both loved.

Neither of us is who we seem: separated and free to choose. Learning this has been a journey that seems a bit like The Wizard of Oz, the movie most of us grew up with where Dorothy wears ruby slippers, magical shoes that she does not learn until story’s end will send her home with a click of her heels.

It was August when D. asked me to go to Canada with him: French Canada: Montreal, Quebec. We entered the elegant Hotel Nelligan on the old street near the water, 106, Saint-Paul Street West. French spoken everywhere. Five days there, evenings sitting on their upper deck trying to remember Clive Owen’s name.

We ate soft boiled eggs in the morning, croissants that we tried unsuccessfully to resist and drank good French wine, ate good bistro steak salads or Asian salmon in the evenings. We slept in the double sheeted bed on 400 thread count linens. In the best hotels, your blanket lies inside a duvet with another flat sheet on top so that all you feel are the crisp clean sheets each night you climb into bed.

But I felt short-sheeted on this trip. Remember that prank? Short-sheeted because I waited for D. to make love to me: We were on vacation together. We were sleeping in the same bed. On day five of the trip, I asked, “Will we make love?” He answered, “I would like to.”

But we were a long way from Paris, my metaphor for the Rom-Com ending. Give me Something’s Gotta Give with Dianne Keaton and Jack Nicholson.

This makes me think of Wendy Doniger’s book The Bedtrick, where she begins this way, “You go to bed with someone you know, and when you wake up you discover that it was someone else—another man or another woman, or a woman instead of a man, or a god, or a snake or a foreigner or alien, or a complete stranger or your own wife or husband, or your mother or father. This is what Shakespearean scholars call ‘the bedtrick’—sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else.” In her prologue she refers us to plays we know where not knowing who is who intrigues and answers: In Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and the film version Roxanne, a movie with Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah that I love. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play I often return to for Feste the jester’s words when accused by Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting: My lady will hang thee for thy absence, and Feste answers, Let her hang me. He that is well-hanged in this world needs to fear no colors, with its proverbial dare and its double entendre and where the fool is anything but.

Let me embarrass D. further by telling you that he is indeed well-hung—thus, my despair in Canada.

Let us now use Canada as the metaphor for marriage.

When we return, I assume that we are reconciling. But he tells me that all must remain the same, that he is not ready. I am inconsolable. I seek counseling. That is when I began to date vigorously while also seeking an exit strategy: Emergency egress. Do not retract dead bolt.

I write him. It is a last ditch effort that speaks for its desperate self. Trust me: What follows does not speak well for me:

Dear D.,

I miss you. I’ve been missing you for a long time I now realize.

I know I am angry but I am still very much in love with you. You have hurt me so deeply that I fear I may never recover, may never be able to love another and may never be able to fully part from you. I sometimes think I am going to die from this heartbreak and what I perceive as your coolness towards me. You have been cool towards me for so long that I don’t think you even know how long. But I have waited. I was waiting. I am still waiting. I am quite mixed up and what I write will probably anger you. I fear that anger so profoundly that I hardly know where to start. But I cannot help the fact that I still must admit that I love you even if I can never have with you what I thought we once had and maybe did have.

I need to be loved again, desired again, fought for, if you will. I know that is too much to ask.

I am offering my hand to you. I know that I offer that hand with much trepidation and that I want some things to be made up to me, childish as that is.

I can no longer cry my way back to you. I have done too much of that over the years and have been deeply wounded by weeping in closets and on floors and in desperation to get you back. I can no longer have you that way. I don’t want anyone that way; I don’t ever again want to be humiliated the way I have been. But I still believe that we may have something that we built and that is worth saving. But I cannot keep trying to get you alone. I must know that you are trying to get me, too.

Eventually, I may wear out and move on, whether or not I can find love. I may move on out of loneliness. I may have to as I crave intimacy so, don’t really find life worth living without it. I don’t mean that as a threat. I mean it as E.M. Forster meant it in his epigraph to Howard’s End: ‘Only connect …’ He defines who I am in the world and who I must be. But you are inside me, and that will never change.

We will live apart. We must now. I finally understand that. But what I have written is worth saying, I think.

Mary

His reply: Of course I’ve saved it, for here is the bedtrick*:

M,

My reaction to this is anything but anger. I don’t react angrily to much anymore. On the contrary, what you write is so heartfelt, it is deeply touching. I know I have been cool, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have similar feelings for you. I could not have gotten so deep inside you without you getting just as deep inside me. My coolness is, I guess ironically, part of my healing, at least initially. I know you are frustrated by this and want to be ‘engaged’ and part of my healing. But I am afraid—afraid of doing the same things to you that I did before.

The potential for damage and setbacks is still great. I need get to some level of confidence about myself. I don’t know that I can explain better at this point, but I hope you can somehow accept that, for now. I do want to be engaged with you, but it may be less intimate right now than you would prefer. Please know that I am aware of that—I am beginning to understand what intimacy is. And while it is not yet what you want, please also know that I am trying to get there.

D.

I have come to understand that what I think I know, I don’t know.

Case in point: Did you know that Dorothy’s shoes in L. Frank Baum’s book were silver?**

We had been to Canada. Where is Paris? It is not on any map. That is the bedtrick.

To find Paris, ask this question: Who needs ruby slippers?

*When I told D. I wanted couples therapy not to get back together, but for an exit strategy, he said, “I don’t want an exit.” He sought his own therapist. We were then both with separate psychiatrists: Were we in a Woody Allen film? All together now, let us click our heels.

**You can follow the yellow brick road or listen to Nietzsche who says, He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Hat trick

After seeing the movie Paris with D. last Saturday, we go to sit on his balcony and drink good red wine that I cannot name though I would like to say it was French, suspect it was Spanish—we are a little drunk. His apartment is near the Verizon Center and the Capitals are playing. We are so close that we can hear the blare of horns. When he checks the scores, we learn that the Caps are beating Toronto three-zip. D. thinks that Alexander Ovechkin may have a “hat trick”: three goals in one game. But it turns out that Ovechkin has two goals and one assist. Not bad. Final score Caps 6, Maple Leafs 4. I read the next day Washington AP: “By the time the game was 77 seconds old, Alex Ovechkin scored the first time his stick touched the puck, earning ‘MVP!’ chants from all those red-clad fans.” Surely he will get the hat trick again the way he did in May 2009 against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

I am stuck on the hat trick. For me the movie Paris is Cédric Klapisch’s and his favorite male lead Romain Duris’s hat trick: L'Auberge Espagnole (filmed in Spain) and Russian Dolls (Paris, London, St. Petersburg) and now a window on Paris from a non-Rom-Com view that includes Romain Duris’s view of the city from a taxi. In that one scene we see Rom-Com Paris: the Tour Eiffel, the golden statue, a Rom-Com collage but not as I have ever seen anything in that much-filmed city filmed—not as I perceive the city by then. For Klapisch has closed with the hat trick.

What we have seen by then is the refrigerated fruit and vegetable outlet while in most Parisian movies we see romanced markets in the street. We see them here too but with the gloss from the grit of living. We see refrigerated meat lockers. We see flowers pushed on an industrial cart by a strong young working-class woman. We see academic Paris. We see dancing, dream-like Paris (Romain Duris, slim beauty in red) and tiny apartments that bespeak living in the spaces of the heart—not the spaces of Architectural Digest.

No villains and no heroes. Humanity on full compassionate show culminating in the simple exchange that brought me to full tears: “Merci” and “merci aussi,” built on the relationship of the characters played by Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche who speak these words.

When we leave the theater, D. asks me, as he makes a note to himself in his Blackberry, “It was Bach’s Minuet in G Major?” And I am struck that he hears what I do not hear, that he brings music to me. He seduced me with his piano, the one with the crack in its sounding board, the one he sold when he married me. He had little furniture when I met him, had placed his baby grand as the centerpiece of his living area.

In 1984 he called me and told me he had a gift for me and I should come over from my place, a tiny house in Garrett Park estates—meaning that all the old big Victorians were in Garrett Park and that I lived in the estate, the extensive land where the poor live near the rich. We used to call his apartment up on Pooks Hill California because the kids and I went there to swim in his pool, to sit on his balcony, to stand in the shiny-like-marble glistening lobby—a world apart. I came that day and he played Beethoven’s “Pathétique” and then without words, with instead the simple silence that follows the end of a piece, the laying of his hands in his lap, he looked at me. And I wept. I’d wept from the first melodic chord.

This was the last time he played the piano for me—twenty-five years ago. When we lived together, I often heard him work on Schubert’s Impromptu in G Flat but he’s never played it for me all the way through. The barren period. Music in silence. When I heard him play, I’d be upstairs in our large Victorian house in Adams Morgan—we’d come such a long way but not come through.

All the silence would seem to me to be gone when I heard him play.

A piano teacher once told me the story about the man who was lucky enough the night before a concert to get a hotel room next to Rubenstein, or was it Horowitz? She’d forgotten which, the name did not matter. What mattered was that the man heard through the wall the same phrase played over and over and over, like a needle stuck on a scratch in a record.

D. and I are stuck like that.

Before all the loss, when I watched him play that day he seduced me, I saw the muscles in his shoulders, his forearms, the angle of his back. The movement of his brow, the corner of his mouth, the line beside his eye. I watched his body move through the piece. He leaned into the bass. The melody rang from the keys, shifted in tone, in softness and loudness with his touch. His back curved into the music, his brow softened, his shoulders rose and fell with the thematic repetition. His neck bent and relaxed.

What he does not know is that when I heard the Schubert in G as I lay in the bed where I waited for him, where I often fell asleep before he came to bed, I did not hear the missed notes, the imperfect phrasing that he explained as the reasons he could not play for me or anyone else. I thought I heard his heart pulse, but knew it was my own.

I am stuck on the hat trick: Will he pull Bach’s Minuet in G Major out of his? Will I pull Paris out of mine?

When Alex Ovechkin pulls the trick, the ice will be full of hats. This tradition owes its history to cricket when a bowler knocked off three wickets and was awarded with a hat.

I am reminded of my favorite Rom-Com The Thomas Crown Affair—not the first one with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, but the second with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. Tommy hides by wearing a bowler hat and filling the museum with men in bowler hats, an allusion to the painting “Son of Man” by René Magritte: a man who wears a suit and a bowler hat with an apple on his face.

When we truly see, we see what has been hidden: the hat trick.

Forget Paris

I am reading in The Washington Post a movie review of Paris. Ann Hornaday says, “Cédric Klapisch’s intoxicating portrait of a city that, despite (or more likely, because of) being in a state of constant flux, retains timeless energy and allure.”

I have not seen the movie that is playing at E Street but I plan to go instead of going to Paris. It is hard to go to the city of love without love. I had been thinking of Paris because my daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter, hurtling onto five months and wowing the Parisians, are there.

Paris equals love: the too-oft used equation of the romantic comedy.

Hornaday to my surprise does not mention that Cédric Klapisch has directed two of my all-time favorite movies that I classify as Parisian romantic comedies—an off classification that suits me perfectly because the Rom-Com that fits that term too well has lost its edge: L'Auberge Espagnole (filmed in Spain) and Russian Dolls (Paris, London, St. Petersburg) are edgy.

I’ll let you know when I see the movie Paris.

Meanwhile, as in yesterday, the CEO I’d met on the plane home from Australia—my Ezio Pinza (across a crowded room …)—wrote me again. This time to say that his “love” has died. My “love” is the way he has always referred to the woman he was on his way to see when he met me on the plane from San Francisco to DC, the woman he’d been dating since he met her on a high-end cruise—meaning not many people, small boat—after his wife had died.

Last we talked on the phone ever so briefly I told him things with D. were in flux and in play.

He writes, “I probably should not be sending this since our connection lapsed so long ago.” He explains what has happened and ends with, “It is as I said at the beginning, ‘I probably should not…[his ellipsis].’ Yet at times like this, perhaps we need to cut ourselves a bit of slack.”

I sit in front of the e-mail: I ponder him. I ponder me. I ponder D. I reply with words about mourning, with my own realization that, as I say to him, “I can only imagine how this loss has thrown you back into the déjà vu of your beloved wife. As to my husband [or rather D. as we know him here, dear readers] I say that the story of our relationship “is an open book for all to read. I am writing a blog, have been doing so for a year now and though the beginning is a bit rough, the later entries seem to know what they are doing.”

I wonder now, A missed chance that was probably not a chance, that the CEO never allowed to be in his honorable stance and his privacy? I gather that he has kept quite a distance from his east coast “love” as he lives comfortably with cook and housekeeper in Saratoga and retreats often to his house in Carmel—no phone, no computer—to paint and collect, perhaps for a book, the letters of his wife.

I wonder D.—as in, I worry him. His presence pervades this writing and, I now see, all the preceding entries. You don’t need to say it. I will: She’s not moved on.

As synchronicity would have it, as I was reaching for Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and for T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems because I sought something to quote to the CEO from these works, a small torn-edged card falls out of one of the books: the note from the brief encounter in the galley on the plane: his e-mail address and this line in his hand, “Cooking is an over-rated feminine attribute …[his ellipsis],” a reference to the title of my book, the title that appears in the margin of this blog, much as it appeared in the margin of my life (instead of celebration, separation).

Didion says, and I write this to the CEO, “Grief is different, grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves.’”

Now I read this and see that the description of grief likens, oddly and out of her context, to love. The miracle of Didion’s book is that she never once mentions the word love while she writes a love story.

Later, she describes the dailiness of her life with her husband; she has her own list. I have mine: espresso and steamed milk in the morning. Cuban bread made quickly with three packages of dried yeast, the baked bread devoured with lightening speed what has lightened with time. Pea soup from Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. Beef stewed in red wine and tomatoes, string beans added at the end. Fork-stirred omelets rolled onto his plate.

Didion quotes from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with no reference; in others words, you either know the source or not: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” p. 190-1 in her book. This is line 431 in “The Wasteland,” in part V What the Thunder Said, three lines from the poem’s end.

The CEO ends his e-mail this way, “Incidentally, I’ve reread two poems you sent to me, ‘Leap Before You Look’ and ‘The Privilege of Being’ …[his ellipsis] both compelling.”

The first is an all time favorite of mine by Auden; the second, a poem by Robert Hass that has resonated throughout my life.

I now ponder whether either of these poems would fill up the ellipsis of time that has passed between me and this gorgeous seventy-ish, stylish, loyal, sensitive man.

I reread. The poems, as poetry magically does, answer:

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep.
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire.
But to rejoice when no else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

—W.H. Auden, December 1940

I like to think I have lived by these words, but knowing oneself is the work of a lifetime. So, who knows? But whether I have lived the words or not, they ring like bells. They answer.

Hass’s poem answers with stunning reality and Victorian swoon—Wisdom more often than not comprises paradox:

Privilege of Being

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate, they hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with odd, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

—Robert Hass, Human Wishes, p. 69

Love is the human wish.

Meanwhile Eliot reminds:

He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

I’ll let you know about Paris. More soon …[ellipsis mine].

One game at a time

D. makes me think about baseball. In particular about Albert Pujols.

“Pujols … really does take 'em one game at a time, one at-bat at a time, one pitch at a time… . Questions are beside the point. Talk is beside the point. The point for Albert Pujols is to hit the ball hard. Everything else is just noise.

“This doesn’t make him especially fun to approach after a game, even a two-home run game. But it’s part of what makes him the best baseball player on earth. And it’s what makes him likely to have many more two-homer games, even if he isn’t a home run hitter.” http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/09/16/albert.pujols

With D.: no answers to questions. Silence.

D. makes me think, too, of the movie Juno: Two years ago, an awful dinner-movie date with this man I used to call my husband: He was anything but a “husband.” He hadn’t made love to me willingly anyway in so many years I could calculate the time in terms of a decade, a wall of time, a block so large that it stood in the way of vision, my recollection of the past. I have talked about this too much here. I now know I am a fool for having done so. Fools repeat their mistakes—except in Shakespeare’s plays where the fool speaks wisdom: In Lear, the fool wisely says:

He that has and a tiny little wit—
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain—
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But that night, I was thinking about the fact of lack of sex as the source of all my trouble, fool without wisdom that I was. I drank myself through the dinner after the movie. I drank my way through D.’s silence.

And this brings me to the movie Juno. Juno is a sweet flick about a sixteen-year-old who makes love once with her boyfriend, her initiation into sex with only the motive of love, and she gets pregnant. She decides to have the baby and give it away to a couple that really wants a baby. She says she’s ill-equipped to raise a baby. She is a wise, sharp-tongued, witty and oddly sweet character. Sweet in her sharpness. And at the end, when she’s had the baby, her boyfriend comes to the hospital in his running clothes and gets in the bed and lies down and holds her. I watched the movie with D. and my heart broke at this image, because this is the way he used to lie down at night with me. We didn’t make love—no home run to continue the metaphor—but we did lie down together, body on body.

The Sunday after the date was difficult: My chest full of anxiety that raged so hard I couldn’t eat, and my head, hungover. I didn’t have the energy to shower. My teaching work was done and still I couldn’t eat. I began work on the separation agreement again. I had a vodka and tonic. The anxiety subsided, hunger appeared. I ate a frozen pizza and cooked some asparagus. My kitchen and my body were low on food.

I had finally gotten the pot rack hung in my apartment, the same pot rack I’d had in our house. I’d finally gotten all the copper and stainless steel pots hung. I’d polished the copper. Even though I did not have the energy to cook, I was ready to cook.

I slept but woke at 2 a.m. from a terror: My kitchen. In the dream my son came to visit—my son who has not spoken to D. since D. left me. He swiftly took down all the pots. The pot rack wasn’t there. Just some hooks in the ceiling. He had cleaned up what he viewed as my mess. I called out: Where are they, where are my pots and pans? Where is my Bain Marie, my French copper and enamel double boiler that I used to melt chocolate, that I scrambled eggs in, that I loved. I find instead dolls and children’s clown costumes. I’d made these costumes for my daughter and son when they were little. I’d made one for myself too. I’d made one for D. after my first husband had betrayed me. But in the dream the only costume I can find is the one I’d made for myself—the pink gingham one.

For the fool does need the costume.

When I am awake, this costume is the only one that is lost. I have all the others in a box in a closet that D. built for me this year—after the separation agreement was finally done. After it was clear that we would live apart, that we are done.

After all that, he gave me money to build out the closets in my 1200 square foot loft with virtually no storage. The loft where I am making a life—alone: where I make content with my fortunes fit.

He did this after he’d come over to drop off mis-delivered mail—an excuse? He could have forwarded the mail—and found me throwing out the clown costumes, the sweaters my mother had made for my children, the dress she’d made for me in 6th grade, after he found me in tears, throwing away what I could not store.

Now all is stored away in my California-Closet-re-done apartment where I live alone.

And then he sent an e-mail. The subject line was: “I know this is against the rules but …

Would you like to go to the Nationals baseball game Thursday night? They're playing the Cardinals. Really good seats. Red, Hot and Blue barbeque. Or Ben’s Chili Bowl.”

I didn’t go to the game where I would have seen Albert Pujols at bat.

I said I couldn’t go because we were done, because I needed to move on, because I couldn’t bear the silence.

And then he spoke. He wrote:

“M.,

I do love you and always have. I have in the past only known how to show love through care-taking. I never learned any other way. But that is no longer enough. I know I need to show it in other ways, most especially through emotional intimacy. I can tell you I love you, but it sounds hollow because there is, right now, no other action behind it. I know that is how it appears, so it is hard for me to say it to you. I just know my feelings are deep, and it is not just history, important as that is. I have always thought and said that I believe we will end up together. I still believe that. But I know it is very hard for you. I don't want to lose you, but I also don't want to hurt you again. That is how I am torn. It is hard; it is painful. I hope and pray that it will work out. I just want you to know that I do love you and care deeply for you.

D.”

All this makes me think of Albert Pujols. He avoids reporters. When he does talk to them, he doesn’t answer their questions. He just keeps going to bat.

All this makes me think of the movie Juno: When all goes wrong, how to set things right?

And I answer: One at-bat at a time.

Once D. asked me, What do you call a player who strikes out two out of three times?

He answered: A hall of famer.

The wave

In August the Obamas went for a week’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard: Ten-year-old Malia’s head already sprouts almost above her father’s shoulder—she is tall and willowy, feminine like her mother, lithe like her father. Gorgeous Michelle follows behind the two with her arm around Sasha: all the “girls” wearing shades as Barack waves from the tarmack at the camera.

He does not wave as he boards the helicopter on the Wednesday before the Labor Day holiday to fly with his family to Camp David with health care reform and the war in Afghanistan looming. But I recall his wave.

I recall my sister’s wave before she got on the plane to Ethiopia, willowy at seventeen, three days before her eighteenth birthday that she would celebrate on her arrival and where she would marry. Her fiancé was in the Army on the base—gone!—in Eritrea. Thirty-five years later she would die on a gurney, legless and about to lose her arms because the blood from her heart could no longer reach her hands, blue with loss and the diabetes that took her life in 1993.

Her wave, full of hope and risk—that fearless wave. I write a postcard to her now: Wish you were here.

How do I deal with all the leavings?

How do I deal with the desperate longing for a new beginning?

How do I deal with the shame of Internet dating that resulted in my daughter’s assertion, “You are fickle, your fickle ways,” said in merited disgust. I am in love and out of love: She recounts: “The psychiatrist who one day is the love of your life and the next, dangerous to your life. The college professor who one day is the love of your life and the next … .” Need I go on reporting how I failed? How she wonders, I suspect, Who is this woman I have called my mother?

Meanwhile The New York Times reports that “fewer than half of [Obama’s] appointees are in place … a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring ….”

Who are the appointees in my life?

D., ephemeral?

I spent another Saturday night with him and I write him on Sunday morning:

It’s hard for me on leaving you, as you could see yesterday. Sometimes, as over this weekend, it is also hard for me to be with you. I think that is because you are not yet able to be fully with me, to express the “need” to be with me in some way that makes sense to me, to put words and gestures around the need. You did seem to do that Saturday when you came over to me, when you sort of asked to stay, when you most poignantly laid your head on my chest. I needed to be cautious because if you had stayed, I would have given myself to you body and soul. That is what I want to do, need to do because I love you, flawed as I am, flawed as you are.

I sense that I must take on—but you point out when I say this, “unfairly to yourself”—the blame for what seems lacking, something nameless, something I think, must be my fault and that needs to be “named.” That doesn’t mean I need to “understand” or have full disclosure about your journey toward your self, or in any way invade your privacy, but something seems withheld, almost as if to accept comfort from me would be to accept blame on your part. I am to blame. I must be. And I don’t want you to take on my blame or yours with the stuff (talking, touching) that would help.

M.

D. replies:

I have held back, I think, because I tend to see our relationship as “all or nothing.” That my approach to you in any measured way would mean or be interpreted as full engagement—and be found lacking, because it is not yet full engagement. I have tended to be silent to protect that space I need to work through my personal past [what does he mean by that? for what is between us is personal? Don’t we share the past?] for a while, but I hear from you that, if I am present, you can also be present and help without full engagement. I do know what full engagement means and looks like, and I don’t want you to think that I want something short of that. I am trying to get to the point of full engagement, and need some space—not totally—still to get there. I tend not to talk about that because I think it’s hurtful to you, even though it has nothing to do with you and is not a rejection of you.

D.

I slept and dreamt after D. left me on Saturday night. I suppose this is one of those classic dreams like the airplane dream: I am driving a big dark grey car—not like my father’s Chevy, not a big rectangle, how I always thought of that bulky car he loved. I’m driving a hyperbolic bullet, sleek and large, probably a Toyota on a road that is soon covered with snow. I tell myself to slow down on this surface but can’t keep my pedal off the metal. The snow is filling up my side windows and the rear window so that all I can see is forward. I know this is not a safe way to drive but I keep going though I don’t know where I am going except that I am on Route 66. As the snow begins to fly off my peripheral windows and my vision opens up, I realize that I have passed a store at a mall where I am trying to meet my parents and my sister. She waves from an unknown location. I know I need directions. I know my parents and my sister are dead. This thought is always a sad thought, sadder now that my husband has left me. When they died, I mourned their loss but had a sense of safety in my marriage. Now that is lost. My loneliness is profound, not unique, but profound. I must stop the car and get directions. When I do, I discover—the way dreams work— that I have driven onto the top of the drugstore soda fountain counter like the one where my father and I used to eat coddies and drink chocolate sodas on Dolfield Road in Baltimore while my mother got her hair done next door. He liked the chocolate soda better than I did. I always wanted an ice cream soda and he could be counted on to get me one.

I am lost but dream: D. waits with his arms open. He kisses me full on the mouth, deeply, with desire, and with admiration if one can feel that in a kiss. I think one can.

He is so slim, so beautiful and in real life so totally unattainable.

I send him this poem with the note: Remember this?

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

Remember?

M.

And he replies:

Think not lost, perhaps nearly born.

D.

I recall D.’s heart and being like the drift of the Caribbean sea over the sand, the strand of light that reaches through the clarity of that sea. His touch and his kiss that once expressed a clarity of vision that took me in its sight and held me so that I let go, floated in its buoyant assurance.

I may not know what I am doing but I do know that what I have just written bears itself on the incontrovertible.

I must understand the multiplicity of irreducible people, of the irreducible D., and that my humanity lies therein. We will not have perfection in discourse. But I must seek humanity in discourse. That responsibility weighs heavily on me as I think it should.

And so, I wave. I wait for the sea.

I’m cooked

The chase begins in earnest, on my part anyway, with another widower, an aerospace engineer, who some eight months before lost his wife to lung cancer (quick and pernicious and I don’t think she smoked).

I believe in rescue. I mistyped that at first and wrote rescure, saw the word cure inside and wondered how crazy or crazed I am. I know we must rescue ourselves. You don’t have to tell me that. But when our goose is cooked, don’t we all want the guy on the white horse—even if the horse turns out to be stationary and turning on a merry-go-round? Where you might think I am at this point. And I’m with you.

So I read the paper: “Almost exactly two years after it embarked on the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve acknowledged that the economy,” according to The New York Times, “was pulling out of its downward spiral and announced a step back toward normal policy.”

I believe my downward spiral is ending. After all, it is August, the month the shrinks escape, gardens overgrow, and children turn off the t.v. to go buy school supplies.

I meet the second widower one Sunday morning on the Internet —let’s call him m.r.s. (his initials and he, as you will see, is widowed but still married), profiled in Forbes, owns his company, consults with the Pentagon but is not a Republican, thank god, (yes, I googled him)— and we agree to meet for an early dinner at Matchbox, great pizza, near my condo. He flirts with me through IM: “You are a beautiful woman and write with both a comic touch and a real sense of romance/passion. It brings out the foolishness in us men. I like the Robert Browning line, ‘Grow old with me, the best is yet to be.’ ”

Here is what he is referring to (Oh sure my photo from 2006—so I don’t look that good now anyway) my Internet dating profile: see what you think:

I’m a fiction writer. I’ve returned from a visiting-writer gig at a major university in the Midwest. I am separated, have been for almost four years, live alone, own my own condo. I would like to talk with an intelligent man interested in the arts and who actually likes the part of my profile that begins: I’d give most anything to see Érik Bédard pitch against the Yankees. But then, of course that fact fits with these and, if you see what I mean, you may like to talk to me: I read, literary fiction and poetry (Nabokov, Joyce, Wolfe, Roth, Bellow, Kunitz, Bishop, Lawrence and especially Auden); love the movies, anything and everything, think a great actor gives us a backstage pass to his soul; loved Wild Strawberries, Match Point, and The Thomas Crown Affair (the second version! —go figure? But Steve was great in the first one.)

The profile, btw, is hidden now. I can’t do this anymore and here’s why:

M.r.s. hit me, the sight of him, like a ton of bricks. I was immediately smitten and then he spoke: He speaks of literature and Mother Teresa, he plays bridge, he had sex with his wife every day for thirty-five years, until she got sick, he thinks I am beautiful, he holds my hand when we cross the street) and I am a goner. He has been widowed for only six months. And, to his question, “Do you believe in beshert?” (meant-to-be would be the loose translation of the Yiddish)—He actually asks this on the first date—I answer, “I do.” Remember in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Andie McDowell advises Hugh Grant on getting married? “It’s pretty easy really,” she says in the church at his wedding to Duckface. “Whenever someone asks you a question, answer ‘I do.’ ”

I think, A second chance (Okay, call it a third if you are nitpicking about my two marriages) fortuitously walked into my life and a door I thought was forever closed opened. We neck impetuously on my couch and move to the bedroom with his pleadings. He says we must not make love—though he does want to—“but can’t we take off some of our clothes and lie down together? You can do this,” he says. I answer, “I can, but I’m old.” He says, “You have the shape of an hourglass.” Not true: I look like a small bosc pear. But it was the perfect response, time and shape in metaphor. He is a short (D. is so tall), gorgeous man—he and I are exactly the same age (D. is almost four years younger—perhaps that explains the wreckage?). M.r.s is an Aries and I am a Pisces. Believe it or not, this aerospace engineer ends up telling me he was born on the cusp of Pisces (the twelfth and final sign of the Zodiac) and that he is ruled by Mars and Neptune. So, he says, we are a Neptune/Mars combination, on the cusp of rebirth, associated with the beginning of human life.

So, I cook the Thomas Keller chicken for him—yes, Discovereuse (one of my anonymous readers, I have no idea who this commenter is), but to you, Discovereuse, who is actually reading what I am writing, this is the man I made the chicken for. At that dinner I serve the chicken, the roasted potatoes, carrots and shallots on my farm dishes, the naïf pattern by Villeroy and Boch. M.r.s. tells me he bought the full set for his wife when he was in Luxembourg where they are made. He is speechless before his dinner plate.

I am unglued. Like a school girl: Remember promise in giant red doors you saw while your knees shook at the edge of the playground with book bag and lunch pail, cold from the thermos of milk? The sound of the future in the creak of the bindings of black and white speckled notebooks? How hope smelled in the wood of sharp yellow pencils? Remember how long red margins ruled down the side of lined paper you titled “My Summer Vacation” and you learned at hard desks how to write—in narrow white spaces—of weather, and clothes, and long days at the beach instead of skies bursting color like peaches and plums or birds’ feet on sand like the sweetness of time?

He calls the next day after the roasted chicken to say he is overwhelmed with guilt even though his wife is dead. He tells me he feels bad. That he is attracted to me but that that is the problem. He tells me he did not mean to mislead. He tells me this before he explains the Gaussian concept in answer to a question I have about a scientific passage I am writing in my novel. I am hearing the message loud and clear: In short, he is not ready.

I am devastated, again. I write him:

Dear m.,

You may indeed feel bad that, for example, you were not able to sleep over with someone you liked for complicated reasons that you could barely even explain (note the proper use of the adverb ‘barely’)–but you do need the adjective to describe this state of mind. However, if you were not able to touch her, you would appropriately say that you have lost your sense of touch; for example, I could not touch her because I feel badly; I can barely tell her skin from her teeth, without telling her of course that you wished to escape by the skin of your teeth (refer to Thorton Wilder for more on this last phrase.)

The reason for all this is that the verb feel when used to describe one’s feelings does not take an adverb. That is because it is what as known as a ‘linking verb,’ much like the verb to be, and it takes what in grammar is known as a ‘subject complement adjective.’ But the verb though it works like the verb to be cannot be replaced with the verb to be.

Thus, the confusion among educated folk. A person who feels bad is very rarely, though could be, bad. As in the phrase: I am bad. Something none of us wants to be except in the bedroom, of course, where consenting adults may be as bad as they both think appropriate.

I write this note to you because I would feel bad if I had mislead you as to the proper usage of a word to describe one’s feelings.

Grammatically yours,

Mary

I call D. and tell him I think we truly need NOT see each other until after the agreement is signed. I tell him I am an all or nothin’ girl and I can’t bear what has happened. I have to find a way to live with what happened. I have to find a way to move on.

I do believe my heart is broken and that I am a fool. I call my daughter Sarah and tell her about m.r.s. She’s been burned by both D. and m., the first widower, and now sees me as foolish, impulsive, inexplicably romantic and has begun not to answer my phone calls. She writes an e-mail in the morning instead of calling me back: “I heard the phone ring downstairs when I was asleep last night. This morning I saw it was you. Is everything okay? Sorry I didn’t pick up. By the time I was awake enough to know the phone was ringing it had stopped.

“Did you see this article?” She includes a link to a site in Paris from our favorite newspaper The New York Times where now I am reading about the economic recovery that is not quite here—and ain’t that an understatement despite the good news from the Federal Reserve. She says, “I think we should take cooking classes in Paris together. Wouldn’t that be fun?” She and her husband Ryan and Lila, my grandchild, are going in September for six months: Sarah will have no time for cooking classes between the research for her next book and Lila. But she knows I need to recover.

I find this at this at WIRED http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant:

Where Felix Salmon had said in February 2009, “A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. … . For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. … Li’s Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

“How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multi-trillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

“A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates.
“... Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability.”

I ask you: What is the probability that my goose is cooked?

In the Grimm Fairy Tale “The Goose-Girl,” a beautiful princess is betrayed and instead of marrying her prince, must tend the geese while her talking horse Falada tries to save her even after his murder, after his head has been pinned to the wall. The princess is now the goose girl who after driving the geese into the country, unravels her plaits of long golden hair that shone with radiance.

But Falada can save her because his head, nailed to the wall can reply when the goose-girl says, Ah Falada, hanging there!

He says and the prince’s father learns of Falada’s reply: Alas, young queen how ill you fare! If this your mother knew, her heart would break in two.

Could it be that D. will ride a white horse? Or is he on the merry-go-round with me?

The real q.: How would Carl Friedrich Gauss measure the probabilities?

Let the chase begin

“So Who Owns Chrysler Now?” Time Magazine in January asked. Fiat owns Chrysler—or at least 35 percent of it when that article was published— with an option to raise its share to 55 percent.

Detroit rethinks. The merger of Chrysler and Fiat occurs in June, the bridal month.

Mary rethinks: An Italian owns the Plymouth?

In the Grimm Brothers’ story, “The Wedding and the Fox,” the brothers include two stories to tell the tale. This choice may have been the brothers’ academic-like reporting of the tales they “collected,” but I am struck by the choice of two endings, as if both were possible, as if we had a choice. In the first, old Mr. Fox with nine tails plays dead because he believed that his wife was not faithful to him and wished to put her to the test. In the second story, the old fox is dead.

D. and I would have been married twenty-five years September 2009. “Which would you rather have?” I once asked D. “A Plymouth or an armchair, a comfortable, elegant armchair.” “That depends,” D. said, “on whether I needed to go to the grocery story or I was having the groceries brought in.” I don’t know if he knows that I used to think of him as a Plymouth: reliable, steady, made in America. I used to think of myself as the armchair.

During the time of separation I have had to think of D. as two stories: dead to me or playing dead.

You may think me a fool. Maimonides says, Fools die for want of heart.

In the first Grimm story, many suitors come but Mrs. Fox will only entertain the fox who had nine tails like old Mr. Fox. But just as the wedding was going to be solemnized, old Mr. Fox stirred under the bench, and cudgeled all the rabble, and drove them and Mrs. Fox out of the house.

But I think she has been true to him. What could old Mr. Fox have been thinking?

Shortly before my stay in Missouri was to end, a Pit Bull attacked me. The guy across the street owned the dog but was house-bound due to his house arrest and the ankle bracelet that kept him there when the dog charged me as I got out of my 1998 used Ford Contour to enter the pit where I lived. A storm door saved me when I managed to get it between me and my attacker. Inside I stood shaking, once I’d gotten my front door closed, and I thought: still alive after all these years and despite these facts: No separation agreement, not even close, still in love with the man who wrecked my life and no path to remaking it before me. But alive.

All this makes me think of the Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum, maybe the muscle car of my time, meaning movie-time, meaning Bullitt: Steve McQueen is detective Frank Bullitt, in case you don’t remember. Bullitt in that dark green Ford GT Mustang 390 Fastback plays a tough cop in the car chase of all car chases. McQueen chases over the streets of San Francisco and the outlying highway the black Dodge Charger.

The Dodge Charger is D.’s dream car. I was in New York this past week, had lunch with my son Ben and learned he’d bought a Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum. It’s in Australia.

My son does not approve of the door I have opened to D. He thinks of D. as a Pit Bull. He thinks of my metaphorical storm door as inappropriately opened and my separation agreement as the assurance that I will be safe. After the Pit Bull attacked—many of these dogs in Oz so my son knows them well—“Anyone could outrun you,” Ben said. “That dog can outrun anyone.” Ben suggested first that I move (with twenty-two days left on my lease?) and then that I park the car as near the storm door as I could.

I have parked my metaphorical car as near the storm door as I can. Perhaps D. is playing dead. Perhaps once the chase had begun—as indeed it has—he will pursue the way McQueen relentlessly pursues the truth in Bullitt because ultimately McQueen’s chase is not for the Charger but for the real story: He makes sure that the dead Ross, whom he’s been protecting, is thought to be alive: in a sense playing dead when he in fact is dead? so that Frank can get to the story in spite of Senator Chalmers, so that he can pursue the other story.

What do I know?

Nothing is what it seems. The Spy Museum in DC puts this line on signs in the Metro.

In a slim little book entitled The Middle Passage the Jungian analyst James Hollis advises: “What is not conscious from our past will infiltrate our present and determine our future. The degree to which we felt nurtured directly affects our ability to nurture others. The degree to which we feel empowered directly affects our ability to lead our own lives. The degree to which we can risk relationship ….” depends.

D., when I met him, seduced me with a 1980 Fiat Spider 2000, otherwise known between us as “The Little Jewel.” While I stood in the cold, waiting for the bus that would take me to the Metro that would take me to the job where I had met D., he would sometimes drive by and swoop me up: me in my overstuffed quilted red coat, my three bags—briefcase, purse and gym bag—and give me a ride to the Metro. He went out of his way to do this, knew when I would be standing there, knew how cold it was with two kids in elementary school and barely enough child support and salary to support them.

And so I married him: the first ending of my story.

Perhaps the Grimm Brothers’ second story’s ending of “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox” might as easily be the ending of the first story: and there was much rejoicing and dancing; and if they have not left off still, they are still dancing.

Behind Chrysler is Fiat: Detroit rethinks.

Mary rethinks: Perhaps the Plymouth is a Fiat.