Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (14 page)

Reading was making me see that my own loss and confusion were matched around the world by others struggling to make sense of the unexpected, the feared, and the unavoidable. How to live? With empathy. Because in sharing the load of that fear and confusion, isolation and sadness, I could lighten my own. Already the burden is lifting. My own desires are reseeding, my own needs rerooting. I am in a garden freed of brambles and weeds, and I am not alone. There are a bunch of us out there, weed-whacking away and ready for the sun.

Chapter 14
Sex by the Book

After twelve years of marriage, Laura had become permanently tired of his enthusiasm. She'd realized if you gave an inch you were in for the mile, that even if you were occasionally available, he'd assume the welcome mat was always on the stoop.

JANE HAMILTON,

Laura Rider's Masterpiece

IF DESIRE WERE ONLY AN IMPULSE TO CONTINUE THE SPECIES
, manifestations of it would have ceased once my children were born. The fact that desire survived the painful physical experience of having children underscores that our desire for sex is more than just a biological urge. With six people to shop and cook for, four children to watch over, a house to keep relatively clean, and a book a day to read and write about, I was short on time and drained of energy. Sex should not even have been part of my vocabulary, and yet it was. Where did the desire come from?

Early in my year of reading, I read
A Celibate Season
by Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. In the novel, a married couple with two teenage children spends ten months apart because of the wife's career. Jocelyn and Charles have the whole of Canada between them, and with finances tight (and e-mail still in the early stages), they decide to communicate only by letters. They have no doubts that they can maintain their loving connection via words alone.

But as the months of their separation pass, they find that the connection cannot be kept through letters alone. Even a phone call here and there is not enough. The pain and loneliness of separation combined with the desire for companionship lead both of them to bouts of adultery. It isn't falling out of love that has sent each into the arms of another; it is falling out of reach. Jocelyn has journeyed off without Charles, and nature abhors a vacuum. Another body must fill the empty space left by the vacant spouse.

Jim Harrison in
The English Major
also sets his character out on a journey alone. Cliff is a sixty-year-old former farmer and high school English teacher whose wife, Vivian, has left him for another man. Cliff decides to visit all the states he dreamed about as a child but has never seen. He starts out on his road trip with an ordered plan of a specific route to follow and things to do along the way. His plan is blown off course by the unexpected addition of Marybelle, an ex-student. Marybelle hitches a ride with Cliff and becomes not only a fellow passenger on his journey west but an instigator of wild sex and unanticipated layovers.

Cliff thinks a lot about sex. Why men want sex, why women do, and why desire flames up, fizzles out, and then starts up all over again. Cliff realizes that desire can be set off by something as simple as a smile. Sometimes the “worm” moves just because of a broad-backed waitress who beams (“not many women beam”) or the memory of a babysitter's bikini-dressed bottom in his face one summer when she turned to get off the hot seat of his car: “Thirty years later her butt is still a vivid painting in my neurons.”

I understood that. A remembered hand sliding across my thigh under the table of a college pub is enough to start the shivers down my spine. It is the power of memory—tactile memories of desire stirred—that gives potency to the descriptions of seduction I read in books. Even where there is no recorded memory, new sensations of desire can be felt through words alone. There was a time a few years ago when I thought about putting up a Web site of “get in the mood” stories for all the women I met who told me that their initially fervent ardor for their mates was fading away.

“I love him,” one friend told me, “but I no longer want him.”

I nixed the idea of writing to stir the loins of others because there were already authors who wrote so well about sex. Instead, I told my friends to have a glass of wine, read a juicy story of lovemaking from a good book, and then grab their beloved.

“Read
The Sailor from Gibraltar
by Marguerite Duras or
The Delta of Venus
by Anaïs Nin,” I suggested. “Or
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
by Terry McMillan.” Stella has to journey to Jamaica and find a young stud to find ardor again, but for those without a travel budget, books alone can bring the groove back on. Just in the past month I'd read
Waiting in Vain
by Colin Channer. There was plenty of great—and innovative—birds-and-bees action in that book. Enough to inspire blazing renewals of physical devotion in even the most dated of relationships.

Such a book might have come in handy for Laura Rider, the main character in Jane Hamilton's
Laura Rider's Masterpiece
. For Laura, desire in a marriage has a shelf life. When the date is past, desire expires, gone for good. She loves her husband, but “just as a horse has a finite number of jumps in her, so Laura had used up her quota.” Laura takes “the welcome mat” off the stoop and lets her husband know sex is no longer an option between them. The only problem with Laura's declaration of her spent desire is that her husband is not finished yet. He still wants sex, he wants it to be part of love, and he falls in love—and into bed—with another woman. Their lives fall into chaos, and people get hurt.

Cliff in
The English Major
never tires of sex, but he does come to understand that “given more than enough sex you see that it isn't the be all and end all of human existence.” Sex is just one of the bindings that holds a marriage together, but it is a pretty good one. Cliff and his wife come back to each other by the end of the novel, reeled in by the history they share, by their ease and comfort with each other, and by their festering mutual desire. As Cliff explains it, love, friendship, and an accumulation of years spent together count for a lot. But sex counts for something too.

I never talked about sex with my parents or with my sisters, not as a teenager and not later, as a woman. When I was in high school, I listened as my friends offered hints and bits of information, but nothing they said seemed quite right to me. I found out what I needed to know from books. I read the hot and sweaty stuff, all heaving breasts, taut nipples, and long members, but often the writing was so bad I doubted I could trust the images. I read
Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong and laughed throughout, but I was not interested in having zipless, mindless sex.

I went on a Graham Greene binge in high school, reading
A Burnt-Out Case
,
The Heart of the Matter
,
The End of the Affair
, and
The Power and the Glory
. When accompanied by love, sex in Greene's world is a gift from God, but it is always second to a greater love, love for God. Sex without love is a perversion of its purpose (to make life). Okay, sex with love, I understood the equation and I liked it. But when I went off to college I didn't quite apply the equation correctly. When the sex happened first, I faked the love to salve my guilt over having loveless sex. Faked love brought melodrama into my life, marked by mood swings, drinking binges, and ugly scenes of very bad breakups.

The book that saved me in college, many times and over and over, was
Burger's Daughter
by Nadine Gordimer. The novel offers so much to emulate in the title character, Rosa Burger. Rosa is struggling to define herself and her future after the death of her father, a prominent antiapartheid activist. She is fleeing both the celebrity and the weight of inherited duty brought on by being the daughter of a famous and influential man. Rosa is tempted to remove herself from the socially responsible and politically committed life she grew up in and to carve out a quiet, uneventful existence for herself.

At one point in the novel, Rosa travels to the south of France to visit her father's first wife. There she begins an affair. She falls in love. But it is more the ease of the relationship, its privacy and its anonymity, that seduces her into love, rather than the man himself. There is nothing lofty or inspired in their love, only normalcy and peace. Rosa finds solace in being part of a couple among countless couples: “In the heat they had shut out, people were eating in soft clatter, laughter, and odours of foods that had been cooked in the same way for so long their smell was the breath of the stone houses. Behind other shutters other people were also making love.”

Rosa considers settling in the south of France and leaving South Africa forever behind in her past: “It's possible to live within the ambit of a person not a country.” But her past will not let her rest in a retired existence of satiety and comfort. She feels a connection to South Africa, and she returns to the country of her youth to fulfill the commitment made long ago by her father.

Rosa became a guiding character for me, and informed many of my thoughts about my own life goals and dreams. Her understanding of love and sex as a place of quiet comfort and hidden joy resonated deeply, providing a jarring example to my own explosive and painful affairs. I slowed down, let love come to me, and, more or less (there was a learning curve), contained my desire within relationships of kindness and affection. I wasn't always a loyal girlfriend, but when I cheated, it wasn't because desire overcame my good sense. It was because love had faded and I was too much of a chicken to break off the relationship.

I first kissed Jack on New Year's Eve 1988. He'd been a good friend for months, both of us logging long hours at the law firm where we worked. The two of us were at the office on the last day of the year, and I'd invited him to come out with me to a big party in a mansion overlooking the Hudson. It was a black-tie party. For a joke, I gave Jack a blue-and-red polka-dot bow tie to wear. At midnight he loosened the ridiculous bow and then grabbed me with both arms, drawing me in close for a long kiss. On the ride back to Manhattan he tried to work his way down the row of sixty buttons on my black velvet dress but had made it through only ten buttons—just below my clavicle—when the cab reached his apartment. One month later we were in Utah together, holed up in the honeymoon suite at the Snowed Inn. It was the only room available, and we took it as a benediction of our desire. Sex with love: the perfect equation.

Maybe one day I'll find myself wondering what someone else would be like. It is human nature, after all, to be drawn to an opposite of what you have in hand. As Antonya Nelson notes in her story “Palisades,” from the collection
Female Trouble
, “You wanted to be sitting in a comfortable leather recliner sipping fine wine and reading a passage of exquisite prose to your wise spouse for your mutual amusement, and you wanted to be having demeaning speed-demon sex in a seedy dorm room with a gorgeous soulless youth. . . . You wanted something solid; you wanted something fluid.” But wondering is not wandering, and my desire is not waning. What holds a couple together is more than just ardor—it is the confabulation of two, a conversation spanning years, sometimes carried out through words and sometimes through caresses.

In the end, it is the acknowledgment of their years of mutual experiences—as parents, as friends, as husband and wife—that bring Cliff and Vivian back together in
The English Major
. They are each happy in their own space with their own interests, but acknowledge their ties of desire and a mutual history. Jocelyn and Charles from
A Celibate Season
also make it through their crises more or less intact. They come together again physically and mentally, bound by “all the little threads of concern and necessity” of their shared past. They never lost their ardor for each other. It's more as if it were misplaced, and then found again.

Where does desire come from? In the books I was reading, it came from many points of stimulus, both physical and mental. Words stirred ardor, as surely as a hand across a breast. But how to hold on to desire?

Desire comes from love between two people, and also gives back to the bonds between them. Ardor waxes and wanes, and I could understand Laura Hamilton feeling as if her quota has been met. There are times when I'd rather read a book than jump into bed, and I'd certainly rather read a book a day than have sex every single day for a year. But I also know—and the books I was reading proved me right—that sex strengthens the connections between my husband and me, adding muscle and flexibility and longevity to a union that is based on much more than just a physical need.

Jack and I are together because we love each other and what we have made out of our love is a place within the world where we are safe—or as safe as we can be. After losing Anne-Marie, I know the limits of security, but I want to be held as tightly as possible within those limits of love and caring. Welcome mat outside the door, a flag against danger and a beacon for life.

Chapter 15
The Man in My Dreams

Here is the old argument . . . “Death is sweet, it delivers us from the fear of death.” Is this not a comfort? No, it is a sophistry. Or rather, proof that it will take more than logic, and rational argument, to defeat death and its terrors.

JULIAN BARNES,

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

IN LATE MAY, THE NORTHERN ALLEY OF TREES IN THE CONSERVATORY
Garden in New York City's Central Park is shadowed by twisting black branches heavy with green leaves. The stone-paved path between benches is littered with fallen apple blossoms, past bloom, and the bordering ivy is thick, rising up the tree trunks like clinging hands desperate for rescue. Under the third tree on the right, the bench dedicated to Anne-Marie waits, inscribed with her name and with the words she spoke to Marvin when together they strolled this alley between trees: “For who can end in despair when there is such beauty in the world?”

My family meets every year on the anniversary of her death at this bench in the park. This year the date fell on a Tuesday. It was a nice day, warm and sunny. On the train into New York, I read short stories of George Saunders collected in
Pastoralia
. Saunders's characters are tortured by how life has not quite panned out for them. They are the unfairly unloved, the hesitant bystanders, or the family caretakers no one cares about. But Saunders's characters hang in there, certain that eventually life will swing their way. They feel an unwarranted—and admirable—optimism. One of the characters in “Sea Oak” dies before getting the just rewards she was so sure of. And so she comes back from the dead as a decomposing corpse to claim what is hers. She is mad as hell, and she isn't going to take it anymore: “Some people get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?” She may be dead, but she is still kicking. Fiction or possibility?

I have always hoped for the possibility of some sort of existence after death. When I read the title of Julian Barnes's memoir of his own struggle with mortality,
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
, it made sense to me as a genuine statement of fear. Since childhood, it has been the
nothingness
that comes after death that frightens me. When I was twelve, I had a dream so vivid that I still remember every detail. I'm at home, standing in the raised doorway between our dimly lit one-car garage and the book-lined study. A man stands next to the shelves in front of my father's chess table. He stands where the wooden-framed dome-shaped chair with the green cushion belongs but that now has somehow disappeared. He is glaring at me with angry eyes, and his mouth is a thin line of hate. He moves toward me. Holding a gun to my head with one hand, he restrains me with the other, preventing me from running away. I feel the gun against the side of my head, and I know then what death will be. A darkness, an eternal void, an ending of all thought. Behind the man are all the books I will never read; in front of me, blankness forever.

Barnes deals with his own fear of nothingness by becoming a troubled agnostic: “I don't believe in God, but I miss him.” He wonders if his transformation from atheist to maybe-believer is a function of age (the closer death comes, the better an afterlife looks) or of intellect. He can't find proof of life after death, but neither can he find disproving evidence.

I love Barnes's story about an atheist getting to the gates of heaven after dying and being pretty pissed off about it all: “Watch the Fury of the Resurrected Atheist.” I wouldn't be angry at all to find pearly gates and endless clouds and the faces of friends and family who'd passed over years before. I know I'd be deliriously relieved and giddy with excitement. I can buy the argument that there are many dimensions we cannot fathom, and that the spirits of those who have died can hover about in those dimensions, appearing as a remembrance or in that déjà vu feeling we are all familiar with. I know my sister comes to me in dreams. I just wish she would come as a perfectly viewed apparition. I wouldn't scream, I promise. I would grab her, wispy bits of air or not, and hold on.

Natasha met me by the clock at the center of Grand Central.

“Do you ever feel as if Anne-Marie is still hovering?” I asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she answered quickly, and then was silent for a moment before continuing. “I know she's here when we talk about her.”

We walked up to the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, entering through the wrought-iron gate at 105th Street. We turned right and entered the northern alley of apple trees, almost past their time of flowering, and found our parents already there, sitting on Anne-Marie's bench.

Red roses had been tied onto the bench, and we added our own white roses and a thick bunch of rosemary held by an electric blue ribbon. Rosemary for remembrance.

“Do you remember when we all came here just after Peter turned one?”

“Peter in his little plaid pants and jacket. He ran all over the garden, and Anne-Marie followed him everywhere.”

There is a picture of us from that day, the three sisters. We are sitting on a bench like this one, but in the southern alley of trees. In the photo we are glowing, smiling, holding confidently onto each other as if we had all the time in the world to talk, laugh, and hold on. Now I ask someone passing by to take a photo. He nods, smiling, and snaps the picture. Two sisters remaining, a mother, a father. Red and white roses, deep green branch of rosemary, a slash of blue ribbon: the colors frame us against the black of the bench.

Was Anne-Marie there with us? Could she be? In the year after Anne-Marie died, I came to this bench in the fall to sit by myself. I looked up to see a raccoon overhead, peaceful and secure, clinging comfortably to the branch above me. That raccoon was either very real or it was an apparition of Anne-Marie, her spirit counseling me. When I came again to the bench a few months later, this time with a friend, I sat down and cried. Suddenly a hard branch came flying out of nowhere and hit me on the head. I looked at my friend.

“Did you see that? Anne-Marie hit me! She's telling me to stop crying.”

My friend nodded, her eyes opened wide. I stopped crying.

I looked up now, on this fourth anniversary, to see the green leaves filtering out the sun and the last blossoms of faded pink against the blue sky. New life after a long winter. Another message for me. Sent by a spirit or by nature?

Ghost or not, Anne-Marie still occupies a space in my life. In
Grief
by Andrew Holleran, the narrator describes grief as being “like Osiris; cut up in parts and thrown into the Nile. It fertilizes in ways we cannot know, the pieces of flesh bleed into every part of our lives, flooding the earth, till eventually Life appears once more.” Osiris, god of the afterlife, offering a rebirth. I think of memories as working that way, of bringing Anne-Marie back before me. No, she is not reborn. And she is probably not a ghost drifting above me, or an angel singing in heaven. But nor is she
nothing
, and there is not
nothing
after her death. There are all my recollected moments of time I spent with her.

Jack and I spent a lot of our weekends out in Bellport with Anne-Marie and Marvin before we had kids. Bellport is a quiet town on the eastern end of Long Island, facing out across the Great South Bay to the dunes of Fire Island. From Anne-Marie's house, we could hear boat lines jangling in the wind off the bay, and the smell of salty marshes wafted through the house at night on breezes.

During the summer we went sailing on Marvin's sailboat or took the town ferry over to Fire Island to play in the ocean. We'd stay on the beach until the last ferry home and then stay up late at night, preparing and eating meals of crab legs, clams, pasta, and tomatoes picked that morning by kids working the local farm stands. After dinner we'd move out to the screened porch with bottles of wine, beer, and scotch, and talk until early in the morning.

When we visited in the winter, days were spent indoors by a fire, all of us reading books and drinking hot tea, or tramping through the small towns that surrounded Bellport, scouting out tag sales and book sales. One weekend I bought the complete set of
Personality Development: A Practical Self-Teaching Course
, published in the 1930s. The slim volumes were full of surprisingly wide-ranging advice, like how to pop a blackhead (“Cover the tips of the fingers with clean gauze or linen and press gently to expel the offending material”) and how to choose a book to read (“Be serious, earnest, sincere in your choice of books, and then put your trust in Providence and read with an easy mind”). When I read out loud the section on how to pick up a fallen item with decorum (“Don't clutch or grab the article but pick it up lightly and gracefully with the fingertips”), Anne-Marie burst out laughing and right away threw a napkin to the floor, allowing me an opportunity to practice.

I remembered showing up at Anne-Marie's door the day Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup and Hurricane Bob came hurtling up the Eastern Seaboard. Jack and I were running away from our rented hut on the farthest reaches of Long Island and arrived in Bellport looking for refuge. All was quiet, with no sign of Anne-Marie or Marvin. We called and called for them, and finally I headed upstairs to look.

Anne-Marie emerged from her bathroom, dripping wet from the shower.

“A coup? A hurricane? What are you talking about?” Within minutes the power went out, and after waking Marvin, we all went down to huddle in the kitchen.

The only food in the house was oysters pulled just yesterday from the sea, salty crackers, and day-old bread. There was no milk and no way to make coffee without power.

“At least we have plenty of champagne,” Anne-Marie offered. So we survived on oysters and champagne and some smelly cheese Anne-Marie dug out of the back of the fridge. We lit candles, made a fire, and had a wonderful day while the wind howled outside. By the next morning electricity cranked through the house, Gorbachev was on his way back to power, and the sun was shining.

When we started having kids, Jack and I were still invited out to Bellport, despite all the equipment we dragged with us (travel crib, high chair, stroller, bags and bags of diapers, clothes, toys), to say nothing of our loud and boisterous little beasts. The adults still stayed up late drinking and talking out on the porch, but the mornings came much earlier than anyone wanted, especially when punctuated by the noises of little children eager for movement and talk and play. I'd try to hustle the kids out of the house, shushing them all the way, taking them to the world's coldest diner for breakfast (we took our winter fleeces along to keep warm) and then driving over to the beachside playground. We stayed there until a decent hour had been reached and we could return home to our second breakfast, the blueberry pancakes that Anne-Marie always made for the boys when we visited.

Anne-Marie used to sit down on the floor with the boys, one at a time. Taking one foot in each of her hands, she would make the feet talk to each other. The feet spoke in little whiny voices, complaining of injustice (“Why do I always have to wear the sock with the hole?”) and arguing back and forth (“You smell!” “No, you smell worse!”). The kids laughed so hard and stuck out their feet, asking for more. And more she would give them, tirelessly.

In remembering Anne-Marie, I hold a warrant against the worst death has to offer. I laugh when remembering the funny stuff, smile at the thought of all her kindnesses, and I find courage for tomorrow, and for the hereafter. There is no void where there is memory. After I die, someone will remember me and bring me back. Maybe I will be a spirit, floating around in the ether around my kids, goading them on to remember me (
she read a book a day for a whole year—what a nut!
), but maybe not. And if there is a gunman out there, waiting to cut off my life and keep me away from the books on the shelves, for now I am safe. I have pulled the purple chair in front of him, backed up against his glaring eyes. I am sitting down and reading my fill of books. And remembering. And keeping myself, and the person who was Anne-Marie, alive. I have nothing to be frightened of.