Authors: Julie Metz
On a good day, I can tell myself that Cathy is another imperfect human, for whom I can have a good deal of sincere compassion. On such a day, I can remind myself of the bottomless tragedy of Henry’s choices and feel a genuine sadness that he never had the chance I received to start over. On a great day, I do not think about Cathy or Henry at all. I am doing my best, living my life, in the present moment.
Henry’s idea of a perfect day was an action-packed race from waking to sleeping. He was afraid of the tedium of everyday life, with its chores and routines. Every real day, however, includes a portion of boredom.
I have struggled to resolve my own boredom through frantic mental activity or shoe shopping. In rare, blessed moments, I have understood that, with patience, boredom can lead to stillness and calm. And in calm, I can experience a meditation where I connect with my true self. I can greet myself with kindness, before I return to my work, parenting, and chores. These uncharted moments, whenever they happen, are as close as I have come to heaven.
Henry fought off every meeting with his true self, with all its flaws, contradictions, and talents. For his own sake, for Liza’s, though no longer for mine, I wish he had made the attempt to see himself.
One afternoon in Brooklyn, during a surge of home-office tidying, I reencountered one of Henry’s small black notebooks, among the dozen I had saved and stored in a set of work drawers, all that remains from his
umami
project. I had never read through the notebooks, but now, with effort, I deciphered lines in his
looped script.
Symbols arise from the instant and continuous deterioration of sensation in the memory since first experience.
One of the urges to lie or embellish is an attempt to re-create the original intensity of sensation.
There is nothing quite so seductive for a woman as a man who is apologizing and admitting wrong.
Everyone understands this level of obsession. As Wilt Chamberlain (from an article about how they couldn’t sell his house because of the stigma of his sleeping with 25,000 women) said, “We tend to get addicted to our activities so you better make sure you love what you do.”
All important activities are addictions, otherwise they wouldn’t be important.
Henry had made his choice to go for the extremes, to try to recapture first-time experience every day. But he might have lived a longer life if he had been able to take more pleasure from everyday activities, the scintillating thrills of real love, the heart-opening delights of parenthood, the occasional flashes of success in work life. I do not agree with Henry’s view that “all important activities are addictions,” not to mention that the rare occasions of his apologies were hardly turn-ons. We cannot experience
umami
in every moment—that would be like a heroin addict finding the magic potion for an ever more ecstatic high—but we can remain
open to “perfect” moments and appreciate them when they appear, perhaps more so from a place of calm.
On an unseasonably mild day
in early January 2006, Will and Liza decided to take a bike ride in Prospect Park with Molly, one of her new school friends, and Molly’s father. I had just returned from a yoga class and was swallowing the first bites of a hastily made tuna sandwich when I received a call.
“Mama,” Liza reported with admirable calm, “Will fell off his bike, the ambulance is coming.”
Dropping my sandwich on the plate, I grabbed my coat and ran up to the park in time to find two EMS workers prepping Will for the waiting ambulance. He was strapped onto a stretcher, his neck in a plastic brace, his face smeared with blood and road dirt. Fresh blood oozed from a one-inch-long gash on his left cheek. My head felt light, my stomach queasy. I hoped it was because I hadn’t finished lunch. I took Liza aside to comfort her and to ask her more about what she had seen.
“Is Liza okay?” Will kept asking.
“She’s fine, don’t worry,” I reassured him. Liza did seem remarkably calm.
“Mama,” Liza said, “Will didn’t recognize me right away after he fell. He sat up and asked me who I was.” This suggested that he’d had a concussion, though I comforted myself that at least he knew her name now.
Molly had been riding with her father a quarter mile ahead on the bike path. They’d stopped, waiting for Will and Liza to catch up. When no one appeared, they turned back and were now able to take Liza home with them while I boarded the ambulance.
Molly’s mom called on my cell, offering to meet me at the hospital later. I got into the ambulance.
Will was still rambling. “Is Liza okay?”
“She’s fine, please don’t worry.”
“Is Liza okay?”
The siren whooped and wailed. The ambulance surged forward into Brooklyn traffic as I glanced at the wall clock. It was 2:00
P.M
.
“Sir,” I asked with a sudden shudder, “what’s the date?”
“January eighth, ma’am, for the rest of the day,” he replied, looking up from the forms attached to his clipboard. “You don’t happen to know his social, do ya?”
Will rattled off his social security number.
“Hey,” the EMS worker said with a chuckle, “you in the military or something?” He began asking Will questions—name, rank, and serial number. Will got through most of it, remembering his office telephone number but stumbling for a moment over our new apartment address. This was good news. He might have had a concussion, but it looked like he’d be fine. The bad news was, I’d forgotten the date. Will had fallen from his bike on the third anniversary of the hour and day of Henry’s departure. Now I really felt light-headed.
After my earlier encounters with Henry following his death, I took a pragmatic approach to the afterlife. Spirits might not make sense, but I’d had experiences that had felt real enough. We’d forgotten his day. This time Henry wasn’t a kitchen spirit encouraging me to salt a steak before cooking. He was pissed off.
After a night of hospital observation and more than twenty stitches around his left nostril, under his left cheekbone, and inside his lower lip, Will began a speedy recovery. He remained cheerful during the three days he took off from work, padding around the
house, his wounds and road rash covered with a mask of newfangled bandages we bought to help heal without scarring—the Phantom of the Opera. By week’s end, Will was back at his office with just one bandage over his cheek. He looked like the feisty boxer he’d been as an adolescent—bruised but ready for another round.
When we returned to the site of the accident, there were no potholes. Will was an expert cyclist; he’d been riding the Prospect Park loop for years. When Liza described the accident again for me, she said his bike had just stopped and he’d flown straight forward. It could have been some mechanical failure, but I had my own opinion: Henry was jealous of Will’s new dad status.
Will didn’t think much of my haunting theory. He started singing the theme song from
Ghostbusters,
which made me laugh but didn’t change my mind about what had happened. I knew the angry Henry better than he did.
I felt wary in our apartment, wondering what calamity would happen next. Would Henry drop a pot on my head from the overhead rack as I washed dishes at the sink? Would I trip and fall down the stairs? I needed a housecleaner, so to speak.
I wrote to Eliana. She didn’t think I was crazy. She said there were people I could find to help with this kind of “energy” problem. I lived in Park Slope—not California but still a New Age mecca; there had to be someone here who wouldn’t laugh at me.
When I sheepishly mentioned my predicament to a neighborhood friend, she told me, to my surprise, that she’d once hired a woman to visit her house for what was termed a “spiritual cleansing.” She e-mailed me the contact information. A week later a sprite of a woman appeared at my door. She said that before she became a spiritual healer she’d been an attorney. With thoughtful, no-nonsense movements, she filled a spray bottle with kitchen
tap water, chanted prayers, and then walked through the apartment spraying water here and there, whispering more quiet prayers. “He was here,” she remarked calmly as she peered into the corners of the living room, as if confirming that Henry was no longer huddled behind the couch. “It’s not good when they linger. He needed help moving on.”
Yes, yes, move on, please move on.
“Now you will find that this home will feel refreshed and you will work well here,” she said. We hugged. She thanked me as she accepted my check and left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but as I watched her walk down the stairs of my front stoop, I felt better already.
January 8, 2007, passed peacefully. I had found happiness and productivity in our new home. I purchased a Yahrzeit memorial candle from the grocery store; Liza and I had a quiet moment together. I hoped that if Henry dropped in for a visit from his astral plane, he would observe our family life and leave us in peace.
“Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?”
she said, looking at him shyly.
“I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.”
—
E. M. FORSTER
,
A Passage to India
Even at twenty-two,
long before frantic motherhood and the onset of pre-senior moments, I worried about losing memories and the sensations that fix them in place. When it comes to preserving love’s fragile, clear moments, sometimes the only thing we get to keep is an image, as fleeting as the splashes of light on curling waves.
I was with Paolo, a man I loved, in Italy, on a sailboat in the Mediterranean waters of the Cinque Terre. A friend had invited him for a week’s sail, and he’d stopped back in the town where I was still staying, persuading me to join him for a few days, though it meant changing my return flight to New York.
We’d met two years earlier, at the beginning of my college junior year in France, and we formed an immediate, though not
easily nameable connection. I spent time with him during that school year, wrote to him when I returned to campus for my senior year. A year after graduation, I traveled back to see him for the few weeks that ended in this boat trip.
Once, while we walked the curved shore, lined with colorfully painted houses and swaying palm trees, he said,
“Ci sposiamo?”
I thought he was teasing me and didn’t answer. I knew what the words meant, though I had never heard anyone say them.
Sposare,
to marry.
Ci,
the first-person plural reflexive pronoun. “Shall we marry?”
In the end we never spoke much about the nature of our relationship. He had a real girlfriend in Torino, where he wintered, a popular arrangement for many of the men he knew. As the weeks passed, I wished for the courage to fight for something more nameable, but I was afraid that the fragile thing we had would shatter like a wineglass hitting a terra-cotta-tiled floor.
I woke up early in the forward sleeping cabin to the sound of the clanking halyard on the mast and the gentle sway of the boat. Paolo was still sleeping next to me, his body curved into a half-moon shape. I was going home that afternoon, returning to my life in New York, whatever that would be. Paolo hadn’t asked me to stay in Italy. I knew he wouldn’t do that. I also knew that staying in Italy would be more difficult than learning the language well and finding work. The cultural divide was huge and might overwhelm me completely. Life in the Italy I knew always looked romantic, but I’d seen plenty of unhappy young American women that summer with their Italian men and thought,
That could be me, too far from home.
I didn’t think Paolo’s hovering mother would want an American daughter-in-law. I was what some people
of my parents’ generation referred to as a “goddamn women’s libber.”
Paolo was not the kind of man that most women would call beautiful. He was thin and wiry, with ropy muscles, the kind of guy who has to drink high-calorie protein shakes to keep on weight. His hair was already receding at thirty, leaving a prominent forehead patched here and there with a few short, tumble-weed curls on an otherwise barren, tawny desert. His face had a carved quality, with the angular cheeks and down-curved nose of a much older man. He wore a short, dark beard and mustache that tickled when we kissed. When we walked hand in hand, I could feel the bony knuckles of his muscled hands and the bitten fingernails he worried when a cigarette wasn’t handy. His best friend called him
“bruttino,”
an affectionate form of the adjective “ugly.”
I looked at his sleeping self with tenderness. This was the man I wanted, this man. I could not have explained why. At twenty-two, I couldn’t truly explain why I did anything. I was old enough, however, to imagine the immediate future.
Later, in the afternoon, Paolo would take me to the station in Monterosso, where I would purchase the cardboard train ticket I have kept all these years. I would travel back alone to Santa Margherita, pack my bags, take the overnight train to Paris, and fly home to New York.
We will never be in bed together again.
He would return to Torino, to his teaching job. I would find a job, and we would proceed through our separate lives. One day he would marry his girlfriend in Torino, and maybe I’d meet somebody I loved as much as this man and marry him. I did not want to forget this morning, the last of its kind.
The sun rose. A shaft of yellow light pierced though the port
hole, forming an elongated triangle of yellow on his back.
I will remember this triangle of light. I will save this moment in the triangle of light.
Paolo walked me from the harbor to the train station. We stood on the platform quietly. I saw the train approaching, on time, this one accursed day. He turned toward me, hugged and kissed me.
I clung to his neck, then released him, unable to speak.
“Allora, ci sentiamo,”
he said, as if we’d be chatting the next day.
I told him I loved him.
“Anch’io ti amo,”
he said with a smile. His lips pressed against mine, his beard tickled my mouth and cheek.
Then I was gone on the train.
Twenty-six years later, the memory remains vivid and well formed.
There are, in the end, moments from my life with Henry I want to keep, moments, like that triangle of light, that were true. A morning walking to work, a few months after we’d met, when I understood that I loved him and that he loved me. Our walk together across the great Nyika Plateau in Malawi, when all things still seemed magnificently possible. The exhausted morning of Liza’s birth, his blissed face as he held her tiny, perfect body.
But more and more days pass now when I forget Henry. I find that I think almost every day about other people I have lost through death or parting: my mother, Henry’s aunt Rose, a man I knew in the 1980s—not even a close friend—who died of AIDS, my friend Jim from the island in Maine, and Emily, with whom I have not spoken in several years. In living too much for himself, Henry missed the point of living for others. I am sorry that Henry cannot
live through me in an everyday way, that his daughter alone bears that quiet burden. Though for the duration of this writing, Henry has been my frequent companion, watching me, even as I type.
I never forget to salt the meat. But I am ready to let him go.
I took a big chance and told Liza about her father’s affairs while we were in Maine this past summer. She listened quietly.
“Are you happy he died?” she asked. What a question for an eleven-year-old child to ask, but of course it was the obvious question, one that deserved an answer.
“What happened to your father was a tragedy. He made some big mistakes in his life, and he died without having a chance to do better, to apologize. He did great harm to you and to me, though he loved us.”
“Do you think you would’ve gotten a divorce?”
“I don’t think we would’ve been able to stay married. So, I’m happy to have a chance to make a new life for us, but it’s terrible that he died the way he did.” I hoped I didn’t sound like a politician at a televised debate, artfully dodging. “I hope that answers your question.”
Liza nodded thoughtfully.
I recently received a letter
from a woman named Avery, who met Henry in February 2002, during his traveling research year. I’d made contact with Avery through the friend he’d stayed with during that week in Northern California, who told me that Avery had something important to share with me. Avery and I talked on the phone, and then she sent me an e-mail describing her brief and unusual encounter with Henry at a dinner party:
The party was delightful, filled with family, friends, laughter and music. I sang “My Romance” and then I sat in the living room to take in the rest of the evening. I sat next to Henry who did not occupy a large space and wore his black jacket zipped all the way to his chin. I remember thinking that this was odd as it was quite warm in the house. Funny, the things we remember when we study our memories for answers.
We exchanged names and handshakes and listened to the music for a while. He said that he was an author and deeply passionate about food, here to visit with his friend while also visiting restaurants in San Francisco to interview famous chefs.
I politely smiled and asked questions about his family. I like to know more about a person’s life and family since it is the center of my life. I was at the time and continue to be happy in a loving and fulfilling marriage, a mother of two daughters. He said that he had a beautiful and successful wife and an adorable little girl who was the light of his life, then showed me photographs. We continued our conversation and walked outside, as I was planning to head home early. Henry asked if there was a good place to run in the area. I said that I was planning to run in the morning at the reservoir and invited him to join me. We met at 10
A.M
. the next day for a 5 miler. I could not keep pace with him, so he ran around once to catch me on the second lap. It was time for me to slow down a bit, so we walked.
That is when his story began to trickle out. He asked if he could tell me something and wanted my opinion. He said that he loved his wife, then he added something about not being sure he was a good partner but he knew he was a good father.
I remember thinking, “Wow, what am I going to do with this?”
Then he mentioned this other woman/friend in town who had made herself available, who’d never put any pressure on
him, with whom he had been having an affair for a quite a while.
I asked him if he loved her.
He said, “No.”
I said something like, “What about a life code…how do people do that and sleep at night?”
He said that he had trouble sleeping and was trying to leave this woman but, recently it had turned very sour and he had discovered that she was violent, unstable and had even threatened to harm him and/or his family if he stopped seeing her.
“I feel trapped,” he said. “I am afraid of what might happen if I stop seeing this other woman.”
I asked if you knew about the affair. He said that he didn’t think so. I told him that no matter what is truth, it was important that he was brave enough to make a decision to change and preserve what was most important in his life, his family. Perhaps he was not brave enough to choose.
We stopped for a sandwich and I told him that I thought he should tell you everything if he believed that the two of you had something special and strong enough to overcome this challenge. I also suggested that he talk to a lawyer and if necessary, face this woman with legal counsel to protect himself and his family.
His phone rang a couple of times while we were having lunch. He said it was “her.”
I suggested that he just come right out and tell her that he didn’t have the energy to be what she needed right now, that it was a mistake and he regretted any pain that he caused, but that he needed to go back to his family.
Henry said that he was afraid you would not understand and might refuse to take him back.
I encouraged him to believe in you and that he would not know if he didn’t try.
He said, “I’m like a spider caught in its own web.”
He asked if there were any shops nearby, he wanted to pick up something for his daughter. I suggested that if he had time we could drive into town where there are some cute shops for kids. So, off we drove, in two cars. We found something sweet for your daughter and then walked into the Indian Artisan shop next door. Henry handed me a thin silver bracelet with instructions to try it on. I balked but he insisted, thanking me for being an honest friend. Although the clasp broke, I felt that I should not throw it away. I will be honored to send it to you, if you like.
So, we hugged and went our separate ways. I wished him good luck and asked him to stay in touch. I did not hear from him at all. I suppose we won’t ever really know what happened and I am sorry for your loss. But, if Henry was so torn and tortured in his heart and mind, perhaps his spirit knew that he could not exist that way.
How sad…to have known him and have been chosen to “see” him like this. Although, I have learned to be a better friend to my friends by asking more questions and demanding truth when they are struggling…
Please feel free to ask me any more questions. I would like to have been a friend and known you then as well, so that I could have called you, for I felt that I did not want to mind my own business. Perhaps then it might have been a story with a different ending. I often wonder why we are chosen to share pieces of other lives. Thank you for trusting me to share this with you.
Fondly,
A.
Will and I went down to City Hall
one Friday morning to become domestic partners. Our reasons were entirely practical.
He had good health insurance, while mine was costing me an arm and a leg, and involved monthly arguments with the friendly folks in the Claims Department. Needless to say, the Bush administration was not going to help me out here. However, Will convinced his employer to expand coverage to opposite-sex domestically partnered couples.
We were directed to the dingy, fluorescent-lit waiting room on the second floor. We filled out our forms, looking up from our task to watch other couples, who unlike us (we’d shown up in our jeans) were preparing for their big moment in wedding attire—white dresses, bouquets, tuxedos, corsages, the whole nine yards. When the clerk summoned us to his little window, we handed over our paperwork. The clerk asked a few questions, looked over our drivers’ licenses and utility bills. He asked us the required question: “Do you have any other domestic partners?” We laughed over that one, signed the forms, and the clerk stamped the forms and handed us an official document announcing our new status.
“We’re done?” I asked, expecting something a bit more dramatic. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” the clerk replied with a smile.
And yet, I felt surprisingly changed as Will and I walked away from City Hall in search of a quick lunch on Court Street. After a lot of mess and misfortune, I felt lucky. Though it might be, as Will remarked between gooey bites of hot pizza, that we make our own luck and that he himself felt just as lucky. In any event, we’d made a commitment. Now we were a for-real family.