Authors: Julie Metz
On several occasions, as we sat with cups of tea at her house or mine, Emily looked at me mournfully (or was it impatiently?) and asked, “When do I get my friend back?” I never knew what to tell her. The friend she was missing seemed to have vanished.
I often visited Emily and her family, eating meals with them,
grateful that Liza was able to feel happy and play. Emily’s home felt warm, energized, and alive, if full of the usual subterranean family conflicts. In contrast, the quiet of my home was oppressive. I had never realized how completely Henry’s personality had filled up the rooms.
When the weekends arrived, Liza and I curled up together on the couch, under blankets, the leftovers of our scrambled egg breakfast on the nearby coffee table. We watched SpongeBob’s manic adventures in the cheerful blue-green tropical glow of Bikini Bottom or Timmy Turner’s adventures with his fairy godparents.
That’s what I need, some fairy godparents.
It was comforting to be together. Liza’s cheeks smelled of peaches and fresh biscuits.
February–May 2003
A few weeks after Henry’s death,
I received a note from Maya, a local massage therapist, offering me free bodywork. I had never met her, but I called her and made an appointment. The idea of receiving help from a stranger was oddly comforting. The next afternoon I found myself in her twilight-lit treatment room.
I lay quietly on the massage table, listening to the CD of bird-song and gentle waves while her confident fingers, coated with fragrant oil, burrowed into my bony back. She found a place at the center of my back that felt tender when she pressed, like a button wired into my sadness. I wanted desperately to cry, but I was too embarrassed to reveal all of my wretched life to this stranger. After a long silence, just the birds and waves and the swish of her oiled hands on my skin, she volunteered that it was okay to talk during the sessions. I hardly knew where to begin, but fortunately I didn’t need to start at the beginning. I was the town’s young widow. Almost everyone had heard something of this story.
The next week I went to her again, and I talked. In fact, I couldn’t stop talking and crying. What a relief to let myself go and be cared for by someone who was compassionate but did not seem to pity me. My body felt sturdier when I left her office.
By my third visit, I genuinely liked Maya, a small, wiry woman with open, curious eyes in a freckled face, a laughing voice, and strong hands. We had no other social connection, so the darkened treatment room felt safe. I went back the fourth week and asked to become a paying patient. Now the relationship was balanced.
Maya was the first person I spoke to about Tomas. I told her about Henry’s visitations, how I felt that Henry wanted a body to be in, because he had lost his body so suddenly, how I wondered if Tomas would be the body. I felt like a crazy person even thinking these thoughts aloud. I told Maya I wanted to ask Tomas if he would do this.
“That seems like a good plan,” she said, as calmly as if I were telling her about a job-search strategy. “I don’t think you are crazy. In the path of Tibetan Buddhism I follow, there is a great understanding about the place where Henry is now, the in-between place.”
Tomas made me a cup of tea
in his warm kitchen.
“Henry visits me every morning,” I said. “I can feel him when he visits. I know it sounds crazy, but I feel him in a physical way.” I couldn’t look right at Tomas, so I stared at the ceramic tea mug. The glaze was a lustrous, warm green.
No backing out now.
“I feel like he needs a body to be with me. He liked you so much. He trusted you. And I trust you. So I want to ask you.”
I cried, because of the cascading relief of speaking to him at last and also because I was ashamed, sure that Tomas would think I had lost my mind. But Tomas did not push me away. He listened,
hugged me, and said, with a strange laugh, that he would think about it.
He was leaving the following day for a two-week visit to see his mother in Costa Rica, where we’d traveled. I wished I were going. I wished Liza and I were going with Tomas to lie on a beach for two weeks to stare at a blue sky and the waves and dip our feet into the warm sea. I drove home, hoping that I wouldn’t feel like a complete fool the next day.
Henry always said I was neurotic
and moody. I couldn’t deny it. I had suffered from depression since the gray autumn following our April marriage in 1989. After struggling with Prozac and Zoloft, I settled on Wellbutrin, which worked well with only moderate side effects. A year before Henry died, my doctor had added an antianxiety drug, Celexa. Henry had insisted I take this medication; he said my anger was “out of control.”
I wanted to go off my medications so I could maybe have sex with Tomas and actually feel something. Henry and I had worked our way around the side effects, but Tomas was a young man; he wouldn’t understand, or have the patience. The colorful pills in their amber plastic vials pleaded with me like rejected friends from the shelf in my medicine cabinet. They had been loyal companions, it was true, but I needed to feel like a young woman again, with a young woman’s nerve endings.
I stopped taking them. The surface of my mind remained calm under a milky, overcast sky. Stunned, I kept waiting for the shattering depression and anxiety to return, but instead there was calm. I was sad but calm. I was pressing forward, one foot in front
of the other, taking care of my child, eating a bit, working, and paying bills.
Tomas would return soon. I was excited about that. I was stunned to feel excited about anything. When I read his e-mail notes, I tried to imagine his life in Costa Rica, based on my memories of our own short visit: the warm sea, the breeze under the palm trees, the rain forest, where exotic birds sang and blue morpho butterflies slowly flapped their delicate wings as they sipped nectar from colorful blossoms.
A cold wind rattled my office windows, as if someone were trying to get my attention from outside. Instinctively I glanced over at the wooden urn filled with Henry’s ashes, positioned in front of the window, now illuminated with late afternoon winter sunlight. I had loved that man whose ashes were in the urn, though he had been an exhausting companion.
And then my eyes opened wide, as after a long and restorative sleep.
I understand now.
I understood the cause of my anxiety. I understood the nature of my depression. Though I had my fair share of Jewish neurosis, the source of my calm was Henry’s absence. Some tightly wound ball of twine inside my body was slowly unraveling. I told no one but my therapist, who nodded thoughtfully.
After Tomas returned from his trip,
I drove up to his house. We sat again in his kitchen and tried to talk about whatever it was we might begin. He said he’d had a sense, since Henry’s death,
that we were being drawn to each other for some purpose, and that he’d been curious about what might happen between us. Leaning toward me, as we sat in our chairs, he kissed me, his way of saying yes to my unusual proposal two weeks earlier.
A few days later, after a breathless e-mail exchange to arrange logistics, Tomas and I sat on my living room rug. Liza had been happy to go to Tanya’s house for a sleepover. Tomas and I ate lamb stew I had made following Julia Child’s instructions. I imagined Henry nodding approvingly from his corner of the kitchen; I had remembered to salt the meat before browning. We drank glasses of the red wine I’d bought from the redheaded wine merchant in town. I sat close to Tomas. He smiled and reached over to hug me—every cell in my body was thrilled and terrified.
I had to tell him how scared and nervous I was. He told me he was nervous too. I relaxed a bit. I hoped he had remembered to bring a condom. He leaned over again, and this time he kissed me. His soft lips tasted of everything young and fresh. My insides exploded.
I can’t do this.
“Let’s look at you,” he said as he took off my T-shirt. I silently prayed that my forty-something body would not horrify him. I had a flat belly. But the skin crinkled in a telltale, postpregnancy way if I leaned over.
I will not lean over.
We kissed again.
Upstairs in my bedroom, I felt Henry’s presence, as if he were reclining in the sitting chair watching me. I hoped Henry understood. Tomas said he could feel Henry too as we lay down, undressed, and slid under the covers. My body felt like it was levitating. A new man was touching me in my bed. My body was lying on the bed, but my consciousness was rising out of my body, floating above the bed. I watched this scene from a height above my body, the man making love to the woman that was me.
I felt him come. He sighed. My brain settled back into my head, and into my body on the bed. I felt the warmth of the sheets and Tomas’s body next to mine. I cried with relief, sobbing and gasping. He cradled my body kindly. I felt alive.
After our first night together,
we corresponded daily in a loving way, letters that someone else might have called love letters, though I hesitated to use such a word because it was clear that Tomas was both available and unavailable. Sensing that too much commitment would scare him away, I tried to reassure him that I would not ask more than he wished to offer. For now, I was stunningly happy to have his company.
A few weeks later, a friend in town threw a big party. Because Tomas and I were trying hard to be discreet about our whatever-it-was-we-were-doing, we arrived at the party in our separate cars—my muddy but still fancy-pants wine red station wagon with leather heated seats and his young dude pickup truck.
After briefly parting the ranks of the beer-drinking, loud-laughing smokers on the porch (wearing my impractical but wonderful new brown suede, high-heel platform boots), I greeted Tomas in what I hoped was a casual way. I poured myself a glass of wine and chose a chair against a wall, where I could slowly sip my wine undisturbed and take some pleasure in watching the rowdy crowd. Tomas stood silently, a short distance away, but when our eyes met we smiled. Our secret was undeniably fun.
A tall young woman walked over on her tall pointy heels to greet Tomas. I wasn’t jealous, for I didn’t think of Tomas as “mine” he was more loan than gift. I watched, fascinated, as she smiled and chatted prettily, and swayed her cute, young, jeans-sheathed butt
side to side, tipping her pointy toes this way and that, edging ever closer to him. His previous girlfriend had had a bit of this look, I recalled; so would the next one, I felt sure, watching the scene unfold. I would turn out to be the brief experiment, an anomaly.
A part of me wished this thing could work out. We had much in common, similar interests and temperaments. But the age difference was a ridiculous impediment we’d never manage easily. Not to mention that my first obligation was to my child. Tomas was too absorbed in his young man’s life to be available in that way. “Your transitional relationship” is how Helen, my polite but no-bullshit therapist described it. Part of me wanted to prove her wrong. The wiser woman in me knew Helen probably had it perfectly pegged.
Tomas looked my way with an awkward, pained expression, and I smiled back at him, hoping to communicate this: “Relax. I am fine. You are beautiful, and everyone wants some of that beauty.”
While Tomas had lived in our attic, we’d had many conversations about his future, personal and artistic. In the friendliest way, Tomas and I continued to have such conversations now. He would tell me how he wanted a tall beauty for a girlfriend, a muse for his work, like his previous girlfriend, but he worried about ending up with someone insubstantial and superficial. He believed in the connection between physical and spiritual beauty. I sighed over his naïveté, the innocence of a handsome young man. Though I too had been innocent, thrilled to marry Henry, who also had been such a pretty young man.
“Henry is so handsome,” my friends gushed when we married. People said we looked good together, and I felt proud. As a young woman, that had seemed important.
“You are so lucky to have Henry, and he loves you so much.” I
had felt lucky and loved. Until the dictionary came flying at me.
Physically, Tomas and I were not such a suitable pairing. When we kissed, I had to stand on tiptoe. It made me feel small, though in public situations the height differential offset the age difference, which was sixteen years.
Anna called one morning, crying.
Since her earlier visit to tell me of her separation from her husband, I’d been doing my best to keep track of her progress, though I felt completely lost in my own fog. For both of us, work was an anchor and a comfort. Sometimes, on the days our shared assistant worked for me, I tentatively asked him how Anna seemed, because I hadn’t seen her much since her announcement. Thin, he reported. He too had been one of John’s students. He quietly told me how disappointed he was in his mentor. When Anna and I talked on the phone, she always sounded tired and wrung out, sometimes on the edge of tears. This morning, however, there was no pretense of self-control; she was hysterical.
“He’s still here,” she sobbed. “And all his stuff is here. He’s sleeping in the barn and he won’t leave, and I can’t stand it anymore.” The barn was their shared work space, across the lawn from their house.
“So you have to work in the studio with him all day? What’s he saying? Does he want to stay married or go off with the girl?” We did not refer to this woman by name.
“He isn’t really saying. It’s like he’s still thinking about it, but I know he’s still seeing her. Fuck, I hate my life.”
She cried some more, and I cried too, thinking about the inevitable mess of their divorce. There didn’t seem to be such a
thing as a gentle divorce.
“Anna, I think you have to just march right down to the barn and tell him to leave now. And just get his shit out of the house if it’s making you upset. He can’t have it both ways. Either he’s married to you or he’s seeing the girl. He has to choose. I think you should go tell him right now. If you need me to, I’ll drive up there and do it myself. But I think you can do it.”
Later that day I called her back. She told me she’d dumped John’s clothes into some black garbage bags and left them on the snowy lawn. Within days, he cleared out of the barn and rented an apartment in town. She felt better, more in charge, but new battles were just beginning. She was looking for a divorce lawyer. No point waiting any longer now.
Sara came to visit from England
for a week in March. A friend from my college days, she had promised to help me sort through Henry’s things.
“This will be my gift to you,” she told me. I knew she could get this job done. She was a librarian both by profession and by temperament; I could trust her to be ruthless yet compassionate. We had the love of over twenty years behind us. She was so like a sister that I forgot we’d chosen each other as friends.
“Maybe you’ll find Henry’s wedding ring,” I said hopefully as she surveyed his office files. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”