Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (11 page)

I needed words again. I needed guidance from books. Yes, I still wanted to follow Knowles's “arrogant determination to live,” but the “how” of living needed bolstering and fattening and enriching. I had to reopen and restock my vault of wisdom. I needed again to hear from authors about their experiences. In reading about experiences both light and dark, I would find the wisdom to get through my own dark times.

According to the historical evidence, Constance Fenimore Woolson either jumped or fell to her death at the age of fifty-three, suffering from influenza and depression. But Maguire imagines a different ending for her character. She has Woolson discovering that she has a tumor in her head, and that she has only months left to live. Maguire herself became ill with ovarian cancer while writing
The Open Door
and finished the novel during the final months of her life, before she died at age forty-seven. Did Maguire write her ending so that Woolson's character could serve as the voice for Maguire's own fears about death and eventual acceptance of what was coming? I am certain that it is Maguire talking when she has Woolson say, “Hard to believe, but once I had absorbed the shock, a certain giddiness followed. Suddenly I had a reprieve from the minor oppressions of everyday life. . . . It was like having a pass to be one's most selfish and unsocial self.”

As a storyteller herself, Maguire channels the storyteller in Woolson to relate her own struggles: “Storytellers live in the future tense. All my life I had pulled myself out of low spirits by imagining what might happen next. Now there was not going to be any next. Everything needed to be experienced as it was. This was a test of my pragmatic soul.” Her words exalt the desire of living on through her words, through readers' witnessing of her own experience: “Gone . . . it is impossible to conceive of oneself as gone, isn't it? . . . In my imagination, I was still there, watching from the heavens. . . . It seems I am just a small hole dug in the sand by a child's shovel, to be erased with the next turn of the tide. I would rather be a mountain, to stand purple and glorious for all time.”

I use the words of Maguire, imagined for Woolson, as a proxy for the lost murmurings of Anne-Marie, and to fill in all that was left unsaid between us that afternoon in her study. I put myself back on the brown couch, my arms close around my sister, and smell again the damp, fresh leaves of her perfume. I hear the words Maguire wrote, and I find comfort. When I return to my purple chair, the low winter sun outside my window and fat cat in my lap, I reach to touch the sleeves of the gray sweater I'm wearing. Anne-Marie is “still there, watching from the heavens.”

How I wish I could get the message to Maguire—
Your words have whispered to me!
—and let her know that she indeed created a “mountain, standing glorious for all time,” a mountain for me. A mountain made up of words, and offering wisdom. Through the door she opened between us, Maguire counsels me that life is precious and fragile. She advises me to live like her wonderful character Woolson, with spirit and intelligence and bravado. She comforts me that while death is scary, it is also inevitable, for all of us, and that if she could face it head-on, Anne-Marie could too.

Maguire used Woolson as a guide and a cipher. Now I would use both women. Four months into my year of reading, and their words found me. They whisper to me and urge me on. I've packed the quotes into my vault, to carry along with me, and to return to again and again.

Chapter 11
Where Warmth Is Found

“Nothing don't matter,” he said, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing the ceiling.

“It matter to me, Jefferson,” she said. “You matter to me.”

ERNEST J. GAINES,

A Lesson Before Dying

I'M ALWAYS COLDEST IN THE LAST WEEKS OF WINTER
. My body is worn out from keeping itself warm for months, and I can no longer fight against the chills coming in under the door. In an effort to find sun and warmth, I read
Scat
by Carl Hiaasen on the last day of February. I knew Hiaasen would take me to Florida, immerse me in heat and humidity, and make me want to live out of a canoe, traveling around the sprawling wildernesses of southern Florida's Ten Thousand Islands. I had a great trip, but when I rose from my purple chair, the grass outside my window was still brown. Snow survived in dirty clumps, glistening wet and icy under a cold gray sky. I wasn't in Florida anymore. I was in a Connecticut winter, and it was ugly.

I went to my computer to read over again the Facebook message I'd received just days before. It was from Andrew. Twenty-seven years ago I'd promised to love Andrew forever. A month ago he'd lobbed a friend request my way, and I'd accepted. Friendship I could renew. But love? When I made my promise of undying devotion all those years ago, the promise was more like a threat: he was breaking up with me, and I swore I'd never forget him. “And you'll never forget me,” was my final curse.

I fell in love for the first time when I was away at horseback-riding camp. I was twelve, and so was Tim, a kid from Milwaukee. We worshipped the ground each other rode on. After the four weeks of camp were over, we never saw each other again, but I liked thinking about him for months afterward.

My next bout of love was with a boy I met in Seville, Spain, when I was seventeen years old. I was in town for ten days with a group from my high school, and I met him on my first day there. He was a friend of the girl with whom I was staying. Alicia was a nice girl but a little wild, with heavily lined eyes, deeply painted lips, and a pack of cigarettes always sticking out from her back pocket. Her father was a strict man, a professor and a conservative Catholic, but he just adored his daughter. As long as she got good grades, she explained to me, he let her do pretty much as she pleased. And it pleased her to go out with her boyfriend late at night and stay out until early in the morning. Our first night out together, the two of them introduced me to Alfonso.

Alfonso was handsome, with curved lips and big brown eyes. He had a straight nose, perfect cheekbones, and a dimple when he smiled. He was a little unkempt, with greasy hair, pants that hung down from a notched-up leather belt, and a shirt that rose off his back when he leaned forward to shake my hand. He was polite and gracious and not a bit confident. He made me feel comfortable. We hung out in the local bar that first night, drinking beer, and then left for one of Seville's public parks. While Alicia and her boyfriend kissed on the bench beside us, Alfonso and I muddled on in conversation, his English just a little bit better than my Spanish.

Alfonso loved his city, and he told me all about her. Seville had been a Muslim capital for hundreds of years, he explained, which accounted for the Moorish architecture everywhere. Then Ferdinand III, the Catholic king from the north of Spain, came along and ran all the Muslims out. He moved himself into the Alcazar, the former Muslim palace.

“You must visit it. It is so beautiful.” Alfonso took my hand and went on talking.

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See in Seville was built on the site of the former mosque of the long-gone Muslim rulers. Beside the cathedral is the Giralda, a tower originally built as a minaret. Instead of stairs, the tower had ramps inside, allowing Muslim muezzins to ride to the top on horseback.

Alfonso told me the Sevillan motto,
“No me ha dejado,”
explaining that it meant Seville would never abandon her people.

“And I will never abandon Seville,” he promised, holding tighter onto my hand and looking soulfully into my eyes. I was hooked.

For the next six days, Alfonso and I spent every afternoon and evening together.
Semana Santa
(Holy Week), traditionally a week for Catholics to make final penance before Easter, had begun. The days were marked by long processions of men wearing white robes and hoods walking behind floats carrying painted polychrome Madonnas. The men were called
nazarenos
, and they bore large wooden crosses across their backs to commemorate the sufferings of Jesus Christ. Onlookers cheered the men on and attached money, trinkets, and flowers to the floats, following the procession to the end with singing and wailing.

When the parades ended, it was time to hit the bars. A favorite drink of the holiday was the
postura
, a mixture of gin and white wine. I liked the crisp taste of the drink, the way it hit the back of my throat and then slid down, a slither of fire down to my belly. The bars were packed with people, and the smell of sawdust from the floor mixed in with the smoke from Ducados and Marlboros. For a girl from the Midwest, this was life straight out of
Carmen
, brought to modern times, and with my own handsome bullfighter beside me. We made out in the dark corners of packed bars and fed each other off tiny plates of fresh shrimp, garlicky potato tortillas, and meaty green olives.

One day toward the end of the week it was Alfonso's turn to carry a heavy wooden cross down the streets of Seville. I couldn't tell which of the hooded men he was, so I just cheered on everyone who passed. The next day Alfonso took me home to meet his parents. He lived in a huge stone house off a quiet square of orange trees and yellow cobblestones. We sat in a room with ceilings fifteen feet high and walls lined with patterned wallpaper. Heavy, dark portraits hung around us, and we sat in ornate wooden chairs just like the ones I would see ten years later in the furnished rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The parents spoke English beautifully and offered me orange soda to drink and almond cookies to eat. Suddenly the mother of Alfonso leaned over to take a closer look at her son. A closer look at his neck. The same neck I'd been passionately biting less than eight hours earlier.

“
Hijo!
Your neck has many bruises!”

I sank into the cushions of my eighteenth-century chair.

“It's from carrying the cross, Mama.”

“You're a good boy,” she said, sitting back again with a smile.

I was hit by a car the next morning. I was crossing the street to go home after a long night, and I never saw the car coming. I refused to take the accident as a sign of divine retribution, payback for the lie we'd perpetrated on Alfonso's mother. Even later, when the distraught driver brought me a present in the hospital, a light-up version of La Giralda, and it blew up in my face as I plugged it in, I refused to see God's hand in my plight. All I could see was Alfonso. I was in love.

The day I left Seville, the father of my host family wished me luck with Alfonso and advised me to hold on to him.

“He comes from an old Sevillan family on his father's side. And on his mother's side, there is Franco.”

I had fallen in love with a boy from the family of Francisco Franco. Alfonso was all lover and no fighter, but the thought of Franco made me shiver in my sandals.

I wasn't able to hold on to Alfonso—time and distance took care of that. I did see him again, three years later, when I was back in Spain for my junior year of college. He was living outside London, and I visited him there. He took me out for a curry in Tunbridge Wells. He was still the sweet boy he'd been in Seville, and as handsome as ever in his own disheveled way. I was no longer in love, but I loved how nice he had been to me, and I loved remembering our walks through the crowded streets of Seville at all hours of the night, the glasses of
postura
we shared, and how he talked about the city while holding tightly on to my hand.

I fell in love a few more times over the years, and thought each and every man was the love of my life. As Nancy Mitford has her character “the Bolter” say in
The Pursuit of Love
, “One always thinks that, every time.” The Bolter would know: she left her children time and time again to pursue new loves. I'd married the last love of my life, and we were happy. Now out of the blue, a man for whom I'd written volumes of poetry and crossed campus six times in one night for one more good-night kiss, and on whose chest I'd written my name in Sharpie to keep other women away, wanted back into my life. I had good memories of our times together, but love?

Back in December, I'd read
Twilight
at the urging of a friend's daughter, and I found it hilarious. Thinking now about love, I saw how adept Stephenie Meyer was at portraying that first thrill of wanting more, physically and soulfully, from another person. Bella, teenage girl and the new kid at school, is lonely and feeling like a misfit. She finds herself strangely attracted to Edward, her handsome, sexy, well-dressed, and very smart lab partner. When she finds out he is a vampire, her desire doesn't diminish. If anything, it grows. Bella describes her “overpowering craving to touch” her beloved vampire, and I recognized that sensation. I'd felt it in Seville for the first time, and it was scary but wonderful. There is no thrill like the anticipation of that first kiss. Meyer cleverly entwines teen hormones (sexual desire) and unexplainable phenomena (vampires) and twists sexual longing into a battle between good and evil. Desire is a monster, but a monster that the young lover (goodness) will accept and encourage because she is so sure the evil within desire can be tamed. Alfonso had no evil in him, but Andrew certainly did, and the desire to tame him had been irresistible twenty-seven years ago.

Maybe that is what love is: the taming of desire into something solid and sustainable. The passion I share with Jack is different from our first New Year's Eve kiss twenty years ago. Weeks after that first spark of desire, Jack flew off on a business trip. I couldn't bear the time away from him, and I jumped on a plane to meet him in Utah. We watched a lightning storm over Salt Lake City and spent the weekend at the Snowed Inn, up in the Park City hills. These days our passion is more content to stay at home, manifesting itself through affection, proffered cups of coffee, and whatever time alone we can wrest away from kids, his work, and my reading. We still have our
Twilight
moments, but even better, we have a love that has lasted more than twenty years.

In
Family Happiness
by Laurie Colwin, a woman with a perfect life, including husband, job, kids, and plenty of money and leisure time, falls in love with another man. Her husband and her kids are not enough for her. She explains that love in the family is “intelligent and deep, and never unrequited. It was the basis of all good things and there was nothing secret or covert about it.” On the other hand, her private love, the desire she has for the man outside of her family, is “feckless, led to nothing, was productive of nothing, and didn't do anyone a bit of good.” Because
Family Happiness
is more fantasy than fact, Polly keeps both kinds of love in her life, the one of desire and passion and the enduring love of family. No one ever finds out about her lover, no one ever gets hurt, and only Polly has to suffer “a life of conflict and pain,” a price she deems well worth it.

In Ford Madox Ford's novel
The Good Soldier
, love is given harsh treatment. Two couples, duplicitous and needy, manipulate desire as a weapon on the battlefield of life. When love manifests itself, suddenly and unexpectedly, it is seen as a weakness but also as a threat that must be squashed by the other characters through “perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful” activity. Desire can be indulged, but in Ford's book, love leads only to madness and suicide.

In Maggie Estep's
Alice Fantastic
, falling in love is simple, necessary, and basic. What happens
after
falling in love is more complicated, with plenty of desire, dependence, and jealousy expressed, fought against, and finally accepted. This loving was a vibe I understood, love not as a battlefield but as a series of leaps into the unknown, with an occasional bump, the rare injury, and a high-flying exhilaration that makes the bumps and injuries worth it.

Alice Fantastic
offers all varieties of romantic love, but what had me rooted to the book is Estep's portrayal of the love between the two sisters, Alice and Eloise. The sisters have grating differences and opposing outlooks on everything from work to romance. When they discover that they have unknowingly shared a lover (through individually experienced one-night stands), the accidental couplings only underscore their differences. Eloise feels cheap and angry, and Alice feels fine, although she'll never sleep with William again.

When facing up to the secret revealed about their mother, the two sisters finally join together: “The tears came and Alice wrapped me in her arms and held me for a long, long time. We were like little kids then. The oceans of differences calm.” The “oceans of differences” between them are nothing compared to the love. The only thing they have in common (other than an accidental lover and a love of dogs) is how for each of them the person they love most, along with their mother, is the other.

It is only within the sibling relationship that such a dichotomy exists. I loved my sisters even when I might never have befriended them across a cafeteria table or at a party. I have more in common with my parents than I used to feel comfortable admitting to, but I had very little in common with Anne-Marie, other than our love for books and for beauty in art. Natasha and I have interests more in sync, yet none of us three sisters had similar friends or lovers. None of us could ever agree on the ideal meal, vacation, house, or political platform. When I started having kids, our disagreements extended to names, haircuts, and bedtimes for a child. As Rilke writes in his poem “The Sisters,” “Look how the same possibilities / unfold in their opposite demeanors.” And yet we loved each other completely and without question. We were there in the most important moments, and in the smaller ones too.