Starts with Love. Ends with Dance. (Or is it the other way around?)
I did this.
It started the day I opened the cheap dark green sliver of drugstore notebook that I designated expressly for writing things I would never show my husband. Consciously, I shut off the filesharing of my thoughts to his. He didn’t know I was doing it, and so I stole part of myself from him. I denied that this part was symbolic of the whole, that it was a map to my territory, whose importance I also denied. I didn’t purposely divorce myself from him, from our togetherness, but I did it. I am the unthinking villian, like Jimmy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, like the central character in the movie Happiness, who progresses from teen magazines to raping boys. Neither of them premeditated harm. They ran from themselves without confronting their fears, and ended up creating untold suffering.
I feared a choice between dancing with Kendall and my marriage. But one can’t hold on to anything in this world.
Maybe I can be “excused” as it were. If all were right with the marriage, I would not have been “susceptible” (as I wrote in March 2007) to “men who pay attention.” Peter didn’t listen to me the way I wanted him to, but not because he didn’t want to. It just didn’t happen. So I said, all right. “My mind is my own.” (Judy Blume, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, 1972.) File sharing shutting down.
He looked on as men dipped me in circles, and he didn’t step up to dip me in a circle. He didn’t say, “Hey, where are you going, when are you coming back?”
Still, I did it.
So now Peter will hate me, and his family will hate me, and I will have to deal with that. Be a grownup.
Life is harder when one is not married. I feel bad, guilty, ashamed to leave him. I promised to be there always, and now I am saying, “psych!” five years later, after we’ve entangled ourselves, enmeshed our money, our debt, our goals.
A new value in the equation of our relationship emerged over vacation in Las Vegas, where we were supposed to be celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. Instead, he told me that he wanted to move on. I’ve starved him out, I thought, dismally. In bed, a couple of nights after we got home, I put my feet next to his, to warm them, and he moved farther to his side of the bed. Not immediately. After a few minutes. That made me more sad than if he’d moved right away.
Blues Cafe occurred the night after our return. Peter helped me get ready but didn’t accompany me. Jake arrived at 7 with Ginger, who had agreed to volunteer, and so he became part of the set-up crew. When the pizza was delivered at 7:45, he had just finished helping Hunter to string the lights and asked me what else he could do.
“The pizza is here, you know,” I said.
“I know,” he answered, and stayed put, smiling.
I sighed. “Thank you for existing.” I stretched up to put my arms around him, then squeezed and let go. “Sorry I was all ridiculous and frazzled before.”
“It’s good for you,” he smiled.
I often think that his extremely relaxed appearance is a calculated mercy. His hair fluffed out horizontally from just above his ears; a snowfall of red-blond covered his cheeks and chin.
Being frazzled is anything but good for me. But what he said meant, “That’s what you do, and I don’t mind.” Permission, validation, lack of judgment: these salve me, make me feel grateful to the point of indebtedness. I have not been able to grant them to myself.
Eckhardt Tolle would take issue with the self-split inherent in the previous sentence. Permission exists just as I exist; no one needs to grant it. The split to which I am addicted removes it. Love, then, has been an illusion: whomever pays attention and refrains from judging me wins my affection.
The evening progressed to the ingloriousness of a mishmash beginner class. It consisted of dragged boyfriends, overconfident girlfriends, older guys that have taken lessons before and felt free to ignore the teachers, one or two beaming Liz and Jake fans, and latecomers continually arriving. Thus it fell far short of the magical synergy possible at the YW on Tuesday nights. I could sense Jake’s young-man frustration; I remembered to breathe deeply and focus soothing thoughts both on him and the students. At the end of the lesson I made announcements and then set him free.
The band sound-checked. I sprinted to the back of the room and hit the dimmer switch. Christmas lights twinkled over the mirrors. Ginger and Aidan stood behind the bar, which they had neatly arrayed with mugs and full coffee carafes. Three-minute couples sailed onto the floor while beginners sat at tables, munched M&M’s and watched. The party was on.
So much goes through my mind during the average Blues Cafe. Tonight I missed Peter, especially when folks asked where he was, what he was doing. Divorcing me, I thought with sadness. He had already told his parents that we were separating. When I found Hunter and Violet practicing in the conference room, I spilled the news to them. But in one sudden moment among the talking and hugging, I snapped to attention. “What did she just do with her voice? Did my ears hear that?” I kissed both my friends and rushed into Hawkins Hall to hear the young vocalist re-vivifying an old standard with in-the-pocket operatic scatting. Then the pianist snake-charmed my heart out of my ribcage with intervals and syncopations reminiscent of Basie. Finally, the leader of the band - not yet graduated from Berklee School of Music - took the apron of the stage and serenaded us like a new-millennium version of St. Elmo’s Fire’s Billy, except more powerful, more stout, more sure.
Kids rocking jazz. I’m in love.
Then the thoughts returned, like neon stock figures electronically parading over Times Square: Am I saying hello to enough people? Dancing with enough beginners? Challenging my lead enough? Is the coffee out? Should I put the pizza on the bar? Are the songs too long? Is Jake still here or did he leave without saying goodbye?
On the contrary: chance put us in relative proximity as one song ended and so I approached him carefully. Over the mike, the vocalist warned, “This is going to be a slow, sassy one.”
“Are we dancing?” Jake asked.
“I would love to.”
When good following is this important, we girls have quite a conundrum. Trying is not quite the right thing to do. We have to be: ourselves, the moment, the music, the boy’s dream - all in order to fulfill our own. We must unattach from the thing we desire dearly: in this case, the most sublime dance possible. Be now, I ordered myself, willfully shutting out past and future. It became a mantra.
“Pardon me,” the girl crooned, “but I’ve gotta run/ The fact’s uncomfortably clear/ Gotta find that old number one/ And why my angel eyes ain’t here.”
One of my best relationships was undone by this song, when, from the back of the Student Center in the fall of 1993, I heard Cameron Reilly sound check that melodic line on his tenor saxophone.
I let Jake do what he wanted. I tried not to try to hard. His low slung West-Coast boogaloo entertained and inspired me, asked much but demanded little. I floated and released into dips. I corralled my center into pirouettes aided by his well-timed hand. After a sweeping dip, I let momentum carry my left leg around his hip and back under me. Then he swung me out and slapped his knees and then the floor as I jumped and snapped my fingers in the air. We laughed. From the corner near stage right, girls watched.