Retirement Projects
Page 4
Chapter 4
I met her in a bar in Abilene. She was perched on a tall stool with her crossed legs stressing the seams of a tight red silk dress, lazy coils of blue smoke from her cigar rising to linger in the fragrant mass of piled-up chestnut hair. . .
Just kidding. But it occurs to me that there's something wrong with you if you're not wondering how it is that a woman like Leilah – intelligent, attractive, kind, practical, and determined – ever ended up with a fogbank like me. Certainly I've had plenty of time to think about that since she left. With my eyes newly opened by shock, distress, pain, loneliness, and intimations of betrayal it was suddenly easy for me to see that we'd somehow grown apart. That's a cliche. Let's be more specific. She had changed and I hadn't, or not much anyway. My only excuse for not noticing what was happening is that all her changes were very gradual, and seem to have taken place internally, like the vast reorganization that goes on invisibly inside a cocoon before the butterfly bursts out. Only in this case, the fluttering and contented butterfly (here I'm thinking of those printed silk tops and flowered umbrellas) has metamorphosed into a determined caterpillar, munching on the bland foliage of scientific knowledge.
No, there were no bars in Abilene, although there was, one Halloween, a tight red dress and a cigar. But Leilah was a good old Midwestern girl, hatched and fledged on the short-grass prairies of suburban Indianapolis, North Side, where the winds swept down without hindrance all the way from Gary, the icy breath of the Rust Belt blowing over her girlish form as she walked the family dog on cold winter nights, under a pale moon imprisoned behind the jaggedy bars of the bare tree limbs. And in the equally quiet summer nights cottony with heat and humidity and bulging with the raunchy commentary of the cicadas.
After high school her horizons expanded to take in West Lafayette and the bricky campus of Purdue University, where she was at that time one of, like, 50 coeds in a student body of 15,000 engineering and ag students. But books told her the world had more to offer than Big Ten football, and she fled to New York with her sociology degree right after graduation, hoping to make something happen in her life. And things did happen. Specifically, she was almost immediately introduced to sex, drugs, and revolutionary politics by a newly minted anarchist from Lander, Wyoming.
Soon she moved into the anarchist’s Avenue C tenement apartment. There they had to turn on the stove burners in the winter for heat, and in summer the place was regularly penetrated through the wide-open windows by cat burglars, whose stealthy rustlings were camouflaged by the rattling of an old box fan. At the same time she was hedging her bets by holding down a 9 to 5 stockings-and-high-heels job at a life insurance company, although it was the kind of bottom-feeder outfit that lives on the flakes of organic matter that drift down from the feeding frenzies of the big boys up above the thermocline. The anarchist worked in the mailroom of the insurance company. Meanwhile, one floor up from the mailroom, I was laboring in a cubicle, inventing creative ways to avoid paying claims.
The scarf of Leilah's life, I believe, has always been knitted from roughly equal strands of rebellion and conventionality. I suppose for a while she thought her rebel boy would be able to minister to both of them. Her restless side went for the fiery rhetoric, the demonstrations, the run-ins with the cops, the impromptu love-making in clothes still pungent with tear gas; the sober side of her was attracted to what she thought was her lover's passionate commitment to a vision of social justice. But he turned out to be committed mainly to his own rakish image and all the balling his Che Guevara beret made possible.
Once the anarchist strand began to fray, Leilah found herself, maybe unconsciously, looking for other options. And there I was, in my button-down collars and striped ties. I was her boss, in fact, not that that mattered to her. The point is, I was fleeing suburbia, too, but not all the way to Bolivia. She favored me with a couple of glances, and I followed her like a sleepwalker. We went to a couple of movies, cheap Indian dinners, trial sex in my bare 59th Street apartment. To me it felt like an extended job interview.
At the time Leilah may have thought she discerned a certain fire in me, because I was bored out of my mind with the insurance job and wanted to do something that meant something. That's what I told her – and myself – anyway. This was still before I'd given up on Enlightenment. And I was even ready to take the one major risk of my lifetime – quitting the insurance company – to drive myself into some more consequential occupation. Whatever it was, she stuck with me for several months, and because of (or despite, I now think) whatever she must have learned about me during that time, she married me. Or maybe she was so relieved to put some distance between herself and Avenue C that she didn't really look at the whole thing very carefully. I don't think Leilah ever expected very much for herself; she was actually a rather cautious person, and just getting out of Indiana was a big deal. Maybe she thought, That's enough experimenting; this one's good enough, he's reasonably intelligent, he's not too homely, although his hair could be a lot better. He may be compulsively neat, but at least he doesn't have any other girlfriends, let's get on with it. Maybe she saw kids, a house or at least a nice big Upper West Side apartment, trips to the beach and the autumn colors.
As for me, I didn't really think about any of those things. I didn't think about much in those days, being essentially on autopilot. For me it was fairly simple and visceral: the first night on Leilah's tender bosom was not like all other nights. If you know, you know. Otherwise there's not much I can say about it.
Once she left, though, and before the great fan of events began to spatter my walls in the ways I'm about to describe, I had lots of time to examine the relationship and think about things. One theory I have is that what I was to Leilah was mainly a huge detour. A detour that began with New York and ended with cancer. In some ways it was a disaster for her – 25 years of semi-vegetating, during which the rebellious strand was wrapped around so tightly by the conventional one that it became invisible. Despite the uneventfulness of our lives, the lack of kids or any other kind of adventure, she went off to work every day without a complaint. She was the kind of person who liked being in an office and didn't mind the tedium. She enjoyed the people there, made friends easily with all ages, got the work done fairly effortlessly, and still had time to hang out near the coffee maker, talking about relationships, boyfriends and girlfriends, and then kids, and still later butt enhancements, botox, and facelifts, although she never contemplated any of those things herself, as far as I know. She seemed contented. I was always the one with the nagging questions about what the hell I was doing. She would listen to my complaints, looking up from her knitting to indicate that she was paying attention, and although she was sympathetic, her only suggestion would be to DO something, to get into action: get a new job, start a new career, write a book, change my life. She couldn't understand the difficulty of that, had no experience with paralysis, because she seemed to have no need to move.
I suppose it was the cancer that changed everything for her. Or rather, the cancer peeled back the cocoon to reveal the new Leilah that had been silently reintegrating inside the placid exterior. I was good about it, I think. I paid attention to her, nursed her through the fear, and the fatigue, and the nausea, and the hair loss, and she survived. But meanwhile she had a lot of time by herself, to sit in the shadow of death and think things over, the fleetingness of time and all that, to examine what she'd been doing with her life. It was the cancer that gave her the motivation and the time to untangle those two constant threads of her life. Sure enough, the strand of restlessness was still there, stretching almost invisibly through the 25 years of our life together. At the New York end was Che Guevara; at the San Francisco end was. . . well, why should I let you in on what I didn't find out myself until it was much too late? No, you're going to have to work for it.