I couldn’t give her up. Before Chris my attraction to women had been ephemeral—a woman might thrill me just with the sound of her voice, or the way she rolled the sleeves of her shirt, but the way that I wanted her would have nothing to do with the ideas I held about the trajectory of my life, my future. Chris changed all that. One night soon after that December dinner party, I pressed myself against her in the hallway of her apartment and was startled by the solidity of her body, solid and smooth as planed wood. And the next morning when I sat with her on the train and watched as she scribbled notes on a legal pad, watched how every few minutes she would pull a torn-edged New York Times crossword out from behind the pad to fill in a few clues then slide it back again behind her work, I knew that there was nothing ephemeral about my desire for her. I knew that if I did not make the future I wanted happen—somehow—with her that I would never know such perfect solidness again, and I would wish for it always.
But the timing, the timing was terrible. This is what I told myself. Once or twice I brought up Chris in my therapy sessions—never actually telling Hector that I was still seeing her, that I was, in fact, still sleeping with her—and I would try to convince him that everything could be mine, that I could have Chris and still keep my tiny faith burning. That I could still be a Catholic. But the Church didn’t believe that was possible, and neither did Hector. He didn’t condemn my desires on religious grounds; he only claimed (at least overtly) that she was causing me to commit the sin of distraction. And it was true; Chris was a distraction. The most beautiful, exciting distraction that had ever crossed my line of vision. And try as I might, I could not turn away.
Now, all these years later, it occurs to me that I was conflating Hector and God, or that at the least I was taking Hector’s word as definitive when really his word was just his own, when really he was only one man who pushed me too hard, the way a father might, the way my own father did not. It also occurs to me that I was an ideal therapeutic patient. I was diligent, engaged, and twenty-four years old. Who among us can resist the urge to tell a twenty-four-year-old what to do? Hector found in me a person who would, for a little while, do what he said. And I found in him a person who made the complexities of my psyche seem singular and intriguing, and, in many ways, beautiful. He must have known what he gave me, and he must have found it gratifying to offer. I can see that now. And I can see that he should have known better.
By February I was seeing Chris nearly every day. And I was still seeing Hector every Tuesday, but I no longer mentioned Chris at all. We talked only about God. Hector suggested I read The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s autobiography. I read it, jumping at the chance to do something to please him, to lessen my feelings of betrayal. The book terrified me. Day writes of her love affair with Forster Batterham, who was, like Day before her conversion, a communist and an atheist. He would not marry Day on philosophical grounds. And so she separated from him, despite the fact that he was the father of her child, despite the grief it caused her. “Becoming Catholic would mean facing life alone,” Day wrote, “and I clung to family life.” But she released the domestic future of her dreams. And how right she had been to do it, for only then could she come to know God, only then could she discern his desires for her. Only then could she become the Dorothy Day who changed the world.
Years later Dorothy Day’s letters were released for publication in a book titled All the Way to Heaven. I ordered the book from interlibrary loan and it arrived at my country library from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The book’s first section contains nine years of letters between Dorothy Day and Forster Batterham. In The Long Loneliness, Day tells her readers that she separated from Batterham, once and for all, in December 1927. But her letters tell a different story. Day wrote to Batterham steadily until 1932, proclaiming her love and her desire, her wish for him to change his mind and agree to marry her. “Do write to me, dearest sweetest,” Day wrote from California in 1929, “because I think of you and want you night and day.” And in January 1932, after a night together: “What do you say you marry me . . . ?” This is what I had not fully understood when I read The Long Loneliness: Dorothy Day adored Forster Batterham. Even after she converted to Catholicism she wanted to marry him, but he would not marry her. Eventually she stopped asking. But in one of the last letters in the book, written two years before her death at eighty years old, Day told a friend that she spoke with Batterham nearly every day.
Would it have mattered if I had read Day’s letters when I was twenty-four years old and trying to decide between God and Chris? Perhaps not. Perhaps then I would only have flipped ahead to torture myself with Day’s final good-bye to Batterham. But I can say with certainty that the letters matter to me now. I read them and know that Day wanted a lover and she wanted God. And regardless of what Day was ultimately granted, our shared longing is enough for me.
4
Let a Joy Keep You
Spring came, and Chris and I were still together. A few days before Easter a package arrived from the Metropolitan Museum shop. I opened it to find another box, this one red and glossy and stamped with a swirling gold M. “Who’s it from?” Chris asked. It was late; we were finishing take-out sushi at my kitchen table, and I had convinced her to sleep over even though she had an early meeting. I no longer sent Chris away every morning before dawn. And I no longer confessed anything to Hector. I kept my ambivalence from both of them, or at least I thought I did. I knew I couldn’t keep it from them forever; I was just hoping to make it to the end of the summer. In September I was leaving for Colorado, and while I knew that I would, most likely, come back to Philadelphia, I fantasized that three months away would transform me into a person who knew exactly how to weave these tangled strands of desire and belief into an orderly, harmonious, and decidedly adult sort of life.
“I’m not sure,” I said, although I had a pretty good idea. Inside the box was a gold cross hanging from a delicate chain and a small white card on which my mother had written a line from a Carl Sandburg poem: Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by. I didn’t read the card aloud.
“So this weekend I’m doing something kind of crazy,” I said to Chris before I lifted the cross from the box. “I’m becoming a Catholic.”
Chris looked surprised, but she didn’t say anything. Had I even mentioned the Catholic Church before now? I might have made a few offhanded comments about going to church, and I didn’t move the Bible or stack of Thomas Merton journals from my bedside table on the nights that she slept over, but that was about the extent of my disclosure. Chris knew nothing about Jesus of the Futon; she knew nothing about Hector.
“It’s sort of a last-minute decision,” I said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. I wanted to say something to her about how it didn’t mean anything about us, or how I felt about her. I wanted to tell her that what I loved about Catholicism was on an entirely different plane from the hatred and prejudice of the institution. But Chris had been raised Catholic, she had suffered terribly because of that hatred, and I—in a blessed moment of common sense—knew enough not to suggest that such a division would be anything more to her than spin.
“Can I help you?” she asked, putting her hands out for the necklace I was struggling to clasp around my neck.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
When I think about that night now, all these years later, I am struck by how patient Chris was, how careful. And how confused I must have seemed. Years later she would tease me, “Can you believe I didn’t run?” No, I would say, in all seriousness. I can’t.
I put on the necklace, went into the bathroom to look at it in the mirror. I had not worn a cross before. I pressed it against my bare neck and felt its pointed edges on my skin. I smiled into the mirror. The cross looked right; wearing it was the most effortless step I had taken toward God.
“So when exactly are you doing this?” Chris asked from the kitchen.
“Saturday night,” I said. “At
the Easter Vigil service.” I didn’t ask her if she wanted to come; she didn’t ask if she could.
The next morning Chris left early. I woke to the sound of her rummaging through her briefcase for a taxi voucher. She was dressed in her gym clothes, her faded Zen Palate T-shirt and running shorts. She looked over at me. “How about dinner?”
“It’s Holy Thursday,” I said, “so I’m going to church.”
“And after?” she asked.
“You can take me to dinner,” I said with a smile. In the last few months I had been in more restaurants that I had in the decade before I met her. And I had enjoyed every bite of food, every drop of wine. Sometimes Chris walked the few blocks from her law firm to my apartment after working late and instead of ordering food, I made her simple things, spaghetti with pesto, chicken salad, cookies that I baked in my toaster oven. She loved everything I fed her, loved that I wore boiled wool slippers in the kitchen and a short, black skirt instead of sweatpants. She loved the way I held my tongue between my front teeth when I danced in front of the stove, something I didn’t even know I did. Until I met her it had not occurred to me that someone could find such pleasure in all the things I did without trying.
At my first Good Friday Mass I didn’t want to venerate the cross. I didn’t want to bend and kiss it, although I did want to be the sort of person who would. I wanted to be the sort of person who had venerated the cross every Good Friday of her life, who was propelled by ritual and habit, by her little-girl memories of watching her own mother bend toward a wooden Jesus. I had a Rumi poem taped to my bathroom mirror: Out beyond ideas of wrong and right there is a field. I’ll meet you there. The field of my dreams was not beyond wrong and right so much as it was beyond deciding, beyond this bewilderment about exactly who I was hoping to become.
I waited in the long procession to the front of the church, and I liked the waiting, I liked the slow shuffle of people in front of me, people behind. I liked approaching the bright altar. When I arrived at the front of the church I put my hand on the warm wood of Jesus’s bare leg, then turned and walked away.
After the service I went back to my apartment and called my Nana, who was just home from her own Good Friday service. “I didn’t venerate the cross,” I confessed.
“Oh, I never do,” Nana said. “Too many germs.”
At dusk I once again walked the two blocks from my apartment to church. I was going to my first confession. Father Dowling, like most priests, no longer used a confessional so there was no dark screen, no anonymity. We sat across from each other at a small table. “This is my first confession,” I said, and he nodded, signaling me to begin. I can’t recall with any certainty what sort of sins I confessed to, perhaps my penchant for white lies, for exaggeration, for gossip? What I do remember is that after I confessed I said I needed to say something, and I needed to be certain he understood that what I was about to say was not a confession. Father Dowling nodded his understanding, and I told him I had a girlfriend.
He paused before speaking. “Do you think you can stop seeing her?”
“No,” I said.
“Then do you think you can pray about her, pray for guidance?”
For a moment I didn’t speak. I knew what sort of guidance he was talking about. But I still said yes, that I could pray about her.
Well what did you think he would say, I asked myself later. I shouldn’t have expected more. Why did I tell him, then? Because I wanted him to know. He had been extraordinarily kind to me, and I had grown to love him, his ruddy face and silver hair, his homilies that were never dogmatic or political and always told us the same thing: you are not alone. And so I didn’t want him to approach me at the altar on Saturday night believing that I was someone I was not. It was as though I believed telling him about Chris would melt the sharp-edged pieces of my life until they were one.
When I arrived at St. Patrick’s for the Easter Vigil, I saw Hector waiting by the door. The sight of him shocked me. I had never, even once, seen him outside his eleventh-floor office. “This is for you,” he told me and handed me a small package. I thanked him awkwardly and put the package in my bag. I went inside and he went down the steps of the church and into the street. I stood by the door for several moments, trying not the think of what it meant that Hector had been here, that there was, in my bag, a package from him.
As I stood there composing myself I watched the Easter fire burn in a cauldron near the entrance to the church. Two priests fed the fire with last Sunday’s palm fronds; the fire’s ashes would be saved to mark foreheads on next year’s Ash Wednesday. There were small slips of paper on a table so that worshippers could write out prayers and toss them into the fire. Years before I had visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and watched while people tucked folded pieces of paper between the stones. I had no prayers then, but I tore a page from my journal and scribbled down my grandparents’ names, then folded the paper, kissed it, and pressed it into the wall. Now I wanted to put a prayer into the fire but I didn’t have one. The God I knew then was not the God of simple gratitude, of protection. The God I knew was one of disapproval.
And so I walked past the fire and into the sanctuary toward the pews that were tied off with thick, crimson-colored ropes and I moved the rope aside, pulled down a kneeler, and rested for a moment in the privacy of a bowed head and folded hands. Kneeling brought me to a moment of grace, which it had done without fail every time I bent down on that narrow beam of wood, and I was reminded that this humble posture was a sort of home for me in this world. But was that—or anything that I loved, or felt devoted to—enough?
The sanctuary dimmed into darkness and the cantor began to sing the Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation, and her voice and the words were, quite literally, sublime, and they swept away my worry. But then it was time for me to go to the altar with all the other catechumens, and it returned. I could rise or not rise—who would care? Who would not forgive me for staying in my seat? But I rose and followed the others; I repeated the words Father Dowling lined out for me. I received the Eucharist and returned to my seat, wishing I felt something other than relief that the time for deciding was over.
When I was back in my apartment that night, I opened the present from Hector. It was a small book in a red leather binding, its title printed in gold on the narrow spine: The Imitation of Christ. I knew of the book (Dorothy Day read from it every day during the months of her conversion) but had never seen a copy. The pages were filled with simplistic drawings of a Jesus I did not recognize and prayers about suffering and sacrifice. I closed the book. I took off my suit, peeled off my stockings, and lay down on my bed, exhausted. What was worse, I asked myself, the terror of the book or the terror that I didn’t want it?
Hector was not the only person who gave me a book when I became Catholic. On Easter Sunday, instead of going to church, I took the train to Chris’s apartment. “I have something for you,” she said when I arrived, and handed me a book: Leaves of Grass. She was a Whitman devotee; she had told me she couldn’t believe how little of him I had read. I thanked her, although I didn’t open the book. I put it in my bag and asked her if she wanted to walk to the park. On the way we passed a small Baptist church. The cross on the lawn, which was six, maybe seven, feet tall, was completely covered in azalea blossoms. At the park we spread out a blanket, and we sat together, watching the children on the climber, the tennis players, the running dogs. We weren’t speaking, only sitting next to each other, our shoulders touching, and I could feel her affection, and knew she could feel mine. After a few minutes Chris took out the paper and a pen for the crossword. She folded her sweatshirt into a pillow and lay down on the blanket, holding the magazine at arm’s length to shield her face from the sun. I opened my bag and took out Leaves of Grass. Her inscription to me was on the title page: For E—All truths wait in all things, they neither hasten their own delivery, nor resist it.
In August, a year after my first date with Chris, I told Hector everything. I was in love with Chris;
I would not stop seeing her. He told me I had to choose.
“Are you saying that you won’t see me if I stay with her?” I asked.
“I’m saying that there’s really nothing for us to do if you are in a relationship,” he said.
I was stunned. Was he telling me that I couldn’t come back? “And you would say the same thing to me if she were a man?” I asked.
Hector paused. “I don’t know.”
Now it was my turn to wait for him to speak.
“I’ve worked with homosexual couples,” he said slowly, “and it seems to me that there is not the same potential for the development of a mature, adult relationship.” He looked at me. “You can, you could, have more.”
My stomach tightened; I had trouble finding a breath. Hadn’t I known this was coming? Hadn’t he been saying this, in whatever ways he could, all along? But this time was different. We were no longer talking about the singular demands of my faith, about the pull of Catholicism and its convenient condemnation of my desires. We were no longer speaking of what I could lose, at some undetermined time in the future, if I didn’t make the right choice. Hector was offering his judgment, and with it, an ultimatum. I looked at Hector, at the rug, at Hector again. I pulled my bag onto my lap and still I could barely breathe. “I think I’ll go now,” I said in barely a whisper.
Hector nodded. He did not look away as I rose from my seat, but he also did not follow me to the door.
I took the long way home from Hector’s office that evening. I didn’t want to be alone in my apartment; I didn’t want to call Chris, or to see her. I was too humiliated to explain what had happened to me. How could I justify the extent of my trust in Hector, or the strange fusion of therapeutic and spiritual concerns that I shared with him? Who talks about God with their therapist? Or more to the point, who stays with a therapist who talks about God the way Hector does? I burned with shame. I felt, as I had so often in my life, like the worst sort of eccentric: not adventurous or inspired, but odd, out of step.
Given Up for You Page 3