I woke up in a sweat. Those photos I allowed him to take. The videos. Oh God. How could I have done such a thing? Jay and I had a good sex life, but like many married couples, we’d fallen into a bit of a rut. Maybe only I thought that. But after Jay died, something in me snapped. I couldn’t explain it. Sex with Dom filled an empty crevasse deep inside me, made me feel more alive. But I surprised myself with my sexual appetite. But now. All those external hard drives I saw on his desk were probably filled with lurid pictures of naked women. Of me. Or worse, maybe he’d sold those pictures to pornographic websites. I Googled him, too late. I paid $35 for a report, verifying addresses, family names. Everything checked out, but I was unnerved. Could I trust him now? What would he do with the photos, which until now I had seen as artistic, me playing the seductive muse?
I lay awake trying to assess his character. In his presence, everything felt fine. He seemed sane, articulate, prided himself on his honesty and talked at length about integrity. When I was with him, I had no qualms. But in the middle of the night his peculiarities woke me – the sexual photographs in particular – and yet I went along wordlessly when I went over to his place that morning to find a video camera affixed to a tripod peering at the bed. I felt extra pressure to be sexy, and to point certain parts of my body toward the camera. I wanted to trust him, to convince myself he was worthy of my trust. I wanted to be in love with him, and to do that I had to trust him. I convinced myself it must be love if I could afford that level of trust.
He seemed to sense my unease and once told me how I reminded him of a friend he had as a child of five or six, a girl who he considered to be his soul mate. I felt strangely honored by this confession, that we had a child-like friendship as well as a romantic relationship, something special, a connection that I alone shared with him. One of the defining moments of his life, he told me, happened the day he went to her house and found that her family had moved away. No one had told him. When he told me the story, I wondered if deep down, he was setting me up to hurt him the same way, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. I felt inexplicably sad.
My weekend alone with him both excited and frightened me. I hadn’t had even one night away from Calder since Jay’s death. I still bore the guilt of my indiscretion against him. But this man was not Jay or Marcus. What could I say? I was horny as hell. Having regular sex again made me more so. I wrote provocative emails and poems about him when we were apart and he sent me photos of us together in bed. “Naati”, a derivation of the words “naughty,” or “nasty”. “Nasty” was my visceral reaction to each of the shots he sent of us together in bed. I didn’t know how to respond to those naked photos of myself in compromising positions. They made me squeamish, but I often found myself dashing upstairs to find the vibrator. I was in dreamland, at the height of sexual addiction, riding high. I felt sexy, desired, alive. It was easy to convince myself I had fallen in love.
And then it quickly started to unravel. His comment that I still had photos of Jay around the house. What could I say? I did. It felt like a shot to the belly. I thought I had relinquished my widow mantle in the context of this new relationship, and had become a new woman, one capable of love. But now I wonder, was he right? Was I still in love with Jay? Perhaps I will always be his widow.
Calder added another complication. One night, Calder sat with me on my bed watching TV when he asked to play Angry Birds on my phone. Halfway through a game, the familiar ping of a text message sounded and Calder stopped playing.
“EEWW!! Who is texting you that?”
I took the phone and on the screen, it read: ‘I want to see you naked.’
“Oh God!”
“Who is that?”
“Sorry, sweetie. It’s just a friend playing a joke.”
“Dominic?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why does he want to see you naked? That’s so gross! Does he want to have sex with you?”
“Calder! How do you know about sex?”
“I’m not a baby anymore!”
“I know, sweetie. I’m not saying you are. It’s just, I’ve never heard you say that word before.”
“Well, I know what it is, you know.”
“Yes. Of course. Anyway, like I said, it was just meant as a joke.”
“A pretty gross joke.”
After Calder went to bed, I adjusted my phone so the content of my text messages would no longer pop up on the main screen. I called Bethany in a panic.
“Dominic expects Calder to simply accept him. A child traumatized was the person meant to change for him, a grown man. ‘He needs to accept me for who I am.’ Jesus. What a fool I am!”
“God, Maya, the guy sounds like a weirdo. Sorry to say it.”
“Maybe. But he might be right about me needing to tell Calder the truth about our relationship instead of sneaking around. I should allow him to be a part of whatever Calder might dole out. Still, I’m surprised he can’t be more sensitive to Calder's needs, not to mention mine.”
“Calder is your number one priority right now, Maya. And any decent man would see that and be respectful of it. Are you sure about this guy?”
I didn’t know what I could trust about him anymore. He seemed so enmeshed in the dogma of “ease and grace” and it made me realize that perhaps he was not as secure in himself as I thought. He needed a framework, a vocabulary to keep himself in check, as though without it he couldn’t even trust himself. He believed he had “integrity” and depth, but I think now that he was so self-absorbed that his depth could only ever be skin deep. And I had apparently scratched the surface a little too hard.
I didn’t see him again until he arrived at my little art show at a Seattle wine bar a week later. I needed to chat with people, so when he arrived, he hovered nearby until I turned to him. He stood waiting expectantly until the people I was talking to became uncomfortable and walked away to view another painting. Dom held out his arms for a hug, closing his eyes and pursing his lips, awaiting the kind of greeting I might give him if we were alone. Instead I gave him a peck on the cheek. He looked pained.
“I’m with some friends right now and they might be interested in buying a painting. Can you give me a few minutes?”
He moped around the bar alone, peering into my paintings as if trying to find the key to my psyche within their colors. I rejoined my friends, but watched him out of the corner of my eye. When they left, he came over and gave me a hug and tried again to kiss me on the lips, but I swiveled away from him to escape his embrace.
“Not now, Dom. I’m working.”
He stepped back, chastised.
After the reception, we walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant for dinner. He tried to hold my hand as we walked, but I wiggled my hand out of his grasp. We were seated at a brightly painted table, an overflowing basket of nacho chips and a bowl of salsa between us.
“I’m sorry about not wanting to kiss you at the show.”
“It’s fine,” he said and looked away.
“I hope you understand it was because I was working. It just didn’t seem professional.”
“It’s fine, really. I just don’t understand why you don’t like being adored.”
“Adored? Don’t I?”
“That’s all I’m trying to do, Maya. Adore you.”
“OK. Well, I’m sorry.” Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I couldn’t help thinking how his version of adoration felt as if he were trying to possess me. I took a warm chip and dunked it in salsa.
“I’m looking forward to meeting your daughter,” I said, trying to change the subject. Despite our three months together, I still had not met any of his friends or family.
“Yes, I’m looking forward to that as well,” he said, looking away. He was leaving the next day to drive to California with his son to help his 21-year-old daughter move into his place in Seattle. His apartment was small, the second bedroom occupied by his office w
hich he said he had no intention of moving. His daughter, Alicia, would sleep on the couch which would have a profound effect on the amount of time we would be able to spend alone together, something that didn’t seem to worry him. “We’ll find other ways,” he assured me.
A week after his daughter’s arrival in Seattle, we arranged to go out for dinner with our kids the night before his departure on one of his business trips to Hawaii. When I arrived at the restaurant, Dom waved but then turned his back to us to talk intently on his cell phone. I introduced myself and Calder to his daughter and then we all stood in awkward silence waiting for our table as Dom continued his conversation on the phone.
“Did you have a good trip up? All settled in?” I asked Alicia.
“Yes. Fine,” Alicia replied. She was tall, slim, and had the same pale complexion as her father. Calder stood beside her playing on his PS2 game, ignoring the world around him. We were shown to our seats just as Dom got off the phone.
“Sorry,” he said. “The hotel in Hawaii.” Alicia rolled her eyes.
We sat next to our respective children, Alicia opposite me, looking bored. She clearly wanted to be elsewhere. We ate dinner in near silence, and I fumbled to make conversation. Alicia seemed to perk up only once when I told the story of my car being hit the day before and how much the shop said it would cost to fix.
“That happened to me too!” Alicia exclaimed, light in her eyes for the first time.
As we were waiting for the bill to arrive, Dom leaned over the table toward Maya and puckered his lips, an expectant gesture for a return smooch that had become his habit in public places. He appeared desperate to prove to the world, and apparently our children, his claim on me, again making me feel more possessed than loved. I gave him a withering look, hoping he would read, “Are you kidding? Our kids are sitting right here!” into it. He sat back in his chair and turned away from me, like a petulant child.
After dinner, the kids waited in our separate cars, and I stood near Dom’s truck to say goodbye.
“I don’t suppose you want to drop off the kids and go meet somewhere?” I asked. “I won’t see you for a while.”
“I still have a lot of packing to do,” he said. “Why? Did you want to talk about something?”
Yes, I think I want to break up, I thought.
“It would be nice to talk, but I guess it can wait until you get back,” I said instead.
“You sure?”
I nodded. He gave me a quick peck on the cheek and walked away.
During his trip to Hawaii, I had more time to think about things and wrote Dom an email:
I’m struggling right now with your expectation that Calder needs to ‘accept you for who you are’, as you say. He’s a kid, Dom. I think it’s you who needs to accept him for who he is.
Dom replied:
I’m surprised what you share with me now that I am not there to defend myself.
I sat back in my chair after reading this. I tried telling him my views, but he couldn’t hear my words unless they were in black and white. I wrote back:
I’ve tried talking with you about this, but you don’t seem to want to hear my views. I thought that I could express my side of things better in writing.
The email exchange that ensued became a volley of increasingly angry misinterpretations. I finally wrote, incredulously, “Are we breaking up over email?”
His immediate response, “I will call it – declare it as complete,” came as a shock. He had gone from “I will die for you” to “it is complete” in a matter of three months.
“Complete” apparently was Dom’s way of overcoming an unpleasant past experience. I had apparently been labeled “past heartbreak” and swept under the carpet – perhaps Dom’s habit with any painful experience – ready for a fresh, new blank canvas to emerge. The blank canvas shimmered in all its linen whiteness, a mirage. I could no more sweep away my past than I could hold my own heart in my hands.
Our past makes us both powerful and weak, lithesome and unbending, hopeful and cynical. Our past is enmeshed into every particle of our minds and bodies, both in life and in death.
Despite my intention of only questioning myself and our relationship, I made it easy for him to read between the lines of that email. I wanted out. I knew I would never fully understand his intentions, and would always feel as if something stood in the way of us having an honest relationship. I wondered why it felt as if my own grief recovery seemed irrelevant to him. If I had dared to look deeper, my aversion to the way he tried to infiltrate my family in such a self-centered way or the fact that I had allowed my sexual relationship to cloud the way I really felt for this man would have been more obvious.
This was not at all what I intended. I thought we would be able to talk through the issues I had, face to face. I was not prepared to have the entire relationship end in an email. I learned from Dom how important it was to remain who you are in a relationship, and yet, paradoxically, he was unwilling to accept me for who I was. I suppose I too was unwilling to accept him.
This new loss has penetrated my carefully constructed shield of grief deeper than I am willing to admit. Another man present one minute and gone the next. Another round of self-recriminations.
Can you possibly still love me, wherever you are? - Maya
Chapter Nineteen
THE PLOTTING PROCESS
The invisible thread connecting me to Maya pulled taut after her breakup with Dom, accompanied by her renewed sense of loss. I was yanked back from the euphoria of being released from my humanness, as if I had just come to the end of my bungeed tether that continued to connect my soul with Maya's. I bounced back into human despair.
I had little effect on the human world, but I paid Dominic a late night visit as he sat hunched over his desk scrolling through nude pictures of women on his giant iMac screen. A photo of Maya appeared and for a moment I saw a white flash and then Dom’s computer went dark. He swore, pushed the power button several times, but nothing happened. He rummaged under the desk to unplug and replug the computer and hard drives, but I didn’t have to hang around to know that all his hard drives were fried by my little electrical hiccup.
After writing her letter to me, Maya lay back down and pulled the covers over her head. I surrounded her in white light as Alice had taught me to do, partly to defend myself and spin,” the lecturer continued. “Then, by virtue of attempting to measure these qualities, when one of the objects displays a certain characteristic, such as moving clockwise, then the other object shows the opposite, corresponding characteristic; it moves counterclockwise.”
I couldn’t figure out where this guy was going with this reasoning.
Ah, human-Jay. Wax-on, wax-off, my son.
I laughed. My dad hadn’t lost his human sense of humor.
“Humans are discovering that separation of particles is illusory. Physicists are loath to take this idea a step further, but in the same way that particles are bound, it is also possible for two living organisms to have an ongoing connection after one of them dies.”
I didn’t need some theory to tell me that Maya and I were still connected.
But don’t you want to understand how you’re connected to Maya? My Dad’s thought was clear.
Apparently, I do.
The lecturer continued. “Those experiencing the loss of a loved one feel a connection to that person through memory, a kind of ‘after-glow’ that happens after a death occurs – a manifestation of Entanglement. Everything in the universe is linked, making an ongoing connection between life and death possible. Such connection transcends an individual completely, as so many religions decree when they talk about being connected individually to a greater whole. Entanglement theory parallels the idea behind ‘collective consciousness’. If we are all a part of a universal reality, then every action we make is an event that affects all other aspects of this reality.”
I would have called this Entanglement idea of connection between the living and the dead bunk if I were alive, but it all seemed pretty obvious to me now.
“Humans are so close to understanding, but are unwilling to believe the unmeasurable.”
I would never have believed in being connected to Maya after my death.
And yet, you have affected her by surrounding her in white light, my dad responded.
I didn’t do anything.
You did a lot. It’s a good defense mechanism. You’re recognizing when that needs to happen, both for her and for you. You’re evolving nicely, J.J.
If I were alive, I would have smirked at my dad’s comment.
You make me sound like a species of small monkey, Dad. Very Darwin.
I suppose I do. I sensed my dad’s old laughter, though I couldn’t hear it.
But seriously, I don’t really feel as though I’m evolving. I feel like I’m weakened by Maya's grief.
As if in answer, the lecturer continued. “A spirit cannot be weakened by a human, but it’s common for some spirits to be slower than others in releasing their human responses to emotion.”
Now it seemed the lecturer was speaking directly to me.
“The process of a spiritual evolution is to completely free yourself from all that made you human, while at the same time remembering all you have learned from your human lifetimes. The evolution of a soul is a natural progression, but one that has no timetable. As you know, it’s part of our soul’s path to maturity that we help those on the earth-plane. But we need to help humans in a way that still allows us to be free of our human tendencies. You have a choice whether or not to help your loved ones. Just as they have a choice whether or not to ask for or accept your help. Each of you must express your needs, either orally or in thought. There must be free will on both sides. As humans or souls, we always have a choice about whether or not we want to evolve.”
Remember The Moon Page 21