by Trish Ryan
The cultural climate in Cambridge was perfect for someone like me, someone fresh off of a disaster with no real grip on her life—few places in America are more devoted to acceptance of alternative lifestyles. Residents describe our city as “the People’s Republic of Cambridge” in a tone utterly devoid of irony; attitudes are monitored by a rabidly devoted citizen militia determined to protect unorthodox life choices from even the slightest raise of an eyebrow. (Indeed, the only thing Cambridge enforces more seriously than open-mindedness, I’ve discovered, is parking laws. If you ever get a ticket in Cambridge, pay it; they will hunt you to the ends of the earth until you do.) Our tree-lined street was a bustling enclave of bourgeois political correctness. On one end was a single entrepreneur who got out of the dot.com boom before it went bust; the other was anchored by a pair of college professors who jointly published books on topics like “the philosophical evolution of the park bench in twentieth-century urban design.” Across the street was a bisexual woman who ruled over her cowering whisper of a husband and their two young children (who had been conceived through some undisclosed—although almost certainly sexless, everyone agreed—miracle of science). To their left lived glamorous upscale hippies (rumor was that the husband had had a minor folk music hit in the early 1970s). They were all lovely to chat with; we were all exceedingly polite.
Spiritually, Cambridge’s citizenry was even more diverse, a surreal mix of Catholic/Hindu/Buddhist immigrants living in and among a hodgepodge of atheist academics, self-proclaimed psychics, Wiccans, and experts in past-life analysis. With this level of diversity, I quickly discovered that one could say almost anything at a dinner party in response to the question “What do you do?” and be met with wide-eyed interest and a series of appreciative questions. (Unless, of course, you said something ridiculous, like “I lobby against increased funding for the new arts initiative” or “I’m thinking of moving to Texas to enroll in Bible college.” But no one ever said anything like that.) Mark had an active social circle he brought me into, and I had no viable answer to that inevitable question. I was living under a made-up name, in a town where I knew no one. I decided to try on a few different personas, to see if anything would stick.
“I’m a golf pro,” I told a linguistics professor one night as we sipped single malt scotch.
“I’m a yoga instructor,” I told a portrait artist a week or so later at open mike night. (I quickly dropped this from my repertoire—everyone in Cambridge is a yoga instructor, I discovered, and I hadn’t paid enough attention during the three classes I’d taken to hold up my end of the conversation.)
“I’m a motivational speaker,” I told a girl at a wine-tasting party.
“I could use some motivation,” she said dryly, “given that four years of therapy hasn’t gotten me any closer to a functional life.” She described some of her ups and downs, a sad tale of dashed hopes. But in spite of this, she seemed quite lovely—the type of girl anyone would want to work with or befriend. I told her so. And somehow, by the end of our little chat, she was up and running again, filled with a sense of possibility. Where did that come from? I marveled. I didn’t know I could do that. Then I got myself another glass of cabernet and forgot all about it.
THE ACCOMMODATIONS IN Cambridge were a little different than those I’d enjoyed at Kristen’s summer mansion, and not just because we didn’t have a pool. The upside was that I had a room, and it was mine. A place of my own, as Virginia Woolf would say. The apartment was part of a two-family house owned by a series of landlords who were, shall we say, unorthodox in their approach to maintenance. There was a giant bucket under the kitchen sink for the plumbing leak that never got fixed, and several gaping holes in the ceiling where Cambridge firefighters chopped into the wall in search of an electrical fire started by the landlord’s redecorating efforts. The dining room featured a seven-foot patch of exposed drywall from where they took over one of our bedrooms, and the spring after I moved in we were overrun with giant flies. (Whenever the topic of this apartment comes up, my friend Amy always says, “Tell them about the flies!”)
For no reason we could ascertain, giant cluster flies hatched by the thousands and swarmed through our house that spring, giving us a real-life experience of what it might have felt like to live in the time of the biblical plagues. They swarmed through our rooms like old-time fighter pilots from a World War II movie, bouncing off our chins and foreheads, getting tangled in my long hair. We all learned the dangers of inhaling too deeply.
My roommates and I smushed flies with our shoes, smacked them with rolled-up newspapers, and sucked them up by the dozens with a shop-vac. We left the halogen lamps on, willing the flies to be drawn to the nine-billion-watt light. Even Kylie did her part, catching flies in midair while leaping from her perch on the edge of the couch. By the time the siege ended, we were surrounded by insect carnage—in our light fixtures, our dishes, our clothing; it was months before I could use my printer without a random wing or leg coming through on each page. Our landlords didn’t understand why we didn’t think a small break on that month’s rent was enough to reimburse us for our trouble. The words, “implied warranty of habitability” were tossed around, but in the long run nothing ever came of it. That was kind of how it was with that apartment: we all knew we could do better, but each of us had our own reasons for leaving well enough alone, despite the water under the sink and the flies.
DURING THIS TRANSITION, I spent a lot of time talking to God (even though I was quite mad at Him and reminded Him on a regular basis that we were not speaking). I still had problems to deal with, and He was the only one I could think of who might have solutions. First on my list was my marriage. I knew that I needed to formalize the legal aspects of disentangling myself from my former husband, but had no idea how to do this without letting him know where I was. I’d grown so accustomed to hovering below the radar that it seemed both foolish and precarious to pop up again to ask for a divorce; I felt like the target in one of those whack-a-mole carnival games, knowing full well my ex would do everything in his power to smash me with a giant mallet if given the chance. Trying to prepare myself for the inevitable battle for my freedom, I asked God how I could fight for my share of our assets while maintaining my hard-won anonymity.
You can’t. The Voice came from somewhere in my head, but it wasn’t me that thought it.
“What do you mean, I can’t?” I replied. Could this be God? I thought, confused. Would He say something like that? “That’s not fair,” I complained.
This is a decision point, He said. The choices you make now will determine whether or not you become that woman—you know: bitter, angry, terrified; defined by your never-ending, contentious divorce.
I did not want to be that woman.
If you walk away from the money, He promised, I will take care of you. You will always be okay. But if you fight, He warned, if you focus on how you’ve been wronged and you deserve better, it will never be over, you’ll never win, you’ll never be free.
Somehow, in the middle of a sea of good advice about protecting myself and getting my share, I knew the Voice was right. I didn’t want the money; I wanted to be free. So I sent my former husband an e-mail saying he could have all our joint assets (my father called it my ransom money) and deleted my online research on winning contentious divorce proceedings. I didn’t stand up for myself, as everyone told me I should. Per God’s suggestion, I stood down instead.
Three months later, the papers came and I signed them. My ex got the house, the car, the business, all our assets; I got my freedom. To mark the occasion, I dug my wedding band from the depths of my underwear drawer and walked down to the corner. I held the ring over the sewer grate and announced, “I’m done with you, forever. No one will ever control me like that again.” The ring bounced off the grate as I dropped it, rolling in a circle out into the street. I kicked at it in a wave of frustration until the ring finally disappeared into the depths of the city sewer. I wondered if it could still haunt
me from there.
WHILE MY FINANCIAL status faltered, my romantic life showed signs of flourishing. Mark was wonderful—handsome, fun, gainfully self-employed. His mellow disposition was like a balm, soothing the frayed edges of my nerves. He never yelled, never argued, never even worried about much.
My presence gave him a chance to practice his disaster-relief skills: he understood that violent movies made me jumpy and made decisions when I couldn’t answer basic questions like “What would you like for dinner?” We were all misfits in this house—none of us would have been there if our lives had worked out the way we’d planned—but somehow our collective determination to laugh at our disappointments created the perfect atmosphere for me to heal, and to relearn what it was like to interact with men who didn’t yell at me.
Like every new couple, Mark and I thought our relationship was unique, special, destined, even. We agreed that we didn’t need the conventional romantic structures (marriage, children) to define us; we were above that. As long as I can leave, I thought, he’ll treat me well. We agreed that it was better to choose each other, every day, than be shackled in the legalistic noose of marriage. We thought we were forging our own way, and that our rebellious independence from societal demands would immunize us against the ghosts of fear and regret from our pasts. We truly believed that our determination alone would allow us to sail on unhindered, the wind of romance always at our back.
It worked at first, in the way new relationships do. Mark was attentive and adoring, and he was a Taurus—my ideal partner, astrologically speaking. We moved to Montreal for the summer because he had friends there and the exchange rate was good, and because, well, we could. There was nothing holding us back—no kids, mortgages, jobs. We bragged about the joys of living free from the stifling confines of tradition.
I spent the next three months choking on those words.
Montreal is a city that prides itself on an elegant sort of sexual openness. (“We’re not like you stuffy Americans,” one man told me. “We’re not afraid of what can happen when we give in to our true nature.”) And summer is the time when that openness flourishes after months of icy winter cold and thick wool sweaters finally break. I tried to fit in, to keep up—to raise my game, so to speak. I traded my Cambridge fleece and flip-flop combinations for cute skirts and Pucci-print halter tops. I went out for chocolate martinis at midnight and double-cheek-kissed everyone I met. I engaged in flirty banter at elegant dinner parties and intrigued people with my confident spiritual theories. “Mark and I believe in magnetic and dynamic power,” I explained, “that’s what makes our relationship so unique . . .” I played the pretty, witty, fun girl to the hilt, working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life to appear effortless and carefree. Somehow, though, I was always just shy of pulling it off.
As I struggled to find my balance, scantily clad women of every description threw themselves at Mark like so many starving hyenas on a carcass, puffing up his ego and ripping us to shreds. Because of our unshackled status, there was little I could say. We had no formal commitment, no long-term plan, and I had no standing to challenge his minor (to his credit there were no major) indiscretions. Once again, I’d assumed that my devotion alone was enough to ensure a man’s faithfulness. I bet the house on our “I choose you” daily opt-in commitment, never dreaming that his response might be, “For the next few minutes at least, I choose her . . .” I missed the irony that even though I’d abandoned the Course, I’d somehow enrolled myself in exactly the sort of “formless” relationship it advocated.
Despite my determined open-mindedness, the dynamic between Mark and me peaked, then started a slow downhill decline as the summer wore on. We were fine, and then we weren’t. I’m not sure where it started, but suddenly, we were awash in all the symptoms of a relationship about to die: he frequented porn sites, there was nothing I could say. He planned a three-week trip to Brazil without me, there was nothing I could say. For my birthday, he gave me an extra-large T-shirt he picked up in the São Paulo airport, with the lyrics to “The Girl from Ipanema” written out in Portuguese. There was nothing I could say. The signs of his declining interest closed in on me, and what had started out so wonderfully unfurled into a long series of hurts and disappointments. I was haunted by the unshakable feeling that no matter how close we were physically, psychically he was still in a world all his own, a world marked “No girls allowed.” I thought making love would bridge this divide, but it widened it, somehow, leaving me dangling precariously over an abyss of questions, wondering if he’d bother to catch me, pretty sure he wouldn’t.
We moved back to Cambridge at the end of the summer and I sank into a puddle of despair. I couldn’t play by these rules we’d established. There was no quality to this lifestyle, only fear. How do people live like this? I wondered. More important, why do they bother? I drove Mark’s car down long highways, thinking about how easy it would be to drive right off the edge, or into the side of a bridge. This was the bed I’d made, though—I’d settled for twenty-four-hour chunks of devotion, an at-will tenancy of our relationship, relying on the best my magnetic power could conjure up.
TRYING TO SHORE up my career prospects while my romantic life wavered, I decided to parlay my former connection with Jayme Brass into a speaking career. After all, I thought, Jayme was a lounge singer when she started. If she can do it, why can’t I? Cambridge was filled with alternative churches, yoga studios, and new age centers that offered outside programming, and after chatting with a few of them and describing my brief apprenticeship with Jayme, I soon had a full schedule of engagements. My audiences were varied: one week I’d have sixteen women at a Unity Church who wanted the universe to fix their broken relationships, the next week I’d face five guys who had inexplicably signed up for a seminar on “Finding Your Feminine Magnetic Power,” at a yoga studio.
“Um, guys,” I told them. “I hate to break it to you, but you don’t have feminine magnetic power. What else would you like to talk about today?”
“Of course I have feminine magnetic power,” one man argued, clutching his coffee with fingers bedecked in silver rings set with turquoise and amethyst. “I’ve been working to actualize my feminine side for almost nine months now, and I’m ready to give birth to my power!”
“That can’t possibly be what you want,” I countered. “You’re a man—you don’t give birth; that’s not the way it works. Besides, I saw you flirting with the girl working out front before the class started, so I don’t believe that feminine power is what you want to pull out of yourself. How about we access some of your masculine power, so you can ask her out and let her provide the feminine side?” Mr. Semiprecious Jewelry stared at me bug-eyed, then stomped out of the class in a huff. Looking at my four remaining students, I began to fantasize about outfitting them all in denim and plaid flannel and dropping them over the border into New Hampshire for a month so they could learn to chop wood and change the oil in a Ford F-150.
The next week was better, as I spoke to a group of eager professional women about finding a spiritual path to guide our lives. I mixed in a hodgepodge of material: a few of Jayme’s words, basic principles of astrology and metaphysics, sentences that just seemed right about how the universe responds to our call. I even quoted Jonathan Livingston Seagull: “If you love someone, set them free.” I was convincing myself as much as any of my students, trying to believe—despite all I’d seen and experienced—that it might somehow be true.
And against all my better judgment, I found myself wondering out loud where Mark and I were headed, whether we were building a future together or just living day to day. He told me that he absolutely meant it when he said he’d never get married, and that he wasn’t sure what our future together would be. “I love you,” he said in a grim tone, “but I don’t ever want to be tied down.”
That was the week I drove to Buffalo and finally admitted that despite Mark’s reluctance, I wanted to be married again. That’s when (as you may recall) I heard James Earl Jo
nes declare that he had more for me, but the time had come for me to take Jesus seriously.
PART II
During
Chapter Eleven
You Can’t Get There from Here
When I heard the Voice, I figured it must be God—who else would ask me to do such a thing? But when I thought about taking Jesus seriously, all I could think of were all the weird people who had hurled that name at me over the years, like the group of earnest teens I’d been stalked by one day as I walked through Harvard Square: “If you get hit by a bus and die today,” they’d asked me solemnly, “do you know for sure you’ll go to heaven?” They handed me a small square pamphlet featuring a stick figure character falling into the pit of hell, then darted away, looking over their shoulders furtively to ascertain if I’d been saved yet, or if a bus had come to mow me down. One good bus incident would do a lot to further their cause, I’d thought at the time.
I’d had other run-ins with Jesus’ people over the years: a hysterical woman standing in a scripture-covered sandwich board in the Philadelphia subway station, shouting through her bullhorn that I was going to hell; a law school friend’s little sister, determined not to kiss her fiancé until their wedding day; a preacher in Virginia who delivered a rousing sermon on why our pets won’t be in heaven. The strangest thing about these fervent believers, I thought later, was how none of them asked me, in their attempts to sell their faith, what was going on in my life—what was missing or what I was searching for. None of them told me how Jesus could make my life better, because they didn’t ask what needed fixing. They guessed—assuming I worried about things like life after death, purity before marriage, the soul of my pet. They were wrong. I worried about my apparent failure in this life, whether I’d ever be married again, and whether my dog was the only family of my own I’d ever have. Amazingly, none of them suggested that Jesus could help me with any of this, that Jesus could help me here and now.