“I for one am very glad you invited us over,” he says. “I had a hunch about you but now that I have seen your house I know for sure.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, first of all, I hope that you and I are going to be friends. Real friends, not just bump-into-each-other-in-the-chocolate-aisle-at-Whole-Foods friends. And second of all, I hope I can convince you to go in on a little project with me.”
I can’t help but feel suspicious, as if he is about to ask me to loan him money.
“Louise, you have a gift for collecting and cultivating beauty. Every single room I’ve seen tonight is put together better than a team of decorators could have done.”
A look of worry crosses his face. “You didn’t hire decorators, did you?”
I shake my head. No.
“I adore the LeTrouve pieces that you picked out, the party Christ and those delicate egg temperas you have displayed in the entrance hall. And I was stunned by the two original portraits by Hank Huffington, and those blue marble Buddhas you have in the living room, and the kilim and Tabriz rugs and the Moulthrop bowls, and I adore how everything is arranged just so—the gorgeous flowers included—and well, I just think you have a real vision.”
I smile despite my frustration with Charles.
“Now this might sound a little cuckoo, but have you ever thought about turning your house into an intimate little gallery? You could host shows the same way you would host a party. My God, if you had the time you could cater your own affairs: I’ve never tasted anything like your brownies, and believe me, I’m a chocolate connoisseur.”
“You think I should be a caterer?”
“No, no, you would hire caterers. I’m just saying that you could do it, if you needed to. No. Your job would be to curate the shows. It would be like throwing parties for a living but people would come and buy the art you had displayed.”
“Stephen, I’m flattered. But I love my art. I don’t want to sell it.”
Stephen flaps his hands back and forth as if waving away a bad smell. “God no, darling. You wouldn’t sell your art. That would be part of the permanent collection—no price tags affixed. What you would do is have shows and borrow—display—art directly from the artists themselves. Granted, you might have to rearrange some of your own pieces during the shows, but I’d help you. And I’d help you connect with artists too.”
“I’m not sure that John Henry would be willing to have his home turned into a stage, but…”
“But isn’t it your home too?” asks Stephen.
Yes. Yes it is.
And haven’t I thrown a zillion firm parties for John Henry where after getting the house in tip-top shape, after getting myself plucked and preened and jeweled, all I ended up doing was talking to the other partners’ wives? And not the interesting ones, oh no. No, as host I would inevitably get stuck (for hours, it seemed!) in conversation with Rosalie Henderson, whose favorite topic seems to be “how affirmative action nearly kept my son out of Dartmouth.”
Lord.
I imagine the guests at Stephen’s and my parties will be a much more interesting bunch, and there will be so much to look at and admire, no one will grow bored. Plus, we can hire musicians, a jazz trio, or maybe even a DJ to set the mood so that every show feels like a party, so that people will be encouraged to let down their hair, to drink too much, to dance even, all before buying up every piece of art that Stephen and I have for sale.
And suddenly I am saying, “Yes, yes, let’s do it, yes,” as if this wonderful possibility before me is elusive, as if it might evaporate as suddenly as smoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Exile
(Caroline, Summer 2006)
Of all the things hindering my spiritual growth, my addiction to ZipRealty.com is the most arresting. I cannot stop looking at homes in Atlanta. I will type in different zip codes around the city (30306, 30307, 30312) and up pops photo after photo of homes Davis and I could easily afford to buy.
In San Francisco we rent. We could purchase an apartment, but Davis refuses to “blow” our house money (his house money, really, considering I don’t have a job and therefore contribute nothing) on only one thousand square feet of space, which is about what we’d get if we bought in any of the areas of the city where Davis feels comfortable. Davis’s comfort zone is small. Bernal is out. The Mission is out. Potrero Hill is out. Hayes Valley is out. The Outer Sunset is fine, but Davis says if we moved out there we might as well move to the suburbs. He makes it sound as if moving to the suburbs is a sad inevitability, when in fact it is his greatest fantasy.
Lately he’s been taking me to this neighborhood in Lafayette called Happy Valley, which is in the East Bay, where his parents live. Real estate in Happy Valley is insanely expensive, but Davis says his parents would be willing to help out significantly if we bought a house near them. (But not if we bought a house in the city.) Honestly, I wouldn’t mind living in the East Bay. I’d be fine with Berkeley or Oakland. But Happy Valley? It sounds like a joke. To get there you have to drive through a tunnel. This is after you’ve already crossed the Bay Bridge. You drive past all the places where the weird people live—Berkeley and its outposts—and then you drive through a tunnel and when you come out you are in the land of the clean, the straight, the safe, the new. What you leave behind is soul—at least my kind of soul—though I will probably find myself in Happy Valley before too long, as Davis has quite a strong will and quite an incentive from his folks.
I never imagined that I—just like my mother—would be in this position. Dependent upon my husband to make our money. It’s just that it seems to come so easily to him, the corporate world and its financial payoff. And giving it away seems to come so easily to me! I tried, in fact, to get Davis to pledge to tithing, but he threw a fit. He hasn’t yet seemed to notice that about one percent of our income is sucked out of our banking account each month by automatic withdrawal. Sucked out and deposited into the accounts of Doctors Without Borders, the Heifer Foundation, AHOPE Ethiopia, and my favorite, Saint Anthony’s.
Saint Anthony’s is where I volunteer once a week, me and the Catholic retirees, most of whom detest Bush’s policies more strongly than any hipster from the Mission. One fiery redhead clenched her fists while talking about domestic spying. “The nerve!” she said. “The nerve of them spying on the Quakers!”
Besides politics, the ladies at Saint Anthony’s talk of their grandchildren, their knee aches, and how expensive housing now is in the city. The Tenderloin, where the majority of San Francisco’s homeless live, is now growing in its elderly population. Old people living on fixed incomes have had to move into SROs (single room occupancies) in order not to be on the street. One of the men who volunteers in the dining room three days a week lives in an SRO on Tenth Street.
Saint Anthony’s is where I most clearly feel Jesus. Some of the time. In flashes. Even though each Friday, as I take the N train down to the Civic Center exit, I dread what I am about to do, even though many of the people whom we serve smell deeply of dirt and urine, even though occasionally I’ve been yelled at or flicked off, there is almost always a breakthrough. Some moment when you realize your contentedness. If Jesus was right, then the Kingdom of God resembles the dining room at Saint Anthony’s. The last shall be first; a privileged daughter of the South shall serve the ignored man from the street.
I don’t mean to sound pious. The truth is, I do it for me. For my own sanity. One man asked why I was volunteering. I said it was to be a part of something. How lonely I often feel in this city, in my apartment, within the confines of my marriage. Davis and I—we don’t fight, we don’t talk. We lead separate lives in the same few rooms. Every night after dinner he watches TV by himself and I catalog houses we will never, ever buy on Zip.
I have a feeling that Davis and I are not unlike most married couples. I have a feeling that very few people feel genuinely connected. And if he were to reach out—how can he go where I am headed? I don’t mean h
eaven—I’m not a literalist—I mean centering my life on the Gospel. Davis finds the idea of Christianity abhorrent (he ought to get together with my mother). I find myself longing to pray with him, to start the day with a prayer, or an intention at least. To end it with attention paid to each other. Some kind of ritual to keep us tuned in. A ritual better than Letterman after the news.
We hardly ever have sex.
I WANT TO go home to Atlanta. A place I haven’t lived in for over five years. A place I’ve returned to fewer than ten times since I first left: every other Christmas, the occasional Thanksgiving, my mother’s fiftieth birthday party, Charles’s high school graduation. Louise tells me everything in Atlanta has changed. To note, she and my father went out to dinner in Cabbagetown the other night. Cabbagetown! The neighborhood surrounding the old cotton mill where all the folks brought down from Appalachia to work in the factory stayed on even after the mill closed. They were a mile from downtown but hardly ever seemed to leave their front porches. They were my first glimpse of poor whites (usually, in Atlanta, when you drive through a poor neighborhood, black people live in it). Years ago I went to Cabbagetown with my youth group from church. We took turkeys to the families for Thanksgiving. Now artists live in the houses and the mill has been turned into upscale lofts. And John Henry and Louise go there to dine.
Davis would never move with me to Atlanta. I know. His job, his family, his center of gravity—they’re all here. I wonder how he would cope without me if I were to divorce him and move home. I wonder how long it would take him to start dating again. Probably not long at all. He’s thirty-three and attractive. He makes money. He wants a child. In fact, if our marriage is to work, I imagine I’ll need to provide him with one soon, but I have no desire—no yearning at all—to care for an infant. And I have to keep reminding him, Honey, you’ve got nine years on me. Your biological clock is ticking faster than mine.
It would never work for me to go home. Not without Davis. First of all, I have no money. Second, I’m too fat. My mother would hate how I look; she does hate how I look. And who would I be friends with? Amanda from Coventry? Jim? (Ha.)
But what if Davis agreed to go? What if I could talk him into it from a financial standpoint? My God, we could buy a perfectly fixed-up bungalow in Candler Park for a fraction of what we’d pay in Happy Valley. He could work for SunTrust or Wachovia or some other southern bank and I could—oh you might as well go there as long as you’re fantasizing—I could go to seminary. Like Davis would ever agree to be a minister’s husband. He is not at all spiritual. He thinks that the fact that religion is contradictory, confusing, and illogical is reason to eschew it. Whereas I say, “Yeah, and so? How would you describe the human heart?”
Seminary. I floated the idea with my mother and she suggested I be a psychologist instead. “Isn’t that the same thing?” she asked. “Just with better pay?”
Well, maybe. Maybe so. It’s a half-baked thought, anyway. I’m still not even entirely comfortable admitting that I’m a Christian. There are just so many disclaimers you have to add, as in, “But I like gay people, and I don’t think you are going to hell.”
NOT LONG AGO I confessed to a friend that I was reconciled to always being in a state of exile. I can’t go home—what home do I have in Atlanta besides my mother’s house, which is hers, not mine?—and yet I long for it. And I’ve yet to find a church community that feels right, that feels as searing and raw as the dream that sent me on this search in the first place. (I’m expecting too much, I know. I’ve always wanted more than anything or anyone could ever give me.) The only thing the mainline churches in San Francisco seem passionate about is gay marriage. Which is fine, admirable even; I just wish they expressed an equal passion for transcendence. And the more hard-core evangelical church that I went to, well, it weirded me out. It started out promisingly enough; the minister was Indian like the one in my dream, but the whole sermon focused on the literality of the Resurrection. “Without the real, physical resurrection of His once-dead body, Christianity doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” said the minister. (His joke, I think, was intentional.)
It seems to me that it’s unnecessarily exclusive to say that in order to be a Christian you must believe certain doctrine. Especially if that doctrine comes from taking the Gospel at its literal word. The smartest thing I ever heard about the Bible is that if you want to take it seriously, you can’t take it literally. And I want to take it seriously. I do take it seriously.
And so, I pick and I choose and I find outlets for my longing—candlelit Taizé services on Wednesday nights, Saint Anthony’s every Friday, ZipRealty.com for God knows how many hours during the day. I fantasize about Davis and me in a bungalow, members of a leftist Christian community in Atlanta, and yet I know I am envisioning myself with someone other than my husband. My husband does not like change. He does not want to be moved. Well, maybe to Marin. Or Walnut Creek. Or God forbid, Happy Valley.
(I do not mean to make an easy target of suburbia. I know the hearts that beat inside those homes are just as red and real. It’s my own heart I worry about. What will happen to it on the other side of that tunnel?)
LAST NIGHT STARTED with one of those meals that makes me want to throw things just to add energy to the event. Davis cooked—spinach salad with poached chicken and dried cranberries, low calorie for my benefit I am sure. At dinner we went over the day’s business (yes, I had called the landlord about the leak in the showerhead; yes, he had made dinner reservations for that Saturday at Delfina).
And then we sat and chewed in silence. He poured himself more wine without offering me any (did he think it was too caloric?) and proceeded to study the bottle. I sneezed and he didn’t say “Bless you.” After eating we stared at each other for a moment or two before he began clearing the table.
“I’ll do the dishes,” I said. “You cooked.”
He went to the living room to watch TV; I looked out the kitchen window while I rinsed off the plates. The hills behind our apartment building had turned yellow and dry from the arid summer.
The yellow hills make Davis nostalgic. They speak to him of summertime and youth: baseball games played until nine at night, cookouts by his parents’ pool, hikes up Mount Diablo. To me, they will always be foreign.
I started to cry. I was thinking about Frederick, how much we shared, how he and I had the same reference points, the same inside jokes about Atlanta. I remembered with clarity the pain of his leaving, how some days it literally was hard to breathe I was so shocked by his absence. How cold he had been leading up to his departure. How he informed me one night in bed, just as I was going to sleep, that he had accepted Tisch’s offer of admission. There was no affect in his voice. There was no longer any love.
I started crying for the eventual heartache that I would feel over Davis; whether we parted through divorce or death, we would part. And then I felt so lonely I started thinking about the loneliest people, and my mind went to the prisoners, as it often does when I’m overwhelmed, to the prisoners in the worst conditions. I read an article once about Sing Sing, an article that haunted me. A former guard wrote it and he talked about the men kept for months (months!) in solitary confinement, in a box deep below the earth, in the bowels of the prison, cut off from everything and everyone. My chest contracted thinking of them there, now, breathing. How do they breathe in such conditions? Right now, in this moment while I wash dishes, they are kept there, buried alive.
I don’t think I believe in hell after death but I know it exists on this earth. Christians with more faith than I believe that Jesus manages to squeeze Himself into those tight spaces where our earthly damned are kept. God, I hope so. I prayed that it was so, even though my chest was tight and constricted just from thinking about the possibility of my own confinement. (What if some secret agent from the Bush administration whisked me away to some undisclosed place for signing too many MoveOn petitions?)
I breathed in and breathed out until I was no longer overtaken.
&
nbsp; I was still crying, but softly now.
I finished the dishes and headed toward the office, where our computer is, where I spend hours looking up houses on Zip. I wanted to be absorbed in the search for a house I would never live in. I wanted to lose myself in the distraction of virtual tours and bathroom counts. But as I entered the office I heard a voice tell me not to. To turn around and talk to my husband. I sound like a loon, I know, but the voice was firm. I was not to check out in front of the computer that night. I was to tell my husband of my loneliness.
I walked into the living room and stood in front of the TV.
“I don’t like this,” I said.
Davis looked at me. “This show?”
“I don’t like that every night after dinner you come in here and watch TV and I go in the other room to use the computer. It’s like we’re roommates, sharing the same space.”
He looked tired. (I wear him out; I know.) He reached for the remote and muted the sound of the TV. He sighed. “Do you want to talk?”
I nodded and sat down at the end of the sofa. He was stretched out over most of it. At an earlier stage in our relationship, back when I was skinny, I could have stretched out beside him.
“I’d like to turn the TV all the way off.”
He clicked it off with the remote.
“I feel so far away from you.”
“I’m right here,” he said.
“I mean spiritually. I feel disconnected.”
“Caroline, you and I spend a lot of time together. Breakfast every morning, dinner most evenings, a date on Saturday night.”
“I know, I know…”
“Look around at other couples,” he said. “We’re doing really well compared to most people. Think about how well we get along compared to—well—compared to them.”
He looked toward the ceiling, indicating our upstairs neighbors, whose screaming fights sometimes keep us awake at night.
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