Part II (Sort of)

Okay, what I meant to say in Part II has been mostly forgotten, but, in the interest of keeping my blog alive, I've decided to post the following, which is an excerpt (and taken out of context may not make perfect sense) from something else I've been writing and which deals with at least some of the themes I hinted at in Part I.

(Excerpt)

A few days earlier, in a grocery store in Bozeman, Montana, I had made eye contact with an attractive thirty-something in the check-out line. I was struck initially by her sexiness. She had the petite body-type that I like, smooth skin, and dewy green eyes. But what captivated me most was her sudden change in demeanor moments before I had made eye contact. She was standing in line, lips pursed, staring directly forward—and then, suddenly, she sighed, dropping her head for a moment and closing her eyes. Then she smiled, faintly, to herself alone, a smile of complete satisfaction. When, an instant later, she raised her head again, she had resumed her public persona. That’s when our eyes met. She smiled at me, warmly but not flirtatiously. And I smiled back, full of light. I had seen something, a flash of transcendence that stunned me. By then it was my turn at the check-out stand, and, by the time I was finished and Jeff had concluded his conversation with the checker, I turned to find her but she was gone, I’m sure never to be seen again.
Until now, that is. Now she was revisiting me, in my thoughts. I recalled her small sigh, her internal smile, and I began to fuse her life with others I have known, and I imagined her story:

I imagined her name to be Grace. She was a thirty-seven year-old former philosophy student now teaching at, say, nearby Montana State University. She had, I decided, recently returned from a trip to … Barbados. A friend from there told her she could stay in her ex-husband’s beach cottage for free, so she decided to take the trip. It was the first time in her life that she had traveled alone and the first time she had traveled period since her divorce.

She found the first part of the trip to be frightening and stressful—she didn’t know how to travel solo—but later, after she met and befriended a fellow traveler named Liz, someone much more travel-savvy than herself, she started to loosen up and enjoy the adventure.

One night, Grace and her new friend went to a beachside bar where they met three young local men, none of whom spoke advanced English but who still managed to convince Grace to try marijuana for the first time ever. Fortunately, the quality was good, and it made her feel more aware than tired. Not only that, it made her horny, incredibly so. Of the three local men who were with her that night, Xavier was the quietest and seemed the least interested in her, and Grace chose him to be her first ever one-night stand. Not only had she never had a one-night stand before, she had only had sexual relations with three other men period, one of whom was her husband and two others with whom she had had two and four year relationships. The idea of casual sex, until that moment, had simply never sounded appealing. In fact, since her divorce over four years previous, she had been entirely celibate. That wasn’t, for her, unusual. Grace treasured her solitude and she had gone without sex for even longer periods, for five years, after breaking up with her college boyfriend and first love. During her present stretch of celibacy, she had had several opportunities for sexual satisfaction, but, out of respect for her ex-husband, she had decided that she wasn’t yet ready. Closer to the point, she had remained celibate as a sign of love. She still loved her ex-husband, and, whether her love was requited or not, she wanted to express how she felt about him in whatever way she could.

Grace had not wanted the divorce. It’s true that she had, for most of the marriage, been unhappy, unhappier than her husband even, and it’s true that she had complained more than he about their situation—but she, unlike him, had always believed things would work out. She did once love her husband. He was in fact the only person she had ever loved, really loved. And she was sure that the feeling she once had had not been in vain, and as long as she remained committed to preserving and/or recovering that feeling, to figuring out its meaning and recovering its poignancy, she would not be ready to abandon the marriage.

She felt that way even after meeting another man with whom she felt more compatible than she had ever felt with her husband, a man with whom she began to have an affair, although she never consummated it. She had strayed not because she was looking for escape but because she had wanted to clarify her situation. She wanted to hurt her husband so he would look real—so that she might again recognize in his face the man she once loved so sincerely—so that she would see him again as human, and, more importantly, so he would see her—so he would see her angst and take her seriously, the way he once did. She did not expect that her flirtation, as she called it, would end the marriage, but she knew it was a possibility. She didn’t care. It felt right. The last time she had met with her secret lover, in her home the afternoon after her husband had left for a business trip, was the last time she had kissed a man.

It felt good to have a secret life outside of her normal routine—to be with someone not as a wife or a student or a secretary or as anything other than herself. It made her feel alive. Of course, she didn’t explicate her feelings so thoroughly when it was happening. She simply found it exciting and wanted for it to continue but without getting complicated. That wasn’t how it worked out.

Her husband, after his flight had been cancelled due to high winds in the Chicago airport, had come home for lunch and found her and her lover in each other’s embrace. And that was the end of the marriage.

She immediately ended her ‘flirtation’ and asked her husband if they could try counseling as a means of working things out, but he didn’t even want to talk to her. All she remembers him saying is that she wasn’t the person he thought she was—that he should have known better.

She tried hard to convince him that she wasn’t a villain, but, especially after his family learned what had happened and her mother-in-law took the time to write a letter saying just how awful Grace’s behavior was and how much her son had been hurt by what she had done—her efforts were wasted. All of their couple friends took his side. He was made the victim. She was to blame. She was cast in the role of a scoundrel.

That was a role she never expected to be playing, and she didn’t like it. So, even though she felt she hadn’t done anything too terribly disgraceful, she decided that in order to purge herself, she would undergo contrition and live as if she were a nun. She didn’t make that choice as a sacrifice, as a submission to her enemies, but because she wanted to. She found it pleasurable, that is, to deny herself pleasure. It felt good, and it proved to herself if to no one else that the others had been wrong about her. Also, because she still loved her ex-husband, or remembered loving him and wanted to express that one-time love in whatever way possible and to keep it alive, it felt good to maintain her allegiance to him. Denying love, she savored more the love she had felt in the past; she underscored it by reducing its surroundings.

Two years after the divorce, she learned that her ex-husband had died of brain cancer. She had not been informed. It was only through a chance encounter that she learned what had happened. And that’s when her celibacy took on a stronger meaning. Her celibacy could no longer be seen as a ploy to get her ex-husband back or as a simple act of penitence but as something more—proof that her love was real and enduring—that love itself was real. Now her motives couldn’t be questioned.

After four years of living not just without sexual intimacy but without any kind of emotional involvement whatsoever, except with her own conscience, she had become a different women, one that a person who had known her five years earlier wouldn’t have recognized. By denying herself all but idealized and abstract forms of love, contrary to her intentions, she began to forget what tangible love felt like, and the memory of her first and only love grew dimmer and was replaced by a more symbolic version, an image of love. Her past became idealized. Love became nostalgia. It required that she do everything possible to restore in her heart a moment from her past that never really occurred the way she imagined it; it required that she not just preserve the past but that she change it. To an outsider aware of what she was doing with her life, she may have seemed like a mad scientist trying to clone and enslave a former lover, turning herself into a monster in the process. She had dreams in which she was walking backwards through a garden of paradise, and, because she was not watching her step, she fell into a hole and she somehow used her eyes to slow her descent, lingering for as long as she could on the visions of the garden above as she slowly but surely plunged into darkness. She told her sister that she felt like a ghost—that she was only remotely a part of this world.

Though she had never read Dante’s Divina Commedia, if she had read it, she would have related to Dante’s epic journey. She too felt as if she were taking a journey through hell: Like Dante, she was going backwards, descending. Having lost her way, she had looked to her past, to history, as a means of finding direction. In her eyes, the journey was not an escape, not a retreat from present reality, but, as with Dante, a journey of artistic awareness. Grace would have understood exactly what Dante meant when his long descent into the inferno suddenly turned into a climb, when, by returning, he managed to find his way out, when his fall turned into an exaltation. Grace felt quite strongly that if she could truly resurrect her former feeling—if she could re-live those moments in which she loved her ex-husband—if she could plunge deep enough, and reach the center—she would escape the hell she had entered since betraying her marriage vows. She would discover the reality hidden beneath the life she saw around her.

Even more important, Grace felt that if she could go back to that moment when she was in love, she would learn whether or not her love was real, and, if it turned out to be false, she could redeem it; she could join the naïve love she may have once felt for her then living ex-husband with the unconditional love she now felt for his memory. And she would thereby sanctify her life.

If Grace had ever really thought about her behavior, she might well explain it as I have above, but, in truth, she never bothered to explain it. She simply felt as if she were still in love with her ex-husband—that deep down, beneath the layers, he was something exceptional, a treasure, and her sincere love would reveal that treasure, even from the grave. In his absence, she would not be distracted by trivial everyday thoughts and needs; her love could find the singular focus it had always lacked and thereby be purged in her ex-husband’s image. That was her hope, even though it hadn’t yet worked out as she expected.

With each passing day, her ex-husband faded further from her memory while simultaneously becoming more of an obsession. He was turning into nothing more than an idea, a faint glimmer, like a snowflake falling away from the lamplight, of whatever he once was. And the harder she tried to remember, the more his image faded. Like someone faced with a clue in a crossword puzzle who can’t let go of the first answer that comes to mind, whenever she tried to think of her ex-husband, she could only imagine the idea, the model, that she had replaced him with. The real person was gone to her.

But that all changed when she walked with Xavier to a private spot on the beach, where she allowed him to slip his fingers down the back of her bikini while, with his other hand, he slid up towards her bared breasts. She was starting to forget, to forget about remembering. She lie down in the sand and allowed Xavier to remove her swimsuit altogether, to touch her intimately first with his hands and then with his lips. And then she reached inside Xavier’s trousers and fondled him, sensing him grow firm in her hands.

When he turned her over and inserted himself, she felt as if she were falling. And then, as if she had set aside a problem and come back to it with a fresh perspective, the answer came to her. She remembered. She remembered vividly the first time she had made love to her ex-husband and what it was like when they first met. She remembered how he smelled, how he looked in the throes of passion, how his body felt to her touch—everything. He had come back to her. But contrary to what she had expected, the visitation was not welcome. After all, her ex-husband had come back when she was again in the arms of another man. She began to see her long bout of celibacy as less of an effort to prove and avow her love and more as an effort to keep her ex-husband from haunting her, from coming back to lay on her life an irremovable curse. By focusing on trying to remember, she had kept her memory blocks in place, had preserved her defenses. But now….

She was frightened. She asked Xavier to stop but he didn’t hear her, so she pushed him off and turned over. Xavier thought she had wanted merely to change positions and took her now from the front. She looked up at the stars, while he continued. She looked harder at the stars and tried again to forget. She tried to disappear in the starlight, staring more and more intently and listening to the sea and feeling the tepid sand on her back, heeding her breaths. She was alert now to every small thing that was happening, exceptionally alert, to the sand flies at her feet and the dew in the air and Xavier’s grunts and thrusts and sweat. When he finished, he collapsed to her side and whispered something in her ear. She didn’t hear him and didn’t respond.

This was not the first time Grace had tried to forget something by smothering the event with an infinity of details, by letting anything and everything into her mind, by opening the filter. That was the first step—to include the event she wished to forget in eternity and attenuate its vividness. Then came the re-focusing, the deliberate will to exclude the event from history. The consciousness.

She focused her eyes now on the crescent moon, focused all her attention on it, to the exclusion of everything else. And from that day on, whenever she looked at the moon, especially the crescent unfinished moon, or when she thought about Xavier or heard his name, she would forget a little more about what had happened that night, about the memory that had come back to her when she had been unguarded. The moon, particularly, became a refuge, increasing in beauty each time she looked at it, arresting her in its return gaze.


There was an article I read recently in the LA Times about memory. The University of Oregon did a study in which they asked subjects to remember words in pairs, such as book/slipper, gown/speakers, or scarf/paper. Afterwards, one control group was asked to try to forget the second word in the pairing, which they did. In subsequent tests, they asked the control group to recall the second word in the pairing after being prompted with the first word. And what they found is that the first word in the pairing served not to solicit the memory of the second word but to block it. Put another way, had the control group been asked simply to forget a random word, their later recall, the study found, would have been better than it was when the forgotten word was paired with another. The first word served to block the memory of the word it was paired with. In the same way, if a person tries to forget a painful episode in one’s life, say being beaten with a broom handle, then, subsequently, the broom handle might actually block recall of the event rather than trigger the unpleasant memory. The findings seemed counter intuitive, went against everything the movies had ever taught us, but there they were, confidently and scientifically proclaimed.


So maybe that’s what happened to Grace. The moon became the first of the paired words, a block to her memory, an impenetrable threshold into a life she had once lived and was now lost to her. The moon mercifully prevented the pain and protected her from her ex-husband, replacing him with a shadow, a ghost, with the person she had first encountered but not understood and not the person who had grown to hate her and whom she had betrayed. That person was cold, had grown cold long before their divorce. That person was a strange, frightening, uncaring beast of a man whom she couldn’t relate to. That person was inscrutable—was all mask. He scared her. She couldn’t bear to look at him. It wasn’t the ghost that haunted her, but the immeasurable darkness lurking behind it.

Xavier wanted to walk her home but she declined his offer. Indifferent to the danger of a woman walking by herself at that time of night, she wished to be alone. And she left him. As she walked along the beach, unsure even if she was heading towards her lodging, she listened to the gently splashing waves and she looked into the ocean, into the dark of the water, as far as she could see. The moon was behind her as she wandered into the tide and kept walking. Soon the waves were going over her head. She closed her eyes and held her breath for as long as she could, trying with her arms to push herself further out to sea. But she didn’t have the will to continue. She came up gasping for air, the moon staring directly at her and the light penetrating her closed lids. Then she swam quietly back to shore, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light.

Her life changed after that. When she returned to the states, perhaps worried about another visitation, her passion fell off all together, and, to compensate, she returned to school and poured herself into her studies. Eventually, she obtained a Phd and embarked on a career as a professor at Montana State University, where she met a nice man, a fellow professor, whom she felt no physical attraction to but loved all the same. They married and had a child. She was happy with life, but she always felt that something was missing. Something was wrong—but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She couldn’t remember. Though she lived a life of ease and prosperity, though she enjoyed her job, adored her child and felt a strong affection for her husband, she knew that something was missing.

Years later, as she stood in line at the grocery store, in an unguarded moment, she looked at her daughter and it brought something up. She thought about something very very deep in her past, something about her childhood maybe, perhaps an event with her mother or her grandmother—a voice from the dead, or, well, who knows? I’m making this all up, in any case. But I think she remembered something. Something came back to her—something from her past that made her smile, made her laugh at her fears and which put everything about her life into perspective and showed the silliness of her concerns—something that put her outside of the borders, as if she were an observer of her own life and who absolved her of everything she had ever done, who set her free, allowing the immense sea to swallow her up in its ceaseless, boundless waters. Something happened. Something that didn’t last long, that would fade like an ember falling on damp earth but which, for a moment, made her irresistibly happy, unconquerable. Something.