This afternoon we went on an outing to the Met, and to get there we walked through the park. (That would be the royal we of me, Casey and TL.) It was a warm, sunny gorgeous early-summer day. The park was full of tourists, school groups, and toddlers with nannies or moms. We walked up the east side of the park to the museum, which happened to take us through the route we used to take in the old days when we would take the dogs there early on Sunday mornings.
Pretty soon I was crying too much and had to sit down on a bench. I was not only longing for M, but also imagining him walking down the path towards me wearing baseball cap, navy blue chinos, white dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, black Church’s shoes, and then kissing me, putting his arm around me, having on his left hand his wedding ring (now on my right hand) and signet ring, being – oh, forget it.
And I felt literally demented because:
- The periods of my life don’t feel joined up anymore; the past feels like a dream, and I can’t be entirely sure if it was as real as the people and characters in my mind, or less real.
- I don’t seem capable of touching the outside world a lot of the time. Sitting on the park bench crying underneath my sunglasses, I felt like a visitor from another dimension: I could see all the passersby, but they couldn’t see me.
- I was wandering (literally) around this city all by myself and without a plan, not knowing what was driving me from moment to moment. How did I even wind up at the museum today?
In fact, I was wandering around in a type of magical thinking fog, imagining I would encounter someone – him, the new person for my life, someone like M but alive and different in a way I can’t envision. The guys I look at are too young for me. I’m looking for someone in his 40s, but my eye notices guys who must be in their 20s. That’s the age I was the last time I looked. Note to self: we are no longer 26.
I did an experiment today and took my wedding ring off my left hand and put it on my right hand, next to where I wear M’s ring. I was curious if it would make any men notice me. Up to now I would say I seem to have on an invisibility cloak which renders me non-existent to anyone but kindly old ladies at church and girl friends. The ring experiment, in case you’re wondering, yielded nothing. But then, I have never been the kind of girl men go for. I’m reasonably pretty (if a bit overweight), sane (relatively speaking), solvent (for the moment), smart, full of heart, playful, churchgoing and devout, deeply kinky, imaginative, possessing of a cool apartment, two awesome dogs, a decent family, and a history of one relationship – a real marriage. Except for the fact that I’m 40 and not 22, the fact that I don’t have a model’s body, and the fact that I want more than anything to have my husband back and need to be drawn into this world again, except for that – I think I’m a good catch.
Where is the angler, out on an early summer fishing trip, kipping off school, lazy narcoleptic English summer by the river, stealing back before tea and evensong, summoned to the library before bed, falling asleep sore, sun-burnt, tired, and quite happy – except for the fact that he hasn’t had his life disturbed by me yet, hasn’t had his heart enlarged by me, his mind bent around my me, his world made infinitely bigger, better, more irritating, and all manner of means well by me? And so he, too, longs somewhere inside himself.
During Holy Week I had two big dreams about M both set in a garden. The second one (between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) was set in my childhood bedroom, and there M had made me a garden. He wasn’t there any longer, but he had put a square of top soil – rich black soil – over the pink carpet, and in it planted blooming bulbs, hyacinth, daffodils, tulips. I was overwhelmed by its beauty and thought that only he could make something that beautiful. The idea was: I could sit in this garden next to the window in the rocking chair and think or read or write. This window is the one out of which I would stick my head, as a child, and long – for something I couldn’t name. I would long for my imagination to be real. I would smell the air and imagine it was a good night for running away from the orphanage to the wide world. I had a perfectly fine real life – great mom, dad, brother, sister, everything you’d want – yet I longed for an inchoate tgi world, something beyond myself. So M made me a garden to sit in by this window of longing.
Do other people long as I did as a child, and as I do again now? I imagine other people, men in particular, do not really long, but get on with their busy lives, distracted or occupied by cell phones, friends, messages, games, work, and – by age 40 – life and its many responsibilities. Is there someone at a window of his own – have been whacked, having wanked, satisfied and secure and yet perhaps not – longing, too, for some inchoate tgi world, his life not yet disrupted and dazzled by me?
