Chapter Sixteen Sacred Waiting
Sixteen
Sacred Waiting
When my mother’s all-time favorite cat, an incredible mouser, vanished, Veronica said, “No, he didn’t get eaten by coyotes! He just killed a deer and is dragging it down a mountain. It will take him awhile. Maybe many years.”
I tried to imagine that what I longed for with David was coming for me, that it was just dragging a deer down the mountain. The waiting could be constructive. That way the good fortune would be even sweeter when it finally arrived. And yet, the weeks of waiting to see David after we’d made plans to meet in California were the most agonizing of my life.
I tried everything to distract and calm myself, including going to church. As part of his sermon, the priest told a version of the 1885 Leo Tolstoy short story “Where Love Is, God Is.” I hadn’t heard it before.
One night a cobbler heard Jesus say to him: “Look out onto the street tomorrow. I will come.”
The next day, the cobbler stared out the window waiting for Jesus. As he did, he noticed an old man in the snow. He invited him in for tea and gave him warm clothes.
Later he saw a young woman and her baby freezing and brought them inside, played with the baby so the mother could rest, fed them and helped bundle them up against the cold.
Then he saw an old woman beating a boy for stealing an apple from her. He ran out, helped them make peace, and by the time they left, the boy was helping the old woman with her cart.
At the end of the day, the cobbler was disappointed that Jesus hadn’t come, but in a dream he heard, “Did you not recognize me? I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
The promise had been kept, but at an hour and in a way that the cobbler did not expect.
I needed to look at the ways in which what I was waiting for had already arrived. I needed to learn how, at the very least, to make my yearning productive. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.”
To help us tolerate the time apart, David suggested we create our own Advent calendar to cover the fifty days until we would see each other. Over those weeks we sent songs, stories, photos, interviews, letters. On Day 14, I told David about how I’d come to understand Emerson’s analogy of the “transparent eyeball”; he sent me photos of his grandparents. On Day 18, I sent him “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles, and he told me about William and Henry James’s cousin Minny Temple. William had said she was “a most honest little phenomenon, and there is a true respectability in the courage with which she keeps ‘true to her own instincts.’?”
On Day 27, I summarized the books of 1940s fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes: Fashion Is Spinach ; Why Women Cry: or Wenches with Wrenches ; Hurry Up Please, It’s Time. I told him how she cut dresses on the bias and drank herself to death in the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. On that day he sent me the wedding vows his friends had written; he’d officiated.
On other days I offered thoughts on Madeleine L’Engle’s car accident, Erasure’s “Oh, L’Amour,” a kitchen gadget called the egg cuber, the saint Padre Pio, the musical Gypsy , and issues of FATE magazine. He sent aphorisms from The Huainanzi (“A standing wall is better once it topples; how much better if it had never been built”); theology from Jacob Boehme (“The hunger of the Soul must be turned to the source of eternal joy”), and sultry confessions (“The book I’d really like for us to write is a version of Aristotle’s brilliant volume Problems ”). We were with references like sharks are with blood in the water, snatching and tearing, smearing ourselves with words and sounds—and learning how to see the world through each other’s eyes. We riffed off the table of contents for Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo : “Why I Am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever, Why I Write Such Good Books, Why I Am a Destiny.” Why Were We So Wise. Why Were We So Clever. Why Were We So Hilarious.
Even though we talked every day, all day, I ached for him. I still believed that one day the passion for David would play itself out and that if we did it right we’d maintain a friendship in books and letters, protect my marriage, find the elusive way between courting divorce and abandoning love. It was risky, but not to see him felt like a kind of death. David’s Day 45 contribution, from Graham Greene: “I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.”