Chapter 14
Rumi says, “Welcome the guests, even if they are a crowd of sorrows.” I had no idea what Phil thought of Rumi, that thirteenth-century Sufist so amenable to modern readers, but such was the spirit, I thought, when Phil welcomed me into his home.
What exactly he was imagining by the invitation, I wasn’t sure.
I wasn’t sure he knew himself, other than his misery seemed to need company.
I had my own sorrows, which were mostly identical to his, but slightly different, too.
They included not only the loss of our shared loved one, but my own feelings of culpability in Sarah’s death, which continued to nag me.
Even if the command I’d disobeyed hadn’t been from God, it’d come from somewhere.
It might have come from my own mind, some unknown precinct where moral understanding was born, and in that, I still wondered if I’d committed some crime.
I’d committed a crime against myself, perhaps, but wasn’t that also a crime against creation?
I could see that my sorrows would follow me anywhere and, thus, I might as well entertain them at Phil’s.
Plus, more and more, I’d come to believe that our fates were bound together in some way, that I had a karmic debt to repay.
I didn’t believe in the concept of sin, necessarily, not at all, but I believed in the concept of spiritual labor.
Through service to Phil, I thought, I might be able to dig my way out of this hole.
I set up a space for myself in the library.
It was a pleasant room even now, with all its books and its bay windows looking onto the side yard with the plum trees.
When the sliding door closed it became a private little boudoir.
The couch folded out, like the sleeper in the Barn, so every morning and every evening I had that mild rebuke.
I brought over a few bags of clothes, my laptop, and a handful of books.
Everything else I left at my mom’s house.
In the morning, I would get up early and make us coffee.
I’d bring Phil his cup in bed and help him to the bathroom, waiting at the door until he was done, at which point I’d help him back to bed.
Sometimes we chatted for a few minutes, both of us checking the news on our phones, but overall, we were quiet in the mornings.
After breakfast, a van came to take him to physical therapy, and I spent the late morning working in the dining room.
I usually worked until sometime after noon, making what fractional headway I could, at which point I fixed us lunch or went into town.
I’d try for another round of writing later in the afternoon, after which I cleaned up my mess and put everything back in the library.
I found great comfort in work, as always. Phil gave me a key.
Evenings were our main social time. I usually made dinner while Phil rested on the couch.
Sometimes we had Manhattans or Negronis, depending on the weather, but more often, a couple of beers.
I’d make us a beef stew, or pasta primavera, and then I’d clean everything up afterward.
Later, we often watched sports or prestige TV.
We went through all of The Sopranos and much of Deadwood together.
We were drawn to stories of powerful men grappling with shameful secrets, prone to violent outbursts against enemies and loved ones alike.
I’d once read a profile about two old widowers in the Midwest who’d pooled their lives much as Phil and I were doing.
They’d made their trips to Walmart together, and done their chores together, and generally became each other’s wives.
We were a little young for that, but our arrangement wasn’t so far off.
We talked often about Sarah. It was a form of therapy, I guessed, this constant worrying of our wounds. Sometimes I wondered whether it was more salt than salve, but in any case, we couldn’t seem to help ourselves.
“She really hated overhead light,” Phil said one night, as I turned on the table lamps around the living room. He was lying on the couch, his usual spot. The windows were almost black.
“Is that so?” I said, taking my normal seat in the wicker rocking chair.
“She actually judged people about that,” he said, chuckling. “She just couldn’t understand how anyone could sit in a room with an overhead light on.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think it’s a moral question, like she did. But overhead light can feel kind of clinical.”
“She said it was like sitting in an operating room, exactly,” he said. “I guess I don’t have that feeling. I don’t see overhead light as that bad.”
“She never drank a single glass of water in her twenties,” he said, another night, as we ate our dinner of roasted chicken and root vegetables. “Only Diet Coke. For ten years, at least. She thought diet soda was healthy. Or she convinced herself, anyway.”
“I heard she smoked a lot then, too,” I said.
“She was a smoker,” he said. “It’s true. Marlboro Lights.”
“How many a day?” I said.
“Hmm. Good question,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
Phil had the advantage on me in these conversations, having logged so much more time with Sarah than I had.
He knew all her daily habits, all her quirks.
He knew where she’d napped, how she’d folded the laundry.
He knew how she’d put the sponge in the microwave to disinfect it.
As the conversations became more in depth, with speculations about her birth in the commune and the influence of her parents’ ideology on her life and personality, Phil remained the undisputed expert.
She became a holy text that we studied and extracted meaning from, with Phil the priest, and I the supplicant.
It was as it should have been. I didn’t question him, nor did I confess my own intimacies.
Quietly, in his shadow, I was working something through, but being the junior, I accepted his authority.
I didn’t mind. As the weaker one, I also understood more about our situation than he did in a way.
It was the nature of the powerful to be ignorant.
“I could tell when she was mad about something by how she walked,” he said. “She’d stomp around the house with these very firm footsteps. She wanted everyone to know she was angry.”
“Did that happen a lot?” I said.
“All the time,” he said. “It was subtle, though. Just a little extra energy in the stomping. And then she was over it. We’d move on.”
After dinner and TV, I’d lie in bed in the library, strapped to the turning wheel of my thoughts.
They were always the same. I had to explain to myself over and over again how I hadn’t done anything wrong.
How the events bringing me to this point were all perfectly normal, if tragic, and out of my control.
I’d loved a woman, I told myself. And she’d loved me.
Our love had unfortunately meant someone would get hurt, but that wasn’t so odd.
It was something that happened all the time, in fact.
The history of love was littered with unfairness.
Then the woman had died in a horrible accident.
There’d never been any miracle on a mountain.
To see it from outside myself, everything looked all right.
Or if not all right, at least bearable, no worse than a lot of people had it.
Definitely, no one seemed to judge me in any way, not even Phil.
On the contrary, everyone seemed to think of me as an admirable person.
They congratulated me for moving in with Phil in his time of need.
They thought I was a true Samaritan. But something still felt unsettled in me, especially at night. Some ineradicable intuition of guilt.
I’d always had trouble sleeping, but in Phil’s house, the problem became much worse.
My body forgot how to shut itself down. I’d lie there on the hide-a-bed for hours, waiting for sleep to come and transport me away from myself, and it never came.
The waves barely lapped at the shore. I felt like I had some dam in my skull that repelled sleep’s waters, some thick membrane that barred my waking self from any relief.
I remained on the lookout for signs from the universe, seeking meanings in the flight of birds, or a reflection in a glass, any indication at all that someone might still be talking to me.
I hadn’t given up on the idea that I’d been addressed, much as I wanted to.
But had the speaker been God? I wondered.
Maybe there was another God, I thought. A God behind the God on the mountain.
Maybe there was a God above or below that God.
If so, I wanted to talk to that God, the real God.
I’d like to find my way to that God’s ear.
“For by this name is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived,” Aquinas wrote about God. I liked that description: “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” It was so ungainly, it stuck in your mouth, and yet it couldn’t be phrased much better.
In those early days after Sarah’s death, I found myself unable to conceive almost anything, and thus, in a way, I was surrounded by God.
God was everywhere, pressed close around me, in every form of ignorance.
All I couldn’t conceive about Sarah, God lay there.
All I couldn’t conceive about Phil, God lay there, too.
All I couldn’t conceive about a tree: that was God.
I saw Him flickering at the edges of my vision at all times, a guttering flame just outside my awareness, never speaking, never throwing light.