Love at the Speed of Email (22 page)

“Oh,” I said, startled. “Uh, okay. That’s not one of my
fears in relation to us by the
way, that
you’re not
good at affection, but all right.”

“It’s not you, I’ve just stumbled over some of my own inner
furniture,” Mike managed to reassure me before signing off. “We’ll talk soon.”

We did talk soon, but not before I spent an uncomfortable
couple of days wondering where I’d gone wrong. Perhaps, I ventured to my
parents after thinking it through, it was the moment when I opened my mouth
after Mike had bared his soul and insinuated that I didn’t think commitment was
that big a deal and that I’d be in a marriage only as long as the other person
was being kind.

“Yeah, that might have done it, I’d say,” Mum said.

“Mum!” I said.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said, negating any reassurance
the statement might have delivered by laughing immediately afterward.

“I
do
think
commitment is hugely important,” I said. “And I know any commitment – to
marriage, to a place – is going to have times when it’s tested. I was just
saying that I’m not sure commitment is the be-all and the end-all. I mean,
would I really want to stay in a marriage indefinitely if commitment was all it
had going for it? Commitment might be effective glue, but surely kindness or
something else
has
to be present much
of the time to make it worth holding something together?”

Mum didn’t venture to touch that one.

“What do
you
think
is the most important quality in a marriage, then?” I asked her.

“Balance,” she said.

“Balance?” asked my father, who’d been listening in from the
other side of the study.

“Balance,” my mother repeated firmly. “What have other
people said?”

“Well, two of my colleagues said trust,” I said, “and
another one said goodwill. They defined that as the commitment to hold a good
image of that person in your mind even when
you’re not liking
them in the moment.”

“Does anyone want to know what I think?” Dad asked in my
favorite tone of
voice, that
of the patient martyr.

Apparently it’s Mum’s favorite tone of voice, too, because
she was quicker off the mark than I was.

“Not really,” Mum said breezily.

“Yes, Dad,” I said, rolling my eyes at both of them. “We
want to know what you think.”

“A commitment to love,” he announced. “It combines
commitment and kindness.”

“That is not a single quality,” Mum replied.

“And balance is?” Dad asked.

In one way, this opportunity Mike and I had to probe our
joys, sorrows, and thoughts across the miles when we might otherwise have been
discovering what snacks we each liked at the movie theater was providing us
with a deep and solid foundation. But it was also rendering our quirks as
adorable abstractions and robbing us of small daily opportunities to identify
differences and head off or resolve conflict. Then, when we did happen to
stumble into these differences or miscommunications, they often seemed
magnified by the miles between us. I had made huge progress since the end of my
relationship with Jason, and I no longer shied away at the first hint of
potential conflict. I still didn’t
enjoy
conflict, however, and although Mike (despite his fears on this front) was
excellent at communicating affection across the miles, we couldn’t always
resolve a conversation satisfactorily when one of us stumbled across our inner
furniture. During those times, I had to battle to control my own insecurities
and learn to live with the tension of the unresolved until we could talk things
out.

There were more than a handful of days when one or both of
us struggled to stay grounded.

“Since leaving the office yesterday afternoon, I’ve felt
blah,” Mike wrote to me a couple of weeks after we parted ways in Melbourne.
“No one particular
reason,
and that makes it more
difficult. I don’t like feeling blah; it means that I don’t feel like doing
anything, that I don’t feel excited about anything. It means absence of
passion. I fear blah. So how about to our official post-
Ballina
discussion topics list I add: ‘What do you do when you feel blah?’”

“When I feel blah everything sort of flattens out and goes
two-dimensional,” I replied. “The day elongates and everything takes more
effort – doing the ‘
shoulds
’ of the day, talking to
people, caring. I don't taste fun. It's like the bubbles go out of life. On the
worst days, nothing I say or do comes out quite right and I feel as if I’m
talking to people through an invisible filter that’s skewing everything, the
way that gazing at objects underwater distorts perception. And what do I do
when I feel like this? That’s a question I wish I had a simple answer to.”

* * *

One of the ways I fought the blah that often threatened
during those three months of separation was working to create a home out of the
new apartment.

I’d arrived in L.A. more than four years earlier with only
two suitcases and I’d resisted buying anything that felt too big and too
permanent for a very long time. Anything I really did need – a bed, for example
– I bought secondhand from online marketplace forums.

But this move, I was determined, would be different.

I would commit to this new beginning by transforming the
blank slate of the new apartment into a haven of tranquility, I resolved. I
imagined dark wood, white bedding, clean lines, and minimal clutter, a space in
which creativity would flourish like grape vines in France, somewhere you would
breathe more deeply and slowly the minute you entered. I wanted a wooden
counter-height kitchen table with six tall chairs. I wanted a bright
Moroccan-tiled console in the entry. I wanted brand-new sophisticated blue
couches and low coffee tables. I wanted stuff to match. And I was determined
that I was going to buy it new, like a normal person. I was
not
going to impulse-buy off secondhand
forums and risk ending up with a couch covered in dog hair or a bread-maker
that I would never use. This time I was going to plan ahead and make sensible
choices. Choices I’d thought through carefully.
    

It took less than two weeks after the move, however, for me
to discover a couple of flaws in that grand plan.

First, money.
Who knew that new
stuff
cost so much money???
Even the
cheapest decent counter-height dining-room table would set me back close to a
thousand dollars. Second, the time and energy it takes to think through such
choices carefully. After a couple of days spent cruising furniture stores
online and walking around them in my new neighborhood, I was done with the
whole process. I didn’t, I learned, really want to spend days thinking about
dining-room tables. And all the furniture in these stores was a shiny sort of
bland.

So it was that less than a month after moving I found myself
back on the online forums hawking secondhand goods, and on my first virtual
peregrination I saw it.

A television cabinet made out of dark teak wood. Perched on
four solid legs, it stood more than six feet tall and two feet deep. The doors
were delicately arched, fronted with slender bars, and double-hinged so that
they unfolded to swing all the way back. It cost a hundred and thirty dollars.

It was probably a little strange that in an apartment devoid
of kitchen table, microwave, and lamps, my first major purchase would be a huge
cabinet for a TV I didn’t own and was not at all sure that I wanted to acquire.
But the second I saw those dark wooden curves I
knew
that exciting creative adventures would unfold for the person
who owned this piece of furniture, that it would infuse my new living room with
mystery and potential, that the cabinet
wanted
me to buy it. So on Saturday I drove down to Hollywood to seal the deal.

On the way home I started to think about how I was going to
pick up the cabinet later that week as promised, and the next day I emailed my
friend Nick and asked if he’d like me to take him out to dinner on Thursday,
via Hollywood, in his truck.

As my preferred partner in crime for adventures related to
sourcing secondhand furniture, this was not the first time Nick had received
such an invitation from me. Nick was blessed with the spiritual gift of “large
vehicle.” Nick also seemed willing to view these occasional forays less as “running
all over town on Lisa’s errands” than as “quality friendship time on the
freeways with intermittent heavy lifting to keep things interesting.”

That Thursday Nick turned up and asked pertinent questions
before we even set out. It seemed he had learned a couple of things over the
years from these outings (although not, apparently, that perhaps the wisest
course of action was just to say no and not set out at all).

“How big is this thing again?” Nick asked.

I told him. And I was honest.

“And once we get it back here, how are we going to get it
from the curb, three hundred feet down winding sidewalks and up two flights of
stairs into your apartment?” he asked.

I confessed that this was a question I had thought about
myself several times during the previous four days but that I had not yet
managed to come up with a good answer.

“I’m not particularly proud of that,” I finished lamely.
“It’s not something I’d normally do – ask you to help me when I’m not sure how
it’s not going to kill the two of us to try to move this thing.”

“Are you kidding?” Nick said. “That totally sounds like
something you’d normally do to me.”

“I’m sure something will work out,” I said, shooting for
optimism more out of desperation than any real conviction that I was right.

Down in Hollywood it took Nick and me, the seller, and two
hapless bystanders to get the cabinet into the back of Nick’s truck, and by the
time we got back to my place at a quarter past ten that night I still hadn’t
figured out a grand relocation plan. As we pulled up in front of my apartment
complex, it was quiet and dark. There were no able-bodied stranger-neighbors
roaming around whom I could beg to help us, but I did find a dolly sitting
conveniently outside someone’s door waiting to be borrowed, and after fifteen
minutes of extreme exertion Nick had managed to wrestle the cabinet to the
bottom of the stairs.

Then we were stuck.

Nick eventually asked the obvious. “How are we going to get
it up there?”

“If we just
look
at it for a while we’ll figure something out,” I said.

Ten minutes later we were still looking at it. And we still
had not figured anything out.

“That’s the biggest TV cabinet I’ve ever seen,” Nick said.
“It looks like the wardrobe in the C.S. Lewis movies. You
know,
the entrance to Narnia?”

“It does!” I agreed, amazed.

“Perhaps if we climb inside it will
fly
up the stairs?” Nick said sarcastically.

“You know,” he added in a tone laced with frustration,
affection, and bewilderment, “I never really understood the whole concept of
love/hate until I met you.”

As I was laughing at this, a muscled neighbor named Tony
whom I had met only five hours earlier, an angel sipping Starbucks, walked up
from the garage and said those holy words: “Looks like you need some help.”

“Even with
Tony’s
help,” I wrote
to Mike later that night, “it took us another ten minutes and several
near-hernias to get the cabinet up the stairs and through my door, but it
was
totally worth it. Who needs predictable new furniture
when you can have furniture with a back story? Who even needs a TV inside a
cabinet that already hints at whole other worlds removed from the mundane in
this one –
worlds
of snow and crocuses, danger and
sacrifice, adventure and valor? No, I’m convinced that this cabinet will make
me a better writer, indeed a better person. It is, after all, a gateway to
Narnia. And you can never have too many of those in your life.”

* * *

After I acquired Narnia, other bits and pieces of furniture
fell into place. Over the next couple of months, I granted a home to dozens of
books in two enormous Spanish-style wooden bookshelves. I flanked my bed with
nightstands that housed gentle lamps. I hung pictures of peaceful beaches in
Australia and wistful children in Belize. I found a secondhand kitchen table,
and friends gave me a coffee table. I bought delicate, sensual wine glasses. I
found the perfect nooks for a bronze statue from Ghana, ebony candlesticks from
Kenya,
and a bowl from Indonesia made entirely of
cinnamon. Out on the deck I planted forget-me-nots in a small pot and watered
them faithfully until
they
, much to my amazed
excitement, pushed up fragile green shoots.

Then I forgot to water them for more than a week and they
died, but never mind. The important point was that I was finally putting energy
into creating my own homey space. It didn’t end up looking much like the home
I’d initially envisioned – nothing was dark wood except the Narnia cabinet, you
couldn’t say that things
matched
exactly, and it was all far more comfortably cheerful than uncluttered elegance
– but with all these different woods and shapes and colors cobbled together, it
worked. It felt like a visual of my life. It felt just right.

Being so far from Mike, on the other hand, didn’t feel just
right. There were many moments from February to May when I wished rather
acutely that we lived in the same city instead of being separated by the
Pacific Ocean and an 18-hour time difference.

Near
Madang
, PNG