The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic (2 page)

For six years we stayed in a studio in Greenwich Village owned by a friend who had moved to Maine, for a month at a stretch, three times a year. Our day jobs in California were part time. We wrote in the mornings—he in the entry hall, me in the main part of the studio—before our colleagues on the West Coast woke up. Our friends charged us very little for what we got, but we still had to make extra money just to live in that city for a month (where, as a friend said, you might as well just throw dollar bills out the window). Vincent wrote catalog copy; I gave talks on my books and taught workshops.

In that nest we got to know how each neighborhood in New York is its own village. Around the corner from our building was a place called Typewriters and Things. The second time I went in there to buy a refillable pen, the Chinese American man who sold small black notebooks with lined pages and zippered lightweight mesh plastic bags in various sizes—for stray keys and whatever you needed to collect—that I have found nowhere else, remembered not only my name but our address in California. I went into our local shoe repair place—now extinct—and the Italian man who did not speak English sold me shoe trees for new
boots. He took only cash, and when I said I didn’t have any and turned to my husband, he said,
“È sempre così con le donne.”
“It’s always like that with women.”

We went to New York for the rivers of words.

One of our goddaughters, who lived around the corner on Bank Street (with a roommate in a one-bedroom divided into two) while she went to NYU, dropped in one night and sat at our high table set in front of the windows. We drank glasses of pale wine and looked south at the Village, a historic district, much of it unchanged since the eighteenth century. Red-brick townhouses with aged vines splayed on a wall. Tarred rooftops. Chimneys shaped like pots. To the west, a watery flash, a sliver of the Hudson. And in the distance, the towers of Wall Street, like a chain of mountains.

“Let’s do this forever,” Carissa said.

But after the crash of October 2008, our friends who owned the apartment were forced to sell. We packed up the few things we had contributed—pots and pans, a computer screen, towels and sheets—and stored them in a friend’s basement, hoping that we might someday find another place, then took the Long Island Rail Road to JFK. I cried all the way.

That November 2009 Vincent was to try out another apartment: a rent-controlled tenement (bathtub in the kitchen) on West 45th Street (where the friend who rented it was once awakened in the middle of the night by a man yelling, “Drug dealer in the building!” as if, she said, it were a public service announcement).

Part of me didn’t want to go. I was reluctant to get on a plane, partly because I really felt sick. And partly because, I realize now, I had been traveling like a traveling fool, and I was worn out.

That year, 2009, I had left our house in California so many times I stopped counting. I packed the same suitcase with many of the same clothes. Printed out the boarding pass. Set the alarm. I was recognized as a business traveler. “When you walk in the door of the hotel room,” a friend said, “ninety percent of the time, you don’t have to look: the bathroom is on the right and the closet is on the left.”

“Are you goin’ out,” a tall man from the South said to me as we entered a Boeing 737 together, “or comin’ in?”

Miles piled up in my United account. I waited in line with the other Premiers, behind the 1 Ks and the Premier Executives, hoping for an upgrade. I lifted my bag into the overhead bin, nodded to the person sitting in the aisle seat, turned off my cell phone.

I traveled to Spokane, Sun Valley, Reno, San Francisco, New York, New Haven, D.C., Indianapolis, Austin. Into the business schedule, I packed family obligations. My former father-in-law, in Palo Alto, with whom I remained close, loved a visit. We have five godchildren with whom we like to check in. Vincent’s father was very ill. Soon he would be dying.

My body was a machine that packed suitcases, lifted bags, printed out boarding passes. My mind knew where the bathroom and the closet would be while it worked on the next trip, the next talk, the next next. I was, as my godson Asa says, “bizzy.”

In his poem “The Outpost,” about being on patrol as part of his military service, Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish Nobelist, tries to stay in the present, “to be where I am and to wait.”

Instead, he finds, “things not yet happened” fill his thoughts.

Things not yet happened
waited for me, at the periphery, crowding to get in.

I traveled like this to talk about my spiritual life, but the irony was lost on me. I have published two memoirs about faith and doubt, and a novel about a physicist’s crisis of faith as he works on the atom bomb. My “religion” was neither certain nor fundamentalist (I was, after all, an Episcopalian), but I was a regular churchgoer. I had gone back to the Episcopal Church in my late twenties, having joined it when I was thirteen with my mother. She found an Episcopal church in Albuquerque, St. John’s Cathedral, with a priest who combined a passion for civil rights with fine liturgy. As a teenager, I fell in love with God and Father Kadey at the same time. One of my memories of Kenneth Kadey—a stocky guy with a crew cut—was of him standing on a tall ladder in the middle of the church aisle changing a lightbulb in one of the huge chandeliers hanging from the cathedral ceiling, while talking to my mother about a civil rights protest.

My mother was what would be called now a “seeker.” She had tried the First Congregational Church, when I was eight or nine, and must have gone to other churches in between then and the time we joined St. John’s. I can’t name what she was looking for, but I can guess. My parents’ marriage took up a lot of space: my father, a lawyer, had been a drinking alcoholic; they separated for a year while we were living in Aspen. (Pretty towns were part of a search for happiness for her and new jobs for him.) Dad went back to Union Grove, Wisconsin, and lived on his sister’s dairy farm that year. (My aunt wore tweeds, played chess by mail, and went to cattle shows in Denver.) A man from AA sat with my dad through the night and day ahead
while he suffered the DTs. A year later, after he had worked on an automobile assembly line in Kenosha to make money to bring back to us, my father came home, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we waited lined up—my mother, my brother, and I—for the stranger who got off the train.

We did not talk about God in my family. We talked about going to church and Father Kadey and marching for Dr. King. For a while I had a best friend who was a Roman Catholic, and I went to church with her because I liked the doughnuts her father bought for us on the way home. The Roman church service was pretty scary to me—the bleeding hearts, the fact that I could not take Holy Communion, the sins, the ringing of bells, the tapping of the heart—but I could see that the family organized itself around the church and belief. My family did not. I think for them it would have been impolite or vulgar.

When my father came home to us, he brought with him softball games, horses, an honest heart I could lean on, and AA. And his AA friends, who often gathered at our house and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes (I emptied the ashtrays into a silent butler), brought with them the thing they called Higher Power. They talked freely and openly about falling down drunk, about lying in the ditch, and about running out of any other option besides this Higher Power. If you had fallen off the edge, I understood finally, you could talk about God. Their stories were “grassroots religion,” a friend said, and that’s what it was.

I left off going to church when I was seventeen and went to college. I stayed away for ten years. I was working as a journalist in San Francisco then, stringing for
Time
magazine; my friends were artists and writers. I liked my work. I liked my friends. My life made sense but not enough sense.
I found myself one Sunday in a beautiful dark-shingled church in the Marina District in San Francisco, crying.

My friends were leftists—some of them called themselves Marxists. Some were serious and thoughtful, others not. In general, Christianity was held in contempt or was not understood apart from the civil rights movement. So my decision to attend services at a pretty little church on Sundays was met with bafflement and condescension. “It looks like a hunting lodge,” one writer said as he surveyed my church. My closest friend at the time wrote me a long letter about how Christianity was nonsense.

But human beings require a larger story to fit themselves into. I was fitting my life into the larger story, the larger map, of Christianity.

I loved the liturgy of the Episcopal Church: the procession down the aisle, the cross held high, the kneeling at the communion rail. I loved the old words of the old prayers: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”

I kept going to church, and I kept my religious views mostly to myself. When a woman in Berkeley complained that there were crucifixes on the walls of a Catholic high school where she had taken her daughter to visit as a prospective student, I did not say, What did you expect? I did not utter a word.

Later, married to Vincent and living in Santa Barbara, I worked in the soup kitchen housed in my church. I kept watch with dying friends. My brother, Kit, died of cancer in his fifties, much too young.

Finally I decided to write about my faith, my doubt, my struggle to understand these events. It was partly, I think, because of all those years of not speaking about it.

Now people wanted me to come and talk about what I had written. I was surprised and gratified when a church or a university invited me to give a talk or a reading (me?), so surprised that I always said yes.

I had become a religious professional without realizing it.

Gradually a crack between what I preached and what I practiced appeared and widened. I had the preaching part down, but the question was, what was my practice? Because of my travel schedule and the expectations placed on me, I lived in a state of anxiety. Before each and every speaking event, I felt terror, dread, and the desire to jump out of my skin. It started before leaving the house. I was not afraid of flying; somehow I gave up control once I got on the plane, but don’t ask me to pack a bag and leave my living room.

I did not “pray.” I did not have time. There was a lot of loss in my stories, but it was someone else’s loss. I was in charge. I stood at podiums and pulpits, giving and giving, talking and talking, and meanwhile
the things not happened yet
occupied my mind like a colonial army. I might describe what was saving my life, but I did not know that something was killing me.

And there was a disconnect between what I got from Sunday church and what, as it turned out, I needed. In the church service, there was a lot of “Almighty God.” In the hymns, there was “A mighty fortress is our God.” Yet in the gospels read each week, one heard about a man who knelt down and hugged children and said, “Be like them.” Or who talked about lilies in the fields and swallows falling to the ground. This man healed someone every time he turned around: a blind beggar, a paralytic, a woman who couldn’t stop menstruating. And all those lost things—the
coins, the sheep, the son. This person—wasn’t he the reason we were here?—seemed to have been relegated to the corners of the church, in the shadows, just outside our vision, on the periphery.

In “Suzanne,” Leonard Cohen sings: “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him …” Only desperate men, I took this to mean. Only those who were lost.

I was, as it turned out, drowning, but my head was just enough above the water that I felt fine. I might be treading water with greater and greater speed, but you don’t know you’re drowning until you go under.

When I was not writing and speaking, I worked for the environmental group within Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company. I am a part-time editor, the perfect day job for a writer. I write in the mornings and work for Patagonia in the afternoons. I have done this for over twenty years. Patagonia gives away one percent of sales to tough activists. At Patagonia too we did not always practice what we preached: one day one of our grantees came to visit us—this group of people hoping to help save steelhead trout and the Alaska wilderness and the river that ran right outside our doors, and she stood looking at us, with our heads bowed and our eyes glued to our computer screens. Finally she said, “Do you think maybe we could go outside?”

There is much to be said for the life I led. I was lucky. I loved seeing towns I’d never seen, on someone else’s dime: I watched the Mississippi Falls one night in Minneapolis, woke to the mountains in Sun Valley, drank real bourbon in Louisville, drove late at night with a bunch of Episcopal
priests to swing dance at the Broken Spoke outside Austin. I loved meeting people in Idaho and Indiana and Kentucky, places I might not have visited on my own. Where I went was based on a toss of a coin or a finger traced on a spinning globe.

In some of the parishes I visited, the idea of “small groups” was taking hold. In these gatherings, and the right climate, people were telling
stories
. I got to hear what people had found out about mystery or sacredness or what they called God, on the ground, in the trenches, outside of religious doctrine or within it, outside belief systems or within them. Inside churches, outside them. Once people had the freedom to talk about it, a wealth of knowledge emerged.

In a church in a suburban town in California, I met with the altar guild, all of them women, most of them elderly. They were the women who managed the practical side of communion: they washed the altar linens and then ironed them, kept track of the candles, ordered the wine and the wafers. Without them, the service would not happen.

One of them told me, with some embarrassment, that before putting the small cloths used to wipe the communion cup into the washing machine, she said a prayer that the stains would come out and the linens would get through the wash, and then that all the people in her church would get through, too.