husband to make sure he was safe and we wept together over this disaster, but I did not
go to him. During that week, when everyone in New York City dropped animosity in
deference to the larger tragedy at hand, I still did not go back to my husband. Which is
how we both knew it was very, very over.
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I did not sleep again for the next four months.
I thought I had fallen to bits before, but now (in harmony with the apparent collapse of
the entire world) my life really turned to smash. I wince now to think of what I imposed
on David during those months we lived together, right after 9/11 and my separation from
my husband. Imagine his surprise to discover that the happiest, most confident woman
he'd ever met was actually--when you got her alone--a murky hole of bottomless grief.
Once again, I could not stop crying. This is when he started to retreat, and that's when I
saw the other side of my passionate romantic hero--the David who was solitary as a
castaway, cool to the touch, in need of more personal space than a herd of American
bison.
David's sudden emotional back-stepping probably would've been a catastrophe for me
even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet's most affectionate
life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle), but this was
my very worst of circumstances. I was despondent and dependent, needing more care
than an armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy,
and my neediness only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire
of my weeping pleas of, "Where are you going? What happened to us?"
(Dating tip: Men LOVE this.)
The fact is, I had become addicted to David (in my defense, he had fostered this, beingsomething of a "man- fatale"), and now that his attention was wavering, I was suffering
the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based
love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady,
hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted--an
emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start
craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is
withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the
dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up
the good stuff anymore--despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere,
goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and
shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just
to have that thing even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now
become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before,
much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame
him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your
own eyes.
So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination--the complete and
merciless devaluation of self.
The fact that I can even write calmly about this today is mighty evidence of time's
healing powers, because I didn't take it well as it was happening. To be losing David right
after the failure of my marriage, and right after the terrorizing of my city, and right during
the worst ugliness of divorce (a life experience my friend Brian has compared to "having
a really bad car accident every single day for about two years") . . . well, this was simply
too much.
David and I continued to have our bouts of fun and compatibility during the days, but at
night, in his bed, I became the only survivor of a nuclear winter as he visibly retreated
from me, more every day, as though I were infectious. I came to fear nighttime like it was
a torturer's cellar. I would lie there beside David's beautiful, inaccessible sleeping body
and I would spin into a panic of loneliness and meticulously detailed suicidal thoughts.
Every part of my body pained me. I felt like I was some kind of primitive springloaded
machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to
blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off
my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me. Most
mornings, David would wake to find me sleeping fitfully on the floor beside his bed,
huddled on a pile of bathroom towels, like a dog.
"What happened now?" he would ask--another man thoroughly exhausted by me.
I think I lost something like thirty pounds during that time.
6 6 6 6Oh, but it wasn't all bad, those few years . . .
Because God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout
cookies (or however the old adage goes), some wonderful things did happen to me in the
shadow of all that sorrow. For one thing, I finally started learning Italian. Also, I found an
Indian Guru. Lastly, I was invited by an elderly medicine man to come and live with him
in Indonesia.
I'll explain in sequence.
To begin with, things started to look up somewhat when I moved out of David's place in
early 2002 and found an apartment of my own for the first time in my life. I couldn't
afford it, since I was still paying for that big house in the suburbs which nobody was
living in anymore and which my husband was forbidding me to sell, and I was still trying
to stay on top of all my legal and counseling fees . . . but it was vital to my survival to
have a One Bedroom of my own. I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice
clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and
bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital. My sister
gave me a hot water bottle as a housewarming gift (so I wouldn't have to be all alone in a
cold bed) and I slept with the thing laid against my heart every night, as though nursing a
sports injury.
David and I had broken up for good. Or maybe we hadn't. It's hard to remember now how
many times we broke up and joined up over those months. But there emerged a pattern: I
would separate from David, get my strength and confidence back, and then (attracted as
always by my strength and confidence) his passion for me would rekindle. Respectfully,
soberly and intelligently, we would discuss "trying again," always with some sane new
plan for minimizing our apparent incompatibilities. We were so committed to solving this
thing. Because how could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after?
It had to work. Didn't it? Reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a few deliriously happy
days together. Or sometimes even weeks. But eventually David would retreat from me
once more and I would cling to him (or I would cling to him and he would retreat--we
never could figure out how it got triggered) and I'd end up destroyed all over again. And
he'd end up gone.
David was catnip and kryptonite to me.
But during those periods when we were separated, as hard as it was, I was practicing
living alone. And this experience was bringing a nascent interior shift. I was beginning to
sense that--even though my life still looked like a multi-vehicle accident on the New
Jersey Turnpike during holiday traffic--I was tottering on the brink of becoming a
self-governing individual. When I wasn't feeling suicidal about my divorce, or suicidal
about my drama with David, I was actually feeling kind of delighted about all the
compartments of time and space that were appearing in my days, during which I could
ask myself the radical new question: "What do you want to do, Liz?"
Most of the time (still so troubled from bailing out of my marriage) I didn't even dare to
answer the question, but just thrilled privately to its existence. And when I finally startedto answer, I did so cautiously. I would only allow myself to express little baby-step wants.
Like:
I want to go to a Yoga class.
I want to leave this party early, so I can go home and read a novel.
I want to buy myself a new pencil box.
Then there would always be that one weird answer, same every time:
I want to learn how to speak Italian.
For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than
roses--but I could never make the practical justification for studying it. Why not just bone
up on the French or Russian I'd already studied years ago? Or learn to speak Spanish, the
better to help me communicate with millions of my fellow Americans? What was I going
to do with Italian? It's not like I was going to move there. It would be more practical to
learn how to play the accordion.
But why must everything always have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent
soldier for years--working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved
ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only
about duty? In this dark period of loss, did I need any justification for learning Italian
other than that it was the only thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now?
And it wasn't that outrageous a goal, anyway, to want to study a language. It's not like I
was saying, at age thirty-two, "I want to become the principal ballerina for the New York
City Ballet." Studying a language is something you can actually do. So I signed up for
classes at one of those continuing education places (otherwise known as Night School for
Divorced Ladies). My friends thought this was hilarious. My friend Nick asked, "Why
are you studying Italian? So that--just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again, and is
actually successful this time--you can brag about knowing a language that's spoken in
two whole countries?"
But I loved it. Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would
slosh home through the rain after class, draw a hot bath, and lie there in the bubbles
reading the Italian dictionary aloud to myself, taking my mind off my divorce pressures
and my heartache. The words made me laugh in delight. I started referring to my cell
phone as il mio telefonino ("my teensy little telephone"). I became one of those annoying
people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain
where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used
by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: "I am
your slave!") Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce
lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a
yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy
again.
Maybe I would move to Italy, after all . . .
7 7 7 7The other notable thing that was happening during that time was the newfound adventure
of spiritual discipline. Aided and abetted, of course, by the introduction into my life of an
actual living Indian Guru--for whom I will always have David to thank. I'd been
introduced to my Guru the first night I ever went to David's apartment. I kind of fell in
love with them both at the same time. I walked into David's apartment and saw this
picture on his dresser of a radiantly beautiful Indian woman and I asked, "Who's that?"
He said, "That is my spiritual teacher."
My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my
heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: "I want a spiritual
teacher." I literally mean that it was my heart who said this, speaking through my mouth.
I felt this weird division in myself, and my mind stepped out of my body for a moment,
spun around to face my heart in astonishment and silently asked, "You DO?"
"Yes," replied my heart. "I do."
Then my mind asked my heart, a tad sarcastically: "Since WHEN?"
But I already knew the answer: Since that night on the bathroom floor.
My God, but I wanted a spiritual teacher. I immediately began constructing a fantasy of
what it would be like to have one. I imagined that this radiantly beautiful Indian woman
would come to my apartment a few evenings a week and we would sit and drink tea and
talk about divinity, and she would give me reading assignments and explain the
significance of the strange sensations I was feeling during meditation . . .
All this fantasy was quickly swept away when David told me about the international
status of this woman, about her tens of thousands of students--many of whom have never
met her face-to-face. Still, he said, there was a gathering here in New York City every
Tuesday night of the Guru's devotees who came together as a group to meditate and chant.
David said, "If you're not too freaked out by the idea of being in a room with several
hundred people chanting God's name in Sanskrit, you can come sometime."
I joined him the following Tuesday night. Far from being freaked out by these
regular-looking people singing to God, I instead felt my soul rise diaphanous in the wake
of that chanting. I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me,
like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothes-line, like New York itself had become a city
made of rice paper--and I was light enough to run across every rooftop. I started going to
the chants every Tuesday. Then I started meditating every morning on the ancient
Sanskrit mantra the Guru gives to all her students (the regal Om Namah Shivaya,
meaning, "I honor the divinity that resides within me"). Then I listened to the Guru speak
in person for the first time, and her words gave me chill bumps over my whole body,
even across the skin of my face. And when I heard she had an Ashram in India, I knew I
must take myself there as quickly as possible.8 8 8 8
In the meantime, though, I had to go on this trip to Indonesia.
