- Will you quit if I tell you mine? I’m sitting on a pew in a sanctuary full of worshippers. The minister is delivering the homily, and I’m playing the violin. I intend to create a soft background music to the text, which is from the Old Testament—desert wanderings, tabernacle. I play in a minor key. From his elevated dais the minister looks down at me. Thank you, he says. You play very well. But your gift is drowning out the gospel. I place the violin in my lap. When the boys have nightmares—Parker about dead parents, Winston about robbers—I tell them: we dream about what we fear will happen, not what will happen. I want to turn them away from the notion of the prophetic dream. But can I be honest? Sometimes I just repeat the things Mom told us and hope they’re true. Those prophetic dreams are all over the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar. Peter’s sheet of animals. Or Joseph’s dreams: Give him the name Jesus. Hie thee to Egypt. “Drowning out the gospel?” That sounds prophetic. But what gospel? It was the Old Testament. Drowning it out for others, or for myself? And what gift?
I heard from Dad last week—he sold two of the paintings you left in the Dumpster to a gallery in Santa Monica. And one in La Jolla, on Prospect! Everyone wants your work now. You need to know this, Ali: you were the one with a gift. - Did I ever tell you about Parker’s violin lessons? Eight free sessions from a college student who needed a child for her pedagogy class. In eight lessons, Parker never bowed the violin. Instead, the teacher showed him how to lift tissues from the ground by curling his thumb and middle finger into an o to get the feel of the bow hold. After mastering tissue, Parker graduated to crumpling newspaper to build strength in his hand. The final lesson, I held an empty paper towel tube while Parker bowed through it to practice the proper angulation of the wrist. Parker also had to learn the note names of the open strings: G, D, A, E. I made up an acronym to help him remember: Good Dogs All Eat. Like the treble clef—Every Good Boy Does Fine—although, according to the violin teacher, today’s kids are demanding edgier acronyms: Empty Garbage Before Dad Flips, Even George Bush Drives Fast. Before sending the violin back to the music store, I handed it to Parker. Bow away, I said. Scrape up a ruckus. But neither of us knew to tighten the knob that pulls the horsehair taut, nor did we find the round chunk of rosin, hidden in a plush red compartment inside the case. Parker bowed and bowed and never struck a note.
- I’m thinking about joining this program. It’s for people who aren’t recovering anything, and want to talk about the things they’re not recovering from. For example: I am considering having an affair. In this program, I could talk about what it would be like to recover from it. Does it shock you, that I would consider such a thing? It shocks
me. The older I get, the more I shock myself. Sometimes I make a mess in our bathroom—powdered makeup on the floor, soap left in a puddle in the sink—just to see if Daniel will clean it up. So far, he always does. He says it gives him joy to serve me this way. The program encourages people who worry about the fact that they have nothing from which to recover to look back and see what they can dig up. Think of things you’d be embarrassed for anyone else to know. Write them down. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
- I tried bulimia for a month in high school. I used those long Benders padded hair rollers instead of my fingers, because they were soft, and because I didn’t want to get vomit on my hand. 2) I mark up library books in blue ink. I believe that I’m helping the next person see what’s essential in the text. I don’t return the books until the notice comes from the collection agency. Then I buy the books, because I feel guilty about returning them all marked up. 3) When I practice the piano, I imagine someone’s breath is taken away. 4) My last semester at UCLA, Dr. Muller gave me an A for four independent study units in eighteenth-century poetry, a course for which I never read a page or wrote a word. She gave me the A, she said, because she’d seen enough of my work to know that, had I written the papers, they would have been As. I promised I’d do the assignments over the summer. She lent me her books and, as I turned to leave her office, she pulled me back and kissed me on the mouth. I returned the books along with a letter apologizing for never having finished, and thanking her for the grade, ten years later.
If I had told you these things, would you have written She is the good sister, I am the bad on the mirror? In the bathroom, where your roommate found you, pills scattered on the tile around your head— would you have called me?
I want to keep telling you. I want to tell you about this affair I’m thinking about having. I have considered it twice, adultery. (Let’s use the weighty word; “affair” just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?) Both times I confessed the temptation to Daniel. The first time it was in grad school. Jeremy, one of Daniel’s MBA buddies, said he’d go pick up the pizza for their study group, which was meeting at our apartment. I said I’d go along to get drinks. When he parked we didn’t get out of the car. Jeremy pointed to the moonlight on the hood of the truck. Bright, he said. I leaned over and put my head in his lap so I could look up through the windshield. He stroked my bangs. Daniel’s a good man, he said. That ended things. The second time, I was thirty-three and the man was twenty-eight. Latino. His son and Winston were on the same mini-mites hockey team. At one of the games in Conejo, he told me, in my ear, that he’d dreamed about making love to me. I’d imagined the same thing— was imagining it even then. I said, Daniel’s a good man. When I told Daniel about Jeremy, he punched the closet in our apartment and left a hole. When I told him about the Latino, he put Parker and Winston in the car and drove all the way up to Ventura. Later, in bed, this is what Daniel said. Both times, this is what he said: Show me what you would have done with him, if you had. I showed him. And I thought, How could I cheat on a man like this?
- I know what I look like on the outside. A perfect marriage, unstained faith. But I want to tell you something I can’t tell people here (we left San Marino; Daniel took a transfer to Chattanooga, buckle on the Bible belt): I am a double-minded woman, unstable in all I do. I joined that program, by the way. We’re supposed to read books about people doing shocking things so that we experience them vicariously and, as a result, feel less like we ourselves are boring. It’s cheap therapy. Remember the matching Bibles Mom gave us? What happened
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to yours? I looked everywhere in your apartment, after. I still have mine, binding has split, but I hold the two halves together when I read. That double-minded thing is James on prayer. In my case, the older I get, the further away from double-minded I become. I worry that, without any help, I’ll be entirely single-minded. On the wrong side. Purity of heart is not to will one thing. Kierke gaard was wrong. Purity of heart is a lost cause: we will and will and will things, some of which align with God and some of which fly in his holy face, but worrying about this is also a sin. Otherwise, why did his son die? Wasn’t it exactly so that I could rest easy about my lapsarian will? Lapsarian. Now I’ll show you how it is with me. I look up the word. It’s not in my dictionary, so I look up lap. It has either to do with a large genus of rough-pubescent herbs (lappula), or, more likely, it derives from the Latin lapsus—fault, error, fall, slide. Backsliding. Or the Greek laparos—slack, loose. Unstable in all we do. “Lap dancing” is the next entry: “seminude performer gyrates on lap of customer.” I look up gyrate, from the Greek gyros, rounded. Rounding my lapsarian hips. It is one of the shocking things I’ve never tried, and therefore desire to try, against the will of God if it is not done overtop of Daniel. But I want to lap dance on this man I’ve met. After you’d left Bryan and were living back at Malibu Horizon (you were painting those giant butterflies on panels, which I found under your bed—I’ve kept them all), you said during a family session that I was a Pharisee. Hanging on to the exterior trappings of religion out of fear. You were right. Even I’m impressed with my exterior. But it’s the old whitewashed tomb. When I was twenty I thought my mind was a walled city. Now I know it’s a dark highway to which anything can obtain access. The only thing I’m learning is not to trust it. Do you want to hear more? I want to tell you more.
Email from this man excites me. That bolded subject line. Sometimes I ask Daniel to hide my computer. He always puts it in the cupboard with the leftover buckets of paint.
Remember that bikini I bought on our Younglife trip to Newport? I shoplifted it in a boutique on Balboa—with $200 cash and Dad’s American Express in my purse. The owner caught me. She called the police, but decided not to press charges when our team leader told her I was a doctor’s daughter, from an upstanding family. When I paid for the suit, the owner wrapped it in pink tissue and tied it with raffia.
Yesterday I dialed your apartment in the Palisades. I imagined, had you been there to answer, you would have left paint smudges on the receiver. The man’s name is Kurt. I met him at the Chickamauga Battlefield ten-miler in October, right after we moved; we finished the race together, a personal record for both of us. He’s got dark hair, like Daniel’s, but curly. He lives in Nashville—ABD in theological studies at Vanderbilt. He’s married, no kids. Neither of us is looking for anything. We’re both in love with our spouses. A group of us from the track club is training for the Country Music Marathon, and Kurt drives down every other weekend to run the river front with us. We distance ourselves from the rest of the group. We discuss sullied words like “perfection,” how it has retained its original sense—a property of something that has been completed—only in music (a perfect cadence) and grammar (the perfect tense). We discuss the ontological versus cosmological arguments for the existence of God; we discuss causation, whether the universe exists in esse like a house (deism, Aristotle) or in fieri, liquid in a vessel (theism, Aquinas). And then he says things that choke me up so that I have to stop and pretend to tie my shoe. How his grandmother died with her arms up, gasping “Jesus, Jesus, my sweet Jesus.” How waiting for God to answer prayer is like standing in line at the farmer’s market. The farmer is your best friend, but he’s helping other people and seems not to notice you standing there, waiting. He’s handing out sunflowers and honey and fat eggplants and zucchini, and here you
are, his best friend, and he’s ignoring you. You turn to leave and finally, finally you hear your name. Wait, he says, and pulls out a basket of perfect grapes: the very thing you were there for. He says, I was saving these for you. One evening around the holidays, we stopped to stretch in front of a shop window that had a Christmas tree decorated with beaded oranges and lemons. The ornaments sparkled, and I said the tree looked beautiful, that the fruit was a noble attempt to mimic nature. He said that decorating a dying tree as if it were alive was an appropriate emblem for today’s church. Our collective moral collapse goes way beyond personal ethics, he said. He was stretching his quads. He said: People say Christianity’s just about a personal relationship with Jesus, but no one talks about rebuilding the ruins of God’s world, about getting politically active— an entire continent dying of AIDS while American evangelicals are hunkered down trying not to commit any gross moral failings. I don’t know. I think I want to have an affair with him because I’m in love with God. My body is so mixed up with my soul I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.What was it like, to wash your hands of religion? I think I know what it would be like for me. I’m running, it’s hot out, I move to the shaded side of the road. The run gets easier. I had a dream about one of your paintings. The colors had collapsed into the bottom of the canvas, all mixed up in swirls. But the suggestion of the form was still there; if I squinted my eyes, I could make out what the painting used to be. There was this tiny thread running through the canvas and hanging off the bottom like the string on a slack puppet. If someone pulled the string, the image would right itself, the collapsed colors would disentangle and lock back into their proper places like stained glass. (That night I had read The Human Body to Winston; when he pulled the tabs, the bones, organs, and muscles slid into place.) The solution was already part of the painting. Someone just needed to pull the string. That day on Westward Beach, the year Mom died. I was twelve,
you were ten. Dad was throwing ice cubes at me, a plastic tumbler full. He was really pelting them, sitting low in his chair, wearing headphones. I took it. When one hit me in the head you knocked the glass onto the sand and ran, swimming out past the breakers. I sat up—I could see you out there, treading water, sunlight on your wet hair, yellow tie around your neck. You were giving me the thumbsup. Did you wonder, then, why I didn’t follow you? Why I lay back on my towel? I needed his love more than yours.Today Kurt and I are supposed to meet for a run, lunch afterward. It’s not a regular track club day. It’s Tuesday. Daniel’s in Orlando on a consulting engagement. The boys will be in school. How do I know he wants to commit adultery? When we bump elbows, I say I have a cramp just so I can stop to catch my breath after the surge. When we’re stretching on the pedestrian bridge over the river, I hold on to the rail with both hands to keep myself from leaning against him, slipping my hands into his and asking him to pray for my purity of mind. Maybe I’m the only one thinking these things, but his coming today makes me doubt it. I wish I could say that all I want to do with him is have sex. That would be the shocking thing to say. But from where I am, I don’t think it’s possible to go directly there. Adultery happens by degrees. I lean against his chest. Maybe try a kiss. A plain kiss would be enough—I think it would startle me back into faithfulness, the feel of someone else’s lips after fifteen years. Wouldn’t Daniel forgive me, for just a plain kiss? The truth is, I’m not sure I’m even capable of such a gross moral failing as adultery. I think Daniel sees my body in palimpsest, current breasts superimposed over the breasts I had at nineteen. What would my breasts look like to someone seeing them for the first time, now, after two children? Could I let Kurt touch my C-section scar, when Daniel was the one who saw the incision open to reveal a still breathless newborn? When he was there to squeeze my hand while the nurse pinched out the staples? Daniel takes the boys fishing at the pond next to their school; he
shows them how to release the fish, first moving them back and forth underwater a few times to circulate the water through the gills. He tells them never to throw the fish back into the water: “Reentry can be disorienting.” After a fight, he sends me emails from work that say things like Sometimes it’s bliss, sometimes it’s blah. Always it’s you. We fight about sex now, because he wants to more than I do. I say it’s because I’m so satisfied, but it’s because, when we make love, it’s Kurt’s hands I feel, his voice I hear in my ear, and I feel so guilty about this I’d rather not have sex. But Daniel feels better about himself, and about us, when we do. So I end up telling myself that the sin of the fantasy is less destructive than the sin of depriving him. It’s adorable, how Daniel worships you, my friend Eileen says. But I want to be the worshipper. The one whose breath is taken away.Do you remember what a burden it was, to see your own sinfulness all the time in front of you? The remedy, they told us, was this: for every glance at your own sin, glance twenty times at the cross. Every sin you commit will make the cross appear bigger. The more sin you see in yourself, the more thankful for Christ you become. This is what is supposed to happen in the life of a true believer. Dad coming into our room to say good night. The hard, wet kisses all over our faces and necks; the way he cried and said mom’s name. I would sing This Old Man in my head to see how many verses I could get through. When it was your turn—those times you spit in his face and he pulled you up by the hair and said ungrateful—do you know what I was thinking? This old man, he played eleven, he played knickknack up to heaven.
I know you thought I’d never have a dog, with three cats in the house. But we got a yellow Lab puppy when we moved. (We actually have land now.) Here’s what I’ve learned since we got Hank: raise a cat, you learn about cats; raise a dog, you learn about yourself. Yesterday, from the kitchen, I watched Hank dragging this giant branch across the yard toward Daniel. It was so undignified, the joy of a retriever, retrieving. He ran to Daniel in a crooked lope, head angled,
intent on proving that he was worthy of the call. And then the eager bounce away and turn back, driven by delight to do again and again what he was bred to do. He was dog fully dog, too absorbed in the joy of his task to think about dignity, or love—he attained them for lack of trying. Augustine says worship of God is the thing for which we were created, the only thing that will bring joy. And C. S. Lewis says (you won’t mind if I quote him, will you?) our desire for heaven is “the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds—when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.” Every now and then, I feel this longing. More often, I long to feel Kurt’s whiskers on my inner thighs.I remembered something else. Your rehearsal dinner at Geoffrey’s. Dad never even looked at Bryan—who I know, now, was stoned, his shock of long unwashed hair pulled into a low ponytail—and that night when you said Dad hates him, sitting on the edge of your mattress, a joint quivering between the tips of your fingers, I saw the reason you were getting married. I should have said something. Instead I flushed your bag of weed down the toilet—because I thought that’s what a good sister would do.
We’ve done it, Kurt and I. This is how it happened. We met at the bridge, ran a couple of slow miles. Very little talking. I said, You up for this today? And he said, Let’s go back and have that lunch. We walked back to the bridge and I realized we’d never walked before and it was incredibly sensual, the walking, it gave me time to experience our accustomed route in slow motion, to see and smell and hear things that, running, we’d never seen or heard or smelled, and then we came to the tunnel at Ross’s Landing. There wasn’t even a plain kiss. But when you thought I’d done it, was there a moment where your heart released me?
Reality is, I made a fool of myself. I leaned into him. He took me by the shoulders and pushed me away. People need to see your faithfulness to God, he said, more than you need to see if God will remain faithful to you. He spoke of Daniel, Parker, Winston, my parents, Daniel’s parents, all the people who know us, who receive our Christmas cards. And he said, I’m sorry if I’ve misled you.Listen to me, all these letters. I think I’ve made such progress, when I don’t even know if I’m capable of loving my own family. The reading to them, the snuggling, the driving to and from this practice and that music lesson; my delight in their achievements and their smiles; the clean, decorated home, the sexual fidelity—I don’t think any of it is for them. I never went to meet Kurt for that Tuesday run and lunch. (You might have known from that speech I wrote for him.) I stayed home and uprooted every invasive plant I could find around the border of our property. How’s that for cliché? For trite symbolism? Please don’t stop listening to me. I’ve decided not to run with the track club anymore. I told Daniel about Kurt and asked him to forgive me. For what? he said. You didn’t do anything. For thoughts, I said. For considering. For being human, he said. And when we made love, it was comfortable. Predictable. Safe. I’ll never be shocking, Ali. Nothing beyond the ordinary temptations. My attempt to prove anything to you only shows I’m too invested in God to disengage. How could I leave him, when he saw every mistake I’d ever make before I made them and said, It’s okay, I’ve got your back? An incomparable burden, an incomparable relief. Maybe this is a temporary thing. A postponement. But until the singing sun stops turning me loose—until I stop noticing the sublime—I belong to him. And to Daniel. And (I swear) to you. Would you still be here if I had told you these things? Love me again, please, won’t you?
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A Plain Kiss (Letters to Allison, 2006) Jamie Quatro
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