Diary of a Heretic

Centrifugal Forces

Walter said, “Amanda, I’m so sorry. Denying us the way I did was wrong. When you were a child, my love for you would have hurt you beyond remedy. And so it’s always terrified me.”

Hearing his voice felt so glorious to Amanda that his meaning was lost. But Callie was getting hungry and wanted to go home.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

“I risked it everyday,” Walter said, “because I believed you needed me.”

“Walter, you don’t need to explain all that old stuff, or anything, really.”

He did, though. He needed to explain that when he had learned he was fighting Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, his doctors had described it as a life or death battle. Walter had taken the war description so literally that he’d left his loved ones for a troop of compatriots in Houston. Because if she or Olivia had known, they would have traded off nursing him—an ordeal he was determined to spare them.

How stupid was he, leaving them to wonder? His disappearance was unforgivable. “But faced with serious illness, no one knows what to do. I wanted you to get on with your life and not waste it taking care of me. Imagine if I had died, and our love had amounted to me taking care of you at one end and you taking care of me at the other. With nothing in between, honey. Except missed opportunities, which were my fault. You always seemed so young to me. At Lake George, you still reminded me of your eleven-year old self. And Olivia has warned me, you still might. Although, I promise, honey, not to act like an idiot about that.”

“Walter,” Amanda kept interrupting. “No more apologies. Or explanations. How are you now?”

She was carrying a tired, cranky toddler to her car uphill, her breath already disrupted by his transcendent voice flooding her body, sweeping away all her flimsy internal structures.

“I’m myself again, sweetheart. Strong and well, for now.”

“I’ve got a hungry, tired baby here, Walter. Let me drive home and call you back.”

He was staying near the airport but did not want to dash over while Callie napped. Instead, they talked through the afternoon. He said how desperately he had missed her, and that—thank God—all their time wasn’t lost.

They were still talking, confessing and forgiving, recalling their long, misaligned lives when James ran in, home from school.

Amanda waved at him, but he stood and listened rather than hurtling upstairs.

“Hey, Mom. Is that Walter? Can I talk?”

Amanda nodded, surprised James even remembered Walter. He was only three, when Walter had saved them from Freddie and his disasters.

Walter had already been sick then, Amanda remembered that. But he had stayed weeks, sorting out her debts and arranging legal actions.

“Hiya, Walter,” James was yelling. “Are ya coming over? Didcha know I’m ten?” 

Callie woke and wanted to wear a bathing suit over her diaper while she watched a cartoon about mermaids. Amanda asked if she could call him later, but Walter wanted to talk about everything so that when they saw each other tomorrow, as they had agreed early on, they wouldn’t need to talk. They would need no more words.

Amanda would find a baby-sitter for Callie. “I promise, Walter, no more words tomorrow. Do you know where I live?”

*

The next evening, when Gavin arrived home, Amanda was lying on the couch curled against Walter and holding his right hand as if it were a miracle of nature. They were drinking iced tea and eating oranges as Callie played with the dog. DeeDee, who’d raced home from school to see Walter, was at play practice. Their neighbor had driven James to soccer practice.

Gavin walked through the foyer, saw how Walter was cradling Amanda’s head, and asked for a word, privately.

He pulled his wife outside the front door. “Is that him, Amanda? The famous, missing Walter?”

She giggled. “Who else?”

“It’s not a joke.”

Giddy now and perhaps from now on, Amanda led Gavin inside to shake Walter’s hand. And she saw how he rocked on his feet, noticing Walter’s height, his thick, silver hair same as before chemo, falling alongside his lined, firm face. Walter’s teeth flashed as he shook Gavin’s hand. But the men disliked each other on sight and Walter excused himself.

Amanda walked him to his car. After he’d fastened his seatbelt, she pressed through the open window and kissed his mouth. He stroked her hair and they agreed, “Again tomorrow.”

With James and DeeDee not due home for another hour, Gavin sat in the kitchen as Amanda fixed dinner.

“You can not leave me, Amanda. You know that.”

“Don’t worry, Gavin. Walter and I are separate from everything else. He’s moving nearby and will remain part of my life. But unless you decide otherwise, everything on the outside can stay the same.”

Gavin was drinking bourbon from a stemless wine glass. “Everything stays the same. You’re so sure I’ll go along with that.”

She turned from washing lettuce. She had been sure.

“Be careful, Amanda. And, as a precaution? Don’t leave him and me alone together.”

(Click here to read the final episode.)

No One Scores a Hundred

When, when, when?  When can I go home?  I don’t care if the shop’s done!  I’ll camp out in a sleeping bag on the terrace if I have to.  Okay?  But I can’t stand the Swiss Crown another hour.  It’s not real, it’s horrible, it’s nothing but interim.  I mean:  What am I doing here?  Besides standing stupefied as my frantic musings take shape, flap for a while, then—splat—gook up my brain. 

So I’m going to tell Carlos:  “I am going home this minute, to my one true shop whether completely transmogrified or not.”

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

But when I peer in at him, he’s sitting before two computer screens, sweating so profusely it’s dripping on the keyboard. He’s swiveling in his chair, rubbing his face, and desperately, desperately, whispering, fuck, fuck, fuck! 

And even though he’s freshly shaven and dressed like a billionaire, my impression is of a hard-core gambling addict having hit bottom.  “Anything wrong?”  I ask.  “I know the market plummeted yesterday.”

“And the day before,” Carlos says.  “Really, it’s been shit all week.  And last.  But not to worry.  These fluctuations are factored into our time-table.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I say, and try to not to smile, an expression he misreads.  For, were Religion Without Rules to collapse, I could reclaim my life.  I could stop endlessly rationalizing.  Stop swallowing the guilt and sorrow surging forth every time someone wants me to heal them, to strengthen and enrich them, make their mother sane, their brother walk, their boy- or girlfriend love them again.  Were this all to unravel, I could get back to selling baked goods, pouring coffee;  and at the end of every day, simply, honestly, cashing out.

“No, seriously,” Carlos tries to reassure me.  “Everything’s going to be fine.  The Linden Street shop is done.  We’re moving back Sunday afternoon.”

I gasp and turn my head, tears springing to my eyes.  My wish so strong, that I can’t deny or disguise it, even if this is Carlos.  Even if I should know better.  “Don’t tease me about this, Carlos.”

“I’m not,” he says.

“Sunday afternoon,” I say.

“That’s right,” Carlos says, his air of panic gone.

I grip my hands together to keep them from shaking.  And that other part of me, which hardly ever speaks, pipes up:  Just relax, Malcolm.  No one scores a hundred.  And this is it—the reason you’re alive.

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Just What It Looks Like

By her eighth month Amanda didn’t know absolutely, but she was pretty sure. The question was whether to confront Gavin. Farrah was right. If he wasn’t stepping out on her yet, he would soon. Amanda couldn’t tell how she knew this, but she did.

After Gavin had said Farrah was crazy; Amanda shouldn’t listen to such nonsense, the atmosphere in the house revealed all kinds of phantasms. Shadows darted in daylight and fleeting colors streaked through the dark. The inevitable loomed just past Amanda’s reach.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

This late in her pregnancy a hormonal cushion eased her discomfort. So what if Farrah was right? Why should Amanda care? Gavin might lead a double life, but not at the risk of his perfectly blended family Gavin Wilding’s family glowed with health, all of them beautiful and brilliant and happy.

The façade didn’t embarrass her—the Wildings were never embarrassed. But it did concern her. Amanda didn’t believe in life plans, not in Gavin’s or anyone else’s. She didn’t believe in tidy minds and obedient souls. Gavin’s perfect world was unreal. Perhaps he clung to his story because he was afraid of messy emotions. Maybe he was so afraid of losing control—control being the greatest illusion—that he had to keep testing it. Draw up a life plan, set it in stone, and then every once in a while, sneak off.

The truth showed up a few weeks later, during spring break. Only Amanda, Gavin, and James were home.  Evie was touring east coast colleges with Mike. And DeeDee had gone to Cocoa Beach with four girlfriends, which made Amanda uneasy. Both girls phoned every other evening, wanting to know if their baby sister was born yet. Amanda kept telling them, “Anything can happen. Nothing’s guaranteed.” But the family had already named the baby, Caroline W. Wilding, the W. for Gavin’s late mother Wanda. If anyone asks, Amanda couldn’t help thinking.

Ten days before Callie was born, Amanda and James were returning from walking Leonardo. Taking off her poncho and unleashing the small black dog with a curly tail, she told James he could watch TV for one hour and then bed.

Gavin was pulling a blue sweater over his head, hurrying to an unscheduled session with a distraught young woman.

“I thought that kind of therapy,” Amanda said, “was unethical.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gavin said, checking for his keys.

“If you’re going to meet a ‘distraught’ patient somewhere with room service isn’t that, well, basically, wrong?”

“That’s not funny, Amanda. It’s offensive. Don’t ask again, because I’m not discussing it.” Gavin slammed the door behind him. Really slammed it, so that Amanda almost giggled.

(Click here to read the next episode.)

 

The Boy Will Come Back

The thing keeping me going is:  the boy will come back.  At every meeting now I peer out at the audience, clench my fists, close my eyes, and pray:  please, please, appear.  I jump from the dais, and on pretense of selecting someone to talk about “life as we know it,” search every face. . .  I grind my teeth and rub my eyes:  Nothing, and no one.

And yet, a tightness in my neck, a throbbing red line to my field of vision, a jigsaw in my head.  A harsh cry goes forth and the Great Prophet knows:  His Truly Beloved Will Return to Him In a New Manifestation.

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

This Manifestation may lurk in shadows, waiting for a lull.  But it’s so close; I can feel it.  The boy’s young, just-woken-up-after-working-all-day scent, his lithe, just-stretching air, the tantalizing glint and sheen of his eyes and hair hover on the periphery of everything I think and do.

When I’m not acting as Millennial Prophet for Religion Without Rules, I wander the streets, doggedly tracing my tracks.  Tyler appeared luminously before me, and the moment I tried to put myself near him—I am just like you!—he vanished.  I no sooner found the soul of concern, of sweetness, light, peace, joy and hope than I lost him.

So now, acting on faith, I float aimlessly, deliberately unawares.  I am not hunting him.  Because you don’t set out to snare the soul of sweetness, light, et cetera.  You respect his freedom.  You calmly accept his absence and wait in joyful hope that he will return to you.

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Out of Sight

Amanda telephoned Gavin from Olivia’s house in Connecticut. Would he meet her at O’Hare? Her plane arrived Wednesday afternoon; the kids returned from Bermuda Sunday evening.

At the baggage claim, Gavin was wearing a straw fedora.  He was tan and smelled like mint, which grew rampant along a shady border in his backyard. Seeing her, her tossed the hat behind him on a plastic chair, and ran up to kiss her.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

“I’ve missed you so much I can’t work. You’ve no idea.” Gavin was so insane without her, he said, that his patients suffering from unreasonable anxieties or injustices sounded perfectly reasonable. Whatever they said or did showed perfect judgment within the context of him not seeing or touching or talking to Amanda for three weeks and five nights and four days.

“How was Connecticut? How’s your old friend, Olivia?”

Gavin knew who Olivia was. He knew that Amanda phoning him from Connecticut meant either that Walter really wasn’t coming back, or at least, that his daughter had advised Amanda to stop waiting and get on with her life.

After Gavin lifted her bag off the conveyor, she touched his arm and led him to the seats lining the vast periphery. He snatched his hat from where it had landed. He warned her that outdoors the air was hotter than their blood.

She squeezed his hand. “I have a little present for you,” she said. “But really little. It’s not a big enough deal to open at home.”

She unzipped her bag, looking for it. Gavin tossed his hat from hand to hand. She had said “home,” knowing they were going straight to his place. His place was how she had always referred to his spacious, light-filled home not far from the high school which Evie and DeeDee attended, and where she worked. He rested a hand on her knee, aching to get “home.”

“It’s not a toy,” she said, handing him a long, narrow gift bag, “but it’s obsolete. Professionals don’t use them anymore.”

“Guess that rules out vintage wine.” He unwrapped the telescope, with its six interchanging lenses.

“I have a present for you, too. Or, mostly for James, if you’ll let him have it.”

Gavin’s silver car sped along the interstate. They held hands and listened to reggae, which Gavin claimed dispersed unformed sweat caused by the mid-summer heat. She deliberated about Gavin having bought her what she instantly knew was a puppy. It was so presumptuous, her first impulse was to call him out. But after Olivia’s many, sensible, concerned discussions—what if Walter this or that—during her four-day visit, Amanda had resolved to stop treating Gavin that way. After all, as Olivia kept saying, Walter didn’t vanish for four years with the idea time would stop. “Four years and counting,” Olivia repeated as often as Amanda wanted to talk about it. “So if he ever shows up—as in, if ever, Amanda—he’ll expect you to be married.”

Before they even stepped out of the car, Gavin apologized twice about the puppy.

“I’ll take it back if you don’t like it,” he said.

“Or,” Amanda said, as if she weren’t certain what the gift was, “you can keep it.”

“No,” he said, pulling the car into the driveway. “I want you to be happy.”

When Gavin opened the door and they stepped into cool, light atmosphere, faintly green with plants, a little black puppy jumped around Amanda’s legs, barking and leaping with such exuberance, it flipped over. Its nails clicked on the tiles.

Amanda squealed, tears streaming, past control. She picked up the dog, and pressed him to her face, whispering, “Samson, my God, you’re Samson.”

“You like him? You’re crying. Who’s Samson?”

She swallowed hard but several tears still fell. “I love him, Gavin. He’s adorable. Does he have a name?”

“You said, ‘Samson.’”

“No,” Amanda said, “that won’t work for this little guy. Maybe James should name him.”

James named him Leonardo. He fed him, walked him three times a day, and played with him in Gavin’s backyard. But the dog, which looked so much like the dog Walter had bought when she was a child, never willingly left Amanda’s presence. Inside the house, the little black dog licked her feet and jumped around her ankles. Leonardo begged to rest in her lap and whined whenever they locked him in his cage, out of Amanda’s sight.

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Go With What You Got

Gavin’s attempts to slip back inside Amanda’s good graces bordered on inspiration, showing a style she would have never guessed he had.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Two days after she banished him, he began leaving her voice messages varying from sweet, swift apologies to whimsical observations, like: “My narcissist patients all wore white this afternoon.”

And once, going all out romantically, he said, “You know what I miss most, Amanda? Seeing you look up. The crescents beneath your pupils keep haunting me.”

He sent her a bouquet of peonies and a tiny tube of vetiver scent, which was refreshing in June’s first, terrible heat. He emailed photos of her and James, mostly caught off-guard. But in her favorite picture, Amanda’s curly-haired, blue-eyed boy was smiling straight into Gavin’s lens, showing off his first, lost baby tooth.

She was afraid to respond. Because she knew if she softened at all, she’d be married to Gavin before she knew it, and more likely than not, pregnant by September.

Her friend Farrah, a longtime patient of Gavin’s, agreed that Amanda had married and mothered enough. Why not take off this next Friday and Monday and stay with her at her condo share in Lake Geneva? Amanda said, “Thanks, Farrah. Why not indeed? I’ll try to arrange it.”

She and Farrah were drinking iced tea during this discussion, while Evie emptied a new box of cereal into a big bowl from which she picked out only raisins. Before Amanda could scold her, Evie said, “Do it, Mom. I’ll talk Dad into taking James. We always miss him on the Dad-weekends.”

Mike phoned that evening. Amanda, who let every call go to voicemail—even if she was continuously anticipating Walter’s return—answered Mike right away. He apologized for not including James sooner. “Just didn’t think of it,” he said

Amanda said she was really grateful; it was above and beyond. “Just watch out for the girls joining forces,” she said. “They’ll get James to make prank phone calls for them.”

Then Gavin, knowing Farrah’s address in Lake Geneva, Fed-exed a sumptuous book of Gustav Kilmt paintings. Farrah’s housemates, a genial, male gay couple, were enthralled. “And, why won’t you marry this guy, honey?” one asked.

Amanda burst into tears. Only Walter called her “honey.”

Farrah trailed after her into the bedroom with busy flowered wallpaper, bedspread and sheets. “But I call you ‘honey’ all the time,” Farrah said.

“It sounds different when you say it.”

Farrah asked, “So when Noah said, ‘honey,’ did he sound just like Walter?”

“No, I don’t know.” Amanda wiped her eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

The kids’ long weekend with Mike went so well that Mike asked if James could go with them for the end-of-the-school-year trip to Bermuda with his parents.

By now, Amanda was almost returning Gavin’s phone calls practically every night. And, many long, wrenching emails to him hung in her draft file. Not long before the kids’ ten-day trip, she telephoned Olivia, who was newly wed and living in Connecticut. “Okay, if I visit?” she asked. “Please, just be honest, O. If it feels like an imposition, I’ll find something else.”

Olivia claimed she had never experienced an imposition, and she couldn’t wait for her new husband to meet her best childhood friend.

Arriving at the airport, Amanda almost didn’t recognize voluptuous Olivia. In six years, she had gotten huge. “I love being so fat,” O said, tugging at her giant turquoise blouse. “And upsetting my fastidious mommy? Whoa, was that fun. Then, too, I love eating. Really eating.”

Olivia’s husband was Egyptian, owned a string of gyms, and smoked cigars. Also overweight, he treated Amanda cordially, but soon gave up trying to overload her plate.

Again and again, fat, happy Olivia insisted she had no clue where Walter was. She knew only that his last known girlfriend, Jessica Ambrose, had moved to Caracas and married a landowner there.

“Wherever he might be,” she said, “he’s sixty-three now. So, sick or well, he’s just way too old for you, Amanda. I mean, be reasonable and marry this guy Gavin. Because even if Daddy does come back, it won’t be to sleep with you.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Care to Count the Ways?

Yesterday, a full-page feature about me in the Tribune’s “Living Section” prompted my parents, en route to Puerto Vallarta, to phone from an airplane.  It took my father twenty minutes to track me down—why was I staying at the Swiss Crown?  He preferred the Drake.  My mother wanted to know where I’d be playing the second week of August.  Wouldn’t it be fun if they popped in for a meeting?  “Name a day,” I said. “I’ll save you the best seats in the house.”  But they said they’d rather surprise me, sneak in, in the back when I wasn’t expecting them.  “We wouldn’t want to throw you off your stride,” my father said. 

Then my mother grabbed the phone.  “Oh Malcolm, I always knew you had a saintly aura about you.”

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

As I hung up, aghast at my chat with Mom and Dad, a picture flashed to mind:  Carlos who wears an earpiece round the clock now, telling his computer to, “Make a note to interview the parents. Get ’em on tape.  Get ’em to sign a waiver.”

Two seconds later Carlos in the flesh says guess what, verbatim?!

If I didn’t know better (and honestly, Dear Diary, I still do know better) I’d think the string of real-life events had gotten snarled up with my messiest most nightmarish imaginings.  In my head, Carlos makes a note, and immediately in real life puts it in writing:  asterisk, word, exclamation point.   A few weeks from now—I know—good old Mom and Pop will turn up on a talk show.  I can hear them now:

My mother: “He was the most compassionate child there ever was.  Even as a baby he had fits of empathy anytime he saw a homeless person.”

My father: “Malcolm is my only son.  And as much as he mystifies me, I have to respect his new direction.”

My mother:  “You have to respect his new direction?  Please.  What about what you said the other night?  That one glimpse of that blinding light shooting from his head and you realized:  Malcolm truly is tapped into something we don’t understand.”

If only I didn’t see these coincidences mounting.  If only everyone and everything around me were not growing ever more predictable.

But then:  oh wait a minute—I get it!  You’re downloading this!  Aren’t you, Carlos?  What an idiot I am! 

No wonder you’re privy to my thoughts!  I was stupid enough to think you were reading my mind, when actually, it’s so obvious!  You’re reading my journal!

So okay.  That being the case:  Pay attention!  This next thing I really want you to get, Carlos!  Let this be your mantra, and maybe we can still avoid the cataclysm we’re obviously careening for:

KEEP MY PARENTS OUT OF THIS!

Don’t bother to argue, my pet, my lover, tormentor, baby, honey, muffin, because I know what you’ll say.  Believe me: my worry here has nothing to do with my own embarrassment (which via your plan, really does grow huger and more drastic by the minute) and everything to do with right and wrong.  Really.  It would be wrong to suck my parents into Religion Without Rules.  They are a hundred times more naive than me.  Think of that, Carlos!  Mom and Dad, not to mention, God forbid, my sister Deirdre can not stand up to your high-voltage temptation.  They’re not like me.  It would never occur to them to agonize over selling their souls.  Because, in my parents’ case, they have never doubted that their souls are not locked on their own private straightaway to heaven.  Because, one, they tithe to the Church, and two, they would never, in the darkest, deepest night of their lives, admit to anything that might differ with the Pope.  Whereas in my sister’s case it’s the opposite. . .  and that’s only half of it:  Life is hard enough on Deirdre.

So for all intents and purposes, Carlos, let’s say my parents and my sister don’t exist.   Leave them out of this or I’ll make you sorry.  Thunder, lightning time: I’ve seen the light. You do what I say, Carlos! Or else, I’ll ruin you.  Care to count the ways?

(Click here to read the next episode.)

It Takes a Saint Not to Preen

There’s no need to feel constantly ashamed!  Sometimes I go on stage and something mystical happens.  Sometimes it’s embarrassing and pathetic;  sometimes it’s magnificent.  I stand in the wings, toss my hair, lick my lips, and bounce up and down. The lights dim, the crowd goes silent and I hurtle through space, landing deftly in the spotlight, arms outstretched, the better to embrace the first of the evening’s many delirious ovations.  I open my mouth and say stuff like:  “It doesn’t matter what we think, we have to act.”  “We have to get out there and make life different than it ultimately is.”  “If it’s not impossible, why bother?”  “If it is impossible, why try?”

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Carlos is right:  it’s easy.  I say whatever pops to mind—I walk, talk, cha-cha-cha.  Sometimes I hum a little and my words become a chant, my convictions a mantra. 

Christ, how pretentious:  Me and my mantra.  Suffice it to say that I gesture, rave, whisper and pause, and everyone screams.  Everyone leaps in ecstasy (or so it seems). 

And—this is not good—lately I have to concentrate to keep from stroking myself!  Adulation rushes in, enlarging me three or four times my normal size.  My eyes start to roll and wings of exultation beat—This is my body, this is my blood!

(Dear God, You have to forgive me!  I did not ask for this.)

I did not ask for this but I’m at the point where even the money is starting to get to me.  Stacks and stacks of it!  More than any of us can count.  Not when you factor in the electronic transfer, which is where Carlos says the real money comes in.  Any time I think of it, I wonder, am I essentially just more alive than everyone else?  I didn’t used to be like this. But it takes real restraint not to preen, not to moan.

(Click here to read the next episode.)