I’ll move to Lisbon and learn how to sing Portuguese fado. I have an insignificant yet pleasant singing voice and an embroidered kerchief— what more will I need to succeed? Every night, I’ll sing in small Alfama restaurants, three songs per set. I’ll walk from restaurant to restaurant, diagonally crossing medieval narrow streets, carefully stepping in my high heel pumps, hopping from stone to stone. I’ll learn how to navigate through the ancient city that wakes up at dusk when fishermen get home after a day at sea. I’ll settle right in the center of this medieval heaven, and learn how to grow verbena on my tiny balcony. I will eventually grow old, but will never gain another pound. Soon enough, Alfama residents will start nodding to me. It shouldn’t be entirely impossible to achieve my tiny local fame; after my death, proud owners of restaurants where I used to sing would display my name on a wall, along with names of other fadistas. I know that I can make it, because I am familiar with the longing for things unattainable. That’s what fado music is about; that’s what my life is about.
I think I should start taking tango lessons if I am serious about dancing in Buenos Aires. One has to have stamina, and bravery, and pride to dance in the streets of San Telmo on flea market days. Shine or rain, Sunday mornings will start with the sound of my dancing shoes sliding on the cobblestones. I will find a partner, my age or younger, and eventually we’ll earn our place among other street performers. We’ll become so good that the statue people, who never move without a coin thrown into a jar, will turn around to watch us dance. I’ll learn to be forever desirable and sexy, without growing vulgar or old. I’ll grow a steel rod inside; I’ll learn to hold on to my newly found core, just three fingers below the navel, to avoid falls. I’ll learn to follow without becoming submissive, and not to lead while exercising my own will. I’ll learn to be content with disappointments and to maintain balance no matter what. Keeping the balance is crucial for the art of tango; this balance is exactly what my marriage lacks.
…Whether I liked it or not, I was turning fifty by the end of that year. There’s something about this point in a life of a woman that makes existence almost unbearable. I have to correct myself: it makes one’s routine unbearable. Something had to change for me in order to be able to go on with my routine. It was the year of my wedding anniversary, too, and the very thought of celebrating it was nauseating. I could almost see my husband of thirty years choosing an anniversary ring and bargaining over a hefty discount with the jeweler on 47th Street. I could almost see him ordering a cruise and telling an agent about our special occasion so that he could submit me to the public humiliation of a cake on the last night, during the captain’s dinner. I had such a wonderful, loving husband. He would then lovingly push me down on the bed of our balcony suite, right after the dinner and the ridiculously huge piece of the anniversary cake, on a full stomach… I already cringed at the thought of the pain I might feel at the moment of this mandatory, anniversary entry.
My mornings started with damage assessment in front of the mirror. I carefully studied new fine lines on my face, slight sagging of the skin under my chin, lipstick running into a newly forming wrinkle on my upper lip, and other losses of territory that I’d suffered in the course of the night. It was me against the mirror… and more often than not, I was losing. After my rendezvous with the mirror, I had to see my son, daughter and husband to work, tidy up around the house, and get ready to go to my store. My store sold fabrics and curtains. The store had been opened up and always run by me, but in its early years, when it used to bring in money, was called “ours”. There had been no profits lately, and, consequently, it became “Mother’s store” for good. I was in debt, as a matter of fact, and didn’t know when would be a good time to break this news to the family. Business had been going down ever since vertical blinds were introduced to the market. However, I had my usuals who hadn’t given up on me, and on crafts, and on cotton and silk curtains. Some customers had been coming to me for twenty-five years. I wasn’t ready to separate myself from the business, even though it stopped being profitable.
Every night, my older son and his wife would come to have dinner with us. They were paying us a visit with such consistency not because they couldn’t live a day without us but because it was convenient and saved them money and effort. In fact, my daughter-in-law was not crazy about me. Yet, when faced with her nastiness, I always chose to bypass her offensive comments and to bribe her with manicure outings instead. God knows I could be as offensive, but what else could I do if my son loved her, and I loved my son?
After the dinner and cleaning up, there was an unavoidable intercourse, and then I could fall asleep- no dreams, no ifs or buts. What a waste of spunk, wit, and bravado. What a pain to carry it all inside of me, and never let it loose.
There were few other things that broke the monotony of my week: a once-a-week therapy session, a once-a-week manicure and pedicure appointment, and a hair salon twice a month. This took care of my body and soul, while I was taking care of my family and business. Is there a better fate for a woman who as a child never had a chance to sit at a dinner table with her family?
…My first dream was a surprise. I dreamt of being on a train with my husband. He held a cello in front of him. Of course he didn’t know what to do with it, but told me that he wanted to play it right there. I wanted to stop him, but could not move or talk. He pulled the cello out of its case and tried to stick a piton in, but he kept putting it the wrong side up and it wouldn’t work. Watching it was so embarrassing that I woke up.
My late afternoon therapy appointment made the dream a bit clearer, but it still appeared puzzling. It was supposedly a dream about my need for transformation and movement, and about my conflict regarding whether my husband was the right person for the journey. His sexual prowess was questioned as well. A cello as a metaphor for a woman’s body seemed to make sense, too (a nice compliment to my, slightly our of focus, shapes!). He didn’t know how to satisfy me, and it became a source of embarrassment for me. I felt uncomfortable getting all this out in the open in the therapist’s office, but, for once, it was definitely worth my money.
The next night, and many more nights to follow, I got stuck with another dream. I dreamt of going up a long, steep escalator. A man stood by my side. He was a handsome, younger man, and I felt flattered to be accompanied by him. I wanted to introduce him to my parents who were attending a reception upstairs. When the escalator reached the top, I walked with the man to meet my parents, and saw that they were black. I didn’t know how to respond to their unexpected blackness.
When I dreamt it the first time, I woke up covered in cold sweat, with a sense of urgency and anxiety. This feeling faded in the course of my day, but the dream returned at night, and the anxiety was back the next morning. I decided to deal with this dream by myself and to be my own therapist. Okay, going up on the escalator was my wish to grow and move ahead, preferably with a new man in my life. But who was this man? No one I knew in reality. Was it my secret wish for a boyfriend? Who knows. And why did my Italian parents have to turn black in the dream? I decided to forget the whole thing, and I did, but the dream returned two weeks later. This time, my confusion and turmoil at the top of the escalator stairs was almost palpable, and anxiety upon awakening got as intense as never before. Was I getting sick? My day progressed as usual, though, filled with customers and vendors, my husband’s frequent phone calls, and afternoon shopping with my daughter. As always, I didn’t have a single quiet moment.
When I finally got home and started dinner, I suddenly knew who the man from the dream was. A younger man by my side was a boyfriend from my adolescence. I vividly remembered being with him on a train to Bensonhurst. He was holding a box of cordial cherries, and kept insisting on opening them right there and then, while we were smashed against each other in a packed car. I was protesting. I wanted him to give the box to my mother, but he just wanted the cherries, and finally took one, despite my angry hissing. I remembered feeling helpless and furious. After all, I was the one who had bought the box. I was the one who had initiated this introduction, which, later that same night, naturally turned into a disaster and abruptly ended my relationship with Larry. My mother didn’t want me to get married young. Also, she had a special gift of making comments like, “What a wonderful boy Larry is! Let’s hope he is not doing drugs like his friends.” Three years later, she was not invited to my wedding as a result of this behavior, but at the time she definitely succeeded in guarding me from Larry.
As for Larry, I never saw him after that ridiculous day. He tried calling me, but I decided to be smart this time. My mother-smart, that is. I never thought about him again, and started dating Frank, my present-day husband, soon after the breakup. Why did Larry enter my dreams now, so many years later? I remembered him as somewhat willful yet warm and affectionate. He was my age, and we were playing a lot. I felt like we were two a puppies in a crate, and it used to drive me up the wall. I wanted something serious, real, and stable. I wanted anything but puppy love.
Frank. Frank was definitely stable, from day one (I learned about his gambling addiction much later, but this could be a plot for a very different story). He provided me with guidance, unlike my father who was too busy with his third family, or my mother who hadn’t changed from her robe since the divorce papers had been served, and couldn’t make a sandwich without reading a cookbook first. Frank was caring yet firm. He was thirteen years older than I, and knew life. He wanted kids. Once we were married, he encouraged me to start my own business, and made it safe by initially researching the trade and negotiating with vendors until I felt comfortable to take full charge of it. He provided me with a suburban house, three kids, and a dog. Despite his slightly uncouth manners, he cared about me. Why would I be dreaming of Larry whose whereabouts were unknown?
It was maddening. I ended up looking for his address. It took me a while to remember his last name. Thanks to the Internet, I finally located him in California— where else, of all places? Such typical Larry’s choice! I sent him an e-mail and prayed that he would never reply.
I was obsessively checking my e-mail every night. In a couple of days, the urge became so strong that I had to check in the morning, too. During the day, I counted minutes left to the end of the work day and crossed them out on tiny pieces of paper snatched into the store register, so that I could go home to check my e-mail. He did not respond.
By the end of the second week, my urge became weaker. I could contain myself better and to skip a day or two of checking. By the end of the third week, he replied. He was happy to hear from me; he was thinking about me all these years; he cursed himself for being away from his computer for two weeks and wasting this valuable time with me. He gave me his cell phone number and asked to call. I decided against it. I had gone too far in following my fantasy; what I did was beyond ridiculous. What did he think of me?
Long ago, I noticed that if you repeat any word over and over, or concentrate hard enough on written words, their meaning is gone. Words disassemble, turning into a collection of randomly drawn hooks, circles, and sticks. “I missed you…thinking of you…want you back” — what did it all mean? Was it worth me staring at the screen with the grave intensity of an infant who’d just deciphered his mother’s face among other objects that were too far or too close to be detected by his developing eyesight? Was I ready to trade my security for this bunch of meaningless symbols?
I called him the next morning. He couldn’t talk; he was in a car with his wife. He was married. This was a disappointment. Wait. I had to stop myself and tried to understand what it was that I wanted for myself. An affair? Definitely not. A nostalgic reunion? What for? What else could I possibly want from this impulsive contact? I didn’t know.
Quite soon, I found out that he was unhappily married; that he, like me, had three kids, but from two marriages combined; that he remembered my youthful tenderness and need to be protected and to be carried away as vividly as I remembered his warmth and playfulness; that he’d gained some two hundred pounds; that he’d retired a few years ago. Did this all really matter if his voice never changed? He found words for me that made me shiver with excitement and desire. He was so gentle and affectionate, and noticed my mood changes, and was always available to me.
In two weeks, I was into it head over heels. We were calling each other on every occasion. He became even more obsessed than I was. He was totally into my life, and demanded to know about my every breath. He was in love with me, as if we’d never separated. Nothing else mattered. He did not dwell on the past, nor did he plan the future. I did not notice the present. My daughter got married, but I was hardly there. Therapy wasn’t needed anymore. The Towers fell, but I didn’t notice. My secret debt was growing, competing with the cell phone bill. It all didn’t matter.
It was my daughter-in-law who went on my computer one night when they were visiting and saw an e-mail that spoke for itself. It was oozing of passion, and could mean just one thing: Mother was having a wild affair. She was more than eloquent about it. That very night, she sent out an e-mail to the entire family, informing everybody of my indiscretion. These days, my husband was the only person who was generously calm and even supportive. He called what had happened to me “her condition.” He truly seemed to believe that I’d gone insane overnight. I could never fully understand nor appreciate his generosity. I guess it would be easier for me if he’d become angry or cold, but instead, he offered so much support that I could not take it anymore and had to move to my mother’s. Surprisingly, saying it was more difficult than actually doing it. I packed up change of clothing to last me one week, took a bank card (not knowing that my name had already been taken off our joint account), my overdrawn credit card and personal papers, kissed my old dog on both cheeks, and drove to Brooklyn where my mother lived in the same one bedroom apartment in which I’d grown up.
Staying with my mother was the most difficult part of it all. As if I hadn’t lived on my own for almost thirty years, she was nagging, and teaching, and criticizing my every move. She was skeptical about Larry’s intentions to tell his wife about my existence in his life. She, the abandoned wife, never forgave my affair and my decision to leave Frank. She always found it difficult to love me, since she believed that my birth became a breaking point in her relationship with my father. Now, I became a symbol of a temptress, pretty much like the woman who had snatched her husband and taken her financial, emotional and social stability away. She frequently observed that even the neighbors never treated her the same after my father had left. As he disclosed that he was finally moving out and getting remarried, she had a nervous breakdown and then just isolated herself for decades. Back then, she did not know how to survive on her own, and never learned.
Her kitchen was disgusting; I couldn’t make myself set foot into it, and had to switch to bagels in the morning and donuts at night. Despite such an unhealthy diet, I lost a lot of weight. I cared less about all these things that used to be my life. The store got affected the most: it was rapidly losing its ability to survive, bills were piling up, and I probably had to start planning liquidation. I was ready to move on.
During these tumultuous weeks, I was on the phone with Larry for hours at a time. His morning call woke me up; at night, he tucked me in with sexually charged monologues leading me to orgasm. Invisible, he was holding my hand day and night. If his nighttime call was a couple of minutes late, usually because his wife delayed his last walk of the day, with the cell phone in his hand, I was crying and scratching my chest in excruciating pain. I needed him every minute of my life; he gave meaning to my whole existence like nobody had ever done before. Even when my children were born, I did not feel such a sense of purpose. I hadn’t ever imagined that another person could acquire such power over me.
Spring came, and I was ready for my flight to California, to see Larry. I decided to spend a month there. This would be a break from living with my mother, too. Larry kept warning me that everything could change once we saw each other after all these years, but I knew that I had nowhere else to go. By that time, I’d initiated divorce, despite my husband’s pleadings and attempts to get us into couple’s therapy. My older son disowned me. My younger children were still angry at me, and would rarely visit me at my mother’s, but Larry was infinitely there for me. I was swept away, something I had secretly longed for in my calm and content days. And, yes, it didn’t matter what he looked like, because I was taken to such heights of pleasure that I became blind and mute. The rate with which each desire was coming true was frightening. I was levitating; I was rising above the ground and observing myself from above at my own volition. Amazing lightness spread over my existence.
Two days after my arrival to San Jose, Larry, as promised, told his wife that he was leaving. No matter what she had suspected earlier, this was hard for her, for the kids, and for all of us. I asked him if he needed more time, but he said that there was no time to waste after losing thirty-two years that he potentially could have spent with me. Three weeks later, we rented an apartment starting the next month, and furnished it together. He paid for everything and did not question a price, something I wasn’t accustomed to during my marriage. I paid special attention to curtains, blinds and drapery, and found matching linens. My return ticket to New York was tossed into a garbage can of a hotel room. I was supposed to vacate it the next day.
…I woke up early in the morning and went through my garbage to get the ticket. I could not do it. Fugue—that’s what it all was like. I had read about cases in which people found themselves in an unfamiliar place, not knowing how they’d gotten there and what it was that they were running from. Here I was, in a strange room, with no belongings, short of changing my name, as if I’d suddenly disowned my whole past and attempted to become someone else. Did I have to give up my old self in order to go on living? This would be such a betrayal of my own self if I decided to become a different person without using what I had already accomplished in my life. I suddenly remembered seeing old stones embedded in the walls of newer buildings. I still could use some stones from my old edifice to erect a new temple. My past, my children, my crazy mother, my dog needed me there, in New York. My customers and a salesgirl in my store needed me. It was enough to know that I could leave it all, but I did not want to continue at this rate any longer. The price of independence and happiness seemed to be a bit unreasonable. I caught myself thinking in my husband’s terms. I packed and went to San Jose International to try a stand-by.
Two years later, I can say that things finally worked out for all of us. As a part of our divorce settlement, Frank got the house we built together, and I got my failing business and a credit card debt. Luckily, I managed to liquidate the business and got some money to start a new, low maintenance one. I offer interior design services online, and have started to get some returns on what I’ve invested. Still, tears well up in my eyes every time I happen to pass my former store.
Frank is remarried; I choose not to know too much about his new wife. I rent a tiny place of my own but don’t spend too much time there. My older son and his wife eat out with me every weekend, as Frank’s new wife is not cooking meals, neither for them nor for Frank. Sometimes, my other two children join us. No matter how much I eat, I don’t gain weight. I am a new grandmother, and I am in love with my granddaughter. Oh, yes, I date occasionally, too, but the men I’ve met so far don’t impress me. Larry went back to his wife. She was so happy to get him back that she forgot to blame and nudge him; of course, the marital idyll didn’t last for long, but he is done rebelling.
After all, I did return to my former therapist, partly to tell him about my changes, but mostly to find out about that old dream of mine that used to torture me before this whole thing. He was kind enough to interpret it for me in hindsight, so to speak. I needed to move up, to get away from my routine, but I was not ready to do it independently (hence, standing passively on the escalator steps instead of walking). For someone with my background, the most conventional solution was to hold on to a man in order to change my life without falling off the steep escalator steps. My conflict was that I felt too different. It was I, not my parents, who was “black,” a black sheep in the family. Most of all, I could not accept my own vitality, which contradicted everything I believed in. I was looking for an agent of change, for someone who would be a herald of a new life. Larry, an overweight Peter Pan, just happened to meet my needs, and helped me to get unstuck. I guess I liked the explanation; it justified things a little and made me look better, at least in my own eyes. I asked my therapist if he considered me crazy. Unchallenged wish fulfillment must be dangerous for one’s sanity. However, he said that it must be hard for me to go through such a dramatic transformation and to grow at such an astounding rate. Therapists are good at giving ambiguous answers to direct questions.
In the end, there’s one thing left to say: I still talk to Larry almost every day and love him dearly, but if I am to find out that I am dying and have just one minute for one last phone call, I will call my ex-husband, Frank. I still love him, in my own way, and there are also other things between us that are stronger than love. We spent so much time together and dealt with so much in the course of almost thirty years that we’ve grown under each other’s skin, like old trees. I hope he won’t hang up on me when I make this call.
With that said— farewell, a quaint Lisbon neighborhood. Farewell, San Telmo, the most flamboyant district of the capital of tango. Another woman will nurse a dream of dancing in your shady streets and sunny squares and catching sun rays in her lap. By the way, I heard it gets really quiet there on weekdays.
2005