Mary, a university professor of history, 40 and beautiful, perched on the very edge of youth, finds herself at the end of her $200K equity line and without money. Feeling like both a failure and a fool she tries to figure out how this has come to pass. In her search, Mary is directed by a friend to consider the ways in which she avoids reality.
"Ways in which I avoid reality?" Well, she could think of a few. With this, one word came to her: "love." As in the unrealistic, impossible, maybe even what some would call the immoral kind of love.
Not too long ago, a few years back, while living a perfectly reasonable married life, she had, quite simply fallen in love with someone else's husband. How? Where? When? It was one of those things that you really couldn't explain no matter how much you spoke about it. Here in the middle of a suburban megalopolis across a sea of minivans and furniture outlets that began to dot suburbia during the Carter administration, Mary beyond her wildest dreams and expectations had fallen in love.
Not love the way the word is lightly tossed around, but love the way that it was played by Barbara Streisand or Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park -- a rapturous love of total union and joy -- penetrating and total.
Can you imagine such a thing? An ocean of good feeling! A love worthy of Solomon's Song of Songs; something that made you either want to embrace or deny Gd. And if such a longing were thwarted, you might feel compelled to take up the cello or some other such difficult instrument.
She could not recall the first moment that she came to this heady realization. How can you describe what happened? Oh, how she tried to explain it. Explain it a thousand times she tried--to herself, to her analyst.
Is the background important? It was a bus stop. That most ordinary of places. It's where the extraordinary happens within the ordinary. Love at the bus stop.
One day in late November of that year she was trying to get on the bus, with her two-year-old daughter Rebecca and the stroller in tow.
She held Rebecca in one hand and was fiddled around looking for loose change in the other. Jack, a man, familiar from the neighborhood was behind her. He rose to the top of the stairwell. He helped her with the dragging stroller. He put his hand up. "I will pay," he said with authority, and motioned to her to sit down. She sat down in the first available seat and settled Rebecca.
He sat across from her. She reached into her pocketbook to pay him back. He put his hands up, in a chivalrous gesture.
"Much appreciated," she said, "but I can't take favors from strangers, can I?" she said.
"Then we will be friends," he firmly answered.
"Do you live around here?" she asked him.
"Yes, just around the corner."
"Where?" she asked, surprised at her own persistence.
"On Decatur Avenue..."
The conversation continued, establishing facts, where they live, where they used to live, where they came from, people they might know in common. This eventually gave way to a lightly studied but peaceful silence.
In that silence, Mary thought they had exchanged information plainly, procedurally. It was as though they had gotten into a fender bender. It was a dent, a scratch, an incident followed by a compulsory exchange of information with identifying numbers. It was a procedure so impersonal.
Even voluntary relationships have become procedural, like loan applications. You fill in the blanks: __ number of children. _ married _ single _ divorced. Everything but the social security number is filled in.
You could even say that love was social security. It's an emotional, economic stop-gap, a hedge against the natural decay and depletion of even the best-lived lives.
Multiple re-financings had become a permanent part of her mid life. She and her husband together made a nice income, but there never was enough money to turn the house you have into the house you want. In the dead of night, awake on their queen bed, she would think of the DH Lawrence story the Rocking Horse Winner. Mary could almost hear the sheet rock walls in the Northern NJ home whisper sometimes soft and often loud there must be more money. There must be more money!
And yet when it came to money, Mary preferred to live in a slight haze, never really knowing for sure, exactly what she had, what she wanted or what she needed, only that there ought to be more of it.
(Acknowledgment to Ncaps learners and faculty.)
