The Best American Essays 2011 Part 5

I HAVE MORE THAN ONCE in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.

The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92 nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short-lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.

The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repet.i.tive, there seems to be almost no talk of s.e.x, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own-a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication-as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That's how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties-located on my right clavicle, or collarbone-was big enough to be seen and felt. It's not at all good when your cancer is "palpable" from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area-"Tissue is the issue" being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue-and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word metastasized was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located-had been located for quite some time-in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of "acceptance," hasn't so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succ.u.mbed to something so predictable and ba.n.a.l that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read-if not indeed write-the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of nonthinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can't see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-cla.s.s flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question 'Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there's a loophole here. The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here's the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing cliches in our language. You've heard it all right. People don't have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It's even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don't hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with pa.s.sivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

It's quite something, this chemo-poison. It has caused me to lose about fourteen pounds, though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a vicious rash on my shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure. (Some venom, to get rid of those furious red dots without a struggle.) Let it please be this mean and ruthless with the alien and its spreading dead-zone colonies. But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. I was fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. But I wasn't quite prepared for the way that my razor blade would suddenly go slipping pointlessly down my face, meeting no stubble. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody's maiden auntie. (The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn't yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it's a rather patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly denatured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only pa.s.sively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn't have such a stout const.i.tution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if-as my father invariably said-I am spared.

Chapels.

Pico Iyer.

FROM Portland Magazine.

GIANT FIGURES ARE TALKING and strutting and singing on enormous screens above me, and someone is chattering away on the miniscreen in the cab from which I just stepped. Nine people at this street corner are shouting into thin air, wearing wires around their chins and jabbing at screens in their hands. One teenager in Sacramento, I read recently, sent 300,000 text messages in a month-or ten a minute for every minute of her waking day, a.s.suming she was awake sixteen hours a day. There are more cell phones than people on the planet now, almost (ten mobiles for every one at the beginning of the century). Even by the end of the last century, the average human being in a country such as ours saw as many images in a day as a Victorian inhaled in a lifetime.

And then I walk off crowded Fifth Avenue and into the capacious silence of St. Patrick's. Candles are flickering here and there, intensifying my sense of all I cannot see. Figures are on their knees, heads bowed, drawing my attention to what cannot be said. Light is flooding through the great blue windows, and I have entered a realm where no I or realm exists. I notice everything around me: the worn stones, the little crosses, the hymnbooks, the upturned faces; then I sit down, close my eyes-and step out of time, into everything that stretches beyond it.

When I look back on my life, the parts that matter and sustain me, all I see is a series of chapels. They may be old or young, cracked brown or open s.p.a.ce; they may be lectories or afterthoughts, hidden corners of a city or deserted s.p.a.ces in the forest. They are as variable as people. But like people they have a stillness at the core of them which makes all discussion of high and low, East and West, you and me dissolve. Bells toll and toll and I lose all sense of whether they are chiming within me or without.

The first time I was asked to enter a New York office building-for a job interview twenty-eight years ago-I gathered myself, in all senses, in St. Patrick's, and knew that it would put everything I was about to face (a company, a new life, my twittering ambitions) into place. It was the frame that gave everything else definition. Ever since, I've made it my practice to step into that great thronged s.p.a.ce whenever I return to the city, to remind myself of what is real, what is lasting, before giving myself to everything that isn't. A chapel is the biggest immensity we face in our daily lives, unless we live in a desert or in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon. A chapel is the deepest silence we can absorb, unless we stay in a cloister. A chapel is where we allow ourselves to be broken open as if we were children again, trembling at home before our parents.

Whenever I fly, I step into an airport chapel. The people there may be sleeping, reading, praying, but all of them are there because they want to be collected. When I go to San Francisco, I stay across from Grace Cathedral, and visit it several times a day, to put solid ground underneath my feet. Returning to the college I attended, I sit on a pew at the back, listening to the high-voiced choir, and think back on that shuffling kid who wandered the downy grounds and what relation he might have to the person who now sits here.

So much of our time is spent running from ourselves, or hiding from the world; a chapel brings us back to the source, in ourselves and in the larger sense of self-as if there were a difference. Look around you. Occasional figures are exploring their separate silences; the rich and the poor are hard to tell apart, heads bowed. Light is diffused and general; when you hear voices, they are joined in a chorus or reading from a holy book. The s.p.a.ce at the heart of the Rothko Chapel is empty, and that emptiness is prayer and surrender.

In 1929 the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to start broadcasting "live silence" in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is "a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal." Permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

This spring I came, for the first time, to the Chapel of Christ the Teacher at the University of Portland, to give a talk as the light was falling. Great shafts of sunshine stretched across the courtyard, catching and sharpening the faces of students returning to their rooms. Later in the evening, since this was Holy Week, an enormous cross was carried into the s.p.a.ce, in darkness and reverence and silence. Now, however, people were walking in from all directions, leaving themselves at the door, putting away their business cards and gathering in a circle. They said nothing, and looked around them. The light through the windows began to fade. A scatter of seats became a congregation. And whatever was said, or not said, became less important than the silence.

Many years ago, when I was too young to know better, I worked in a twenty-fifth-floor office four blocks from Times Square, in New York City. Teletypes juddered the news furiously into our midst every second-this was the World Affairs department of Time magazine-and messengers breathlessly brought the latest reports from our correspondents to our offices. Editors barked, early computers sputtered, televisions in our senior editors' offices gave us the news as it was breaking. We spoke and conferred and checked facts and wrote, often, twenty or twenty-five pages in an evening.

I left all that for a monastery on the back streets of Kyoto. I wanted to learn about silence. I wanted to learn about who I was when I wasn't thinking about it. The j.a.panese are masters of not saying anything, both because their attention is always on listening, on saying little, even on speaking generically, and because when they do talk, they are very eager to say nothing offensive, outrageous, or confrontational. They're like talk-show hosts in a nation where self-display is almost forbidden. You learn more by listening than talking, they know; you create a wider circle not by thinking about yourself, but about the people around you, and how you can find common ground with them. The j.a.panese idea of a dream date-I've been with my j.a.panese sweetheart for twenty-three years and I've learned the hard way-is to go to a movie and come out saying nothing.

Perhaps I wouldn't need this kind of training in paying attention and keeping quiet were it not for the fact that I used to love babbling, and my colleges and friends in England and the U.S. trained and encouraged me to talk, to thrust myself forward, to a.s.sert my little self in all its puny glory. Perhaps we wouldn't need chapels if our lives were already clear and calm (a saint or a Jesus may never need to go into a church; he's always carrying one inside himself). Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives-usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.

"I like the silent church," Emerson wrote, "before the service begins."

I grew up in chapels, at school in England. For all the years of my growing up, we had to go to chapel every morning and to say prayers in a smaller room every evening. Chapel became everything we longed to flee; it was where we made faces at one another, doodled in our hymnbooks, sn.i.g.g.e.red at each other every time we sang about "the bosom of the Lord" or the "breast" of a green hill. All we wanted was open s.p.a.ce, mobility, freedom-the California of the soul. But as the years went on, I started to see that no movement made sense unless it had a changelessness beneath it; that all our explorations were only as rich as the still place we brought them back to.

I noticed, in my early thirties, that I had acc.u.mulated 1.5 million miles with United Airlines alone; I started going to a monastery. It wasn't in order to become religious or to attend services in the chapel, though I did go there, over and over, as Emerson might have done, when n.o.body was present. The real chapel was my little cell in the hermitage, looking out on the boundless blue of the Pacific Ocean below, the Steller's jay that just alighted on the splintered fence in my garden. Chapel was silence and s.p.a.ciousness and whatever put the human round, my human, all too human thoughts, in some kind of vaster context.

My house had burned down eight months before, and kind friends might have been thinking that I was seeking out a home; but in the chapel of my cell, I was seeking only a reminder of the inner home we always carry with us. To be a journalist is to be beholden to the contents ofjust now, the news, the public need; to be a human-even if you're a journalist-is to be conscious of the old, what stands outside of time, our prime necessity. I could only write for Time, I thought, if I focused on Eternity.

I've stayed in those little cells in a Benedictine hermitage above the sea more than fifty times by now, over almost twenty years. I've stayed in the cloister with the monks; spent three weeks at a time in silence; stayed in a trailer in the dark, and in a house for the monastery's laborers, where I'd come upon monks doing press-ups against the rafters on the ground floor and planning their next raid upon the monastery computer.

Now the place lives inside me so powerfully that my home in j.a.pan looks and feels like a Benedictine hermitage. I receive no newspapers or magazines there, and I watch no television. I've never had a cell phone, and I've ensured that we have almost no Internet connections at all. We own no car or bicycle, and the whole apartment (formerly, population four, my wife and two children and myself) consists of two rooms. I sleep on a couch in the living room at 8:30 every night, and think this is the most luxurious, expansive, liberating adventure I could imagine.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

We've always needed chapels, however confused or contradictory we may be in the way we define our religious affiliations; we've always had to have quietness and stillness to undertake our journeys into battle, or just the tumult of the world. How can we act in the world, if we haven't had the time and chance to find out who we are and what the world and action might be?

But now Times Square is with us everywhere. The whole world is clamoring at our door even on a mountaintop (my monastery has wireless Internet, its workers downloaded so much of the world recently that the system crashed, and the monastery has a digital address, www.contemplation.com). Even in my cell in j.a.pan, I can feel more than 6 billion voices, plus the Library of Alexandria, CNN, MSNBC, everything, in that inoffensive little white box with the apple on it. Take a bite, and you fall into the realm of Knowledge, and Ignorance, and Division.

The high-tech firm Intel experimented for seven months with enforcing "Quiet Time" for all of its workers for at least four consecutive hours a week (no e-mails were allowed, no phone calls accepted). It tried banning all e-mail checks on Fridays and a.s.suring its workers that they had twenty-four hours, not twenty-four minutes, in which to respond to any internal e-mail. If people are always running to catch up, they will never have the time and s.p.a.ce to create a world worth catching up with. Some colleges have now inst.i.tuted a vespers hour, though often without a church; even in the most secular framework, what people require is the quietness to sink beneath the rush of the brain. Journalist friends of mine switch off their modems from Friday evening to Monday morning, every week, and I bow before them silently; I know that when I hop around the Web, watch You Tube videos, surf the TV set, I turn away and feel agitated. I go for a walk, enjoy a real conversation with a friend, turn off the lights and listen to Bach or Leonard Cohen, and I feel palpably richer, deeper, fuller, happier.

Happiness is absorption, being entirely yourself and entirely in one place. That is the chapel that we crave.

Long after my home had burned down, and I had begun going four times a year to my monastery up the coast, long after I'd constructed a more or less unplugged life in j.a.pan-figuring that a journalist could write about the news best by not following its every convulsion, and writing from the chapel and not the madness of Times Square-I found a Christian retreat house in my own hometown. Sometimes, when I had an hour free in the day, or was running from errand to errand, I drove up into the silent hills and parked there, and just sat for a few minutes in its garden. Encircled by flowers. In a slice of light next to a statue of the Virgin.

Instantly, everything was okay. I had more rea.s.surance than I would ever need. I was thinking of something more than an "I" I could never entirely respect.

Later, I opened the heavy doors and walked into the chapel, again when no one was there. It sat next to a sunlit courtyard overlooking the dry hills and far-off blue ocean of what could have been a s.p.a.ce in Andalusia. A heavy bell spoke of the church's private sense of time. A row of blond-wood chairs was gathered in a circle. I knelt and closed my eyes and thought of the candle flickering in one corner of the chapel I loved in the monastery up the coast.

When I had to go to Sri Lanka, in the midst of its civil war, I went to the chapel to be still; to gather my resources and protection, as it were. I went there when I was forcibly evacuated from the house that my family had rebuilt after our earlier structure had burned down, and our new home was surrounded by wild flames driven by seventy-mile-per-hour winds. In the very same week, my monastery in Big Sur was also encircled by fire.

I went there even when I was halfway across the world, because I had reconst.i.tuted the chapel in my head, my heart; it was where I went to be held by something profound. Then another wildfire struck up, and a newspaper editor called me in j.a.pan: the retreat house near my home was gone.

Where does one go when one's chapel is reduced to ash? Perhaps it is the first and main question before us all. There are still chapels everywhere. And I go to them. But like the best of teachers or friends, they always have the gift of making themselves immaterial, invisible-even, perhaps, immortal. I sit in Nara, the capital of j.a.pan thirteen centuries ago, and I see a candle flickering. I feel the light descending from a skylight in the rotunda roof. I hear a fountain in the courtyard. I close my eyes and sit very still, by the side of my bed, and sense the chapel take shape around me.

If your silence is deep enough, bells toll all the way through it.

Long Distance.

Victor Lavalle.

FROM Granta.

THE MOST LOVING RELATIONSHIP of my early twenties cost me ninety-nine cents per minute. Her name was Margie, and while I was charged to talk with her, she was not a pro. She was a fifty-year-old woman who lived in New Jersey. Two or three nights a week we called each other on a chatline. I'd dial 970-DATE and agree to have the charges billed to my telephone while Margie dialed the same number but never paid a fee. Much like at nightclubs and bars, it's a lot harder to get ladies into the room. So Margie, and the hundreds of women like her, would call the number and register as a woman, then punch through the recorded greetings from thousands of guys who were waiting to talk with them. One of those men was me.

Each guy's greeting was his name and a little something about himself. Our messages were either lewd or p.o.r.nographic, nothing else. Using euphemisms about your p.e.n.i.s counted as a true gentleman's move. I was no better than the rest. Twenty-one and h.o.r.n.y and incapable of getting a real-world date. So instead I listened to the recorded greetings of anonymous women from all over the northeastern United States. The women's greetings tended to differ from the men's; they spoke about amus.e.m.e.nt parks and dining out and walks on the beach. Ridiculous s.h.i.t. We all knew why we were here and it wasn't to line up any dates. We were there to talk dirty into our telephones and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in our separate darkened rooms. At least that was true for me and Margie.

We liked each other's voices-each other's imaginations-enough to keep calling back. We'd make appointments for the next "meeting" and then call the line. Scroll through the many recorded messages, listening for the voice we recognized. She was Margie and I was Michael. We spent two years having phone s.e.x and, eventually, speaking to each other off the line, but we never told each other our real names.

But why was I doing this? At twenty-one? I was in college and, in theory, surrounded by eligible women. Besieged by more appropriate partners. My little crew of friends enjoyed no end of s.e.x, but my crew consisted of some sterling men. But even that's a cop-out, because the schlumps and losers were actually doing all right too, juggling a couple of women on campus. Not me, though.

I was 350 pounds and didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as a housing project. Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. Second year of university I missed half my cla.s.ses just because I couldn't pull my big b.u.t.t out of bed.

But here's the thing: I was charming. Funnier than you and all your friends. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. Not too easily suckered. Street-smart. In other words, I was kind of a f.u.c.king catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch.

Margie lived alone in the home she owned in northern New Jersey. Her daughter had grown up and married and moved away to Boston. Margie had retired because she got sick, but she'd saved her money all these years. Even leaving the workforce as young as fifty didn't give her much concern. She had enough in the bank and the mortgage had been paid off. She felt quite proud of herself, and rightly so. She never mentioned a husband, the father of her only child, and I didn't ask. During the day Margie ran errands and spent time with her neighbors. At night Margie entertained her gentleman callers.

One of them was me, Michael, a college student in upstate New York. A kid from Queens who was paying for school with a part-time job and loans. A former high school baseball player who wanted to become a lawyer someday. I told her I looked like Derek Jeter. She said she resembled Gina Lollobrigida. Did I know who that was? The first time she told me I said, "Of course," and then looked the actress up. Both our exaggerations were probably true enough. I did have one black parent and one white parent and I had played baseball in high school. I might as well be Derek's twin brother! As for Margie, I felt sure she was at least a woman who had brown hair. But when we finally found each other on the chatline, all suspicions fell away. She was there and I was too. Our rooms so dark we could imagine each other-and ourselves-exactly as we wanted.

"h.e.l.lo, Michael."

"h.e.l.lo, Margie."

"I missed you," she said.

"I'm there with you now."

"Right here in bed?"

"No. I'm outside. Looking in through your window."

She blew out a breath. "My neighbors will see you."

"Then I'd better break in."

"Aren't you afraid I'll hear you?"

I said, "I'll hide until you're sleeping."

"I don't keep much money in the house."

"I don't want your money."

"I don't have jewelry."

"I don't want your jewels," I said.

"Why me?" she asked.

"I saw you at the supermarket. You were wearing those tight shorts."

"You followed me home?" she asked.

"And now I'm standing by your bed."

Margie sighed. "It gets so dark in here at night. I can't see anything."

"But you can feel me getting on the bed."

Quiet.

"Yes," she said.

"I'm going to have to stop you from getting away, though."

She whispered, "You could climb on my chest. Pin my arms down with your knees."

"That would hurt you."

"Yes," she said.

Quiet, a little longer.

"Now open your mouth," I said.

"I won't."

"Don't make me smack you," I told her.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Even quieter now. The longest silence yet.

I said, "If you say no to me again, I'm going to get rough."

Margie blew into the phone softly.

"No," she said.

Margie and I were "together" for about two years. After the first year she gave me her home number and I would call at our appointed times. Neither of us expected the other to stay off the chat-lines. If I happened to hear her recorded message there, on one of our off days, calling out the name of a different man, I didn't mind. I was usually listening for a different woman. We'd defeated the madness of monogamy! It only required that we never actually see or touch each other. Sometimes we talked about me taking a bus up to her town, or her meeting me for coffee in New York City, on one of my visits home. But we never did that. And never would. Both of us knew it. She was a fifty-year-old woman with some undefined illness that forced her to retire fifteen years early. Maybe it took some toll on her physically. Maybe she was in a wheelchair, or had purple spots on her a.s.s, I don't know. But I sure as h.e.l.l never would let her see me either. If she did, how could we ever fantasize about me crouching over her chest again? In real life I'd suffocate the poor woman between my meaty thighs if we ever tried.

And yet, somehow, I convinced myself that Margie was helping to keep me tethered to the "normal" world of relationships. I knew what we had wasn't complete, but at least we were two human beings sharing some kind of real affection. I still felt like this was infinitely better than the alternative: have you ever known men or women who don't get any kind of loving for years? They get weird. The women become either monstrously drab or they costume themselves in ways that make them seem unreal; they externalize their inner fantasies and come to believe-on some level-they really are elves or princesses or, most disturbing of all, children again. And the men? They're even worse. Men who are denied affection too long devolve into some kind of rage-filled hominoid. Their anger becomes palpable. You can almost feel the wrath emanating from their pores. Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.

So with that fate in mind, I felt truly grateful for Margie. While I enjoyed phone s.e.x with other women, Margie and I would also have real conversations after the s.e.x was done. She'd want to know what I'd been reading in cla.s.s and I'd ask about the home-improvement work she'd been doing. I enjoyed her company, her voice. And she sounded sincere when she told me she'd missed me.

So it came as a real shock when she said we'd have to stop talking.

Her daughter's husband had lost his job and their home had gone into foreclosure. The two of them, and their three-year-old child, would be moving in with Margie. There was no other way to go. Margie had plenty of s.p.a.ce in her home. Plus she'd been so good with her money that she could afford to carry the three of them until the husband found work. And Margie wanted to do this; she loved the idea of having them close. Her only regret was that she'd have to say goodbye to me. (And to the other dudes she'd had relationships with, I gathered.) Someone would always be home and she couldn't risk the embarra.s.sment if one of them overheard us.

So in 1995 my fifty-year-old girlfriend, the one I'd never met, broke up with me.