Scene 1: A handsome young editor is at the top of his game.
Tall, passionate, witty, the man turns heads and squeezes hearts wherever he goes. He is married to a woman with money, who adores him. They throw brilliant parties for their friends in a big, perfectly appointed house overlooking a romantic metropolitan view. Mentally I stand outside their lives like a kind of homeless mutt on Christmas Eve, staring in.
A year later they are divorced–swiftly, violently. He’d fallen for another woman–who then backed out. The editor rents a few odd rooms for a brief while, then quietly leaves the country. It all happens bafflingly fast.
Scene 2: A teacher marries one of his students. She is exquisite, worships him. He is soaring. They invite all their friends to the housewarming; Renaissance lute music welcomes arriving guests. They never stop touching, kissing. She does ceramics and bakes pies; he reads her Yeats by the fire. I’m not making a bit of this up.
Five months later it is finished. It seems that to marry an acolyte is to then have to live with one. He’d begun to feel as if he were addressing an echo.
Of course this list goes on. The beautiful, serene ballerina dies suddenly in the passenger seat of a car, of anorexia. The respected writer with a gorgeous family checks himself into a hotel room to end his life. The vital young comedian we thought would live forever is felled by some mundane cancer.
My point is not the instability or vulnerability of people, nor that a pleasant veneer can shelter horrors. Rather I am struck by how strange it feels when our quick assumptions–confident judgments based on what we have seen with our own eyes–are overturned.
How interesting it is to be wrong.
What compels me is the reverse-thrust to the brain when we learn that things are not, per Shakespeare, what they seem. (It needn’t always be bad news: The dull acquaintance proves gifted, the deadbeat holds down a job, the confirmed bachelor rears a family; the sad elder discovers travel, art or romance.) What intrigues me is what happens to us, the observers, when we witness living proof of our misperceptions.
Once a friend became temporarily convinced that the time difference between the West and East Coasts was three hours later rather than vice versa. “Look, Joan,” he boomed in fine manly authority. “When it’s noon in California . . .” Gently I finished his sentence: “It’s 3 p.m. in New York.” And I watched his face assume a strange openness as his mind absorbed the actuality.
That is the moment I want to know better: the prickle of a deep cross-wiring lighting up in our brains. You can almost smell the activation of something long-hidden, like the scent of a cedar chest or musty attic.
While no one seeks tragedy, being proved wrong keeps us lively and awake. Like big weather, it teaches humility and whimsy–to allow for the astonishing, the illogical, the unaccountable gaps; to remind us that we’re driving around for the duration with a learner’s permit. For years, I have carried an unwritten mantra: Everything you thought least likely is almost mandated to occur.
To be wrong is to smack into an elemental form of surprise, something we do our best to avoid. Sex used to be a routine outlet for spontaneity, but disease has slowed that impulse. Increasingly, exposure to the unplanned becomes an undertaking for only the very young or very hardy. We like maps. Convenience stations. Truth in advertising.
Surprise at the level of human behavior forces a weightless moment between worlds, like the moment when the acrobat has let go of one trapeze bar and is sailing out to grasp the bar swinging toward him. Or when Wile E. Coyote realizes Roadrunner has just led him off the cliff’s edge, staring wryly at us a dismal instant before dropping straight down into the abyss. Technically, this is the moment of learning Otherwise.
Revelation, with a bit of egg on its face.
During that moment we confront not only what has proved not to be the case, we’re also forced to think about why. When I see that I have been mistaken, all the sensible connectors that led me to the fallacy beg re-examination. A portion of me has to change to accommodate the changed knowledge and whatever it may imply. Adrienne Rich once wrote a poem examining the realization that one had been lied to. She compared it to the destruction of a great city by an even greater storm: all those constructs, avenues, walls, edificesblown away!
But if we mean to keep our curiosity, if we mean to grow, I think we also learn to leave a good blank margin around reflexes of judgment. We learn to make room for Otherwise.
Over time I have learned to park my envy at a wary distance from the ideal marriage or family, the great beauty, the ultimate artist. However stark the situation, however blatantly it may seem to warrant a label, I am slowly learning that the immersed part of the iceberg will likely never be known by me.
Scene 3: Recently I went to a high school reunion where I saw people I had not laid eyes upon for years. Again and again I felt that odd weightlessness as I witnessed who people had become. The school nerd, whose bad skin, fluctuating voice and hiked pants had been as laughable to us heedlessly cruel teenagers as his cheerful genius, was now a scientist working for NASA. His skin had cleared, his voice had lowered, his conversation had grown shapely. Then he pulled a photo from his pocket, of a radiant little boy at the beach: his son. The former bumbling nerd, scapegoat of the many, had also become a devoted father.
The pretty cheerleader–earmarked for happy-ever-aftering–never married. She was always shy and intimidated, she told me, until she found her vocation as an illustrator for children’s books. The reckless class clown supports a big family as a grain broker, cannily and well. The exotic fashion plate became a bricklayer, marrying her Native American assistant. The party girl transformed into a sedate mother; the personable, handsome school jock into a solitary mountain ranger.
Some did fit a predictable pattern. The long-distance runner became a physical therapist, keeping his wiry shape. The hard guy went on to a life of drug-abetted madness. The sullen rebel stood before me with the same dark desperation, now steeped in alcohol. The apple-pie kid-next-door had become a house-paint salesman–but before I could automatically limit his life in my imagination, I learned he had weathered the death of one of his children, and saw in his face a hard-earned light.
Here was the real surprise: Sheer persistence to live had about it a sort of unsurpassable dignity. I was meeting fellow adult survivors of the difficult world, in all their peculiarity and diversity. And in face of the earnestness with which they had offered themselves to life, even when it turned out badly, for the sheer faith and truth of that participation, I stood chastened.
Yet again.
