But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because I view the regional phone company with the same disdain as the IRS, I refuse to pay more than I absolutely have to. This means that I refuse to pay the extra charge for caller I.D. Therefore, every time I answer the phone it’s like playing Russian roulette. Only in my version, the gun holds four bullets as there are very few people I actually want to talk to. On the other hand, I gladly pay for voice mail so that I can hear the messages of those who called with out the tiresome bit of having to talk to them. I think I need to re-think the logic in this decision and perhaps opt for caller-id, afterall.
There is no plausible reason to talk to someone you dislike. For instance, I assume that when I break up with a boyfriend that I have found good reason to discontinue communication. A few years ago, one of those boyfriends decided that it would be remarkable to call me. I was young when I had this relationship, he was older, more accomplished, which is probably what attracted me to him as I was just beginning my career and eager for a mentor. To say that I was naive is an understatement. I was foolish enough to believe that if someone told you they loved you, that they would not get up from your bed and go to someone else’s and when confronted, lie about it. I hate liars, they are anathema to one’s ability to make rational decisions. So when this knucklehead called me years after we broke up and said that he wanted to be friends, well, I was incredulous for a moment…the moment before I told him to lose my number.
As to dinner parties, I do not detest the concept. It’s simply a matter of being in control versus relinquishing control. Hosting a dinner party allows me to enjoy the company of friends in small doses, always having the excuse of tending to pots in the kitchen. Of course, the popularity of kitchens that open to the living room, such as mine, or the bizarre propensity of guests to congregate in the kitchen, rather than in the perfectly comfortable living room sometimes confounds my best efforts.
Being a guest doesn’t afford me the same escape. Despite my entreaties to the host to let me help in the kitchen, I am often rebuffed and sent to mingle. This exile means that I am forced to smile and make friendly conversation. I would rather sit and watch. If I retreat out doors on the pretext of going for a smoke, someone or ones, even on a bitter cold night like last night, usually follow and ask me what I am doing out there alone. This makes me very nervous.
I hadn’t planned to attend this dinner party, in fact had entirely forgotten about the invitation until the host called to ask me if I would bring an extra bottle of wine. My initial reaction was to scrounge up a polite but vague illness. After the events of the previous 48 hours, however, I thought it better to leave the house, be among people rather than alone in the house.
Further, it afforded me a chance to get to know my neighbors, most of whom are very pleasant, if a bit too curious. I asked my hosts, a wonderful gay couple who’d lived two doors down for the last fifteen years and had been the first to welcome me to the neighborhood, if there had been any recent burglaries in the neighborhood. They assured me that this was a very safe neighborhood and home invasions were generally limited to the multi million dollar homes closer to the lake.
As to the insult of being called an intellectual, I find anyone who would proclaim themselves, outright or via association, to be smarter than average, usually turns out to be a fool. Perhaps I am averse to intellectual elitism, to those who are book-smart, but lack the insight of humility. I like the strong silent type myself. I like someone smart enough to keep their mouth shut and let the fool across the table reveal himself.
When I am feeling too full of myself, I simply turn to the Psalms. They’re written, in part, by David, a great warrior, and poet. The strong silent type, I’d like to imagine. In the eighth Psalm, he wrote:
‘When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him?’
Indeed. If God is silent, perhaps that speaks volumes about His wisdom.
Despite the rude awakening of the phone call, seemingly a wrong number, it was a beautiful morning. After staring at the ceiling to regain my bearings, I went downstairs, made coffee, and recorded my thoughts in my journal.
I’d decided that I would indeed continue to use the journal. I felt better.
Though not so good that I actually answered the phone the next time it rang. Instead, I took out my passport. The new one. Its pages were blank. I pulled out the other one, the one with the different colored cover. I flipped through the pages and looked at the various stamps. I held the last page closer to my eyes and examined the stamp that showed my departure from Russia.
I sighed and calculated that if I took a certain airline I’d be able to manage an overnight stay in Paris, dinner at a favorite restaurant, and a new Hermes scarf from the store on Rue de Faubourg in the morning before catching my next flight. I looked out the window at the bright sunlight and shuddered at the grey that would envelop me in Moscow. I thought of the rude customs agents, the aggressive taxi drivers. No, they were no worse than JFK. That wasn’t an excuse.
I looked around the living room. I wanted to have Christmas here. I’d planned on a ten foot tree that would do justice to the two story ceiling in the living room, planned to invite the neighbors over for a Christmas Eve party, as a show of my hospitality. I liked to entertain, as long as it was on my terms. This was going to be the place of my new beginning. I was going to put down roots here, begin again, do all the things that one does in a place that signaled home, and permanency. I would shun those other cravings and create the life I’d dreamed of when I’d sat staring at the walls in foreign venues. I’d imagined a place that spoke of family, of at least one generation that had created memories in a home. I’d seen it in magazines, and thought with enough money I could create it for myself. I was looking forward to Christmas in a new place, this place. I had better ornaments here. Better produce, better everything.
Yet the lure of foreign airports still called to me. I fought constantly with the longing for the eternal new beginning. The cold white unfamiliarity that greeted me through bleary eyes after an all-night flight, the blue, chrome, sleek lines of the automated walkways that lead me to shops that were just beginning to open in this new country. Business class lounges. The frosty allure of anonymous business men reading their newspapers, talking on cell phones, un-tethered in this way station of bad coffee, juice from a machine, and day old muffins. Orange laminate restroom counters upon which I spread my Chanel cosmetics after the trans-Atlantic flight, with fluorescent lights over the mirrors that would challenge the best esthetician, putting contacts into sandy eyes, that have been called cat-like and beautiful but only adorned for special occasions, smirking at the reflection that came into focus, with an hour to go before the flight that would take me further east, after I’d changed in the bathroom stall into the outfit that I’d want to be seen in when I arrived at my destination.
I liked that play.
I liked moving through crowds anonymously. I liked looking around at others without being known. I liked selecting my choice of wines on the flight and flipping through the choice of movies on the personal video display. I liked the suspended limbo of being neither here nor there. I liked wondering what my fellow passengers were thinking, where they were going, and their stories. Who waited for them at the end of the steel grey customs gate? I liked walking out that gate and knowing that no one was waiting for me.
But I don’t want to go back there again. Not even for the Cracker Jack prize of an Hermes scarf on the trip home through Paris. I don’t want to see smiling faces that are thinking unpleasant thoughts. I want to find a new destination. I want to find a place again where I am not known. Where I can walk through the streets and not recognize the economic price a country has to pay for its freedom. I don’t want to be pointed at and labeled an American, I want to be invisible.
The phone rings again.
I stare at the slim receiver that sits next to me on the couch, as if it is a visitor. I watch the little red light blink with each ring but don’t pick it up, although I am touched by its desperate entreaties. I wait until it stops. Then I get up and move across the room to the kitchen and refill my cup with fresh coffee.
I turn and look at the TV screen and with the remote control I turn up the volume of CNN. As the program of international headlines begins, I think of how differently the world is portrayed here versus there, our splendid naiveté…there where I don’t want to go. Because it is too complicated. I know my limits now. I don’t understand the way they view human life. I don’t understand their view of its infinite expendability. I cannot, will never, understand because I am not one of them, I have not lived their history.
I push a button on the remote and find a program on incorporating a water feature in a garden of a newly built home, in a newly built subdivision in New Mexico. I listen and think that they should have arranged the rocks in such a way that the water wouldn’t make such an annoying sound as it came out of its self-regulating water pump. Yet my eyes are drawn to the water that splashes happily as it splatters against the sun-baked rocks and heads towards its endless loop.
I flip back to CNN, throw the remote down on the couch next to the phone, and walk to my study, to my computer where I check the cost of flights to Moscow. But I don’t make a reservation, I just save it as an itinerary. A possibility. One of several flights I’ve saved in the past two days. Including one to Tahiti, another to Iceland, and one to Chicago. I cancel the one to Chicago and reserve a cruise through the Panama Canal and another up the inland passage to Alaska on a luxury yacht that promises the opportunity to go kayaking in front of calving glaciers. Then I book a flight to Katmandu and then another to Bishkek, Kyrghistan. It then occurs to me that I might be better served to book successive flights linked together, I play with the idea of creating a necklace of flights circling the globe. If so, it should have a theme. I am tempted to entertain this thought in greater detail, to spend the rest of the morning creating it, but realize that it would lead me into an expensive and too tempting a journey. “Lead me not into temptation.”
I check my email. I delete several messages purporting to save me millions or make me millions. I write a quick message to the online Dostoevsky discussion group that I know will be chastised as having nothing to do with the current discussion of Nietzsche-ian nihilism. I savor the simple pleasure of knowing it will be disparaged as politically incorrect. I don’t respond to an IM from a friend. I have turned on the message that says I am away from my desk. I go to Amazon.com and check my reviewer rank. My goal is to get into the Top 1000. No matter how many reviews I write, I seem to maintain a spot somewhere in the 1400’s. Regrettably, one of the things that brings me pleasure, works against the elevation of my status. I particularly enjoy racking up negative votes on the books I pan. This indicates a success in my ability to convey a message clearly. Sadly, they only count ‘helpful’ votes, my negative reviews rack up too many ‘unhelpful’ votes. Hoist on my own petard. Not that I only write negative reviews…I am as ardent in writing glowing reviews of books I enjoy; though I’ve noticed these reviews garner fewer votes than the negative reviews. But there is more than this working against me. I also suspect that some of those ranked higher than me are cheating by logging on under another name and then voting for themselves.
I finally leave my computer while still connected to the Internet so I can’t be accused of lying, and return to the living room. I pick up the remote and turn to EWTN in time to catch the morning Mass. I cross myself and follow along for five minutes. I admire Mother Angelica and believe she is spreading the gospel, although the program I most like on her network is “The Journey Home” which features guests who have converted to Catholicism. I like to hear their stories. My own conversion is very simple. It was the Eucharist. Body and Blood of Christ was more than enough for me. I’ve never actually read the Catechism, but I always look forward to getting marked on Ash Wednesday. And though I’ve yet to successfully deprive myself for the entire 40 days, I’m very spiritually minded during Lent. Then there’s the draw of Mary. She shows up everywhere nowadays. People scoff at the sightings, but I believe. I believe because it gives me hope.
The phone rings again, so I switch back to CNN and watch a brief stock market update. There’s been a report of unfavorable economic data, the market is down by three hundred points. Market panics are akin to the ‘Last Call’ sale at Neiman Marcus. If you know what to look for, you can pick up a bargain. I am tempted to go back to my computer to check the performance of my portfolio, maybe do some buying, but someone is knocking at the door.
Before I am ten feet from the door, I can see through the glass paneled door that he has finally come out of the woodwork. He sees me too. Neither of us smile, though I experience a shiver of excitement.
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